In spite of the lateness of the season, and Will’s preoccupation, that visit to the Dolomites turned out a complete success. Rue was in excellent spirits; Florian was in fine form; Nature smiled compliance, as he consummately phrased it—in other words, the weather was lovely, the mountains clear of cloud, the horses fresh, and the roads (for Austria) in very good order. Their capacious carriage held its party of five comfortably,—for Rue, with her wonted wisdom, had consulted Mrs Grundy’s feelings by inviting an old Indian colonel and his wife, whose acquaintance she had picked up at the Erzherzog Johann, to accompany them on their trip, and chaperon the expedition. Rue herself enjoyed those four days immensely. She had lots of long talks with Will on the hillsides, and she noticed Will spoke much—though always in an abstract and highly impersonal way—of the human heart, its doubts and its difficulties. He was thinking of Linnet, who engaged his thoughts much during that enforced absence; but Rue imagined he was thinking of himself and her, and was glad accordingly. She was growing very fond of her English poet. She hoped and half-believed he in turn was growing fond of her.
As for Will, now he was away from Linnet for awhile, he began to think much more seriously than he had ever thought before of the nature of his relations with her, and the end to which they were inevitably leading him. As long as Linnet was near, as long as he could hold her hand in his, and look deep into her eyes, and hear that wonderful voice of hers carolling out some sweet song for his ear alone among the clambering vineyards,—why, he could think of nothing else but the passing joy and delight of her immediate presence. Imperceptibly, and half-unconsciously to himself, she had grown very dear to him. But now that he was away from her, and alone with Rue, he began to realise how much he longed to be once more by her side—how little he was prepared to do without her, how deeply she had entwined herself into his inmost being. Again and again the question presented itself to his mind, “When I go back to Meran, on what footing shall I stand with her? If I find it so hard to run away for four days, how shall I ever run away from her for ever and ever?”
Besides, during those few happy weeks at Meran, Linnet had begun to reveal herself to him as another person. He was catching faint glimpses now of the profounder depths of that deeply artistic, though as yet almost wholly undeveloped, character. The books he had read to her she understood so fast; the things he had told her she caught at so readily; the change to new scenes seemed so soon to quicken and stimulate all her latent faculties. Had not Nature said of her, as of Wordsworth’s country lass, “She shall be mine and I will make A lady of my own”? For that she was a lady indeed had been forcing itself every day more and more plainly upon Will’s mind, as he walked and talked with her. At Innsbruck, he had thought more than once to himself, “How could one dream in a world where there are women like Rue, of tying oneself for life to this sweet-voiced alp-girl?” Among the Dolomites, three weeks later, he asked himself rather, “How could one ever be content with mere brightness and sunniness like that charming Rue’s, in a world which holds women so tender, so true, and so passionate as Linnet?”
Slowly, bit by bit, he began to wonder how he could muster up courage to tear himself away again—and, if he did, for how long he could manage to keep away from her? And then, as he debated, there arose in his mind the profounder question of justice or injustice to Linnet. Was it right of him so deeply to engage her affections, unless he meant by it something real, something sure, something definite? She loved him so well that to leave her now would surely break her heart for her. What end could there be to this serious complication save the end he had so strenuously denied to Florian?
On the very last evening of their drive through those great bare unearthly peaks that look down upon Botzen, Florian came into Will’s room for an evening gossip. They sat up long over the smouldering embers of a fragrant pinewood fire. There’s nothing more confidential than young men’s confabulations over a smouldering hearth in the small hours of the morning. The two friends talked—and talked, and talked, and talked—till at last Will was moved to make a clean breast of his feelings in the matter to Florian. He put his dilemma neatly. He acknowledged he was going just where Florian had said he would go. “I pointed out the noose to you,” the epicurean philosopher observed, with bland self-satisfaction, “and you’ve run your neck right into it. Instead of playing with her like a doll as a sensible man would have done, you’ve simply gone ahead and lost your heart outright to her. Foolish, foolish, exceedingly foolish;but, just what I expected from you. I said from the very first, ‘Now mark my words, Deverill, as sure as eggs is eggs, you’ll end by marrying her.’ ”
“I don’t say I’ll marry her now,” Will replied, somewhat sheepishly. “How can I, indeed? I’ve got nothing to marry on. I find it hard enough work to keep body and soul together for myself in London, without thinking of an engagement to keep somebody else’s into the bargain.”
