ST EWOLD'S PARSONAGE
When Mr Harding and Mrs Bold reached the rectory on the following
morning, the archdeacon and his friend were at St Ewold's. They had
gone over that the new vicar might inspect his church, and be
introduced to the squire, and were not expected back before dinner.
Mr Harding rambled out by himself, and strolled, as was his wont at
Plumstead, about the lawn and round the church; and as he did so,
the two sisters naturally fell into conversation about Barchester.
There was not much sisterly confidence between them. Mrs Grantly
was ten years older than Eleanor, and had been married while
Eleanor was yet a child. They had never, therefore, poured into
each other's ears their hopes and loves; and now that one was a
wife and the other a widow, it was not probable that they would
begin to do so. They lived too much asunder to be able to fall into
that kind of intercourse which makes confidence between sisters
almost a necessity; and, moreover, that which is so easy at
eighteen is often very difficult at twenty-eight. Mrs Grantly knew
this, and did not, therefore, expect confidence from her sister;
and yet she longed to ask her whether in real truth Mr Slope was
agreeable to her.
It was by no means difficult to turn the conversation to Mr Slope.
That gentleman had become so famous at Barchester, had so much to
do with all clergymen connected with the city, and was so specially
concerned in the affairs of Mr Harding, that it would have been odd
if Mr Harding's daughters had not talked about him. Mrs Grantly was
soon abusing him, which she did with her whole heart; and Mrs Bold
was nearly as eager to defend him. She positively disliked the man,
would have been delighted to learn that he had taken himself off so
that she should never see him again, had indeed almost a fear of
him, and yet she constantly found herself taking his part. The
abuse of other people, and abuse of a nature that she felt to be
unjust, imposed that necessity on her, and at last made Mr Slope's
defence an habitual course of argument with her.
From Mr Slope the conversation turned to the Stanhopes, and Mrs
Grantly was listening with some interest to Eleanor's account of
the family, when it dropped out that Mr Slope was one of the party.
'What!' said the lady of the rectory, 'was Mr Slope there too?'
Eleanor merely replied that such had been the case.
'Why, Eleanor, he must be very fond of you, I think; he seems to
follow you everywhere.'
Even this did not open Eleanor's eyes. She merely laughed, and said
that she imagined Mr Slope found other attraction at Dr Stanhope's.
And so they parted. Mrs Grantly felt quite convinced that the
odious match would take place; and Mrs Bold as convinced that that
unfortunate chaplain, disagreeable as he must be allowed to be, was
more sinned against than sinning.
The archdeacon of course heard before dinner that Eleanor had
remained the day before at Barchester with the view of meeting Mr
Slope, and that she had so met him. He remembered how she had
positively stated that there were to be guests at the Stanhopes,
and he did not hesitate to accuse her of deceit. Moreover, the
fact, or rather the presumed fact, of her being deceitful on such a
matter, spoke but too plainly in evidence against her as to her
imputed crime of receiving Mr Slope as a lover.
'I am afraid that anything we can do will be too late,' said the
archdeacon. 'I own I am fairly surprised. I never liked your
sister's taste with regard to men; but still I did not give her
credit for--ugh!'
'And so soon, too,' said Mrs Grantly, who thought more, perhaps, of
her sister's indecorum in having a lover before she had put off her
weeds, than her bad taste in having such a lover as Mr Slope.
'Well, my dear, I shall be sorry to be harsh, or to do anything
that can hurt your father; but, positively, neither that man nor
his wife shall come within my doors.'
Mrs Grantly sighed, and then attempted to console herself and her
lord by remarking that, after all, the thing was not accomplished
yet. Now that Eleanor was at Plumstead, much might be done to wean
her from her fatal passion. Poor Eleanor!
The evening passed off without anything to make it remarkable. Mr
Arabin discussed the parish of St Ewold with the archdeacon, and
Mrs Grantly and Mr Harding, who knew the parsonages of the parish,
joined in. Eleanor also knew them, but spoke little. Mr Arabin did
not apparently take much notice of her, and she was not in a humour
to receive at that time with any special grace any special
favourite of her brother-in-law. Her first idea on reaching her
bedroom was that a much more pleasant family party might be met at
Dr Stanhope's than at the rectory. She began to think that she was
getting tired of clergymen and their respectable humdrum wearisome
mode of living, and that after all, people in the outer world, who
had lived in Italy, London, or elsewhere, need not necessarily be
regarded as atrocious and abominable. The Stanhopes, she had
thought, were a giddy, thoughtless, extravagant set of people; but
she had seen nothing wrong about them, and had, on the other hand,
found that they thoroughly knew how to make their house agreeable.
It was a thousand pities, she thought, that the archdeacon should
not have a little of the same savoir vivre. Mr Arabin, as we have
said, did not apparently take much notice of her; but yet he did
not go to bed without feeling that he had been in company with a
very pretty woman; and as is the case with most bachelors, and some
married men, regarded the prospect of his month's visit at
Plumstead in a pleasanter light, when he learnt that a very pretty
woman was to share it with him.
Before they all retired it was settled that the whole party should
drive over on the following day to inspect the parsonage at St
Ewold. The three clergymen were to discuss dilapidations, and the
two ladies were to lend their assistance in suggesting such changes
as might be necessary for a bachelor's abode. Accordingly, soon
after breakfast, the carriage was at the door. There was only room
for four inside, and the archdeacon got upon the box. Eleanor found
herself opposite to Mr Arabin, and was, therefore, in a manner
forced into conversation with him. They were soon on comfortable
terms together; and had she thought about it, she would have
thought that, in spite of his black cloth, Mr Arabin would not have
been a bad addition to the Stanhope family party.
Now that the archdeacon was away, they could all trifle. Mr Harding
began by telling them in the most innocent manner imaginable an old
legend about Mr Arabin's new parish. There was, he said, in days of
yore, an illustrious priestess of St Ewold, famed through the whole
country for curing all manner of diseases. She had a well, as all
priestesses have ever had, which well was extant to this day, and
shared in the minds of many of the people the sanctity which
belonged to the consecrated grounds of the parish church. Mr Arabin
declared that he should look on such tenets on the part of the
parishioners as anything but orthodox. And Mrs Grantly replied
that she so entirely disagreed with him as to think that no parish
was in a proper estate that had not its priestess as well as its
priest. 'The duties are never well done,' said she, 'unless they
are so divided.'
'I suppose, papa,' said Eleanor, 'that in the oldest times the
priestess bore all the sway herself. Mr Arabin, perhaps, thinks
that such might be too much the case now if a sacred lady were
admitted within the parish.'
'I think, at any rate,' said he, 'that it is safer to run no such
risk. No priestly pride has ever exceeded that of sacerdotal
females. A very lowly curate, I might, perhaps, essay to rule; but
a curatess would be sure to get the better of me.'
'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 his
examination; 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 herself had not 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 up stairs, 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 gray 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 encompass 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 Mahometan
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 Mahometan 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 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 then men, demands of us that we should do our work with
godlike perfection. There is nothing godlike about us: we differ
from each other with the acerbity common to man--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 become 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 heaviest 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 power in the strains that 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 non-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 new comer 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; show up the worst
side of every thing 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;" you fitly began 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 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 apologise for presuming to criticise
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 is 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 down stairs, 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 those 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 minted, after it had lain 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 here to the
scene of 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 shall 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
anybody 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 a round 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 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 new fangled method
of leaving cloth on the table, 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 protege 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, then 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 of 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 have
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
commission 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 effectively, and systematically, the
party returned to Plumstead well satisfied with their expedition.