Phineas Finn Part 99

"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 pa.s.sion. 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 pa.s.s 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 a.s.surance of undying constancy of his love for Miss Effingham, that he could not as yet acknowledge the force of another pa.s.sion. 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."