The Last Chronicle of Barset (131 page)

‘I'm not so sure of that,' said Conway, who had heard something of Mr Peter Bangles. ‘There are men who have strong wills of their own, and strong hands of their own.'

‘Poor Madalina!' said Johnny. ‘If he does beat her, I hope he will
do it tenderly. It may be that a little of it will suit her fevered temperament.'

Before the summer was over Conway Dalrymple had been married to Clara Van Siever, and by a singular arrangement of circumstances had married her with the full approval of old Mrs Van. Mr Musselboro – whose name I hope has not been altogether forgotten, though the part played by him has been subordinate – had opposed Dalrymple in the efforts made by the artist to get something out of Broughton's estate for the benefit of the widow. From circumstances of which Dalrymple learned the particulars with the aid of an attorney, it seemed to him that certain facts were wilfully kept in the dark by Musselboro, and he went with his complaint to Mrs Van Siever, declaring that he would bring the whole affair into court, unless all the workings of the firm were made clear to him. Mrs Van was very insolent to him – and even turned him out of the house. But, nevertheless, she did not allow Mr Musselboro to escape. Whoever was to be left in the dark she did not wish to be there herself – and it began to dawn upon her that her dear Mr Musselboro was deceiving her. Then she sent for Dalrymple, and without a word of apology for her former conduct, put him upon the right track. As he was pushing his inquiries and working heaven and earth for the unfortunate widow – as to whom he swore daily that when this matter was settled he would never see her again, so terrible was she to him with her mock affection and pretended hysterics, and false moralities – he was told one day that she had gone off with Mr Musselboro! Mr Musselboro, finding that this was the surest plan of obtaining for himself the little business in Hook Court, married the widow of his late partner, and is at this moment probably carrying on a law-suit with Mrs Van. For the law-suit Conway Dalrymple cared nothing. When the quarrel had become hot between Mrs Van and her late myrmidon, Clara fell into Conway's hands without opposition; and, let the law-suit go as it may, there will be enough left of Mrs Van's money to make the house of Mr and Mrs Conway Dalrymple very comfortable. The picture of Jael and Sisera was stitched up without any difficulty, and I daresay most of my readers will remember it hanging on the walls of the exhibition.

Before I take my leave of the diocese of Barchester for ever, which I purpose to do in the succeeding paragraph, I desire to be allowed to say one word of apology for myself, in answer to those who have accused me – always without bitterness, and generally with tenderness – of having forgotten, in writing of clergymen, the first and most prominent characteristic of the ordinary English clergyman's life. I have described many clergymen, they say, but have spoken of them all as though their professional duties, their high calling, their daily workings for the good of those around them, were matters of no moment, either to me, or in my opinion, to themselves. I would plead, in answer to this, that my object has been to paint the social and not the professional lives of clergymen; and that I have been led to do so firstly, by a feeling that as no men affect more strongly, by their own character, the society of those around than do country clergymen, so, therefore, their social habits have been worth the labour necessary for painting them; and secondly, by a feeling that though I, as a novelist, may feel myself entitled to write of clergymen out of their pulpits, as I may also write of lawyers and doctors, I have no such liberty to write of them in their pulpits. When I have done so, if I have done so, I have so far transgressed. There are those who have told me that I have made all my clergymen bad, and none good. I must venture to hint to such judges that they have taught their eyes to love a colouring higher than nature justifies. We are, most of us, apt to love Raphael's madonnas better than Rembrandt's matrons. But, though we do so, we know that Rembrandt's matrons existed; but we have a strong belief that no such woman as Raphael painted ever did exist. In that he painted, as he may be surmised to have done, for pious purposes – at least for Church purposes – Raphael was justified; but had he painted so for family portraiture he would have been false. Had I written an epic about clergymen, I would have taken St Paul for my model; but describing, as I have endeavoured to do, such clergymen as I see around me, I could not venture to be transcendental. For myself I can only say that I shall always be happy to sit, when allowed to do so, at the table of Archdeacon Grantly, to walk through the High Street of Barchester arm in arm with Mr Robarts of Framley, and to stand alone and shed
a tear beneath the modest black stone in the north transept of the cathedral on which is inscribed the name of Septimus Harding.

And now, if the reader will allow me to seize him affectionately by the arm, we will together take our last farewell of Barset and of the towers of Barchester. I may not venture to say to him that, in this country, he and I together have wandered often through the country lanes, and have ridden together over the too well-wooded fields, or have stood together in the cathedral nave listening to the peals of the organ, or have together sat at good men's tables, or have confronted together the angry pride of men who were not good. I may not boast that any beside myself have so realised the place, and the people, and the facts, as to make such reminiscences possible as those which I should attempt to evoke by an appeal to perfect fellowship. But to me Barset has been a real county, and its city a real city, and the spires and towers have been before my eyes, and the voices of the people are known to my ears, and the pavement of the city ways are familiar to my footsteps. To them all I now say farewell. That I have been induced to wander among them too long by my love of old friendships, and by the sweetness of old faces, is a fault for which I may perhaps be more readily forgiven, when I repeat, with some solemnity of assurance, the promise made in my title, that this shall be
The Last Chronicle of Barset
.

Biblical references are to the Authorized/King James Version; Shakespeare references are to the Arden editions. Trollope's
An Autobiography
(Penguin, 1996, ed. David Skilton), published posthumously in 1883, is an important source of information, and three previous annotated editions of
The Last Chronicle of Barset
have proven useful: Peter Fairclough (Penguin, 1967), Stephen Gill (Oxford World's Classics, 1980) and David Skilton (Everyman, 1993). Owen Chadwick's
The Victorian Church
, vol. I (Oxford, 1966) and Laurence Lerner's Appendix to
The Last Chronicle of Barset
(Penguin, 1967) have been invaluable in clarifying some of the novel's ecclesiastical complexities.

