WhileCophetua’s Adventurewas running at the Harmony, Will necessarily saw a good deal of Linnet. Signora Casalmonte was now the talk of the town. Her name cropped up everywhere. Many men paid her most assiduous court. She was greatly in request for meets of the Four-in-hand Club, for Sundays at the Lyric, for picnics at Virginia Water, for little dinners at Richmond. To all of them Linnet went in her innocent way—that deeper-seated innocence that sees and knows much evil, yet passes unscathed through it; for the innocence that springs from mere ignorance alone is hardly worth counting. Andreas accompanied her everywhere with marital solicitude; the foolish were wont to say he was a jealous fellow; wiser heads saw well he was only making sure that the throat which uttered such valuable notes should take no hurt from night air or injudicious ices. It was the singer, not the woman, Andreas guarded so close—the singer herself, and the money she brought him.
For Will Deverill, however, as a special old friend, Andreas always made very great concessions. He knew it did Linnet good to see much of her Englishman; and what did Linnet good gave resonance to her voice, and increased by so much her nett money value. So Will was allowed every chance of meeting her. When the weather permitted it, the Hausbergers often went down by the first train on Sunday morning to Leith Hill, or Hind Head, or Surrey commons; and Florian, and Rue, and Will Deverill, and Philippina, were frequently of the company. On such occasions, Will noticed, he was often sent on, as if of set design, to walk in front with Linnet, while Florian paired in the middle distance with Rue, and Andreas Hausberger himself, being the heaviest of the six, brought up the rear with that strapping Philippina. More than once, indeed, it struck Will as odd how much the last couple lagged behind, and talked earnestly. He remembered that look Linnet had given him at the theatre whileCophetuawas being arranged for. But, there, Philippina was always a flirt; and Andreas and she had been very old friends in the Tyrol together!
On one such excursion, as it chanced, when Rue was not of the party, Florian brought down his queer acquaintance, the Colorado Seer, and an American friend who had lately made a hit at a London theatre. This theatrical gentleman did the English Stage Yankee in drawing-room comedies to perfection by simply being himself, and was known in private life as Theodore Livingstone. He was tall and handsome, with peculiar brown eyes, brown hair and beard, and a brown tweed suit to match that exactly echoed them. Philippina had always been a susceptible creature—she was one of those women who take their loves lightly, a little and often, with no very great earnestness or steadfastness of purpose. She flirted desperately all that day with the handsome stranger. Andreas smiled sardonically; he himself was nowhere by Mr Theodore Livingstone’s side, though he was generally a prime favourite; and even Florian himself, who had resumed at once in London the amicable relations broken off on the Küchelberg, felt his attentions slighted in favour of the new and good-looking American. Philippina, to say the truth, was all agog with excitement at her fresh acquaintance. When they lunched on the heather-clad slope of Holmbury, she sat by his side and drank out of the same cup with him; and when he left them at last to descend towards Guildford, while the rest made their way back on foot to Gomshall Station, she was momentarily disconsolate for the loss of her companion. Not till they had gone a full half-a-mile or more did she recover sufficiently to bandy words with Florian.
“Philippina has her moments,” Andreas said, with his bitter smile, when Florian chaffed her a little on her evident captivation, for the brown eyes and beard of the handsome actor had quite taken her by storm. “Philippina has her moments. I’ve seen her so before, and I shall see her so again, I don’t doubt, in future. She’s alwaysvolage.” And his lip curled curiously.
“Well,volatschor not,” Philippina replied, turning round to him sharply, with one of her arch little looks—Philippina was always famed for her archness—“volatschor not, Herr Andreas, I haf always returnt to my olt frents at last, sooner or later, haf I not?”
