Grafton unfolded his resolve to Worthing, over the dinner table, when the girls and Miss Waterhouse had left them to their cigars.
"I'm going to get rid of Mercer," he said. "The fellow has become an infernal nuisance, and I'm tired of him."
Worthing stared at him, and laughed. "You can't do it," he said. "I thought you knew better than that. You're the patron of the living, and you appoint a man when it becomes vacant. But once appointed he sticks there till he chooses to go. You've nothing more to do with it than anybody else."
"Oh, I know all that. When I say I'm going to get rid of him, I don't mean that I've got the power to turn him out. But you can do a good many things that you haven't got that sort of power over, if you go the right way to work."
"Well, I don't care much about Mercer myself, though I've always tried to keep my opinion dark for the sake of peace. He's a tiresome fellow, and that's a fact; but he's never done anything that he could be shifted for. It takes a Bishop all he knows, and a devil of a lot of money besides, to get rid of an incumbent who's a real wrong 'un. There was a case over at Minbrook when I first came here."
"I know that too. But to my mind a quarrelsome back-biting fellow like Mercer does more harm in a community like this than many a man who kicks over the traces in a way to give a handle against himself."
"I quite agree with you there," said Worthing, allowing himself to be diverted to this question of the welfare of a community, which he had much at heart. "I'm glad you take that view of it. It's the right view for a landholder to take, in my opinion. It's up to us who are running a place like this to keep people contented and happy. It's the human side, as I often tell young Bradby. You've got to be just in your dealings, but there are lots of little points where the law seems to give you an unfair advantage. I don't say it does, but it seems to, in the way things are looked at now, with all this Radicalism about. You can run things all right on the old system if you bring goodwill to bear, and remember the people you're dealing with aren't any different to what you are yourself. It seems to me that's the best thing about the old system--the human contact between all parties concerned."