The Last Chronicle of Barset (35 page)

‘She does not think so at all.'

‘For yourself, as I was saying, pray believe me that though from the roughness of my manner, being now unused to social intercourse, I seem to be ungracious and forbidding, I am grateful and mindful, and that in the tablets of my heart I have written you down as one in whom I could trust – were it given to me to trust in men and women.' Then he turned round with his face to the wall and his back to his visitor, and so remained till Mr Robarts had left him. ‘At any rate I wish you well through your trouble,' said Robarts; and as he spoke he found that his own words were nearly choked by a sob that was rising in his throat.

He went away without another word, and got out his gig without seeing Mrs Crawley. During one period of the interview he had been very angry with the man – so angry as to make him almost declare to himself that he would take no more trouble on his behalf. Then he had been brought to acknowledge that Mr Walker was right, and that Crawley was certainly mad. He was so mad, so far removed from the dominion of sound sense, that no jury could say that he was guilty
and that he ought to be punished for his guilt. And, as he so resolved, he could not but ask himself the question, whether the charge of the parish ought to be left in the hands of such a man? But at last, just before he went, these feelings and these convictions gave way to pity, and he remembered simply the troubles which seemed to have been heaped on the head of this poor victim to misfortune. As he drove home he resolved that there was nothing left for him to do, but to write to the dean. It was known to all who knew them both, that the dean and Mr Crawley had lived together on the closest intimacy at college, and that the friendship had been maintained through life – though, from the peculiarity of Mr Crawley's character, the two had not been much together of late years. Seeing how things were going now, and hearing how pitiful was the plight in which Mr Crawley was placed, the dean would, no doubt, feel it to be his duty to hasten his return to England. He was believed to be at this moment in Jerusalem, and it would be long before a letter could reach him; but there still wanted three months to the assizes, and his return might be probably effected before the end of February.

‘I was never so distressed in my life,' Mark Robarts said to his wife.

‘And you think you have done no good?'

‘Only this, that I have convinced myself that the poor man is not responsible for what he does, and that for her sake as well as for his own, some person should be enabled to interfere for his protection.' Then he told Mrs Robarts what Mr Walker had said; also the message which Mr Crawley had sent to the archdeacon. But they both agreed that that message need not be sent on any further.

Mrs Thorne had spoken very plainly in the advice which she had given to Major Grantly. ‘If I were you, I'd be at Allington before twelve o'clock tomorrow.' That had been Mrs Thorne's advice; and though Major Grantly had no idea of making the journey so rapidly as the lady had proposed, still he thought that he would make it before long, and follow the advice in spirit if not to the letter. Mrs Thorne had asked him if it was fair that the girl should be punished because of the father's fault; and the idea had been sweet to him that the infliction or non-infliction of such punishment should be in his hands. ‘You go and ask her,' Mrs Thorne had said. Well – he would go and ask her. If it should turn out at last that he had married the daughter of a thief, and that he was disinherited for doing so – an arrangement of circumstances which he had to teach himself to regard as very probable – he would not love Grace the less on that account, or allow himself for one moment to repent what he had done. As he thought of all this he became somewhat in love with a small income, and imagined to himself what honours would be done to him by the Mrs Thornes of the county, when they should come to know in what way he had sacrificed himself to his love. Yes – they would go and live at Pau.
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He thought Pau would do. He would have enough of income for that – and Edith would get lessons cheaply, and would learn to talk French fluently. He certainly would do it. He would go down to Allington, and ask Grace to be his wife; and bid her understand that if she loved him she could not be justified in refusing him by the circumstances of her father's position.

