THE WARDEN
CHAPTER XXI
Conclusion
Our tale is now done, and it only remains to us to collect the
scattered threads of our little story, and to tie them into a
seemly knot. This will not be a work of labour, either to the
author or to his readers; we have not to deal with many personages,
or with stirring events, and were it not for the custom of the
thing, we might leave it to the imagination of all concerned to
conceive how affairs at Barchester arranged themselves.
On the morning after the day last alluded to, Mr Harding, at an
early hour, walked out of the hospital, with his daughter under his
arm, and sat down quietly to breakfast at his lodgings over the
chemist’s shop. There was no parade about his departure; no
one, not even Bunce, was there to witness it; had he walked to the
apothecary’s thus early to get a piece of court plaster, or a
box of lozenges, he could not have done it with less appearance of
an important movement. There was a tear in Eleanor’s eye as
she passed through the big gateway and over the bridge; but Mr
Harding walked with an elastic step, and entered his new abode with
a pleasant face.
‘Now, my dear,’ said he, ‘you have everything
ready, and you can make tea here just as nicely as in the parlour
at the hospital.’ So Eleanor took off her bonnet and made the
tea. After this manner did the late Warden of Barchester Hospital
accomplish his flitting, and change his residence.
It was not long before the archdeacon brought his father to
discuss the subject of a new warden. Of course he looked upon the
nomination as his own, and he had in his eye three or four fitting
candidates, seeing that Mr Cummins’s plan as to the living of
Puddingdale could not be brought to bear. How can I describe the
astonishment which confounded him, when his father declared that he
would appoint no successor to Mr Harding? ‘If we can get the
matter set to rights, Mr Harding will return,’ said the
bishop; ‘and if we cannot, it will be wrong to put any other
gentleman into so cruel a position.’
It was in vain that the archdeacon argued and lectured, and even
threatened; in vain he my-lorded his poor father in his sternest
manner; in vain his ‘good heavens!’ were ejaculated in
a tone that might have moved a whole synod, let alone one weak and
aged bishop. Nothing could induce his father to fill up the vacancy
caused by Mr Harding’s retirement.
Even John Bold would have pitied the feelings with which the
archdeacon returned to Plumstead: the church was falling, nay,
already in ruins; its dignitaries were yielding without a struggle
before the blows of its antagonists; and one of its most respected
bishops, his own father—the man considered by all the world
as being in such matters under his, Dr Grantly’s,
control—had positively resolved to capitulate, and own
himself vanquished!
And how fared the hospital under this resolve of its visitor?
Badly indeed. It is now some years since Mr Harding left it, and
the warden’s house is still tenantless. Old Bell has died,
and Billy Gazy; the one-eyed Spriggs has drunk himself to death,
and three others of the twelve have been gathered into the
churchyard mould. Six have gone, and the six vacancies remain
unfilled! Yes, six have died, with no kind friend to solace their
last moments, with no wealthy neighbour to administer comforts and
ease the stings of death. Mr Harding, indeed, did not desert them;
from him they had such consolation as a dying man may receive from
his Christian pastor; but it was the occasional kindness of a
stranger which ministered to them, and not the constant presence of
a master, a neighbour, and a friend.
Nor were those who remained better off than those who died.
Dissensions rose among them, and contests for pre- eminence; and
then they began to understand that soon one among them would be the
last—some one wretched being would be alone there in that now
comfortless hospital—the miserable relic of what had once
been so good and so comfortable.
