The Chronicles of Barsetshire (183 page)

Nor when he got home was he much more inclined to any resolute line of action. He might have drunk his tea with Lady Scatcherd, as well as have sat there in his own drawing-room, drinking it alone; for he got no pen and paper, and he dawdled over his teacup with the utmost dilatoriness, putting off, as it were, the evil day. To only one thing was he fixed—to this, namely, that that letter should be written before he went to bed.

Having finished his tea, which did not take place till near eleven, he went downstairs to an untidy little room which lay behind his dépôt of medicines, and in which he was wont to do his writing; and herein he did at last set himself down to his work. Even at that moment he was in doubt. But he would write his letter to Miss Dunstable and see how it looked. He was almost determined not to send it; so, at least, he said to himself: but he could do no harm by writing it. So he did write it, as follows—

Greshamsbury, June, 185—.

MY DEAR MISS DUNSTABLE—

When he had got so far, he leaned back in his chair and looked at the paper. How on earth was he to find words to say that which he now wished to have said? He had never written such a letter in his life, or anything approaching to it, and now found himself overwhelmed with a difficulty of which he had not previously thought. He spent another half-hour in looking at the paper, and was at last nearly deterred by this new difficulty. He would use the simplest, plainest language, he said to himself over and over again; but it is not always easy to use simple, plain language—by no means so easy as to mount on stilts, and to march along with sesquipedalian words, with pathos, spasms, and notes of interjection. But the letter did at last get itself written, and there was not a note of interjection in it.

MY DEAR MISS DUNSTABLE,

I think it right to confess that I should not now be writing this letter to you, had I not been led to believe by other judgement than my own that the proposition which I am going to make would be regarded by you with favour. Without such other judgement I should, I own, have feared that the great disparity between you and me in regard to money would have given to such a proposition an appearance of being false and mercenary. All I ask of you now, with confidence, is to acquit me of such fault as that.

When you have read so far you will understand what I mean. We have known each other now somewhat intimately, though indeed not very long, and I have sometimes fancied that you were almost as well pleased to be with me as I have been to be with you. If I have been wrong in this, tell me so simply, and I will endeavour to let our friendship run on as though this letter had not been written. But if I have been right, and if it be possible that you can think that a union between us will make us both happier than we are single, I will plight you my word and troth with good faith, and will do what an old man may do to make the burden of the world lie light on your shoulders. Looking at my age I can hardly keep myself from thinking that I am an old fool: but I try to reconcile myself to that by remembering that you yourself are no longer a girl. You see that I pay you no compliments, and that you need expect none from me.

I do not know that I could add anything to the truth of this, if I were to write three times as much. All that is necessary is, that you should know what I mean. If you do not believe me to be true and honest already, nothing that I can write will make you believe it.

God bless you. I know you will not keep me long in suspense for an answer.

Affectionately your friend,

THOMAS THORNE.

When he had finished he meditated again for another half-hour whether it would not be right that he should add something about her money. Would it not be well for him to tell her—it might be said in a postscript—that with regard to all her wealth she would be free to do what she chose? At any rate he owed no debts for her to pay, and would still have his own income, sufficient for his own purposes. But about one o’clock he came to the conclusion that it would be better to leave the matter alone. If she cared for him, and could trust him, and was worthy also that he should trust her, no omission of such a statement would deter her from coming to him: and if there were no such trust, it would not be created by any such assurance on his part. So he read the letter over twice, sealed it, and took it up, together with his bed candle, into his bedroom. Now that the letter was written it seemed to be a thing fixed by fate that it must go. He had written it that he might see how it looked when written; but now that it was written, there remained no doubt that it must be sent. So he went to bed, with the letter on the toilette-table beside him; and early in the morning—so early as to make it seem that the importance of the letter had disturbed his rest—he sent it off by a special messenger to Boxall Hill.

“I’se wait for an answer?” said the boy.

“No,” said the doctor: “leave the letter, and come away.”

The breakfast hour was not very early at Boxall Hill in these summer months. Frank Gresham, no doubt, went round his farm before he came in for prayers, and his wife was probably looking to the butter in the dairy. At any rate, they did not meet till near ten, and therefore, though the ride from Greshamsbury to Boxall Hill was nearly two hours’ work, Miss Dunstable had her letter in her own room before she came down.

She read it in silence as she was dressing, while the maid was with her in the room; but she made no sign which could induce her Abigail to think that the epistle was more than ordinarily important. She read it, and then quietly refolding it and placing it in the envelope, she put it down on the table at which she was sitting. It was full fifteen minutes afterwards that she begged her servant to see if Mrs. Gresham were still in her own room. “Because I want to see her for five minutes, alone, before breakfast,” said Miss Dunstable.

“You traitor; you false, black traitor!” were the first words which Miss Dunstable spoke when she found herself alone with her friend.