1.
perpetual curate
: Curate usually means a parson's deputy, employed on a temporary basis by the parson and answerable in the first instance to him. But a perpetual curate is a different position, with a long and complex history going back to the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. Before the dissolution a monastery would sometimes appoint a vicar as its deputy in a parish; the vicar was entitled to the small tithes of the parish while the monastery kept the large tithes (see note
4
below). In cases where Henry VIII granted the monastic lands and the large tithes to a favoured layman, or impropriator, he would commonly also inherit the power to appoint a vicar. When the vicar's position is ‘for perpetuity' and not conditional upon the whim of the impropriator he is a perpetual vicar. Similarly, a perpetual curate is a permanent position, but poorer and more humble, as he can collect no tithes at all but is dependent upon a ‘rentcharge' (see note
4
below) paid by the impropriator. Mr Crawley knows that as an appointed clergyman, rather than a parson's curate, he cannot be removed from his position without the bishop taking the proper legal procedures through the ecclesiastical courts.

2.
a crown to her husband
: Proverbs 12:4: ‘A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones.'

3.
Cambridge
: Dean Arabin and Mr Crawley had been students together at Oxford. Arabin's decision to support Bob Crawley's education at Cambridge may be because Oxford was associated with the religious temptations of the Oxford Movement, or even Roman Catholicism, to which Arabin had been very susceptible in his youth, while Cambridge was associated with Low-Church traditions. The Oxford Movement, or Tractarianism, led by Newman, Pusey and Keble, advocated a return to the principles of early Christianity and encouraged a revival of the High-Church ideals of the seventeenth century. (These views were propounded in a series of ‘Tracts for the Times' (1833–41), hence Tractarianism.) At Oxford, Dean Arabin had been a student of Newman, who famously converted to Roman Catholicism in 1845. It was a young Mr Crawley who persuaded his friend Arabin not to convert to the Roman Church (see
Barchester Towers
, Chapter
20
).

4.
rentcharge
…
large tithes
: The rentcharge was a periodical payment charged upon rent; in other words, a sum that Lufton as impropriator (see note
1
above) is required by deed to pay to the incumbent, in this case, Mr Crawley. Tithes, the tenth of annual produce given by the parish to support its church, were divided into large (derived from corn, hay and wood, or whatever made up the main crops of the parish) and small (from the lesser produce of the parish). Lord Lufton receives the income of the large tithes of Crawley's parish. Trollope does not specify who receives the income of the small tithes, but it is not Mr Crawley. (Tithes were commuted in 1836 in England and Wales into a more manageable form of payment.)

5.
the waters were meeting over his head
: Lamentations 3:54: ‘Waters flowed over mine head; then I said, I am cut off.'

1.
dog-cart
: Popular type of light cart, originally with a box under the seat for sportsmen's dogs.

2.
All unaccoutred as he was
:
Julius Caesar
I.ii.103–5: ‘Upon the word/Accoutred as I was, I plunged in/And bade him follow.'

1.
does her duty in her sphere of life
: From the Catechism in
The Book of Common Prayer
: ‘to do my duty in that state of life, unto which it shall please God to call me'. The phrase is echoed in Chapter
7
.

1.
phaeton
: Light, four-wheeled, open carriage drawn by two horses.

2.
the very noble ballad of Lord Bateman
: This traditional ballad, also known as ‘Young Beichan', tells the story (in some versions) of a young lord rescued from a Turkish prison by an Arabic maiden, who marries him when she finds him after seven years, on the day of his wedding to another. An idea of the jaunty rhythm and rhyme which Crawley translates into classical Greek is given by the last two stanzas:

‘O it's true I made a bride of your daughter,
  But she's neither the better nor the worse for me;
She came to me with a horse and saddle,
  But she may go home in a coach and three.'

Lord Bateman then prepared another marriage,
  With both their hearts so full of glee,
Saying, ‘I'll roam no more to foreign countries,
  Now that Sophia has crossed the sea.'

1.
which had wellnigh been fatal to her
: This incident occurred in the fourth novel of the Barsetshire series,
Framley Parsonage
(1861), when the young Lady Lufton was still Lucy Robarts.

2.
a certain interview
: See Chapter
15
of
Framley Parsonage
. Mr Crawley's admonishment of Mark Robarts is mentioned again later, in Chapter
21
.

1.
bring herself to acknowledge more
: The story of Lily Dale and John Eames is begun in
The Small House at Allington
(1864), the fifth book in the series.

1.
Was St Paul not bound in prison
: See Acts 21, 24 and 28.

2.
that my lines should be cast in such terrible places
: Psalms 16:6: ‘The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.' This use of ‘lines', meaning ‘the marking out of land for a dwelling place' (
The Oxford English Dictionary
) is literally appropriate to the poor and unattractive area where Crawley's parish lies, as well as to his (and the biblical) metaphorical usage. Trollope often adapts this verse; it appears again in Chapter
49
.

3.
the profession
: The first modern police force was set up in London in 1829 by the Home Secretary, Robert Peel. By 1856 towns and counties were legally required to establish similar forces.

4.
assizes
: Periodical sittings of judges in each county of England and Wales (replaced by Crown Courts in 1971–2). Judges and barristers ‘on the circuit' travelled through a given area to hold the assizes there. See, for example, Thomas Hardy's short story ‘On the Western Circuit' (1894).

1.
petty sessions
: Court in which magistrates try minor cases and refer others to a higher court, in this case to the Barchester Assizes.