“Then whatdoyou mean to do?” Florian inquired, with sound common-sense. “If you don’t mean to marry her, and you don’t mean to harm her, and you can’t go away from her, and you can’t afford to stop with her,—why, what possible new term are you going to introduce into human relations and the English language to cover your ways with her?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know,” Will answered, in a somewhat hopeless and helpless voice, piling the embers together in the centre as he spoke, just to keep them alight for some minutes longer. “There’s the rub. I admit it. Nobody feels it more than I do. But I don’t see any possible kind of way out of it. I’ve been thinking to myself—or perhaps half-thinking—I might manage it like this, if Linnet would assent to it. We might get married first——”
Florian raised one warning hand, and nodded his shapely head up and down two or three times solemnly. “I told you so,” he interposed, in a tone of most mitigated and mournful triumph. “There we get at it at last. You have said the word. I was sure ’twould come to that. Marry, marry, marry!”
“And then,” Will went on, with a very shamefaced air, never heeding his comment, “what’s enough for one’s enough for two, they say—or very nearly. I thought we might live in lodgings quite quietly for awhile, somewhere cheap, in London——”
“Notlive,” Florian corrected gravely, with another sage nod of that sapient head; “lurk, linger, vegetate. A very sad end! A most dismal downfall! I see it all: Surrey side, thirty shillings a week; cold mutton for dinner; bread and cheese for lunch; an ill-furnished parlour, a sloppy-faced slavey! I know the sort of thing. Pah! My gorge rises at it!”
“And then, I could get Linnet’s voice trained and prepared for the stage,” Will continued, perusing his boots, “and work very hard myself to keep us both alive till she could come out in public. In a year or two, I feel sure, if I watched her close and saw her capabilities, I could write and compose some good piece of my own to suit her exactly. With me to make the songs, and Linnet to interpret them, I believe, sooner or later, we ought easily to earn a very good livelihood. But it’d be a hard pull first; I don’t conceal that from myself. We’d have a struggle for life, though in the end, I feel sure, we’d live it down and conquer.”
Florian lighted a cigarette and watched the thin blue smoke curl upward, languidly. “Love’s young dream!” he mused to himself with a placid smile of superior wisdom. “I know the style of old. Bread and cheese and kisses! Very charming, very charming! Chorus hymeneal of the most approved pattern. So odd, so interesting! I’ve often asked myself what it is in the world that leads otherwise sensible and intelligent fellows to make wrecks of their lives in this incredible way—and all for the sake of somebody else’s daughter! Why this insane desire to relieve some other man of his natural responsibilities? I account for it in my own mind on evolutionary principles. Marriage, it seems to me, is an irrational and incomprehensible civilised instinct, by which the individual sacrifices himself on the shrine of duty for the benefit of the species. Have you ever heard of the lemmings?”
“The lemmings!” Will repeated, unable to conceive the connection in Florian’s mind between two such totally dissimilar and unrelated subjects. “Not those little brown animals like rats or marmots they have in Norway?”
“Precisely,” Florian answered, waving his cigarette airily. “Those little brown animals like rats or marmots they have in Norway. You put it like a dictionary. Well, every year or two, you know, an irresistible desire seizes on many myriads of those misguided rodents at once, to march straight to the sea in a body together, plunge boldly into the water, and swim out in a straight line, without rhyme or reason, till they can swim no farther but drown themselves by cartloads. What’s the origin of this swarmery? It’s only an instinct which keeps down the number of the lemmings, and so acts as a check against over-population. A beautiful and ingenious provision of Nature they call it!” and Florian smiled sweetly. “I’ve always thought,” he went on, puffing a contemptuous ring of smoke from his pursed-up lips, “that marriage among mankind was a very similar instinct. It’s death to the individual—mental and moral death; but it ensures at least a due continuance of the species. The wise man doesn’t marry; he knows too well for that; he stands by and looks on; but he leaves no descendants, and his wisdom dies with him. Whereas the foolish burden themselves with a wife and family, and become thereby the perpetuators of their race in future. It’s a wonderful dispensation; I admire it—at a distance!”
“But you said you’d marry yourself,” Will objected, “if you met the right person; and, to tell you the truth, Florian, I fancied you’d been rather markedly attentive to Rue for the last few weeks or so.”
Florian stroked a smooth small chin with five meditative fingers. “That’squiteanother matter,” he answered, in a self-satisfied tone. “Circumstances, it has been well remarked by an anonymous thinker, alter cases. If an Oriental potentate in all his glory were to order me to flop down on my marrow-bones before him and kiss his imperial foot as an act of pure homage, I should take my proud stand as a British subject, and promptly decline so degrading a ceremony. But if he offered me a thousand pounds down to comply with his wishes, I would give the polite request my most earnest consideration. If he made it ten thousand, I would almost certainly accede; and if he went to half-a-million, which is a fortune for life, well, no gentleman on earth could dream of disputing the question any further with him. Just so, I say, with marriage. If a lady desires me, without due cause assigned, to become her abject slave, and serve her alone for a lifetime, I will politely but firmly answer, ‘No, thank you.’ If she confers upon me, incidentally, a modest competence, I shall perpend for a moment, and murmur, ‘Well, possibly.’ But if she renders me independent and comfortable for life, with a chance of surrounding myself with books, pictures, music, without a moment’s hesitation I shall answer, ‘Like a bird,’ to her. Slavery, in short, though in itself disagreeable, may be mitigated or altogether outweighed by concomitant advantages.”
