Linnet: A Romance
drawing her towards him with one arm. “Just this once! It’s so good of
you!”
Rue held up her face in return, and answered him back in a choking
voice, “Yes, yes; just this once, O Will, my Will—before I feel you’re
Linnet’s for ever!”
He clasped her tight in his arms. Rue let him embrace her unresistingly.
She kissed him long and hard, and nestled there tenderly. For fifty
whole seconds she was in heaven indeed. At last, with a little start,
she broke away and left him. “Now go,” she said, standing a yard or two
off, and gazing at him, tearfully. “Go at once and fetch her. Every
moment she stops in your rooms is compromising. . . . Go, go; goodbye!
. . . You’re mine no longer. But, Will, don’t be afraid I shall be sad
when she comes! I’ll have my good cry out in my own room first; and, by
the time she arrives, I’ll be smiling to receive her!”
CHAPTER XLIV
AND WILL’S
At Will’s chambers, meanwhile, Linnet sat and waited, her flushed face
in her hands, her hot ears tingling. She had plenty of time in Will’s
absence to reflect and to ruminate. Horror and shame for her own
outspokenness began to overcome her. If Will had accepted her sacrifice,
indeed, as frankly as she offered it, that profound emotional nature
would have felt nothing of the kind: her passion would have hallowed and
sanctified her love in her own eyes—not as the Church could have done,
to be sure; not from the religious side at all; but still, from the
alternative point of view of the human heart, which to her was almost
equally sacred in its way, ’twould have hallowed and sanctified it.
Linnet would have regarded her union with Will as sinful and wrong, but
not as impure or unholy; she wouldn’t have attempted to justify it, but
she would never have felt ashamed of it. She recognised it as the union
imposed upon her by the laws of her own highest nature; the laws of God,
as she understood them, might forbid it and punish it—they never could
make it anything else for her than pure and beautiful and true and
ennobling.
But Will’s refusal, for her own sake, to accept her self-surrender,
filled her soul with shame for her slighted womanhood. She understood
Will’s reasons; she saw how unselfish and kind were his motives; but
still, the sense remained that she had debased herself before him, all
to no purpose. She had offered him the most precious gift a woman can
offer to any man—and _he_, he had rejected it. Linnet bowed down her
head in intense humiliation. On her own scheme of life, she would have
been far less dishonoured by Will’s accepting her then and there, in a
hot flood of passion, than by his proposal to wait till she could get a
purely meaningless and invalid release from her sacrament with Andreas.
Having once made up her mind to desert her husband and follow her own
heart, in spite of ultimate consequences, it seemed to her almost
foolish that Will should shrink on her account from the verdict of the
world, when she herself did not shrink—so great was her love—from the
wrath of heaven and eternal punishment.
But, as she sat there and ruminated, it began gradually to dawn upon her
that in some ways Will was right; even if she sinned boldly and openly,
as she was prepared to sin, before Our Lady and the Saints, it might be
well for her immediate comfort and happiness to keep up appearances
before English society. Perhaps it was desirable for the next few days,
till the talk blew over, to go, as Will said, under some married woman’s
protection. But what married woman? Not that calmly terrible Mrs
Sartoris, at any rate. She dreaded Will’s sister, more even than she
dreaded the average middle-aged British matron. She knew how Maud would
treat her, if she took her in at all; better anything at that moment of
volcanic passion than the cold and cutting repose, the icy calmness of
the British matron’s unemotional demeanour.
As Linnet was sitting there with her face in her hands, longing for
Will’s return, and half-doubting in her own heart whether she had done
quite right, even from her own heart’s standpoint, in coming straight
away to him—Florian Wood, in a faultless frock-coat, with a moss-rose
in his buttonhole, strolled by himself in a lazy mood down Piccadilly.
It was Florian’s way to lounge through life, and he was lounging as
usual. He pulled out his watch. Hullo! time for dinner! Now, Florian was
always a creature of impulse. He hesitated for a moment, with cane
poised in his dainty hand, which of three courses to pursue that lay
open before him. Should he drop into the Savile for his evening meal;
should he go home by himself to Grosvenor Gardens; or should he take
pot-luck with Will Deverill in Duke Street? Bah! the dinner at the
Savile’s a mere bad _table d’hôte_. At home, he would be lonely with a
solitary chop. The social instinct within him impelled him at once to
seek for society with his old friend in St James’s.
He opened the door for himself, for he had a latch-key that fitted it.
In the hall, Ellen was seated, and the man-servant of the house was
standing by and flirting with her. “Mr Deverill’s not at home, sir,” he
said, with a hurried start, as Florian entered.
“Never mind,” the Epicurean philosopher replied, with his bland, small
smile. “Pretty girl on the chair there. He’s coming back to dinner, I
suppose, at the usual hour. Very well, that’s right; I’ll go up and wait
for him. You can tell Mrs Watts to lay covers for two. I purpose to dine
here.”
“Beg your pardon, sir,” the man said, placing himself full in front of
Florian’s delicate form, so as to half-block the passage; “there’s a
lady upstairs.” He hesitated, and simpered. “I rather think,” he
continued, very doubtful how to proceed, “Mr Deverill wished nobody to
go up till he came back again. Leastways, I had orders.”
