Linnet: A Romance

To enlist the Church on his side was therefore Andreas Hausberger’s first and chief endeavour. With this object in view, he took the unwonted step of confessing himself in due form to the priest of the pro-Cathedral the very day after Linnet left him. ’Twas a well-timed confession. Andreas admitted to the full his own misconduct – admitted it with a most exemplary and edifying show of masculine contrition. But then he went on to point out to the priest that between his wife’s case and his there was a great gulf fixed, from the point of view of the ecclesiastical vision. He had sinned, it was true, and deserved reprehension; but he was anxious, all the same, to remain in close union as ever with his wife, to admit the obligation and sanctity of the sacrament. Frau Hausberger, on the other hand, had left his hearth and home, and seemed now on the very point of falling into the hands of heretics, who might persuade her to accept the dissolving verdict of a mere earthly court, and to marry again during her husband’s lifetime, in open defiance of the Church’s authority. Her soul was thus placed in very serious jeopardy. If she continued to remain with Will or with Will’s friends, and if they over-persuaded her to obtain a divorce, she would become a Protestant, or at any rate would enter into an irregular union which no Catholic could regard as anything other than legalised adultery.

The justness and soundness of Herr Hausberger’s views deeply impressed the candid mind of his confessor. It is pleasant indeed, in these degenerate days, to find a layman who so thoroughly enters into the Church’s idea as to the obligation of the sacraments. Moreover, to let a well-known lamb of the flock thus stray from the fold before the eyes of all Europe – and on such a question – the confessor saw well would be a serious calamity. Indeed, the Church had somewhat prided itself in its way on Signora Casalmonte. It had pointed to her more than once as a conspicuous example of pure Catholic life under trying circumstances. A Tyrolese peasant-girl, brought up in a country where Catholic influences still bear undisputed sway, and transplanted to the most dangerous and least approved of professions, she had comported herself on the stage, in spite of every temptation, with conspicuous modesty and religious feeling. Beautiful, graceful, much admired, much sought after in all the capitals of Europe, she had resisted the many snares that beset a singer’s career, and had shown a singular instance of pure domestic life in a sphere where such life is, alas, too uncommon. So much could the lessons of the Church effect; so great was the lasting power of early Catholic influences.

And now, if they must eat their own words publicly, and go back on their own encomiums, if Linnet, on whom they had prided themselves as a shining example of the success of their method, was to go off before the eyes of all the world with a non-Catholic poet – worse still, if she was to fly in the face of their most cherished principles, and request a divorce at the hands of purely secular judges, Catholicism itself would receive a serious blow in the eyes of many doubtful or wavering adherents. A person like the Casalmonte commands public attention. Of course, if the worst came to the worst, it would be easy enough for the Church to disown her; easy enough to remark, with a casual little sneer, that Rome had never approved of the theatrical profession – above all, for women. Still, it is a good pastor’s duty, if possible, to save, above all things, the souls of his flock; and the first thing to do, it was clear, the confessor thought, was to bring the Casalmonte back again into subjection to her own husband. They must strain every nerve to prevent her obtaining or even demanding a divorce; they must strive, if they could, to obviate a gross and open scandal.

Actuated by such motives, and by many others of a more technical character, the confessor, after some demur, consented at last to the somewhat unusual course of calling upon the lost lamb, if her whereabouts could be found, and endeavouring to save her either from open sin or still more open rebellion. As soon as he learned she hadn’t gone off with Will Deverill, but was quietly staying with a wealthy American lady, an intimate friend of her suspected lover’s, the priest made up his sapient mind at once this meant a determination to seek a divorce, which must instantly be combated by every means in his power. So he worked upon Linnet’s susceptible Southern nature by striking successively all the profoundest chords of religion, shame, penitence, remorse, and terror. He appalled her with the authoritative voice of the Church; he convicted her of sin; he overawed her with the mysterious sanctity of a divine sacrament. Before he had finished his harangue, Linnet crouched and cowered in abject fear before him. She loved Will with all her heart: she would always love him; she hated Andreas with all her soul: she couldn’t help but hate him. Still, if God and the Church so ordained, she would follow that man she hated, till death them did part; she would forsake that man she loved, though her heart broke with love for him.

