Barchester Towers

A >> Anthony Trollope >> Barchester Towers


But Eleanor was not inclined to be severe in her criticisms on him
in this respect, and felt no annoyance of any kind, when she found
herself seated between Bertie and Charlotte Stanhope. She had no
suspicion of Mr. Slope's intentions; she had no suspicion even of the
suspicion of other people; but still she felt well-pleased not to
have Mr. Slope too near to her.

And she was not ill-pleased to have Bertie Stanhope near her. It
was rarely indeed that he failed to make an agreeable impression on
strangers. With a bishop indeed who thought much of his own dignity
it was possible that he might fail, but hardly with a young and
pretty woman. He possessed the tact of becoming instantly intimate
with women without giving rise to any fear of impertinence. He had
about him somewhat of the propensities of a tame cat. It seemed
quite natural that he should be petted, caressed, and treated with
familiar good nature, and that in return he should purr, and be sleek
and graceful, and above all never show his claws. Like other tame
cats, however, he had his claws, and sometimes made them dangerous.

When tea was over, Charlotte went to the open window and declared
loudly that the full harvest moon was much too beautiful to be
disregarded, and called them all to look at it. To tell the truth
there was but one there who cared much about the moon's beauty, and
that one was not Charlotte, but she knew how valuable an aid to her
purpose the chaste goddess might become, and could easily create a
little enthusiasm for the purpose of the moment. Eleanor and Bertie
were soon with her. The doctor was now quiet in his armchair, and
Mrs. Stanhope in hers, both prepared for slumber.

"Are you a Whewellite or a Brewsterite, or a t'othermanite, Mrs.
Bold?" said Charlotte, who knew a little about everything, and had
read about a third of each of the books to which she alluded.

"Oh!" said Eleanor; "I have not read any of the books, but I feel
sure that there is one man in the moon at least, if not more."

"You don't believe in the pulpy gelatinous matter?" said Bertie.

"I heard about that," said Eleanor, "and I really think it's almost
wicked to talk in such a manner. How can we argue about God's power
in the other stars from the laws which he has given for our rule in
this one?"

"How indeed!" said Bertie. "Why shouldn't there be a race of
salamanders in Venus? And even if there be nothing but fish in
Jupiter, why shouldn't the fish there be as wide awake as the men and
women here?"

"That would be saying very little for them," said Charlotte. "I am
for Dr. Whewell myself, for I do not think that men and women are
worth being repeated in such countless worlds. There may be souls in
other stars, but I doubt their having any bodies attached to them.
But come, Mrs. Bold, let us put our bonnets on and walk round the
close. If we are to discuss sidereal questions, we shall do so much
better under the towers of the cathedral than stuck in this narrow
window."

Mrs. Bold made no objection, and a party was made to walk out.
Charlotte Stanhope well knew the rule as to three being no company,
and she had therefore to induce her sister to allow Mr. Slope to
accompany them.

"Come, Mr. Slope," she said, "I'm sure you'll join us. We shall be
in again in a quarter of an hour, Madeline."

Madeline read in her eye all that she had to say, knew her object,
and as she had to depend on her sister for so many of her amusements,
she felt that she must yield. It was hard to be left alone while
others of her own age walked out to feel the soft influence of the
bright night, but it would be harder still to be without the sort of
sanction which Charlotte gave to all her flirtations and intrigues.
Charlotte's eye told her that she must give up just at present for
the good of the family, and so Madeline obeyed.

But Charlotte's eyes said nothing of the sort to Mr. Slope. He had
no objection at all to the _tete-a-tete_ with the signora which the
departure of the other three would allow him, and gently whispered to
her, "I shall not leave you alone."

"Oh, yes," said she; "go--pray go, pray go, for my sake. Do not
think that I am so selfish. It is understood that nobody is kept
within for me. You will understand this too when you know me better.
Pray join them, Mr. Slope, but when you come in speak to me for five
minutes before you leave us."

Mr. Slope understood that he was to go, and he therefore joined the
party in the hall. He would have had no objection at all to this
arrangement, if he could have secured Mrs. Bold's arm; but this
of course was out of the question. Indeed, his fate was very soon
settled, for no sooner had he reached the hall-door than Miss
Stanhope put her hand within his arm, and Bertie walked off with
Eleanor just as naturally as though she were already his own
property.

