“Certainly not to the People’s Banner.”
“I don’t quite understand what the franchise is,” continued Madame Max Goesler.
“Household in boroughs,” said Phineas with some energy.
“Very well;—household in boroughs. I daresay that is very fine and very liberal, though I don’t comprehend it in the least. And you want a borough. Very well. You won’t go to the households. I don’t think you will;—not at first, that is.”
“Where shall I go then?”
“Oh—to some great patron of a borough;—or to a club;—or perhaps to some great firm. The households will know nothing about it till they are told. Is not that it?”
“The truth is, Madame Max, I do not know where I shall go. I am like a child lost in a wood. And you may understand this;—if you do not see me in Park Lane before the end of January, I shall have perished in the wood.”
“Then I will come and find you—with a troop of householders. You will come. You will be there. I do not believe in death coming without signs. You are full of life.” As she spoke, she had hold of his hand, and there was nobody near them. They were in a little book-room inside the library at Matching, and the door, though not latched, was nearly closed. Phineas had flattered himself that Madame Goesler had retreated there in order that this farewell might be spoken without interruption. “And, Mr. Finn;—I wonder whether I may say one thing,” she continued.
“You may say anything to me,” he replied.
“No—not in this country, in this England. There are things one may not say here—that are tabooed by a sort of consent—and that without any reason.” She paused again, and Phineas was at a loss to think what was the subject on which she was about to speak. Could she mean—? No; she could not mean to give him any outward plainspoken sign that she was attached to him. It was the peculiar merit of this man that he was not vain, though much was done to him to fill him with vanity; and as the idea crossed his brain, he hated himself because it had been there.
“To me you may say anything, Madame Goesler,” he said—“here in England, as plainly as though we were in Vienna.”
“But I cannot say it in English,” she said. Then in French, blushing and laughing as she spoke—almost stammering in spite of her usual self-confidence—she told him that accident had made her rich, full of money. Money was a drug with her. Money she knew was wanted, even for householders. Would he not understand her, and come to her, and learn from her how faithful a woman could be?
He still was holding her by the hand, and he now raised it to his lips and kissed it. “The offer from you,” he said, “is as high-minded, as generous, and as honourable as its acceptance by me would be mean-spirited, vile, and ignoble. But whether I fail or whether I succeed, you shall see me before the winter is over.”
L
Again Successful
Phineas also said a word of farewell to Violet before he left Matching, but there was nothing peculiar in her little speech to him, or in his to her. “Of course we shall see each other in London. Don’t talk of not being in the House. Of course you will be in the House.” Then Phineas had shaken his head and smiled. Where was he to find a requisite number of householders prepared to return him? But as he went up to London he told himself that the air of the House of Commons was now the very breath of his nostrils. Life to him without it would be no life. To have come within the reach of the good things of political life, to have made his mark so as to have almost insured future success, to have been the petted young official aspirant of the day—and then to sink down into the miserable platitudes of private life, to undergo daily attendance in law-courts without a brief, to listen to men who had come to be much below him in estimation and social intercourse, to sit in a wretched chamber up three pairs of stairs at Lincoln’s Inn, whereas he was now at this moment provided with a gorgeous apartment looking out into the Park from the Colonial Office in Downing Street, to be attended by a mongrel between a clerk and an errand boy at 17s. 6d. a week instead of by a private secretary who was the son of an earl’s sister, and was petted by countesses’ daughters innumerable—all this would surely break his heart. He could have done it, so he told himself, and could have taken glory in doing it, had not these other things come in his way. But the other things had come. He had run the risk, and had thrown the dice. And now when the game was so nearly won, must it be that everything should be lost at last?
He knew that nothing was to be gained by melancholy looks at his club, or by show of wretchedness at his office. London was very empty; but the approaching elections still kept some there who otherwise would have been looking after the first flush of pheasants. Barrington Erle was there, and was not long in asking Phineas what were his views.
“Ah;—that is so hard to say. Ratler told me that he would be looking about.”
“Ratler is very well in the House,” said Barrington, “but he is of no use for anything beyond it. I suppose you were not brought up at the London University?”
“Oh no,” said Phineas, remembering the glories of Trinity.
“Because there would have been an opening. What do you say to Stratford—the new Essex borough?”
“Broadbury the brewer is there already!”
“Yes;—and ready to spend any money you like to name. Let
