And yet, Linnet was happier that first season in London than ever before since her marriage with Andreas. She knew well why. In fear and trembling, with many a qualm of conscience, she nevertheless confessed to herself the simple truth; it was that Will was near, and she felt at all times dimly conscious of his nearness. Not that she saw much of him; both she and Will sedulously avoided that pitfall; but from time to time they met, for the most part by accident; and even when they didn’t, she knew instinctively Will was watching over her unseen, and guarding her. She was no longer alone in the great outer world; she had some one to love her, to care for her, to observe her. Often, as she sang, her eyes fell on his face upturned in the stalls towards her; her heart gave a throb; she faltered and half-paused—then went on again all the happier. Often, too, as she walked in Kensington Gardens with Andreas, Will would happen to pass by—sonatural for a man who lives in Craven Street, Strand, to be strolling of an afternoon in Kensington Gardens!—and whenever he passed, he stopped and spoke a few words to her, which Linnet answered in her pretty, hardly foreign English.
“How well you speak now!” Will exclaimed, one such day, as she described to him in glowing terms some duchess’s house she had lately visited.
The delicate glow that rose so readily to that rich brown cheek flushed Linnet’s face once more as she answered, well pleased, “Oh yes; I had so many reasons, you see, Herr Will, for learning it!”—she called him Herr Will even in English still—it was a familiar sound, and for old times’ sake she loved it;—then she added, half-shamefacedly, “Andreas always said it was wiser so; I should make my best fortunes in England and America.”
Will nodded, and passed on, pretending not to catch at her half-suppressed meaning; but he knew in his own heart what her chief reason was for taking so much pains to improve her English.
They saw but little of one another, to be sure, and that little by chance; though Andreas Hausberger, at least, made no effort to keep them apart. On the contrary, if ever they met by appointment at all, ’twas at Andreas’s own special desire or invitation. The wiseWirthof St Valentin was too prudent a man to give way, like Franz Lindner, to pettish freaks of pure personal jealousy. He noted, indeed, that Linnet was happiest when she saw most of Will Deverill; not many things escaped that keen observer’s vision. But when Linnet was happiest she always sang best. Therefore, Andreas, being a wise and prudent man, rather threw them together now and again than otherwise. That cool head of his never allowed anything to interfere with the course of business; he was too sure of Linnet to be afraid of losing her. It was a voice he had married, not a living, breathing woman—an exquisite voice, with all its glorious potentialities of wealth untold, now beginning to flow in upon him that season in London.
But to Linnet herself, struggling hard in her own soul with the love she could not repress, and would never acknowledge, it was a very great comfort that she could salve her conscience with that thought: she seldom saw Will save at Andreas’s invitation!
The next three years of the new singer’s life were years of rapid rise to fame, wealth, and honour. Signora Casalmonte grew quickly to be a universal favourite, not in London alone, but also in Berlin, Vienna, Paris. ’Twas a wonderful change, indeed, from the old days in the Zillerthal. Her name was noised abroad; crowned heads bowed down to her; Serene Highnesses whispered love; Archdukes brought compliments and diamond necklaces. No one mounts so fast to fame as the successful singer. She must make her reputation while she is young and beautiful. She may come from nowhere, but she steps almost at once into the front rank of society. It is so with all of them; it was so with Linnet. But to Will she was always the same old Linnet still; he thought no more of her, and he thought no less, than he had thought in those brief days of first love in the Tyrol.
At the end of Linnet’s first London season, after some weeks in Paris, when August came round, Andreas took his wife for her yearly villeggiatura to a hill-top in Switzerland. He was for ozone still; he believed as much as ever in the restorative value of mountain air and simple life for a vocalist. It gave tone to the larynx, he said, and tightened the vocal chords: for he had taken the trouble to read up the mechanism of voice production. So he carried off Linnet to an upland village perched high on the slopes behind the Lake of Thun—not to a great hotel or crowdedpension, where she would breathe bad air, eat made French dishes, drink doubtful wine, keep very late hours, and mix with exciting company, but to a châlet nestling high beneath a clambering pinewood, among Alpine pastures thick with orchids and globe-flowers, where she might live as free and inhale as pure and unpolluted an atmosphere as in their own green Zillerthal. For reasons of his own, indeed, Andreas wouldn’t take her to St Valentin, lest the homesickness of the mountaineer should come over her too strong when she returned once more to London or Berlin. But he chose this lofty Bernese hamlet as the next best thing to their native vale to be found in Europe. There, for six happy weeks, Linnet drank in once more the fresh mountain breeze, blowing cool from the glaciers,—climbed, as of old, among alp and crag and rock and larch forest—felt the soft fresh turf rise elastic under her light foot as she sprang from tussock to tussock of firmer grass among the peaty sward of the hillside.
