That night again Franz didn’t trouble to undress. He lay on the bed in his clothes, and let the candle burn out as it would in its socket. Early next morning, with the restlessness of a hunted man, he rose betimes, and went down to the wonted breakfast of the inn with Cousin Fridolin. Their talk over their coffee was of Linnet and Andreas. Fridolin retailed to him, bit by bit, all the sinister surmises of the village gossips; people thought at St Valentin Andreas was jealous at last of his beautiful Frau—Fridolin let his voice drop to a confidential key—and had brought her away hither from some lover in London. Franz smiled bitterly at that thought; why, the man hadn’t heart enough in him to be even jealous—for one may be beneath jealousy as one may be above it. Was he unkind to her? Franz asked, curiously, as Cousin Fridolin broke off in the midst of a sentence.
Well, he didn’t exactlystrikeher, Cousin Fridolin believed; though, to be sure, when she first came to the inn, she bore marks of violence. But she cried all day, and she cried all night; and folks fancied in the village it might perhaps be for Will Deverill. At any rate, she and Andreas lost no love between them; man said it was only as a good Catholic she stopped with him.
After breakfast, Franz rose up and walked out on the road aimlessly. Restless still, with the ever-present fear of detection upon him, and with the fiery Tyrolese heart eating itself out within, he walked on and on, hardly knowing why he did so. At last he reached Zell, the little capital of the valley. It was early still, for he had started at daybreak; but already a strange group of whispering villagers crowded agog round the door of the post-office and telegraph, where the post-master was affixing an official notice. Franz joined them, and read. His blood ran cold within him. It was a Kaiserlich-Königlich police announcement of a public reward of ten thousand florins for information leading to the capture of one Karl von Forstemann of Vienna—age, height, and description as below annexed—accused of the murder of Joaquin Holmes, an American citizen, at Monte Carlo, and known to have returned to Austrian territory by Verona and Botzen, where he had altered his clothing, and gone on to Innsbruck.
As Franz read those damning words, he knew in a second all was really up with him. Once they had tracked him so far, they must track him to St Valentin. Again the instinct of his race drove him back towards his native village, after a word or two interchanged with his friends at the post-office. Those simple country souls never dreamt in their hearts of suspecting their old comrade, Franz Lindner thejäger, who had come back unexpectedly, like Andreas and Linnet, of being the Karl von Forstemann of Vienna referred to in the announcement. But Franz knew it couldn’t be long before the police were on his track; and he turned and fled upwards to his old home at St Valentin, like a fox to its lair, or a rabbit to its burrow.
All the way up the hill his soul seethed within him. He would sell his life dear, if the worst came to the worst; they should fight for it now before ever they took him. He had stopped at a shop at Zell to buy ajäger’sknife, in place of the one he had left behind him at Monte Carlo, in the card-sharper’s body. He stuck it ostentatiously in the leather belt he had bought at Botzen to complete his costume; as he went on his way, he fingered it ever and anon with affectionate familiarity. Old moods came back to him; with his feather in his hat and his blade by 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 mountainjäger!
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 quitetellhim, 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.
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 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 oldjägerdays, 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 thefirn, 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.
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.”
Rue went back with her friend to London, stopping a week or two by the way at quiet country spots in the Bavarian Highlands, on the Rhine, and in Belgium. ’Twas early June when they reached town. Rue wouldn’t hear of Linnet’s returning to her old house in St John’s Wood, where everything would remind her of that hateful past: she insisted that her “new sister,” as she called her, must share for the present her home in Hans Place, till other arrangements could be made for her. “Besides,” she added, with a little smile, full of deeper import, “it’ll save scandal, you know. You mustn’t live alone. It’s best you should stop in some other woman’s house, till you’ve arrived at some fixed understanding as to your future.”
It was in Rue’s drawing-room, accordingly, a few weeks later, that Linnet for the first time saw Will Deverill once more after all that had happened. With the same generous self-restraint he had always shown wherever Linnet’s reputation was concerned, Will had denied himself for many days the pleasure of calling upon her. When at last he came, Linnet made up her mind beforehand she should receive him with becoming calmness and dignity. But the moment Will entered the room, and took her two hands in his, and looked deep into her dark eyes, and stood there silent, thrilling through from head to foot at sight of her, yet rejoicing in heart at his one love recovered—why, as for Linnet, she just looked up at him, and drew short gasps of breath, and held his hands tight in her own, and then with a sweet half-unconscious self-surrender let herself fall slowly, slowly upon his bosom. There he allowed her to lie long without speaking one word to her. What need of words between those two who understood one another instinctively? what chance of concealing the hope and joy each felt, and knew, and communicated, unspoken, by mere contact to the other? For touch is to love the most eloquent of the senses.
At last they found words, and talked long and eagerly. There was no question between them now in what relation they must henceforth stand to one another. It was mere details of time, and place, and propriety—the when and how and where—that interested them at present. “But you can get a dispensation for me?” Linnet asked, nestling close to him.
