The Last Chronicle of Barset (19 page)

In the course of these battles Framley Court would sometimes assume a clerical aspect – have a prevailing hue, as it were, of black coats, which was not altogether to the taste of Lord Lufton, and as to which he would make complaint to his wife, and to Mark Robarts, himself a clergyman. ‘There's more of this than I can stand,' he'd say to the latter. ‘There's a deuced deal more of it than you like yourself, I know.'

‘It's not for me to like or dislike. It's a great thing having your mother in the parish.'

‘That's all very well; and of course she'll do as she likes. She may ask whom she pleases here, and I shan't interfere. It's the same as though it was her own house. But I shall take Lucy to Lufton.' Now Lord Lufton had been building his house at Lufton for the last seven years, and it was not yet finished – or nearly finished, if all that his wife had said were true. And if they could have their way, it never would be finished. And so, in order that Lord Lufton might not actually be driven away by the turmoils of ecclesiastical contest, the younger Lady Lufton would endeavour to moderate both the wrath and the zeal of the elder one, and would struggle against the coming clergymen. On this day, however, three sat at the board at Framley, and Lady Lufton, in her justification to her son, swore that the invitation had been given by her daughter-in-law. ‘You know, my
dear,' the dowager said to Lord Lufton, ‘something must be done for these poor Crawleys; and as the dean is away, Lucy wants to speak to the archdeacon about them.'

‘And the archdeacon could not subscribe his ten-pound note without having Mr Champion to back him?'

‘My dear Ludovic, you do put it in such a way.'

‘Never mind, mother. I've no special dislike to Champion, only as you are not paid five thousand a year for your trouble, it is rather hard that you should have to do all the work of opposition bishop in the diocese.'

It was felt by them all – including Lord Lufton himself, who became so interested in the matter as to forgive the black coats before the evening was over – that this matter of Mr Crawley's committal was very serious, and demanded the full energies of their party. It was known to them all that the feeling at the palace was inimical to Mr Crawley. ‘That she-Beelzebub hates him for his poverty, and because Arabin brought him into the diocese,' said the archdeacon, permitting himself to use very strong language in his allusion to the bishop's wife. It must be recorded on his behalf that he used the phrase in the presence only of the gentlemen of the party. I think he might have whispered the word in the ear of his confidential friend old Lady Lufton, and perhaps have given no offence; but he would not have ventured to use such words aloud in the presence of ladies.

‘You forget, archdeacon,' said Dr Thorne, laughing, ‘that the she-Beelzebub is my wife's particular friend.'

‘Not a bit of it,' said the archdeacon. ‘Your wife knows better than that. You tell her what I call her, and if she complains of the name I'll unsay it.' It may therefore be supposed that Dr Thorne, and Mrs Thorne, and the archdeacon, knew each other intimately, and understood each other's feelings on these matters.

It was quite true that the palace party was inimical to Mr Crawley. Mr Crawley undoubtedly was poor, and had not been so submissive to episcopal authority as it behoves any clergyman to be whose loaves and fishes are scanty. He had raised his back more than once against orders emanating from the palace in a manner that had made the
hairs on the head of the bishop's wife to stand almost on end, and had taken as much upon himself as though his living had been worth twelve hundred a year. Mrs Proudie, almost as energetic in her language as the archdeacon, had called him a beggarly perpetual curate. ‘We must have perpetual curates, my dear,' the bishop had said. ‘They should know their places then. But what can you expect of a creature from the deanery? All that ought to be altered. The dean should have no patronage in the diocese. No dean should have any patronage. It is an abuse from the beginning to the end. Dean Arabin, if he had any conscience, would be doing the duty at Hogglestock himself.' How the bishop strove to teach his wife, with mildest words, what really ought to be a dean's duty, and how the wife rejoined by teaching her husband, not in the mildest words, what ought to be a bishop's duty, we will not further inquire here. The fact that such dialogues took place at the palace is recorded simply to show that the palatial feeling in Barchester ran counter to Mr Crawley.

