The Last Chronicle of Barset | Page 4

in
spite of the unfortunate peculiarity of his disposition. This was the man
who was now accused of stealing a cheque for twenty pounds.

But before the circumstances of the alleged theft are stated, a word or
two must be said as to Mr Crawley's family. It is declared that a good
wife is a crown to her husband, but Mrs Crawley has been much more
than a crown to him. As had regarded all the inner life of the man--all
that portion of his life which had not been passed in the pulpit or in
pastoral teaching--she had been crown, throne, and sceptre all in one.
That she had endured with him and on his behalf the miseries of
poverty, and the troubles of a life which had known no smiles, is
perhaps not to be alleged as much to her honour. She had joined herself
to him for better or worse, and it was her manifest duty to bear such
things; wives always have to bear them, knowing when they marry that
they must take their chance. Mr Crawley might have been a bishop, and
Mrs Crawley, when she married him, perhaps thought it probable that
such would be his fortune. Instead of that he was now, just as he was
approaching his fiftieth year, a perpetual curate, with an income of one
hundred and thirty pounds per annum--and a family. That had been Mrs
Crawley's luck in life, and of course she bore it. But she had also done
much more than this. She had striven hard to be contented, or, rather, to
appear to be contented, when he had been most wretched and most
moody. She had struggled to conceal from him her own conviction to
his half-insanity, treating him at the same time with the respect due to
an honoured father of a family, and with the careful measured
indulgence fit for a sick and wayward child. In all the terrible troubles
of their life her courage had been higher than his. The metal of which
she was made had been tempered to a steel which was very rare and
fine, but the rareness and fineness of which he had failed to appreciate.
He had often told her that she was without pride, because she was
stooped to receive from others on his behalf and on behalf of their
children, things which were needful, but which she could not buy. He
had told her that she was a beggar, and that it was better to starve than
to beg. She had borne the rebuke without a word in reply, and had then
begged again for him, and had endured the starvation herself. Nothing
in their poverty had, for years past, been a shame to her; but every
accident of their poverty was still, and ever had been, a living disgrace
to him.
They had had many children, and three were still alive. Of the eldest,

Grace Crawley, we shall hear much in the coming story. She was at this
time nineteen years old, and there were those who said, that in spite of
her poverty, her shabby outward apparel, and a certain thin, unfledged,
unrounded form of person, a want of fulness in the lines of her figure,
she was the prettiest girl in that part of the world. She was living now at
a school in Silverbridge, where for the last year she had been a teacher;
and there were many in Silverbridge who declared that very bright
prospects were opening to her--that young Major Grantly of Crosby
Lodge, who, though a widower with a young child, was the cynosure of
all female eyes in and around Silverbridge, had found beauty in her thin
face, and that Grace Crawley's fortune was made in the teeth, as it were,
of the prevailing ill-fortune of the family. Bob Crawley, who was two
years younger, was now at Malbro' School, from whence it was
intended that he should proceed to Cambridge, and be educated there at
the expense of his godfather Dean Arabin. In this also the world saw a
stroke of good luck. But then nothing was lucky to Mr Crawley. Bob,
indeed, who had done well at school, might do well at
Cambridge--might achieve great things there. But Mr Crawley would
almost have preferred that the boy should work in the fields, than that
he should be educated in a manner so manifestly eleemosynary. And
then his clothes! How was he to be provided with clothes fit either for
school or for college? But the dean and Mrs Crawley between them
managed this, leaving Mr Crawley very much in the dark, as Mrs
Crawley was in the habit of leaving him. Then there was a younger
daughter, Jane, still at home, who passed her life between her