I shall be glad to have your reply with as little delay as may suit your convenience, and in the event of your accepting the offer—which I sincerely trust you may be enabled to do—I shall hope to have an early opportunity of seeing you, with reference to your institution to the parish.
Allow me also to say to you and to Mrs. Crawley that, if we have been correctly informed as to that other event to which I have alluded, we both hope that we may have an early opportunity of making ourselves personally acquainted with the parents of a young lady who is to be so dear to us. As I have met your daughter, I may perhaps be allowed to send her my kindest love. If, as my daughter-in-law, she comes up to the impression which she gave me at our first meeting, I, at any rate, shall be satisfied.
This letter the archdeacon had shown to his wife, by whom it had not been very warmly approved. Nothing, Mrs. Grantly had said, could be prettier than what the archdeacon had said about Grace. Mrs. Crawley, no doubt, would be satisfied with that. But Mr. Crawley was such a strange man!
“He will be stranger than I take him to be if he does not accept St. Ewolds,” said the archdeacon.
“But in offering it,” said Mrs. Grantly, “you have not said a word of your own high opinion of his merits.”
“I have not a very high opinion of them,” said the archdeacon. “Your father had, and I have said so. And as I have the most profound respect for your father’s opinion in such a matter, I have permitted that to overcome my own hesitation.” This was pretty from the husband to the wife as it regarded her father, who had now gone from them; and, therefore, Mrs. Grantly accepted it without further argument. The reader may probably feel assured that the archdeacon had never, during their joint lives, acted in any church matter upon the advice given to him by Mr. Harding; and it was probably the case also that the living would have been offered to Mr. Crawley, if nothing had been said by Mr. Harding on the subject; but it did not become Mrs. Grantly even to think of all this. The archdeacon, having made his gracious speech about her father, was not again asked to alter his letter.
“I suppose he will accept it,” said Mrs. Grantly.
“I should think that he probably may,” said the archdeacon.
So Grace, knowing what was the purport of the letter, sat with it between her fingers, while her lover sat beside her, full of various plans for the future. This was his first lover’s present to her;—and what a present it was! Comfort, and happiness, and a pleasant home for all her family. “St. Ewolds isn’t the best house in the world,” said the major, “because it is old, and what I call piecemeal; but it is very pretty, and certainly nice.”
“That is just the sort of parsonage that I dream about,” said Jane.
“And the garden is pleasant with old trees,” said the major.
“I always dream about old trees,” said Jane, “only I’m afraid I’m too old myself to be let to climb up them now.” Mrs. Crawley said very little, but sat by with her eyes full of tears. Was it possible that, at last, before the world had closed upon her, she was to enjoy something again of the comforts which she had known in her early years, and to be again surrounded by those decencies of life which of late had been almost banished from her home by poverty!
Their various plans for the future—for the immediate future—were very startling. Grace was to go over at once to Plumstead, whither Edith had been already transferred from Cosby Lodge. That was all very well; there was nothing very startling or impracticable in that. The Framley ladies, having none of those doubts as to what was coming which had for a while perplexed Grace herself, had taken little liberties with her wardrobe, which enabled such a visit to be made without overwhelming difficulties. But the major was equally eager—or at any rate equally imperious—in his requisition for a visit from Mr. and Mrs. Crawley themselves to Plumstead rectory. Mrs. Crawley did not dare to put forward the plain unadorned reasons against it, as Mr. Crawley had done when discussing the subject of a visit to the deanery. Nor could she quite venture to explain that she feared that the archdeacon and her husband would hardly mix well together in society. With whom, indeed, was it possible that her husband should mix well, after his long and hardly-tried seclusion? She could only plead that both her husband and herself were so little used to going out that she feared—she feared—she feared she knew not what.
“We’ll get over all that,” said the major, almost contemptuously. “It is only the first plunge that is disagreeable.” Perhaps the major did not know how very disagreeable a first plunge may be!
At two o’clock Henry Grantly got up to go. “I should very much like to have seen him, but I fear I cannot wait longer. As it is, the patience of my horse has been surprising.” Then Grace walked out with him to the gate, and put her hand upon his bridle as he mounted, and thought how wonderful was the power of Fortune, that the goddess should have sent so gallant a gentleman to be her lord and her lover.
“I declare I don’t quite believe it even yet,” she said, in the letter which she wrote to Lily Dale that night.
It was four before Mr. Crawley returned to his house, and then he was very weary. There were many sick in these days at Hoggle End, and he had gone from cottage to cottage through the