“Florian,” Will said, earnestly, “I don’t know what you mean. You speak a foreign language to me. If I felt like that, I could never bring myself to marry any woman. If I married at all, I must do it for the sake of the girl I loved—and to make her happy.”
Florian gazed at him compassionately. “Quixotic,” he answered low, shaking his sculpturesque head once or twice with a face of solemn warning. “Quixotic, exceedingly! The pure lemming instinct; theywillrush into it! It’s the moth and the candle again: dazzle, buzz, and flutter,—andpom! pom! pom!—in a second, you’re caught, and sizzled hot in the flame, and reduced to ashes. That’s how it’ll be with you, my dear fellow: you’ll go back to Meran and, by Jingo, to-morrow, you’ll go straight up the hill, and ask the cow-girl to marry you.”
“I think I will,” the poet answered, taking up his candlestick with a sigh to leave the room. “I think I will, Florian. I’ll fight it out to the bitter end, sloppy slavey and all, on your threatened south side, in those dingy lodgings.” And he took himself off with a hurried nod to his bland companion.
Florian rose, and closed the door behind the poet softly. He had played his cards well, remarkably well, that evening. If he wanted to drive Will into proposing to Linnet, he had gone the right way to effect his object. “And I,” he thought to himself with a contented smile, “will stand a fair chance with Rue, without fear of a rival, when once he’s gone off and got well married to his cow-girl. It’ll be interesting to ask them to a nice little dinner, from their Surrey side garret, at our snug small den in Park Lane or South Kensington. Park Lane’s the most fashionable, but South Kensington’s the pleasantest:
In Cromwell Road did Florian Wood,A stately pleasure dome decree.
In Cromwell Road did Florian Wood,A stately pleasure dome decree.
In Cromwell Road did Florian Wood,A stately pleasure dome decree.
In Cromwell Road did Florian Wood,
A stately pleasure dome decree.
Such a palace of art as it will be, too! I can see it now, in my mind’s eye, Horatio!—Botticellis, Della Robbias, Elzevirs, Stradivariuses! William Morris on the floor! Lewis Day on the ceiling! It rises like an exhalation, all beautiful to behold! Such things might I do—with Rue’s seven hundred thousand!”
It was with no little trepidation that Will mounted the Küchelberg on the morning after his return to Meran from the Dolomites. Would Linnet be there, he wondered, or would he somehow miss her? He didn’t know why, but a certain vague foreboding of possible evil possessed his soul. He was dimly conscious to himself of danger ahead. He couldn’t feel reassured till he stood once more face to face with Linnet.
When he arrived at the appointed place, however, by the Station of the Cross which represented the Comforting of the Daughters of Jerusalem, a cold shudder of alarm came over him suddenly. No Linnet there! Not a sign of her to be seen! And hitherto she had always kept her tryst before him. He took out his watch and looked. Ha, a moment’s respite! In his eagerness, he had arrived five minutes early. But Linnet was usually, even so, five minutes ahead of him. He couldn’t make it out; this was ominous, very!
With heart standing still, he waited a quarter of an hour—half-an-hour—three-quarters. And still no Linnet came!—And still he watched eagerly. He paced up and down, looking again and again at his watch with impatience. Could she have mistaken the place? Yet he told her plain enough! On the bare chance of some error, he would try the other stations. He went to them all, one by one, from the Crown of Thorns to the Calvary. The same luck still! No Linnet at any of them! Then he mounted the great boss of ice-worn rock with the bench on its top, that commands far and wide the whole expanse of the Küchelberg. Gazing down on every side upon the long, low hog’s back, he saw nobody all around save the women in the fields, watching their cows at pasture, and the men with the carts urging overtasked oxen to drag too heavy a load up the cobble-paved hill-track.
Thoroughly alarmed by this time, and uncertain how to act, Will determined to take a very bold measure. He descended the hill once more, and, passing under the archway of the old town gate, and through the narrow streets, and past the high-towered parish church, he made his way straight to Andreas Hausberger’s inn in the street that is called Unter den Lauben. At the doorway, Franz Lindner, all on fire, was standing. Wrath smouldered in his face; his hat was cocked fiercely; his feather, turned Robblerwise, looked angrier, more defiant, more aggressive than ever. But to Will’s immense surprise, the village champion, instead of scowling challenge at him, or receding under the arch, stepped forward with outstretched palm to meet him. He grasped Will’s hand hard. His pressure struck some note of a common misfortune.
