CHAPTER LVI

THE ARCHDEACON GOES TO FRAMLEY

By some of these unseen telegraphic wires which carry news about the country and make no charge for the conveyance, Archdeacon Grantly heard that his son the major was at Framley.  Now in that itself there would have been nothing singular.  There had been for years much intimacy between the Lufton family and the Grantly family—­so much that an alliance between the two houses had once been planned, the elders having considered it expedient that the young lord should marry that Griselda who had since mounted higher in the world even than the elders had then projected for her.  There had come no such alliance; but the intimacy had not ceased, and there was nothing in itself surprising in the fact that Major Grantly should be staying at Framley Court.  But the archdeacon, when he heard the news, bethought him at once of Grace Crawley.  Could it be possible that his old friend Lady Lufton—­Lady Lufton whom he had known and trusted all his life, whom he had ever regarded as a pillar of the Church in Barsetshire—­should be now untrue to him in a matter so closely affecting his interests?  Men when they are worried by fears and teased by adverse circumstances become suspicious of those on whom suspicion should never rest.  It was hardly possible, the archdeacon thought, that Lady Lufton should treat him so unworthily—­but the circumstances were strong against his friend.  Lady Lufton had induced Miss Crawley to go to Framley, much against his advice, at a time when such a visit seemed to him to be very improper; and it now appeared that his son was to be there at the same time—­a fact of which Lady Lufton had made no mention to him whatever.  Why had not Lady Lufton told him that Henry Grantly was coming to Framley Court?  The reader, whose interest in the matter will be less keen than was the archdeacon’s, will know very well why Lady Lufton had said nothing about the major’s visit.  The reader will remember that Lady Lufton, when she saw the archdeacon, was as ignorant as to the intended visit as was the archdeacon himself.  But the archdeacon was uneasy, troubled, and suspicious;—­and he suspected his old friend unworthily.

He spoke to his wife about it within a very few hours of the arrival of the tidings by those invisible wires.  He had already told her that Miss Crawley was to go to Framley parsonage, and that he thought that Mrs Robarts was wrong to receive her at such a time.  ’It is only intended for good-nature,’ Mrs Grantly had said.  ’It is misplaced good-nature at the present moment,’ the archdeacon had replied.  Mrs Grantly had not thought it worth her while to undertake at the moment any strong defence of the Framley people.  She knew well how odious was the name of Crawley in her husband’s ears, and she felt that the less that was said at the present about the Crawleys the better for the peace of the rectory at Plumstead.  She had therefore allowed the expression of his disapproval to pass unchallenged.  But now he came upon her with a more bitter grievance and she was obliged to argue the matter with him.