The building of the hospital itself has not been allowed to go
to ruins. Mr Chadwick, who still holds his stewardship, and pays
the accruing rents into an account opened at a bank for the
purpose, sees to that; but the whole place has become disordered
and ugly. The warden’s garden is a wretched wilderness, the
drive and paths are covered with weeds, the flower-beds are bare,
and the unshorn lawn is now a mass of long damp grass and
unwholesome moss. The beauty of the place is gone; its attractions
have withered. Alas! a very few years since it was the prettiest
spot in Barchester, and now it is a disgrace to the city. Mr
Harding did not go out to Crabtree Parva. An arrangement was made
which respected the homestead of Mr Smith and his happy family, and
put Mr Harding into possession of a small living within the walls
of the city. It is the smallest possible parish, containing a part
of the Cathedral Close and a few old houses adjoining. The church
is a singular little Gothic building, perched over a gateway,
through which the Close is entered, and is approached by a flight
of stone steps which leads down under the archway of the gate. It
is no bigger than an ordinary room—perhaps twenty-seven feet
long by eighteen wide—but still it is a perfect church. It
contains an old carved pulpit and reading-desk, a tiny altar under
a window filled with dark old-coloured glass, a font, some
half-dozen pews, and perhaps a dozen seats for the poor; and also a
vestry. The roof is high pitched, and of black old oak, and the
three large beams which support it run down to the side walls, and
terminate in grotesquely carved faces—two devils and an angel
on one side, two angels and a devil on the other. Such is the
church of St Cuthbert at Barchester, of which Mr Harding became
rector, with a clear income of seventy-five pounds a year.
Here he performs afternoon service every Sunday, and administers
the Sacrament once in every three months. His audience is not
large; and, had they been so, he could not have accommodated them:
but enough come to fill his six pews, and on the front seat of
those devoted to the poor is always to be seen our old friend Mr
Bunce, decently arrayed in his bedesman’s gown.
Mr Harding is still precentor of Barchester; and it is very
rarely the case that those who attend the Sunday morning service
miss the gratification of hearing him chant the Litany, as no other
man in England can do it. He is neither a discontented nor an
unhappy man; he still inhabits the lodgings to which he went on
leaving the hospital, but he now has them to himself. Three months
after that time Eleanor became Mrs Bold, and of course removed to
her husband’s house.
There were some difficulties to be got over on the occasion of
the marriage. The archdeacon, who could not so soon overcome his
grief, would not be persuaded to grace the ceremony with his
presence, but he allowed his wife and children to be there. The
marriage took place in the cathedral, and the bishop himself
officiated. It was the last occasion on which he ever did so; and,
though he still lives, it is not probable that he will ever do so
again.
Not long after the marriage, perhaps six months, when
Eleanor’s bridal-honours were fading, and persons were
beginning to call her Mrs Bold without twittering, the archdeacon
consented to meet John Bold at a dinner-party, and since that time
they have become almost friends. The archdeacon firmly believes
that his brother-in-law was, as a bachelor, an infidel, an
unbeliever in the great truths of our religion; but that matrimony
has opened his eyes, as it has those of others. And Bold is equally
inclined to think that time has softened the asperities of the
archdeacon’s character. Friends though they are, they do not
often revert to the feud of the hospital.
Mr Harding, we say, is not an unhappy man: he keeps his
lodgings, but they are of little use to him, except as being the
one spot on earth which he calls his own. His time is spent chiefly
at his daughter’s or at the palace; he is never left alone,
even should he wish to be so; and within a twelvemonth of
Eleanor’s marriage his determination to live at his own
lodging had been so far broken through and abandoned, that he
consented to have his violoncello permanently removed to his
daughter’s house.
Every other day a message is brought to him from the bishop.
‘The bishop’s compliments, and his lordship is not very
well to-day, and he hopes Mr Harding will dine with him.’
This bulletin as to the old man’s health is a myth; for
though he is over eighty he is never ill, and will probably die
some day, as a spark goes out, gradually and without a struggle. Mr
Harding does dine with him very often, which means going to the
palace at three and remaining till ten; and whenever he does not
the bishop whines, and says that the port wine is corked, and
complains that nobody attends to him, and frets himself off to bed
an hour before his time.
It was long before the people of Barchester forgot to call Mr
Harding by his long well-known name of Warden. It had become so
customary to say Mr Warden, that it was not easily dropped.
‘No, no,’ he always says when so addressed, ‘not
warden now, only precentor.’