The Palliser Novels (199 page)

Mr. Monk’s bill was read the first time before Easter, and Phineas Finn still held his office. He had spoken to the Prime Minister once on the subject, and had been surprised at that gentleman’s courtesy; — for Mr. Gresham had the reputation of being unconciliatory in his manners, and very prone to resent anything like desertion from that allegiance which was due to himself as the leader of his party. “You had better stay where you are and take no step that may be irretrievable, till you have quite made up your mind,” said Mr. Gresham.

“I fear I have made up my mind,” said Phineas.

“Nothing can be done till after Easter,” replied the great man, “and there is no knowing how things may go then. I strongly recommend you to stay with us. If you can do this it will be only necessary that you shall put your resignation in Lord Cantrip’s hands before you speak or vote against us. See Monk and talk it over with him.” Mr. Gresham possibly imagined that Mr. Monk might be moved to abandon his bill, when he saw what injury he was about to do.

At this time Phineas received the following letter from his darling Mary: —
 

Floodborough, Thursday.

Dearest Phineas
,

We have just got home from Killaloe, and mean to remain here all through the summer. After leaving your sisters this house seems so desolate; but I shall have the more time to think of you. I have been reading Tennyson, as you told me, and I fancy that I could in truth be a Mariana here, if it were not that I am so quite certain that you will come; — and that makes all the difference in the world in a moated grange. Last night I sat at the window and tried to realise what I should feel if you were to tell me that you did not want me; and I got myself into such an ecstatic state of mock melancholy that I cried for half an hour. But when one has such a real living joy at the back of one’s romantic melancholy, tears are very pleasant; — they water and do not burn.

I must tell you about them all at Killaloe. They certainly are very unhappy at the idea of your resigning. Your father says very little, but I made him own that to act as you are acting for the sake of principle is very grand. I would not leave him till he had said so, and he did say it. Dear Mrs. Finn does not understand it as well, but she will do so. She complains mostly for my sake, and when I tell her that I will wait twenty years if it is necessary, she tells me I do not know what waiting means. But I will, — and will be happy, and will never really think myself a Mariana. Dear, dear, dear Phineas, indeed I won’t. The girls are half sad and half proud. But I am wholly proud, and know that you are doing just what you ought to do. I shall think more of you as a man who might have been a Prime Minister than if you were really sitting in the Cabinet like Lord Cantrip. As for mamma, I cannot make her quite understand it. She merely says that no young man who is going to be married ought to resign anything. Dear mamma; — sometimes she does say such odd things.

You told me to tell you everything, and so I have. I talk to some of the people here, and tell them what they might do if they had tenant-right. One old fellow, Mike Dufferty, — I don’t know whether you remember him, — asked if he would have to pay the rent all the same. When I said certainly he would, then he shook his head. But as you said once, when we want to do good to people one has no right to expect that they should understand it. It is like baptizing little infants.

I got both your notes; — seven words in one, Mr. Under-Secretary, and nine in the other! But the one little word at the end was worth a whole sheet full of common words. How nice it is to write letters without paying postage, and to send them about the world with a grand name in the corner. When Barney brings me one he always looks as if he didn’t know whether it was a love letter or an order to go to Botany Bay. If he saw the inside of them, how short they are, I don’t think he’d think much of you as a lover nor yet as an Under-Secretary.

But I think ever so much of you as both; — I do, indeed; and I am not scolding you a bit. As long as I can have two or three dear, sweet, loving words, I shall be as happy as a queen. Ah, if you knew it all! But you never can know it all. A man has so many other things to learn that he cannot understand it.

Good-bye, dear, dear, dearest man. Whatever you do I shall be quite sure you have done the best.

Ever your own, with all the love of her heart,

Mary F. Jones
.
 

