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. Undersecretary, 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 Undersecretary.
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.
Goodbye, dear, dear, dearest man. Whatever you do I shall be quite sure you have done the best.
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 dullness 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 dullness 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
