The failure of Mrs. Orme’s ministry

Recall Lady Mason’s stunning outburst to Mrs. Orme: “No Saviour had lived and died for me” (OF II.158). She places herself outside of Christendom and Christian salvation, and perhaps she does so again, despairingly, when she tells Mrs.

That makes her agonized dialogues with Mrs. Orme a kind of dialogue between Judaism and Christianity, in which Christianity prevails. As we have seen, Shaffer writes from the conviction that Mrs. Orme (unlike Furnival) has done the moral thing in overcoming Lady Mason’s resistance; he evidently supposes as well that Trollope shared this conviction. I am not so sure on either count.

After all, if Lady Mason is, like Rebekah, a good person who lied in the service of justice, then why is it so imperative that she return Orley Farm? To say that the law requires it supposes, as Shaffer usually takes care not to suppose, that our moral reasons come from the law. Merely to presume that keeping Orley Farm is not just illegal but morally wrong begs the question against Rebekah. That leaves just one possibility.

Does the fate of Lady Mason’s soul truly depend on whether she returns Orley Farm? The questions of moral psychology here are profound and difficult. Trollope, I have suggested, leaves open the question of whether stealing Orley Farm was a sin. If it was no sin, then it requires no absolution. But matters are not quite so simple, because even if the forgery was the just thing to do, it may well metamorphose into a sin as it eats away at Lady Mason over the years. That is what Lady Mason herself fears when, on the eve of trial, she finds herself burdened by the terrible consciousness of sin:

She had striven to be true and honest, true and honest with the exception of that one deed. But that one deed had communicated its poison to her whole life. Truth and honesty - fair, unblemished truth and open-handed, fearless honesty, - had been impossible to her. Before she could be true and honest it would be necessary that she should go back and cleanse herself from the poison of that deed. Men have sinned deep as she had sinned, and, lepers though they have been, they have afterwards been clean. But that task of cleansing oneself is not an easy one; - the waters of that Jordan in which it is needful to wash are scalding hot. The cool neighbouring streams of life’s pleasant valleys will by no means suffice (OF II.181).

No wonder that Shaffer comes away with the lesson that it is impossible to make things come out right without suffering.

Two questions arise, however. The first is whether Lady Mason’s reflections at this point are true of her. Has her one misdeed in fact poisoned her entire life, or are these the momentary despairing thoughts of an exhausted, humiliated, beaten-down woman facing a terrifying trial the next day, while her own best friend is raising the even more terrifying prospect that she must soon be disgraced in the eyes of her own son? This is, after all, no ordinary night.

I believe that Lady Mason’s terrible sin-consciousness is not true of her, in the sense that it does not represent any essential fact of who she is. On the eve of trial, in hindsight, it appears to her that the die was cast from the very first moment, but that may be an illusion born of despair. It may be illusion as well when, after her ruin, she takes the same view, that from the moment of the forgery her life had been “one incessant struggle to appear before the world as though that deed had not been done... a labour that had been all but unendurable” (OF II.311). But earlier, tellingly, Trollope places a very dif­ferent set of recollections in Lady Mason’s mind - that for years she had dwelt in Orley Farm “if not happily at least tranquilly... Her guilt had sat so lightly on her shoulders” (OF II.105). This was before her careful plans unraveled. Had circumstances been only slightly different - had, for example, her friend Miriam taken her advice and burned the incriminating papers that Dockwrath eventually discovered, or had Lucius never angered Dockwrath and launched him on his vendetta against Lady Mason - there is no reason to doubt that Lady Mason’s life would have proceeded “if not happily at least tranquilly,” with no slow poison spreading itself through her soul. Her abjection at the novel’s end is no truer of her than her earlier tranquility, the “quiet and repose” of her well-conducted widowhood when we first meet her.

The second question is whether her reflections on the eve of trial are true - whether telling the truth and enduring the suffering that results do indeed make things any better. Here, my answer is more confident. The course of action Lady Mason chose at the behest of Mrs. Orme did not make things better for her and did not relieve her soul.

