Linnet: A Romance
Philippina crumpled the envelope, and looked vacantly at the fireplace.
The fire wasn’t lighted, for the day, though damp and dark, was by no
means chilly. The Seer noted that glance: so she wanted to burn it,
then! Philippina, unheeding him, poked the envelope through the bars of
the grate with the aid of the tongs, but laid the note itself on the
table by her side, a little uneasily. The Seer, with that native
quickness of perception which had made him into a thought-reader,
divined at once what was passing through her mind; she must destroy that
note before Theodore returned, and she was anxious in her own soul for a
chance of destroying it.
Joaquin Holmes spotted a mystery—perhaps an intrigue; but, in any case,
a mystery. Now little family affairs of this sort were part and parcel
of his stock-in-trade; there was nothing so useful to him in life as
possession of a secret. And Philippina was indeed an open book; he could
read her as easily as he could read a pack of cards with the tips of his
fingers. The longer he stopped, the more obviously and evidently
Philippina fidgeted; the more she fidgeted, the longer he determined, as
he phrased it to himself with Western frankness, “to stop and see the
fun out.” Philippina grew more and more silent as time went by; the Seer
talked on and on with more unceasing persistence. Meanwhile, the fog
without grew denser and denser. At last, of a sudden, it descended,
pitch dark, with that surprising rapidity we all know so well in our
smoky metropolis. Philippina yawned; she saw there was no help for it.
It was a case for the gas. “Will you ring the bell, Mr Holmes?” she
asked languidly, in German.
The Seer seized his chance, and rose briskly to obey her. As he brushed
past her side, Philippina, in a quiver, put out her hand for her letter.
The room was black as night. She fumbled for it in vain; a cold chill
came over her. “Why, where’s that paper?” she exclaimed, in a tone of
most evident and undisguised dismay. “I wish I had a match. It was lying
here a minute ago.”
Mr Holmes stood calmly in the dark, with his hand upon the bell-handle.
He was in no hurry to ring it. “You’ll have to wait now,” he said, in
his very coolest manner, “till the servant comes up. Unfortunately, I
don’t happen to have a match about me.”
“There are some upon the mantelpiece, perhaps,” Philippina faltered,
unwilling to rise and move away from the table that held that
compromising letter.
“Oh, that’s all right!” the Seer said quietly, in his slow Western
drawl. “Don’t trouble yourself about me. I can see very well in the dark
without one.” Then he began to read aloud, “Du liebste Philippina!”
Philippina made a wild dash across the room in his direction. This was
horrible! He had abstracted it! But the Seer, unabashed, took a step or
two backward with great deliberation. “That’s all right!” he said again,
in a languid tone of the blandest unconcern. “There’s nothing fresh
here; you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s only a little note from a very
old friend, signed, ‘Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.’”
Philippina darted once more blindly in the direction of the voice;
Joaquin Holmes heard her coming, and stepped aside noiselessly. He
passed his practised finger-tips again over the lines of the writing.
“Very pretty!” he said, smiling. “Very nice, indeed—for Signora
Casalmonte! Why, I fancied you were her friend. This is charming,
charming! And only to think so prudent a man as our dear friend
Hausberger should have ventured to write such a compromising letter! ‘At
three o’clock to-morrow, at the usual place,’ he says. Dear me, that’s
interesting! So you’ve met him there before! And what a fool the man
must be to go and put it on paper!”
Philippina clasped her hands, and dashed wildly against the sofa. “Oh,
give it back to me!” she cried, really alarmed. “What will Andreas ever
say! How _can_ you be so cruel? And my husband—my husband!”
The American, still wholly undisconcerted by her cries, popped the paper
inside his breast-coat pocket, buttoned it up securely, drew a match-box
from his waistcoat, and lighted the gas with a calm air of triumph.
“Now, don’t be a fool, Philippina,” he said, taking hold of her by those
plump round arms of hers, and pushing her back with conspicuous calmness
into an easy-chair. “Compose yourself! Compose yourself! There’s nothing
new in all this; we all know what _you_ are—Theodore Livingstone, I
suppose, just as well as the rest of us. Why trouble to give yourself
these airs of tragic virtue? To tell you the truth, my dear girl, they
don’t at all become you. Nobody expects miracles from an actress
nowadays—not even her husband. Besides, I’m not going to make money out
of _you_; you’re a very nice girl, and you’ve always been kind to me; so
why should I want to show this letter to Theodore? What’s Theodore to
me, or I to Theodore, that I should bother my head to uphold his
domestic dignity? No, no, my child; that’s not the game. I hold the
letter as a threat over Andreas Hausberger. Hausberger’s rich, don’t you
see, and his wife’s his fortune. What’s more, she hates him, and he
keeps her always precious short of money. She’ll be ready to pay
anything for a letter like this; it’s a handle against _him_; and he,
for his part, well—he’ll make any terms she likes rather than drive her
away from him.”
He took up his hat, and made a courtly bow. “Good-bye, Philippina,” he
said, smiling; “this’ll never come out at all, as far as regards
yourself and your husband. Hausberger’d pay me well to keep the thing
out of court; but I shan’t take it to _him_; I’ll go and offer it
direct, money down, to the Casalmonte.”
