The Graftons: A Novel

by Archibald Marshall

Lying in his bed, as he had lain for months past, or when his strength had rallied sitting wrapped up in a big chair by the window, the old man must sometimes have occupied himself in casting up his accounts preparatory to the great Audit to which he would soon have to submit them.

His life had been kindly and useful. He had never turned a deaf ear to the call of sympathy, nor shirked any of his easy duties, as easy duties are sometimes apt to be shirked when no punishment is to be expected from the shirking except from the disapproval of conscience. Probably he had given more thought to the episodes of his long life as they affected himself and his family than to the affairs of his ministry.

His wife had managed him until she had died, and then his daughters had managed him. In neither case had the managing been done in such a way as to irritate, or to lessen his dignity before the world. Perhaps he had hardly known that he had been managed, for he had had his own way, and had not been aware that it was often the way into which he had been guided. If both wife and daughters had sometimes raised bristles on the backs of neighbours, it had been his part to smooth them down, and he had gained liking by the contrast between himself and them. When his wife had died he would greatly have missed her sure capable hand in the affairs of life if his daughters had not then been of an age to fill her place. He was a man to be dependent upon women, and to draw the best that was in them towards himself.

The guidance exercised by women, however, seldom earns love, even when it escapes domination, and the guidance exercised by the old Rector's daughters did not always escape it, though they made his welfare the chief object in their lives. It was his son whom he loved, and thought most about, during the long hours in which he lay drifting towards the end.

He had come to him late in life. He was now not yet twenty-four. If he had been only a year older the great anxiety which had shadowed the old man's last months would have been lightened.

The living of Surley was in the gift of the Bishop, but it had been held by a Cooper for three generations, covering a period of nearly eighty years. If only it could be handed on to Denis!

He had been ordained in the previous Advent, with a title to his father's curacy. He had done the work of the parish, with the help, or oversight, of his sisters, and taken such of the services as is permitted to a Deacon. The people liked him, and if these matters were arranged by the popular voice he would certainly have been the next Rector of Surley. But he would not be eligible for Priest's Orders for another seven months. It was almost too much to hope that the Bishop would present a Deacon of only a few months' standing to one of the richest livings in his gift.

But the old man could not give up hope. These things had been done before; he had a dozen cases at his fingers' ends. But unfortunately they were all cases dating back many years, to a time when the fitting of rewards to work done, or to be done, in the Church, had not seemed of such importance as now. Fifty years ago nobody would have made any fuss about such an appointment; now-a-days there would certainly be a fuss. But he would not admit that there ought to be; he only tacitly accepted the fact that it was impossible for him to take any steps to bring about what he so ardently desired.

The Bishop had been to see him during his illness. Perhaps he might have put in a word then; he had thought beforehand that he might. But he had not done so. To that extent he accepted the changed conditions. But none the less he deplored them. He felt it to be hard, for one thing, that he would have to die without knowing what should happen after him. His own uncle, whom he had succeeded in the living, had been made contented by a promise on his deathbed. He himself had known that he would be presented to the living a month or more before it had become vacant.