But he must go to Plumstead before he could go to Allington. He was engaged to spend his Christmas there, and must go now at once. There was not time for the journey to Allington before he was due at Plumstead. And, moreover, though he could not bring himself to resolve that he would tell his father what he was going to do – ‘It would seem as though I were asking his leave!' he said to himself –
he thought that he would make a clean breast of it to his mother. It made him sad to think that he should cut the rope which fastened his own boat among the other boats in the home harbour at Plumstead, and that he should go out all alone into strange waters – turned adrift together, as it were, from the Grantly fleet. If he could only get the promise of his mother's sympathy for Grace it would be something. He understood – no one better than he – the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father. And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring. He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter of an earl, and who was already mentioned as a candidate for high places. How his sister was the wife of a marquis, and a leader in the fashionable world, the reader already knows. The archdeacon himself was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a bishop; and Mrs Grantly, though there was left about her something of an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been hers before the stream of her days had run gold, yet she, too, had taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of those who construe literally that passage of scripture which tells us of the camel and the needle's eye.
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Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew himself to be his mother's favourite child – knew himself to have become so since something of coolness had grown up between her and her august daughter. The augustness of the daughter had done so much to reproduce the old freshness of which I have spoken in the mother's heart, and had specially endeared to her the son who, of all her children, was the least subject to the family failing. The clergyman, Charles Grantly – he who had married the Lady Anne – was his father's darling in these days. The old archdeacon would go up to London and be quite happy in his son's house. He met there the men whom he loved to meet, and heard the talk which he loved to hear. It was very fine, having the Marquis of Hartletop for his son-in-law, but he had never cared to be much at Lady Hartletop's house. Indeed, the archdeacon cared
to be in no house in which those around him were supposed to be bigger than himself. Such was the little family fleet from out of which Henry Grantly was now proposing to sail alone with his little boat – taking Grace Crawley with him at the helm. ‘My father is a just man at the bottom,' he said to himself, ‘and though he may not forgive me, he will not punish Edith.'

But there was still left one of the family – not a Grantly, indeed, but one so nearly allied to them as to have his boat moored in the same harbour – who, as the major well knew, would thoroughly sympathise with him. This was old Mr Harding, his mother's father – the father of his mother and of his aunt Mrs Arabin – whose home was now at the deanery. He was also to be at Plumstead during this Christmas, and he at any rate would give a ready assent to such a marriage as that which the major was proposing for himself. But then poor old Mr Harding had been thoroughly deficient in that ambition which had served to aggrandise the family into which his daughter had married. He was a poor old man who, in spite of good friends – for the late bishop of the diocese had been his dearest friend – had never risen high in his profession, and had fallen even from the moderate altitude which he had attained. But he was a man whom all loved who knew him; and it was much to the credit of his son-in-law, the archdeacon, that, with all his tendencies to love rising suns, he had ever been true to Mr Harding.

Major Grantly took his daughter with him, and on his arrival at Plumstead she of course was the first object of attention. Mrs Grantly declared that she had grown immensely. The archdeacon complimented her red cheeks, and said that Cosby Lodge was as healthy a place as any in the county, while Mr Harding, Edith's greatgrandfather, drew slowly from his pocket sundry treasures with which he had come prepared for the delight of the little girl. Charles Grantly and Lady Anne had no children, and the heir of all the Hartletops was too august to have been trusted to the embraces of her mother's grandfather. Edith, therefore, was all that he had in that generation, and of Edith he was prepared to be as indulgent as he had been, in their time, of his grandchildren the Grantlys, and still was of his grandchildren the Arabins, and had been before that of his own
daughters. ‘She's more like Eleanor than anyone else,' said the old man in a plaintive tone. Now Eleanor was Mrs Arabin, the dean's wife, and was at this time – if I were to say over forty I do not think I should be uncharitable. No one else saw the special likeness, but no one else remembered, as Mr Harding did, what Eleanor had been when she was three years old.

‘Aunt Nelly is in France,' said the child.

‘Yes, my darling, aunt Nelly is in France, and I wish she were at home. Aunt Nelly has been away a long time.'

‘I suppose she'll stay till the dean picks her up on his way home?' said Mrs Grantly.

‘So she says in her letters. I heard from her yesterday, and I brought the letter, as I thought you'd like to see it.' Mrs Grantly took the letter and read it, while her father still played with the child. The archdeacon and the major were standing together on the rug discussing the shooting at Chaldicotes, as to which the archdeacon had a strong opinion. ‘I'm quite sure that a man with a place like that does more good by preserving than by leaving it alone. The better head of game he has the richer the county will be generally. It is just the same with pheasants as it is with sheep and bullocks. A pheasant doesn't cost more than he's worth any more than a barn-door fowl. Besides, a man who preserves is always respected by the poachers, and the man who doesn't is not.'