Before leaving town that summer, she had lunched once with Will at Florian’s chambers and mentioned to him casually in the course of talk the name and position of their Bernese village. Will bore it well in mind. A week or two later, as Linnet strolled by herself in a simple tweed frock and a light straw hat among the upland pastures, she saw to her surprise a very familiar figure in a grey knickerbocker suit, winding slowly along the path from the direction of Beatenberg. Her heart leapt up within her with joy at the sight.Ach, himmel!what was this? It was her Engländer, her poet! Then he had remembered where she was going; he had come after her to meet her!
Next moment, she reproached herself with a bitter reproach. The little oval Madonna, which kept its place still round her neck amid all her new magnificence, felt another hard grip on its sorely tried margin. Oh, Dear Lady, pardon her, that her heart should so jump for a stranger and a heretic—which never jumped at all for her wedded husband.
The Church knew best! The Church knew best! For her soul’s sake, no doubt, the Herr Vicar was right—and dear Herr Will was a heretic. But if only they had wedded her to Herr Will instead,—her heart gave a great thump—oh, how she would have loved him!
Though now, as things stood, of course, she could never care for him.
And with that wise resolve in her heart, and Our Lady clasped hard in her trembling hand,—she stepped forth with beaming eyes and parted lips to greet him.
Will came up, a little embarrassed. He had no intention, when he set out, of meeting Linnet thus casually. It was his design to call in due form at thechâletand ask decorously for Andreas; it made him feel like a thief in the night to have lighted, thus unawares, upon Linnet alone, without her husband’s knowledge. However, awkward circumstanceswillarise now and again, and we have all of us to face them. Will took her hand, a trifle abashed, but still none the less cordially. “What, Frau Hausberger!” he cried in German—and Linnet winced at the formal name, though of course it was what he now always called her; “I didn’t expect to see you here, though I was coming to ask after . . . your husband in the village,” and he glanced down at his feet with a little nervous confusion.
“I saw you coming,” Linnet answered, in English, for she loved best to speak with her Engländer in his own language; “and I knew that it was you, so I came on to meet you. Isn’t it lovely here? Just like my own dear Fatherland!”
Will was hot and dusty with his long tramp from Interlaken. It was a broiling day. He sat down by Linnet’s side on the grassy slope that looks across towards the lake and the great snow-clad giants of the Bernese Oberland. That was the very first time he had been quite alone with her since she married Andreas. The very first time since those delicious mornings on the vine-draped Küchelberg. They sat there long and talked, Linnet picking tall grasses all the while with her twitching fingers, and pulling them into joints, and throwing them away bit by bit, with her eyes fixed hard on them. After a time as they sat, and grew more at home with one another, they fell naturally into talk of the old days at St Valentin. They were both of them timid, and both self-conscious; yet in the open air, out there on that Alpine hillside, it all seemed so familiar, so homely, so simple—so like those lost hours long ago in the Zillerthal—that by degrees their shyness and reserve wore off, and they fell to talking more easily and unrestrainedly. Once or twice Will even called her “Linnet,”tout court, without noticing it; but Linnet noticed it herself, and felt a thrill of strange joy, followed fast by a pang of intense remorse, course through her as she sat there.
By-and-by, their talk got round by slow degrees to London. Linnet had seen one of Will’s pieces at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, in June, and admired it immensely. “How I should love to sing in something of your composing, Herr Will,” she exclaimed, with fervour. “Just for old times’ sake, you know—when neither of us was well-known, and when we met at St Valentin.”
Will looked down a little nervously. “I’ve often thought,” he said, with a stifled sigh; “I should love to write something on purpose for you, Linnet. I know your voice and its capabilities so well, I’ve watched you so close—for your career has interested me; and I think it would inspire one, both in the lines and in the music, to know one was working for a person one—well . . . one knew and liked, and . . . had met before, under other circumstances.”
He looked away, and hesitated. Linnet clasped her hands in front of her between her knees, on her simple tweed frock, and stared studiously at the mountains. “Oh, that would be lovely!” she cried, pressing her fingers ecstatically. “That would be charming! that would be beautiful! I should love that I should sing in something you’d written, and, above all, in something you’d written forme, Will. I’m sure it would inspire me too—it would inspire both of us. I do not think you could write for anybody, or I could sing for anybody, as we could write and sing, each one of us, for one another. We should do ourselves justice then. Why don’t you try it?”
She looked deep into his eyes. Will quailed, and felt his heart stand still within him. “There are difficulties in the way, my child,” he answered, deliberating. “You’re more or less bound to the Harmony, I think; and I’m more or less bound to the Duke of Edinburgh’s. And then, there’s Herr Hausberger to consider as well. Even ifwecould arrange things with our respective managers, do you think he’d be likely to fall in with our arrangements?”
Linnet seized his arm impulsively. With these warm southern natures, such acts are natural, and mean less than with us northerners. “Oh, do try, dear Herr Will!” she exclaimed, bending forward in earnest entreaty. “Do try if we can’t manage it. Never mind about Andreas. I’m sure he would consent, if he saw it was a good piece, and I could sing in it with spirit. And I would sing in it—ach, lieber Gott,—how well I would sing in it! You would see what I could do, then! It would be splendid, splendid!”
