and plainly, and yet you expect me, a woman, to speak openly to you. Why did you speak calumny of me to Dr. Grantly behind my back?”
“Calumny!” said he, and his whole face became suffused with blood. “What calumny? If I have spoken calumny of you, I will beg your pardon, and his to whom I spoke it, and God’s pardon also. But what calumny have I spoken of you to Dr. Grantly?”
She also blushed deeply. She could not bring herself to ask him whether he had not spoken of her as another man’s wife. “You know that best yourself,” said she. “But I ask you as a man of honour, if you have not spoken of me as you would not have spoken of your own sister—or rather I will not ask you,” she continued, finding that he did not immediately answer her. “I will not put you to the necessity of answering such a question. Dr. Grantly has told me what you said.”
“Dr. Grantly certainly asked me for my advice, and I gave it. He asked me—”
“I know he did, Mr. Arabin. He asked you whether he would be doing right to receive me at Plumstead if I continued my acquaintance with a gentleman who happens to be personally disagreeable to yourself and to him.”
“You are mistaken, Mrs. Bold. I have no personal knowledge of Mr. Slope; I never met him in my life.”
“You are not the less individually hostile to him. It is not for me to question the propriety of your enmity, but I had a right to expect that my name should not have been mixed up in your hostilities. This has been done, and been done by you in a manner the most injurious and the most distressing to me as a woman. I must confess, Mr. Arabin, that from you I expected a different sort of usage.”
As she spoke she with difficulty restrained her tears—but she did restrain them. Had she given way and sobbed aloud, as in such cases a woman should do, he would have melted at once, implored her pardon, perhaps knelt at her feet and declared his love. Everything would have been explained, and Eleanor would have gone back to Barchester with a contented mind. How easily would she have forgiven and forgotten the archdeacon’s suspicions had she but heard the whole truth from Mr. Arabin. But then where would have been my novel? She did not cry, and Mr. Arabin did not melt.
“You do me an injustice,” said he. “My advice was asked by Dr. Grantly, and I was obliged to give it.”
“Dr. Grantly has been most officious, most impertinent. I have as complete a right to form my acquaintance as he has to form his. What would you have said had I consulted you as to the propriety of my banishing Dr. Grantly from my house because he knows Lord Tattenham Corner? I am sure Lord Tattenham is quite as objectionable an acquaintance for a clergyman as Mr. Slope is for a clergyman’s daughter.”
“I do not know Lord Tattenham Corner.”
“No, but Dr. Grantly does. It is nothing to me if he knows all the young lords on every racecourse in England. I shall not interfere with him, nor shall he with me.”
“I am sorry to differ with you, Mrs. Bold, but as you have spoken to me on this matter, and especially as you blame me for what little I said on the subject, I must tell you that I do differ from you. Dr. Grantly’s position as a man in the world gives him a right to choose his own acquaintances, subject to certain influences. If he chooses them badly, those influences will be used. If he consorts with persons unsuitable to him, his bishop will interfere. What the bishop is to Dr. Grantly, Dr. Grantly is to you.”
“I deny it. I utterly deny it,” said Eleanor, jumping from her seat and literally flashing before Mr. Arabin, as she stood on the drawing-room floor. He had never seen her so excited, he had never seen her look half so beautiful.
“I utterly deny it,” said she. “Dr. Grantly has no sort of jurisdiction over me whatsoever. Do you and he forget that I am not altogether alone in the world? Do you forget that I have a father? Dr. Grantly, I believe, always has forgotten it.
“From you, Mr. Arabin,” she continued, “I would have listened to advice because I should have expected it to have been given as one friend may advise another—not as a schoolmaster gives an order to a pupil. I might have differed from you—on this matter I should have done so—but had you spoken to me in your usual manner and with your usual freedom, I should not have been angry. But now—was it manly of you, Mr. Arabin, to speak of me in this way—so disrespectful—so—? I cannot bring myself to repeat what you said. You must understand what I feel. Was it just of you to speak of me in such a way and to advise my sister’s husband to turn me out of my sister’s house because I chose to know a man of whose doctrine you disapprove?”
“I have no alternative left to me, Mrs. Bold,” said he, standing with his back to the fireplace, looking down intently at the carpet pattern, and speaking with a slow, measured voice, “but to tell you plainly what did take place between me and Dr. Grantly.”
“Well,” said she, finding that he paused for a moment.
“I am afraid that what I may say may pain you.”
“It cannot well do so more than what you have already done,” said she.
“Dr. Grantly asked me whether I thought it would be prudent for him to receive you in his house as the wife of Mr. Slope, and I told him that I thought it would be imprudent. Believing it to be utterly impossible that Mr. Slope and—”
“Thank you, Mr. Arabin, that is sufficient. I do not want to know your reasons,” said she, speaking with a terribly calm voice. “I have shown to this gentleman the commonplace civility of a neighbour; and because I have done so, because I have not indulged against him in all the rancour and hatred which you and Dr. Grantly consider due to all clergymen who do not agree with yourselves, you conclude that I am to marry him; or rather you do not conclude so—no rational man could really come to such an outrageous conclusion without better ground; you have not thought so, but, as I am in a position in which such an accusation must be peculiarly painful, it is made in order that I may be terrified into hostility against this enemy of yours.”
As she finished speaking, she walked to the drawing-room window and stepped out into the garden. Mr. Arabin was left in the room, still occupied in counting the pattern on the carpet. He had, however, distinctly heard and accurately marked every word that she had spoken. Was it not clear from what she had said that the archdeacon had been wrong in imputing to her any attachment to Mr. Slope? Was it not clear that Eleanor was still free to make another choice? It may seem strange that he should for a moment have had a doubt, and yet he did doubt. She had not absolutely denied the charge; she had not expressly said that it was untrue. Mr. Arabin understood little of the nature of a woman’s feelings, or he would have known how improbable it was that she should make any clearer declaration than she had done. Few men do understand the nature of a woman’s heart, till years have robbed such understanding of its value. And it is well that it should be so, or men would triumph too easily.
Mr. Arabin stood counting the carpet, unhappy, wretchedly unhappy, at the hard words that had been spoken to him, and yet happy, exquisitely happy, as he thought that after all the woman whom he so regarded was not to become the wife of the man whom he so much disliked. As he stood there he began to be aware that he was himself in love. Forty years had passed over his head, and as yet woman’s beauty had never given him an uneasy hour. His present hour was very uneasy.
Not that he remained there for half or a quarter of that time. In spite of what Eleanor had said, Mr. Arabin was, in truth, a manly man. Having ascertained that he loved this woman, and having now reason to believe that she was free to receive his love, at least if she pleased to do so, he followed her into the garden to make such wooing as he could.
He
