Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope [popular e readers txt] 📗

long dusky gray coat, which buttoned close up to his neck and descended almost to his heels. He was full six feet high, but being so slight in build, he looked as though he were taller.

He came at once at Lady Lufton’s bidding, putting himself into the gig beside the servant, to whom he spoke no single word during the journey. And the man, looking into his face, was struck with taciturnity. Now Mark Robarts would have talked with him the whole way from Hogglestock to Framley Court; discoursing partly as to horses and land, but partly also as to higher things.

And then Lady Lufton opened her mind and told her griefs to Mr. Crawley, urging, however, through the whole length of her narrative, that Mr. Robarts was an excellent parish clergyman⁠—“just such a clergyman in his church as I would wish him to be,” she explained, with the view of saving herself from an expression of any of Mr. Crawley’s special ideas as to church teaching, and of confining him to the one subject-matter in hand; “but he got this living so young, Mr. Crawley, that he is hardly quite as steady as I could wish him to be. It has been as much my fault as his own in placing him in such a position so early in life.”

“I think it has,” said Mr. Crawley, who might perhaps be a little sore on such a subject.

“Quite so, quite so,” continued her ladyship, swallowing down with a gulp a certain sense of anger. “But that is done now, and is past cure. That Mr. Robarts will become a credit to his profession, I do not doubt, for his heart is in the right place and his sentiments are good; but I fear that at present he is succumbing to temptation.”

“I am told that he hunts two or three times a week. Everybody round us is talking about it.”

“No, Mr. Crawley; not two or three times a week; very seldom above once, I think. And then I do believe he does it more with the view of being with Lord Lufton than anything else.”

“I cannot see that that would make the matter better,” said Mr. Crawley.

“It would show that he was not strongly imbued with a taste which I cannot but regard as vicious in a clergyman.”

“It must be vicious in all men,” said Mr. Crawley. “It is in itself cruel, and leads to idleness and profligacy.”

Again Lady Lufton made a gulp. She had called Mr. Crawley thither to her aid, and felt that it would be inexpedient to quarrel with him. But she did not like to be told that her son’s amusement was idle and profligate. She had always regarded hunting as a proper pursuit for a country gentleman. It was, indeed, in her eyes one of the peculiar institutions of country life in England, and it may be almost said that she looked upon the Barsetshire hunt as something sacred. She could not endure to hear that a fox was trapped, and allowed her turkeys to be purloined without a groan. Such being the case, she did not like being told that it was vicious, and had by no means wished to consult Mr. Crawley on that matter. But nevertheless, she swallowed down her wrath.

“It is at any rate unbecoming in a clergyman,” she said; “and as I know that Mr. Robarts places a high value on your opinion, perhaps you will not object to advise him to discontinue it. He might possibly feel aggrieved were I to interfere personally on such a question.”

“I have no doubt he would,” said Mr. Crawley. “It is not within a woman’s province to give counsel to a clergyman on such a subject, unless she be very near and very dear to him⁠—his wife, or mother, or sister.”

“As living in the same parish, you know, and being, perhaps⁠—” the leading person in it, and the one who naturally rules the others. Those would have been the fitting words for the expression of her ladyship’s ideas; but she remembered herself, and did not use them. She had made up her mind that, great as her influence ought to be, she was not the proper person to speak to Mr. Robarts as to his pernicious, unclerical habits, and she would not now depart from her resolve by attempting to prove that she was the proper person.

“Yes,” said Mr. Crawley, “just so. All that would entitle him to offer you his counsel if he thought that your mode of life was such as to require it, but could by no means justify you in addressing yourself to him.”

This was very hard upon Lady Lufton. She was endeavouring with all her woman’s strength to do her best, and endeavouring so to do it that the feelings of the sinner might be spared; and yet the ghostly comforter whom she had evoked to her aid, treated her as though she were arrogant and overbearing. She acknowledged the weakness of her own position with reference to her parish clergyman by calling in the aid of Mr. Crawley; and under such circumstances, he might, at any rate, have abstained from throwing that weakness in her teeth.

“Well, sir; I hope my mode of life may not require it; but that is not exactly to the point: what I wish to know is, whether you will speak to Mr. Robarts?”

“Certainly I will,” said he.

“Then I shall be much obliged to you. But, Mr. Crawley, pray⁠—pray, remember this: I would not on any account wish that you should be harsh with him. He is an excellent young man, and⁠—”

“Lady Lufton, if I do this, I can only do it in my own way, as best I may, using such words as God may give me at the time. I hope that I am harsh to no man; but it is worse than useless, in all cases, to speak anything but the truth.”

“Of course⁠—of course.”

“If the ears be too delicate to hear the truth, the mind will be too perverse to profit by it.” And then Mr. Crawley got up to