The Last Chronicle of Barset (129 page)

‘I shall be glad to have your reply with as little delay as may suit your convenience, and in the event of your accepting the offer – which I sincerely trust you may be enabled to do – I shall hope to have an early opportunity of seeing you, with reference to your institution to the parish.

‘Allow me also to say to you and to Mrs Crawley that, if we have been correctly informed as to that other event to which I have alluded, we both hope that we may have an early opportunity of making ourselves personally acquainted with the parents of a young lady who is to be so dear to us. As I have met your daughter, I may perhaps be allowed to send her my kindest
love. If, as my daughter-in-law, she comes up to the impression which she gave me at our first meeting, I, at any rate, shall be satisfied.

I have the honour to be, my dear sir,

your most faithful servant,                  

‘T
HEOPHILUS
G
RANTLT
'          

This letter the archdeacon had shown to his wife, by whom it had not been very warmly approved. Nothing, Mrs Grantly had said, could be prettier than what the archdeacon had said about Grace. Mrs Crawley, no doubt, would be satisfied with that. But Mr Crawley was such a strange man! ‘He will be stranger than I take him to be if he does not accept St Ewold's,' said the archdeacon. ‘But in offering it,' said Mrs Grantly, ‘you have not said a word of your own high opinion of his merits.' ‘I have not a very high opinion of them,' said the archdeacon. ‘Your father had, and I have said so. And as I have the most profound respect for your father's opinion in such a matter, I have permitted that to overcome my own hesitation.' This was pretty from the husband to the wife as it regarded her father, who had now gone from them; and, therefore, Mrs Grantly accepted it without further argument. The reader may probably feel assured that the archdeacon had never, during their joint lives, acted in any church matter upon the advice given to him by Mr Harding; and it was probably the case also that the living would have been offered to Mr Crawley, if nothing had been said by Mr Harding on the subject; but it did not become Mrs Grantly even to think of all this. The archdeacon, having made his gracious speech about her father, was not again asked to alter his letter. ‘I suppose he will accept it,' said Mrs Grantly. ‘I should think that he probably may,' said the archdeacon.

So Grace, knowing what was the purport of the letter, sat with it between her fingers, while her lover sat beside her, full of various plans for the future. This was his first lover's present to her – and what a present it was! Comfort, and happiness, and a pleasant home for all her family. ‘St Ewold's isn't the best house in the world,' said the major, ‘because it is old, and what I call piecemeal; but it is very pretty, and certainly nice.' ‘That is just the sort of parsonage that I dream about,' said Jane. ‘And the garden is pleasant with old trees,'
said the major. ‘I always dream about old trees,' said Jane, ‘only I'm afraid I'm too old myself to be let to climb up them now.' Mrs Crawley said very little, but sat with her eyes full of tears. Was it possible that, at last, before the world had closed upon her, she was to enjoy something again of the comforts which she had known in her early years, and to be again surrounded by those decencies of life which of late had been almost banished from her home by poverty!

Their various plans for the future – for the immediate future – were very startling. Grace was to go over at once to Plumstead, whither Edith had been already transferred from Cosby Lodge. That was all very well; there was nothing very startling or impracticable in that. The Framley ladies, having none of those doubts as to what was coming which had for a while perplexed Grace herself, had taken little liberties with her wardrobe, which enabled such a visit to be made without overwhelming difficulties. But the major was equally eager – or at any rate equally imperious – in his requisition for a visit from Mr and Mrs Crawley themselves to Plumstead rectory. Mrs Crawley did not dare to put forward the plain unadorned reasons against it, as Mr Crawley had done when discussing the subject of a visit to the deanery. Nor could she quite venture to explain that she feared that the archdeacon and her husband would hardly mix well together in society. With whom, indeed, was it possible that her husband should mix well, after his long and hardly-tried seclusion? She could only plead that both her husband and herself were so little used to going out that she feared – she feared – she feared she knew not what. ‘We'll get over all that,' said the major, almost contemptuously. ‘It is only the first plunge that is disagreeable.' Perhaps the major did not know how very disagreeable a first plunge may be!

