The Last Chronicle of Barset Part 32

"I am grateful for the archdeacon's kindness, as a man is bound to be for any kindness, whether displayed wisely or unwisely. But it seems to me that my affair, as you call it, Mr. Robarts, is of that nature that they who wish well to me will better further their wishes by silence than by any discussion."

"Then I cannot agree with you." Mr. Crawley shrugged his shoulders, opened his hands a little and then closed them, and bowed his head.

He could not have declared more clearly by any words that he differed altogether from Mr. Robarts, and that as the subject was one so peculiarly his own he had a right to expect that his opinion should be allowed to prevail against that of any other person. "If you come to that, you know, how is anybody's tongue to be stopped?"

"That vain tongues cannot be stopped, I am well aware. I do not expect that people's tongues should be stopped. I am not saying what men will do, but what good wishes should dictate."

"Well, perhaps you'll hear me out for a minute." Mr. Crawley again bowed his head. "Whether we were wise or unwise, we were discussing this affair."

"Whether I stole Mr. Soames's money?"

"No; n.o.body supposed for a moment you had stolen it."

"I cannot understand how they should suppose anything else, knowing, as they do, that the magistrates have committed me for the theft.

This took place at Framley, you say, and probably in Lord Lufton's presence."

"Exactly."

"And Lord Lufton was chairman at the sitting of the magistrates at which I was committed. How can it be that he should think otherwise?"

"I am sure he has not an idea that you were guilty. Nor yet has Dr.

Thorne, who was also one of the magistrates. I don't suppose one of them then thought so."

"Then their action, to say the least of it, was very strange."

"It was all because you had n.o.body to manage it for you. I thoroughly believe that if you had placed the matter in the hands of a good lawyer, you would never have heard a word more about it. That seems to be the opinion of everybody I speak to on the subject."

"Then in this country a man is to be punished or not, according to his ability to fee a lawyer!"

"I am not talking about punishment."

"And presuming an innocent man to have the ability and not the will to do so, he is to be punished, to be ruined root and branch, self and family, character and pocket, simply because, knowing his own innocence, he does not choose to depend on the mercenary skill of a man whose trade he abhors for the establishment of that which should be clear as the sun at noon-day! You say I am innocent, and yet you tell me I am to be condemned as a guilty man, have my gown taken from me, be torn from my wife and children, be disgraced before the eyes of all men, and be made a byword and a thing horrible to be mentioned, because I will not fee an attorney to fee another man to come and lie on my behalf, to browbeat witnesses, to make false appeals, and perhaps shed false tears in defending me. You have come to me asking me to do this, if I understand you, telling me that the archdeacon would so advise me."

"That is my object." Mr. Crawley, as he had spoken, had in his vehemence risen from his seat, and Mr. Robarts was also standing.

"Then tell the archdeacon," said Mr. Crawley, "that I will have none of his advice. I will have no one there paid by me to obstruct the course of justice or to hoodwink a jury. I have been in courts of law, and know what is the work for which these gentlemen are hired.

I will have none of it, and I will thank you to tell the archdeacon so, with my respectful acknowledgments of his consideration and condescension. I say nothing as to my own innocence, or my own guilt.

But I do say that if I am dragged before that tribunal, an innocent man, and am falsely declared to be guilty, because I lack money to bribe a lawyer to speak for me, then the laws of this country deserve but little of that reverence which we are accustomed to pay to them.

And if I be guilty--"

"n.o.body supposes you to be guilty."

"And if I be guilty," continued Mr. Crawley, altogether ignoring the interruption, except by the repet.i.tion of his words, and a slight raising of his voice, "I will not add to my guilt by hiring any one to prove a falsehood or to disprove a truth."

"I'm sorry that you should say so, Mr. Crawley."

"I speak according to what light I have, Mr. Robarts; and if I have been over-warm with you,--and I am conscious that I have been in fault in that direction,--I must pray you to remember that I am somewhat hardly tried. My sorrows and troubles are so great that they rise against me and disturb me, and drive me on,--whither I would not be driven."

"But, my friend, is not that just the reason why you should trust in this matter to some one who can be more calm than yourself?"

"I cannot trust to any one,--in a matter of conscience. To do as you would have me is to me wrong. Shall I do wrong because I am unhappy?"