Andreas seized his opportunity; he struck while the iron was hot. His brougham was at the door; he had sent their luggage on to Charing Cross before him. In haste and trembling, he hurried Linnet away, hardly even waiting for Ellen to bring down the portmanteau with her jewellery and necessaries. They drove straight to Charing Cross, and took the Club train southwards. That night they spent in Paris. Linnet, heart-broken but calm, insisted on separate rooms; for that, at least, she must stipulate; she would follow him, she said, as the Church directed, to the bitter end, but never again while he lived should he dare to lay those heavy hands of his upon her. Next morning, they took the early express to Innsbruck, via Zurich and the Vorarlberg. Two evenings later, they sat together at St Valentin.

How strange it all seemed to her now, that familiar old world of her own native Tyrol! Everything was there, just as of yore, to be sure – land, people, villages – but oh, how small, how petty, how mean, how shrunken! St Valentin had dwindled down to a mere collection of farm-houses; the church, whose green steeple once looked so tall and great, had grown short and stumpy and odd and squalid-looking; the Wirthshaus, that once prosperous and commodious inn, seemed in her eyes to-day a mere fourth-rate little simple country tavern. To all of us, when we revisit well-known scenes of our childhood, space seems to have shrunk, the world to have grown smaller and meaner and uglier. But to Linnet, the change seemed even greater than to most of us. She had been taken straight away from that petty hamlet, and elevated with surprising rapidity into European fame – a popular favourite of Milan and Naples, Rome and Paris, Munich and Brussels, London and Vienna. The break in her life had been sudden and enormous; she had passed at once, as it were, from the village inn to the courts of kings and the adulation of great cities. And now, when she came back again, all was blank and dreary. The dear mother was dead; Will Deverill was away, and she might not see him; the Herr Vicar turned out a greasy, frowsy Austrian parish priest; Cousin Fridolin had a fat wife and two dirty-faced babies. The poetry seemed to have faded out of the Tyrol she once knew; the very cow-bells rang harsh – and Will Deverill, who could make music of them, was away over in London.

Only Nature itself remained to console her. And Andreas in his wisdom allowed her to commune much with Nature. The eternal hills had still some slight balm for her wounded spirit. Linnet and her husband stopped as guests at the Wirthshaus; it was Andreas’s still, but he had let it to Cousin Fridolin. In the morning, after Linnet had gulped down the coffee and roll that seemed to half choke her, she would stroll up the hill behind the village inn, and sit on the boulders, just above the belt of pine wood, where she had sat long ago hand in hand with Will Deverill. The village children sometimes came and gazed at her, and whispered to one another in an awestruck undertone how this was Lina Telser, who once minded cows in a châlet on the Alps, and who was now the Casalmonte, a great, rich singer in England, with diamonds in her box, and grand rings on her fingers. Linnet dressed very simply for this mountain life, and tried to seem the same as of yore to Cousin Fridolin, and the priest, and the good old neighbours: but, ah me, how changed was the world of the Tyrol! And how curious it seemed to hear the same familiar chatter still running on about the same old gossips, the same petty jealousies, the same narrow hopes, and fears, and ideals, when she herself had passed through so much, meanwhile – had known other men, new ideas, strange cities!

So for a fortnight, Linnet lived on, scarcely speaking to Andreas, but sitting by herself on those springtide hills, where the globe-flowers scattered gold with a stintless hand and the orchids empurpled whole wide tracts of the meadows. She sat there – and thought of Will – and obeyed the Church – and followed Andreas. Yet, oh, how strange that God and our hearts should be thus at open war! that Nature should tell us one thing and the Church another! ’Twas a consequence of the Fall of Man, the Herr Vicar assured her; for the heart, the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked. And it was desperately wicked of her, no doubt, to think so much about Will; but there – Church or no Church, Linnet couldn’t help thinking of him.

She was resigned, in a way; very much resigned; her heart had been crushed once for all when she married Andreas. It had flared up in a fitful flicker of open rebellion when she left his house and flung herself fiercely on Will Deverill’s bosom; and then – Will himself had bruised the broken reed, had quenched the smoking flax, and sent her away hurt, bleeding, and humiliated. He did it for her own sake, she knew, but, oh, she would have loved him better if he’d been a little less thoughtful for her, less noble, less generous! Loved him better? Oh no; to love him better would be impossible! But they would both have been happier, with the world well lost, and present love for the reward of Paradise closed to them hereafter.

