Linnet: A Romance
utter a syllable. I’ve tried to bring them out a bit, and make life
worth living for them. But without a young man—at that age—no
amusement’s worth anything. _Do_ come, Mr Deverill—there’s a good soul,
just to humour them.”
And Will and Florian, it must be candidly allowed, fell in with a good
grace with her philanthropic projects. Though, to be sure, when once the
carriage got under way, they seemed much more desirous of amusing the
pretty American herself, than of seconding her schemes for drawing out
the latent conversational powers of the giggling inarticulates, who
contented themselves chiefly with leaning back in their seats, and
listening open-mouthed to Florian’s flamboyant disquisitions. That,
however, is a detail. Will attempted at first to pay his share of the
carriage; but such interference with her plans Mrs Palmer most manfully
and successfully resisted. She wanted to give the girls a little outing,
she said; Will might come or he might stop; but she wasn’t going to let
any other person pay for her well-meant attention to her poor little
protégées. To that point she stuck hard, through thick and thin. They
must come as her guests if they came as anything.
From this, and sundry other events that came under his knowledge by
occulter channels, Florian grew strengthened in his idea that the late
Mr Palmer, whoever he might have been, had at least “cut up well,” and,
what was more to the point, had cut up entirely in his widow’s favour.
Now this was business; for Florian, incurious as he was by nature where
mere gossip was concerned, liked to know what was what in the
matrimonial market. As he was wont to put it sweetly to his friends at
the Savile, he wasn’t going to throw himself away on a woman for
nothing. He had an income of his own, just sufficient to supply him with
the bare necessaries of life—such as stalls at the opera and hansoms
_ad libitum_; and, this being so, he had no intention of giving up that
singular franchise which young men call “their liberty,” except in
return for valuable consideration. But if good things were going, he
liked at least to know of them; some day, perhaps, if some lady bribed
him high enough, he might possibly consent to retire by her side into
the Philistine gloom of wedded respectability.
So he pushed his inquiries hard into the Vision’s antecedents, wholly
without effect, during the first few days of their stay at Innsbruck.
A few nights later, however, as they sat in the _salon_ after a long
day’s tramp to the summit of the Patscher Kopf, Florian found himself
cast casually into conversation with an American old maid, belonging to
the most virulent type and class of old maidhood—“of the cat-kind,
catty,” he said afterwards to Will Deverill; one of those remarkable
persons who have pervaded cosmopolitan hotels for years together, and
are on intimate terms with the domestic skeletons in every cupboard.
Miss Beard, as she was called, favoured Florian at full length with the
histories and antecedents of the giggling inarticulates, their papas and
mammas, and all their forebears; informing him with much gusto how one
of them had paid ninepence in the pound to his creditors, and another
had been cashiered from the navy for embezzlement. Then she proceeded in
the same strain to demolish the unprepossessing gentleman of
nonconformist exterior, who had been guilty, it seemed, of the social
crime of retail business. Miss Beard was inclined, indeed, to believe he
was nothing more than a retired chemist; but she wasn’t even sure—with
hushed and bated breath—that it mightn’t be as bad as grocery and
provisions. All these, and many other unimportant details, Florian’s
soul endured, possessing itself in patience for many minutes together,
in the fervent hope that at last this living encyclopædia of
genealogical knowledge would come round to the character of the Vision
of Beauty.
“And Mrs Palmer, who sits opposite me,” he adventured gently after
awhile, when Miss Beard reached a pause in her caustic comments; “she
seems a nice little thing in her way, though, of course, a mere
butterfly. She comes from New York. I suppose you know her?”
Miss Beard drew herself up with that offended dignity which only an
American woman of the “very best class” can exhibit in perfection when
you suspect her of an acquaintance with a person moving in a social
grade less exalted than the sphere she herself revolves in. “I don’t
_know_ her,” she said, markedly, “but I know, of course, who she is.
She’s the widow of Palmer—the well-known Palmer—the notorious Palmer,
who—but there!—you’ve been in the States; you must know all about
him.”
“Not Palmer the murderer!” Florian exclaimed in surprise. “She’s too
young for that, surely.”
“No; _not_ Palmer the murderer,” Miss Beard responded in a very shrill
voice with considerable acerbity. “_He_ was at least a _gentleman_. I
can’t say as much for this lady’s husband. She’s the widow of Palmer,
the dry-goodsman in Broadway.”
“Oh, indeed,” Florian cried, deeply interested in this discovery—for it
meant much money. “I remember the place well—a palatial building in the
Renaissance style at the corner of a street near the junction with Fifth
Avenue. These princes of commerce in your Western world represent in our
midst to-day the great signiors of the Adriatic who held the gorgeous
East in fee, and whose Gothic façades, rich in arch and tracery, still
line the long curve of the Grand Canal for us. They are the satraps of
finance. The world in our times is ruled once more—as in Venice of old,
in the heyday of its splendour—by the signet-ring of the merchant.
Palmer was one of these—a paladin of silken bales, a Doge Dandolo of
Manhattan, a potentate in the crowded marts of the Samarcand of the
Occident.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Miss Beard retorted in an acrid tone,
eyeing him sternly through her _pince-nez_, “but I say he was a
dry-goodsman.”