This was very nice. Such a man as was Phineas Finn always takes a delight which he cannot express even to himself in the receipt of such a letter as this. There is nothing so flattering as the warm expression of the confidence of a woman’s love, and Phineas thought that no woman ever expressed this more completely than did his Mary. Dear, dearest Mary. As for giving her up, as for treachery to one so trusting, so sweet, so well beloved, that was out of the question. But nevertheless the truth came home to him more clearly day by day, that he of all men was the last who ought to have given himself up to such a passion. For her sake he ought to have abstained. So he told himself now. For her sake he ought to have kept aloof from her; — and for his own sake he ought to have kept aloof from Mr. Monk. That very day, with Mary’s letter in his pocket, he went to the livery stables and explained that he would not keep his horse any longer. There was no difficulty about the horse. Mr. Howard Macleod of the Treasury would take him from that very hour. Phineas, as he walked away, uttered a curse upon Mr. Howard Macleod. Mr. Howard Macleod was just beginning the glory of his life in London, and he, Phineas Finn, was bringing his to an end.

With Mary’s letter in his pocket he went up to Portman Square. He had again got into the habit of seeing Lady Laura frequently, and was often with her brother, who now again lived at his father’s house. A letter had reached Lord Brentford, through his lawyer, in which a demand was made by Mr. Kennedy for the return of his wife. She was quite determined that she would never go back to him; and there had come to her a doubt whether it would not be expedient that she should live abroad so as to be out of the way of persecution from her husband. Lord Brentford was in great wrath, and Lord Chiltern had once or twice hinted that perhaps he had better “see” Mr. Kennedy. The amenities of such an interview, as this would be, had up to the present day been postponed; and, in a certain way, Phineas had been used as a messenger between Mr. Kennedy and his wife’s family.

“I think it will end,” she said, “in my going to Dresden, and settling myself there. Papa will come to me when Parliament is not sitting.”

“It will be very dull.”

“Dull! What does dulness amount to when one has come to such a pass as this? When one is in the ruck of fortune, to be dull is very bad; but when misfortune comes, simple dulness is nothing. It sounds almost like relief.”

“It is so hard that you should be driven away.” She did not answer him for a while, and he was beginning to think of his own case also. Was it not hard that he too should be driven away? “It is odd enough that we should both be going at the same time.”

“But you will not go?”

“I think I shall. I have resolved upon this, — that if I give up my place, I will give up my seat too. I went into Parliament with the hope of office, and how can I remain there when I shall have gained it and then have lost it?”

“But you will stay in London, Mr. Finn?”

“I think not. After all that has come and gone I should not be happy here, and I should make my way easier and on cheaper terms in Dublin. My present idea is that I shall endeavour to make a practice over in my own country. It will be hard work beginning at the bottom; — will it not?”

“And so unnecessary.”

“Ah, Lady Laura, — if it only could be avoided! But it is of no use going through all that again.”

“How much we would both of us avoid if we could only have another chance!” said Lady Laura. “If I could only be as I was before I persuaded myself to marry a man whom I never loved, what a paradise the earth would be to me! With me all regrets are too late.”

“And with me as much so.”

“No, Mr. Finn. Even should you resign your office, there is no reason why you should give up your seat.”

“Simply that I have no income to maintain me in London.”

She was silent for a few moments, during which she changed her seat so as to come nearer to him, placing herself on a corner of a sofa close to the chair on which he was seated. “I wonder whether I may speak to you plainly,” she said.

“Indeed you may.”

“On any subject?”

“Yes; — on any subject.”

“I trust you have been able to rid your bosom of all remembrances of Violet Effingham.”

“Certainly not of all remembrances, Lady Laura.”

“Of all hope, then?”

“I have no such hope.”

“And of all lingering desires?”

“Well, yes; — and of all lingering desires. I know now that it cannot be. Your brother is welcome to her.”

“Ah; — of that I know nothing. He, with his perversity, has estranged her. But I am sure of this, — that if she do not marry him, she will marry no one. But it is not on account of him that I speak. He must fight his own battles now.”

“I shall not interfere with him, Lady Laura.”

