Phineas Finn eBook

But at length he was in the street, and had found his way across Piccadilly into the Green Park.  Then, as soon as he could find a spot apart from the Sunday world, he threw himself upon the turf; and tried to fix his thoughts upon the thing that he had done.  His first feeling, I think, was one of pure and unmixed disappointment;—­of disappointment so bitter, that even the vision of his own Mary did not tend to comfort him.  How great might have been his success, and how terrible was his failure!  Had he taken the woman’s hand and her money, had he clenched his grasp on the great prize offered to him, his misery would have been ten times worse the first moment that he would have been away from her.  Then, indeed,—­it being so that he was a man with a heart within his breast,—­there would have been no comfort for him, in his outlooks on any side.  But even now, when he had done right,—­knowing well that he had done right,—­he found that comfort did not come readily within his reach.

CHAPTER LXXIII

Amantium Irae

Miss Effingham’s life at this time was not the happiest in the world.  Her lines, as she once said to her friend Lady Laura, were not laid for her in pleasant places.  Her residence was still with her aunt, and she had come to find that it was almost impossible any longer to endure Lady Baldock, and quite impossible to escape from Lady Baldock.  In former days she had had a dream that she might escape, and live alone if she chose to be alone; that she might be independent in her life, as a man is independent, if she chose to live after that fashion; that she might take her own fortune in her own hand, as the law certainly allowed her to do, and act with it as she might please.  But latterly she had learned to understand that all this was not possible for her.  Though one law allowed it, another law disallowed it, and the latter law was at least as powerful as the former.  And then her present misery was enhanced by the fact that she was now banished from the second home which she had formerly possessed.  Hitherto she had always been able to escape from Lady Baldock to the house of her friend, but now such escape was out of the question.  Lady Laura and Lord Chiltern lived in the same house, and Violet could not live with them.

Lady Baldock understood all this, and tortured her niece accordingly.  It was not premeditated torture.  The aunt did not mean to make her niece’s life a burden to her, and, so intending, systematically work upon a principle to that effect.  Lady Baldock, no doubt, desired to do her duty conscientiously.  But the result was torture to poor Violet, and a strong conviction on the mind of each of the two ladies that the other was the most unreasonable being in the world.