The Palliser Novels (317 page)

He rose so suddenly from his chair that the man did not dare to ask him whether he would not sit over his wine. A suggestion that way was indeed made, would he “visit the laird out o’ hand, or would he bide awee?” Phineas decided on visiting the laird out of hand, and was at once led across the hall, down a back passage which he had never before traversed, and introduced to the chamber which had ever been known as the “laird’s ain room.” Here Robert Kennedy rose to receive him.

Phineas knew the man’s age well. He was still under fifty, but he looked as though he were seventy. He had always been thin, but he was thinner now than ever. He was very grey, and stooped so much, that though he came forward a step or two to greet his guest, it seemed as though he had not taken the trouble to raise himself to his proper height. “You find me a much altered man,” he said. The change had been so great that it was impossible to deny it, and Phineas muttered something of regret that his host’s health should be so bad. “It is trouble of the mind, — not of the body, Mr. Finn. It is her doing, — her doing. Life is not to me a light thing, nor are the obligations of life light. When I married a wife, she became bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh. Can I lose my bones and my flesh, — knowing that they are not with God but still subject elsewhere to the snares of the devil, and live as though I were a sound man? Had she died I could have borne it. I hope they have made you comfortable, Mr. Finn?”

“Oh, yes,” said Phineas.

“Not that Loughlinter can be comfortable now to any one. How can a man, whose wife has deserted him, entertain his guests? I am ashamed even to look a friend in the face, Mr. Finn.” As he said this he stretched forth his open hand as though to hide his countenance, and Phineas hardly knew whether the absurdity of the movement or the tragedy of the feeling struck him the more forcibly. “What did I do that she should leave me? Did I strike her? Was I faithless? Had she not the half of all that was mine? Did I frighten her by hard words, or exact hard tasks? Did I not commune with her, telling her all my most inward purposes? In things of this world, and of that better world that is coming, was she not all in all to me? Did I not make her my very wife? Mr. Finn, do you know what made her go away?” He had asked perhaps a dozen questions. As to the eleven which came first it was evident that no answer was required; and they had been put with that pathetic dignity with which it is so easy to invest the interrogatory form of address. But to the last question it was intended that Phineas should give an answer, as Phineas presumed at once; and then it was asked with a wink of the eye, a low eager voice, and a sly twist of the face that were frightfully ludicrous. “I suppose you do know,” said Mr. Kennedy, again working his eye, and thrusting his chin forward.

“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 any thing 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; “and I am going to the house of the Earl of Brentford.”

“Who was it wrote and asked you?”

“The letter was from Lady Laura.”

“Yes; — from my wife. What right had my wife to write to you when she will not even answer my appeals? She is my wife; — my wife! In the presence of God she and I have been made one, and even man’s ordinances have not dared to separate us. Mr. Finn, as the husband of Lady Laura Kennedy, I desire that you abstain from seeking her presence.” As he said this he rose from his chair, and took the poker in his hand. The chair in which he was sitting was placed upon the rug, and it might be that the fire required his attention. As he stood bending down, with the poker in his right hand, with his eye still fixed on his guest’s face, his purpose was doubtful. The motion might be a threat, or simply have a useful domestic tendency. But Phineas, believing that the man was mad, rose from his seat and stood upon his guard. The point of the poker had undoubtedly been raised; but as Phineas stretched himself to his height, it fell gradually towards the fire, and at last was buried very gently among the coals. But he was never convinced that Mr. Kennedy had carried out the purpose with which he rose from his chair. “After what has passed, you will no doubt abandon your purpose,” said Mr. Kennedy.

“I shall certainly go to Dresden,” said Phineas. “If you have a message to send, I will take it.”

“Then you will be accursed among adulterers,” said the laird of Loughlinter. “By such a one I will send no message. From the first moment that I saw you I knew you for a child of Apollyon. But the sin was my own. Why did I ask to my house an idolater, one who pretends to believe that a crumb of bread is my God, a Papist, untrue alike to his country and to his Saviour? When she desired it of me I knew that I was wrong to yield. Yes; — it is you who have done it all, you, you, you; — and if she be a castaway, the weight of her soul will be doubly heavy on your own.”

To get out of the room, and then at the earliest possible hour of the morning out of the house, were now the objects to be attained. That his presence had had a peculiarly evil influence on Mr. Kennedy, Phineas could not doubt; as assuredly the unfortunate man would not have been left with mastery over his own actions had his usual condition been such as that which he now displayed. He had been told that “poor Kennedy” was mad, — as we are often told of the madness of our friends when they cease for awhile to run in the common grooves of life. But the madman had now gone a long way out of the grooves; — so far, that he seemed to Phineas to be decidedly dangerous. “I think I had better wish you good night,” he said.

