Linnet: A Romance
the Landrath, who was a heavy man of more than middle-age, with those
two stout arms of his. “Follow and catch me, who can,” he cried,
laughing loud once more, “Kaiserlich-Königlich Commissary!” And before
they all knew what was happening under their eyes, with a bound like a
wild beast Franz had darted to the door, pushed his way through the
little group that obstructed the threshold, hit out right and left with
elbows and fists against all who strove to stop him, tripped up the
first man who tried to seize him by the coat, and sprung by the
well-known path up the free mountains behind them.
“Follow him!” the Commissary gasped out, collecting his breath, and
pulling himself together again after the unexpected shaking. “In the
law’s name and the Emperor-King’s, all good subjects, follow him!”
Three or four of the younger men, thus adjured and called on personally
to arrest the criminal, darted after him at full speed up the slope of
the mountain. But they followed just at first with somewhat half-hearted
zeal; for why should they wish thus to seal the fate of an old friend
and comrade? As they advanced, Franz waved his hat derisively a hundred
yards in front of them. In his old _jäger_ days, not Fridolin Telser
himself was so swift to follow the clambering chamois among the peaks
and pinnacles above the pine-clad forest. All those years of indulgence
in crowded cities had weakened his bodily vigour and relaxed his
muscles; but in soul he felt himself still once more as of old the free
mountain hunter. “Come on!” he shouted aloud, with a wild jodel of
challenge. “Come, and catch me if you can. Who comes first, gets my fist
in his face and knife in his heart. Arrest me if you dare. If you try
it, you may sup to-night in purgatory, at a table side by side with
Andreas Hausberger!”
He fled up the mountain with incredible speed for a person so out of
training; but his native air braced him, and the double excitement of
the last few days seemed to stimulate his nerves and limbs to
extraordinary energy. A man runs his best when he runs for his life. On
and on Franz mounted, past the pinewood and the boulder where Linnet sat
long ago with Will Deverill, and up to the crags beyond, where blank
patches of snow still lurked here and there in the sunless crevices.
Every now and again he looked back to see how far he had distanced his
pursuers. He gained at each step. He had one great advantage. He was
flying for dear life, whither or why he knew not; they were following
unwillingly, in the name of the law, the footsteps of an old friend and
boon companion.
Above, all was snow. In those northward valleys winter loiters late, and
spring comes but tardily. Once among the _firn_, Franz could give them
the slip, he felt sure; he could lurk behind rocks, or hide among the
klamms, and let the baffled pursuers pass by unnoticing. But no—but
no—ach, Gott! the footprints! With a sudden revulsion he realised his
error. Those years in milder climates had made him forget for a moment
the hopelessness of escaping if once he reached the snow-line. Appalled
and dismayed, he turned and hesitated. Then he dashed off at an angle,
horizontally along the hill, at the same general level, so as to avoid
the snow-covered glaciers. That one false move lost him. His pursuers,
seeing him double, headed forward diagonally across the third side of
the triangle, and gained on him visibly. Franz was blown and panting.
His heart throbbed hard; he had overtaxed it sadly in that first wild
burst up the ramping hillside. Again he paused, and looked back. The
hopelessness and futility of the whole thing broke in upon him. If he
ran all day and all night as well—if he distanced that little body of
amateur pursuers for the moment—what would it profit him in the end?
Could he evade arrest at last? could he escape the clutches of the
Austrian law, shake off the strong hand of the Kaiserlich-Königlich
government?
All at once, seized with a sudden little access of despair, he sat down
on the hillside, and laughed aloud audibly. “Ha, ha, ha,” he cried,
hoarsely, at the very top of his voice, as his antagonists drew nearer,
“So you think you’ll catch me! You think you’ll get well paid! You want
to earn a reward on me! Well, look here, Ludwig Dangl,” and he shouted
through his bent hand to the foremost of his pursuers, “there’s ten
thousand florins set on my head already for stabbing a man dead in an
hotel at Monte Carlo—and it’s yours . . . if you catch me! Come on,
friend, and earn it!”
He had grown reckless now. The dare-devil spirit of the man who knows
well he has forfeited his life and has no chance of escape left, had
wholly taken hold of him. He sat there, by the Kamin, waiting till the
pursuers were almost upon him. “Ten thousand florins!” he shouted aloud
once more, waving his hat above his head, as he jumped up when they
neared him. “Ten thousand florins is a nice round sum! Will you have it,
Ludwig Dangl? will you have it, Karl Furst? will you have it, Fritz
Mairhofer?”
His very recklessness appalled them. The men thought he must be mad.
They paused, and stared hard at him. There were only three now. Neither
liked to advance first. Franz waved his hat frantically, and beckoned
them on towards the weathered crags that overlook St Valentin. Great
rocks there rose sheer over fissured gullies. The men hardly ventured to
follow him up to those frowning heights. Heaven knows what a madman, in
such a mood as that, may do or dare among the cleft troughs and gorges!
They halted,—debated,—then came on towards him, abreast, more slowly,
step by step, in a little formed body. But Franz, now restored by a
momentary pause, leaped upward like a chamois over the steep path in
front of him. The fresh mountain air seemed to nerve and invigorate him.