We learn this at the novel’s end. At that point, Lady Mason has done all that she was asked to do: reveal the truth to Lucius, abandon Orley Farm, and accept banishment from her community.

A Christian, as Shaffer reminds us, has faith that “the Ruler of the Universe is in charge, that fate is finally benign.”^[603] But the meaning of “finally” is unclear. Though fate may be benign in the hereafter, it is not necessarily benign in this world, and if Mrs. Orme has ministered to Lady Mason’s redemption, it is redemption that, for all Trollope knows, will take place only in the hereafter. That is how I read Trollope’s profession of helpless ignorance at the end of his book about whether Lady Mason will ever experience repose again (OF II.312). For those of us who accept Trollope’s invitation to doubt that Lady Mason has sinned, Mrs. Orme has gambled and lost.

I have suggested that Trollope takes an agnostic stance about whether Lady Mason has sinned, and whether at the story’s end she has been redeemed. I now wish to suggest that his stance is equally agnostic toward Mrs. Orme’s ministry (and thus, I think, Trollope does not take the Christian side in the dialogue between Judaism and Christianity that he so elaborately sets up). The crucial scenes occur at the end of the book, after Lady Mason had been acquitted and Lucius has given back Orley Farm. Sir Peregrine Orme, heartbroken to the point of infirmity by Lady Mason’s confession, conceives the hope that he could still salvage happiness from disaster by marrying Lady Mason. After all, he reflects, she has now been acquitted by the law of the perjury charge; and, by returning Orley Farm, she has righted the wrong she did twenty years before. Her legal and moral accounts are balanced. Sir Peregrine has forgiven her, and he knows that Mrs.

It is Mrs. Orme, none other, who destroys his fantasy. “It would be wrong to yourself, sir. Think of it, father. It is the fact that she did that thing. We may forgive her, but others will not do so on that account. It would not be right that you should bring her here” (OF II.307).5⁶

At this point, Mrs. Orme is no longer speaking as a minister of souls. She is speaking as the voice of social propriety. Sir Peregrine “would offend all social laws if he were to do that which he contemplated, and ask the world around him to respect as Lady Orme - as his wife, the woman who had so deeply disgraced herself” (OF II.307). Theirs is a community of class, and it is the class of people for whom land matters more than character. Lady Mason has stolen real estate and tried to get away with it. For their class of people, that is the one unforgivable sin, regardless of her legal acquittal and her reparations. Bringing Lady Mason into their society would be inap- propriate.^{[604] [605]}

Until now, Sir Peregrine has shared his community’s outlook. He is a great and pure soul, but his views are the conventional views of his class. Earlier, he regarded Lady Mason’s forgery as “great wrong - fearful wrong” (OF II.40); “so base a crime” (OF II.46); and Lady Mason was “that terrible criminal” (OF II.124), “so deep a criminal” (OF II.126); “very vile, despe­rately false, wicked beyond belief, with premeditated villany, for years and years” (OF II.152). However, through his own Lear-like suffering, Sir Peregrine has now achieved a glimpse past the prejudices of his class to a vision of redemption through love, redemption for both Lady Mason and himself - until Mrs. Orme brings him to his senses and makes him see how childish his vision is.

Trollope voices no judgment of Mrs. Orme, either directly or indirectly. As always in this book, he allows us to draw our own conclusions. The conclusion I draw is that Mrs. Orme is too willing to tolerate suffering so that the proprieties may be maintained - too willing to defer happiness to the world beyond, too credulous of the conventions of this world. If, as Shaffer says, Furnival is too eager to make things come out right, without suffering, I fear that Mrs. Orme is not eager enough. And I fear that the very thing that makes her ministry so magnificent - her hope and faith in the world beyond - leads her to devalue happiness in this world. Mrs. Orme is no model for a lawyer to emulate. Lawyers are given over to the business of this world.