The Case of Richard Meynell | Page 8

at the door, with his eyes on the form by the
fire, knew why. The Rector had always been too poor. He had been left
an orphan while still at Balliol, and had to bring up his two younger
brothers. He had done it. They were both in Canada now and
prospering. But the signs of the struggle were on this shabby house, and
on this shabby, frugal, powerfully built man. Yet now he might have
been more at ease; the living, though small, was by no means among
the worst in the diocese. Ah, well! Anne, the housekeeper and only
servant, knew how the money went--and didn't go, and she had passed
on some of her grievances to Barron. They two knew--though Barron
would never have dared to show his knowledge--what a wrestle it
meant to get the Rector to spend what was decently necessary on his
own food and clothes; and Anne spent hours of the night in indignantly
guessing at what he spent on the clothes and food of other
people--mostly, in her opinion, "varmints."

These things flitted vaguely through the young man's sore mind. Then
in a flash they were absorbed in a perception of a wholly different kind.
The room seemed to him transfigured; a kind of temple. He thought of
the intellectual life which had been lived there; the passion for truth
which had burnt in it; the sermons and books that had been written on
those crowded tables; the personality and influence that had been
gradually built up within it, so that to him, as to many others, the dingy
study was a place of pilgrimage, breathing inspiration; and his heart
went out, first in discipleship, and then in a pain that was not for
himself. For over his friend's head he saw the gathering of clouds not
now to be scattered or dispersed; and who could foretell the course of
the storm?
The young man gently closed the door and went his way. He need not
have left the house so quietly. The Rector got no sleep that evening.

CHAPTER II
The church clock of Upcote Minor was just striking nine o'clock as
Richard Meynell, a few hours later than the conversation just recorded,
shut the Rectory gate behind him, and took his way up the village.
The night was cold and gusty. The summer this year had forgotten to be
balmy, and Meynell, who was an ardent sun-lover, shivered as he
walked along, buttoning a much-worn parson's coat against the sharp
air. Before him lay the long, straggling street, with its cottages and
small shops, its post-office, and public-houses, and its occasional
gentlefolks' dwellings, now with a Georgian front plumb on the street,
and now hidden behind walls and trees. It was evidently a large village,
almost a country town, with a considerable variety of life. At this hour
of the evening most of the houses were dark, for the labourers had gone
to bed. But behind the drawn blinds of the little shops there were still
lights here and there, and in the houses of the gentility.
The Rector passed the fine perpendicular church standing back from
the road, with its churchyard about it; and just beyond it, he turned, his

pace involuntarily slackening, to look at a small gabled house,
surrounded by a garden, and overhung by a splendid lime tree.
Suddenly, as he approached it, the night burst into fragrance, for a gust
of wind shook the lime-blossom, and flung the scent in Meynell's face;
while at the same time the dim masses of roses in the garden sent out
their sweetness to the passers-by.
A feeling of pleasure, quick, involuntary, passed through his mind;
pleasure in the thought of what these flowers meant to the owner of
them. He had a vision of a tall and slender woman, no longer young,
with a delicate and plaintive face, moving among the rose-beds she
loved, her light dress trailing on the grass. The recollection stirred in
him affection, and an impulse of sympathy, stronger than the mere
thought of the flowers, and the woman's tending of them, could explain.
It passed indeed immediately into something else--a touch of new and
sharp anxiety.
"And she's been very peaceful of late," he said to himself ruefully, "as
far at least as Hester ever lets her be. Preston's wife was a godsend.
Perhaps now she'll come out of her shell and go more among the people.
It would help her. Anyway, we can't have everything rooted up again
just yet--before the time."
He walked on, and as the farther corner of the house came into view, he
saw a thinly curtained window with a light inside it, and it seemed to
him that he distinguished a figure within.
"Reading?--or embroidering? Probably, at her