And this was cause enough, if no other cause existed, for partiality to Mr Crawley at Framley Court. But, as has been partly explained, there existed, if possible, even stronger ground than this for adherence to the Crawley cause. The younger Lady Lufton had known the Crawleys intimately, and the elder Lady Lufton had reckoned them among the neighbouring clerical families of her acquaintance. Both these ladies were therefore staunch in their defence of Mr Crawley. The archdeacon himself had his own reasons – reasons which for the present he kept altogether within his own bosom – for wishing that Mr Crawley had never entered the diocese. Whether the perpetual curate should or should not be declared to be a thief, it would be terrible to him to have to call the child of that perpetual curate his daughter-in-law. But not the less on this occasion was he true to his order, true to his side in the diocese, true to his hatred of the palace.

‘I don't believe it for a moment,' he said, as he took his place on the rug before the fire in the drawing-room when the gentlemen came in from their wine. The ladies understood at once what it was that he couldn't believe. Mr Crawley had for the moment so usurped the county that nobody thought of talking of anything else.

‘How is it then,' said Mrs Thorne, ‘that Lord Lufton, and my
husband, and the other wiseacres at Silverbridge, have committed him for trial?'

‘Because we were told to do so by the lawyer,' said Dr Thorne.

‘Ladies will never understand that magistrates must act in accordance with the law,' said Lord Lufton.

‘But you all say he's not guilty,' said Mrs Robarts.

‘The fact is, that the magistrates cannot try the question,' said the archdeacon; ‘they only hear the primary evidence. In this case I don't believe Crawley would ever have been committed if he had employed an attorney, instead of speaking for himself.'

‘Why didn't somebody make him have an attorney?' said Lady Lufton.

‘I don't think any attorney in the world could have spoken for him better than he spoke for himself,' said Dr Thorne.

‘And yet you committed him,' said his wife. ‘What can we do for him? Can't we pay the bail, and send him off to America?'

‘A jury will never find him guilty,' said Lord Lufton.

‘And what is the truth of it?' asked the younger Lady Lufton.

Then the whole matter was discussed again, and it was settled among them all that Mr Crawley had undoubtedly appropriated the cheque through temporary obliquity of judgment – obliquity of judgment and forgetfulness as to the source from whence the cheque had come to him. ‘He has picked it up about the house, and then has thought that it was his own,' said Lord Lufton. Had they come to the conclusion that such an appropriation of money had been made by one of the clergy of the palace, by one of the Proudieian party, they would doubtless have been very loud and very bitter as to the iniquity of the offender. They would have said much as to the weakness of the bishop and the wickedness of the bishop's wife, and would have declared the appropriator to have been as very a thief as ever picked a pocket or opened a till – but they were unanimous in their acquittal of Mr Crawley. It had not been his intention, they said, to be a thief, and a man should be judged only by his intention. It must now be their object to induce a Barchester jury to look at the matter in the same light.

‘When they come to understand how the land lies,' said the
archdeacon, ‘they will be all right. There's not a tradesman in the city who does not hate that woman as though she were –'

‘Archdeacon,' said his wife, cautioning him to repress his energy.

‘Their bills are all paid by this new chaplain they've got, and he is made to claim discount on every leg of mutton,' said the archdeacon. Arguing from which fact – or from which assertion, he came to the conclusion that no Barchester jury would find Mr Crawley guilty.

But it was agreed on all sides that it would not be well to trust to the unassisted friendship of the Barchester tradesmen. Mr Crawley must be provided with legal assistance, and this must be furnished to him whether he should be willing or unwilling to receive it. That there would be a difficulty was acknowledged. Mr Crawley was known to be a man not easy of persuasion, with a will of his own, with a great energy of obstinacy on points which he chose to take up as being of importance to his calling, or to his own professional status. He had pleaded his own cause before the magistrates, and it might be that he would insist on doing the same thing before the judge. At last Mr Robarts, the clergyman of Framley, was deputed from the knot of Crawleian advocates assembled in Lady Lufton's drawing-room, to undertake the duty of seeing Mr Crawley, and of explaining to him that his proper defence was regarded as a matter appertaining to the clergy and gentry generally of that part of the country, and that for the sake of the clergy and gentry the defence must of course be properly conducted. In such circumstances the expense of the defence would of course be borne by the clergy and gentry concerned. It was thought that Mr Robarts could put the matter to Mr Crawley with such a mixture of the strength of manly friendship and the softness of clerical persuasion, as to overcome the recognised difficulties of the task.