He walked lightly to the door, leaving Philippina petrified. He turned
into the street: the fog began to lift again. He walked briskly on in
the direction of Portland Place. Before he crossed the Regent’s Park, he
had made up his mind to his plan of action. It was no use trying to
blackmail a cool hand like Andreas; he must offer the letter, as he
said, direct to Linnet. He didn’t doubt she would gladly seize on the
pretext for a divorce, or at least a rupture. It would give her a good
excuse for going away from the man whom his observation and instinct had
rightly taught him she despised and detested.
He rang at the door in Avenue Road. By a lucky chance, he found Linnet
in—and alone: her husband, she said, was out; he had gone for the day,
she thought, with a party down to Greenwich.
The Seer didn’t mince matters. With American directness, he went
straight to the root of things. “I’m glad of that,” he said, coolly,
“for I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to see you alone. I’ve got
something against him I want to sell you.”
“Something against him?” Linnet cried, puzzled. “I don’t know what you
mean, Mr Holmes; and why on earth should you think I’d care to buy it?”
“Now, just you look here,” the Seer went on, holding the letter, face
downward, before him and fumbling it with his fingers; “why shouldn’t we
speak straight? What’s the good of going beating about the bush like
this? Let’s talk fair and square. You hate your husband.”
Linnet rose and faced him. She was flushed and angry. “You’ve no right
to say that,” she cried. “I never told you so.”
The Seer smiled sweetly. “I wouldn’t be a thought-reader,” he answered,
with unaffected frankness, “if I needed to be _told_ a thing in order to
know it. But that’s neither here nor there. Don’t let’s quarrel about
these trifles. The real thing’s this. I have a letter in my hand here
that may be of very great use to you, if you want to get away from this
man—as you do—and to marry Mr Deverill.”
Linnet’s face was crimson with shame and indignation. “How dare you say
such a thing, sir!” she cried, trying to move towards the door. “You
_know_ it isn’t true. I never dreamt of marrying him.”
By a quick flank movement, the Seer sprang in front of her and cut off
her retreat. “That won’t do,” he said, sharply. “You can’t deceive me
like that. Remember, I can read your inmost thoughts as readily as I can
read this letter in my hand. I’ll read it to you now. It’s to your
friend Mrs Livingstone.” And, without a passing tremor on that handsome
face or a quiver in his voice, he read out with his fingers the short
compromising note, from “Thou dearest Philippina” down to “Thy ever
affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.”
Linnet faced him, unmoved externally but with a throbbing heart. The
Seer, as he finished it, darted a triumphant glance at her.
“Well?” Linnet said quietly, drawing herself up to her full height.
“Well, what’ll you give me for that, in plain black and white?” the Seer
asked, with a calm tone of unquestioned victory.
“Nothing!” Linnet answered, moving once more towards the door. “It’s
nothing fresh to me. I knew all that, oh, long ago.”
“Knew it? Ah, yes, no doubt,” the Seer answered, with a curl of those
handsome lips. “There’s nothing much in that. Of course we all knew it.
But it’s not enough _knowing_ it. You want it written down in plain
black and white, to put in evidence against him. You see he
acknowledges—”
Linnet cut him short sharply. “To put it in evidence?” she repeated,
staring at him with a bewildered look. “In evidence against whom? What
on earth can you mean? To put in evidence where? I don’t understand
you.”
“Now, don’t let’s waste useful time,” the Seer interposed seriously.
“This is a practical matter. There’s no knowing how soon your husband
may return. I just mean business. I want to hear, straight and short,
what you’ll give for this letter. We all know very well you’ve got
enough already to prove the count of cruelty upon. You’ve only got to
prove the other thing in order to get a regular divorce from him. And
the proof of it’s here, in plain black and white, under his own very
hand, in this letter I’ve read to you. Now, what do you offer? If you
name my figure, it’s yours; if you don’t—well, Philippina’s a very good
friend of mine; here goes—I’ll burn it!”
He held it over the fire, which was burning in the grate, as he looked
hard into her eyes. Linnet drew back a pace or two, and faced him
proudly. “Mr Holmes,” she said, in her very coldest voice, “you entirely
misunderstand. You reckon without your host. You forget I’m a Catholic.
Divorce to me means absolutely nothing. I’m Andreas Hausberger’s wife
before the eye of God, and all the law-courts on earth could never make
me otherwise—could never set me free to be anyone else’s. So your
letter would be absolutely no use at all to me. I knew pretty well, long
since, the main fact it implies; and it mattered very little to me.
Andreas Hausberger is my husband—as such, I obey him, by the law of
God—but he never had my heart; and I never had his. On no ground
whatsoever do I value your document.”
The Seer, in turn, drew back in incredulous amazement. Was she trying to
cheapen him? He interpreted her words after his own psychology. “No; you
don’t mean that,” he said, with an unbelieving air. “You’d get a divorce
if you could, of course, like anyone else; and you’d marry that man
Deverill. Don’t think I’m such a fool as not to know how you feel to
him. But you’re seeming to hang back so as to knock down my price. You
want to get it a bargain. You think you can best me. Now, don’t let’s
lose time haggling. Make me an offer, money down, and I’ll tell you at
once whether or not I’ll entertain it.”
Linnet gazed at him in unspeakable scorn and contempt. “Do you think,”
she said, advancing a step, “I’d bargain with you to buy a wretched
thing like that! If I wanted to leave my husband, I’d leave him
outright, letter or no letter. I stop with him now, of my own free will,
by the Church’s command, and from a sense of duty.”