“That’s true,” Florian answered, taking the remark to himself, in the Florianesque manner, and fingering his own smooth chin with his white hand, lovingly. “And I’m sure, Philippina, if it comes to that, your old friends have never forgotten you, either. In London or at Meran, they’ve always been the same—to you, and to everyone.” As he spoke, he gave a side-long glance at Linnet; for though he had said in his haste, once, the grapes were sour, he had never ceased in his own heart to admire them greatly; and since Linnet had come forth from her chrysalis stage, a full-fledged butterfly of the cosmopolitan world, decked in brilliant hues, and much praised or desired of all beholders, he had paid her assiduous court with every device in his power. It was Franz Lindner’s naïf belief that every woman must yield in the end to money or diamonds, if you only bid high enough; it was Florian’s, equally naïf, though a trifle less gross, that every woman must yield in the end to flattery and address, if you only flatter long enough. So he pressed himself assiduously upon Linnet’s attention, in season and out of season; and Linnet, who now regarded such compliments as part of the small change in which the world pays its successful entertainers, took very little heed of all his hints and innuendoes.
Andreas was wrong, however, in supposing this fancy of Philippina’s for the brown-eyed American was merely one of the good-humoured Tyrolese girl’s passing affections. For once, at last, Philippina was fairly caught in a genuine attachment “ ’Tis a scratch,” Andreas said at first; “she’ll soon get over it.” But, as a matter of fact, Philippina didn’t. On the contrary, the attack grew more and more serious. In a week or two, she was madly in love with Mr Theodore Livingstone; they had dropped insensibly into Christian names; it was Theodore this, and Theodore that, and Theodore the other thing, till Andreas, out of joint, was fairly sick and tired of it. What was odder still, the good-looking American on his side returned the feeling with interest. Philippina had always been a fine-built girl of the buxom beauty type, very large and vigorous; she was lively, and bright, and head over ears in love; and the American, though not unaccustomed to female admiration, was thoroughly taken with her. Before long, it was evident they meant to make a match of it. Andreas shrugged his shoulders; still, he was amused and yet piqued by it. Why any man should ever be minded to marry an actress at all—unless, indeed, there was money in her—fairly passed his comprehension; he felt sure there was no money in poor dear Philippina. For every other purpose, the ceremony in such a case is so absurdly superfluous. However, being a wise and prudent man, who trusted much to the mitigating effects of time, Andreas threw no obstacles in their way, and raised no objections. He only observed, in his dry fashion, more than once to Linnet, “She’ll get tired of him soon; it’s always the way with these hot first loves; like straw fires, they flare up fast, and cool down again quickly.” The thought seemed to afford him much inward consolation.
But though Andreas saw no difficulties in the young people’s way, Linnet, with her quicker feminine instinct, immediately spied one. “Is he a Catholic, Philippina?” she asked almost at once, somewhat doubtfully.
“Ah, no; he isn’t a Catholic,” Philippina answered in German, with a nonchalant air; “he belongs to some queer kind of American religion, I know not what. They have lots of assorted religions in America, I’m told, to suit all tastes. His they call in English a hard-shell Baptist. So, of course, when we marry, we’ll have to get a dispensation.”
The dispensation, however, proved a harder matter in the end than Philippina or her lover at all imagined. The Church was obdurate. Florian, who, as a friend of the house, had been called in to assist in this domestic difficulty, and who knew an Archbishop—Florian, in his easy-going Gallio mood, was of opinion that the problem might easily be solved by Mr Livingstone’s immediate conversion and reception into the bosom of the Church; a course to which he, for his part, saw no possible objection. But, greatly to his surprise, the American stuck to his grotesque and quaintly-named creed with dogged persistence. Why any man should trouble to haggle about a faith when a woman was in question, Florian couldn’t understand—he’d have turned Mahommedan himself, or Esoteric Buddhist, for that matter, with the greatest pleasure if it gave the lady one moment’s satisfaction; and Mr Livingstone’s own character hardly led him to expect any greater devotion on his part to the nice abstractions of dogmatic theology. But the American, though he dealt largely in fearsome Western oaths, and played poker with a will, and was not more particular in his domestic relations than most other members of his own uncensorious profession, yet stood firm as a rock on the question of recusancy. The Inquisition itself would never have moved him. He had no particular reason, indeed, for his dogged refusal, except an innate prejudice against Papistry, prelacy, and all forms of idolatry; he had no objection of any sort to marrying a Roman Catholic girl, and bringing up her future children, if any, in the Roman Catholic religion; but he stood out firm himself for his own personal Protestantism. “A hard-shell Baptist I was born,” he said, with great persistence, “and a hard-shell Baptist I’ll die, you bet. I was never a church member, nor even an inquirer, but a hard-shell Baptist I was and will be—and be durned to all Papists.”