“But I’m afraid Willdon Blades——”
Linnet cut him short impatiently, jerking her little curled forefinger with a contemptuous gesture. “What matter about Willdon Blades!” she cried. “We can easily settlehim. If you and I decide to work this play together, the managermustgive in: we can arrange it somehow.” And she looked at him with more conscious dignity and beauty than usual; for, simple peasant-girl as she was, and a child still at heart, she knew by this time she was also a queen of the opera. How thegommeuxhad crowded hersalonin her Paris hotel; how great ladies had fought for stalls at her triumphantpremière!
“I might think about it,” Will answered, after a brief pause, half-alarmed at her eagerness. Was it not too dangerous?
But Linnet, quite sure in her own soul she was urging him from purely artistic motives, had no such scruples. “Do try,” she cried, laying her hand impulsively on his arm once more. “Now, promise me you’ll try! Begin to-day! I should love to see what sort of a part you’d write for me.”
Will stammered, and hesitated. “Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve begun already, Linnet,” he answered, fingering the pencil-case that hung from his watch chain with ill-concealed agitation. “I’ve been walking about for a fortnight through the mountains alone—Florian wanted to come, but I wouldn’t bring him with me, that I might have time for thinking; and everything I saw seemed somehow to recall . . . well, why shouldn’t I confess it?—those days on the Küchelberg. I thought of you a great deal—I mean of your voice and the sort of words and chords that would be likely to suit you. I always compose best in the open air. The breeze whispers bars to me. And I’ve begun a few songs—just your part in the play, you know—words and airs together, Wagner-wise—that’s how I always do it. The country I passed through brought the music of itself; it all spoke to me direct—and I thought it would be something new to bring this breezy Alpine air to freshen the stuffy atmosphere of a London theatre.”
“Have you got what you’ve done with you?” Linnet inquired, with deep interest.
“It’s here in my knapsack,” Will answered, half reluctant.
“Ah, do let me see it!” And she pressed one hand to her breast with native southern vehemence.
“It’s only in pencil, roughly scratched on bits of paper over rocks or things anyhow,” Will replied, apologetically. “I don’t suppose you’ll be able to read one word of it. But, if you like, you can try,” and he pulled it forth and opened it.
For twenty minutes or more of terrestrial time Linnet sat entranced in the seventh heavens. She tried over parts of the songs, half to herself, half to Will, with many an “Oh” and an “Ach, Gott,” and was charmed and delighted with them. They were written straight at her—not a doubt in the world about that; and they suited her voice and manner admirably. It’s so innocent for a singer to sit on the grassy mountain sides like this, with a poet and composer close at hand to consult and talk over the work they mean to produce together. This was art, pure art; the sternest moralist could surely find nothing to object to in it Linnet didn’t even feel bound to give another hard squeeze to the poor much-battered, and hardly-used Madonna. She only sat and sang—with Will smiling by her side—there in the delicate mountain air, among the whispering pines, gazing across at the stainless peaks, and thrilling through to the finger tips.
“O Herr Will,” she cried at last, “how lovely it is out here—how high, how soft, how pure—how much lovelier than in London! I’ve never enjoyed anything in my life so much, since,” . . . her voice sank low—“since those days on the Küchelberg.”
Will leant over towards her for a moment. His heart beat hard. He laid one palm on the ground and rested on it as he looked at her. He was trembling all over. Surely, surely he must give way! For a moment he paused and debated; then he rose to his feet suddenly. “I think, Linnet,” he said, in a very serious voice, “for your sake—I think—we ought to go on and find your husband.”
When Will, with fear and trembling, explained his plan half-an-hour later at thechâletto Andreas Hausberger, that wise man of business, instead of flouting the idea, entered into his suggestion with the utmost alacrity. He knew Linnet was still very fond of Will Deverill—and, being a practical man, he was perfectly ready to make capital out of her fondness. It was good for trade; and whatever was good for trade appealed at once to Andreas on the tenderest point of his nature. He had perfect confidence in Linnet’s honour—as well, indeed, he might have; but if she chose to cherish an innocent sentimental attachment of the German sort—in point of fact, aschwärmerei—towards a young man she had known and liked before her marriage, that was no business of his; or, rather, it was just so much his business as it might help him to make a little more money out of her. Andreas Hausberger was a proud and self-respecting person, but his pride and his self-respect were neither of them touched by a purely romantic feeling on his young wife’s part towards a rising poet-composer who was anxious to write and score an opera to suit her. Indeed, he rather congratulated himself than otherwise on the thought that very few husbands of theatrical favourites had such very small cause for jealousy as he had.
So he listened to Will’s humming and hawing apology with a quiet face of subdued amusement. What a bother about nothing! If Will wrote a piece for Linnet, why, of course, he’d write it excellently, and write it with most intimate knowledge of her voice, as well as with close sympathy for all its shades of feeling. Will knew her exact compass, her range, her capabilities; he knew also her weak points, her limitations, her dramatic failings. And Linnet, for her part, was sure to sing well whatever Will wrote for her—both because it was Will’s, and because it was suited to her voice and character. The idea was an excellent one; how absurd to make a fuss about it!