“Why, it’s Signora Casalmonte!” Florian broke in, interrupting him; for
he recognised the pretty girl on a second glance as the housemaid at
Linnet’s. An expansive smile diffused itself over his close-shaven face.
This was indeed a discovery! Linnet come to Will Deverill’s! And with a
portmanteau, too!—Will, whose stern morality had read him so many
pretty lectures on conduct in the Tyrol. And Linnet—that devout
Catholic, so demure, so immaculate, the very pink of public singers, the
pure flower of the stage! Who on earth would have believed it? But
there, it’s these quiet souls who are always the deepest! While Florian
himself, for all his talk, how innocent he was, how harmless, how free
from every taint of guile, wile, or deception! What reconciled him to
life, as he grew older every day, was the thought that, after all, ’twas
so very amusing.
The man hesitated still more. “I don’t think you must go up, sir,” he
said, still barring the way, “Mr Deverill told me if Hare Houseberger
called, to say he wasn’t at home to him.”
Florian’s face was a study. It rippled over with successive waves of
stifled laughter. But Ellen, with feminine quickness, saw the error of
the man’s clumsy male intelligence. It would never do for Mr Wood, that
silver-tongued man-about-town to go away and explain at every club in
London how he’d caught the Casalmonte, with her maid and her
portmanteau, on a surreptitious visit to Will Deverill’s chambers.
Better far he should go up and see the Signora herself. Principals, in
such cases, should invent their own lies, untrammelled by their
subordinates. The Signora might devise what excuse she thought best to
keep Florian’s mouth shut; and Will himself might come back before long
to corroborate it.
“No, no,” she said hastily, with much evident artlessness. “You can go
up, sir, of course. The Signora’s just waiting to see Mr Deverill.”
Florian brushed past the man with a spring, and ran lightly up the
stairs, with quite as much agility as so small a body can be expected to
compass. He burst into the room unannounced. Linnet rose, in very
obvious dismay, to greet him. She was taken aback, Florian could
see—and glad indeed he was to notice it. This little _contretemps_ was
clearly the wise man’s opportunity. Providential, providential! He
grasped her hand with warmth, printing a delicate little squeeze on the
soft bit of muscle between thumb and fingers. “What, Linnet!” he cried,
“alone, and in Will Deverill’s rooms! How lucky I am to catch you! This
is really delightful!”
Linnet sank back in her chair. She hardly knew what to say, how to cover
her confusion. But excuse herself she must; some portion at least of
what had passed she must explain to him. In a faltering voice, with many
pauses and hesitations, she told him a faint outline of what had
happened that day—her quarrel with Andreas, his cruel treatment, how he
had struck her and hurt her, how she had fled from him precipitately.
She hinted to him even in her most delicate way some dim suggestion of
her husband’s letter to Philippina. Florian stroked himself and smiled;
he nodded wisely. “We knew all that before,” he put in at last, with a
knowing little air of sagacious innuendo. “We knew Friend Hausberger’s
little ways. Though, how quiet he kept over them! A taciturn Don Juan! a
most prudent Lothario!” It was the wise man’s cue now to set Linnet
still further against her husband.
“So I left him,” Linnet went on simply, with transparent _naïveté_; “I
left him, and came away, just packing a few clothes into my portmanteau,
hurriedly. I didn’t know where to go, so I came straight to Mr
Deverill’s. He was always a good friend of mine, you know, was Mr
Deverill.” She paused, and blushed. “I’ve sent him out,” she continued,
with a little pardonable deviation from the strictest veracity, “to see
if he can find me some house among his friends—some English
lady’s—where I can stop for the present, till I know what I mean to do,
now I’ve come away from Andreas. He’s going to his sister’s first, to
see if she can take me in; after that, if she can’t, he’s going to look
about elsewhere.”
She gazed up at him timidly. She felt, as she spoke, Will was right
after all. How could she brave the whole world’s censure, openly and
frankly expressed, if she shrank so instinctively from the prying gaze
of that one man, Florian? God, who reads all hearts, would know, if she
sinned, she sinned for true love; but the world—that hateful
world—Linnet leant back in her seat and shut her eyes with horror.
As for Florian, however, he seized the occasion with avidity. He saw his
chance now. He was all respectful sympathy. The man Hausberger was a
wretch who had never been fit for her; he had entrapped her by fraud;
she did right to leave him. What horrid marks on her arm, and on that
soft brown neck of hers! Did the cur do that? What a creature, to lay
hands on so divine a woman! Though, of course, it was unwise of her to
come round to Will’s; the world—and here Florian assumed his most
virtuously sympathetic expression of face—the world is so cruel, so
suspicious, so censorious. For themselves, they two moved on a higher
plane; they saw through the conventions and restrictions of society.
Still, it was always well to respect the _convenances_. Mrs Sartoris!
Oh, dear, no! unsympathetic, out of touch with her! And yet, oh, how
dangerous to stop here in these rooms one moment longer. With dexterous
little side hints the wise man worked upon Linnet’s fears insensibly.
That fellow in the passage, now—the people of the house—so unwise, so
uncertain; who could tell friend from enemy?
As he spoke, Linnet grew every moment more and more uneasy. “I wish Will
would come back!” she cried. “I wish I had somewhere to go! It makes me
so afraid, you see—this delay, this uncertainty.”
Florian played a trump card boldly. “Why not come off with me at once,
then,” he suggested, “to my sister’s?”