Purgatory? Ah, what did she care for their purgatory now! To count one year of love fulfilled with Will, she would gladly give her poor body to be burnt in burning hell for ever and ever. It was the Church that intervened to prevent it, not she; for herself, she was Will’s; she could live for him, she could die for him, she could lose her own soul for him.

She never said a word to Cousin Fridolin and his wife, or to the people of St Valentin, of her relations with Andreas. Still, the villagers guessed them all. Simple villagers know more of the world than we reckon. She was rich, she was grand, they said, since she’d married the Wirth, and become a great lady: but she wasn’t happy with Herr Andreas; he was cold and unkind to her. Those marks on her little wrists – they were surely the impress of Herr Andreas’s big fingers; those red eyes, that pale face – they were surely the result of Herr Andreas’s infidelities. Money, after all, isn’t everything in this world: Lina Telser had diamonds and pearls at command, and she drank fine red wine, specially brought from Innsbruck; but she would have been happier, people thought at St Valentin in the Zillerthal, if she’d married Cousin Fridolin, or even Franz Lindner!

CHAPTER XLVII

SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED

Franz Lindner! And how was Franz Lindner engaged during these stormy days? He was working out by degrees his own scheme in life for making himself rich, and so, as he thought, acceptable to Linnet.

With great difficulty, partly by saving and hoarding with Tyrolese frugality, partly by rare good luck in following a fortunate tip for last autumn’s Cesarewitch, Franz had scraped together at last the five hundred pounds which he required for working his “system” at Monte Carlo. The royal road to wealth now lay open before him. So he started blithely from Victoria one bright spring morning, bound southward straight through by the rapide to Nice, with his heart on fire, and his capital in good Bank of England notes in his pocket. He meant to stop at Nice, not at Monte Carlo itself, because he was advised that living was cheaper in the larger town; and Franz, being a Tyroler, reflected with prudence that even when one’s going to win twenty thousand pounds, it’s best to be careful in the matter of expenditure till one’s sure one’s got them.

At Calais, he found a place in the through carriage for the Riviera. With great presence of mind, indeed, he secured a corner seat by pushing in hastily past a fumbling old lady with an invalid daughter. The opposite corner was already occupied by a handsome man – tall, big-built, rather dark, with brilliant black eyes, and abundant curly hair, of somewhat southern aspect. As Franz entered the carriage, the stranger scanned him, casually, with an observant glance. He had the air of a gentleman this stranger, but he was affable for all that; he entered into conversation very readily with Franz, first in English, then more fully in German, which latter tongue he spoke quite fluently. Part of his education had been acquired at Heidelberg, he said in explanation, before he went to Oxford; ’twas there he had picked up his perfect mastery of German idiom. As a matter of fact, he had picked it up rather by mixing with Jewish shop-boys from Frankfort in Denver City, Colorado; for the stranger was no other than Mr Joaquin Holmes, the Psycho-physical Entertainer, flying southward to restore his fallen fortunes at Monte Carlo.

Fate had used her Seer rather badly of late. His failure to sell Andreas’s letter to Linnet was the last straw that broke the camel’s back of Mr Holmes’s probity. Thought-reading had by this time gone quite out of fashion; Theosophy and occult science were now all in the ascendant. There were no more dollars to be made any longer out of odic force; so Mr Holmes was compelled by adverse circumstances, very much against his will, to take refuge at last in his alternative and less reputable profession of card-sharper. With that end in view, he was now on his way to the Capital of Chance in the Principality of Monaco. Where gamblers most do congregate is naturally the place for a dexterous manipulator of the pack to make his fortune. Mr Holmes was somewhat changed in minor detail as to his outer man, in order to avoid too general recognition. His hair was cut shorter; his beard was cut sharper; his moustache – a hard wrench – was altogether shaved off; and sundry alterations in his mode of dress, especially the addition of a most unnecessary pince-nez, had transformed him, in part, from the aspect of a keen and piercing Transatlantic thought-reader to that of a guileless English mercantile gentleman. But his vivid black eyes were still sharp and eager and shifty as ever; his denuded mouth, now uncovered at the corners, showed still more of a cynical smile than before; and his complete expression was one of mingled astuteness and deferential benevolence – the former, native to his face, the latter, by long use, diligently trained and cultivated.

