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Barchester Towers

by Anthony Trollope

previous: CHAPTER XII SLOPE VERSUS HARDING

CHAPTER XIII THE RUBBISH CART

Mr Harding was not a happy man as he walked down the palace pathway, and stepped out into the close. His preferment and pleasant house were a second time gone from him; but that he could endure. He had been schooled and insulted by a man young enough to be his son; but that he could put up with. He could even draw from the very injuries, which had been inflicted on him, some of that consolation, which we may believe martyrs always receive from the injuries of their own sufferings, and which is generally proportioned in it strength to the extent of cruelty with which martyrs are treated. He had admitted to his daughter that he wanted the comfort of his old home, and yet he could have returned to his lodgings in the High Street, if not with exultation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain's harangue had worked into his blood, and had sapped the life of his sweet contentment.

'New men are carrying out new measures, and are eating away the useless rubbish of past centuries.' What cruel words these had been; and how often are they now used with all the heartless cruelty of a Slope! A man is sufficiently condemned if it can only be shown that either in politics or religion he does not belong to some new school established within the last score of years. He may then regard himself as rubbish and expect to be carted away. A man is nothing now unless he has within him a full appreciation of the new era; an ear in which it would seem that neither honesty nor truth is very desirable, but in which success is the only touchstone of merit. We must laugh at every thing that is established. Let the joke be ever so bad, ever so untrue to the real principles of joking; nevertheless we must laugh - or else beware the cart. We must talk, think, and live up to the spirit of the times, and write up to it too, if that cacoethes be upon us, or else we are nought. New men and now measures, long credit and few scruples, great success and wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live. Alas, alas! under the circumstances Mr Harding could not but feel that he was an Englishman who did not know how to live. This new doctrine of Mr Slope and the rubbish cart, new at least at Barchester, sadly disturbed his equanimity.

'The same thing is going on throughout the whole country!' 'Work is now required from every man who receives wages!' and had he been living all his life receiving wages and doing no work? Had he in truth so lived as to be now in his old age justly reckoned as rubbish fit only to be hidden away in some huge dust hole? The school of men to whom he professes to belong, the Grantlys, the Gwynnes, and the old high set of Oxford divines, are afflicted with no such self-accusations as these which troubled Mr Harding. They, as a rule, are as satisfied with the wisdom and propriety of their own conduct as can be any Mr Slope, or any Dr Proudie, with his own. But unfortunately for himself, Mr Harding had little of this self-reliance. When he heard himself designated as rubbish by the Slopes of the world, he had no other recourse than to make inquiry within his own bosom as to the truth of the designation. Alas, alas! the evidence seemed generally to go against him.

He had professed to himself in the bishop's parlour that in these coming sources of the sorrow of the age, in these fits of sad regret from which the latter years of few reflecting men can be free, religion would suffice to comfort him. Yes, religion could console him for the loss of any worldly good; but was his religion of that active sort which would enable him so to repent of misspent years as to pass those that were left to him in a spirit of hope for the future? And such repentance itself, is it not a work of agony and of tears? It is very easy to talk of repentance; but a man has to walk over hot ploughshares before he can complete it; to be skinned alive as was St Bartholomew; to be stuck full of arrows as was St Sebastian; to lie broiling on a gridiron like St Lorenzo! How if his past life required such repentance as this? had he the energy to go through with it?

Mr Harding after leaving the palace, walked slowly for an hour or so beneath the shady elms of the close, and then betook himself to his daughter's house. He had at any rate made up his mind that he would go out to Plumstead to consult Dr Grantly, and that he would in the first instance tell Eleanor what had occurred.

And now he was doomed to undergo another misery. Mr Slope had forestalled him at the widow's house. He had called there on the preceding afternoon. He could not, he had said, deny himself the pleasure of telling Mrs Bold that her father was about to return to the pretty house at Hiram's hospital. He had been instructed by the bishop to inform Mr Harding that the appointment would now be made at once. The bishop was of course only too happy to be able to be the means of restoring to Mr Harding the preferment which he had so long adorned. And then by degrees Mr Slope had introduced the subject of the pretty school which he had hoped before long to see attached to the hospital. He had quite fascinated Mrs Bold by his description of this picturesque, useful, and charitable appendage, and she had gone so far as to say that she had no doubt her father would approve, and that she herself would gladly undertake a class.

Anyone who had heard the entirely different tone, and seen the entirely different manner in which Mr Slope had spoken of this projected institution to the daughter and to the father, would not have failed to own that Mr Slope was a man of genius. He said nothing to Mrs Bold about the hospital sermons and services, nothing about the exclusion of the old men from the cathedral, nothing about dilapidation and painting, nothing about carting away the rubbish. Eleanor had said to herself that certainly she did not like Mr Slope personally, but that he was a very active, zealous, clergyman, and would no doubt be useful in Barchester. All this paved the way for much additional misery to Mr Harding.

