第280章

Robarts rode over with a groom behind him--really taking the groom because he knew that Mr Crawley would have no one to hold his horse for him--and the groom was the source of great offence. He come upon Mr Crawley standing at the school door, and stopping at once, jumped off his nag. There was something in the way in which he sprang out of the saddle and threw the reins to the man, which was not clerical to Mr Crawley's eyes. No man could be so quick in the matter of a horse who spent as many hours with the poor and with the children as should be spent by a parish clergyman. It might be probable that Mr Robarts had never stolen twenty pounds--might never be accused of so disgraceful a crime--but, nevertheless, Mr Crawley had his own ideas, and made his own comparisons.

'Crawley' said Robarts, 'I am so glad to find you at home.'

'I am generally to be found in the parish,' said the perpetual curate of Hogglestock.

'I know you are,' said Robarts, who knew the man well, and cared nothing for his friend's peculiarities when he felt his own withers to be unwrung. 'But you might have been down at Hoggle End with the brickmakers, and then, I would have had to go after you.'

'I should have grieved--' began Crawley; but Robarts interrupted him at once.

'Let us go for a walk, and I'll leave the man with the horses. I've something special to say to you, and I can say it better out here than in the house. Grace is quite well, and sends her love. She is growing to look so beautiful!'

'I hope she may grow in grace with God,' said Mr Crawley.

'She is as good a girl as ever I knew. By-the-bye, you had Henry Grantly over here the other day?'

'Major Grantly, whom I cannot name without expressing my esteem for him, did do us the honour of calling upon us not very long since. If it be with reference to him that you have taken this trouble--'

'No, no; not at all. I'll allow him and the ladies to fight out that battle. I've not the least doubt in the world how that will go. When I'm told that she made a complete conquest of the archdeacon, there cannot be any doubt about that.'

'A conquest of the archdeacon!'

But Mr Robarts did not wish to have to explain anything further about the archdeacon. 'Were you not terribly shocked, Crawley,' he asked, 'when you heard of the death of Mrs Proudie?'

'It was sudden and very awful,' said Mr Crawley. 'Such deaths are always shocking. Not more so, perhaps, as regards the wife of a bishop., than with any other woman.'

'Only we happen to know her.'

'No doubt the finite and meagre nature of our feelings does prevent us from extending our sympathies to those whom we have not seen in the flesh. It should not be so, and would not with one who had nurtured his heart with the proper care. And we are prone to permit an evil worse than that to canker our regards and to foster and to mar our solicitudes. Those who are in high station strike us more by their joys and sorrows than do the poor and lowly. Were some young duke's wife, wedded but the other day, to die, all England would put on a show of mourning--nay, would feel some true gleam of pity; but nobody cares for the widowed brickmaker seated with his starving infant on his cold hearth.'

'Of course we hear more of the big people,' said Robarts.

'Ay; and think more of them. But do not suppose, sir, that I complain of this man or that woman because his sympathies, or hers, runs out of that course which my reason tells me they should hold. The man with whom it would not be so would simply be a god among men. It is in his perfection as a man that we recognise the divinity of Christ. It is in the imperfection of men that we recognise our necessity for a Christ.

Yes, sir, the death of the poor lady at Barchester was very sudden. Ihope that my lord bears with becoming fortitude the heavy misfortune.

They say that he was a man much beholden to his wife--prone to lean upon her in his goings out and comings in. For such a man such a loss is more dreadful than for another.'

'They say she led him a terrible life, you know.'

'I am not prone, sir, to believe much of what I hear about the domesticities of other men, knowing how little any other man can know of my own. And I have, methinks, observed a proneness in the world to ridicule that dependence on a woman which every married man should acknowledge in regard to the wife of his bosom, if he cant trust her as well as love her. When I hear jocose proverbs spoken as to men such as that in this house the grey mare is the better horse, or that in that house the wife wears that garment which is supposed to denote virile command, knowing that the joke is easy, and that meekness in a man is more truly noble than the habit of stern authority, I do not allow them to go far with me in influencing my judgment.'

So spoke Mr Crawley, who never permitted the slightest interference with his own word in his own family, and who had himself been a witness of one of those scenes between the bishop and his wife in which the poor bishop had been so cruelly misused. But to Mr Crawley the thing which he himself had seen under such circumstances was as sacred as though it had come to him under the seal of confession. In speaking of the bishop and Mrs Proudie--nay, as far as was possible in thinking of them--he was bound to speak and to think as though he had not witnessed that scene in the palace study.

'I don't suppose that there is much doubt as to her real character,' said Robarts. 'But you and I need not discuss that.'

'By no means. Such discussion would be both useless and unseemly.'

'And just at present there is something else that I specially want to say to you. Indeed, I went to Silverbridge on the same subject yesterday, and have come here expressly to have a little conversation with you.'

'If it be about affairs of mine, Mr Robarts, I am indeed troubled in spirit that so great labour should have fallen upon you.'