And so they sauntered forth: first they walked round the close,
according to their avowed intent; then they went under the old arched
gateway below St. Cuthbert's little church, and then they turned
behind the grounds of the bishop's palace, and so on till they came
to the bridge just at the edge of the town, from which passers-by can
look down into the gardens of Hiram's Hospital; and here Charlotte
and Mr. Slope, who were in advance, stopped till the other two came
up to them. Mr. Slope knew that the gable-ends and old brick chimneys
which stood up so prettily in the moonlight were those of Mr.
Harding's late abode, and would not have stopped on such a spot, in
such company, if he could have avoided it; but Miss Stanhope would not
take the hint which he tried to give.

"This is a very pretty place, Mrs. Bold," said Charlotte; "by far the
prettiest place near Barchester. I wonder your father gave it up."

It was a very pretty place, and now by the deceitful light of the
moon looked twice larger, twice prettier, twice more antiquely
picturesque than it would have done in truth-telling daylight. Who
does not know the air of complex multiplicity and the mysterious
interesting grace which the moon always lends to old gabled buildings
half-surrounded, as was the hospital, by fine trees! As seen from
the bridge on the night of which we are speaking, Mr. Harding's late
abode did look very lovely, and though Eleanor did not grieve at her
father's having left it, she felt at the moment an intense wish that
he might be allowed to return.

"He is going to return to it almost immediately, is he not?" asked
Bertie.

Eleanor made no immediate reply. Many such a question passes
unanswered without the notice of the questioner, but such was not now
the case. They all remained silent as though expecting her to reply,
and after a moment or two, Charlotte said, "I believe it is settled
that Mr. Harding returns to the hospital, is it not?"

"I don't think anything about it is settled yet," said Eleanor.

"But it must be a matter of course," said Bertie; "that is, if your
father wishes it. Who else on earth could hold it after what has
occurred?"

Eleanor quietly made her companion understand that the matter was one
which she could not discuss in the present company, and then they
passed on. Charlotte said she would go a short way up the hill out
of the town so as to look back upon the towers of the cathedral, and
as Eleanor leant upon Bertie's arm for assistance in the walk, she
told him how the matter stood between her father and the bishop.

"And, he," said Bertie, pointing on to Mr. Slope, "what part does he
take in it?"

Eleanor explained how Mr. Slope had at first endeavoured to tyrannize
over her father, but how he had latterly come round and done all
he could to talk the bishop over in Mr. Harding's favour. "But my
father," she said, "is hardly inclined to trust him; they all say he
is so arrogant to the old clergymen of the city."

"Take my word for it," said Bertie, "your father is right. If I am
not very much mistaken, that man is both arrogant and false."

They strolled up to the top of the hill and then returned through the
fields by a foot-path which leads by a small wooden bridge, or rather
a plank with a rustic rail to it, over the river to the other side
of the cathedral from that at which they had started. They had thus
walked round the bishop's grounds, through which the river runs,
and round the cathedral and adjacent fields, and it was past eleven
before they reached the doctor's door.

"It is very late," said Eleanor; "it will be a shame to disturb your
mother again at such an hour."

"Oh"' said Charlotte, laughing, "you won't disturb Mamma; I dare say
she is in bed by this time, and Madeline would be furious if you did
not come in and see her. Come, Bertie, take Mrs. Bold's bonnet from
her."

They went upstairs and found the signora alone, reading. She looked
somewhat sad and melancholy, but not more so perhaps than was
sufficient to excite additional interest in the bosom of Mr. Slope;
and she was soon deep in whispered intercourse with that happy
gentleman, who was allowed to find a resting-place on her sofa. The
signora had a way of whispering that was peculiarly her own, and was
exactly the reverse of that which prevails among great tragedians.
The great tragedian hisses out a positive whisper, made with bated
breath, and produced by inarticulated tongue-formed sounds, but yet
he is audible through the whole house. The signora, however, used no
hisses and produced all her words in a clear, silver tone, but they
could only be heard by the ear into which they were poured.

