Framley Parsonage (9 page)

‘We did not exterminate the inhabitants of India,’
said Harold Smith, angrily.

‘Nor have we attempted to Christianize them, as the bishop so properly wishes to do with your islanders.’

‘Supplehouse, you are not fair,’ said Mr Sowerby, ‘neither to Harold Smith nor to us; – you are making him rehearse his lecture, which is bad for him; and making us hear the rehearsal, which is bad for us.’

‘Supplehouse belongs to a clique which monopolizes the
wisdom of England,’ said Harold Smith; ‘or, at any rate, thinks that it does. But the worst of them is that they are given to talk leading articles.’

‘Better that, than talk articles which are not leading,’ said Mr Supplehouse. ‘Some first-class official men do that.’

‘Shall I meet you at the duke’s next week, Mr Robarts,’ said the bishop to him, soon after they had gone into the drawing-room.

Meet him at the duke’s! – the established enemy of Barsetshire mankind, as Lady Lufton regarded his grace! No idea of going to the duke’s had ever entered our hero’s mind; nor had he been aware that the duke was about to entertain any one.

‘No, my lord; I think not. Indeed, I have no acquaintance with his grace.’

‘Oh – ah! I did not know. Because Mr Sowerby is going; and so are the Harold Smiths,
and, I think, Mr Supplehouse. An excellent man is the duke; – that is, as regards all the county interests,’ added the bishop, remembering that the moral character of his bachelor grace was not the very best in the world.

And then his lordship began to ask some questions about the church affairs of Framley, in which a little interest as to Framley Court was also mixed up, when he was interrupted
by a rather sharp voice, to which he instantly attended.

‘Bishop,’ said the rather sharp voice; and the bishop trotted across the room to the back of the sofa, on which his wife was sitting.

‘Miss Dunstable thinks that she will be able to come to us for a couple of days, after we leave the duke’s.’

‘I shall be delighted above all things,’ said the bishop, bowing low to the dominant lady of
the day. For be it known to all men, that Miss Dunstable was the great heiress of that name.

‘Mrs Proudie is so very kind as to say that she will take me in, with my poodle, parrot, and pet old woman.’

‘I tell Miss Dunstable, that we shall have quite room for any of her suite,’ said Mrs Proudie. ‘And that it will give us no trouble.’

‘“The labour we delight in physics pain,”’
²
said the gallant
bishop, bowing low, and putting his hand upon his heart.

In the meantime, Mr Fothergill had got hold of Mark Robarts. Mr Fothergill was a gentleman, and a magistrate of the county, but he occupied the position of managing man on the Duke of Omnium’s estates. He was not exactly his agent; that is to say, he did not receive his rents; but he ‘managed’ for him, saw people, went about the county,
wrote letters, supported the electioneering interest, did popularity when it was too much trouble for the duke to do it himself, and was, in fact, invaluable. People in West Barset-shire would often say that they did not know what
on earth
the duke would do, if it were not for Mr Fothergill. Indeed, Mr Fothergill was useful to the duke.

‘Mr Robarts,’ he said, ‘I am very happy to have the pleasure
of meeting you – very happy, indeed. I have often heard of you from our friend Sowerby.’

Mark bowed, and said that he was delighted to have the honour of making Mr Fothergill’s acquaintance.

‘I am commissioned by the Duke of Omnium,’ continued Mr Fothergill, ‘to say how glad he will be if you will join his grace’s party at Gatherum Castle, next week. The bishop will be there, and indeed nearly
the whole set who are here now. The duke would have written when he heard that you were to be at Chaldicotes; but things were hardly quite arranged then, so his grace has left it for me to tell you how happy he will be to make your acquaintance in his own house. I have spoken to Sowerby,’ continued Mr Fothergill, ‘and he very much hopes that you will be able to join us.’

Mark felt that his face
became red when this proposition was
made to him. The party in the county to which he properly belonged – he and his wife, and all that made him happy and respectable – looked upon the Duke of Omnium with horror and amazement; and now he had absolutely received an invitation to the duke’s house! A proposition was made to him that he should be numbered among the duke’s friends!

