The Last Chronicle of Barset (8 page)

‘I do not know that they have ever been disgraced.'

‘You'll see. The whole county has heard of the affair of this twenty pounds. Look at that dear girl upstairs, who has been such a comfort to us. Do you think it would be fit that she and her husband should meet such a one as Grace Crawley at our table?'

‘I don't think it would do them a bit of harm,' said Mrs Grantly. ‘But there would be no chance of that, seeing that Griselda's husband never comes to us.'

‘He was here the year before last.'

‘And I never was so tired of a man in all my life.'

‘Then you prefer the Crawleys, I suppose. This is what you get from Eleanor's teaching.' Eleanor was the dean's wife, and Mrs Grantly's
younger sister. ‘It has always been a sorrow to me that I ever brought Arabin into the diocese.'

‘I never asked you to bring him, archdeacon. But nobody was so glad as you when he proposed to Eleanor.'

‘Well, the long and the short of it is this, I shall tell Henry tonight that if he makes a fool of himself with this girl, he must not look to me any longer for an income. He has about six hundred a year of his own, and if he chooses to throw himself away, he had better go and live in the south of France, or in Canada, or where he pleases. He shan't come here.'

‘I hope he won't marry the girl, with all my heart,' said Mrs Grantly.

‘He had better not. By heavens, he had better not!'

‘But if he does, you'll be the first to forgive him.'

On hearing this the archdeacon slammed the door, and retired to his washing apparatus. At the present moment he was very angry with his wife, but then he was so accustomed to such anger, and was so well aware that it in truth meant nothing, that it did not make him unhappy. The archdeacon and Mrs Grantly had now been man and wife for more than a quarter of a century, and had never in truth quarrelled. He had the most profound respect for her judgment, and the most implicit reliance on her conduct. She had never yet offended him, or caused him to repent the hour in which he had made her Mrs Grantly. But she had come to understand that she might use a woman's privilege with her tongue; and she used it – not altogether to his comfort. On the present occasion he was the more annoyed because he felt that she might be right. ‘It would be a positive disgrace, and I never would see him again,' he said to himself. And yet as he said it, he knew that he would not have the strength of character to carry him through a prolonged quarrel with his son. ‘I would never see her – never, never!' he said to himself. ‘And then such an opening as he might have at his sister's house!'

Major Grantly had been a successful man in life – with the one exception of having lost the mother of his child within a twelve-month of his marriage and within a few hours of that child's birth. He had served in India as a very young man, and had been decorated with
the Victoria Cross. Then he had married a lady with some money, and had left the active service of the army, with the concurring advice of his own family and that of his wife. He had taken a small place in his father's county, but the wife for whose comfort he had taken it had died before she was permitted to see it. Nevertheless he had gone to reside there, hunting a good deal and farming a little, making himself popular in the district, and keeping up the good name of Grantly in a successful way, till – alas – it had seemed good to him to throw those favouring eyes on poor Grace Crawley. His wife had now been dead just two years, and he was still under thirty, no one could deny it would be right that he should marry again. No one did deny it. His father had hinted that he ought to do so, and had generously whispered that if some little increase to the major's income were needed, he might possibly be able to do something. ‘What is the good of keeping it?' the archdeacon had said in liberal after-dinner warmth; ‘I only want it for your brother and yourself.' The brother was a clergyman.

And the major's mother had strongly advised him to marry again without loss of time. ‘My dear Henry,' she had said, ‘you'll never be younger, and youth does go for something. As for dear little Edith, being a girl, she is almost no impediment. Do you know those two girls at Chaldicotes?'

‘What, Mrs Thorne's nieces?'

‘No; they are not her nieces but her cousins. Emily Dunstable is very handsome – and as for money – !'

‘But what about birth, mother?'

‘One can't have everything, my dear.'

