Linnet: A Romance
his side, he felt himself once more a true Tyrolese Robbler. The thin
veneer of Regent Street had dropped off as if by magic; when they wanted
to arrest him, they should fight for it first; who would take him, must
follow him like a fleet-footed chamois up the rocks behind St Valentin.
And whoever came first should receive that good knife, plump, so, in his
bosom, or plunge his own, if he could, into Franz’s. He would die like a
man with his dagger in his hand. No rope or axe should ever finish the
life of a free mountain _jäger_!
Thus thinking to himself, at last he reached the inn. On the threshold,
Cousin Fridolin met him, distinctly penitent. “Andreas knows you’re
here, friend Franz,” he said, with a reluctant air. “I didn’t quite
_tell_ him, but he guessed it, and wormed it out of me. He’s gone for a
walk just now with Linnet—she’s grown such a fine lady. But there, I
forgot; you’ve seen her in London.”
“Yes; I’ve seen her in London,” Franz answered, half-dreamily, in a
musing undertone. His voice was as the voice of a condemned criminal. He
knew he was doomed. He knew he must die. It might be to-day, or it might
be to-morrow; but, sooner or later, he felt sure, the police would be
after him.
He stalked moodily into the inn, and dropped, tired, into a chair in the
parlour bar, with his legs extended straight in front of him in a
despondent attitude. There he sat and reflected. Cousin Fridolin’s voice
ran on, but Franz never heeded it. How little it meant to him now,
Cousin Fridolin’s chatter about Linnet and Andreas! What did he care
whether they were rich enough to buy up the whole parish, as Fridolin
asserted, and have money left over? In a few short weeks, nothing on
earth would make any difference. He gazed at his feet, and knit his
brows, and breathed hard. Cousin Fridolin by his side ran on unchecked.
Franz answered him nothing.
By-and-by the latch lifted—and Andreas Hausberger entered, followed
close by Linnet.
Andreas gazed at his man angrily. Then he turned round to his wife. “Go
to your room, Linnet,” he said, in his stern tone of command. “I must
speak with this fellow.”
Linnet, cowed and trembling, slank off without a word. Franz could see
she was pale, and had suffered greatly. Her cheeks had fallen in, her
colour had flown, her lips were bloodless, her eye had lost its lustre.
Andreas spoke to her in an ugly, domineering voice. Franz glared at him
in his wrath. Surely, surely it was high time old scores were wiped out,
and this question at least of Linnet’s happiness settled.
He must die himself soon; of that he felt quite sure; ’tis a chance
which a Robbler has long been accustomed to keep vividly before him. But
it would be something at least to feel he didn’t lose his own life in
vain; that he was avenging himself on Andreas, and freeing Linnet. If
guillotined he must be, it was better he should be guillotined for
killing Andreas Hausberger on a woman’s behalf, than for stabbing a base
card-sharper in a drunken brawl at Monte Carlo.
In such temper, at last, did Franz Lindner stand up and confront with
mortal hate his old unforgiven enemy. Andreas turned to him with a
little sneer. He spoke in English, lest Cousin Fridolin, bustling about
behind the bar at his business, should overhear him and know what they
were saying. “Well, what are you doing here?” he asked, with a
contemptuous curl of those cynical lips. “Deverill sent you, I suppose.
You’ve come all this way to spy upon me and my wife as his flunkey.”
Franz took a step forward, and glared at him fiercely from under his
eyebrows. “I have not, liar,” he answered, his fingers twitching. “I
didn’t know you were here, and I am no man’s flunkey.”
The return to his native air and his native costume, coupled with the
gravity and danger of the situation, seemed to have raised him all at
once from the music-hall level to the higher and nobler plane of the
Tyrolese mountaineer. He looked and moved every inch a freeman—nay,
more, he confronted Andreas with such haughty self-confidence that his
enemy, surprised, drew back half-a-step and surveyed him critically.
“That’s a very strange coincidence,” Andreas murmured, after a short
pause. “It’s curious you should choose the exact moment to come when I
happened to be at St Valentin.”
Franz scowled at him yet again. “You can take it how you like,” he
retorted, in German, with a toss of the head in his old defiant fashion.
“If you choose to think I came here to follow you and fight you, you’re
at liberty to think so. I’m ready, if you are. I’ve an old cause of
quarrel against you, recollect, Andreas Hausberger. You robbed me by
fraud long ago of the woman I loved; you married her by force; and
you’ve made her life unhappy. If I dogged you, which I haven’t done, I’d
have cause enough and to spare. You remember that first night when I saw
you in London, in Mrs Palmer’s box at the Harmony Theatre? Well, if it
hadn’t been for the presence of the woman I loved—the woman you stole
from me—that very first night, you false cur, I’d have buried my knife
in you.”
Andreas drew back yet another pace. He was taller than Franz, very big
and powerful. With a contemptuous look, he measured his enemy from head
to foot. “Why, you couldn’t, you fool,” he answered, drawing himself up
to his full height. “I never yet was afraid of you or of any man. Many’s
the time I’ve turned you, drunk, out of this very room. I’ll turn you
out again if you dare to speak so to me!”
He was wearing a Tyrolese hat, just like Franz’s own; he had bought it
at Jenbach on his eastward route, to return, as was his wont, at each
fresh visit home, to the simplicity and freedom of his native mountains.
Before Franz’s very eyes he removed it from his head, and, with a sneer
on his face, turned the blackcock’s feather Robbler-wise as a challenge
of defiance.
