“I imagine that she was not happy.”
“Happy? What right had she to expect to be happy? Are we to believe that we should be happy here? Are we not told that we are to look for happiness there, and to hope for none below?” As he said this he stretched his left hand to the ceiling. “But why shouldn’t she have been happy? What did she want? Did she ever say anything against me, Mr. Finn?”
“Nothing but this—that your temper and hers were incompatible.”
“I thought at one time that you advised her to go away?”
“Never!”
“She told you about it?”
“Not, if I remember, till she had made up her mind, and her father had consented to receive her. I had known, of course, that things were unpleasant.”
“How were they unpleasant? Why were they unpleasant? She wouldn’t let you come and dine with me in London. I never knew why that was. When she did what was wrong, of course I had to tell her. Who else should tell her but her husband? If you had been her husband, and I only an acquaintance, then I might have said what I pleased. They rebel against the yoke because it is a yoke. And yet they accept the yoke, knowing it to be a yoke. It comes of the devil. You think a priest can put everything right.”
“No, I don’t,” said Phineas.
“Nothing can put you right but the fear of God; and when a woman is too proud to ask for that, evils like these are sure to come. She would not go to church on Sunday afternoon, but had meetings of Belial at her father’s house instead.” Phineas well remembered those meetings of Belial, in which he with others had been wont to discuss the political prospects of the day. “When she persisted in breaking the Lord’s commandment, and defiling the Lord’s day, I knew well what would come of it.”
“I am not sure, Mr. Kennedy, that a husband is justified in demanding that a wife shall think just as he thinks on matters of religion. If he is particular about it, he should find all that out before.”
“Particular! God’s word is to be obeyed, I suppose?”
“But people doubt about God’s word.”
“Then people will be damned,” said Mr. Kennedy, rising from his chair. “And they will be damned.”
“A woman doesn’t like to be told so.”
“I never told her so. I never said anything of the kind. I never spoke a hard word to her in my life. If her head did but ache, I hung over her with the tenderest solicitude. I refused her nothing. When I found that she was impatient I chose the shortest sermon for our Sunday evening’s worship, to the great discomfort of my mother.” Phineas wondered whether this assertion as to the discomfort of old Mrs. Kennedy could possibly be true. Could it be that any human being really preferred a long sermon to a short one—except the being who preached it or read it aloud? “There was nothing that I did not do for her. I suppose you really do know why she went away, Mr. Finn?”
“I know nothing more than I have said.”
“I did think once that she was—”
“There was nothing more than I have said,” asserted Phineas sternly, fearing that the poor insane man was about to make some suggestion that would be terribly painful. “She felt that she did not make you happy.”
“I did not want her to make me happy. I do not expect to be made happy. I wanted her to do her duty. You were in love with her once, Mr. Finn?”
“Yes, I was. I was in love with Lady Laura Standish.”
“Ah! Yes. There was no harm in that, of course; only when anything of that kind happens, people had better keep out of each other’s way afterwards. Not that I was ever jealous, you know.”
“I should hope not.”
“But I don’t see why you should go all the way to Dresden to pay her a visit. What good can that do? I think you had much better stay where you are, Mr. Finn; I do indeed. It isn’t a decent thing for a young unmarried man to go half across Europe to see a lady who is separated from her husband, and who was once in love with him;—I mean he was once in love with her. It’s a very wicked thing, Mr. Finn, and I have to beg that you will not do it.”
Phineas felt that he had been grossly taken in. He had been asked to come to Loughlinter in order that he might take a message from the husband to the wife, and now the husband made use of his compliance to forbid the visit on some grotesque score of jealousy. He knew that the man was mad, and that therefore he ought not to be angry; but the man was not too mad to require a rational answer, and had some method in his madness. “Lady Laura Kennedy is living with her father,” said Phineas.
“Pshaw;—dotard!”
“Lady Laura Kennedy is living with her father,” repeated Phineas;