And though in one
sense he was sorry that the proposition was made to him, yet in another he was proud of it. It is not every young man, let his profession be what it may, who can receive overtures of friendship from dukes without some elation. Mark, too, had risen in the world, as far as he had yet risen, by knowing great people; and he certainly had an ambition to rise higher. I will not degrade him by calling
him a tuft-hunter; but he undoubtedly had a feeling that the paths most pleasant for a clergyman’s feet were those which were trodden by the great ones of the earth.

Nevertheless, at the moment he declined the duke’s invitation. He was very much flattered, he said, but the duties of his parish would require him to return direct from Chaldicotes to Framley.

‘You need not give me an answer to-night,
you know,’ said Mr Fothergill. ‘Before the week is past, we will talk it over with Sowerby and the bishop. It will be a thousand pities, Mr Robarts, if you will allow me to say so, that you should neglect such an opportunity of knowing his grace.’

When Mark went to bed, his mind was still set against going to the duke’s; but, nevertheless, he did feel that it was a pity that he should not do
so. After all, was it necessary that he should obey Lady Lufton in all things?

I
T
is no doubt very wrong to long after a naughty thing. But nevertheless we all do so. One may say that hankering after naughty things is the very essence of the evil into which we have been precipitated by Adam’s fall. When we confess that we are all sinners, we confess that we all long after naughty things.

And ambition is a great vice – as Mark Antony
told us a long time ago – a great vice, no doubt, if the ambition of the man be with reference to his own advancement, and not to the advancement of others. But then, how many of us are there who are not ambitious in this vicious manner?

And there is nothing viler than the desire to know great people – people of great rank I should say; nothing worse than the hunting of titles and worshipping
of wealth. We all know this, and say it every day of our lives. But presuming that a way into the society of Park Lane was open to us, and a way also into that of Bedford Row,
¹
how many of us are there who would prefer Bedford Row because it is so vile to worship wealth and title?

I am led into these rather trite remarks by the necessity of putting forward some sort of excuse for that frame of
mind in which the Rev. Mark Robarts awoke on the morning after his arrival at Chaldicotes. And I trust that the fact of his being a clergyman will not be allowed to press against him unfairly. Clergymen are subject to the same passions as other men; and, as far as I can see, give way to them, in one line or in another, almost as frequently. Every clergyman should, by canonical rule, feel a personal
disinclination to a bishopric;
²
but yet we do not believe that such personal disinclination is generally very strong.

Mark’s first thoughts when he woke on that morning flew back to Mr Fothergill’s invitation. The duke had sent a special message to say how peculiarly glad he, the duke, would be to make acquaintance with him, the parson! How much of this message
had been of Mr Fothergill’s own
manufacture, that Mark Robarts did not consider.

He had obtained a living at an age when other young clergymen are beginning to think of a curacy, and he had obtained such a living as middle-aged parsons in their dreams regard as a possible Paradise for their old years. Of course he thought that all these good things had been the results of his own peculiar merits. Of course he felt that he was
different from other parsons, – more fitted by nature for intimacy with great persons, more urbane, more polished, and more richly endowed with modern clerical well-to-do aptitudes. He was grateful to Lady Lufton for what she had done for him; but perhaps not so grateful as he should have been.

At any rate he was not Lady Lufton’s servant, nor even her dependant. So much he had repeated to himself
on many occasions, and had gone so far as to hint the same idea to his wife. In his career as parish priest he must in most things be the judge of his own actions – and in many also it was his duty to be the judge of those of his patroness. The fact of Lady Lufton having placed him in the living, could by no means make her the proper judge of his actions. This he often said to himself; and he
said as often that Lady Lufton certainly had a hankering after such a judgment-seat.

