‘There are certainly examples of such accidents happening,’ said Mrs Grantly. ‘They do say that there is a priestess at Barchester who is very imperious in all things touching the altar. Perhaps the fear of such a fate as that is before your eyes.’
When they were joined by the archdeacon on the gravel before the vicarage, they descended again to grave dullness. Not that Archdeacon Grantly was a dull man; but his frolic humours were of a cumbrous kind; and his wit, when he was witty, did not generally extend itself to his auditory. On the present occasion he was soon making speeches about wounded roofs and walls, which he declared to be in want of some surgeon’s art. There was not a partition that he did not tap, nor a block of chimneys that he did not narrowly examine; all water-pipes, flues, cisterns, and sewers underwent an investigation; and he even descended, in the care of his friend, so far as to bore sundry boards in the floors with a bradawl.
Mr Arabin accompanied him through the rooms, trying to look wise in such domestic matters, and the other three also followed. Mrs Grantly showed that she had not herself been priestess of a parish twenty years for nothing, and examined the bells and window panes in a very knowing way.
‘You will, at any rate, have a beautiful prospect out of your own window, if this is to be your private sanctum,’ said Eleanor. She was standing at the lattice of a little room upstairs, from which the view certainly was very lovely. It was from the back of the vicarage, and there was nothing to interrupt the eye between the house and the glorious grey pile of the cathedral. The intermediate ground, however, was beautifully studded with timber. In the immediate foreground ran the little river which afterwards skirted the city; and, just to the right of the cathedral, the pointed gables and chimneys of Hiram’s Hospital peeped out of the elms which encompassed it.
‘Yes,’ said he, joining her. ‘I shall have a beautifully complete view of my adversaries. I shall sit down before the hostile town, and fire away at them at a very pleasant distance. I shall just be able to lodge a shot in the hospital, should the enemy ever get possession of it; and as for the palace, I have it within full range.’
‘I never saw anything like you clergymen,’ said Eleanor; ‘you are always thinking of fighting each other.’
‘Either that,’ said he, ‘or else supporting each other. The pity is that we cannot do the one without the other. But are we not here to fight? Is not ours a church militant? What is all our work but fighting, and hard fighting, if it be well done?’
‘But not with each other.’
‘That’s as it may be. The same complaint which you make of me for battling with another clergyman of our own Church, the Mohammedan would make against me for battling with the error of a priest of Rome. Yet, surely, you would not be inclined to say that I should be wrong to do battle with such as him. A pagan, too, with his multiplicity of gods, would think it equally odd that the Christian and the Mohammedan should disagree.’
‘Ah! but you wage your wars about trifles so bitterly.’
‘Wars about trifles,’ said he, ‘are always bitter, especially among neighbours. When the differences are great, and the parties comparative strangers, men quarrel with courtesy. What combatants are ever so eager as two brothers?’
‘But do not such contentions bring scandal on the Church?’
‘More scandal would fall on the Church if there were no such contentions. We have but one way to avoid them – that of acknowledging a common head of our Church, whose word on all points of doctrine shall be authoritative. Such a termination of our difficulties is alluring enough. It has charms which are irresistible to many, and all but irresistible, I own, to me.’
‘You speak now of the Church of Rome?’ said Eleanor.
‘No,’ said he, ‘not necessarily of the Church of Rome; but of a church with a head. Had it pleased God to vouchsafe to us such a church our path would have been easy. But easy paths have not been thought good for us.’ He paused and stood silent for a while, thinking of the time when he had so nearly sacrificed all he had, his powers of mind, his free agency, the fresh running waters of his mind’s fountain, his very inner self, for an easy path in which no fighting would be needed; and then he continued: ‘What you say is partly true; our contentions do bring on us some scandal. The outer world, though it constantly reviles us for our human infirmities, and throws in our teeth the fact that being clergymen we are still no more than men, demands of us that we should do our work with god-like perfection. There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with the acerbity common to man – we triumph over each other with human frailty – we allow differences on subjects of divine origin to produce among us antipathies and enmities which are anything but divine. This is all true. But what would you have in place of it? There is no infallible head for a church on earth. This dream of believing man has been tried, and we see in Italy and in Spain what has come of it. Grant that there are and have been no bickerings within the pale of the Pope’s Church. Such an assumption would be utterly untrue; but let us grant it, and then let us say which Church has incurred the heavier scandals.’