At two o'clock Henry Grantly got up to go. ‘I should very much like to have seen him, but I fear I cannot wait longer. As it is, the patience of my horse has been surprising.' Then Grace walked out with him to the gate and put her hand upon his bridle as he mounted, and thought how wonderful was the power of Fortune, that the goddess should have sent so gallant a gentleman to be her lord and her lover. ‘I declare I don't quite believe it even yet,' she said, in the letter which she wrote to Lily Dale that night.

It was four before Mr Crawley returned to his house, and then he was very weary. There were many sick in these days at Hoggle End, and he had gone from cottage to cottage through the day. Giles Hoggett was almost unable to work from rheumatism, but still was of opinion that doggedness might carry him on. ‘It's been a deal o' service to you, Muster Crawley,' he said. ‘We hears about it all. If you hadn't a been dogged, where'd you a been now?' With Giles Hoggett and others he had remained all the day, and now he came home weary and beaten. ‘You'll tell him first,' Grace had said, ‘and then I'll give him the letter.' The wife was the first to tell him of the good fortune that was coming.

He flung himself into the old chair as soon as he entered, and asked for some bread and tea. ‘Jane has already gone for it, dear,' said his wife. ‘We have had a visitor here, Josiah.'

‘A visitor – what visitor?'

‘Grace's own friend – Henry Grantly.'

‘Grace, come here, that I may kiss you and bless you,' he said very solemnly. ‘It would seem that the world is going to be very good to you.'

‘Papa, you must read this letter first.'

‘Before I kiss my own darling?' Then she knelt at his feet. ‘I see,' he said, taking the letter; ‘it is from your lover's father. Peradventure he signifies his consent, which would be surely needful before such a marriage would be seemly.'

‘It isn't about me, papa, at all.'

‘Not about you? If so, that would be most unpromising. But, in any case, you are my best darling.' Then he kissed her and blessed her, and slowly opened the letter. His wife had now come close to him, and was standing over him, touching him, so that she also could read the archdeacon's letter. Grace, who was still in front of him, could see the working of his face as he read it; but even she could not tell whether he was gratified, or offended, or dismayed. When he had got as far as the first offer of the presentation, he ceased reading for a while, and looked round about the room as though lost in thought. ‘Let me see what further he writes to me,' he then said; and after that he continued the letter slowly to the end. ‘No, my child, you were in
error in saying that he wrote not about you. 'Tis in writing of you he has put some real heart into his words. He writes as though his home would be welcome to you.'

‘And does he not make St Ewold's welcome to you, papa?'

‘He makes me welcome to accept it – if I may use the word after the ordinary and somewhat faulty parlance of mankind.'

‘And you will accept it – of course?'

‘I know not that, my dear. The acceptance of a cure of souls is a thing not to be decided on in a moment – as is the colour of a garment or the shape of a toy. Nor would I condescend to take this thing from the archdeacon's hands, if I thought that he bestowed it simply that the father of his daughter-in-law might no longer be accounted poor.'

‘Does he say that, papa?'

‘He gives it as a collateral reason, basing his offer first on the kindly expressed judgment of one who is no more. Then he refers to the friendship of the dean. If he believed that the judgment of his late father-in-law in so weighty a matter were the best to be relied upon of all that were at his command, then he would have done well to trust it. But in such case he should have bolstered up a good ground for action with no collateral supports which are weak – and worse than weak. However, it shall have my best consideration, whereunto I hope that wisdom will be given to me where only such wisdom can be had.'

‘Josiah,' said his wife to him, when they were alone, ‘you will not refuse it?'

‘Not willingly – not if it may be accepted. Alas! you need not urge me, when the temptation is so strong!'