“You’ve come to look for Linnet?” he said, holding his head very haughtily. “She wasn’t on the hill? She’d promised to meet you there? Well, we’re both in the same box, it seems. He’s done two of us at once. This is indeed a dirty trick Andreas Hausberger has played upon us!”
“What do you mean?” Will cried, aghast, clapping his hand to his head. “Where’s Linnet? I want to see her.”
“You won’t see her ever again as Lina Telser, that’s sure,” the Robbler answered aloud, with an indignant gesture. His wrath against Andreas had wholly swallowed up all memory of his little quarrel on the hills with Will Deverill. It was common cause now. Andreas had outwitted both of them.
“You can’t mean to tell me——” Will cried, drawing back in horror.
Franz took him up sharply. “Yes; I do mean to tell you just what I say,” he answered, knitting his brows. “Andreas Hausberger has gone off with her . . . to St Valentin . . . to marry her.”
It was a bolt from the blue—an unforeseen thunder-stroke. Will raised his hat from his brow, and held his hand on his stunned and astonished forehead. “To marry her!” he repeated, half-dazed at the bare thought. “Andreas Hausberger to marry her!—to marry Linnet! Oh no; it can’t be true; you never can mean it!”
Franz stared at him doggedly. “He gave me the slip on Wednesday morning,” he answered, with a resounding German oath. “He went off quite secretly. May the Evil One requite him! He knew if he told me beforehand I’d have planted my good knife to the handle in his heart. So he said never a word, but went off unexpectedly, with Linnet and Philippina, leaving the rest of us here stranded, but cancelling all engagements for the next three evenings. The white-livered cur! He’ll never dare to come back again! He knows if I meet him now—it’ll bethisin his black heart!” And Franz tapped significantly the short hunting knife that stuck out from his leather belt in truejägerfashion.
“And you haven’t followed him?” Will exclaimed, taken aback at the man’s inaction. “You know all this, and you haven’t gone after him to prevent the wedding!” In an emergency like the present one, with Linnet’s happiness at stake, he was only too ready to accept as an ally even the village bully.
Franz shrugged his broad shoulders. “How could I?” he asked, helplessly. “Have I money at command? Have I wealth like thewirth, to pay my fare all the way from Meran to Jenbach?”
Will drew back with a deep sigh. He had never thought of that difficulty. It’s so natural to us all to have money in our pockets, or at least at our command, for any great emergency, that we seldom realise how insuperable a barrier a bare hundred miles may often seem to men of other classes. It was as impossible for Franz Lindner to get from Meran to St Valentin at a day’s notice as for most of us to buy up the house of Rothschild.
“Come with me!” Will cried, starting up. “The man has cheated us vilely. Come with me to St Valentin, Herr Franz—forget our differences—and before he has time to get through with the legal formalities, help me, help me, to prevent this nefarious wedding!”
“It’s too late to prevent it now!” Franz answered, shaking his head, with a settled gloom on his countenance. “It’s all over by this. She’s his wife already. They were married on Friday.”
At those words Will felt his heart stand still within him. He gasped for breath. He steadied himself mechanically. Never till that moment had he known how much he loved the Tyrolese singer-girl, and now the blow had come, he couldn’t even believe it. “Married!” he faltered out in a broken voice; “what, married already! Linnet married to that man! Oh, impossible! Impossible!”
“But it’strue, all the same,” Franz answered sturdily. “Philippina was there, and she saw them married. She came back last night to collect their things and pack up for Italy. She’s to meet them to-morrow by the mid-day train, at a place called Verona.”
“But how did he do it in the time?” Will exclaimed still incredulous, and clinging still to the last straw with a drowning man’s instinct. “Your Austrian law has so many formalities. Perhaps it’s a story the man has made up on purpose to deceive us. He may have told Philippina, and she may be in league with him.”
Franz shook his head with gloomy determination. “No, no,” he said; “it won’t do; don’t flatter your soul with that; there’s no doubt at all in the world about it. He’s as deep as a well, and as false as a fox, and he’d laid all his plans very cunningly beforehand. He made the arrangements and swore to the Civil Act without consulting Linnet. He and the priest were in league, and the priest helped him out with it. At the very last moment, Andreas carried her off, and before she could say nay, he went straight through and married her.”
Will’s brain reeled round; his mind seemed to fail him. The sense of his loss, his irreparable loss, deadened for the moment every other feeling. Linnet gone from him for ever! Linnet married to somebody else!—and that somebody else so cold, so calculating, so cruel a man as Andreas Hausberger! It was terrible to contemplate. “He must have forced her to do it!” the Englishman cried in his distress. “But how could she ever consent? How could she ever submit? I can’t believe it! I can’t even understand it!”