Florian descended at a bound from the open empyrean to the solid earth
of commonplace. “Well, at any rate, he was rich,” he said, letting the
paladins slide. “He must have died worth millions.”
“His estate was proved,” Miss Beard said, curtly, “at a sum in dollars
which totals out—let me see—fives into 35—ah, yes, to exactly seven
hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds sterling.”
Florian gave a little gasp. “That’ll do,” he said, with slow emphasis.
“And he left it?” he suggested, after a second’s pause, with an
interrogative raising of his broad white forehead.
“And he left it, every cent,” Miss Beard responded, “without deduction
of any sort, to that fly-away little inanity.”
Florian drew a deep breath. “Then she’s rich,” he said, musing; “rich
beyond the utmost dreams of avarice.”
“Well, of course she is,” Miss Beard answered, with a sharp little snap,
as though every one knew that. “If she wasn’t, could she go tearing
about Europe as she does, herself and her maid, buying everything she
sees, and making presents right and left—to everyone she comes across.
She’d give her own soul away if anybody asked her for it. Little
empty-headed fool! She’s not fit to be trusted with the use of money.
But, of course, one can’t _know_ her, however rich she may be. We draw
the line in the States at keeping shop. And, besides, she was never
brought up among cultivated people.”
As she spoke, Florian noted several things silently to himself. He
noted, first, that Mrs Palmer spoke the English tongue many degrees more
correctly, and more pleasantly as well, than her would-be critic. He
noted, second, that her very generosity was counted for blame to her by
this narrower nature. He noted, third, that in republican America, even
more than in monarchical and aristocratic England, Mrs Palmer’s
cleverness, her information, her reading, her culture, were as dust in
the balance in Society’s eyes, compared with the damning and indelible
fact that her late lamented husband had owned a dry-goods store. But,
being a worldly-wise man, Florian noted these things in his own heart
alone. Externally, he took no overt notice of them. On the contrary, he
continued his talk in the same bland and honey-sweet tone as ever.
“Still, she’d be a catch in her way,” he said, with a condescending
smile, “for any man who didn’t object to swallow her antecedents.”
“She would,” Miss Beard replied, with austere self-respect, “if people
care to mix in that sort of society. For myself, I’ve been used to a
different kind of life. _I_ couldn’t put up with it.”
Florian was audacious. He posed the one last question he still wished to
ask, boldly. “And there’s no awkward clause, I suppose,” he said,
without even the apology of a blush, “in her husband’s will, of that
nasty so-long-as-my-said-wife-remains-unmarried character?”
Miss Beard took up her Galignani with crushing coldness. She didn’t care
to discuss such people’s prospects from such a standpoint. Their
matrimonial affairs were beneath her notice. For fine old crusted
prejudice of a social sort, commend me, so far as my poor knowledge
goes, to the members of good New Yorker families. “To the best of my
knowledge and belief,” she murmured, acridly, without raising her eyes,
“the property’s left for her own sole use and benefit, without any
restriction. But I’m sure I don’t know. If you want to find out you’d
better ask her. I don’t burden my mind with these people’s business.”
Then Florian knew the Vision of Beauty was a catch not to be despised by
a man of culture. Such wealth as that, no gentleman could decline, in
justice to himself, if she gave him the refusal of it.
CHAPTER XII
THE MADDING CROWD
Andreas Hausberger was a dictator. He kept his own counsel till the
moment of action grew ripe for birth in the womb of time; then, heeding
no man, he gave his orders. Three days after Will Deverill’s departure
from St Valentin, he called up Linnet to his office suddenly. “The
dressmaker has brought home your new costume,” he said in his curt way.
“Go upstairs and put it on. Then come down and let me see you.”
Linnet, much wondering what this mood might portend, went up to her own
room and tried on her new gew-gaws. Puffed white sleeves, laced corset,
crimson kirtle, high shoes, flowered kerchief at her bosom, silver dirk
in her hair; Linnet wasn’t over-vain, as girls go in this world, but
tricked out in such finery, she gazed in her glass, and, to tell the
whole truth, admired herself consumedly. If only her Englishman could
have seen her in that dress! But she stifled her sigh, and tripped
lightly downstairs again, with the buoyancy of youth, when conscious of
a perfectly becoming costume, for Andreas Hausberger’s scrutiny.
The _wirth_ scanned her, well satisfied. “On Monday,” he said, briefly,
in that iron voice, “we set out on our tour, and go first to Innsbruck.”
It was earlier by a week than he at first intended; but he saw it would
be hard, if he stopped at St Valentin, to keep Fridolin’s hands from
Franz’s throat much longer. So, by way of minimising the adverse
chances, he made up his mind to start as soon as possible for his winter
season. He meant to begin modestly with entertainments at hotels among
the Tyrolese winter resorts, and the towns of the Riviera; and then,
when his troupe had got over its first access of stage fright, and grown
used to an audience, to go across for the summer to England or America.
So, for the next few days Linnet was busy as a bee with preparations for
her first journey into the great wide world outside the Zillerthal. As
yet, her native valley had bounded her view—she had never gone even as
far as Jenbach. Expectation and preparation kept her mind well employed
during that busy week, and prevented it from dwelling too much or too