The Last Chronicle of Barset. Anthony Trollope
don’t mean to say, archdeacon, that you think that Mr. Crawley—a clergyman—stole it!” said Mrs. Grantly.
“I don’t say anything of the kind, my dear. But supposing Mr. Crawley to be as honest as the sun, you wouldn’t wish Henry to marry his daughter.”
“Certainly not,” said the mother. “It would be an unfitting marriage. The poor girl has had no advantages.”
“He is not able even to pay his baker’s bill. I always thought Arabin was very wrong to place such a man in such a parish as Hogglestock. Of course the family could not live there.” The Arabin here spoken of was Dr. Arabin, dean of Barchester. The dean and the archdeacon had married sisters, and there was much intimacy between the families.
“After all it is only a rumour as yet,” said Mrs. Grantly.
“Fothergill told me only yesterday, that he sees her almost every day,” said the father. “What are we to do, Griselda? You know how headstrong Henry is.” The marchioness sat quite still, looking at the fire, and made no immediate answer to this address.
“There is nothing for it, but that you should tell him what you think,” said the mother.
“If his sister were to speak to him, it might do much,” said the archdeacon. To this Mrs. Grantly said nothing; but Mrs. Grantly’s daughter understood very well that her mother’s confidence in her was not equal to her father’s. Lady Hartletop said nothing, but still sat, with impassive face, and eyes fixed upon the fire. “I think that if you were to speak to him, Griselda, and tell him that he would disgrace his family, he would be ashamed to go on with such a marriage,” said the father. “He would feel, connected as he is with Lord Hartletop—”
“I don’t think he would feel anything about that,” said Mrs. Grantly.
“I dare say not,” said Lady Hartletop.
“I am sure he ought to feel it,” said the father. They were all silent, and sat looking at the fire.
“I suppose, papa, you allow Henry an income,” said Lady Hartletop, after a while.
“Indeed I do,—eight hundred a year.”
“Then I think I should tell him that that must depend upon his conduct. Mamma, if you won’t mind ringing the bell, I will send for Cecile, and go upstairs and dress.” Then the marchioness went upstairs to dress, and in about an hour the major arrived in his dog-cart. He also was allowed to go upstairs to dress before anything was said to him about his great offence.
“Griselda is right,” said the archdeacon, speaking to his wife out of his dressing-room. “She always was right. I never knew a young woman with more sense than Griselda.”
“But you do not mean to say that in any event you would stop Henry’s income?” Mrs. Grantly also was dressing, and made reply out of her bedroom.
“Upon my word, I don’t know. As a father I would do anything to prevent such a marriage as that.”
“But if he did marry her in spite of the threat? And he would if he had once said so.”
“Is a father’s word, then, to go for nothing; and a father who allows his son eight hundred a year? If he told the girl that he would be ruined she couldn’t hold him to it.”
“My dear, they’d know as well as I do, that you would give way after three months.”
“But why should I give way? Good heavens—!”
“Of course you’d give way, and of course we should have the young woman here, and of course we should make the best of it.”
The idea of having Grace Crawley as a daughter at the Plumstead Rectory was too much for the archdeacon, and he resented it by additional vehemence in the tone of his voice, and a nearer personal approach to the wife of his bosom. All unaccoutred as he was, he stood in the doorway between the two rooms, and thence fulminated at his wife his assurances that he would never allow himself to be immersed in such a depth of humility as that she had suggested. “I can tell you this, then, that if ever she comes here, I shall take care to be away. I will never receive her here. You can do as you please.”
“That is just what I cannot do. If I could do as I pleased, I would put a stop to it at once.”
“It seems to me that you want to encourage him. A child about sixteen years of age!”
“I am told she is nineteen.”
“What does it matter if she was fifty-nine? Think of what her bringing up has been. Think what it would be to have all the Crawleys in our house for ever, and all their debts, and all their disgrace!”
“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 to-night 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 never would 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 twelvemonth 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