PHINEAS FINN HAS A BOOK TO READ.
The sensation created by the man's death was by no means confined to Manchester Square, but was very general in the metropolis, and, indeed, throughout the country.As the catastrophe became the subject of general conversation, may people learned that the Silverbridge affair had not, in truth, had much to do with it.
The man had killed himself, as many other men have done before him, because he had run through his money and had no chance left of redeeming himself.But to the world at large, the disgrace brought upon him by the explanation given in Parliament was the apparent cause of his self-immolation, and there were not wanting those who felt and expressed a sympathy for a man who could feel so acutely the affect of his own wrong-doing.No doubt he had done wrong in asking the Duke for the money.But the request, though wrong, might almost be justified.There could be no doubt, these apologists said, that he had been ill-treated between the Duke and Duchess.No doubt Phineas Finn, who was now described by some opponents as the Duke's creature, had been able to make out a story in the Duke's favour.But all the world knew what was the worth and what was the truth of ministerial explanations! The Coalition was very strong; and even the question in the House, which should have been hostile, had been asked in a friendly spirit.In this way there came to be a party who spoke and wrote of Ferdinand Lopez as though he had been a martyr.
Of course Mr Quintus Slide was in the front rank of these accusers.He may be said to have led the army which made this matter a pretext for a special attack on the Ministry.Mr Slide was especially hostile to the Prime Minister, but he was not less hotly the enemy of Phineas Finn.Against Phineas Finn he had old grudges, which, however, age had never cooled.He could, therefore, write with a most powerful pen when discussing the death of the unfortunate man, the late candidate for Silverbridge, crushing his two foes in the single grasp of his journalistic fist.Phineas had certainly said some hard things against Lopez, though he had not mentioned the man's name.He had congratulated the House that it had not been contaminated by the presence of so base a creature, and he had said that he would not pause to stigmatize the meanness of the application for money which Lopez had made.Had Lopez continued to live and to endure the 'slings and arrows of outrageous fortune', no one would have ventured to say that these words would have inflicted too severe a punishment.But death wipes out many faults, and a self-inflicted death caused by remorse, will, in the minds of many, wash a blackamoor almost white.Thus it came to pass that some heavy weapons were hurled at Phineas Finn, but none so heavy as those hurled by Quintus Slide.Should not this Irish knight, who was so ready with his lance in the defence of the Prime Minister, asked Mr Slide, have remembered past events of his own rather peculiar life? Had not he, too, been poor, and driven in his poverty to rather questionable straits? Had he not been abject in his petition for office,--and in what degree were such petitions less disgraceful than a request for money which had been hopelessly expended on an impossible object, attempted at the instance of the great Croesus who, when asked to pay it, had at once acknowledged the necessity of doing so? Could not Mr Finn remember that he himself had stood in danger of his life before a British jury, and that, though he had been, no doubt properly, acquitted of the crime imputed to him, circumstances had come out against him during the trial which, if not as criminal, were at any rate almost as disgraceful? Could he not have had some mercy on a broken political adventurer who, in his aspirations for public life, had shown none of that greed by which Mr Phineas Finn had been characterized in all the relations of life.As for the Prime Minister, 'We,' as Mr Quintus Slide always described himself,--'We do not wish to add to the agony which the fate of Mr Lopez must have brought upon him.He has hounded that poor man to his death in revenge for the trifling sum of money which he was called upon to pay for him.It may be that the first blame lay not with the Prime Minister himself, but with the Prime Minister's wife.With that we have nothing to do.
The whole thing lies in a nutshell.The bare mention of the name of her Grace the Duchess in Parliament would have saved the Duke, at any rate as effectually as he had been saved by his man-of-all-work, Phineas Finn, and would have saved him without driving poor Ferdinand Lopez to insanity.But rather than do this he allowed his servant to make statements about mysterious agents, which we are justified in stigmatizing as untrue, and to throw the whole blame where but the least of the blame was due.We all know the result.It was found in those gory shreds and tatters of a poor human being with which the Tenway Railway Station was bespattered.'
Of course such an article had considerable effect.It was apparent at once that there was ample room for an action of libel against the newspaper on the part of Phineas Finn if not on that of the Duke.But it was equally apparent that Mr Quintus Slide must have been very well aware of this when he wrote the article.
Such an action, even if successful, may bring with it to the man punished more of good than evil.Any pecuniary penalty might be more than recouped by the largeness of advertisement which such an action would produce.Mr Slide no doubt calculated that he would carry with him a great body of public feeling by the mere fact that he had attacked a Prime Minister and a Duke.If he could only get all the publicans in London to take his paper because of his patriotic and bold conduct, the fortune of the paper would be made.There is no better trade than that of martyrdom, if the would-be martyr knows how far he may judiciously go, and in what direction.All this Mr Quintus Slide was supposed to have considered very well.