Tidings of Mr Crawley's fate reached the palace at Barchester on the afternoon of the day on which the magistrates had committed him. All such tidings travel very quickly, conveyed by imperceptible wires, and distributed by indefatigable message boys whom Rumour seems to supply for the purpose. Barchester is twenty miles from Silverbridge by road, and more than forty by railway. I doubt whether anyone was commissioned to send the news along the actual telegraph, and yet Mrs Proudie knew it before four o'clock. But she did not know it quite accurately. ‘Bishop,' she said, standing at her husband's study door. ‘They have committed that man to gaol. There was no help for them unless they had forsworn themselves.'

‘Not forsworn themselves, my dear,' said the bishop, striving, as was usual with him, by some meek and ineffectual word to teach his wife that she was occasionally led by her energy into error. He never persisted in the lessons when he found, as was usual, that they were taken amiss.

‘I say forsworn themselves!' said Mrs Proudie; ‘and now what do you mean to do? This is Thursday, and of course the man must not be allowed to desecrate the church of Hogglestock by performing the Sunday services.'

‘If he has been committed, my dear, and is in prison –'

‘I said nothing about prison, bishop.'

‘Gaol, my dear.'

‘I say they have committed him to gaol. So my informant tells me. But of course all the Plumstead and Framley set will move heaven and earth to get him out, so that he may be there as a disgrace to the diocese. I wonder how the dean will feel when he hears of it! I do, indeed. For the dean, though he is an idle, useless man, with no church principles, and no real piety, still he has a conscience. I think he has a conscience.'

‘I'm sure he has, my dear.'

‘Well – let us hope so. And if he has a conscience, what must be his feelings when he hears that this creature whom he has brought into the diocese has been committed to gaol along with common felons.'

‘Not with felons, my dear; at least, I should think not.'

‘I say with common felons! A downright robbery of twenty pounds, just as though he had broken into the bank! And so he did, with sly artifice, which is worse in such hands than a crow-bar. And now what are we to do? Here is Thursday, and something must be done before Sunday for the souls of those poor benighted creatures at Hogglestock.' Mrs Proudie was ready for the battle, and was even now sniffing the blood afar off. ‘I believe it's a hundred and thirty pounds a year,' she said, before the bishop had collected his thoughts sufficiently for a reply.

‘I think we must find out, first of all, whether he is really to be shut up in prison,' said the bishop.

‘And suppose he is not to be shut up. Suppose they have been weak, or untrue to their duty – and from what we know of the magistrates of Barsetshire, there is too much reason to suppose that they will have been so; suppose they have let him out, is he to go about like a roaring lion
¹
– among the souls of the people?'

The bishop shook in his shoes. When Mrs Proudie began to talk of the souls of the people he always shook in his shoes. She had an eloquent way of raising her voice over the word souls that was qualified to make any ordinary man shake in his shoes. The bishop was a conscientious man, and well knew that poor Mr Crawley, even though he might have become a thief under terrible temptation, would not roar at Hogglestock to the injury of any man's soul. He was aware that this poor clergyman had done his duty laboriously and efficiently, and he was also aware that though he might have been committed by the magistrates, and then let out upon bail, he should not be regarded now, in these days before his trial, as a convicted thief. But to explain all this to Mrs Proudie was beyond his power. He knew well that she would not hear a word in mitigation of Mr Crawley's presumed offence. Mr Crawley belonged to the other party, and Mrs Proudie was a thorough-going partisan. I know a man – an
excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon the earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called Mrs Proudie a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred. He believed her to be simply a vulgar, interfering, brazen-faced virago. Mrs Proudie in truth believed that the archdeacon was an actual emanation from Satan, sent to those parts to devour souls – as she would call it – and that she herself was an emanation of another sort, sent from another source expressly to Barchester, to prevent such devouring, as far as it might possibly be prevented by a mortal agency. The bishop knew it all – understood it all. He regarded the archdeacon as a clergyman belonging to a party opposed to his party, and he disliked the man. He knew that from his first coming into the diocese he had been encountered with enmity by the archdeacon and the archdeacon's friends. If left to himself he could feel and to a certain extent could resent such enmity. But he had no faith in his wife's doctrine of emanations. He had no faith in many things which she believed religiously – and yet what could he do? If he attempted to explain, she would stop him before he had got through the first half of his first sentence.