Eleanor put on her happiest face as she heard her father on the stairs, for she thought she had only to congratulate him; but directly she saw his face, she knew that there was but little matter for congratulation. She had seen him with the same weary look of sorrow on one or two occasions before, and remembered it well. She had seen him when he first read that attack upon himself in the Jupiter, which had ultimately caused him to resign the hospital; and she had seen him also when the archdeacon had persuaded him to remain there against his own sense of propriety and honour. She knew at a glance that his spirit was in deep trouble.

'Oh, papa, what is it?' said she, putting down her boy to crawl upon the floor.

'I came to tell you, my dear,' said he, 'that I am going out to Plumstead: you won't come with me, I suppose?'

'To Plumstead, papa? Shall you stay there?'

'I suppose I shall tonight: I must consult the archdeacon about this weary hospital. Ah me! I wish I had never thought of it again.'

'Why, papa, what is the matter?'

'I've been with Mr Slope, my dear; and he isn't the pleasantest companion in the world, at least not to me.' Eleanor gave a sort of half blush; but she was wrong if she imagined that her father in any way alluded to her acquaintance with Mr Slope.

'Well, papa.'

'He wants to turn the hospital into a Sunday school and a preaching house; and I suppose he will have his way. I do not feel myself adapted for such an establishment, and therefore, I suppose, I must refuse the appointment.'

'What would be the harm of the school, papa?'

'The want of a proper schoolmaster, my dear.'

'But that would of course be supplied.'

'Mr Slope wishes to supply it by making me his schoolmaster. But as I am hardly fit for such work, I intend to decline.'

'Oh, papa! Mr Slope doesn't intend that. He was here yesterday, and what he intends - '

'He was here yesterday, was he?' asked Mr Harding.

'Yes, papa.'

'And talking about the hospital?'

'He was saying how glad he would be, and the bishop too, to see you back there again. And then he spoke about the Sunday school; and to tell the truth I agreed with him; and I thought you would have done so too. Mr Slope spoke of a school, not inside the hospital, but just connected with it, of which you would be the patron and visitor; and I thought you would have liked such a school as that; and I promised to look after it and to take a class - and it all seemed so very - . But, oh, papa! I shall be so miserable if I find that I have done wrong.'

'Nothing wrong at all, my dear,' said he, gently, very gently rejecting his daughter's caresses. 'There can be nothing wrong in your wishing to make yourself useful; indeed, you ought to do so by all means. Every one must now exert himself who would not choose to go to the wall.' Poor Mr Harding thus attempted in his misery to preach the new doctrine to his child. 'Himself or herself, it's all the same,' he continued, 'you will be quite right, my dear, to do something of this sort; but - '

'Well, papa.'

'I am not quite sure that if I were you I would select Mr Slope for my guide.'

'But I have never done so, and never shall.'

'It would be very wicked of me to speak evil of him, for to tell the truth I know no evil of him; but I am not quite sure that he is honest. That he is not gentleman-like in his manners, of that I am quite sure.'

'I never thought of taking him for my guide, papa.'

'As for myself, my dear,' continued he, 'we know the old proverb - "It's a bad thing teaching an old dog new tricks." I must decline the Sunday school, and shall therefore probably decline the hospital also. But I will first see your brother-in-law.' So he took up his hat, kissed the baby, and withdrew, leaving Eleanor in as low spirits as himself.

All this was a great aggravation to his misery. He had so few with whom to sympathise, that he could not afford to be cut off from the one whose sympathy was of the most value to him. And yet it seemed probable that this would be the case. He did not own to himself that he wished his daughter to hate Mr Slope; yet had she expressed such a feeling there would have been very little bitterness in the rebuke he would have given her for so uncharitable a state of mind. The fact, however, was that she was on friendly terms with Mr Slope, that she coincided with his views, adhered at once to his plans, and listened with delight to his teaching. Mr Harding hardly wished his daughter to hate the man, but he would have preferred that to her loving him.

He walked away to the inn to order a fly, went home to put up his carpet bag, and then started for Plumstead. There was, at any rate, no danger that the archdeacon would fraternise with Mr Slope; but then he would recommend internecine war, public appeals, loud reproaches, and all the paraphernalia of open battle. Now that alternative was hardly more to Mr Harding's taste than the other.