Of whom generally did prime ministers and official bigwigs think it expedient to make bishops and deans? Was it not, as a rule, of those clergymen who had shown themselves able to perform their clerical duties efficiently, and able also to take their place with ease in high society? He was very well off certainly
at Framley; but he could never hope for anything beyond Framley, if he allowed himself to regard Lady Lufton as a bugbear. Putting Lady Lufton and her prejudices out of the question, was there any reason why he ought not to accept the duke’s invitation? He could not see that there was any such reason. If any one could be a better judge on such a subject than himself, it must be his bishop. And
it was clear that the bishop wished him to go to Gatherum Castle.

The matter was still left open to him. Mr Fothergill had especially explained that; and therefore his ultimate decision was
as yet within his own power. Such a visit would cost him some money, for he knew that a man does not stay at great houses without expense; and then, in spite of his good income, he was not very flush of money.
He had been down this year with Lord Lufton in Scotland. Perhaps it might be more prudent for him to return home.

But then an idea came to him that it behoved him as a man and a priest to break through that Framley thraldom under which he felt that he did to a certain extent exist. Was it not the fact that he was about to decline this invitation from fear of Lady Lufton? and if so, was that a
motive by which he ought to be actuated? It was incumbent on him to rid himself of that feeling. And in this spirit he got up and dressed.

There was hunting again on that day; and as the hounds were to meet near Chaldicotes, and to draw some coverts lying on the verge of the chase, the ladies were to go in carriages through the drives of the forest, and Mr Robarts was to escort them on horseback.
Indeed it was one of those hunting-days got up rather for the ladies than for the sport. Great nuisances they are to steady, middle-aged hunting men; but the young fellows like them because they have thereby an opportunity of showing off their sporting finery, and of doing a little flirtation on horseback. The bishop, also, had been minded to be of the party; so, at least, he had said on the
previous evening; and a place in one of the carriages had been set apart for him: but since that, he and Mrs Proudie had discussed the matter in private, and at breakfast his lordship declared that he had changed his mind.

Mr Sowerby was one of those men who are known to be very poor – as poor as debt can make a man – but who, nevertheless, enjoy all the luxuries which money can give. It was
believed that he could not live in England out of jail but for his protection as a member of Parliament; and yet it seemed that there was no end to his horses and carriages, his servants and retinue. He had been at this work for a great many years, and practice, they say, makes perfect. Such companions are very dangerous. There is no cholera, no yellow-fever, no small-pox more contagious than debt.
If one lives habitually among embarrassed men, one catches it to a certainty. No one had injured the community in this way
more fatally than Mr Sowerby. But still he carried on the game himself; and now on this morning carriages and horses thronged at his gate, as though he were as substantially rich as his friend the Duke of Omnium.

‘Robarts, my dear fellow,’ said Mr Sowerby, when they were
well under way down one of the glades of the forest, – for the place where the hounds met was some four or five miles from the house of Chaldicotes, – ‘ride on with me a moment. I want to speak to you; and if I stay behind we shall never get to the hounds.’ So Mark, who had come expressly to escort the ladies, rode on alongside of Mr Sowerby in his pink coat.

‘My dear fellow, Fothergill tells
me that you have some hesitation about going to Gatherum Castle.’

‘Well, I did decline, certainly. You know I am not a man of pleasure, as you are. I have some duties to attend to.’

‘Gammon!’ said Mr Sowerby; and as he said it he looked with a kind of derisive smile into the clergyman’s face.

‘It is easy enough to say that, Sowerby; and perhaps I have no right to expect that you should understand
me.’

‘Ah, but I do understand you; and I say it is gammon. I would be the last man in the world to ridicule your scruples about duty, if this hesitation on your part arose from any such scruple. But answer me honestly, do you not know that such is not the case?’

‘I know nothing of the kind.’

‘Ah, but I think you do. If you persist in refusing this invitation will it not be because you are afraid
of making Lady Lufton angry? I do not know what there can be in that woman that she is able to hold both you and Lufton in leading-strings.’

Robarts, of course, denied the charge and protested that he was not to be taken back to his own parsonage by any fear of Lady Lufton. But though he made such protest with warmth, he knew that he did so ineffectually. Sowerby only smiled and said that the
proof of the pudding was in the eating.

‘What is the good of a man keeping a curate if it be not to save him from that sort of drudgery?’ he asked.