“Then why should you not establish yourself by a marriage that will make place a matter of indifference to you? I know that it is within your power to do so.” Phineas put his hand up to his breastcoat pocket, and felt that Mary’s letter, — her precious letter, — was there safe. It certainly was not in his power to do this thing which Lady Laura recommended to him, but he hardly thought that the present was a moment suitable for explaining to her the nature of the impediment which stood in the way of such an arrangement. He had so lately spoken to Lady Laura with an assurance of undying constancy of his love for Miss Effingham, that he could not as yet acknowledge the force of another passion. He shook his head by way of reply. “I tell you that it is so,” she said with energy.

“I am afraid not.”

“Go to Madame Goesler, and ask her. Hear what she will say.”

“Madame Goesler would laugh at me, no doubt.”

“Psha! You do not think so. You know that she would not laugh. And are you the man to be afraid of a woman’s laughter? I think not.”

Again he did not answer her at once, and when he did speak the tone of his voice was altered. “What was it you said of yourself, just now?”

“What did I say of myself?”

“You regretted that you had consented to marry a man, — whom you did not love.”

“Why should you not love her? And it is so different with a man! A woman is wretched if she does not love her husband, but I fancy that a man gets on very well without any such feeling. She cannot domineer over you. She cannot expect you to pluck yourself out of your own soil, and begin a new growth altogether in accordance with the laws of her own. It was that which Mr. Kennedy did.”

“I do not for a moment think that she would take me, if I were to offer myself.”

“Try her,” said Lady Laura energetically. “Such trials cost you but little; — we both of us know that!” Still he said nothing of the letter in his pocket. “It is everything that you should go on now that you have once begun. I do not believe in you working at the Bar. You cannot do it. A man who has commenced life as you have done with the excitement of politics, who has known what it is to take a prominent part in the control of public affairs, cannot give it up and be happy at other work. Make her your wife, and you may resign or remain in office just as you choose. Office will be much easier to you than it is now, because it will not be a necessity. Let me at any rate have the pleasure of thinking that one of us can remain here, — that we need not both fall together.”

Still he did not tell her of the letter in his pocket. He felt that she moved him, — that she made him acknowledge to himself how great would be the pity of such a failure as would be his. He was quite as much alive as she could be to the fact that work at the Bar, either in London or in Dublin, would have no charms for him now. The prospect of such a life was very dreary to him. Even with the comfort of Mary’s love such a life would be very dreary to him. And then he knew, — he thought that he knew, — that were he to offer himself to Madame Goesler he would not in truth be rejected. She had told him that if poverty was a trouble to him he need be no longer poor. Of course he had understood this. Her money was at his service if he should choose to stoop and pick it up. And it was not only money that such a marriage would give him. He had acknowledged to himself more than once that Madame Goesler was very lovely, that she was clever, attractive in every way, and as far as he could see, blessed with a sweet temper. She had a position, too, in the world that would help him rather than mar him. What might he not do with an independent seat in the House of Commons, and as joint owner of the little house in Park Lane? Of all careers which the world could offer to a man the pleasantest would then be within his reach. “You appear to me as a tempter,” he said at last to Lady Laura.

“It is unkind of you to say that, and ungrateful. I would do anything on earth in my power to help you.”

“Nevertheless you are a tempter.”

“I know how it ought to have been,” she said, in a low voice. “I know very well how it ought to have been. I should have kept myself free till that time when we met on the braes of Loughlinter, and then all would have been well with us.”

“I do not know how that might have been,” said Phineas, hoarsely.

“You do not know! But I know. Of course you have stabbed me with a thousand daggers when you have told me from time to time of your love for Violet. You have been very cruel, — needlessly cruel. Men are so cruel! But for all that I have known that I could have kept you, — had it not been too late when you spoke to me. Will you not own as much as that?”

“Of course you would have been everything to me. I should never have thought of Violet then.”

“That is the only kind word you have said to me from that day to this. I try to comfort myself in thinking that it would have been so. But all that is past and gone, and done. I have had my romance and you have had yours. As you are a man, it is natural that you should have been disturbed by a double image; — it is not so with me.”