“He didn’t exactly force her,” Franz answered, tilting his hat still more angrily on one side of his head. “But he brought the Herr Vicar from St Valentin to persuade her; and you know what priests are, and you know what women! The Herr Vicar just turned on purgatory and all the rest of it to frighten the poor child—so Philippina says. She was crying all the time. She cried in the train, and she cried on the road, and she cried in the church, and she cried at the altar! She cried worst of all when Herr Andreas took her home to theWirthshausto supper. . . . But I’ll be even with him yet.” And Franz tapped his knife once more. “When I meet him again—ten thousand devils!—this goes right up to the hilt in the base black heart of him!”
“Can I see Philippina?” Will gasped out, white as death.
“Yes; certainly you can see her,” the Robbler answered with a burst, leading him in through the dark archway to the sunless courtyard. “Come this way into the parlour. She’s upstairs just now, but I’ll bring her down to speak to you.”
In a minute or two more, sure enough, Philippina appeared in her very best dress, looking bright and smiling. She was garrulous as usual, and most gay and lively. “Oh yes; they had been to St Valentin, and no mistake—the Herr Vicar going with them—no scandal of any sort—and ’twas a very grand affair; never anything like it! Andreas Hausberger had spared no expense or trouble; red wine at the supper, and fiddlers for the dance, and all the world of the valley bidden to the feast on the night of the wedding! Linnet had cried a good deal;ach, yes, she had cried, how she had cried—but cried!—mein Gott, it was wonderful! But there, girls alwayswillcry when they’re going to be married; and you know, Herr Will,” archly, “she was very, very fond of you.” For herself, Philippina couldn’t think what the child had to cry about—except, of course, what you call her feelings; but allshecould say was, she’d be very glad herself to make such a match as Lina Telser was making. Why, would thegnädige Herrbelieve it? Herr Andreas was going to take her to a place called Mailand, away off in Italy, to train her for the stage—the operatic stage—and make in the end a real grand lady of her!
Will sat down on a wooden chair by the rough little table, held his face in his hands, and listened all aghast to Philippina’s artless outpourings. Thesennerin, unheeding his obvious distress, went on to describe in her most glowing terms the magnificence of the wedding, and of thewirth’sentertainment. St Valentin hardly knew itself. Andreas had had a wedding-dress, oh, a beautiful wedding-dress, made beforehand, as a surprise, at Meran for Linnet—a white silk wedding-dress from a Vienna clothes-maker’s on the Promenade, by the Stephanie Garten; it was cut to measure from an old bodice of Linnet’s, which he abstracted all unknown from her box on purpose; and it fitted her like a glove, and she was ever so much admired in it. And all the young men thought Andreas the luckiest dog in the whole Tyrol; and cousin Fridolin had almost wanted to fight him for his bride; but Linnet intervened, and wouldn’t let them have it out for her. “And on the morning after the marriage,” Philippina concluded, with wide open eyes, “there wasn’t a cradle at the door, though Linnet was asennerin—not one single cradle.”
“Of course not!” Franz Lindner cried, bridling up at the bare suggestion, and frowning native wrath at her.
“But perhaps if you’d been there, Franz——” Philippina put in saucily, and then broke off short, like a discreet maiden.
The Robbler rose above himself in his generous indignation that anyone should dare even to hint such things about their peerless Linnet. He clenched his fist hard. “If amanhad said that, my girl,” he cried, fingering his knife involuntarily, “though she’s Andreas Hausberger’s wife, he’d have paid with his blood for it.”
Philippina for a moment stood silent and overawed. Then, recovering herself at once, with a sudden little recollection, she thrust her hand into her bosom and drew out a small note, which she passed to Will openly. “Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed; “I was to give you this, Herr Will. Linnet asked me to take it to you on the morning of her marriage.”
Will opened it, and read. It was written in a shaky round hand like a servant’s, and its German orthography was not wholly above criticism. But it went to Will’s heart like a dagger for all that.
“Dear Herr Will,” it began, simply, “I write to you to-night, the last night that I may, on the eve of my wedding; for to-morrow I may not. When Andreas asked me first, it seemed to me impossible. But the Herr Vicar told me it was sin to love a heretic; you did not mean to marry me, and if you did, you would drag my soul down to eternal perdition. And then, the good Mother, and the dear Father in purgatory! So between them they made me do it, and I dared not refuse. It is hard to refuse when one’s priest commands one. Yet, dear Herr Will, I loved you; ah,howI loved you! and I know it is sin; but, may Our Dear Frau forgive me, as long as I live, I shall always love you! Though I never must see you again.—Your heart-brokenLinnet.”
Will folded it reverently, and slipped it into the pocket just over his heart. “And tell her, Philippina,” he said, “when you see her at Verona, I had come back to-day to ask her to marry me.”
