“Nor did I expect such a proposition.”
“I shall be glad at any rate to know what answer I am to make to his lordship,” said Mr. Slope.
“I will take an early opportunity of seeing his lordship myself,” said Mr. Harding.
“Such an arrangement,” said Mr. Slope, “will hardly give his lordship satisfaction. Indeed, it is impossible that the bishop should himself see every clergyman in the diocese on every subject of patronage that may arise. The bishop, I believe, did see you on the matter, and I really cannot see why he should be troubled to do so again.”
“Do you know, Mr. Slope, how long I have been officiating as a clergyman in this city?” Mr. Slope’s wish was now nearly fulfilled. Mr. Harding had become angry, and it was probable that he might commit himself.
“I really do not see what that has to do with the question. You cannot think the bishop would be justified in allowing you to regard as a sinecure a situation that requires an active man merely because you have been employed for many years in the cathedral.”
“But it might induce the bishop to see me, if I asked him to do so. I shall consult my friends in this matter, Mr. Slope; but I mean to be guilty of no subterfuge — you may tell the bishop that as I altogether disagree with his views about the hospital, I shall decline the situation if I find that any such conditions are attached to it as those you have suggested;” and so saying, Mr. Harding took his hat and went his way.
Mr. Slope was contented. He considered himself at liberty to accept Mr. Harding’s last speech as an absolute refusal of the appointment. At least, he so represented it to the bishop and to Mrs. Proudie.
“That is very surprising,” said the bishop.
“Not at all,” said Mrs. Proudie; “you little know how determined the whole set of them are to withstand your authority.”
“But Mr. Harding was so anxious for it,” said the bishop.
“Yes,” said Mr. Slope, “if he can hold it without the slightest acknowledgement of your lordship’s jurisdiction.”
“That is out of the question,” said the bishop.
“I should imagine it to be quite so,” said the chaplain.
“Indeed, I should think so,” said the lady.
“I really am sorry for it,” said the bishop.
“I don’t know that there is much cause for sorrow,” said the lady. “Mr. Quiverful is a much more deserving man, more in need of it, and one who will make himself much more useful in the close neighbourhood of the palace.”
“I suppose I had better see Quiverful?” said the chaplain.
“I suppose you had,” said the bishop.
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 injustice of their own sufferings, and which is generally proportioned in its 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 exaltation, at least with satisfaction, had that been all. But the venom of the chaplain’s harangue had worked into his blood and sapped the life of his sweet contentment.
“New men are carrying out new measures and are carting 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 era 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 everything 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 new measures, long credit and few scruples, great success or wonderful ruin, such are now the tastes of Englishmen who know how to live. Alas, alas! Under such 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 resource 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 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 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