“And he has some of it scored already, he says,” Linnet put in, half-trembling.
“Let me see it,” Andreas exclaimed, in his authoritative way; and he skimmed it over carefully. “H’m, h’m . . . that’s not bad,” he muttered from time to time as he went along . . . “suits her style very well . . . not at all a weak close; fine opportunity for that clear upper G of hers; excellently considered piece—have you tried it over, Linnet? I should think it ought to do very nicely indeed for you.”
“I just sang it a bit at sight,” Linnet answered, “on the hillside. When I met Herr Will first, we sat down and talked, because Herr Will was tired; and he showed me his score, and I tried part of it over a bit. But it was not that which you would quite call fairly trying it, for I had not seen it before, and had no time to study it. Still, I thought it very good—oh, exquisite, perfect!—and I should like so much the chance to sing in it.”
“Try it now!” Andreas said, in his dictatorial tone.
And Linnet, without any affected hesitation, or professional airs, opened her rich mouth naturally, and trilled forth upon Will’s delighted ear in a raptured flood her native first reading of his own graceful music.
“That’ll do!” Andreas said, with decision, as soon as she’d finished. “That’ll do, Linnet. We’ll arrange for it.”
And Will, leaning across to her over the plain deal table, as she stood blushing in front of him, exclaimed with delight, “Why, Linnet—Frau Hausberger, I mean—that’s charming, charming! I couldn’t have believed how pretty my own song was, till I heard you sing it!”
So that very day the whole matter was settled, as far, at least, as those three could settle it. It was decided and contracted that Will should definitely write an opera for Linnet; that he should offer it first to Mr Wells, the manager of the Harmony; and that if Wells refused it, it should go next to the Duke of Edinburgh’s, on condition that Linnet was engaged for the title-role. Before evening, Will had shouldered his knapsack once more (though Andreas would fain have constrained him to stay the night at their inn), and, with a timorous farewell to Linnet at thechâletdoor, had gone on his way rejoicing, to descend towards Oberwesel.
That interview gave him courage. During the course of the autumn he completed his piece, for he was a man of inspirations, and he worked very rapidly when the fit was upon him. The greater part of his opera he wrote and composed in the open air, beneath the singing larks, on those green Swiss hillsides. And the larks themselves did not sing more spontaneous, with heart elate, for pure joy of singing. That one shorttête-à-têtewith Linnet at herchâlethad filled his teeming brain with new chords and great fancies. Words and notes seemed to come of themselves, and to suggest one another; moods seemed to mirror themselves in becoming music. Besides, Will thought with no little pleasure, this new venture would bring him, for a time at least, into closer personal connection with Linnet. While rehearsals and other preliminary arrangements went on, he must be thrown a great deal perforce into Linnet’s company. And how delightful to think they would be working together for a common end; that success, if achieved, would be due in part and in equal degrees to each of them.
Will didn’t return to London till the end of October. He had spent the time meanwhile partly in the Bernese Oberland, and partly, later, on the south side of the Alps, among the valleys and waterfalls of the Canton Ticino. But when he arrived at Charing Cross, it was not empty-handed; he carried in his portmanteau the almost complete manuscript ofCophetua’s Adventure, that exquisite romance of no particular time and place, with its fanciful theme and its curious episodes, which proved at last that poetry is not stone-dead on our English stage, and that exquisite verse wedded to exquisite harmonies has still its fair chance of a hearing in England. He had only to polish it at his rooms in Craven Street, before submitting it to the opinion of the manager of the Harmony.
Linnet came later. She had a two months’ engagement first to fulfil in Paris, where Will read, with a little pang of regret, in theFigarohow she had turned the heads and captured the hearts (if any) of ten thousandboulevardiers. Her very innocence and simplicity at once delighted and surprised the profoundly sophisticated Parisian mind. All the world of thefoyerunanimously voted hertout ce qu’il-y-a de plus enfantin. “She has afforded us,” said a famous lady-killer of the Avenue Victor Hugo, “the rare pleasure of a persistent and unreasoning refusal.” So all Paris was charmed, as all Paris always is at any new sensation. An opera-singer insensible to the persuasiveness of diamonds and the eloquence of bank-notes—all Paris shugged its shoulders in incredulous astonishment. “Incroyable!” it muttered: “mais enfin, elle est jeune, cette petite—ça viendra!”
So it was March before Linnet was in London once more. Andreas, ever business-like, had preceded her by a week or two, to conclude the needful arrangements with the people at the Harmony. By the time theprima donnaherself arrived, everything was already well in train for the rehearsals. Linnet had studied her part, indeed, in Paris beforehand, till she knew every line, every word, every note of it. She had never learnt anything so easily in her life before, though she would hardly admit, even to herself, the true reason—because Will had written it. They met at the Harmony the very next afternoon, to discuss the details. Andreas was there, of course—he never left his wife’s side when business was in question; he must protect her interests: erect, inflexible, tall, powerful, big-built, with his resolute face and his determined mien, he was a man whom no theatrical manager on earth could afford to bully. He bargained hard with the Harmony for his wife’s services in this new engagement; for, indeed, her late Parisian vogue had put up her price another twenty per cent, or so; and now he stood there, triumphant, self-conscious, jubilant, aware that he had done a good stroke of business for himself, and ready to do battle again on his wife’s behalf with all and sundry. So satisfied was he, indeed, with their rising fortunes, that he had presented Linnet spontaneously with a five-pound note, all pocket-money of her own to do as she liked with, on their way to the theatre.