For the next three years, Will heard and saw nothing more of Linnet. Not that he failed to make indirect inquiries, as time went on, from every likely source, as to her passing whereabouts; once Linnet was lost to him, he realised to himself how deeply he had loved her, how much he had admired her. But, for her happiness’ sake, he felt it would be wrong of him to write to her direct, or attempt in any way to put himself into personal communication with her. She was Andreas Hausberger’s wife now, and there he must leave her. He knew himself too well, he knew Linnet too well, too, to cheat himself with false ideas of mere friendship in future. A woman with so passionate a nature as hers, married against her will to a man she could never love, and meeting once more the man whom she loved, the man who really loved her, must find such friendship a dangerous pitfall. So, for the very love’s sake he bore her, he refrained from attempting to communicate with her directly; and all indirect inquiries failed to elicit anything more than the bare fact, already known to him, that Linnet was being musically educated for the stage, in Germany and Italy.
Three years, however, must be got through somehow, no matter how drearily; and during those next three years many things of many sorts happened to Will Deverill. To begin with, he was steadily growing in name and fame, in the stage-world of London, as a composer and playwright. That was mainly Rue’s doing; for Rue, having once taken her Englishman up, was by no means disposed to lay him down again easily. Not twice in her life, indeed, does even a pretty American with money at her back stand her solid chance of booming a poet. And Rue boomed Will steadily, after the manner of her countrymen. It didn’t escape her quick womanly eye, indeed, that Linnet’s sudden marriage and hasty flight to Italy had produced a deep effect on Will’s spirits for the moment. But it was only for the moment, she hoped and believed—a mere passing whim, a poet’s fancy; impossible that a man who thought and wrote like Will Deverill—a bard of lofty aim and exquisite imaginings, one who on honey-dew had fed and drunk the milk of Paradise—should be permanently enslaved by a Tyrolese cow-girl. Surely, in the end, common-sense and good taste and right feeling must prevail; he must come back at last—well—to a woman worthy of him!
So, very shortly after Will’s return to London, Rue decided on a complete change in her plans for the winter, and made up her mind, instead of going on as she had intended to Rome and Naples, to take a house for the season in Mayfair or South Kensington. But Florian would hear of no such temporary expedients; she must have a home of her own in London, he said,—in the world’s metropolis,—and he himself would choose it for her. So he found her a shelter in Hans Place, Chelsea, and fitted it up beforehand with becoming magnificence—just such a palace of art as he had dreamed of among the Dolomites; though, to be sure, his own chance of inhabiting it now seemed considerably lessened, since the failure of his scheme for putting off Will Deverill on his musicalsennerin. Still, Florian furnished it, all the same, with a strictly business eye to his own tastes and fancies—in case of contingencies. There was a drawing-room for Rue, of course quite utterly Hellenic; there was a dining-room for Society, not grim and gloomy, after the common superstition of all British dining-rooms, but gay and bright and airy, like Florian himself: for Florian held that the cult of the sacred dinner bell, though important enough in the wise man’s scheme of life, should be a blithe and joyous, not a solemn and stolid one; there was a smoking-room, for which Rue herself had certainly no need, but which Florian insisted might be useful in the future, as events demanded. “For, you see,” he said, pointedly, “we’re not in Bombay. You may yet choose a new friend to light his cigars in it.” All was decorated throughout in the most modern taste; incandescent wires shed tempered beams through Venetian glass globes on Liberty brocades and Morris wall-papers. ’Twas a triumph of ornamental art on a very small scale—an Aladdin’s palace in Hans Place,—and Florian took good care that paragraphs should get into the Society papers, both describing the house, and attributing its glories to his own superintendence.
However, he took good care, too, that due prominence should be given on every hand to Rue’s own personal claims to social distinction. He was a first-rate wire-puller. Little notes about the beauty, the wealth, the cleverness, and the fine taste of the pretty American widow cropped up spasmodically inTruthand thePall Mall. Even theSpectatoritself, that high-and-dry organ of intellectual life, deigned to recognise her existence. It was Florian’s intention, in short, to float his newprotégée. Now, all the world admitted that Florian, if he chose, could float almost anybody; while Rue, for her part, was without doubt exceptionally easy of flotation. Seven hundred thousand pounds, to say the truth, would have buoyed up a far heavier social subject than the pretty and clever New Yorker. Americans are the fashion; for a woman, at least, the mere fact that she comes from beyond the mill-pond is in itself just at present a passport to the best society. But Rue had also money; and money in these days will admit anyone anywhere. Furthermore, she had good looks, taking manners, much culture, real cleverness. She was well informed and well read; Society itself, that collective critic, could find nothing to criticise or to carp at in her conversation. So, introduced by Florian on one side, and His Excellency the American Minister on the other, Rue made that spring a perfect triumphal progress through the London drawing-rooms. She was the fact of the season; she entertained in her own pretty rooms in Hans Place, where Florian exhibited his decorative skill with bland satisfaction to dowager-marchionesses,—“I edited it,” was his pet phrase—while Will Deverill hung modestly in the background by the door, talking, as was his wont, to those neglected souls who seemed to him most in need of encouragement and companionship.
