The Last Chronicle of Barset (63 page)

‘He spoke of the dean in the highest terms to me.'

‘He may do that – and yet quarrel with him. He'd quarrel with his own right hand, if he had nothing else to quarrel with. That makes the difficulty, you see. He'll take nobody's advice. He thinks that we're all against him.'

‘I suppose the world has been heavy on him, Mr Walker?'

‘The world has been very heavy on him,' said John Eames, who had now been left free to join the conversation, Mr Summerkin having gone away to his lady-love. ‘You must not judge him as you do other men.'

‘That is just it,' said Mr Walker. ‘And to what result will that bring us?'

‘That we ought to stretch a point in his favour,' said Toogood.

‘But why?' asked the attorney from Silverbridge. ‘What do we mean when we say that one man isn't to be trusted as another? We simply imply that he is not what we call responsible.'

‘And I don't think Mr Crawley is responsible,' said Johnny.

‘Then how can he be fit to have charge of a parish?' said Mr Walker. ‘You see where the difficulty is. How it embarrasses one all round. The amount of evidence as to the cheque is, I think, sufficient to get a verdict in an ordinary case, and the Crown has no alternative but so to treat it. Then his friends come forward – and from sympathy with his sufferings, I desire to be ranked among the number – and say, “Ah, but you should spare this man, because he is not responsible.” Were he one who filled no position requiring special responsibility, that might be very well. His friends might undertake to look after him, and the prosecution might perhaps be smothered. But Mr Crawley holds a living, and if he escapes he will be triumphant – especially triumphant over the bishop. Now, if he has really taken this money, and if his only excuse be that he did not know when he took it whether he was stealing it or whether he was not – for the sake of justice that ought not to be allowed.' So spoke Mr Walker.

‘You think he certainly did steal the money?' said Johnny.

‘You have heard the evidence, no doubt?' said Mr Walker.

‘I don't feel quite sure about it, yet,' said Mr Toogood.

‘Quite sure of what?' said Mr Walker.

‘That the cheque was dropped in his house.'

‘It was at any rate traced to his hands.'

‘I have no doubt about that,' said Toogood.

‘And he can't account for it,' said Walker.

‘A man isn't bound to show where he got his money,' said Johnny. ‘Suppose that sovereign is marked,' and Johnny produced a coin from
his pocket, ‘and I don't know but what it is; and suppose it is proved to have belonged to someone who lost it, and then to be traced to my hands – how am I to say where I got it? If I were asked, I should simply decline to answer.'

‘But a cheque is not a sovereign, Mr Eames,' said Walker. ‘It is presumed that a man can account for the possession of a cheque. It may be that a man should have a cheque in his possession and not be able to account for it, and should yet be open to no grave suspicion. In such a case a jury has to judge. Here is the fact: that Mr Crawley has the cheque, and brings it into use some considerable time after it is drawn; and the additional fact that the drawer of the cheque had lost it, as he thought, in Mr Crawley's house, and had looked for it there, soon after it was drawn, and long before it was paid. A jury must judge; but, as a lawyer, I should say that the burden of disproof lies with Mr Crawley.'

‘Did you find out anything, Mr Walker,' said Toogood, ‘about the man who drove Mr Soames that day?'

‘No – nothing.'

‘The trap was from “The Dragon” at Barchester, I think?'

‘Yes – from “The Dragon of Wantly.”'

‘A respectable sort of house?'

‘Pretty well for that, I believe. I've heard that the people are poor,' said Mr Walker.

‘Somebody told me that they'd had a queer lot about the house, and that three or four of them left just then. I think I heard that two or three men from the place went to New Zealand together. It just came out in conversation while I was in the inn-yard.'

‘I have never heard anything of it,' said Mr Walker.

‘I don't say that it can help us.'

‘I don't see that it can,' said Mr Walker.