When Mr Harding reached the parsonage he found that the archdeacon was out, and would not be home till dinner-time, so he began his complaint to his elder daughter. Mrs Grantly entertained quite as strong an antagonism to Mr Slope as did her husband; she was also quite as alive to the necessity of combatting the Proudie faction, of supporting the old church interest of the close, of keeping in her own set much of the loaves and fishes as duly belonged to it; and was quite as well prepared as her lord to carry on the battle without giving or taking quarter. Not that she was a woman prone to quarrelling, or ill inclined to live at peace with her clerical neighbours; but she felt, as did the archdeacon, that the presence of Mr Slope in Barchester was an insult to every one connected with the late bishop, and that his assumed dominion in the diocese was a spiritual injury to her husband. Hitherto people had little guessed how bitter Mrs Grantly could be. She lived on the best of terms with all the rectors' wives around her. She had been popular with all the ladies connected with the close. Though much the wealthiest of the ecclesiastical matrons of the county, she had so managed her affairs that her carriage and horses had given umbrage to none. She had never thrown herself among the county grandees so as to excite the envy of other clergymen's wives. She had never talked too loudly of earls and countesses, or boasted that she gave her governess sixty pounds a year, or her cook seventy. Mrs Grantly had lived the life of a wise, discreet, peace-making woman; and the people of Barchester were surprised at the amount of military vigour she displayed as general of the feminine Grantlyite forces.

Mrs Grantly soon learnt that her sister Eleanor had promised to assist Mr Slope in the affairs of the hospital; and it was on this point that her attention soon fixed itself.

'How can Eleanor endure him?' said she.

'He is a very crafty man,' said her father, 'and his craft has been successful in making Eleanor think that he is a meek, charitable, good clergyman. God forgive me, if I wrong him, but such is not his true character in my opinion.'

'His true character, indeed!' said she, with something approaching scorn for her father's moderation. 'I only hope he won't have craft enough to make Eleanor forget herself and her position.'

'Do you mean marry him?' said he, startled out of his usual demeanour by the abruptness and horror of so dreadful a proposition.

'What is there so improbable in it? Of course that would be his own object if he thought he had any chance of success. Eleanor has a thousand a year entirely at her own disposal, and what better fortune could fall to Mr Slope's lot than the transferring of the disposal of such a fortune to himself?'

'But you can't think she likes him, Susan?'

'Why not?' said Susan. 'Why shouldn't she like him? He's just the sort of man to get on with a woman left as she is, with no one to look after her.'

'Look after her!' said the unhappy father; 'don't we look after her?'

'Ah, papa, how innocent you are! Of course it was to be expected that Eleanor should marry again. I should be the last to advise her against it, if she would only wait the proper time, and then marry at least a gentleman.'

'But you don't really mean to say that you suppose Eleanor has ever thought of marrying Mr Slope? Why, Mr Bold has only been dead a year.'

'Eighteen months,' said his daughter. 'But I don't suppose Eleanor has ever thought about it. It is very probable, though, that he has, and that he will try and make her do so; and that he will succeed too, if we don't take care what we are about.'

This was quite a new phase of the affair to poor Mr Harding. To have thrust upon him as his son-in-law, as the husband of his favourite child, the only man in the world whom he really positively disliked, would be a misfortune which he felt he would not know how to endure patiently. But then, could there be any ground for so dreadful a surmise? In all worldly matters he was apt to look upon the opinion of his eldest daughter, as one generally sound and trustworthy. In her appreciation of character, of motives, and the probable conduct both of men and women, she was usually not far wrong. She had early foreseen the marriage of Eleanor and John Bold; she had at a glance deciphered the character of the new bishop and his chaplain; could it possibly be that her present surmise should ever come forth as true?'

'But you don't think that she likes him,' said Mr Harding again.

'Well, papa, I can't say that I think she dislikes him as she ought to do. Why is he visiting there as a confidential friend, when he never ought to have been admitted inside the house? Why is it that she speaks to him of about your welfare and your position, as she clearly has done? At the bishop's party the other night, I saw her talking to him for half an hour at the stretch.'

'I thought Mr Slope seemed to talk to nobody there but that daughter of Stanhope's,' said Mr Harding, wishing to defend his child.

'Oh, Mr Slope is a cleverer man than you think of, papa, and keeps more than one iron in the fire.'

To give Eleanor her due, any suspicion as to the slightest inclination on her part towards Mr Slope was a wrong to her. She had no more idea of marrying Mr Slope than she had of marrying the bishop; and the idea that Mr Slope would present himself as a suitor had never occurred to her. Indeed, to give her her due again, she had never thought about suitors since her husband's death. But nevertheless it was true that she had overcome all that repugnance to the man which was so strongly felt for him by the rest of the Grantly faction. She had forgiven him his sermon. She had forgiven him his low church tendencies, his Sabbath schools, and puritanical observances. She had forgiven his pharisaical arrogance, and even his greasy face and oily vulgar manners. Having agreed to overlook such offences as these, why should she not in time be taught to regard Mr Slope as a suitor?

And as to him, it must be affirmed that he was hitherto equally innocent of the crime imputed to him. How it had come to pass that a man whose eyes were generally widely open to everything had not perceived that this young widow was rich as well as beautiful, cannot probably now be explained. But such was the fact. Mr Slope had ingratiated himself with Mrs Bold, merely as he had done with other ladies, in order to strengthen his party in the city. He subsequently attended his error; but it was not till after the interview with him and Mr Harding.

Turn to the next chapter: CHAPTER XIV THE NEW CAMPAIGN