"You should cease to think it wrong when so advised by persons you can trust."

"I can trust no one with my own conscience;--not even the archdeacon, great as he is."

"The archdeacon has meant only well to you."

"I will presume so. I will believe so. I do think so. Tell the archdeacon from me that I humbly thank him;--that, in a matter of church question, I might probably submit my judgment to his; even though he might have no authority over me, knowing as I do that in such matters his experience has been great. Tell him also, that though I would fain that this unfortunate affair might burden the tongue of none among my neighbours,--at least till I shall have stood before the judge to receive the verdict of the jury, and, if needful, his lordship's sentence--still I am convinced that in what he has spoken, as also in what he has done, he has not yielded to the idleness of gossip, but has exercised his judgment with intended kindness."

"He has certainly intended to do you a service; and as for its not being talked about, that is out of the question."

"And for yourself, Mr. Robarts, whom I have ever regarded as a friend since circ.u.mstances brought me into your neighbourhood,--for you, whose sister I love tenderly in memory of past kindness, though now she is removed so far above my sphere, as to make it unfit that I should call her my friend--"

"She does not think so at all."

"For yourself, as I was saying, pray believe me that though from the roughness of my manner, being now unused to social intercourse, I seem to be ungracious and forbidding, I am grateful and mindful, and that in the tablets of my heart I have written you down as one in whom I could trust,--were it given to me to trust in men and women."

Then he turned round with his face to the wall and his back to his visitor, and so remained till Mr. Robarts had left him. "At any rate I wish you well through your trouble," said Robarts; and as he spoke he found that his own words were nearly choked by a sob that was rising in his throat.

He went away without another word, and got out to his gig without seeing Mrs. Crawley. During one period of the interview he had been very angry with the man,--so angry as to make him almost declare to himself that he would take no more trouble on his behalf. Then he had been brought to acknowledge that Mr. Walker was right, and that Crawley was certainly mad. He was so mad, so far removed from the dominion of sound sense, that no jury could say that he was guilty and that he ought to be punished for his guilt. And, as he so resolved, he could not but ask himself the question, whether the charge of the parish ought to be left in the hands of such a man? But at last, just before he went, these feelings and these convictions gave way to pity, and he remembered simply the troubles which seemed to have been heaped on the head of this poor victim to misfortune.

As he drove home he resolved that there was nothing left for him to do, but to write to the dean. It was known to all who knew them both, that the dean and Mr. Crawley had lived together on the closest intimacy at college, and that that friendship had been maintained through life;--though, from the peculiarity of Mr. Crawley's character, the two had not been much together of late years. Seeing how things were going now, and hearing how pitiful was the plight in which Mr. Crawley was placed, the dean would, no doubt, feel it to be his duty to hasten his return to England. He was believed to be at this moment in Jerusalem, and it would be long before a letter could reach him; but there still wanted three months to the a.s.sizes, and his return might be probably effected before the end of February.

"I never was so distressed in my life," Mark Robarts said to his wife.

"And you think you have done no good?"

"Only this, that I have convinced myself that the poor man is not responsible for what he does, and that for her sake as well as for his own, some person should be enabled to interfere for his protection." Then he told Mrs. Robarts what Mr. Walker had said; also the message which Mr. Crawley had sent to the archdeacon. But they both agreed that that message need not be sent on any further.

CHAPTER XXII.

MAJOR GRANTLY AT HOME.

Mrs. Thorne had spoken very plainly in the advice which she had given to Major Grantly. "If I were you, I'd be at Allington before twelve o'clock to-morrow." That had been Mrs. Thorne's advice; and though Major Grantly had no idea of making the journey so rapidly as the lady had proposed, still he thought that he would make it before long, and follow the advice in spirit if not to the letter. Mrs.