‘There's something in that, sir, certainly,' said the major.

‘More than you think for, perhaps. Look at poor Sowerby, who went on there for years without a shilling. How he was respected, because he lived as the people around him expected a gentleman to live. Thorne will have a bad time of it, if he tries to change things.'

‘Only think,' exclaimed Mrs Grantly, ‘when Eleanor wrote she had not heard of that affair of poor Mr Crawley's.'

‘Does she say anything about him?' asked the major.

‘I'll read what she says. “I see in the Galignani
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that a clergyman in Barsetshire has been committed for theft. Pray tell me who it is. Not the bishop, I hope, for the credit of the diocese?”'

‘I wish it were,' said the archdeacon.

‘For shame, my dear,' said his wife.

‘No shame at all. If we are to have a thief among us, I'd sooner find him in a bad man than a good one. Besides, we should have a change at the palace, which would be a great thing.'

‘But is it not odd that Eleanor should have heard nothing of it?' said Mrs Grantly.

‘It's odd that you should not have mentioned it yourself.'

‘I did not, certainly; nor you, papa, I suppose?'

Mr Harding acknowledged that he had not spoken of it, and then they calculated that perhaps she might not have received any letter from her husband written since the news had reached him. ‘Besides, why should he have mentioned it?' said the major. ‘He only knows as yet of the inquiry about the cheque, and can have heard nothing of what was done by the magistrates.'

‘Still it seems so odd that Eleanor should not have known of it, seeing that we have been talking of nothing else for the last week,' said Mrs Grantly.

For two days the major said not a word of Grace Crawley to anyone. Nothing could be more courteous and complaisant than was his father's conduct to him. Anything that he wanted for Edith was to be done. For himself there was no trouble which would not be taken. His hunting, and his shooting, and his fishing seemed to have become matters of paramount consideration to his father. And then the archdeacon became very confidential about money matters – not offering anything to his son, which, as he well knew, would have been seen through as palpable bribery and corruption – but telling him of this little scheme and of that, of one investment and of another – how he contemplated buying a small property here, and spending a few thousands on building there. ‘Of course it is all for you and your brother,' said the archdeacon, with that benevolent sadness which is used habitually by fathers on such occasions; ‘and I like you to know what it is that I am doing. I told Charles about the London property the last time I was up,' said the archdeacon, ‘and there shall be no difference between him and you, if all goes well.' This was very good-natured on the archdeacon's part, and was not strictly necessary, as Charles was the eldest son; but the major understood it perfectly. ‘There shall be an elysium opened to you, if only you will not do
that terrible thing of which you spoke when last here.' The archdeacon uttered no such words as these, and did not even allude to Grace Crawley; but the words were as good as spoken, and had they been spoken ever so plainly the major could not have understood them more clearly. He was quite awake to the loveliness of the elysium opened before him. He had had his moment of anxiety, whether his father would or would not make an elder son of his brother Charles. The whole thing was now put before him plainly. Give up Grace Crawley, and you shall share alike with your brother. Disgrace yourself by marrying her, and your brother shall have everything. There was the choice, and it was still open to him to take which side he pleased. Were he never to go near Grace Crawley again no one would blame him, unless it were Miss Prettyman or Mrs Thorne. ‘Fill your glass, Henry,' said the archdeacon. ‘You'd better, I tell you, for there is no more of it left.' Then the major filled his glass and sipped the wine, and swore to himself that he would go down to Allington at once. What! Did his father think to bribe him by giving him'20 port? He would certainly go down to Allington, and he would tell his mother tomorrow morning, or certainly on the next day, what he was going to do. ‘Pity it should be all gone; isn't it, sir?' said the archdeacon to his father-in-law. ‘It has lasted my time,' said Mr Harding, ‘and I'm very much obliged to it. Dear, dear; how well I remember your father giving the order for it! There were two pipes, and somebody said it was a heady wine. “If the prebendaries and rectors can't drink it,” said your father, “the curates will.”'