“As to my course,” he said, dryly, “Letters
of Request will be sent at once to the Court of Arches
preferring charges of heretical teaching and unauthorized
services against yourself and two other clergy.
I shall be represented by so-and-so.” He
named the lawyers.
They stood, exchanging a few technical informations
of this kind for a few minutes. Then Meynell
took up his hat. The Bishop hesitated a moment,
then held out his hand.
Meynell grasped it, and suddenly stooped and kissed
the episcopal ring.
“I am an old man”—said the
Bishop brokenly—“and a weary one.
I pray God that He will give me strength to bear this
burden that is laid upon me.”
Meynell went away, with bowed head. The Bishop
was left alone. He moved to the window and stood
looking out. Across the green of the quadrangle
rose the noble mass of the Cathedral. His lips
moved in prayer; but all the time it was as though
he saw beside the visible structure—its
ordered beauty, its proud and cherished antiquity—a
ruined phantom of the great church, roofless and fissured,
its sacred places open to the winds and rains, its
pavements broken and desolate.
The imagination grew upon him, and it was only with
a great effort that he escaped from it.
“My bogies are as foolish as Barbara’s,”
he said to himself with a smile as he went back to
the daily toil of his letters.
Meynell left the Palace shaken and exhausted.
He carried in his mind the image of his Bishop, and
he walked in bitterness of soul. The quick, optimistic
imagination which had alone made the action of these
last weeks possible had for the moment deserted him,
and he was paying the penalty of his temperament.
He turned into the Cathedral, and knelt there some
time, conscious less of articulate prayer than of
the vague influences of the place; the warm gray of
its shadows, the relief of its mere space and silence,
the beauty of the creeping sunlight—gules,
or, and purple—on the spreading pavements.
And vaguely—while the Bishop’s grief
still, as it were, smarted within his own heart—there
arose the sense that he was the mere instrument of
a cause; that personal shrinking and compunction were
not allowed him; that he was the guardian of nascent
rights and claims far beyond anything affecting his
own life. Some such conviction is essential to
the religious leader—to the enthusiast indeed
of any kind; and it was not withheld from Richard
Meynell.
When he rose and went out, he saw coming toward him
a man he knew well—Fenton, the Vicar of
a church on the outskirts of Markborough, famous for
its “high” doctrine and services; a young
boyish fellow, curly haired, in whom the “gayety”
that Catholicism, Anglican or Roman, prescribes to
her most devout children was as conspicuous as an ascetic
and labourious life. Meynell loved and admired
him. At a small clerical meeting the two men