Before two months were out, everybody was talking of Rue as “our new acquisition.” It was Mrs Palmer this, and Mrs Palmer that. “We understand Mrs Palmer will not be present at the Duchess of Thingumabob’s dance on Tuesday.” “Among the guests on the Terrace, we noticed Lord So-and-so, Lady What’s-her-name of Ware, and Mrs Palmer of New York, whose pretty house in Hans Place is fast becoming a rallying point for all that is most interesting in London Society.” Old Miss Beard, indeed, when she arrived at the Langham Hotel early in May, and found Rue in quiet possession of the Very Best Houses, was positively scandalised. She declared, with a little sneer, it was perfectly disgraceful the way That Woman had forced herself by pure brass on the English Aristocracy. The widow of a dry-goodsman to give herself such airs!—but there, Miss Beard had begun to despair before now of the future of Europe! The Nobility and Gentry of England had degringolated. For true blue blood, she was perfectly convinced, you could only look nowadays to the heirs of the Puritans, the Knickerbockers, and the Virginians.
The very first use Rue made of her new-found friends and position in London was to push Will Deverill’s claims with theatrical managers. Will had sent the manuscript score of his pretty little open-air operetta, “Honeysuckle,” to Wildon Blades of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Theatre. And, before Mr Blades had had time to consider the work submitted to him, backed up as it was by Florian Wood’s powerful recommendation, Rue’s new victoria drew up one day at the door of the manager’s house in St John’s Wood, and Rue herself, in her most becoming and bewitching costume, stepped out, with her blameless footman’s aid, to interview him.
The pretty little American looked prettier and more charming than ever that morning. A dainty blush rose readily to her peach-blossom cheeks; her eyes were cast down; an unwonted tinge of flutter in voice and manner became her even better than her accustomed serenity. Mr Blades bowed and smiled as he scanned her card; he was a bullet-headed man with shifty grey eyes, a dubious mouth, and a sledge-hammer manner. He knew her name well; Florian had already sung the American’s praises to the astute manager. They sat down and talked. With many indirect little feminine twists and turns, Rue gradually got round to the real subject of her visit. She didn’t approach it straight, of course—what woman ever does?—by stray hints and roundabout roads she let Mr Blades understand in dim outline she was to some extent interested—platonically interested—in the success of Will Deverill’s Tyrolese operetta. Mr Deverill, she explained, was merely a young poet of musical tastes, whom she had met last year at an hotel in the Tyrol—a friend of their mutual friend’s, Mr Wood. The manager smiled wisely with that dubious mouth. Rue saw he drew his own inference—and drew it wrong; he thought it was Florian in whom her interest centred, not the unknown poet. Indeed, Florian himself had done his very best already to produce that impression; if you want to marry a rich woman, it’s not a bad plan to let her friends and the world at large believe the matter’s as good as settled already between you. So the manager smiled, and looked intensely wise. “Anything I can do for any friend of our friend Florian’s,” he said, politely, “I’m sure will give me the very greatest pleasure.”
Rue was not wholly unwilling he should make this mistake; she could ask the more easily the favour she had to beg on behalf of Will Deverill. With many further circumlocutions, and many womanly wiles, she gradually let the bullet-headed manager see she was very anxious “Honeysuckle” should be duly produced at an early date at the Duke of Edinburgh’s. But Mr Blades, for his part, like a man of the world that he was, was proof against all the smiles and blandishments of the pretty enchantress. A beautiful woman is thrown away, to say the truth, upon a theatrical manager; they are his stock-in-trade; he’s accustomed to bargaining with them, bullying them, quarrelling with them. He regards them merely as a class of exceptionally exacting and irritating persons, who presume upon their good looks and their popularity with the public to excuse the infinite trouble and annoyance they give in their business relations. So Mr Blades smiled again, this time a hard little mercantile smile, as of a man unimpressed, and answered briefly, in his sledge-hammer style, “Now, let’s be frank with one another, at once, Mrs Palmer. I run this theatre, not for the sake of high art, nor to oblige a lady, but on the vulgarest and commonest commercial grounds—just to make my living, and get a fair percentage on the capital I invest in it. I judge by returns, not by literary merit or artistic value. If Mr Deverill’s little piece seems likely to pay—why, of course, I’ll produce it. If it don’t, why, I won’t. That’s the long and the short of it!”