On, on, he bounded swift over the jagged steps in the rock, till he
poised himself at last like a mountain goat on the very edge of the
precipice. It was a sheer cliff that looked down on a great snowdrift in
a ravine two hundred feet beneath him. The Robbler instinct in Franz’s
blood had now gained complete mastery. He waved his hat again, with its
feather turned insultingly. “Ten thousand florins!” he cried once more,
in his loudest voice. “Ten thousand florins! Who wants them? Who’ll earn
them?”
He laughed aloud in their faces. The three men drew on cautiously. Franz
waited till they came up. Then Ludwig Dangl, mustering up courage to
take the first step, stood forward and laid hands on him. Straightway
Franz seized his assailant round the body with a wrestler’s grip. Ludwig
tried to disengage himself; but ’twas a narrow and dangerous spot for
wrestling. With a sudden wrench, Franz lifted him from the ground.
Holding him grasped in his arms, he looked over the edge of the
precipice. Next instant, he had leaped, with Ludwig Dangl in his
embrace. One loud cry burst at once from both their straining throats. A
cry of wild triumph; a cry of fierce despair. Then all was silence.
The other two men, looking awestruck and horrified over the edge of the
crag, saw them fall two hundred feet sheer into the soft snow beneath.
It received them gently. Not a sign marked the spot where the two bodies
sank in. The soft snow closed over them. But they must have been dead
many seconds before they reached the bottom.
CHAPTER LII
A CONFESSION OF FAITH
It was a terrible time for Linnet, those few days at the inn, while she
waited to bury her murdered husband. She felt so lonely, here among her
own people; her isolation came out even more vividly than she could have
expected: she had outgrown them, that was the fact, and they could no
longer sympathise with her. Their very deference and respect chilled her
heart to the core in that appalling season of solitary wretchedness:
they regarded her just in the light of the great lady from London, too
grand and too fine for them to venture upon comforting her. So Linnet
was forced to have out her dark hour by herself, and be content for the
rest with the respectful silence of her poor fellow-country-people.
The first night, in particular, was a very painful trial to her. By
evening, they had brought back Franz’s body from the snowdrift; and now
it lay with Ludwig Dangl beside her dead husband’s in the dancing-hall
that stood just below the very room where Linnet had to spend the first
night of her widowhood. Though she kept the candle burning, and the
crucifix by her side, the awful sense of solitude through the long slow
hours, with those three hostile corpses lying side by side in the hall
beneath her, made her shudder with affright each time she woke with a
start from a snatch of hurried sleep, much disturbed by hateful dreams,
to the reality of her still more hateful position.
Early next morning, however, a messenger arrived post haste from Zell,
with a telegram directed to Frau Hausberger, St Valentin. Linnet tore it
open mechanically, half dreading some fresh surprise. As she read it,
she drew a deep breath. Oh, that dear, dear Rue! This was quite too good
of her. “Have heard of your trouble, and sympathise with you deeply. Am
on my way to join you. Shall reach St Valentin to-morrow evening.”
It was a measure to Linnet of how English she had become, that, as she
stood on the platform at Jenbach next day, awaiting the arrival of Rue’s
train from Innsbruck, she felt as though she were expecting the advent
of some familiar home-friend, coming to cheer her solitude in a land of
strangers. When at last the train drew up, Rue leapt from the carriage
into her rival’s arms, and caressed her tenderly. Linnet looked sweet in
her simple dark dress, the plainest she possessed, for she hadn’t yet
had time to get her mourning ready. “How did you hear of it all, you
dear kind Rue?” she inquired, half-hysterically, clasping her new friend
to her bosom in a sudden outburst of sated sympathy. “It couldn’t surely
have got so soon into the English papers.”
“No, dear,” Rue answered, in her tenderest tone, laying one soft hand
soothingly on the pale cheek as she answered. “I’d written to St
Valentin beforehand, to some one whose address Will Deverill gave me,
asking for news of you every day, and enclosing money; and he
telegraphed to me at once as soon as all this happened. His name’s
Fridolin Telser, and Will says he is a cousin of yours. So, of course,
as soon as I heard, I felt I must come out, post haste, to join you; for
I knew, Linnet, how lonely you’d be—and how much in need of a woman’s
sympathy.”
Linnet answered nothing. That “of course” was too much for her. She
burst into tears instead, and sobbed her full heart out contentedly on
Rue’s friendly shoulder. They drove back to St Valentin hand-in-hand
together. That night, Rue slept with her, in a little room in the
village; and though they talked for hours with one another, and only
dozed at intervals, Linnet rose next morning fresher and stronger by far
than she had felt at any time since the day of the murder.
Rue stopped on with her all that week, till Andreas was buried, and she
could leave St Valentin. Linnet shrank now from taking anything that had
ever been his. The Wirthshaus was to be sold: Cousin Fridolin bought it
at a low price with his hoarded savings, and the proceeds were to be
devoted to a new school for the village. The Herr Vicar, too, was richer
by many masses for the repose of the unworthy soul which Linnet felt
sure had now much need of his orisons. Nor were even Franz Lindner and
Ludwig Dangl forgotten: the shrine on the hill-top, by the Chamois
Rocks, marking the spot whence they took their fatal leap, was erected,
the guides will tell you, “by the famous singer, Casalmonte, who came
originally from this village.”