Charlotte hurried and scurried about the room hither and thither,
doing, or pretending to do many things; then, saying something about
seeing her mother, ran upstairs. Eleanor was thus left alone with
Bertie, and she hardly felt an hour fly by her. To give Bertie his
due credit, he could not have played his cards better. He did not
make love to her, nor sigh, nor look languishing, but he was amusing
and familiar, yet respectful; and when he left Eleanor at her own
door at one o'clock, which he did by the by with the assistance
of the now jealous Slope, she thought that he was one of the most
agreeable men and the Stanhopes decidedly the most agreeable family
that she had ever met.




CHAPTER XX

Mr. Arabin


The Rev. Francis Arabin, fellow of Lazarus, late professor of
poetry at Oxford, and present vicar of St. Ewold, in the diocese
of Barchester, must now be introduced personally to the reader. He
is worthy of a new volume, and as he will fill a conspicuous place
in it, it is desirable that he should be made to stand before the
reader's eye by the aid of such portraiture as the author is able
to produce.

It is to be regretted that no mental method of daguerreotype or
photography has yet been discovered by which the characters of men
can be reduced to writing and put into grammatical language with
an unerring precision of truthful description. How often does the
novelist feel, ay, and the historian also and the biographer, that
he has conceived within his mind and accurately depicted on the
tablet of his brain the full character and personage of a man, and
that nevertheless, when he flies to pen and ink to perpetuate the
portrait, his words forsake, elude, disappoint, and play the deuce
with him, till at the end of a dozen pages the man described has no
more resemblance to the man conceived than the sign-board at the
corner of the street has to the Duke of Cambridge.

And yet such mechanical descriptive skill would hardly give more
satisfaction to the reader than the skill of the photographer does to
the anxious mother desirous to possess an absolute duplicate of her
beloved child. The likeness is indeed true, but it is a dull, dead,
unfeeling, inauspicious likeness. The face is indeed there, and those
looking at it will know at once whose image it is, but the owner of
the face will not be proud of the resemblance.

There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement
of any valuable art. Let photographers and daguerreotypers do what
they will, and improve as they may with further skill on that which
skill has already done, they will never achieve a portrait of the
human face divine. Let biographers, novelists, and the rest of us
groan as we may under the burdens which we so often feel too heavy
for our shoulders; we must either bear them up like men, or own
ourselves too weak for the work we have undertaken. There is no way
of writing well and also of writing easily.

_Labor omnia vincit improbus_. Such should be the chosen motto of
every labourer, and it may be that labour, if adequately enduring,
may suffice at last to produce even some not untrue resemblance of
the Rev. Francis Arabin.

Of his doings in the world, and of the sort of fame which he has
achieved, enough has been already said. It has also been said that he
is forty years of age, and still unmarried. He was the younger son of
a country gentleman of small fortune in the north of England. At an
early age he went to Winchester, and was intended by his father for
New College; but though studious as a boy, he was not studious within
the prescribed limits, and at the age of eighteen he left school with
a character for talent, but without a scholarship. All that he had
obtained, over and above the advantage of his character, was a gold
medal for English verse, and hence was derived a strong presumption
on the part of his friends that he was destined to add another name
to the imperishable list of English poets.

From Winchester he went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at
Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly
eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no
horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of his
college tutor. Such at least was his career till he had taken his
little go, and then he commenced a course of action which, though not
less creditable to himself as a man, was hardly so much to the taste
of the tutor. He became a member of a vigorous debating society, and
rendered himself remarkable there for humorous energy. Though always
in earnest, yet his earnestness was always droll. To be true in his
ideas, unanswerable in his syllogisms, and just in his aspirations
was not enough for him. He had failed, failed in his own opinion as
well as that of others when others came to know him, if he could not
reduce the arguments of his opponents to an absurdity and conquer
both by wit and reason. To say that his object was ever to raise a
laugh would be most untrue. He hated such common and unnecessary
evidence of satisfaction on the part of his hearers. A joke that
required to be laughed at was, with him, not worth uttering. He
could appreciate by a keener sense than that of his ears the success
of his wit, and would see in the eyes of his auditors whether or no
he was understood and appreciated.