Before they reached Paris, Seer and singer had put themselves on excellent terms with one another. They had even exchanged names in a friendly way, the Seer giving his, for obvious reasons, as plain Mr Holmes, without the distinguishing Joaquin; it was safer so: there are plenty of Holmeses scattered about through the world, and the name’s not compromising; while, on the other hand, if any London acquaintance chanced to come up and call him by it, such initial frankness avoided complications. Franz Lindner, more cautious and less wise in his way, gave his name unblushingly as Karl von Forstemann, a Vienna proprietor, out of pure foolish secretiveness. He had no reason for changing his ordinary style and title, except that he wished to be taken at Monte Carlo for an Austrian gentleman, not a music-hall minstrel. The Seer smiled blandly at the transparent lie; Franz’s accent and manner no more resembled those of a Viennese Junker than his staring tweed suit and sky-blue tie resembled the costume of an English gentleman.

However, the prudent Seer reflected immediately to himself that this sort was created for his especial benefit. Behold, a pigeon! He was even more affable than usual on that very account to Herr Karl von Forstemann. He offered him brandy out of his Russia-leather covered flask; he invited him to share his anchovy sandwiches; he regretted there was no smoking compartment on the through carriage for Mentone, or he might have introduced his new friend to a very choice brand of fragrant Havana. Going to Cannes? or San Remo? Ah, Nice! that was capital. They’d travel together all night then, without change of companions, for he himself was going on straight through to Monte Carlo.

At that charmed name, which the Seer pronounced with a keenly cautious side-glance, Franz pricked up his ears. Monte Carlo! ach, so? really? Did he play, then? The cautious Seer smiled a deep and wary smile of consummate self-restraint. Play? no, not he; the Casino was rubbish: he went there for the scenery, the music, the attractions. Occasionally of an evening, to be sure, he might just drop into the Rooms to observe what was happening. If a run of luck came on any particular colour – or number, or series, as the case might be – now and again he would back it – once in a week or a blue moon – for pure amusement. But as to making money at it – bah, bah, what puerile nonsense! With odds on the bank – one chance in thirty-six – no scientific player could regard it in that light for one moment. As excitement – “I grant you,” yes, all very well; one got one’s fun for one’s louis: but as speculation, investment, trial for luck – if it came to that – why, everybody knew it was all pure moonshine.

Franz listened with a smile, and looked preternaturally cunning. That was all very well in its way, he said, with a sphinx-like face – for the general public; but he had a System.

The Seer’s eye was grave; the Seer’s face was solemn; only about the corners of his imperturbable mouth could a faint curl have betrayed his inner feelings to the keenest observer. A System! oh, well, of course, that was altogether different. No one knew what a clever and competent mathematician might do with a System. Though, mark you, mathematicians had devised the tables, too; they had carefully arranged so that no possible combination could avoid the extra chances which the bank reserved to itself. However, experience – experience is the only solid guide in these matters. Let him try his System, by all means; and if it worked – with stress on that if – Mr Holmes would be glad for his own part to adopt it. If it didn’t, he could show him a trick worth two of that – a game where the players stood at even chances, with no rapacious bank to earn a splendid dividend and pay royally for the maintenance of a palatial establishment. And with that, he tucked himself up and subsided into his corner.

All night through, on their way to Marseilles, they slept or dozed at intervals – and then woke up once more to discuss by fits and starts that enthralling subject of winning at Monte Carlo. The fumbling old lady and her invalid daughter, propped upright in the middle seats, got no sleep to speak of, with their perpetual chatter. Before morning, the two men were excellent friends with one another. Franz liked Mr Holmes. He was a jolly, outspoken, good-natured gentleman, very kindly and well-disposed, and he recommended him to a good cheap hotel at Nice, lying handy to the station, for a man who wanted to run over pretty often to Monte Carlo. Franz went there as he was bid, and found it not amiss; ’twas pleasant, after so long a stay in England, to discover himself once more amongst compatriots, or next door – to talk in his native tongue with Swiss porters, Swiss waiters, Swiss boots, and Swiss chambermaids. With the great bare mountains rising abruptly in the rear, Nice almost seemed to him like his beloved Fatherland. The strange longing for home which is peculiar to mountaineers came over him with a rush at sight of their lonely summits. Ach, Gott, – if it weren’t that he had his fortune to make at Monte Carlo, he’d have gone on, then and there, straight through to St Valentin!