No Robbler on earth could overlook such a wager of battle. Trembling
with rage, Franz Lindner sprang forth, and leaped angrily towards him.
His face was black as night; his brow was like thunder. He snatched the
hat from Andreas’s head with a deft flank movement, and tore hastily
from its band the offending emblem.
“Was kost die Feder?” he cried, in a tone of angry contempt, holding it
up triumphantly before its owner’s eyes. All the west was blotted out;
Franz Lindner was himself again. He was a Robbler once more, with the
hot blood of his Robblerhood boiling fierce within him.
Quick as lightning, the familiar answer rang out in clear tones, “Fünf
Finger und ein Griff!” Andreas brooked no such insult. “Five fingers and
a grip”—he should have if he wanted them.
Before Cousin Fridolin had time to understand what was passing before
his eyes, or to intervene to prevent it—in the twinkle of an eye, with
extraordinary rapidity, the two men had closed, hands and arms fast
locked, and were grappling with one another in a deadly struggle. Franz
flung himself upon his foe like a tiger in its fury. One moment, his
knife flashed high in air. Cousin Fridolin rushed forward, and strove to
tear them asunder. But, before he could reach them, that gleaming blade
had risen above Franz’s head and flashed down again, with unerring aim,
on Andreas Hausberger’s bosom. The big man fell back heavily, both hands
pressed to his heart, where black blood was oozing out in long, deep,
thick gurgles.
With a sudden jerk, Franz flung down the knife he had wrenched from the
wound. It stuck quivering by its point in the wooden flooring. Then he
thrust his hands into his pockets, with one foot pushed forward. He
clenched his teeth, and bent his head towards the dying man’s body. “I
always meant to kill you,” he cried, in his gratified rage, “and, thank
God and all blessed saints, to-day I’ve done it.”
Cousin Fridolin jumped forward, and bent aghast over the body. But Franz
stood still, gazing on it calmly. At that moment, the door opened, and
Linnet entered.
CHAPTER LI
EXIT FRANZ LINDNER
The first thing Linnet felt, as she sprang forward to her husband, who
lay dying or dead on the floor in front of her, was a pervading sense,
not of sorrow or of affection, but of horror at a great crime
successfully accomplished. “You’ve killed him, you’ve killed him!” she
cried aloud to Franz. “O Fridolin, quick, quick, run and fetch the Herr
Vicar! He’s breathing still; I can hear him ever breathing! Perhaps
there’s time yet for him to receive extreme unction.”
To all of them, the sacraments were the chief things to be thought of.
Fridolin hurried off as he was bid, rousing the house as he went with a
loud cry of alarm to come and look after Linnet. But Linnet herself sat
on the ground all aghast, with her husband’s head laid heavy in her lap,
trying to staunch his wound helplessly, and wringing her hands now and
again in a blind agony of terror. Meanwhile, Franz stood by as if wholly
unmoved, regarding the entire scene with a certain sardonic and
triumphant self-satisfaction. He wouldn’t die for nothing, as things had
turned out now; he had avenged himself at least on his lifelong enemy!
He stood there many minutes, with his hands in his pockets, growing
cooler and cooler as he reflected on his deed, and more and more glad in
his heart to think he had done it. So Linnet at least would be free! it
was ever something to have rid her of Andreas Hausberger! Men and women
came in, and lifted Andreas where he lay, and stretched him on the bed
in the adjoining room, and stripped off part of his clothes, and washed
the wound, and examined it. But nobody as yet thought of arresting Franz
or molesting him in any way. He stood there still, the one wholly
unconcerned and careless person in that excited assembly. His rage had
cooled down by this time, and he was perfectly collected. He was waiting
for the village authorities to come and take him into custody.
The priest arrived in due time, with the holy oil and the viaticum; but,
pronouncing Andreas dead, refused to administer the sacraments. The
doctor came, too, a little later than the priest, and confirmed the Herr
Vicar’s unfavourable verdict. Linnet sat and wrung her hands by the
bedside where he lay, more at the suddenness of the event, and the
unexpected horror of it, than from any real sense of affection or
bereavement. The little crowd in the room gathered in small knots and
whispered low around Franz. But Franz stood coolly looking on, without
making an attempt to escape, less interested in what had occurred than
anyone else in the village. What was one murder more to the man who was
wanted from Monte Carlo to St Valentin?
By-and-by, a fresh commotion arose outside the inn. The crowd in the
room divided, and buzzed eagerly. The Herr Landrath, they said, had come
to arrest the murderer. Franz looked around him defiantly, as they
whispered and stared at him. But no man laid a hand on him. No man dared
to touch him. The Landrath himself hesitated to enter the place where
the dead man lay, and arrest the murderer, red-handed, in presence of
the priest, the corpse, the widow. “Is Franz Lindner in there?” he asked
solemnly from the doorway.
And Franz answered in a firm and unshaken voice, “He is so, Herr
Kaiserlich-Königlich Commissary.”
“Come out,” the official said. And with a bold and haughty tread Franz
Lindner came out to him.
“In the name of the Emperor-King, I arrest you, Franz Lindner, for the
wilful murder of Andreas Hausberger in this village,” the Commissary
said sternly, laying his hand on his prisoner’s shoulder.
Franz laughed a discordant laugh. “And, in the name of the Emperor-King,
you shall run for it, by Our Blessed Frau,” he answered, contemptuously.
He shook the hand from his shoulder with an easy jerk, and pushed back