Linnet: A Romance
than once before, and my experience is, the man who begins by meaning
only to flirt with a girl, sinks down, down, down, by gradual degrees,
till at last he loses every relic of self-respect—and ends by marrying
her!”
Will fingered his under lip, and knit his brow reflectively. “At least,”
he said, “I must see her and tell her I’m going away again.”
Stern justice once more embodied itself as Florian. “Certainly _not_,”
the little man answered, with an emphatic shake of the head. “If you say
goodbye, she’ll want to know where you’re going. If she knows where
you’re going, she’ll want, of course, to follow you. If you don’t mean
her harm, then, hang it all, my dear fellow, you _must_ mean her
good—which is far more dangerous. There are only two possible _motifs_
in such an affair—_ou le bon, ou le mauvais_. You must mean the first,
if you don’t mean the second. I’ve talked it over with Rue, and Rue
entirely supports me. For the poor girl’s own sake, she says, it’s your
duty at once to run away from the spot, post haste, and leave her.”
A little later in the day, on the slopes behind Mühlan, Will thrashed it
out himself, _tête-à-tête_ with Rue, seated close by her side on the
grassy upland. “She’s in love with you, poor thing,” Rue said very
seriously. “You mayn’t see it yourself; sometimes, you know, Mr
Deverill—I can’t always say Will; it seems so forward—sometimes, you
know, you men—even the best of you—are unkind to us poor women through
pure excess of modesty. You don’t realise how much a girl may really
think of you. Your very want of self-conceit may make you blind to her
feelings. But consider what you must seem to a child like Linnet. You’re
a gentleman, a poet, a man of the great world, wholly removed from her
sphere in knowledge, position, culture. She looks up to you, vaguely and
dimly no doubt, with a shrinking respect, as some one very grand and
great and solemn. But your attentions flatter her. Florian has told me
all about how you met her at St Valentin. Now, even a lady,” and Rue
looked down as she spoke, and half stifled a sigh, “even a lady might be
pleased at attracting the notice of such a man as you; how much more
then a peasant-girl! I watched her close last night when you first came
into the room, and I saw such a red flush break over her throat and
cheeks, like a wave surging upwards, as I never saw before on any
woman’s face—though long ago . . . myself . . . when I was _very_ young
. . . I think I may have felt it. And I knew what it meant at once; I
said to myself as I looked, ‘That girl loves Mr Deverill.’”
“I think she’s fond of me,” Will admitted modestly. “I didn’t notice it
so much myself, I confess, at St Valentin; but last night, I won’t deny
I watched her hard, and I could see she was really very pleased to meet
me.”
Rue looked grave. “Mr Deverill,” she said in a serious voice, “a woman’s
heart is not a thing to trifle with—I’m an old married woman myself,
you see, and I can speak to you plainly. You may think very little
yourself—for I know you’re not conceited—of the effect you’re likely
to produce on women. I’ve known cruel things done, before now, by very
good men, just because they never realised how much store women set on
their passing attentions. You’ve only to look at Linnet to see she has a
deeply passionate nature. Now, I beg of you, don’t play fast and loose
with it any longer. If you don’t mean anything, don’t see her again. The
more you see of her, the worse it will be for her.”
Will listened, and ruminated. Rue’s words had more effect on him by far
than Florian’s. For one thing, she was a woman, and she treated the
matter earnestly, where Florian only treated it with the condescending
flippancy of his native clubland. To Rue, in her true womanliness, an
alp-girl’s heart was still a sacred object; to Florian, ’twas a toy for
the superior creature, man, as he said, “to play skittles with.” But
then, again, Florian had dwelt much to him on the chance of his finally
marrying Linnet. To Will himself, that contingency seemed too remote to
contemplate. As he sat by Rue’s side on the grassy upland, and heard Rue
speak so gently to him in her well-turned sentences, the distance
between a refined and educated lady like that and a musical alp-girl
appeared to his mind too profound to be bridged over. Was it likely, in
a world which held such women as Rue, he ever could marry such a girl as
Linnet? Now, Rue herself never spoke of marriage between Linnet and
himself as even possible. She took it for granted the end must be either
Linnet’s ruin or Linnet’s desertion. And all she urged him was not to
break the poor child’s heart for her. So, where Florian’s worldly wisdom
fell somewhat flat on his ears, Rue’s feminine sympathy and tact
produced a deep effect upon him.
“It’ll make her very sad, I’m afraid, if she doesn’t see me again,” he
said, looking down, with masculine shyness.
“I know it will,” Rue answered, pushing her point with advantage. “I
could see that last night. But all the more reason, then, you shouldn’t
let it go any further.”
“Well, but must I _never_ see her again?” Will inquired with an anxious
air. For his own sake, even, that counsel of perfection was a very hard
saying.