Rue seized her cue at once with American quickness. “Just so,” she replied, catching him up very sharp, and going straight to the point; “that’s exactly why I’ve come here. I want you to read this play very soon, and to say as a candid business man what you think of it. Then I want you to tell me what you’ll take, money down, to produce it at once, and to run it on your boards till you see whether it’s likely to succeed or fail—if I give you a guarantee, secured against bonds, to reimburse you in full for any loss you may sustain, say, by giving it the chance of a fortnight’s production.”
It was a curious offer. The manager’s shifty grey eyes ran her over with a sharp little stare of astonishment. Her directness amused him. “Well now,” he said, “that’s odd; but it’s business-like—for a woman.”
“You understand,” Rue said, blushing crimson, and letting her eyelids drop once more, “I make this suggestion in strict confidence; I don’t want it talked about.”
“Certainly, certainly,” Mr Blades replied, with a scrutinising glance. “Not even to our friend Florian?” And he eyed her quizzingly.
Rue’s face flushed deeper still. “Above all, not to him,” she answered firmly. “But what do you say to my offer? Is it business or not? Does it seem to you possible?”
The manager hesitated, and drummed with his finger on the desk before him. “Well, to tell you the truth, my dear lady,” he answered, evasively, “I couldn’t very well give you any opinion, good, bad, or indifferent, till I’ve read the manuscript, and considered it carefully. You see, a play’s not quite like a book or picture; a deal of capital’s involved in its production; and, besides, its success or its failure don’t stand quite alone; they mean so much in the end to the theatre. It won’t do for me to reckon only how many hundreds or thousands I may possibly lose on this or that particular venture if it turns out badly; there’s the indirect loss as well to take into consideration. Every success in a house means success in future; every failure in a house means gradual increase in the public coldness. It wouldn’t pay me, you understand, if you were merely to offer me a big lump sum down to produce a piece with no chance of a run in it. I never produce anything for anybody on earth unless I believe myself there’s really money in it. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” and he brightened up most amiably; “I’ll read it this very day; and then, if I think it won’t prejudice the Duke’s to bring it out at once, why, . . . I’ll consider whether or not I can accept your offer.”
“Oh, thank you!” Rue cried, very gratefully indeed; for she was a simple soul, in spite of her thousands.
The manager drew himself up, and looked stonily grave. He shook his bullet-head. This charge was most painful. It hurt his feelings as a business man that a pretty woman should even for one moment suppose he meant to make a concession to her.
“You’ve nothing to thank me for,” he answered, truthfully; and indeed she hadn’t; for his answer, after all, amounted merely to this: that if he thought the play likely to prove a success, he would generously permit the rich American to indemnify him beforehand against the off-chance of a failure. In other words, if it turned out well, he stood to win all; while if it turned out ill, it was Rue who stood to lose whatever was lost upon it.
Nevertheless, after a few more preliminary arrangements, Rue drove off, not ill-satisfied with her partial success, leaving behind her many injunctions of profoundest secrecy with the blandly-smiling manager. As she disappeared down the road, Mr Blades chuckled inwardly. Was he likely to tell any one else in the world, indeed, that he had even entertained so unequal a bargain? He would keep to himself his own clever compact with the American heiress. But two days later, Rue’s heart was made glad, when she came down to breakfast, by a letter from the manager, couched in politest terms, informing her that he had read Mr Deverill’s manuscript; that he thought on the whole there was possibly money in it; and that he would be pleased to talk over the question of its production on the basis of the arrangement she had herself proposed at their recent interview. Rue read it, overjoyed. In the innocence of her heart, she agreed to promise whatever the astute Mr Blades demanded. Moreover, this being a strictly confidential matter, she couldn’t even submit it to her lawyer for advice; she was obliged to act for once on her own initiative. She longed to rush off the very moment it was settled and tell Will the good news; but prudence and womanly reserve prevented her. However, she had her reward none the less next day, when Will hurried round immediately after breakfast to announce the splendid tidings which had come by that morning’s post, that Blades had accepted “Honeysuckle,” without any reserve, and intended to put it in rehearsal forthwith at theDuke of Edinburgh’s. His face beamed with delight; Rue smiled contentment. She was pleased he should burst in upon her first of all the world in London with news of his good fortune; that really looked as if he rather liked her! And then, how sweet it was to feel she had managed it all herself, and he didn’t know it. It was such a delightful secret that, womanlike, she longed to tell it to him outright—only that, of course, to divulge it would be to spoil the whole point of it. So she merely smiled a tranquil smile, to her own proud heart, and felt as happy as a queen about it. ’Tis delicious to do something for the man you love, and to know he doesn’t even suspect you of doing it. . . . Some day, perhaps, she would be able to tell him. But not till he’d made a great name for himself. Then she might say to him with pride, at some tender moment, “Before the world found you out, Will, I knew what you were, and, all unknown to yourself, it was I who stretched out the first helping hand to your fortunes!”