Linnet stood a little behind. Will grasped her hand eagerly. She took his in return without the faintest pressure—for Our Dear Lady knew well how wisely and circumspectly she meant to behave now towards him. The circumstances were dangerous: so much the more, Beloved Frau, would she strive to comport herself as becomes a good Catholic wife in the hour of temptation.
“You like your part, Signora?” Will asked of her, half-playfully, adopting her theatrical Italian style and title.
Linnet raised her big eyes. “I have never sung in anything I liked half so well,” she answered, simply.
The company assembled by degrees, and the usual preliminary discussion ensued forthwith as to parts, and cues, and costumes, and properties. Will’s own ideas, conceived among the virgin snows and pure air of the high Alps, were a trifle too ethereal and a trifle too virginal for that practical manager. He modified them considerably. Various points had to be talked over with various persons. In the midst of them all, Will was surprised to feel of a sudden a sturdy gloved hand laid abruptly on his shoulder, and a powerful though musical feminine voice exclaiming volubly at his ear in very high German, “Ach mein Gott!it’s Herr Will! So we meet again in London. Herr Andreas told me you had written this piece for Linnet; but one hardly knows you again, you’ve grown so much older—and better dressed—and richer! And, Dear Frau! in the Tyrol, you wore no beard and whiskers!”
Will turned in surprise. It was a minute, even so, before he quite recognised the stalwart speaker. It was Philippina, still good-humoured and buxom and garrulous as of old; but, oh, great heavens, how much changed from the brown-facedsennerinwith the rough woollen petticoat who had offered them milk, all frothy from the cow, in the stoneware mug on the hillside at St Valentin! If Linnet was altered, Philippina was transmogrified. Her jolly round face was surmounted incongruously by the latest and airiest thing out in Parisian bonnets; her dress was the very glass and mirror of fashion; her delicate gloves looked as dainty as seven-and-a-halfs are ever likely to look upon feminine fingers. Civilisation, indeed, had done its worst for Philippina: it had transformed her outright from a simple and natural if somewhat coarse-fibred cow-girl into the jolly, bouncing, distinctly vulgar type of third-rate actress. With all the good-humoured coarseness of her original nature, she now possessed in addition all the airs and graces, all the coquettish affectations, all the noisy self-assertion of the theatrical utility.
“Why, I didn’t know you were in England,” Will exclaimed, taken aback at her unexpected salute, and surveying from head to foot with no very pleased eye the fly-away peculiarities of her over-trimmed costume. “Then you’ve taken to the stage!” He turned hastily to Linnet, and added in English, which Philippina did not understand when he last met her, “She isn’t surely going to play in this piece of mine, is she?”
“So!” Philippina answered, in a very Teutonic voice, indeed, but in our native vernacular. “Ach, yes; I am going to play in it; Herr Andreas has arranched all zat wis ze manager. You are surbrized to zee zat I shall blay in your biece. But I haf blay pevore in many bieces in Paris.”
Will glanced at Linnet, a mute glance of inquiry. He didn’t know why, but Linnet’s eyes fell, and a blush spread quick over that clear brown cheek of hers. It wasn’t the familiar blush he was accustomed to see there; he noted at once some tinge of shame and personal humiliation in the look that accompanied it. But she answered quickly, “Oh yes; Philippina’s to play. My husband and Mr Wells have settled all about it.”
“What part?” Will inquired, with a slight sense of sinking; for he wasn’t over-well pleased to hear those dainty lines of his were to be murdered by Philippina’s coarse guttural utterance.
“Ze Brincess Berylla,” Philippina replied, with glib promptitude and great self-satisfaction. “It’s a very schmall part; bod I shall do my best in it.”
Will gave a slight sigh of relief. The Princess Berylla would do at a pinch. If shemustsing at all, it was well at least she should sing in so minor a character. Though, to be sure, he had his misgivings how his water-fairies’ song would sound on the stage when delivered with her clumsy Teutonic pronunciation:
“They loved to dwellIn a pearly shellAnd to deck their cellWith amber;Or amid the cavesThat the riplet lavesAnd the beryl pavesTo clamber.
“They loved to dwellIn a pearly shellAnd to deck their cellWith amber;Or amid the cavesThat the riplet lavesAnd the beryl pavesTo clamber.
“They loved to dwellIn a pearly shellAnd to deck their cellWith amber;Or amid the cavesThat the riplet lavesAnd the beryl pavesTo clamber.