Thorne had asked him if it was fair that the girl should be punished because of the father's fault; and the idea had been sweet to him that the infliction or non-infliction of such punishment should be in his hands. "You go and ask her," Mrs. Thorne had said. Well;--he would go and ask her. If it should turn out at last that he had married the daughter of a thief, and that he was disinherited for doing so,--an arrangement of circ.u.mstances which he had to teach himself to regard as very probable,--he would not love Grace the less on that account, or allow himself for one moment to repent what he had done. As he thought of all this he became somewhat in love with a small income, and imagined to himself what honours would be done to him by the Mrs. Thornes of the county, when they should come to know in what way he had sacrificed himself to his love. Yes;--they would go and live at Pau. He thought Pau would do. He would have enough of income for that;--and Edith would get lessons cheaply, and would learn to talk French fluently. He certainly would do it. He would go down to Allington, and ask Grace to be his wife; and bid her understand that if she loved him she could not be justified in refusing him by the circ.u.mstances of her father's position.

But he must go to Plumstead before he could go to Allington. He was engaged to spend his Christmas there, and must go now at once.

There was not time for the journey to Allington before he was due at Plumstead. And, moreover, though he could not bring himself to resolve that he would tell his father what he was going to do;--"It would seem as though I were asking his leave!" he said to himself;--he thought that he would make a clean breast of it to his mother. It made him sad to think that he should cut the rope which fastened his own boat among the other boats in the home harbour at Plumstead, and that he should go out all alone into strange waters,--turned adrift altogether, as it were, from the Grantly fleet. If he could only get the promise of his mother's sympathy for Grace it would be something. He understood,--no one better than he,--the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as in his father.

And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring.

He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter of an earl, and who was already mentioned as a candidate for high places.

How his sister was the wife of a marquis, and a leader in the fashionable world, the reader already knows. The archdeacon himself was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a bishop; and Mrs. Grantly, though there was left about her something of an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been hers before the stream of her days had run gold, yet she, too, had taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of those who construe literally that pa.s.sage of scripture which tells us of the camel and the needle's eye. Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew himself to be his mother's favourite child,--knew himself to have become so since something of coolness had grown up between her and her august daughter. The augustness of the daughter had done much to reproduce the old freshness of which I have spoken in the mother's heart, and had specially endeared to her the son who, of all her children, was the least subject to the family failing. The clergyman, Charles Grantly,--he who had married the Lady Anne,--was his father's darling in these days. The old archdeacon would go up to London and be quite happy in his son's house. He met there the men whom he loved to meet, and heard the talk which he loved to hear. It was very fine, having the Marquis of Hartletop for his son-in-law, but he had never cared to be much at Lady Hartletop's house. Indeed, the archdeacon cared to be in no house in which those around him were supposed to be bigger than himself. Such was the little family fleet from out of which Henry Grantly was now proposing to sail alone with his little boat,--taking Grace Crawley with him at the helm. "My father is a just man at the bottom," he said to himself, "and though he may not forgive me, he will not punish Edith."

But there was still left one of the family,--not a Grantly, indeed, but one so nearly allied to them as to have his boat moored in the same harbour,--who, as the major well knew, would thoroughly sympathize with him. This was old Mr. Harding, his mother's father,--the father of his mother and of his aunt Mrs. Arabin,--whose home was now at the deanery. He was also to be at Plumstead during this Christmas, and he at any rate would give a ready a.s.sent to such a marriage as that which the major was proposing for himself. But then poor old Mr. Harding had been thoroughly deficient in that ambition which had served to aggrandize the family into which his daughter had married. He was a poor old man who, in spite of good friends,--for the late bishop of the diocese had been his dearest friend,--had never risen high in his profession, and had fallen even from the moderate alt.i.tude which he had attained. But he was a man whom all loved who knew him; and it was much to the credit of his son-in-law, the archdeacon, that, with all his tendencies to love rising suns, he had ever been true to Mr. Harding.

Major Grantly took his daughter with him, and on his arrival at Plumstead she of course was the first object of attention. Mrs.

Grantly declared that she had grown immensely. The archdeacon complimented her red cheeks, and said that Cosby Lodge was as healthy a place as any in the county, while Mr. Harding, Edith's great-grandfather, drew slowly from his pocket sundry treasures with which he had come prepared for the delight of the little girl.

Charles Grantly and Lady Anne had no children, and the heir of all the Hartletops was too august to have been trusted to the embraces of her mother's grandfather. Edith, therefore, was all that he had in that generation, and of Edith he was prepared to be as indulgent as he had been, in their time, of his grandchildren the Grantlys, and still was of his grandchildren the Arabins, and had been before that of his own daughters. "She's more like Eleanor than any one else,"