He had been a religious lad before he left school. That is, he had
addicted himself to a party in religion, and having done so had
received that benefit which most men do who become partisans in such
a cause. We are much too apt to look at schism in our church as an
unmitigated evil. Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, at
any rate calls attention to the subject, draws in supporters who
would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches
men to think upon religion. How great an amount of good of this
description has followed that movement in the Church of England which
commenced with the publication of Froude's Remains!

As a boy young Arabin took up the cudgels on the side of the
Tractarians, and at Oxford he sat for a while at the feet of the
great Newman. To this cause he lent all his faculties. For it he
concocted verses, for it he made speeches, for it he scintillated
the brightest sparks of his quiet wit. For it he ate and drank and
dressed and had his being. In due process of time he took his degree
and wrote himself B.A., but he did not do so with any remarkable
amount of academical eclat. He had occupied himself too much
with High Church matters and the polemics, politics, and outward
demonstrations usually concurrent with High Churchmanship to devote
himself with sufficient vigour to the acquisition of a double first.
He was not a double first, nor even a first class man, but he
revenged himself on the university by putting firsts and double
firsts out of fashion for the year and laughing down a species of
pedantry which, at the age of twenty-three, leaves no room in a man's
mind for graver subjects than conic sections or Greek accents.

Greek accents, however, and conic sections were esteemed necessaries
at Balliol, and there was no admittance there for Mr. Arabin within
the list of its fellows. Lazarus, however, the richest and most
comfortable abode of Oxford dons, opened its bosom to the young
champion of a church militant. Mr. Arabin was ordained, and became
a fellow soon after taking his degree, and shortly after that was
chosen professor of poetry.

And now came the moment of his great danger. After many mental
struggles, and an agony of doubt which may be well surmised, the
great prophet of the Tractarians confessed himself a Roman Catholic.
Mr. Newman left the Church of England and with him carried many a
waverer. He did not carry off Mr. Arabin, but the escape which that
gentleman had was a very narrow one. He left Oxford for awhile that
he might meditate in complete peace on the step which appeared to him
to be all but unavoidable, and shut himself up in a little village on
the sea-shore of one of our remotest counties, that he might learn
by communing with his own soul whether or no he could with a safe
conscience remain within the pale of his mother church.

Things would have gone badly with him there had he been left entirely
to himself. Everything was against him: all his worldly interests
required him to remain a Protestant, and he looked on his worldly
interests as a legion of foes, to get the better of whom was a point
of extremest honour. In his then state of ecstatic agony such a
conquest would have cost him little; he could easily have thrown away
all his livelihood; but it cost him much to get over the idea that by
choosing the Church of England he should be open in his own mind to
the charge that he had been led to such a choice by unworthy motives.
Then his heart was against him: he loved with a strong and eager love
the man who had hitherto been his guide, and yearned to follow his
footsteps. His tastes were against him: the ceremonies and pomps of
the Church of Rome, their august feasts and solemn fasts, invited
his imagination and pleased his eye. His flesh was against him:
how great an aid would it be to a poor, weak, wavering man to be
constrained to high moral duties, self-denial, obedience, and
chastity by laws which were certain in their enactments, and not to
be broken without loud, palpable, unmistakable sin! Then his faith
was against him: he required to believe so much; panted so eagerly to
give signs of his belief; deemed it so insufficient to wash himself
simply in the waters of Jordan; that some great deed, such as that
of forsaking everything for a true Church, had for him allurements
almost past withstanding.

Mr. Arabin was at this time a very young man, and when he left Oxford
for his far retreat was much too confident in his powers of fence,
and too apt to look down on the ordinary sense of ordinary people,
to expect aid in the battle that he had to fight from any chance
inhabitants of the spot which he had selected. But Providence was
good to him; there, in that all but desolate place, on the storm-beat
shore of that distant sea, he met one who gradually calmed his mind,
quieted his imagination, and taught him something of a Christian's
duty. When Mr. Arabin left Oxford, he was inclined to look upon the
rural clergymen of most English parishes almost with contempt. It
was his ambition, should he remain within the fold of their church,
to do somewhat towards redeeming and rectifying their inferiority and
to assist in infusing energy and faith into the hearts of Christian
ministers, who were, as he thought, too often satisfied to go through
life without much show of either.