“They loved to dwell
In a pearly shell
And to deck their cell
With amber;
Or amid the caves
That the riplet laves
And the beryl paves
To clamber.
By the limpets’ homeAnd the vaulted domeWhere the star-fish roamThey’d linger;In the mackerel’s jaw,Or the lobster’s claw,They’d push and withdrawA finger.”
By the limpets’ homeAnd the vaulted domeWhere the star-fish roamThey’d linger;In the mackerel’s jaw,Or the lobster’s claw,They’d push and withdrawA finger.”
By the limpets’ homeAnd the vaulted domeWhere the star-fish roamThey’d linger;In the mackerel’s jaw,Or the lobster’s claw,They’d push and withdrawA finger.”
By the limpets’ home
And the vaulted dome
Where the star-fish roam
They’d linger;
In the mackerel’s jaw,
Or the lobster’s claw,
They’d push and withdraw
A finger.”
He trembled to think what sort of strange hash those thick lips of hers would make of his lilting versification.
However, for the moment, and for Linnet’s sake, he said nothing against it. A little later in the afternoon, he had five minutes with theprima donnaalone in one of the passages. “Look here, Linnet,” he said hurriedly with a beseeching glance, “mustwe have Philippina?”
“There’s nomustat all in the matter, except the musts you make,” Linnet answered, trembling. “Ifyousay she must go, Mr Wells will cut her out, I suppose, to please you. Only——” and she hesitated.
“Only what?” Will cried, inquiringly.
“Only . . . I’m afraid Andreas wouldn’t like it.”
Her face flushed again. Will looked down at her and paused. A great many thoughts ran through his head in a second. Linnet scanned the floor, embarrassed. After awhile, Will spoke again in a very low tone. “I’d letanybodysing, Linnet,” he said, “with a voice like a frog’s, rather than allow—well, any trouble to crop up between myself and your husband.”
“Thank you,” Linnet answered simply. But she lifted her eyes and gave him one grateful look that was more than full recompense.
“How did Philippina learn English?” Will asked once more, hardly daring to press the subject.
“Oh, Andreas has always taken—well—a very great interest in her, you know,” Linnet answered, with a faintly evasive air. “She went with us to Italy. He kept her on when he paid off the rest of his troupe at Meran; and he got her trained under agreement, and put her into a minor part when I sang at San Carlo. When we came to England first, she went for awhile to Paris; but he’s always been getting her English lessons everywhere. He has a claim on her, he says, for money advanced to train her for the stage. . . . She’s a very good-natured girl, and she’s always been kind to me.”
“I see,” Will answered, with a suddenly sobered air. “Very well, then, Linnet,” and he drew a deep sigh—though not for himself; “she shall sing the part of Princess Berylla.”
“Thank you,” Linnet said simply, with a sigh, once more.
But till then, he had never thought Linnet hadthatto put up with.
Mr Franz Lindner,aliasSignor Francesco of the London Pavilion, laid down his morning paper at his lodgings in Soho, with unmistakable outward and visible signs of a very bad humour. Montepulciano and Lacrima-Christi, as Florian put it, had evidently disagreed with him. But that was not all. The subject which roused his undisguised discontent was the marked success of the woman he once loved—the woman he loved now even more than ever.
For this was what Franz had read, amid much else of the same cheap laudatory strain, in the theatrical column of theDaily Telephone.
“The first performance of Mr W. Deverill’s new English opera,Cophetua’s Adventure, at the Harmony last night marks an epoch in the renascence of the poetical drama in England. Never has the little house on the Embankment been so crowded before; never has an audience received a new play with more unanimous marks of profound enthusiasm. Both as a work of literature and as a musical composition, this charming piece recalls to mind the best days of the great Italian outburst of song at the beginning of the century.” Franz snorted internally as he ran his eye in haste over the learned digression on the various characteristics of the various operas whichCophetua’s Adventuresuggested to the accomplished critic who works the drama for that leading newspaper. Then, skipping the gag, he read on once more with deeper interest, “It would be hard to decide whether the chief honours of the night belonged more unmistakably to Mr Deverill himself or to his charming exponent, Signora Casalmonte. The words of the songs, indeed, possessed to a rare degree high literary merit; the music, as might be expected from so accomplished a composer, was light and airy, yet with the genuine ring of artistic inspiration; but the ever-delightful soprano rendered her part so admirably that ’twas difficult to disentangle Mr Deverill’s tunes from the delicious individualisation conferred upon them by Signora Casalmonte’s voice and acting. Theprima donna’sfirst appearance on the stage as the Beggar Maid, lightly clad in a graceful though ostentatiously simple costume, was the signal for a burst of irrepressible applause from stalls, boxes, and gallery. In the second act, as Cophetua’s Queen, the populardivalooked, if possible, even more enchantingly beautiful; while the exquisitenaïvetéwith which she sang the daintyaria, ‘Now all ye maidens, matrons, wives, and widows,’ brought down the house in one prolonged outburst of unmixed appreciation. Our operatic stage has seldom boasted a lady so perfectly natural, in manner, gesture, and action, or one who allowed her great native gifts to degenerate so little into affectations or prettinesses.”