Will smiled a gentle smile. “There’s little need of dispensation, for you and me, my darling,” he said, holding her hand tenderly. “You would have given me yourself once, in spite of the Church and the world: you can surely give me yourself now without a qualm of conscience, when the Church and the world will both smile approval. To me, Linnet, the whole sanctity of a union between us lies infinitely deeper than any man’s sanction, be he priest or Pope or king or lawgiver. As I said to you, once before, you are mine, and I am yours, not by any artificial bond, but by the voice of our hearts, which is the voice of nature and of God within us: and whom God hath joined together, man cannot join firmer, nor yet put asunder. But if it pleases you to ask some priest’s leave for the union no priest on earth can possibly make sacreder—yes; set your heart at rest about that, darling;—I’ve seen the Archbishop already, and he’s promised to get you the regular papal dispensation.”
Linnet leant back, and gazed up at him. Her gaze was half fear, half frank admiration. “Dearest Will,” she said, pleadingly, in her pretty foreign English, “you’re a man, I’m a woman, and therefore illogical: forgive me. I’ve been brought up to think one way, which I know is a dreadful way: my own heart tells me how foolish and cruel and wicked it is to think so; and yet—may the Blessed Madonna and all holy saints forgive me for saying it—I should be afraid of their anger and the eternal hell if I dared to disbelieve in what seems so cruel. You speak to me of another way, which my own heart tells me is just and pure and good and beautiful—which my head approves as common-sense and sound reasoning; and yet—may the Blessed Madonna forgive me again—though I try hard to believe it, the teachings of my childhood rise up at every step and prevent my accepting it. I can’t understand this mystery of open war between God and our hearts—between God, who made them, on the one hand, and what is best, not what is worst, within them, on the other. I pray for light, but no light comes. Why should God’s law fight so hard against God’s instincts in our souls—against all that we feel to be purest, noblest, truest, best in our nature?”
“Not God’s law,” Will said gently, smoothing her hand with his own, “but the priests’, Linnet, the priests’,—which is something quite different. God’s law is never some precept beyond and outside us: it is the law of our own being, the law of our own hearts, the law of the native instincts and impulses that stir us. Your marriage with Andreas, were it twenty times blessed by priest or by Pope, was from the very first moment an unholy and unnatural one. It was a sin against purity and your own body; it was a legalised lie, a lifelong adultery. You felt its shame yourself, and shrank from the man physically. Your heart was not his, so how could your body be? Even the laws of men would have allowed you to leave him and come home to me, whose complement and mate you are by nature, after his treatment of you that day, and your discovery of his letter to Philippina. But the laws of your Church, which are not the laws of men but the laws of priests—and therefore worse and more unnatural than even the common laws of mankind—forbade you to take advantage of the loophole of escape which divorce would permit you from that wicked union your priests had imposed upon you. The Church or the law that bids you live with a man you loathe and despise, that Church or law dishonours your own nature; that Church and that law is not of God, nor even of man, but of priests and the devil. The Church or the law that forbids you to live with the man your own heart dictates and points out to you, is equally of the devil. And see how it proves itself so! It needed the intervention of Franz Lindner’s knife to free you from your false union with Andreas Hausberger! Can that Church and that law be right or sound which make a murder the one loophole by which a soul can free itself from the unholy bond they would unwillingly impose upon it? Your own heart told you it was wrong and dishonouring to live with Andreas; your own heart shrank from his loveless embraces; your own heart showed you it was right to leave him, and fly away to the man you loved, the man that loved you. Will you believe that God’s law is worse than your own heart? Will you think there’s something divine in an institution of men which compels you to degrade and dishonour your own body, to sin so cruelly against your own pure instincts? Nothing can be wickeder, I say, than for a woman to sell herself or to yield herself in any way to a man she loathes. No Church and no law can make right of that wrong: it’s degrading and debasing to her moral nature. The moment a woman feels she gives herself up against her own free will and the instincts of her own heart, she is living in sin—and you know it, Linnet—though all the priests and all the Popes on earth should stretch robed arms and hands to bless and absolve her.”
He spoke with fierce conviction. Linnet nestled against his breast: his words overcame her. “I know it, Will, I know it,” she exclaimed, half-hysterically. “My heart told me so always—but I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it now,—though I know you’re right when I hear you speak so. Perhaps, some day, when I’ve lived with you long enough, I shall come to think and feel as you do. . . . But for the present, my darling, I’m so glad, oh, so glad,—don’t laugh at me for saying it—that you’ve got a dispensation.”
W. H. WHITE AND CO. LTD., RIVERSIDE PRESS, EDINBURGH
Obvious printer errors have been corrected.
Punctuation corrected including missing apostrophes and closing quotations necessary to the dialogue.
The use of hyphenated words has been retained. Where two spellings of the same word appear, the spelling with the highest frequency was adopted.
[The end ofLinnet; A Romance, by Grant Allen.]