The Last Chronicle of Barset. Anthony Trollope

me it does not signify. Let me pass.”

      “I will not let you pass, Josiah. Be a man and bear it. Ask God for strength, instead of seeking it in an over-indulgence of your own sorrow.”

      “Indulgence!”

      “Yes, love;—indulgence. It is indulgence. You will allow your mind to dwell on nothing for a moment but your own wrongs.”

      “What else have I that I can think of? Is not all the world against me?”

      “Am I against you?”

      “Sometimes I think you are. When you accuse me of self-indulgence you are against me,—me, who for myself have desired nothing but to be allowed to do my duty, and to have bread enough to keep me alive, and clothes enough to make me decent.”

      “Is it not self-indulgence, this giving way to grief? Who would know so well as you how to teach the lesson of endurance to others? Come, love. Lay down your hat. It cannot be fitting that you should go out into the wet and cold of the raw morning.”

      For a moment he hesitated, but as she raised her hand to take his cloak from him he drew back from her, and would not permit it. “I shall find those up whom I want to see,” he said. “I must visit my flock, and I dare not go through the parish by daylight lest they hoot after me as a thief.”

      “Not one in Hogglestock would say a word to insult you.”

      “Would they not? The very children in the school whisper at me. Let me pass, I say. It has not as yet come to that, that I should be stopped in my egress and ingress. They have—bailed me; and while their bail lasts, I may go where I will.”

      “Oh, Josiah, what words to me! Have I ever stopped your liberty? Would I not give my life to secure it?”

      “Let me go, then, now. I tell you that I have business in hand.”

      “But I will go with you? I will be ready in an instant.”

      “You go! Why should you go? Are there not the children for you to mind?”

      “There is only Jane.”

      “Stay with her, then. Why should you go about the parish?” She still held him by the cloak, and looked anxiously up into his face. “Woman,” he said, raising his voice, “what is it that you dread? I command you to tell me what is it you fear?” He had now taken hold of her by the shoulder, slightly thrusting her from him, so that he might see her face by the dim light of the single candle. “Speak, I say. What is that you think that I shall do?”

      “Dearest, I know that you will be better at home, better with me, than you can be on such a morning as this out in the cold damp air.”

      “And is that all?” He looked hard at her, while she returned his gaze with beseeching loving eyes. “Is there nothing behind, that you will not tell me?”

      She paused for a moment before she replied. She had never lied to him. She could not lie to him. “I wish you knew my heart towards you,” she said, “with all and everything in it.”

      “I know your heart well, but I want to know your mind. Why would you persuade me not to go out among my poor?”

      “Because it will be bad for you to be out alone in the dark lanes, in the mud and wet, thinking of your sorrow. You will brood over it till you will lose your senses through the intensity of your grief. You will stand out in the cold air, forgetful of everything around you, till your limbs will be numbed, and your blood chilled,—”

      “And then—?”

      “Oh, Josiah, do not hold me like that, and look at me so angrily.”

      “And even then I will bear my burden till the Lord in His mercy shall see fit to relieve me. Even then I will endure, though a bare bodkin or a leaf of hemlock would put an end to it. Let me pass on; you need fear nothing.”

      She did let him pass without another word, and he went out of the house, shutting the door after him noiselessly, and closing the wicket-gate of the garden. For a while she sat herself down on the nearest chair, and tried to make up her mind how she might best treat him in his present state of mind. As regarded the present morning her heart was at ease. She knew that he would do now nothing of that which she had apprehended. She could trust him not to be false in his word to her, though she could not before have trusted him not to commit so much heavier a sin. If he would really employ himself from morning till night among the poor, he would be better so,—his trouble would be easier of endurance,—than with any other employment which he could adopt. What she most dreaded was that he should sit idle over the fire and do nothing. When he was so seated she could read his mind, as though it was open to her as a book. She had been quite right when she had accused him of over-indulgence in his grief. He did give way to it till it became a luxury to him,—a luxury which she would not have had the heart to deny him, had she not felt it to be of all luxuries the most pernicious. During these long hours, in which he would sit speechless, doing nothing, he was telling himself from minute to minute that of all God’s creatures he was the most heavily afflicted, and was revelling in the sense of the injustice done to him. He was recalling all the facts of his life, his education, which had been costly, and, as regarded knowledge, successful; his vocation to the church, when in his youth he had determined to devote himself to the service of his Saviour, disregarding promotion or the favour of men; the short, sweet days of his early love, in which he had devoted himself again,—thinking nothing of self, but everything of her; his diligent working, in which he had ever done his very utmost for the parish in which he was placed, and always his best for the poorest; the success of other men who had been his compeers, and, as he too often told himself, intellectually his inferiors; then of his children, who had been carried off from his love to the churchyard,—over whose graves he himself had stood, reading out the pathetic words of the funeral service with unswerving voice and a bleeding heart; and then of his children still living, who loved their mother so much better than they loved him. And he would recall all the circumstances of his poverty,—how he had been driven to accept alms, to fly from creditors, to hide himself, to see his chairs and tables seized before the eyes of those over whom he had been set as their spiritual pastor. And in it all, I think, there was nothing so bitter to the man as the derogation from the spiritual grandeur of his position as priest among men, which came as one necessary result from his poverty. St. Paul could go forth without money in his purse or shoes to his feet or two suits to his back, and his poverty never stood in the way of his preaching, or hindered the veneration of the faithful. St. Paul, indeed, was called upon to bear stripes, was flung into prison, encountered terrible dangers. But Mr. Crawley,—so he told himself,—could have encountered all that without flinching. The stripes and scorn of the unfaithful would have been nothing to him, if only the faithful would have believed in him, poor as he was, as they would have believed in him had he been rich! Even they whom he had most loved treated him almost with derision, because he was now different from them. Dean Arabin had laughed at him because he had persisted in walking ten miles through the mud instead of being conveyed in the dean’s carriage; and yet, after that, he had been driven to accept the dean’s charity! No one respected him. No one! His very wife thought that he was a lunatic. And now he had been publicly branded as a thief; and in all likelihood would end his days in a gaol! Such were always his thoughts as he sat idle, silent, moody, over the fire; and his wife well knew their currents. It would certainly be better that he should drive himself to some employment, if any employment could be found possible to him.

      When she had been alone for a few minutes, Mrs. Crawley got up from her chair, and going into the kitchen, lighted the fire there, and put the kettle over it, and began to prepare such breakfast for her husband as the means in the house afforded. Then she called the sleeping servant-girl, who was little more than a child, and went into her own girl’s room, and then she got into bed with her daughter.

      “I have been up with your papa, dear, and I am cold.”

      “Oh, mamma, poor mamma! Why is papa up so early?”

      “He has gone out to visit some of the brickmakers before they go to their