There was a quiet earnestness about Mr Arabin, as he half acknowledged and half defended himself from the charge brought against him, which surprised Eleanor. She had been used all her life to listen to clerical discussion; but the points at issue between the disputants had so seldom been of more than temporal significance as to have left on her mind no feeling of reverence for such subjects. There had always been a hard worldly leaven of the love either of income or of power in the strains she had heard; there had been no panting for the truth; no aspirations after religious purity. It had always been taken for granted by those around her that they were indubitably right, that there was no ground for doubt, that the hard uphill work of ascertaining what the duty of a clergyman should be had been already accomplished in full; and that what remained for an active militant parson to do, was to hold his own against all comers. Her father, it is true, was an exception to this; but then he was so essentially anti-militant in all things that she classed him in her own mind apart from all others. She had never argued the matter within herself, or considered whether this common tone was or was not faulty; but she was sick of it without knowing that she was so. And now she found to her surprise, and not without a certain pleasurable excitement, that this newcomer among them spoke in a manner very different from that to which she was accustomed.
‘It is so easy to condemn,’ said he, continuing the thread of his thoughts. ‘I know no life that must be so delicious as that of a writer for newspapers, or a leading member of the opposition – to thunder forth accusations against men in power; to show up the worst side of everything that is produced; to pick holes in every coat; to be indignant, sarcastic, jocose, moral, or supercilious; to damn with faint praise, or crush with open calumny! What can be so easy as this when the critic has to be responsible for nothing? You condemn what I do; but put yourself in my position and do the reverse, and then see if I cannot condemn you.’
‘Oh! Mr Arabin, I do not condemn you.’
‘Pardon me, you do, Mrs Bold – you as one of the world; you are now the opposition member; you are now composing your leading article, and well and bitterly you do it. “Let dogs delight to bark and bite”; 3 you fitly begin with an elegant quotation; “but if we are to have a church at all, in heaven’s name let the pastors who preside over it keep their hands from each other’s throats. Lawyers can live without befouling each other’s names; doctors do not fight duels. Why is it that clergymen alone should indulge themselves in such unrestrained liberty of abuse against each other?” and so you go on reviling us for our ungodly quarrels, our sectarian propensities, and scandalous differences. It will, however, give you no trouble to write another article next week in which we, or some of us, shall be twitted with an unseemly apathy in matters of our vocation. It will not fall on you to reconcile the discrepancy; your readers will never ask you how the poor parson is to be urgent in season and out of season, and yet
never come in contact with men who think widely differently from him. You, when you condemn this foreign treaty. or that official arrangement, will have to incur no blame for the graver faults of any different measure. It is so easy to condemn; and so pleasant too; for eulogy charms no listeners as detraction does.’
Eleanor only half followed him in his raillery, but she caught his meaning. ‘I know I ought to apologize for presuming to criticize you,’ she said; ‘but I was thinking with sorrow of the ill-will that has lately come among us at Barchester, and I spoke more freely than I should have done.’
‘Peace on earth and good-will among men, are, like heaven, promises for the future’; said he, following rather his own thoughts than hers. ‘When that prophecy is accomplished, there will no longer be any need for clergymen.’
Here they were interrupted by the archdeacon, whose voice was heard from the cellar shouting to the vicar.
‘Arabin, Arabin,’ – and then turning to his wife, who was apparently at his elbow – ‘where has he gone to? This cellar is perfectly abominable. It would be murder to put a bottle of wine into it till it has been roofed, walled, and floored. How on earth old Goodenough ever got on with it, I cannot guess. But then Goodenough never had a glass of wine that any man could drink.’