And yet it was from such a one that Mr. Arabin in his extremest need
received that aid which he so much required. It was from the poor
curate of a small Cornish parish that he first learnt to know that
the highest laws for the governance of a Christian's duty must act
from within and not from without; that no man can become a serviceable
servant solely by obedience to written edicts; and that the safety
which he was about to seek within the gates of Rome was no other
than the selfish freedom from personal danger which the bad soldier
attempts to gain who counterfeits illness on the eve of battle.

Mr. Arabin returned to Oxford a humbler but a better and a happier
man, and from that time forth he put his shoulder to the wheel
as a clergyman of the Church for which he had been educated. The
intercourse of those among whom he familiarly lived kept him staunch
to the principles of that system of the Church to which he had always
belonged. Since his severance from Mr. Newman, no one had had so
strong an influence over him as the head of his college. During
the time of his expected apostasy Dr. Gwynne had not felt much
predisposition in favour of the young fellow. Though a High
Churchman himself within moderate limits, Dr. Gwynne felt no sympathy
with men who could not satisfy their faiths with the Thirty-nine
Articles. He regarded the enthusiasm of such as Newman as a state of
mind more nearly allied to madness than to religion, and when he saw
it evinced by very young men, he was inclined to attribute a good
deal of it to vanity. Dr. Gwynne himself, though a religious man, was
also a thoroughly practical man of the world, and he regarded with
no favourable eye the tenets of anyone who looked on the two things
as incompatible. When he found that Mr. Arabin was a half Roman, he
began to regret all he had done towards bestowing a fellowship on
so unworthy a recipient; and when again he learnt that Mr. Arabin
would probably complete his journey to Rome, he regarded with some
satisfaction the fact that in such case the fellowship would be again
vacant.

When, however, Mr. Arabin returned and professed himself a confirmed
Protestant, the Master of Lazarus again opened his arms to him, and
gradually he became the pet of the college. For some little time he
was saturnine, silent, and unwilling to take any prominent part in
university broils, but gradually his mind recovered, or rather made
its tone, and he became known as a man always ready at a moment's
notice to take up the cudgels in opposition to anything that savoured
of an evangelical bearing. He was great in sermons, great on
platforms, great at after-dinner conversations, and always pleasant
as well as great. He took delight in elections, served on committees,
opposed tooth and nail all projects of university reform, and talked
jovially over his glass of port of the ruin to be anticipated by the
Church and of the sacrilege daily committed by the Whigs. The ordeal
through which he had gone in resisting the blandishments of the lady
of Rome had certainly done much towards the strengthening of his
character. Although in small and outward matters he was self-confident
enough, nevertheless in things affecting the inner man he aimed at a
humility of spirit which would never have been attractive to him but
for that visit to the coast of Cornwall. This visit he now repeated
every year.

Such is an interior view of Mr. Arabin at the time when he accepted
the living of St. Ewold. Exteriorly, he was not a remarkable person.
He was above the middle height, well-made, and very active. His hair,
which had been jet black, was now tinged with gray, but his face
bore no sign of years. It would perhaps be wrong to say that he was
handsome, but his face was nevertheless pleasant to look upon. The
cheek-bones were rather too high for beauty, and the formation of the
forehead too massive and heavy: but the eyes, nose, and mouth were
perfect. There was a continual play of lambent fire about his eyes,
which gave promise of either pathos or humour whenever he essayed to
speak, and that promise was rarely broken. There was a gentle play
about his mouth which declared that his wit never descended to sarcasm,
and that there was no ill-nature in his repartee.

Mr. Arabin was a popular man among women, but more so as a general
than a special favourite. Living as a fellow at Oxford, marriage with
him had been out of the question, and it may be doubted whether he had
ever allowed his heart to be touched. Though belonging to a church in
which celibacy is not the required lot of its ministers, he had come
to regard himself as one of those clergymen to whom to be a bachelor
is almost a necessity. He had never looked for parochial duty, and his
career at Oxford was utterly incompatible with such domestic joys as
a wife and nursery. He looked on women, therefore, in the same light
that one sees them regarded by many Romish priests. He liked to have
near him that which was pretty and amusing, but women generally were
little more to him than children. He talked to them without putting
out all his powers, and listened to them without any idea that what he
should hear from them could either actuate his conduct or influence
his opinion.