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“I did not think there was so much mischief in you, nor so keen and commonplace a desire for match-making. Look here. Read the first four lines; not more, if you please; the rest is private. Whose is the other judgement of whom your uncle speaks in his letter?”

“Oh, Miss Dunstable! I must read it all.”

“Indeed you’ll do no such thing. You think it’s a love-letter, I dare say; but indeed there’s not a word about love in it.”

“I know he has offered. I shall be so glad, for I know you like him.”

“He tells me that I am an old woman, and insinuates that I may probably be an old fool.”

“I am sure he does not say that.”

“Ah! but I’m sure that he does. The former is true enough, and I never complain of the truth. But as to the latter, I am by no means so certain that it is true—not in the sense that he means it.”

“Dear, dearest woman, don’t go on in that way now. Do speak out to me, and speak without jesting.”

“Whose was the other judgement to whom he trusts so implicitly? Tell me that.”

“Mine, mine, of course. No one else can have spoken to him about it. Of course I talked to him.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“I told him—”

“Well, out with it. Let me have the real facts. Mind, I tell you fairly that you had no right to tell him anything. What passed between us, passed in confidence. But let us hear what you did say.”

“I told him that you would have him if he offered.” And Mrs. Gresham, as she spoke, looked into her friend’s face doubtingly, not knowing whether in very truth Miss Dunstable were pleased with her or displeased. If she were displeased, then how had her uncle been deceived!

“You told him that as a fact?”

“I told him that I thought so.”

“Then I suppose I am bound to have him,” said Miss Dunstable, dropping the letter on to the floor in mock despair.

“My dear, dear, dearest woman!” said Mrs. Gresham, bursting into tears, and throwing herself on to her friend’s neck.

“Mind you are a dutiful niece,” said Miss Dunstable. “And now let me go and finish dressing.” In the course of the afternoon, an answer was sent back to Greshamsbury, in these words—

DEAR DR. THORNE,

I do and will trust you in everything; and it shall be as you would have it. Mary writes to you; but do not believe a word she says. I never will again, for she has behaved so bad in this matter.

Yours affectionately and very truly,

MARTHA DUNSTABLE.

“And so I am going to marry the richest woman in England,” said Dr. Thorne to himself, as he sat down that day to his mutton-chop.

CHAPTER XL

Internecine

It must be conceived that there was some feeling of triumph at Plumstead Episcopi, when the wife of the rector returned home with her daughter, the bride elect of the Lord Dumbello. The heir of the Marquis of Hartletop was, in wealth, the most considerable unmarried young nobleman of the day; he was noted, too, as a man difficult to be pleased, as one who was very fine and who gave himself airs—and to have been selected as the wife of such a man as this was a great thing for the daughter of a parish clergyman. We have seen in what manner the happy girl’s mother communicated the fact to Lady Lufton, hiding, as it were, her pride under a veil; and we have seen also how meekly the happy girl bore her own great fortune, applying herself humbly to the packing of her clothes, as though she ignored her own glory.

But nevertheless there was triumph at Plumstead Episcopi. The mother, when she returned home, began to feel that she had been thoroughly successful in the great object of her life. While she was yet in London she had hardly realized her satisfaction, and there were doubts then whether the cup might not be dashed from her lips before it was tasted. It might be that even the son of the Marquis of Hartletop was subject to parental authority, and that barriers should spring up between Griselda and her coronet; but there had been nothing of the kind. The archdeacon had been closeted with the marquis, and Mrs. Grantly had been closeted with the marchioness; and though neither of those noble persons had expressed themselves gratified by their son’s proposed marriage, so also neither of them had made any attempt to prevent it. Lord Dumbello was a man who had a will of his own—as the Grantlys boasted amongst themselves. Poor Griselda! the day may perhaps come when this fact of her lord’s masterful will may not to her be matter of much boasting. But in London, as I was saying, there had been no time for an appreciation of the family joy. The work to be done was nervous in its nature, and self-glorification might have been fatal; but now, when they were safe at Plumstead, the great truth, burst upon them in all its splendour.

Mrs. Grantly had but one daughter, and the formation of that child’s character and her establishment in the world had been the one main object of the mother’s life. Of Griselda’s great beauty the Plumstead household had long been conscious; of her discretion also, of her conduct, and of her demeanour there had been no doubt. But the father had sometimes hinted to the mother that he did not think that Grizzy was quite so clever as her brothers. “I don’t agree with you at all,” Mrs. Grantly had answered. “Besides, what you call cleverness is not at all necessary in a girl; she is perfectly lady-like; even you won’t deny that.” The archdeacon had never wished to deny it, and was now fain to admit that what he had called cleverness was not necessary in a young lady.