After that there was a pause, and Mr Toogood pushed about the old port, and made some very stinging remarks as to the claret-drinking propensities of the age. ‘Gladstone claret
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the most of it is, I fancy,' said Mr Toogood. ‘I find that port wine which my father bought in the wood five-and-twenty years ago is good enough for me.' Mr Walker said that it was quite good enough for him, almost too good,
and that he thought that he had had enough of it. The host threatened another bottle, and was up to draw the cork – rather to the satisfaction of John Eames, who liked his uncle's port – but Mr Walker stopped him. ‘Not a drop more for me,' he said. ‘You are quite sure?' ‘Quite sure.' And Mr Walker moved towards the door.

‘It's a great pity, Mr Walker,' said Toogood, going back to the old subject, ‘that this dean and his wife should be away.'

‘I understand that they will both be home before the trial,' said Mr Walker.

‘Yes – but you know how very important it is to learn beforehand exactly what your witnesses can prove and what they can't prove. And moreover, though neither the dean nor his wife might perhaps be able to tell us anything themselves, they might help to put us on the proper scent. I think I'll send somebody after them. I think I will.'

‘It would be a heavy expense, Mr Toogood.'

‘Yes,' said Toogood, mournfully, thinking of the twelve children; ‘it would be a heavy expense. But I never like to stick at a thing when it ought to be done. I think I shall send a fellow after them.'

‘I'll go,' said Johnny.

‘How can you go?'

‘I'll make old Snuffle give me leave.'

‘But will that lessen the expense?' said Mr Walker.

‘Well, yes, I think it will,' said John, modestly.

‘My nephew is a rich man, Mr Walker,' said Toogood.

‘That alters the case,' said Mr Walker. And thus, before they left the dining-room, it was settled that John Eames should be taught his lesson and should seek both Mrs Arabin and Dr Arabin on their travels.

On the morning after his return from London Mr Crawley showed symptoms of great fatigue, and his wife implored him to remain in bed. But this he would not do. He would get up, and go out down to the brickfields. He had specially bound himself, he said, to see that the duties of the parish did not suffer by being left in his hands. The bishop had endeavoured to place them in other hands, but he had persisted in retaining them. As he had done so he could allow no weariness of his own to interfere – and especially no weariness induced by labours undertaken on his own behalf. The day in the week had come round on which it was his wont to visit the brickmakers, and he would visit them. So he dragged himself out of his bed and went forth amidst the cold storm of a harsh wet March morning. His wife well knew when she heard his first word on that morning that one of those terrible moods had come upon him which made her doubt whether she ought to allow him to go anywhere alone. Latterly there had been some improvement in his mental health. Since the day of his encounter with the bishop and Mrs Proudie, though he had been as stubborn as ever, he had been less apparently unhappy, less depressed in spirits. And the journey to London had done him good. His wife had congratulated herself on finding him able to set about his work like another man, and he himself had experienced a renewal, if not of hope, at any rate, of courage, which had given him a comfort which he had recognised. His common-sense had not been very striking in his interview with Mr Toogood, but yet he had talked more rationally then and had given a better account of the matter in hand than could have been expected from him for some weeks previously. But now the labour was over, a reaction had come upon him, and he went away from his house having hardly spoken a word to his wife after the speech which he made about his duty to his parish.