It was more than a week before the archdeacon received a reply from Mr Crawley, during which time the dean had been over to Hogglestock more than once, as had also Mrs Arabin and Lady Lufton the younger – and there had been letters written without end, and the archdeacon had been nearly beside himself. ‘A man who pretends to conscientious scruples of that kind is not fit to have a parish,' he had said to his wife. His wife understood what he meant, and I trust that the reader may also understand it. In the ordinary cutting of blocks a very fine razor is not an appropriate instrument. The archdeacon, moreover, loved the temporalities of the Church as temporalities. The Church was beautiful to him because one man by interest might have a thousand a year, while another man equally good, but without interest, could only have a hundred. And he liked the men who had the interest a great deal better than the men who had it not. He had been willing to admit this poor perpetual curate, who had so long been kept out in the cold, within the pleasant circle which was warm with ecclesiastical good things, and the man hesitated – because of scruples, as the dean told him! ‘I always button up my pocket when I hear of scruples,' the archdeacon said.

But at last Mr Crawley condescended to accept St Ewold's. ‘Reverend and dear sir,' he said in his letter. ‘For the personal benevolence of the offer made to me in your letter of the — instant, I beg to tender you my most grateful thanks; as also for your generous kindness to me, in telling me of the high praise bestowed upon me by a gentleman who is now no more – whose character I have esteemed and whose good opinion I value. There is, methinks, something inexpressibly dear to me in the recorded praise of the dead. For the further instance of the friendship of the Dean of Barchester, I am also thankful.

‘Since the receipt of your letter I have doubted much as to my fitness for the work you have proposed to entrust to me – not from any feeling that the parish of St Ewold's may be beyond my
intellectual power, but because the latter circumstances of my life have been of a nature so strange and perplexing, that they have left me somewhat in doubt as to my own aptitude for going about among men without giving offence and becoming a stumbling-block.

‘Nevertheless, reverend and dear sir, if after this confession on my part of a certain faulty demeanour with which I know well that I am afflicted, you are still willing to put the parish into my hands, I will accept the charge – instigated to do so by the advice of all whom I have consulted on the subject; and in thus accepting it, I hereby pledge myself to vacate it at a month's warning, should I be called upon by you to do so at any period within the next two years. Should I be so far successful during those twenty-four months as to have satisfied both yourself and myself, I may then perhaps venture to regard the preferment as my own in perpetuity for life. – I have the honour to be, reverend and dear sir,

‘Your most humble and faithful servant,   
‘J
OSIAH
C
RAWLEY
.'

‘Psha!' said the archdeacon, who professed that he did not at all like the letter. ‘I wonder what he would say if I sent him a month's notice at next Michaelmas?'

‘I'm sure he would go,' said Mrs Grantly.

‘The more fool he,' said the archdeacon.

At this time Grace was at the parsonage in a seventh heaven of happiness. The archdeacon was never rough to her, nor did he make any of his harsh remarks about her father in her presence. Before her St Ewold's was spoken of as the home that was to belong to the Crawleys for the next twenty years. Mrs Grantly was very loving with her, lavishing upon her pretty presents, and words that were prettier than the presents. Grace's life had hitherto been so destitute of those prettinesses and softnesses which can hardly be had without money though money alone will not purchase them, that it seemed to her now that the heavens rained graciousness upon her. It was not that the archdeacon's watch, or her lover's chain, or Mrs Grantly's locket, or the little toy from Italy which Mrs Arabin brought to her from the treasures of the deanery, filled her heart with undue exaltation.
It was not that she revelled in her new delights of silver and gold and shining gems; but that the silver and gold and shining gems were constant indications to her that things had changed, not only for her, but for her father and mother, and brother and sister. She felt now more sure than ever that she could not have enjoyed her love had she accepted her lover while the disgrace of the accusation against her father remained. But now – having waited till that had passed away, everything was a new happiness to her.

At last it was settled that Mr and Mrs Crawley were to come to Plumstead – and they came. It would be too long to tell now how gradually had come about that changed state of things which made such a visit possible. Mr Crawley had at first declared that such a thing was quite out of the question. If St Ewold's was to depend upon it St Ewold's must be given up. And I think that it would have been impossible for him to go direct from Hogglestock to Plumstead. But it fell out after this wise.