Linnet: A Romance
Hausberger! It was terrible to contemplate. “He must have forced her to
do it!” the Englishman cried in his distress. “But how could she ever
consent? How could she ever submit? I can’t believe it! I can’t even
understand it!”
“He didn’t exactly force her,” Franz answered, tilting his hat still
more angrily on one side of his head. “But he brought the Herr Vicar
from St Valentin to persuade her; and you know what priests are, and you
know what women! The Herr Vicar just turned on purgatory and all the
rest of it to frighten the poor child—so Philippina says. She was
crying all the time. She cried in the train, and she cried on the road,
and she cried in the church, and she cried at the altar! She cried worst
of all when Herr Andreas took her home to the _Wirthshaus_ to
supper. . . . But I’ll be even with him yet.” And Franz tapped his knife
once more. “When I meet him again—ten thousand devils!—this goes right
up to the hilt in the base black heart of him!”
“Can I see Philippina?” Will gasped out, white as death.
“Yes; certainly you can see her,” the Robbler answered with a burst,
leading him in through the dark archway to the sunless courtyard. “Come
this way into the parlour. She’s upstairs just now, but I’ll bring her
down to speak to you.”
In a minute or two more, sure enough, Philippina appeared in her very
best dress, looking bright and smiling. She was garrulous as usual, and
most gay and lively. “Oh yes; they had been to St Valentin, and no
mistake—the Herr Vicar going with them—no scandal of any sort—and
’twas a very grand affair; never anything like it! Andreas Hausberger
had spared no expense or trouble; red wine at the supper, and fiddlers
for the dance, and all the world of the valley bidden to the feast on
the night of the wedding! Linnet had cried a good deal; _ach_, yes, she
had cried, how she had cried—but cried!—_mein Gott_, it was wonderful!
But there, girls always _will_ cry when they’re going to be married; and
you know, Herr Will,” archly, “she was very, very fond of you.” For
herself, Philippina couldn’t think what the child had to cry
about—except, of course, what you call her feelings; but all _she_
could say was, she’d be very glad herself to make such a match as Lina
Telser was making. Why, would the _gnädige Herr_ believe it? Herr
Andreas was going to take her to a place called Mailand, away off in
Italy, to train her for the stage—the operatic stage—and make in the
end a real grand lady of her!
Will sat down on a wooden chair by the rough little table, held his face
in his hands, and listened all aghast to Philippina’s artless
outpourings. The _sennerin_, unheeding his obvious distress, went on to
describe in her most glowing terms the magnificence of the wedding, and
of the _wirth’s_ entertainment. St Valentin hardly knew itself. Andreas
had had a wedding-dress, oh, a beautiful wedding-dress, made beforehand,
as a surprise, at Meran for Linnet—a white silk wedding-dress from a
Vienna clothes-maker’s on the Promenade, by the Stephanie Garten; it was
cut to measure from an old bodice of Linnet’s, which he abstracted all
unknown from her box on purpose; and it fitted her like a glove, and she
was ever so much admired in it. And all the young men thought Andreas
the luckiest dog in the whole Tyrol; and cousin Fridolin had almost
wanted to fight him for his bride; but Linnet intervened, and wouldn’t
let them have it out for her. “And on the morning after the marriage,”
Philippina concluded, with wide open eyes, “there wasn’t a cradle at the
door, though Linnet was a _sennerin_—not one single cradle.”
“Of course not!” Franz Lindner cried, bridling up at the bare
suggestion, and frowning native wrath at her.
“But perhaps if you’d been there, Franz——” Philippina put in saucily,
and then broke off short, like a discreet maiden.
The Robbler rose above himself in his generous indignation that anyone
should dare even to hint such things about their peerless Linnet. He
clenched his fist hard. “If a _man_ had said that, my girl,” he cried,
fingering his knife involuntarily, “though she’s Andreas Hausberger’s
wife, he’d have paid with his blood for it.”
Philippina for a moment stood silent and overawed. Then, recovering
herself at once, with a sudden little recollection, she thrust her hand
into her bosom and drew out a small note, which she passed to Will
openly. “Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed; “I was to give you this, Herr
Will. Linnet asked me to take it to you on the morning of her marriage.”
Will opened it, and read. It was written in a shaky round hand like a
servant’s, and its German orthography was not wholly above criticism.
But it went to Will’s heart like a dagger for all that.
“Dear Herr Will,” it began, simply, “I write to you to-night, the last
night that I may, on the eve of my wedding; for to-morrow I may not.
When Andreas asked me first, it seemed to me impossible. But the Herr
Vicar told me it was sin to love a heretic; you did not mean to marry
me, and if you did, you would drag my soul down to eternal perdition.
And then, the good Mother, and the dear Father in purgatory! So between
them they made me do it, and I dared not refuse. It is hard to refuse
when one’s priest commands one. Yet, dear Herr Will, I loved you; ah,
_how_ I loved you! and I know it is sin; but, may Our Dear Frau forgive
me, as long as I live, I shall always love you! Though I never must see
you again.—Your heart-broken LINNET.”
Will folded it reverently, and slipped it into the pocket just over his
heart. “And tell her, Philippina,” he said, “when you see her at Verona,
I had come back to-day to ask her to marry me.”