At this period of the family glory the archdeacon himself was kept a little in abeyance, and was hardly allowed free intercourse with his own magnificent child. Indeed, to give him his due, it must be said of him that he would not consent to walk in the triumphal procession which moved with stately step, to and fro, through the Barchester regions. He kissed his daughter and blessed her, and bade her love her husband and be a good wife; but such injunctions as these, seeing how splendidly she had done her duty in securing to herself a marquis, seemed out of place and almost vulgar. Girls about to marry curates or sucking barristers should be told to do their duty in that station of life to which God might be calling them; but it seemed to be almost an impertinence in a father to give such an injunction to a future marchioness.

“I do not think that you have any ground for fear on her behalf,” said Mrs. Grantly, “seeing in what way she has hitherto conducted herself.”

“She has been a good girl,” said the archdeacon, “but she is about to be placed in a position of great temptation.”

“She has a strength of mind suited for any position,” replied Mrs. Grantly, vain-gloriously.

But nevertheless even the archdeacon moved about through the close at Barchester with a somewhat prouder step since the tidings of this alliance had become known there. The time had been—in the latter days of his father’s lifetime—when he was the greatest man of the close. The dean had been old and infirm, and Dr. Grantly had wielded the bishop’s authority. But since that things had altered. A new bishop had come there, absolutely hostile to him. A new dean had also come, who was not only his friend, but the brother-in-law of his wife; but even this advent had lessened the authority of the archdeacon. The vicars choral did not hang upon his words as they had been wont to do, and the minor canons smiled in return to his smile less obsequiously when they met him in the clerical circles of Barchester. But now it seemed that his old supremacy was restored to him. In the minds of many men an archdeacon, who was the father-in-law of a marquis, was himself as good as any bishop. He did not say much of his new connexion to others beside the dean, but he was conscious of the fact, and conscious also of the reflected glory which shone around his own head.

But as regards Mrs. Grantly it may be said that she moved in an unending procession of stately ovation. It must not be supposed that she continually talked to her friends and neighbours of Lord Dumbello and the marchioness. She was by far too wise for such folly as that. The coming alliance having been once announced, the name of Hartletop was hardly mentioned by her out of her own domestic circle. But she assumed, with an ease that was surprising even to herself, the airs and graces of a mighty woman. She went through her work of morning calls as though it were her business to be affable to the country gentry. She astonished her sister, the dean’s wife, by the simplicity of her grandeur; and condescended to Mrs. Proudie in a manner which nearly broke that lady’s heart. “I shall be even with her yet,” said Mrs. Proudie to herself, who had contrived to learn various very deleterious circumstances respecting the Hartletop family since the news about Lord Dumbello and Griselda had become known to her.

Griselda herself was carried about in the procession, taking but little part in it of her own, like an Eastern god. She suffered her mother’s caresses and smiled in her mother’s face as she listened to her own praises, but her triumph was apparently within. To no one did she say much on the subject, and greatly disgusted the old family housekeeper by declining altogether to discuss the future Dumbello
ménage
. To her aunt, Mrs. Arabin, who strove hard to lead her into some open-hearted speech as to her future aspirations, she was perfectly impassive. “Oh, yes, aunt, of course,” and “I’ll think about it, Aunt Eleanor,” or “Of course I shall do that if Lord Dumbello wishes it.” Nothing beyond this could be got from her; and so, after half-a-dozen ineffectual attempts, Mrs. Arabin abandoned the matter.

But then there arose the subject of clothes—of the wedding
trousseau
! Sarcastic people are wont to say that the tailor makes the man. Were I such a one, I might certainly assert that the milliner makes the bride. As regarding her bridehood, in distinction either to her girlhood or her wifehood—as being a line of plain demarcation between those two periods of a woman’s life—the milliner does do much to make her. She would be hardly a bride if the
trousseau
were not there. A girl married without some such appendage would seem to pass into the condition of a wife without any such line of demarcation. In that moment in which she finds herself in the first fruition of her marriage finery she becomes a bride; and in that other moment, when she begins to act upon the finest of these things as clothes to be packed up, she becomes a wife.

When this subject was discussed Griselda displayed no lack of a becoming interest. She went to work steadily, slowly, and almost with solemnity, as though the business in hand were one which it would be wicked to treat with impatience. She even struck her mother with awe by the grandeur of her ideas and the depth of her theories. Nor let it be supposed that she rushed away at once to the consideration of the great fabric which was to be the ultimate sign and mark of her status, the quintessence of her briding, the outer veil, as it were, of the tabernacle—namely, her wedding-dress. As a great poet works himself up by degrees to that inspiration which is necessary for the grand turning-point of his epic, so did she slowly approach the hallowed ground on which she would sit, with her ministers around her, when about to discuss the nature, the extent, the design, the colouring, the structure, and the ornamentation of that momentous piece of apparel. No; there was much indeed to be done before she came to this; and as the poet, to whom I have already alluded, first invokes his muse, and then brings his smaller events gradually out upon his stage, so did Miss Grantly with sacred fervour ask her mother’s aid, and then prepare her list of all those articles of underclothing which must be the substratum for the visible magnificence of her
trousseau
.

