Framley Parsonage Anthony Trollope (best english novels for beginners .TXT) 📖

in London with Sowerby and Harold Smith, petitioning for Church preferment to a man who should have been altogether powerless in such a matter, buying horses, and arranging about past due bills? He did not reconcile it to his conscience. Mr. Crawley had been right when he told him that he was a castaway.

Lord Lufton, whose anger during the whole interview had been extreme, and who had become more angry the more he talked, had now walked once or twice up and down the room; and as he so walked the idea did occur to him that he had been unjust. He had come there with the intention of exclaiming against Sowerby, and of inducing Robarts to convey to that gentleman, that if he, Lord Lufton, were made to undergo any further annoyance about this bill, the whole affair should be thrown into the lawyer’s hands; but instead of doing this, he had brought an accusation against Robarts. That Robarts had latterly become Sowerby’s friend rather than his own in all these horrid money dealings, had galled him; and now he had expressed himself in terms much stronger than he had intended to use.

“As to you personally, Mark,” he said, coming back to the spot on which Robarts was standing, “I do not wish to say anything that shall annoy you.”

“You have said quite enough, Lord Lufton.”

“You cannot be surprised that I should be angry and indignant at the treatment I have received.”

“You might, I think, have separated in your mind those who have wronged you, if there has been such wrong, from those who have only endeavoured to do your will and pleasure for you. That I, as a clergyman, have been very wrong in taking any part whatsoever in these matters, I am well aware. That as a man I have been outrageously foolish in lending my name to Mr. Sowerby, I also know well enough: it is perhaps as well that I should be told of this somewhat rudely; but I certainly did not expect the lesson to come from you.”

“Well, there has been mischief enough. The question is, what we had better now both do?”

“You have said what you mean to do. You will put the affair into the hands of your lawyer.”

“Not with any object of exposing you.”

“Exposing me, Lord Lufton! Why, one would think that I had had the handling of your money.”

“You will misunderstand me. I think no such thing. But do you not know yourself that if legal steps be taken in this wretched affair, your arrangements with Sowerby will be brought to light?”

“My arrangements with Sowerby will consist in paying or having to pay, on his account, a large sum of money, for which I have never had and shall never have any consideration whatever.”

“And what will be said about this stall at Barchester?”

“After the charge which you brought against me just now, I shall decline to accept it.”

At this moment three or four other gentlemen entered the room, and the conversation between our two friends was stopped. They still remained standing near the fire, but for a few minutes neither of them said anything. Robarts was waiting till Lord Lufton should go away, and Lord Lufton had not yet said that which he had come to say. At last he spoke again, almost in a whisper: “I think it will be best to ask Sowerby to come to my rooms tomorrow, and I think also that you should meet him there.”

“I do not see any necessity for my presence,” said Robarts. “It seems probable that I shall suffer enough for meddling with your affairs, and I will do so no more.”

“Of course I cannot make you come; but I think it will be only just to Sowerby, and it will be a favour to me.”

Robarts again walked up and down the room for half-a-dozen times, trying to resolve what it would most become him to do in the present emergency. If his name were dragged before the courts⁠—if he should be shown up in the public papers as having been engaged in accommodation bills, that would certainly be ruinous to him. He had already learned from Lord Lufton’s innuendoes what he might expect to hear as the public version of his share in these transactions! And then his wife⁠—how would she bear such exposure?

“I will meet Mr. Sowerby at your rooms tomorrow, on one condition,” he at last said.

“And what is that?”

“That I receive your positive assurance that I am not suspected by you of having had any pecuniary interest whatever in any money matters with Mr. Sowerby, either as concerns your affairs or those of anybody else.”

“I have never suspected you of any such thing. But I have thought that you were compromised with him.”

“And so I am⁠—I am liable for these bills. But you ought to have known, and do know, that I have never received a shilling on account of such liability. I have endeavoured to oblige a man whom I regarded first as your friend, and then as my own; and this has been the result.”

Lord Lufton did at last give him the assurance that he desired, as they sat with their heads together over one of the coffee-room tables; and then Robarts promised that he would postpone his return to Framley till the Saturday, so that he might meet Sowerby at Lord Lufton’s chambers in the Albany on the following afternoon. As soon as this was arranged, Lord Lufton took his leave and went his way.

After that poor Mark had a very uneasy night of it. It was clear enough that Lord Lufton had thought, if he did not still think, that the stall at Barchester was to be given as pecuniary recompense in return for certain money accommodation to be afforded by the nominee to the dispenser of this patronage. Nothing on earth could be worse than this. In the first place it would be simony; and then it would be simony beyond all description mean and simoniacal.