He slept well, but when he woke in the morning the dreariness of his loneliness was very strong on him. He must do something, and must see somebody, but he felt that he did not know how to bear himself in his new position. He must send of course for his chaplain, and tell his chaplain to open all letters and to answer them for a week. Then he remembered how many of his letters in days of yore had been opened and been answered by the helpmate who had just gone from him. Since Dr. Tempest’s visit he had insisted that the palace letter-bag should always be brought in the first instance to him;—and this had been done, greatly to the annoyance of his wife. In order that it might be done the bishop had been up every morning an hour before his usual time; and everybody in the household had known why it was so. He thought of this now as the bag was brought to him on the first morning of his freedom. He could have it where he pleased now;—either in his bedroom or left for him untouched on the breakfast-table till he should go to it. “Blessed be the name of the Lord,” he said as he thought of all this; but he did not stop to analyse what he was saying. On this morning he would not enjoy his liberty, but desired that the letter-bag might be taken to Mr. Snapper, the chaplain.
The news of Mrs. Proudie’s death had spread all over Barchester on the evening of its occurrence, and had been received with that feeling of distant awe which is always accompanied by some degree of pleasurable sensation. There was no one in Barchester to lament a mother, or a sister, or a friend who was really loved. There were those, doubtless, who regretted the woman’s death—and even some who regretted it without any feeling of personal damage done to themselves. There had come to be around Mrs. Proudie a party who thought as she thought on church matters, and such people had lost their head, and thereby their strength. And she had been staunch to her own party, preferring bad tea from a low-church grocer, to good tea from a grocer who went to the ritualistic church or to no church at all. And it is due to her to say that she did not forget those who were true to her—looking after them mindfully where looking after might be profitable, and fighting their battles where fighting might be more serviceable. I do not think that the appetite for breakfast of any man or woman in Barchester was disturbed by the news of Mrs. Proudie’s death, but there were some who felt that a trouble had fallen on them.
Tidings of the catastrophe reached Hiram’s Hospital on the evening of its occurrence—Hiram’s Hospital, where dwelt Mr. and Mrs. Quiverful with all their children. Now Mrs. Quiverful owed a debt of gratitude to Mrs. Proudie, having been placed in her present comfortable home by that lady’s patronage. Mrs. Quiverful perhaps understood the character of the deceased woman, and expressed her opinion respecting it, as graphically as did anyone in Barchester. There was the natural surprise felt at the Warden’s lodge in the Hospital when the tidings were first received there, and the Quiverful family was at first too full of dismay, regrets and surmises, to be able to give themselves impartially to criticism. But on the following morning, conversation at the breakfast-table naturally referring to the great loss which the bishop had sustained, Mrs. Quiverful thus pronounced her opinion of her friend’s character: “You’ll find that he’ll feel it, Q.,” she said to her husband, in answer to some sarcastic remark made by him as to the removal of the thorn. “He’ll feel it, though she was almost too many for him while she was alive.”
“I daresay he’ll feel it at first,” said Quiverful; “but I think he’ll be more comfortable than he has been.”
“Of course he’ll feel it, and go on feeling it till he dies, if he’s the man I take him to be. You’re not to think that there has been no love because there used to be some words, that he’ll find himself the happier because he can do things more as he pleases. She was a great help to him, and he must have known that she was, in spite of the sharpness of her tongue. No doubt she was sharp. No doubt she was upsetting. And she could make herself a fool too in her struggles to have everything her own way. But, Q., there were worse women than Mrs. Proudie. She was never one of your idle ones, and I’m quite sure that no man or woman ever heard her say a word against her husband behind his back.”
“All the same, she gave him a terribly bad life of it, if all is true that we hear.”
“There are men who must have what you call a terribly bad life of it, whatever way it goes with them. The bishop is weak, and he wants somebody near to him to be strong. She was strong—perhaps too strong; but he had his advantage out of it. After all I don’t know that his life has been so terribly bad. I daresay he’s had everything very comfortable about him. And a man ought to be grateful for that, though very few men ever are.”
Mr. Quiverful’s predecessor at the Hospital, old Mr. Harding, whose halcyon days in Barchester had been passed before the coming of the Proudies, was in bed playing cat’s-cradle with Posy seated on the counterpane, when the tidings of Mrs. Proudie’s death