I think that at this time nobody saw clearly the working of his
mind – not even his wife, who studied it very closely, who gave him credit for all his high qualities, and who had gradually learned to acknowledge to herself that she must distrust his judgment in many things. She knew that he was good and yet weak, that he was afflicted by false pride and supported by true pride, that his intellect was still very bright, yet so dismally obscured on many sides as almost to justify people in saying that he was mad. She knew that he was almost a saint, and yet almost a castaway through vanity and hatred of those above him. But she did not know that he knew all this of himself also. She did not comprehend that he should be hourly telling himself that people were calling him mad and were so calling him with truth. It did not occur to her that he could see her insight into him. She doubted as to the way in which he had got the cheque – never imagining, however, that he had wilfully stolen it – thinking that his mind had been so much astray as to admit of his finding it and using it without wilful guilt – thinking also, alas, that a man who could so act was hardly fit for such duties as those which were entrusted to him. But she did not dream that this was precisely his own idea of his own state and of his own position – that he was always inquiring of himself whether he was not mad; whether, if mad, he was not bound to lay down his office; that he was ever taxing himself with improper hostility to the bishop – never forgetting for a moment his wrath against the bishop and the bishop's wife, still comforting himself with his triumph over the bishop and the bishop's wife – but, for all that, accusing himself of a heavy sin and proposing to himself to go to the palace and there humbly to relinquish his clerical authority. Such a course of action he was proposing to himself, but not with any realised idea that he would so act. He was as a man who walks along a river's bank thinking of suicide, calculating how best he might kill himself – whether the river does not offer an opportunity too good to be neglected, telling himself that for many reasons he had better do so, suggesting to himself that the water is pleasant and cool, and that his ears would soon be deaf to the harsh noises of the world – but yet knowing, or thinking that he knows, that he never will kill himself. So it was with Mr Crawley. Though his imagination pictured to himself the whole scene – how he would humble himself to the
ground as he acknowledged his unfitness, how he would endure the small-voiced triumph of the little bishop, how, from the abjectness of his own humility, even from the ground on which he would be crouching, he would rebuke the loudmouthed triumph of the bishop's wife; though there was no touch wanting to the picture which he thus drew – he did not really propose to himself to commit this professional suicide. His wife, too, had considered whether it might be in truth becoming that he should give up his clerical duties, at any rate for a while; but she had never thought that the idea was present to his mind also.

Mr Toogood had told him that people would say that he was mad; and Mr Toogood had looked at him, when he declared for the second time that he had no knowledge whence the cheque had come to him, as though his words were to be regarded as the words of some sick child. ‘Mad!' he said to himself, as he walked home from the station that night. ‘Well; yes; and what if I am mad? When I think of all that I have endured my wonder is that I should not have been mad sooner.' And then he prayed – yes, prayed, that in his madness the Devil might not be too strong for him, and that he might be preserved from some terrible sin of murder or violence. What, if the idea should come to him in his madness that it would be well for him to slay his wife and his children? Only that was wanting to make him of all men the most unfortunate.

He went down among the brickmakers on the following morning, leaving the house almost without a morsel of food, and he remained at Hoggle End for the greater part of the day. There were sick persons there with whom he prayed, and then he sat talking with rough men while they ate their dinners, and he read passages from the Bible to women while they washed their husbands' clothes. And for a while he sat with a little girl in his lap teaching the child her alphabet. If it were possible for him he would do his duty. He would spare himself in nothing, though he might suffer even to fainting. And on this occasion he did suffer – almost to fainting, for as he returned home in the afternoon he was forced to lean from time to time against the banks on the road-side, while the cold sweat of weakness trickled down his face, in order that he might recover strength to go on a few
yards. But he would persevere. If God would but leave to him mind enough for his work, he would go on. No personal suffering should deter him. He told himself that there had been men in the world whose sufferings were sharper even than his own. Of what sort had been the life of the man who had stood for years on the top of a pillar? But then the man on the pillar had been honoured by all around him. And thus, though he had thought of the man on the pillar to encourage himself by remembering how lamentable had been that man's sufferings, he came to reflect that after all his own sufferings were perhaps keener than those of the man on the pillar.
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When he reached home, he was very ill. There was no doubt about it then. He staggered to his arm-chair, and stared at his wife first, then smiled at her with a ghastly smile. He trembled all over, and when food was brought to him he could not eat it. Early on the next morning the doctor was by his bedside, and before that evening came he was delirious. He had been at intervals in this state for nearly two days, when Mrs Crawley wrote to Grace, and though she had restrained herself telling everything, she had written with sufficient strength to bring Grace at once to her father's bedside.