Rue’s face grew still graver. “No; I think you must _never_ see her
again,” she answered, seriously. “Remember what it involves. Remember
what she is; how dazzled she must be by a gentleman’s advances. The more
you see of her, the more she’ll think of it—the more she’ll love you,
confide in you, lean on you. That’s only womanly. We all of us do it
. . . with a man we admire and feel greater and better than us. And you
and she, after all, are both of you human. Some day, perhaps, carried
away by a moment of emotion—” She broke off quite suddenly, and let her
silence say the rest. “And then,” she went on, after a long pause, “when
all’s lost and all’s done, you’ll be sorry, poor child, you’ve spoilt
and wrecked her whole life for her. . . .” She paused again, and grew
crimson. “Mr Deverill—Will—” she said, faltering, “I wouldn’t speak to
you like this if I didn’t feel I was doing it to save this poor child in
the end from untold misery. It’s not only the material consequences I’m
thinking of now (though those are bad enough), but the girl’s own
heart—for I can see she has got one. If you don’t go away, sooner or
later you’ll break it. What other end can there be to an affair like
this between a poet like you and a Tyrolese peasant girl?”
What other end, indeed! Will knew it, and felt it. He saw she was right.
And her words thrilled through him. When a beautiful woman discusses
your personal affections in such a strain as this it isn’t in human
nature (in its male embodiment) not to tingle through and through in
pure instinctive response with her. While Rue spoke like that, Will felt
he must indeed see no more of Linnet. “But where must I go?” he asked,
vaguely, just to distract the talk from his own potential misdeeds.
Their original idea was Cortina and the Dolomites.
The innocent question fell in pat with Rue’s plans. Already that morning
she had talked it over with Florian; and Florian, for the furtherance of
his own designs, had agreed it would be best for them to alter their
route, as things stood, in favour of a new project which Rue suggested.
She was going to Meran herself, for a month or six weeks of bright
autumn weather, on her way down to Italy. Why shouldn’t they come there,
too, she asked, and keep the family together? Florian, not unmindful of
her seven hundred thousand pounds, admitted at once the cogency of her
reasoning. It would be quite delightful, he said—in point of fact,
consummate. But would Will consent to it? Then Rue expounded to him her
views about Will and his future in life—how he ought to retire to the
wilderness for forty days, after the manner of the prophets, to
meditate, and, if possible, to begin some great work, which should bring
in the end name and fame and honour to him. Florian admitted, just to
humour her, that if Will had the chance, and chose to buckle to, he
might really produce something quite worth looking at. “Persuade him to
it,” he said, in his mellifluous tones. “To you, Rue, it comes so easy,
you see, to be persuasive. One word from your lips is worth fifty from
mine. Make him stop away for three months from that dear, delightful,
distracting London, and begin some big thing that the world must listen
to.”
To inspire a great work is a mission in life for a woman—to be some
Petrarch’s Laura, some Dante’s Beatrice. So, when Will asked
plaintively, “Where must I go?” that afternoon, Rue answered with prompt
decision, “Why, of course, to Meran. I’m going there myself. You must
come with us and stop there.”
“What for?” Will inquired, not wholly untouched in soul—for proximity
counts for much, and they were sitting close together—that the pretty
American should so desire his company.
Then Rue began to explain, to persuade, to reason. And reason from those
lips was profoundly conclusive. No syllogism on earth could have failed
to convince from them. Meran was the prettiest place in South Tyrol, she
said; the pleasantest climate for the autumn months, the loveliest
scenery. The sun always shone, and the birds always sang there. Though
it froze underfoot, you could bask on the hill-tops. But that wasn’t
all;—and she leaned forward confidentially—she wanted to speak to him
again about that subject she had broached the other day on the Lanser
Kopf. When a pretty woman interests herself in your private concerns,
she’s always charming; when she pays you the delicate flattery of
stimulating you to use “your own highest powers”—that’s the proper
phrase—she’s quite irresistible. So Will Deverill found Rue. Why, she
asked, should he go back so soon to London? This devotion to mere
journalism was penny-wise and pound-foolish. Could he afford to stay
away for six weeks at Meran—just barely afford it—and settle himself
down at a quiet hotel to some really big work that would make him
famous?
Will, drawing a deep breath, and looking wistfully into her eyes,
admitted his funds in hand would permit him, with care, such a
hard-working holiday.
Then Rue pressed him close. She brought ghee to his vanity. She was
convinced if he stopped in this keen mountain air, among these glorious
Alps, fresh inspired from Nature, he could turn out a poem, a play, a
romance, some great thing of its kind, that the world _must_ listen to.
He had it in him, she felt sure, to make his name famous. Nothing
venture, nothing have. If he didn’t believe in himself enough to risk
six weeks of his precious time on the effort to sketch out something
really worthy of him, then all she could say was—and she flooded him as
she spoke with the light of her lustrous eyes—he believed in himself
far less—oh, so far, far less—than his friends believed in him.
Florian had told her Will held no regular staff-appointment on any
London paper; he was an occasional journalist, unattached, earning a
precarious livelihood, in fear and trembling, by reviews and poems and
descriptive articles in half-a-dozen assorted dailies and weeklies. Why
shouldn’t he give them up for awhile, then, and play boldly and manfully
for some larger stake, some stake such as she knew he could well attain
to? And she quoted Queen Elizabeth—or was it Walter Raleigh?—
“He either fears his fate too much,
Or his desert is small,
Who will not put it to the touch
To lose, or win it all.”
Now, this line of argument, as it happened, exactly fell in, for a
special reason of his own, with Will’s mood for the moment. A holiday,
we all know, especially in the pure and stimulating air of the