‘As far as I am concerned, I should like to have everything or nothing,' the major had said, laughing. Now for him to think of Grace Crawley after that – of Grace Crawley who had no money, and no particular birth, and not even beauty itself – so at least Mrs Grantly said – who had not even enjoyed the ordinary education of a lady, was too bad. Nothing had been wanting to Emily Dunstable's education, and it was calculated that she would have at least twenty thousand pounds on the day of her marriage.

The disappointment to the mother would be the more sore because
she had gone to work upon her little scheme with reference to Miss Emily Dunstable, and had at first, as she thought, seen her way to success – to success in spite of the disparaging words which her son had spoken to her. Mrs Thorne's house at Chaldicotes – or Dr Thorne's house as it should, perhaps, be more commonly called, for Dr Thorne was the husband of Mrs Thorne – was in these days the pleasantest house in Barsetshire. No one saw so much company as the Thornes, or spent so much money in so pleasant a way. The great county families, the Pallisers and the De Courcys, the Luftons and the Greshams, were no doubt grander, and some of them were perhaps richer than the Chaldicote Thornes – as they were called to distinguish them from the Thornes of Ullathorne; but none of these people were so pleasant in their ways, so free in their hospitality, or so easy in their modes of living, as the doctor and his wife. When first Chaldicotes, a very old country seat, had by the chances of war fallen into their hands and been newly furnished, and newly decorated, and newly gardened, and newly greenhoused and hot-watered by them, many of the county people had turned up their noses at them. Dear old Lady Lufton had done so, and had been greatly grieved – saying nothing, however, of her grief, when her son and daughter-in-law had broken away from her, and submitted themselves to the blandishments of the doctor's wife. And the Grantlys had stood aloof, partly influenced, no doubt, by their dear and intimate old friend Miss Monica Thorne of Ullathorne, a lady of the very old school, who, though good as gold and kind as charity, could not endure that an interloping Mrs Thorne, who had never had a grandfather, should come to honour and glory in the county, simply because of her riches. Miss Monica Thorne stood out, but Mrs Grantly gave way, and having once given way found that Dr Thorne, and Mrs Thorne, and Emily Dunstable, and Chaldicote House together, were very charming. And the major had been once there with her, and had made himself very pleasant, and there had certainly been some little passage of incipient love between him and Miss Dunstable, as to which Miss Thorne, who managed everything, seemed to be well pleased. This had been after the first mention made by Mrs Grantly to her son of Emily Dunstable's name, but before she had heard any
faintest whispers of his fancy for Grace Crawley; and she had therefore been justified in hoping – almost in expecting, that Emily Dunstable would be her daughter-in-law, and was therefore the more aggrieved when this terrible Crawley peril first opened itself before her eyes.

The dinner-party at the rectory comprised none but the Grantly family. The marchioness had written to say that she preferred to have it so. The father had suggested that the Thornes of Ullathorne, very old friends, might be asked, and the Greshams from Boxall Hill, and had even promised to endeavour to get old Lady Lufton over to the rectory, Lady Lufton having in former years been Griselda's warm friend. But Lady Hartletop had preferred to see her dear father and mother in privacy. Her brother Henry she would be glad to meet, and hoped to make some arrangement with him for a short visit to Hartlebury, her husband's place in Shropshire – as to which latter hint, it may, however, be at once said, that nothing further was spoken after the Crawley alliance had been suggested. And there had been a very sore point mooted by the daughter in a request made by her to her father that she might not be called upon to meet her grandfather, her mother's father, Mr Harding, a clergyman of Barchester, who was now stricken in years. – ‘Papa would not have come,' said Mrs Grantly, ‘but I think – I do think –' Then she stopped herself.

‘Your father has odd ways sometimes, my dear. You know how fond I am of having him here myself.'