Franz flung down the paper and sighed. He admitted it; he regretted it. What a fool he had been not to marry that girl, offhand, when he once had the chance, instead of dawdling and hanging about till Hausberger carried the prize off under his nose to St Valentin. It was disgusting, it was silly of him! And now it began to strike him very forcibly indeed that his chance, once gone, was gone for ever. A full year and more had passed since Linnet and her husband first came to London. During that year it had dawned slowly upon Franz’s mind that Linnet had risen into a higher sphere, and could never by any possibility be his in future. He was dimly conscious by this time that he himself was a music-hall gentleman by nature and position, while Linnet was born to be a special star of the higher opera. Never could he recover the ground thus lost; the woman he loved once, and now loved again distractedly, had climbed to a higher plane, and was lost to his horizon.
What annoyed Franz more than anything, however, was his feeling of chagrin that he had let himself be cajoled, on the night of Linnet’s first appearance in London, into abandoning his designs against her husband’s person. He knew now he had done wrong; heoughtto have stabbed Andreas Hausberger, then and there, as he intended. In a moment of culpable weakness, he had allowed himself to be beguiled from his fixed purpose by the blandishments of Linnet and the rich American widow. That would indeed have been the dramatic time to strike; he had let the psychological moment go by unheeded, and it would never return, or, at least, it would never return in so effectual a fashion. To have struck him then and there, on their very first meeting after Linnet’s marriage, and on the night when Linnet made her earliest bow before an English audience—that would have been splendid, that would have been beautiful, that would have been romantic: all London would have rung with it. But now, during those past months, he had met Andreas twice or thrice, on neutral ground, as it were, and the relations between them, though distant and distinctly strained, had been nominally friendly. The Robbler felt he had committed a fatal error in accepting Mr Will’s invitation to supper on that critical evening. It had compelled him to treat Andreas as an acquaintance once more; to turn round upon him now, and stab him in pure pique, would be feeble and self-stultifying. Franz wished he had had strength of mind to resist the women’s wiles that first night at the Harmony, and to draw his rival’s blood before their very eyes, as his own better judgment had told him he ought to do.
He had seen Linnet, too, and there came the unkindest cut of all; for he recognised at once that the girl he had described to Will Deverill as beneath his exalted notice since he rose to the front ranks of the profession at the London Pavilion, was now so much above him that she scarcely thought of him at all, and evidently regarded him only in the light of the man who had threatened her husband’s life when they came to England.
Yes; Linnet thought nothing of him now; how could you expect it to be otherwise? She had money and rank and position at her feet; was it likely, being a woman, she would care greatly, when things were thus, for a music-hall singer who earned as much in six months as she herself could earn in one easy fortnight? And yet . . . Franz rose, and gazed abstractedly at his own face in the glass over the mantelpiece. No fault to find there! Many women did worse. He was excellently pleased with his black moustache, his flashing dark eyes, his well-turned figure; he even thought not ill of his blazing blue necktie. And Andreas was fifty if he was a day, Franz felt sure; old Andreas with his solid cut, his square-set shoulders, his steely-grey eyes, his heavy, unimpassioned, inexpressive countenance!Ach, if only he himself had the money to cut a dash—the mere wretched rhino—the miserable oof—for Franz had lived long enough in England now to have picked up a choice collection of best British slang—he might stand a chance still against that creature Andreas!
It was one o’clock by this time, though Franz had only just risen from his morning coffee. What would you have? A professional man must needs sing till late at night, and take his social pleasures at hiscaféafterwards. So Franz was seldom in bed till two or three in the morning, recouping himself next day by sleeping on till mid-day. ’Twas the hour of the promenade. He went into his bedroom, doffed his flannel smoking-coat, and arrayed himself in the cheaply-fashionable broadcloth suit in which it was his wont to give the daily treat of seeing him to the girls in Bond Street. Then he lighted a bad cigar, and strolled out towards Piccadilly. At the Circus, he met a friend, an English betting man, who was a constant patron of the London Pavilion.
“Hello, Fred!” he cried, with a start, “how spruce you look to-day! Ze favourite must have lost. You have ze appearance of ze man who is flush of money. And yet, ze winter, is it not your off season?”
The bookmaker smiled a most self-contented smile. He certainly had the air of being in the very best of spirits. He was one of those over-fed, full-faced, knowing-eyed creatures who lurk round racecourses with a flower in their buttonholes, smoke the finest cigars, drink Heidsieck’s Dry Monopole, and drop their H’s over the grand stand with surprising unanimity. But his aspect just then was even more prosperous than usual. He seized Signor Francesco’s arm with good-humoured effusiveness. “Flush!” he cried, with a bounce. “Well, my boy, I should rather think so. Wy, I ain’t on the turf any longer, that’s jest w’ere it is. I’ve retired from business. Jest you look ’ere, Frenchy; that’s gold, that is; I’ve been over in your country for six weeks, I ’ave; and danged if I ain’t come back with my pockets ’arf bust with furrineerin’ money!”
