His clerical mind allows him to demonstrate his virtue by tolerating the chapel, though his poor wife may be obliged to endure the sight and sounds of it without being allowed to complain to him. But the perpetrator of the chapel is not to be spared, and the vicar writes a stinging letter to the marquis, in which he explains the use of very strong words:
He showed the letter to his wife.
"Isn't malice a very strong word?" she said.
"I hope so," answered the vicar.
The pace of the gentle life in Victorian England was surely a leisurely one. This pace is reflected in the whole page that is given to the thoughts of the Marquis of Trowbridge when he receives the insulting letter from Mr. Fenwick; and his reflections are further supplemented by the author's reminding us, if it were not already evident, that the Marquis is an old fool:
His lordship's mind was one utterly incapable of sifting evidence—unable even to understand evidence when it came to him. He was not a bad man. He desired nothing that was not his own, and remitted much that was. He feared God, honoured the Queen, and loved his country. He was not self-indulgent. He did his duties as he knew them. But he was an arrogant old fool, who could not keep himself from mischief—who could only be kept from mischief by the aid of some such master as his son.
Trollope can be more pithy, as when he describes the Marquis's reception and reaction to the letter from the vicar: "His intelligence worked slowly, whereas his wrath worked quickly."
The vicar subsequently feels himself cheated of his revenge after the Marquis's son Lord St. George succeeds in "pouring oil on the waters." But others pursue the matter for him, and in the end the chapel is pulled down.
The vicar is actually rather well portrayed and could stand with his clerical brethren of Barsetshire if he were given six novels in which we could follow his career. He shows himself to be a naive clergyman who thinks he can intervene in the problems of a pretty, banished prostitute without incurring any risk to his reputation. He urges the miller Jacob Brattle to accept his daughter, ignoring the father's refusal to speak to him about Carry. He visits Carry's brother George, urging him and his wife to take her in, facing the wife's wrath after George advises him not to raise the issue with her. He visits Carry's brother-in-law Mr. Jay the ironmonger with similar lack of success. He visits Carry at the small town inn where she is staying and pays for her lodging. Just when the reader begins to wonder whether, in the words of the song in The Music Man, "Hester will win just one more A," the vicar's wife Janet finally persuades him to lower his profile in the matter, but he never seems to understand the damage of gossip.
His instincts are shown to be correct in his championing of Sam Brattle, who is accused of murder but subsequently exonerated, and of Carry Brattle, who returns home and finally regains her father's affection. Carry's return is after setting out on foot, exposing herself to the elements in desperation, half expecting to die of exposure as did Lady Dedlock in Dickens's Bleak House, and as Gerald Crich would do in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. Did such a recurrent fictional device reflect an occasional practice of the times?
Trollope is a chatty author. Had he been as reticent as twentieth century practitioners of minimalist fiction, we might not have had spelled out for our curiosity a definition of a gentleman, a recurrent source of fascination for Trollope. Miss Marrable is the author's agent who ponders the matter, concluding that money does not entitle a millionaire to be considered a gentleman. Attorneys don't make the cut by virtue of their profession. A son of a gentleman, however, could maintain his rank by earning his living as a clergyman, a barrister, a soldier, or a sailor. Physicians were not absolutely excluded from the ranks of the gentlemen, but a physician could never participate in the privileges accorded to the Law and the Church. There might be some doubt about the engineering profession, but any man who allowed himself to touch trade or commerce automatically excluded himself. Such men might be ever so respectable, "but brewers, bankers and merchants were not gentlemen, and the world, according to Miss Marrable's theory, was going astray, because people were forgetting their landmarks."
And it goes without mentioning that for Walter Marrable, the option of going to work to make money is never considered. His only recourse is to return to the army.