‘It does not signify,' said Mrs Grantly. ‘Do not let us say anything more about it. Of course we cannot have everything. I am told the child does her duty in her sphere of life,
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and I suppose we ought to be contented.' Then Mrs Grantly went up to her own room, and
there she cried. Nothing was said to the major on the unpleasant subject of the Crawleys before dinner. He met his sister in the drawing-room, and was allowed to kiss her noble cheek. ‘I hope Edith is well, Henry,' said the sister. ‘Quite well; and little Dumbello is the same, I hope?' ‘Thank you, yes; quite well.' Then there seemed to be nothing more to be said between the two. The major never made inquiries after the august family, or would allow it to appear that he was conscious of being shone upon by the wife of a marquis. Any adulation which Griselda received of that kind came from her father, and, therefore, unconsciously she had learned to think that her father was better bred than the other members of her family, and more fitted by nature to move in that sacred circle to which she herself had been exalted. We need not dwell upon the dinner, which was but a dull affair. Mrs Grantly strove to carry on the family party exactly as it would have been carried on had her daughter married the son of some neighbouring squire; but she herself was conscious of the struggle, and the fact of there being a struggle produced failure. The rector's servants treated the daughter of the house with special awe, and the marchioness herself moved, and spoke, and ate, and drank with a cold magnificence, which I think had become a second nature with her, but which was not on that account the less oppressive. Even the archdeacon, who enjoyed something in that which was so disagreeable to his wife, felt a relief when he was left alone after dinner with his son. He felt relieved as his son got up to open the door for his mother and sister, but was aware at the same time that he had before him a most difficult and possibly a most disastrous task. His dear son Henry was not a man to be talked smoothly out of, or into, any propriety. He had a will of his own, and having hitherto been a successful man, who in youth had fallen into few youthful troubles – who had never justified his father in using stern parental authority – was not now inclined to bend his neck. ‘Henry,' said the archdeacon, ‘what are you drinking? That's '34 port, but it's not just what it should be. Shall I send for another bottle?'

‘It will do for me, sir. I shall only take a glass.'

‘I shall drink two or three glasses of claret. But you young fellows have become so desperately temperate.'

‘We take our wine at dinner, sir.'

‘By-the-by, how well Griselda is looking.'

‘Yes, she is. It's always easy for women to look well when they're rich.' How would Grace Crawley look, then, who was poor as poverty itself, and who should remain poor, if his son was fool enough to marry her? That was the train of thought which ran through the archdeacon's mind. ‘I do not think much of riches,' said he, ‘but it is always well that a gentleman's wife or a gentleman's daughter should have a sufficiency to maintain her position in life.'

‘You may say the same, sir, of everybody's wife and everybody's daughter.'

‘You know what I mean, Henry.'

‘I am not quite sure that I do, sir.'

‘Perhaps I had better speak out at once. A rumour has reached your mother and me, which we don't believe for a moment, but which, nevertheless, makes us unhappy even as a report. They say that there is a young woman living in Silverbridge to whom you are becoming attached.'

‘Is there any reason why I should not become attached to a young woman in Silverbridge? – though I hope any young woman to whom I may become attached will be worthy at any rate of being called a young lady.'

‘I hope so, Henry; I hope so. I do hope so.'

‘So much I will promise, sir; but I will promise nothing more.'

The archdeacon looked across into his son's face, and his heart sank within him. His son's voice and his son's eyes seemed to tell him two things. They seemed to tell him, firstly, that the rumour about Grace Crawley was true; and, secondly, that the major was resolved not to be talked out of his folly. ‘But you are not engaged to anyone, are you?' said the archdeacon. The son did not at first make any answer, and then the father repeated the question. ‘Considering our mutual positions, Henry, I think you ought to tell me if you are engaged.'

‘I am not engaged. Had I become so, I should have taken the first opportunity of telling either you or my mother.'

‘Thank God. Now, my dear boy, I can speak out more plainly. The
young woman whose name I have heard is daughter to that Mr Crawley who is perpetual curate at Hogglestock. I knew that there could be nothing in it.'

‘But there is something in it, sir.'

‘What is there in it? Do not keep me in suspense, Henry. What is it you mean?'

‘It is rather hard to be cross-questioned in this way on such a subject. When you express yourself as thankful that there is nothing in the rumour, I am forced to stop you, as otherwise it is possible that hereafter you may say that I have deceived you.'