“Tomycountry! To Tyrol?” Franz put in, greatly astonished. “Zer ain’t moch money going zere, I fancy. We’re as poor as ze church mice. But, perhaps,” he added, with an afterthought, “you mean Vienna.”
“Vienna be ’anged!” the bookmaker responded, with a hearty slap on the Frenchy’s back. To him, as to all his kind, the Continent was the Continent, one and indivisible. He made and encouraged no petty distinctions between France and Austria. “Vienna be ’anged. It’s Monty CarloI’vebeen to. By George, sir, that’s the place to rake the looees in! You puts down your cash on red or black or numbers, orong chevalthey calls it; wh’rr, wh’rr, goes the roolett—pop, out jumps the pea—‘Rooge gang!’ sez the croopyer;—and you hauls in your money! I tell you, Frenchy, that’s the place to make your pile in! Wy, I haven’t been there more ’n jest six weeks—an’ I come back last night with a cool twenty thou’ in my britches pocket!”
“Twenty sousand francs?” Franz cried, fairly dazzled.
His companion’s eyes gazed unutterable contempt “Twenty thousand francs! Francs be blowed!” he answered, briskly. “None o’ your furrineerin’ reckonin’s for me,ifyou please, young man! I’m a true-born Briton, and I count in pounds sterlin’. No, no; twenty thousand pounds in good French bank-notes—a cool twenty thousand in my britches pocket. I’ve carried ’em home myself, all the way from Monty Carlo, for fear of bein’ robbed—there’s a lot o’ shady people down there on the Literal—and I’m going down now to my banker’s in the Strand, with the twenty thousand pound, to pay ’em in and invest ’em!”
“And you earned all zat lot in six weeks!” Franz cried, his mouth watering.
“Well, I didn’t exactlyearnit, old chap,” the bookmaker replied, with a knowing wink; “though I’ve got a System. I just let it flow in, without doing anything pertickler myself to ’elp it, excep’ it might be to rake in the rhino. But I mean to retire now, and do the toff in future, just runnin’ down there again every two or three years, when I feel the shoe pinch, to replenish the exchequer.”
“How much did you start wis?” Franz inquired, eagerly; for a Plan was rising up in indefinite outline before his mind’s eye as they stood there.
“Oh, I took across five ’underd,” the bookmaker replied, with easy confidence, as though five hundred pounds were to him the merest flea-bite. “I wouldn’t advise anybody to try and work his luck on less than that. You want thecapital, that’s where it is; the fly ’uns know that; outsiders go smash through not startin’ with the capital.”
He took Franz’s arm in his own. Luck makes men generous. They lunched together at Simpson’s, at the winner’s expense, after he had deposited his gains at the bank in the Strand. The lobster salad was good; the asparagus was fine; the iced champagne made glad the heart of the bookmaker. Expanding by degrees, he waxed warm in praise of his infallible System. It was fallacious, of course—all such Systems are; but its inventor, at any rate, implicitly believed in it. Little by little, with the aid of a pencil and paper, and a diagram of a roulette table, he explained to his eager listener the nature of his plan for securing a fortune offhand at Monte Carlo. Franz drank it in open-mouthed. This was really interesting! How could any man be such a fool as to sing for a miserable pittance six nights a week in smoky, grimy London, when a turn of fortune’s wheel could bring him a hundred pounds every time the table spun in cloudless Monte Carlo? It was clear as mud how to win; the bookmaker was right; no fellow could fail to pull off five strokes out of nine with this infallible martingale! Visions of untold wealth floated vague before his eyes. He saw his way to be rich beyond the dreams of avarice.
But it wasn’t avarice alone that inflamed Franz Lindner’s desire; it was love, it was revenge, it was wounded vanity. At once the idea rose up clear in his mind that if he could go to Monte Carlo and win a fortune, as the bookmaker had done, he might come home and lay it all at Linnet’s feet, with a very good chance of final acceptance. His experience at the London Pavilion had led him to believe that women in general, and theatrical stars in particular, had all their price, and might all be bought, if you only bid high enough. He didn’t doubt that Linnet was like the rest of her kind in this matter. She didn’t love Andreas; she couldn’t love Andreas. If a good-looking man, with a very fine figure and a very black moustache, laid the untold gold of Monte Carlo at her feet, could Linnet resist? Would she care to resist him? Franz opined she would not. He didn’t think it likely. There was only one thing needed to break the slender tie that bound her to Andreas. That one thing he would get—money, money, money!
So, from that day forth, Franz Lindner’s life was changed. He began to work on quite a new basis. Hitherto, like most others of his trade and class, he had spent all he earned as fast as he got it. Now, he began to save and lay by for love, with the thrift of his countrymen. One great object in life swam clear before his eyes; he must manage to scrape together five hundred pounds, and take it to Monte Carlo, where he could make it by a stroke or two of that wonder-working roulette-table into twenty thousand. And, with twenty thousand pounds, he didn’t for a moment doubt he’d be able to pay his suit once more to Linnet.