‘What is it, archdeacon?’ said the vicar, running downstairs, and leaving Eleanor above to her meditations.
‘This cellar must be roofed, walled, and floored,’ repeated the archdeacon. ‘Now mind what I say, and don’t let the architect persuade you that it will do; half of these fellows know nothing about wine. This place as it is now would be damp and cold in winter, and hot and muggy in summer. I wouldn’t give a straw for the best wine that ever was vinted, after it had Iain here a couple of years.’
Mr Arabin assented, and promised that the cellar should be reconstructed according to the archdeacon’s receipt.
‘And, Arabin, look here; was such an attempt at a kitchen grate ever seen?’
‘The grate is really very bad,’ said Mrs Grantly; ‘I am sure the priestess won’t approve of it, when she is brought home to the scene of her future duties. Really, Mr Arabin, no priestess accustomed to such an excellent well as that above could put up with such a grate as this.’
‘If there must be a priestess at St Ewold’s at all, Mrs Grantly, I think we will leave her to her well, and not call down her divine wrath on any of the imperfections rising from our human poverty. However, I own I am amenable to the attractions of a well-cooked dinner, and the grate shall certainly be changed.’
By this time the archdeacon had again ascended, and was now in the dining-room. ‘Arabin,’ said he, speaking in his usual loud clear voice, and with that tone of dictation which was so common to him; ‘you must positively alter this dining-room, that is, remodel it altogether; look here, it is just sixteen feet by fifteen; did any man ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions!’ and the archdeacon stepped the room long-ways and cross-ways with ponderous steps, as though a certain amount of ecclesiastical dignity could be imparted even to such an occupation as that by the manner of doing it. ‘Barely sixteen; you may call it a square.’
‘It would do very well for around table,’ suggested the ex-warden.
Now there was something peculiarly unorthodox in the archdeacon’s estimation in the idea of a round table. He had always been accustomed to a goodly board of decent length, comfortably elongating itself according to the number of the guests, nearly black with perpetual rubbing, and as bright as a mirror. Now round dinner-tables are generally of oak, or else of such new construction as not to have acquired the peculiar hue which was so pleasing to him. He connected them with what he called the nasty newfangled method of leaving a cloth on the table, 4 as though to warn people that they were not to sit long. In his eyes there was something democratic and parvenu in a round table. He imagined that dissenters and calico-printers chiefly used them, and perhaps a few literary lions more conspicuous for their wit than their gentility. He was a little flurried at the idea of such an article being introduced into the diocese by a protégé of his own, and at the instigation of his father-in-law.
‘A round dinner-table,’ said he, with some heat, ‘is the most abominable article of furniture that ever was invented. I hope that Arabin has more taste than to allow such a thing in his house.’
Poor Mr Harding felt himself completely snubbed, and of course said nothing further; but Mr Arabin who had yielded submissively in the small matters of the cellar and kitchen grate, found himself obliged to oppose reforms which might be of a nature too expensive for his pocket.
‘But it seems to me, archdeacon, that I can’t very well lengthen the room without pulling down the wall, and if I pull down the wall, I must build it up again; then if I throw out a bow on this side, I must do the same on the other, and if I do it for the ground floor, I must carry it up to the floor above. That will be putting a new front to the house, and will cost, I suppose, a couple of hundred pounds. The ecclesiastical commissioners will hardly assist me when they hear that my grievance consists in having a dining-room only sixteen feet long.’
The archdeacon proceeded to explain that nothing would be easier than adding six feet to the front of the dining-room, without touching any other room in the house. Such irregularities of construction in small country houses were, he said, rather graceful than otherwise; and he offered to pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket if it cost more than forty pounds. Mr Arabin, however, was firm, and, although the archdeacon fussed and fumed about it, would not give way. Forty pounds, he said, was a matter of serious moment to him, and his friends, if under such circumstances they would be good-natured enough to come to him at all, must put up with the misery of a square room. He was willing to compromise matters by disclaiming any intention of having a round table.
