Doctor Thorne by Anthony Trollope (interesting books to read TXT) 📖

CHAPTER I

The Greshams of Greshamsbury

 

Before the reader is introduced to the modest country medical

practitioner who is to be the chief personage of the following

tale, it will be well that he should be made acquainted with some

particulars as to the locality in which, and the neighbours among

whom, our doctor followed his profession.

 

There is a county in the west of England not so full of life, indeed,

nor so widely spoken of as some of its manufacturing leviathan

brethren in the north, but which is, nevertheless, very dear to those

who know it well. Its green pastures, its waving wheat, its deep

and shady and—let us add—dirty lanes, its paths and stiles, its

tawny-coloured, well-built rural churches, its avenues of beeches,

and frequent Tudor mansions, its constant county hunt, its social

graces, and the general air of clanship which pervades it, has made

it to its own inhabitants a favoured land of Goshen. It is purely

agricultural; agricultural in its produce, agricultural in its poor,

and agricultural in its pleasures. There are towns in it, of course;

dépôts from whence are brought seeds and groceries, ribbons and

fire-shovels; in which markets are held and county balls are carried

on; which return members to Parliament, generally—in spite of Reform

Bills, past, present, and coming—in accordance with the dictates

of some neighbouring land magnate: from whence emanate the country

postmen, and where is located the supply of post-horses necessary

for county visitings. But these towns add nothing to the importance

of the county; they consist, with the exception of the assize town,

of dull, all but death-like single streets. Each possesses two

pumps, three hotels, ten shops, fifteen beer-houses, a beadle, and a

market-place.

 

Indeed, the town population of the county reckons for nothing when

the importance of the county is discussed, with the exception, as

before said, of the assize town, which is also a cathedral city.

Herein is a clerical aristocracy, which is certainly not without its

due weight. A resident bishop, a resident dean, an archdeacon, three

or four resident prebendaries, and all their numerous chaplains,

vicars, and ecclesiastical satellites, do make up a society

sufficiently powerful to be counted as something by the county

squirearchy. In other respects the greatness of Barsetshire depends

wholly on the landed powers.

 

Barsetshire, however, is not now so essentially one whole as it was

before the Reform Bill divided it. There is in these days an East

Barsetshire, and there is a West Barsetshire; and people conversant

with Barsetshire doings declare that they can already decipher some

difference of feeling, some division of interests. The eastern moiety

of the county is more purely Conservative than the western; there

is, or was, a taint of Peelism in the latter; and then, too, the

residence of two such great Whig magnates as the Duke of Omnium and

the Earl de Courcy in that locality in some degree overshadows and

renders less influential the gentlemen who live near them.

 

It is to East Barsetshire that we are called. When the division above

spoken of was first contemplated, in those stormy days in which

gallant men were still combatting reform ministers, if not with hope,

still with spirit, the battle was fought by none more bravely than

by John Newbold Gresham of Greshamsbury, the member for Barsetshire.

Fate, however, and the Duke of Wellington were adverse, and in the

following Parliament John Newbold Gresham was only member for East

Barsetshire.

 

Whether or not it was true, as stated at the time, that the aspect of

the men with whom he was called on to associate at St Stephen’s broke

his heart, it is not for us now to inquire. It is certainly true that

he did not live to see the first year of the reformed Parliament

brought to a close. The then Mr Gresham was not an old man at the

time of his death, and his eldest son, Francis Newbold Gresham, was a

very young man; but, notwithstanding his youth, and notwithstanding

other grounds of objection which stood in the way of such preferment,

and which must be explained, he was chosen in his father’s place.

The father’s services had been too recent, too well appreciated, too

thoroughly in unison with the feelings of those around him to allow

of any other choice; and in this way young Frank Gresham found

himself member for East Barsetshire, although the very men who

elected him knew that they had but slender ground for trusting him

with their suffrages.

 

Frank Gresham, though then only twenty-four years of age, was a

married man, and a father. He had already chosen a wife, and by

his choice had given much ground of distrust to the men of East

Barsetshire. He had married no other than Lady Arabella de Courcy,

the sister of the great Whig earl who lived at Courcy Castle in the

west; that earl who not only voted for the Reform Bill, but had been

infamously active in bringing over other young peers so to vote,

and whose name therefore stank in the nostrils of the staunch Tory

squires of the county.

 

Not only had Frank Gresham so wedded, but having thus improperly and

unpatriotically chosen a wife, he had added to his sins by becoming

recklessly intimate with his wife’s relations. It is true that he

still called himself a Tory, belonged to the club of which his father

had been one of the most honoured members, and in the days of the

great battle got his head broken in a row, on the right side; but,

nevertheless, it was felt by the good men, true and blue, of East

Barsetshire, that a constant sojourner at Courcy Castle could not be

regarded as a consistent Tory. When, however, his father died, that

broken head served him in good stead: his sufferings in the cause

were made the most of; these, in unison with his father’s merits,

turned the scale, and it was accordingly decided, at a meeting held

at the George and Dragon, at Barchester, that Frank Gresham should

fill his father’s shoes.

 

But Frank Gresham could not fill his father’s shoes; they were too

big for him. He did become member for East Barsetshire, but he was

such a member—so lukewarm, so indifferent, so prone to associate

with the enemies of the good cause, so little willing to fight the

good fight, that he soon disgusted those who most dearly loved the

memory of the old squire.

 

De Courcy Castle in those days had great allurements for a young man,

and all those allurements were made the most of to win over young

Gresham. His wife, who was a year or two older than himself, was a

fashionable woman, with thorough Whig tastes and aspirations, such

as became the daughter of a great Whig earl; she cared for politics,

or thought that she cared for them, more than her husband did; for

a month or two previous to her engagement she had been attached to

the Court, and had been made to believe that much of the policy of

England’s rulers depended on the political intrigues of England’s

women. She was one who would fain be doing something if she only

knew how, and the first important attempt she made was to turn her

respectable young Tory husband into a second-rate Whig bantling. As

this lady’s character will, it is hoped, show itself in the following

pages, we need not now describe it more closely.

 

It is not a bad thing to be son-in-law to a potent earl, member of

Parliament for a county, and a possessor of a fine old English seat,

and a fine old English fortune. As a very young man, Frank Gresham

found the life to which he was thus introduced agreeable enough. He

consoled himself as best he might for the blue looks with which he

was greeted by his own party, and took his revenge by consorting more

thoroughly than ever with his political adversaries. Foolishly, like

a foolish moth, he flew to the bright light, and, like the moths,

of course he burnt his wings. Early in 1833 he had become a member

of Parliament, and in the autumn of 1834 the dissolution came.

Young members of three or four-and-twenty do not think much of

dissolutions, forget the fancies of their constituents, and are too

proud of the present to calculate much as to the future. So it was

with Mr Gresham. His father had been member for Barsetshire all his

life, and he looked forward to similar prosperity as though it were

part of his inheritance; but he failed to take any of the steps which

had secured his father’s seat.

 

In the autumn of 1834 the dissolution came, and Frank Gresham, with

his honourable lady wife and all the de Courcys at his back, found

that he had mortally offended the county. To his great disgust

another candidate was brought forward as a fellow to his late

colleague, and though he manfully fought the battle, and spent ten

thousand pounds in the contest, he could not recover his position. A

high Tory, with a great Whig interest to back him, is never a