CHAPTER XXI

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; 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; 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 this 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 made 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 in 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 no guests at the Stanhopes,

and he did not hesitate to accuse her of deceit. Moreover, the fact,

or rather 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 personages of the parish,

joined in. Eleanor also knew them, but she said 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 pleasanter 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 ground of the parish church. Mr. Arabin declared

that he should look on such tenets on the part of his 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 state

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 olden 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 auditors. 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 an

investigation; 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 had not herself 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 upstairs, 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 Mohammedan

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 Mohammedan 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--by 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 of 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 awhile, 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 than men,

demands of us that we should do our work with godlike perfection.

There is nothing god-like about us: we differ from each other with

the acerbity common to man; we triumph over each other with human

frailty; 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 come 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

heavier 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 of power in the strains 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 anti-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; to show up the worst

side of everything 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 begin 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 it 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 apologize for presuming to criticize

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 goodwill 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 has 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 downstairs 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 these 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 vinted, 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 home to the scene

of her 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 will 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 any

man ever hear of a dining-room of such proportions!" 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 the 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 newfangled

method of leaving a 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 protégé 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, and 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 room in 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 having

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 commissioners

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 effectually and systematically, the

party returned to Plumstead well satisfied with their expedition.