Dr Thorne Read Free

know it will be said of Lord Lufton… that, putting aside his peerage and broad acres and handsome, sonsy face, he was not worth a girl’s care and love.’
    But when he created Frank Gresham he was relatively new to the business of hero-making. He did not And it necessary to ascribe to this young man as a chief fault that ‘he was so young’, as he later did to Peregrine Orme in
Orley Farm
, or bestow on him as among ‘frolics of which he had been guilty’ the liberating of a bag full of rats into the college hall at dinner time. For this and other like offences young Orme was sent down from his university, but Frank desperately wants to return to Cambridge in October, and this in opposition to the wishes of his mother and aunt who would have him stay at home and sell himself to an heiress.
    From the first Frank is not interested in money and not much interested in ‘blood’. What has happened to him is what happens to many young men and must have been even more common in Victorian lives; he falls in love with the first young woman he has ever really known well, his sister’s best friend. In Frank’s case, though, this is very like a biological imprinting, not an easy-come, easy-go first love but a strong, permanent and surely lifelong attachment. In his devotion to Mary Thorne, the doctor’s niece, he never really wavers. True to her and to himself, he gives no more than lip service to his ‘lady-aunt’ when set upon to court the ointment ‘ heiress Miss Dunstable. In a series of curious scenes, interesting because they are so un-Victorian, he and Martha Dunstable play a game he knows is false and she, because of her beleaguered situation as a prey to fortune-hunters, only briefly suspects may be sincere.
    Frank found the task before him by no means an easy one. He had tomake Miss Dunstable understand that he had never had the slightest idea of marrying her, and that he had made love * to her merely with the object of keeping his hand in for the work as it were; with that object, and the other equally laudable one of interfering with his cousin George…
    â€˜Miss Dunstable, I never for a moment thought of doing what you accuse me of; on my honour, I never did. I have been very foolish – very wrong – idiotic, I believe; but I have never intended that.’
    â€˜Then, Mr Gresham, what did you intend?’
    This was rather a difficult question to answer; and Frank was not very quick in attempting it. ‘I know you will not forgive me,’ he said at last; ‘and, indeed, I do not see how you can. I don’t know how it came about; but this is certain, Miss Dunstable; I have never for a moment thought about your fortune; that is, thought about it in the way of coveting it.’
    â€˜You never thought of making me your wife, then?’
    â€˜Never,’ said Frank, looking boldly into her face.
    â€˜You never intended really to propose to go with me to the altar, and then make yourself rich by one great perjury?’
    â€˜Never for a moment,’ said he.
    Still less has he thought about any fortune that may be coming the way of Mary Thorne. Her poverty dismays his bankrupt father and infuriates his greedy pathetic mother, but he is undeterred by it. His father must not trouble himself about the Greshamsbury estate for his sake. ‘I do not care for it. I can be just as happy without it. Let the girls have what is left, and I will make my own way in the world somehow. I will go to Australia; yes, sir, that will be best. I and Mary will both go…’
    Falling in love was to Trollope what A. O. J. Cockshut calls ‘a virtuous art’ and adds that it ‘becomes more virtuous still if it outlasts rejection and loss of hope’. 3 All his most attractive heroines have this art. For the best of them there can be no changes of heart, no second thoughts, and Mary Thorne is one of the very best. If one’s belief in