Linnet: A Romance
it a very good mixture for zis time of day, Mr Deverill. I always take
it myself. It softens ze organ.”
The young woman fulfilled the order with unwonted alacrity—Franz was a
favourite at the bar, and gave his commands leaning across it with the
arch smile of an _habitué_—and Will then discovered that the mixture in
question consisted of a glass of Dublin stout, well fortified with a
thimbleful of Highland whisky. He also observed, what he had not at
first sight noticed, that Franz Lindner’s face, somewhat redder than of
old, bore evidence, perhaps, of too frequent efforts for the softening
of the organ. Franz nodded to the barmaid.
“Here’s our meeting!” he said to Will. “Shall we step a little aside
here? We can talk wisout overhearing.”
They drew aside to a round table for their unfinished gossip. “You’re
not in town often, I suppose,” the Tyroler began, scanning his companion
from head to foot with a critical scrutiny.
“Why, I live here,” Will answered, taken aback—“in Craven Street,
Strand; I’ve always lived here.”
“Oh, indeed,” the Robbler responded, with a somewhat superior air; “I
sought from your costume you’d just come up from ze country.”
Will smiled good-humouredly. He was wearing, in point of fact, a soft
slouch hat and a dusty brown suit of somewhat poetical cut, which
contrasted in more ways than one with the music-hall singer’s too
elaborate parody of the glossy silk chimney-pot and regulation
frock-coat of the orthodox Belgravian.
Then Franz came back at a bound to the subject he had quitted on the
flags of Piccadilly. He explained, with much circumlocution and many
needless expletives, how he had heard from time to time, through common
friends at St Valentin, that Andreas Hausberger and his wife had
fluctuated of late years between summer at Munich, Leipzig, Stuttgart,
and winter at Milan, Florence, Naples, Venice. Linnet got on with him
very well—oh, very well indeed—yes; Linnet, you know, was just the
sort of girl to get on very well with pretty nearly anyone. No doubt by
this time she’d settled down into tolerably amicable relations with
Andreas Hausberger! Any children? Oh dear, no; Hausberger’d take care of
that; a public singer’s time is far too valuable to be wasted on the
troubles of a growing young family. Had she come out yet? Well, yes;
that is to say, from time to time she’d sung at concerts in Munich,
Florence, and elsewhere. Successfully? Of course; she’d a very good
voice, as voices go, for her sort, and training was sure to do something
at least for it. Franz had heard rumours she was engaged next season for
San Carlo at Naples; you might count upon Hausberger’s doing his very
best, now he’d invested his savings in preparing her for the stage, to
make money out of his bargain.
Through all Franz said, however, there ran still, as of yore, one
constant thread of undying hatred to the man who had outwitted him at
Meran and St Valentin. “Then you haven’t forgiven him yet?” Will
inquired at last, after one such spiteful allusion to Andreas’s
meanness.
The Robbler’s hand moved instinctively of itself to his left breast
pocket. He had changed his coat, but not his customs. “I carry it here
still,” he answered, with the same old defiant air, just defining with
finger and thumb the vague outline of the knife that bulged between them
through the glossy broadcloth. “It’s always ready for him. Ze day I meet
him—” and he stopped short suddenly, with a face like a bulldog’s.
“You Tyrolers have long memories,” Will answered, with a little shudder.
“It’s very unfashionable you know, to stab a rival in London.”
Franz showed his handsome teeth. “Unfashionable or not,” he replied,
with a shrug, “it is so I was born; it is so I live ever. As we say in
ze song, I am made zat way. I cannot help it. I never forget an
injury. . . . Zough, mind you,” he continued, after a telling little
pause, during which he drove many times an imaginary knife into an
invisible enemy, “it isn’t so much now zat I grudge him Linnet. Let him
keep his fine Frau. Zere are better girls in ze world, you and I have
found out, zan Lina Telser—to-day Frau Hausberger. We were younger zen;
we are men of ze world now; we know higher sings, I sink, zan a
Zillerthal _sennerin_. What I feel wis him at present is not so much zat
he took away ze girl, as zat he played me so mean a trick to take her.”
Will smiled to himself in silence. How strangely human feelings and
ideas differ! He himself had never forgotten the beautiful alp-girl with
the divine voice; in the midst of London drawing-rooms he never ceased
to miss her; while Franz Lindner thought he had left Linnet far, far
behind, since he became acquainted with those higher and nobler types,
the music-hall stars of the London Pavilion! “There’s no accounting for
tastes,” people say; oh, most inept of proverbs! surely it’s easy for
anyone to account for the reasons which made Linnet appear so different
now in Franz Lindner’s eyes and in her English poet’s.
But before Franz and Will parted at the Circus that afternoon, they had
made mutual promises, for old acquaintance’s sake—Franz, that he would
graciously accept a stall, on an off-night, at the Duke of Edinburgh’s,
to see Will’s new piece, _The Duchess of Modena_; and Will, that he
would betake himself to the London Pavilion one of these next few
evenings, to hear Signor Francesco, alias the Frenchy, in his celebrated
and universally encored impersonation of Mossoo Robert in Regent Street.
