Edith Orme’s ministry
Edith Orme takes Lady Mason to places where she would prefer not to go. The crucial scenes in Orley Farm are Mrs. Orme’s conversations with Lady Mason after she learns the truth about Lady Mason’s crime, the scenes in which “they sat together for hours and hours, they spoke and argued, and lived together as though they were equal” (OF II.178).
Mrs. Orme’s concern is, above all else, with the state of Lady Mason’s soul. She herself forgives Lady Mason (OF II.41), and she hopes that Lady Mason will be acquitted at her trial - but forgiving her and hoping for legal acquittal do not mean accepting her crime. Mrs. Orme never wavers from her purpose: to support Lady Mason through her travails, but also to bring her to repent her sin. Mrs. Orme is a true Christian - in Trollope’s typical wry understatement, “a good church-woman but not strong, individually, in points of doctrine. All that she left mainly to the woman’s conscience and her own dealings with her Saviour” (OF II.41).Mrs. Orme believes that repentance requires renouncing the crime, and that will include giving Orley Farm back to Joseph Mason. Lady Mason will have to confess everything to Lucius, for the farm belongs to Lucius now, and the law makes him the one who will have to renounce it. For her own part, Lady Mason can bear any pain except the pain of confessing to Lucius. Through hour after excruciating hour, Mrs. Orme gently insists that Lady Mason must place herself in the hands of her Savior, for the sake of her soul (OF II.153-60). Above all, she must tell Lucius the truth and have faith that Lucius will forgive her. The more Mrs. Orme insists, the more the increasingly distraught Lady Mason resists. Better death than the scorn of her son, the first creature she had ever loved, and still the creature she loves the best. The contest between the two friends is remarkable.
“Lady Mason was greater than [Mrs. Orme] in force of character, - a stronger woman in every way, endowed with more force of will, with more power of mind, with greater energy, and a swifter flow of words” (OF II.155). But in the end, Mrs. Orme-“the weaker, softer, and better woman” (OF II.153) - prevails.The outcome is not what Mrs. Orme had hoped. The stunned Lucius does give back Orley Farm, but he never forgives his mother, and eventually he emigrates to Australia and abandons her in exile in Germany (OF II.320). At the end of the novel, Trollope expresses pious hopes that God will someday
allow life to smile on Lady Mason again, “for no lesson is truer than that which teaches us to believe that God does temper the wind to the shorn lamb” (OF II.312). But his show of piety is surely ironic, even disingenuous, because he deliberately offers the reader nothing beyond it. If Lady Mason’s life ended better than the bleak desolation in which we leave her, it was within Trollope’s power to tell his readers about it, which he refuses to do. At the point where Trollope breaks off Lady Mason’s story, she remains in unalloyed misery.
But to Shaffer, none of this implies that Mrs. Orme made a mistake. Christians know that it is impossible “to make things come out right, without suffering.”[580] That is how Mrs. Orme, representing Christianity, contrasts with Mr. Furnival, representing only the ethic of the gentleman:
The gentleman had become merely optimistic... where the faithful Jew or Christian was hopeful: Hope is optimism that is truthful. It rejoices in the truth. When it comes to the gentleman’s ethic, the virtue of hope can come to terms with and deal truthfully with the certainty that the moral life will cause others to suffer. Hope, which says that the Ruler of the Universe is in charge, that fate is finally benign, also says that the harm that may come to others is not an argument against taking a moral direction. It was hope that caused Mrs. Orme to advise Lady Mason to tell the truth, as it was mere optimism that led Thomas Furnival to use his lawyer’s skill to keep her from telling the truth... He wants too much for things to come out right.[581]