“Look here, Mr. Finn.”

“Well?”

“I hope you won’t go and make more mischief.”

“I shall not do that, certainly.”

“You won’t tell her what I have said?”

“I shall tell her nothing to make her think that your opinion of her is less high than it ought to be.”

“Good night.”

“Good night,” said Phineas again; and then he left the room. It was as yet but nine o’clock, and he had no alternative but to go to bed. He found his way back into the hall, and from thence up to his own chamber. But there was no fire there, and the night was cold. He went to the window, and raised it for a moment, that he might hear the well-remembered sound of the Fall of Linter. Though the night was dark and wintry, a dismal damp November night, he would have crept out of the house and made his way up to the top of the brae, for the sake of auld lang syne, had he not feared that the inhospitable mansion would be permanently closed against him on his return. He rang the bell once or twice, and after a while the old serving man came to him. Could he have a cup of tea? The man shook his head, and feared that no boiling water could be procured at that late hour of the night. Could he have his breakfast the next morning at seven, and a conveyance to Callender at half-past seven? When the old man again shook his head, seeming to be dazed at the enormity of the demand, Phineas insisted that his request should be conveyed to the master of the house. As to the breakfast, he said he did not care about it, but the conveyance he must have. He did, in fact, obtain both, and left the house early on the following morning without again seeing Mr. Kennedy, and without having spoken a single word to Mr. Kennedy’s mother. And so great was his hurry to get away from the place which had been so disagreeable to him, and which he thought might possibly become more so, that he did not even run across the sward that divided the gravel sweep from the foot of the waterfall.

Phineas on his return to London wrote a line to Lady Chiltern in accordance with a promise which had been exacted from him. She was anxious to learn something as to the real condition of her husband’s brother-in-law, and, when she heard that Phineas was going to Loughlinter, had begged that he would tell her the truth. “He has become eccentric, gloomy, and very strange,” said Phineas. “I do not believe that he is really mad, but his condition is such that I think no friend should recommend Lady Laura to return to him. He seems to have devoted himself to a gloomy religion, — and to the saving of money. I had but one interview with him, and that was essentially disagreeable.” Having remained two days in London, and having participated, as far as those two days would allow him, in the general horror occasioned by the wickedness and success of Mr. Daubeny, he started for Dresden.

He found Lord Brentford living in a spacious house, with a huge garden round it, close upon the northern confines of the town. Dresden, taken altogether, is a clean cheerful city, and strikes the stranger on his first entrance as a place in which men are gregarious, busy, full of merriment, and pre-eminently social. Such is the happy appearance of but few towns either in the old or the new world, and is hardly more common in Germany than elsewhere. Leipsic is decidedly busy, but does not look to be social. Vienna is sufficiently gregarious, but its streets are melancholy. Munich is social, but lacks the hum of business. Frankfort is both practical and picturesque, but it is dirty, and apparently averse to mirth. Dresden has much to recommend it, and had Lord Brentford with his daughter come abroad in quest of comfortable easy social life, his choice would have been well made. But, as it was, any of the towns above named would have suited him as well as Dresden, for he saw no society, and cared nothing for the outward things of the world around him. He found Dresden to be very cold in the winter and very hot in the summer, and he liked neither heat nor cold; but he had made up his mind that all places, and indeed all things, are nearly equally disagreeable, and therefore he remained at Dresden, grumbling almost daily as to the climate and manners of the people.

Phineas, when he arrived at the hall door, almost doubted whether he had not been as wrong in visiting Lord Brentford as he had in going to Loughlinter. His friendship with the old Earl had been very fitful, and there had been quarrels quite as pronounced as the friendship. He had often been happy in the Earl’s house, but the happiness had not sprung from any love for the man himself. How would it be with him if he found the Earl hardly more civil to him than the Earl’s son-in-law had been? In former days the Earl had been a man quite capable of making himself disagreeable, and probably had not yet lost the power of doing so. Of all our capabilities this is the one which clings longest to us. He was thinking of all this when he found himself at the door of the Earl’s house. He had travelled all night, and was very cold. At Leipsic there had been a nominal twenty minutes for refreshment, which the circumstances of the station had reduced to five. This had occurred very early in the morning, and had sufficed only to give him a bowl of coffee. It was now nearly ten, and breakfast had become a serious consideration with him. He almost doubted whether it would not have been better for him to have gone to an hotel in the first instance.