The Case of Richard Meynell | Page 9

work. She had that
commission to finish. Busy woman!"
He fell to imagining the little room, the embroidery frame, the books,
and the brindled cat on the rug, of no particular race or beauty; for use
not for show; but sensitive and gentle like its mistress, and like her, not
to be readily made friends with.
"How wise of her," he thought, "not to accept her sister's offer since
Ralph's death--to insist on keeping her little house and her
independence. Imagine her!--prisoned in that house, with that family.

Except for Hester--except for Hester!"
He smiled sadly to himself, threw a last troubled look at the little house,
and left it behind him. Before him, the village street, with its green and
its pond, widened under the scudding sky. Far ahead, about a quarter of
a mile away, among surrounding trees, certain outlines were visible
through the July twilight. The accustomed eye knew them for the
chimneys of the Fox-Wiltons' house, owned now, since the recent death
of its master, Sir Ralph Fox-Wilton, by his widow, the sister of the lady
with the cat and the embroidery, and mother of many children, for the
most part an unattractive brood, peevish and slow-minded like their
father. Hester was the bright, particular star in that house, as Stephen
Barron had now found out.
Alack!--alack! The Rector's face resumed for a moment the expression
of painful or brooding perplexity it had worn during his conversation of
the afternoon with young Barron, on the subject of Hester Fox-Wilton.
Another light in a window--and a sound of shouting and singing. The
"Cowroast," a "public" mostly frequented by the miners who inhabited
the northern end of the village, was evidently doing trade. The Rector
did not look up as he passed it; but in general he turned an indulgent
eye upon it. Before entering upon the living, he had himself worked for
a month as an ordinary miner, in the colliery whose tall chimneys could
be seen to the east above the village roofs. His body still vividly
retained the physical memory of those days--of the aching muscles, and
the gargantuan thirsts.
At last the rows of new-built cottages attached to the colliery came in
view on the left; to the right, a steep hillside heavily wooded, and at the
top of it, in the distance, the glimmering of a large white house--stately
and separate--dominating the village, the church, the collieries, and the
Fox-Wiltons' plantations.
The Rector threw a glance at it. It was from that house had come the
letter he had found on his hall-table that afternoon; a letter in a
handwriting large and impressive like the dim house on the hill. The
handwriting of a man accustomed to command, whether his own

ancestral estate, or the collieries which had been carved out of its fringe,
or the village spreading humbly at his feet, or the church into which he
walked on Sunday with heavy tread, and upright carriage, conscious of
his threefold dignity--as squire, magistrate, and churchwarden.
"It's my business to fight him!" Meynell thought, looking at the house,
and squaring his broad shoulders unconsciously. "It's not my business
to hate him--not at all--rather to respect and sympathize with him. I
provoke the fight--and I may be thankful to have lit on a strong
antagonist. What's Stephen afraid of? What can they do? Let 'em try!"
A smile--contemptuous and good-humoured--crossed the Rector's face.
Any angry bigot determined to rid his parish of a heretical parson might
no doubt be tempted to use other than legal and theological weapons, if
he could get them. A heretic with unpaid bills and some hidden vice is
scarcely in a position to make much of his heresy. But the Rector's
smile showed him humorously conscious of an almost excessive
innocence of private life. The thought of how little an enemy could find
to lay hold on in his history or present existence seemed almost to bring
with it a kind of shamefacedness--as for experience irrevocably
foregone, warm, tumultuous, human experience, among the sinners and
sufferers of the world. For there are odd, mingled moments in the lives
of most scholars and saints--like Renan in his queer envy of Théophile
Gautier--when such men inevitably ask themselves whether they have
not missed something irreplaceable, the student, by his learning--the
saint even, by his goodness.
Here now was "Miners' Row." As the Rector approached the cottage of
which he was in search the clouds lightened in the east, and a pale
moonshine, suffusing the dusk, showed in the far distance beyond the
village, the hills of Fitton Chase, rounded, heathy hills, crowned by
giant firs. Meynell looked at them with longing, and a sudden
realization of his own weariness. A day or two, perhaps a week or two,
among the fells, with their