That first evening, he rested after the fatigues of the journey. He merely strolled about on the Promenade des Anglais, in the cool of the evening, and lounged along the Quays or through the Public Garden. It was a fine town, Nice, and Franz was very much pleased with it. He had given his name at the hotel as Herr Karl von Forstemann, a gentleman from Vienna; and as he sauntered along now through that gay little city, with five hundred pounds sterling in his trousers pocket, and twenty thousand awaiting him in the bank at Monte Carlo, he felt for the moment like the person he called himself. His strut was still prouder and more jaunty than ever; he stared at the pretty girls under the palm-trees of the parade as if they all belonged to him; he twirled his short cane by the arcades of the Place Masséna with a millionaire swagger. After all, it’s easy as dirt to win thousands at roulette – if only you have a System. Strange how people will toil, and moil, and slave, and save, at a desk in London, when, here by this basking tideless Southern sea, this Tom Tiddler’s ground of fortune, they might pick up coin at will just as one picks up pebbles!

Franz broke a bottle of champagne at ten o’clock, discounting his success, with two awfully jolly fellows he’d come across in the smoking-room. Nice seemed to be just cram-full of awfully jolly fellows! Then he went to bed early, and slept the sleep of the just till morning. After a cup of fragrant coffee and a fresh French roll – so unlike that bad bread man gets in London – he lounged over to the station, and took a first-class return to Monte Carlo. Oh, that exquisite journey! How bright it was, how sweet, how fairy-fair, how beautiful! Like all Tyrolese, Franz Lindner was by no means insensible to the charms of Nature; and that man must be blind and seared and dull indeed who wouldn’t gaze with hushed delight, the first time he saw them, on those endless blue bays, those craggy cliffs, those towering heights, those jagged precipices. Villefranche, with its two promontories and its quaint white town; the Cap Ferrat and its twin lighthouses; the peninsula of St Jean, with its indented outline; the great bluffs of Beaulieu; the tunnelled headlands of the coast; green water breaking white on tumbled masses in the sea; Eza, perched high on its pinnacle of rearing rock; the bastions of Monaco, rising sheer like some basking whale from the purple waves beneath; the hanging gardens of La Condamine, the bare mountains in the background: Franz drank them all in with delight and enthusiasm. But all only sharpened his zest for the game he had in view; what an enchanted tract of coast it was, to be sure, this land that led him up to the Palace of Luck, where he was to woo and win his twenty thousand pounds sterling!

He wouldn’t leave off till he had won it, every penny; on that he was determined. None of your beggarly ten or fifteen thousands for him! Twenty thousand pounds down was the goal he set before him. After that – well, who knows? He might perhaps stop.. or – why this moderation? – he might perhaps go on, if he chose, and double it.

In such heroic mood, like a winner already, Franz mounted the broad steps of the great white Casino. Its magnificence for a moment abashed and daunted him. He had never yet entered so splendid a building; never trod so fine a room as that gorgeous atrium. However, he reflected next instant that he came there that day armed with the passport which makes a man welcome wherever he may go the wide world over – the talismanic passport of money in his pocket. Regaining his usual swagger as he mounted the steps, he followed the crowd into the office where cards of admission were issued, and gave his name boldly once more, in a very firm voice, as Herr von Forstemann of Vienna. Then, provided with the necessary pasteboard which ensures admission to the rooms, he still followed the stream into the vast, garish hall which contains the gaming tables. Its size and its gorgeousness fairly took the man’s breath away. Though the hour was still early, as Franz now reckoned time in his cosmopolitanised avatar, he was surprised to find so immense a crowd of players gathered in deep rows round table after table, opening into long perspective of saloon after saloon in the farther distance. He drew up to the first roulette-board, and watched the play carefully for several minutes. Though he had studied the subject beforehand with books and diagrams, and had made sure, as he thought, of the truth of his System by frequent imaginary trials, it interested him immensely to see at last in real life, and with tangible actors, the scene he had so long contemplated in his feverish day-dreams.