CHAPTER XXII
A WOMAN’S STRATAGEM
For the next three years, Will heard and saw nothing more of Linnet. Not
that he failed to make indirect inquiries, as time went on, from every
likely source, as to her passing whereabouts; once Linnet was lost to
him, he realised to himself how deeply he had loved her, how much he had
admired her. But, for her happiness’ sake, he felt it would be wrong of
him to write to her direct, or attempt in any way to put himself into
personal communication with her. She was Andreas Hausberger’s wife now,
and there he must leave her. He knew himself too well, he knew Linnet
too well, too, to cheat himself with false ideas of mere friendship in
future. A woman with so passionate a nature as hers, married against her
will to a man she could never love, and meeting once more the man whom
she loved, the man who really loved her, must find such friendship a
dangerous pitfall. So, for the very love’s sake he bore her, he
refrained from attempting to communicate with her directly; and all
indirect inquiries failed to elicit anything more than the bare fact,
already known to him, that Linnet was being musically educated for the
stage, in Germany and Italy.
Three years, however, must be got through somehow, no matter how
drearily; and during those next three years many things of many sorts
happened to Will Deverill. To begin with, he was steadily growing in
name and fame, in the stage-world of London, as a composer and
playwright. That was mainly Rue’s doing; for Rue, having once taken her
Englishman up, was by no means disposed to lay him down again easily.
Not twice in her life, indeed, does even a pretty American with money at
her back stand her solid chance of booming a poet. And Rue boomed Will
steadily, after the manner of her countrymen. It didn’t escape her quick
womanly eye, indeed, that Linnet’s sudden marriage and hasty flight to
Italy had produced a deep effect on Will’s spirits for the moment. But
it was only for the moment, she hoped and believed—a mere passing whim,
a poet’s fancy; impossible that a man who thought and wrote like Will
Deverill—a bard of lofty aim and exquisite imaginings, one who on
honey-dew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise—should be permanently
enslaved by a Tyrolese cow-girl. Surely, in the end, common-sense and
good taste and right feeling must prevail; he must come back at
last—well—to a woman worthy of him!
So, very shortly after Will’s return to London, Rue decided on a
complete change in her plans for the winter, and made up her mind,
instead of going on as she had intended to Rome and Naples, to take a
house for the season in Mayfair or South Kensington. But Florian would
hear of no such temporary expedients; she must have a home of her own in
London, he said,—in the world’s metropolis,—and he himself would
choose it for her. So he found her a shelter in Hans Place, Chelsea, and
fitted it up beforehand with becoming magnificence—just such a palace
of art as he had dreamed of among the Dolomites; though, to be sure, his
own chance of inhabiting it now seemed considerably lessened, since the
failure of his scheme for putting off Will Deverill on his musical
_sennerin_. Still, Florian furnished it, all the same, with a strictly
business eye to his own tastes and fancies—in case of contingencies.
There was a drawing-room for Rue, of course quite utterly Hellenic;
there was a dining-room for Society, not grim and gloomy, after the
common superstition of all British dining-rooms, but gay and bright and
airy, like Florian himself: for Florian held that the cult of the sacred
dinner bell, though important enough in the wise man’s scheme of life,
should be a blithe and joyous, not a solemn and stolid one; there was a
smoking-room, for which Rue herself had certainly no need, but which
Florian insisted might be useful in the future, as events demanded.
“For, you see,” he said, pointedly, “we’re not in Bombay. You may yet
choose a new friend to light his cigars in it.” All was decorated
throughout in the most modern taste; incandescent wires shed tempered
beams through Venetian glass globes on Liberty brocades and Morris
wall-papers. ’Twas a triumph of ornamental art on a very small scale—an
Aladdin’s palace in Hans Place,—and Florian took good care that
paragraphs should get into the Society papers, both describing the
house, and attributing its glories to his own superintendence.
However, he took good care, too, that due prominence should be given on
every hand to Rue’s own personal claims to social distinction. He was a
first-rate wire-puller. Little notes about the beauty, the wealth, the
cleverness, and the fine taste of the pretty American widow cropped up
spasmodically in _Truth_ and the _Pall Mall_. Even the _Spectator_
itself, that high-and-dry organ of intellectual life, deigned to
recognise her existence. It was Florian’s intention, in short, to float
his new _protégée_. Now, all the world admitted that Florian, if he
chose, could float almost anybody; while Rue, for her part, was without
doubt exceptionally easy of flotation. Seven hundred thousand pounds, to
say the truth, would have buoyed up a far heavier social subject than
the pretty and clever New Yorker. Americans are the fashion; for a
woman, at least, the mere fact that she comes from beyond the mill-pond
is in itself just at present a passport to the best society. But Rue had
also money; and money in these days will admit anyone anywhere.
Furthermore, she had good looks, taking manners, much culture, real
cleverness. She was well informed and well read; Society itself, that
collective critic, could find nothing to criticise or to carp at in her
conversation. So, introduced by Florian on one side, and His Excellency
the American Minister on the other, Rue made that spring a perfect
triumphal progress through the London drawing-rooms. She was the fact of
the season; she entertained in her own pretty rooms in Hans Place, where
Florian exhibited his decorative skill with bland satisfaction to
dowager-marchionesses,—“I edited it,” was his pet phrase—while Will