CHAPTER XXVIII
SIGNORA CASALMONTE
Three years and more had passed since Will’s visit to the Tyrol. Events
had moved fast for his fortunes meanwhile. He was a well-known man now
in theatrical circles. Florian Wood went about, indeed, boasting in
clubs and drawing-rooms that ’twas he who had discovered and brought out
Will Deverill. “It’s all very well to be a poet,” he said, “and it’s all
very well to be born with a head full of rhymes and tunes, of crochets,
clefs, and quavers; but what’s the use of all that, I ask you my dear
fellow, without a critic to push you? A Critic is a man with a fine eye
for potentialities. Before the world sees, he sees; before the world
hears, he listens. He sits by the world’s wayside, as it were, with open
eye or ear, and catches unawares the first faint lisping notes of
undeveloped genius. He divines in the bud the exquisite aroma and
perfect hue of the full-blown blossom. Long ago, I said to Deverill,
‘You have the power within you to write a good opera!’ He laughed me to
scorn; but I said to him, ‘Try!’—and the outcome was, _Honeysuckle_. He
took up a battered fiddle one day at an old inn in the Zillerthal, when
we two were rusticating on the emerald bosom of those charming
unsophisticated Tyrolese valleys; he struck a few notes on it of his own
composing; and I said to him, ‘My dear Will, Sullivan trembles on his
pedestal.’ At the time he treated it as a mere passing joke; but I made
him persevere; and what was the result?—why, those exquisite airs which
found their way before long to the sheep-runs of Australia, and
resounded from lumberers’ camps in the backwoods of Canada! The Critic,
I say, is the true prophet and sage of our modern world; he sees what is
to be, and he helps to produce it.”
But whether Florian was right in attributing Will’s success to himself
or not, it is certain, at least, that Will was rapidly successful. The
world recognised in him a certain genuine poetical vein which has seldom
been vouchsafed to the English librettist; it recognised in him, also, a
certain depth and intensity of musical sense which has seldom been
vouchsafed to the English dramatic composer.
One afternoon that spring, Will returned to town from a visit to the
Provinces in connection with his new opera, _The Lady of Llandudno_,
then about to be performed in several country theatres by Mr D’Arcy
Clift’s operatic company. He drove almost straight from the station to
Rue’s. Florian was there in great form; and Mr Joaquin Holmes, the
Colorado Seer, had dropped in for afternoon tea at his fair disciple’s.
In spite of Will’s ridicule, Rue continued to believe in Mr Holmes’
thought-reading and other manifestions. For the Seer had added by this
time a touch of spiritualism to the general attractions of his flagging
entertainments at the Assyrian Hall; and it is a mysterious dispensation
of Providence that wealthy Americans, especially widows, fall a natural
prey to all forms of transcendentalism or spiritualistic quackery. It
seems to be one of the strange devices which Providence adopts for
putting excessive or monopolised wealth into circulation.
“Mr Holmes wants me to go to the Harmony to-night,” Rue said, with a
smile—“you know what it is—the new Harmony Theatre. He says there’s a
piece coming out there this evening I ought to see—a pretty new piece
by an American composer. You’re going to be crushed, Will. They’ve got a
fresh tenor there, a very good man, whom Mr Holmes thinks a deal of.
I’ve half a mind to go; will you join our party?”
“You ought to hear it,” the Seer remarked, with his oracular air,
turning to Will, and looking critical. “This new tenor’s a person you
should keep your eye upon; I heard him rehearse, and I said to myself at
once, ‘That fellow’s the very man Mr Deverill will want to write a first
part for; if he doesn’t, I’ll retire at once from the prophetic
business.’ He has a magnificent voice; you should get Blades to secure
him next season for the Duke of Edinburgh’s. He’s worth fifty pounds a
night, if he’s worth a penny.”
“Very good trade, a tenor’s,” Florian mused philosophically. “I often
regret I wasn’t brought up to it.”
“What’s his name?” Will asked with languid interest, for he had no great
faith in the Seer’s musical ear and critical acumen.
“His name? Heaven knows,” the Seer answered, with a short laugh; “but he
_calls_ himself Papadopoli—Signor Romeo Papadopoli.”
“There’s a deal in a name, in spite of that vastly overrated man,
Shakespeare,” Florian murmured, musingly. “It’s my belief, if the late
lamented Lord Beaconsfield had only been christened Benjamin Jacobs, or
even Benjamin Israels, he never would have lived to be Prime Minister of
England. But as Benjamin Disraeli—ah, what poetry, what mystery, what
Oriental depth, what Venetian suggestiveness! And Romeo’s good, too;
Signor Romeo Papadopoli! Why, ’twas of Romeo himself the Bard first
asked, ‘What’s in a name? the rose,’ etcætera. And in the fulness of
time, this singer man crops up with that very name to confute him. ‘Ah,
Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’ Why, because it looks so
extremely romantic in a line of the playbill, and helps to attract the
British public to your theatre! Papadopoli, indeed! and his real name’s
Jenkins. I don’t doubt it’s Jenkins. There’s a Palazzo Papadopoli on the
Grand Canal. But this fellow was born, you may take your oath, at
Haggerston or Stepney!”
“Well, your own name has floated you in life, at any rate,” Rue put in,
a little mischievously.
Florian gazed at her hard—and changed the subject abruptly. “And
there’s a woman in the troupe who sings well, too, I’m told,” he
interposed, with airy grace—the airy grace of five feet—turning to
Joaquin Holmes. “I haven’t heard her myself; I’ve been away from
town—you know how engaged I am—visits, visits in the country—Lady
Barnes; Lady Ingleborough. But they say she sings well; really, Will,
you ought to come with us.”
“Yes; she’s not bad in her way,” the Seer admitted, with a stifled yawn,
stroking his long moustache, and assuming the air of a connoisseur in
female voices. “She’s got a fine rich organ, a little untrained,
perhaps, but not bad for a _débutante_. A piquante little Italian;