‘But,’ said Mrs Grantly, ‘what if the priestess insists on having both the rooms enlarged?’
‘The priestess in that case must do it for herself, Mrs Grantly.’
‘I have no doubt she will be well able to do so,’ replied the lady; ‘to do that and many more wonderful things. I am quite sure that the priestess of St Ewold, when she does come, won’t come empty-handed.’
Mr Arabin, however, did not appear well inclined to enter into speculative expenses on such a chance as this, and therefore, any material alterations in the house, the cost of which could not fairly be made to lie at the door either of the ecclesiastical commissioners or of the estate of the late incumbent, were tabooed. With this essential exception, the archdeacon ordered, suggested, and carried all points before him in a manner very much to his own satisfaction. A close observer, had there been one there, might have seen that his wife had been quite as useful in the matter as himself. No one knew better than Mrs Grantly the appurtenances necessary to a comfortable house. She did not, however, think it necessary to lay claim to any of the glory which her lord and master was so ready to appropriate as his own.
Having gone through their work effectually and systematically, the party returned to Plumstead well satisfied with their expedition.
CHAPTER 3
The Thornes of Ullathorne
ON the following Sunday Mr Arabin was to read himself in at his new church. It was agreed at the rectory that the archdeacon should go over with him and assist at the reading desk, and that Mr Harding should take the archdeacon’s duty at Plumstead Church. Mrs Grantly had her school and her buns to attend to, and professed that she could not be spared; but Mrs Bold was to accompany them. It was further agreed also that they would lunch at the squire’s house, and return home after the afternoon service.
Wilfred Thorne, Esq., of Ullathorne, was the squire of St Ewold’s; or rather the squire of Ullathorne; for the domain of the modern landlord was of wider notoriety than the fame of the ancient saint. He was a fair specimen of what that race has come to in our days, which a century ago was, as we are told, fairly represented by Squire Western.1 If that representation be a true one, few
classes of men can have made faster strides in improvement. Mr Thorne, however, was a man possessed of quite a sufficient number of foibles to lay him open to much ridicule. He was still a bachelor, being about fifty, and was not a little proud of his person. When living at home at Ullathorne there was not much room for such pride, and there therefore he always looked like a gentleman, and like that which he certainly was, the first man in his parish. But during the month or six weeks which he annually spent in London he tried so hard to look like a great man there also, which he certainly was not, that he was put down as a fool by many at his club. He was a man of considerable literary attainment in a certain way and on certain subjects. His favourite authors were Montaigne and Burton, 2 and he knew more perhaps than any other man in his own county, and the next to it, of the English essayists of the two last centuries. He possessed complete sets of the Idler, the Spectator, the Tatler, the Guardian, and the Rambler;3 and would discourse by hours together on the superiority of such publications to anything which has since been produced in our Edinburghs, and QuarterIies.4 He was a great proficient in all questions of genealogy, and knew enough of almost every gentleman’s family in England to say of what blood and lineage were descended all those who had any claim to be considered as possessors of any such luxuries. For blood and lineage he himself had a most profound respect. He counted back his own ancestors to some period long antecedent to the Conquest; and could tell you, if you would listen to him, how it had come to pass that they, like Cedric the Saxon,5 had been permitted to hold their own among the Norman barons. It was not, according to his showing, on account of any weak complaisance on the part of his family towards their Norman neighbours. Some Ealfried of Ullathorne once fortified his own castle, and held out, not only that, but the then existing cathedral of Barchester also, against one Geoffrey De Burgh, in the time of King John; and Mr Thorne possessed the whole history of the siege written on vellum, and illuminated in a most costly manner. It little signified that no one could read the writing, as, had that been possible, no one could have understood the language. Mr Thorne could, however, give you all the particulars in good English, and had no objection to do so.
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