第84章

Mrs Thorne had spoken very plainly in the advice which she had given to Major Grantly. That had been Mrs Thorne's advice; and though Major Grantly had no idea of making the journey so rapidly as the lady had proposed, still he thought that he would make it before long, and follow the advice in spirit if not to the letter. Mrs Thorne had asked him if it was fair that the girl should be punished because of the father's fault; and the idea had been sweet to him that the infliction or non-infliction of such punishment should be in his hands. 'You go and ask her,' Mrs Thorne had said. Well;--he would go an ask her. If it should turn out at last that he had married the daughter of a thief, and that he was disinherited for doing so--an arrangement of circumstances which had to teach himself to regard as very probable--he would not love Grace the less on that account, or allow himself for one moment to repent what had done. As he thought of all this he became somewhat in love with a small income, and imagined to himself what honours would be done to him by the Mrs Thornes of the county, when they should come to know in what way he had sacrificed himself to his love. Yes;--they would go and live in Pau. He thought Pau would do. He would have enough income for that;--and Edith would get lessons cheaply, and would learn to talk French fluently. He certainly would do it. He would go down to Allington, and ask Grace to be his wife; and bid her to understand that if she loved him she could not be justified in refusing him by the circumstances of her father's position.

But he must go to Plumstead before he could go to Allington. He was engaged to spend Christmas there, and must go now at once. There was not time for the journey to Allington before he was due at Plumstead. And, moreover, though he could not bring himself to resolve that he would tell his father what he was going to do; --'It would seem as though Iwere asking his leave!' he said to himself;--he thought he would make a clean breast of it to his mother. It made him sad to think that he should cut the rope which fastened his own boat among the other boats in the home harbour at Plumstead, and that he should go out all alone into strange waters--turned adrift altogether, as it were, from the Grantly fleet. If he could only get the promise of his mother's sympathy for Grace it would be something. He understood--no one better than he--the tendency of all his family to an uprising in the world, which tendency was almost as strong in his mother as his father. And he had been by no means without a similar ambition himself, though with him the ambition had been only fitful, not enduring. He had a brother, a clergyman, a busy, stirring, eloquent London preacher, who got churches built, and was heard of far and wide as a rising man, who had married a certain Lady Anne, the daughter of an earl, and who was already mentioned as a candidate for high places. How his sister was the wife of a marquis, and a leader in the fashionable world, the reader already knows. The archdeacon himself was a rich man, so powerful that he could afford to look down upon a bishop; and Mrs Grantly, though there was left about her something of an old softness of nature, a touch of the former life which had been hers before the stream of her days had run to gold, yet she, too, had taken kindly to wealth and high standing, and was by no means one of those who construe literally that passage of scripture which tells of the camel and the needle's eye. Our Henry Grantly, our major, knew himself to be his mother's favourite child--knew himself to have become so since something of a coolness had grown up between her and her daughter. The augustness of the daughter had done much to reproduce the old freshness of which I spoke of in the mother's heart, and had specially endeared to her the son, who, of all her children, was the least subject to the family's failing. The clergyman, Charles Grantly--he who had married the Lady Anne--was his father's darling in these days. The old archdeacon would go up to London and be quite happy in his son's house. He met there the men whom he loved to meet, and heard the talk which he loved to hear. It was very fine, having the Marquis of Hartletop for his son-in-law, but he had never cared to be much at Lady Hartletop's house. Indeed, the archdeacon cared to be in no house in which those around him were supposed to be bigger than himself.

Such was the little family fleet from which Henry Grantly was now proposing to sail alone with his little boat--taking Grace Crawley with him at the helm. 'My father is a just man at the bottom,' he said to himself, 'and though he may not forgive me, he will not punish Edith.'

But there was still left one of the family--not a Grantly, indeed, but one so nearly allied to them as to have his boat moored in the same harbour--who, as the major well knew, would thoroughly sympathise with him. This was old Mr Harding, his mother's father--the father of his mother and of his aunt Mrs Arabin--whose home was now at the deanery. He was also to be at Plumstead during this Christmas, and he at any rate would give a ready assent to such a marriage as that which the major was proposing to himself. But then poor old Mr Harding had been thoroughly deficient in that ambition which had served to aggrandize the family into which his daughter had married. He was a poor old man who, in spite of good friends--for the late bishop of the diocese had been his dearest friend--had never risen high in his profession, and had fallen even from the moderate altitude which he had attained. But he was a man whom all loved who knew him; and it was much to the credit of his son-in-law the archdeacon, that, with all his tendencies to love rising suns, he had ever been true to Mr Harding.