Money was no object. We all know what that means; and frequently understand, when the words are used, that a blaze of splendour is to be attained at the cheapest possible price. But, in this instance, money was no object—such an amount of money, at least, as could by any possibility be spent on a lady’s clothes, independently of her jewels. With reference to diamonds and such like, the archdeacon at once declared his intention of taking the matter into his own hands—except in so far as Lord Dumbello, or the Hartletop interest, might be pleased to participate in the selection. Nor was Mrs. Grantly sorry for such a decision. She was not an imprudent woman, and would have dreaded the responsibility of trusting herself on such an occasion among the dangerous temptations of a jeweller’s shop. But as far as silks and satins went—in the matter of French bonnets, muslims, velvets, hats, riding-habits, artificial flowers, head-gilding, curious nettings, enamelled buckles, golden tagged bobbins, and mechanical petticoats—as regarded shoes, and gloves, and corsets, and stockings, and linen, and flannel, and calico—money, I may conscientiously assert, was no object. And, under these circumstances, Griselda Grantly went to work with a solemn industry and a steady perseverance that was beyond all praise.

“I hope she will be happy,” Mrs. Arabin said to her sister, as the two were sitting together in the dean’s drawing-room.

“Oh, yes; I think she will. Why should she not?” said the mother.

“Oh, no: I know of no reason. But she is going up into a station so much above her own in the eyes of the world that one cannot but feel anxious for her.”

“I should feel much more anxious if she were going to marry a poor man,” said Mrs. Grantly. “It has always seemed to me that Griselda was fitted for a high position; that nature intended her for rank and state. You see that she is not a bit elated. She takes it all as if it were her own by right. I do not think that there is any danger that her head will be turned, if you mean that.”

“I was thinking rather of her heart,” said Mrs. Arabin.

“She never would have taken Lord Dumbello without loving him,” said Mrs. Grantly, speaking rather quickly.

“That is not quite what I mean either, Susan. I am sure she would not have accepted him had she not loved him. But it is so hard to keep the heart fresh among all the grandeurs of high rank; and it is harder for a girl to do so who has not been born to it, than for one who has enjoyed it as her birthright.”

“I don’t quite understand about fresh hearts,” said Mrs. Grantly, pettishly. “If she does her duty, and loves her husband, and fills the position in which God has placed her with propriety, I don’t know that we need look for anything more. I don’t at all approve of the plan of frightening a young girl when she is making her first outset into the world.”

“No; I would not frighten her. I think it would be almost difficult to frighten Griselda.”

“I hope it would. The great matter with a girl is whether she has been brought up with proper notions as to a woman’s duty. Of course it is not for me to boast on this subject. Such as she is, I, of course, am responsible. But I must own that I do not see occasion to wish for any change.” And then the subject was allowed to drop.

Among those of her relations who wondered much at the girl’s fortune, but allowed themselves to say but little, was her grandfather, Mr. Harding. He was an old clergyman, plain and simple in his manners, and not occupying a very prominent position, seeing that he was only precentor to the chapter. He was loved by his daughter, Mrs. Grantly, and was treated by the archdeacon, if not invariably with the highest respect, at least always with consideration and regard. But, old and plain as he was, the young people at Plumstead did not hold him in any great reverence. He was poorer than their other relatives, and made no attempt to hold his head high in Barsetshire circles. Moreover, in these latter days, the home of his heart had been at the deanery. He had, indeed, a lodging of his own in the city, but was gradually allowing himself to be weaned away from it. He had his own bedroom in the dean’s house, his own arm-chair in the dean’s library, and his own corner on a sofa in Mrs. Dean’s drawing-room. It was not, therefore, necessary that he should interfere greatly in this coming marriage; but still it became his duty to say a word of congratulation to his granddaughter—and perhaps to say a word of advice.

“Grizzy, my dear,” he said to her—he always called her Grizzy, but the endearment of the appellation had never been appreciated by the young lady—”come and kiss me, and let me congratulate you on your great promotion. I do so very heartily.”

“Thank you, grandpapa,” she said, touching his forehead with her lips, thus being, as it were, very sparing with her kiss. But those lips now were august and reserved for nobler foreheads than that of an old cathedral hack. For Mr. Harding still chanted the Litany from Sunday to Sunday, unceasingly, standing at that well-known desk in the cathedral choir; and Griselda had a thought in her mind that when the Hartletop people should hear of the practice they would not be delighted. Dean and archdeacon might be very well, and if her grandfather had even been a prebendary, she might have put up with him; but he had, she thought, almost disgraced his family in being, at his age, one of the working menial clergy of the cathedral. She kissed him, therefore, sparingly, and resolved that her words with him should be few.