To Florian, such obstinacy on so unimportant a point seemed simply incomprehensible; if it had been a critical question, now, about Pacchiarotto or Baudelaire or Pater’s prose style, he might perhaps have understood it: but infant baptism! theological quibbles! an obscure American sect! impossible! incredible! Still, the wise man has to take the world as he finds it, allowing for all existing follies and errors of other people’s psychology. So Florian, who was really a good-natured fellow in a lazy sort of way, when things cost him no trouble, went to see his friend the Archbishop more than once about the dispensation. He found the Archbishop, however, even more impracticable on the subject than the hard-shell Baptist. Those two minds were built, indeed, on such opposite lines that ’twas impossible they should discuss anything, except at cross-questions. The Archbishop, tall, thin, ascetic, ecclesiastical, a churchman to the finger-tips, saw in this proposed marriage a breach of discipline, a relaxation of the Church’s rules, a danger to a woman’s immortal soul, and to heaven knows how many souls of her unborn children. Florian, short, dainty, easy-going, worldly-minded, tolerant, saw in it all only a question of obliging a jolly, good-looking, third-rate actress, whom marriage would perhaps reclaim for a few brief months from a shifting series of less regular attachments. But the mere fact that she was an actress told against her with the Archbishop. Why should he make exception in favour of a young woman of ill-regulated life and flippant conversation, who belonged to a profession already ill-seen by the Church, and who wished to enter into one of the most solemn sacraments of life with a professed unbeliever? The Archbishop interposed endless objections and vexatious delays. He must referthismatter to Rome, andthatone to further personal deliberation. He must satisfy himself about the state of the young woman and the young man by actual interviews. Florian, like most others of his type, was patient of delays, and seldom lost his temper; but he almost lost it now with that grim, thin old man who could make such a strange and unnecessary fuss about allowing a third-rate playhouse singing-girl to contract marriage with a nondescript hard-shell Baptist!
Two or three weeks passed away in this undecided fashion, and still Florian called almost daily, and still the Archbishop hummed and hawed and shilly-shallied. Philippina, all the time, grew more and more visibly eager, and the hard-shell Baptist himself, unable to enter into his Eminence’s ecclesiastical frame of mind, consigned the Archbishop and all his Church to eternal perdition ten times a day in sound round Western phrases. Florian heartily sympathised with him; it was absurd to treat so slight a matter so seriously. Why, Florian himself, if he’d been an Archbishop (which he might have been in the great age of Italian churchmanship), would have granted the girl dispensations enough in less than half the time to drive a round dozen of husbands abreast, if her fancy so dictated. His Eminence couldn’t have asked more questions or insisted on more proof if he’d been buying a Leonardo for the National Gallery, instead of handing over the precarious possession of a Tyrolese cow-girl to a handsome but highly-flavoured Western-American mountebank.
At last, when Florian returned, much disturbed, from his sixth or seventh unsuccessful interview, to Linnet’s house in Avenue Road, where he was to meet Philippina and her betrothed by special appointment, his hansom drew up at the door just as Philippina herself and Mr Theodore Livingstone, in their most Sunday array, disappeared into the vestibule. Florian followed them fast upstairs into Linnet’s drawing-room. Andreas Hausberger was there, with Linnet by his side; Philippina and Mr Livingstone looked radiantly happy, and bursting with excitement.
“Well, the Archbishop still refuses,” Florian exclaimed, with great disgust, dropping exhausted on a sofa. “I never in my life met such a stubborn old dromedary. I’ve tried him with reason, and I’ve tried him with ridicule, and I’ve tried him with authority, but nothing answers. He’s impervious to any of ’em—a typical pachyderm. I don’t believe, myself, if you gird at him for a year, you’ll get anything out of him.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Philippina answered, glibly, withdrawing her light glove. “Teodore and I haf taken ze law into our own hands. He persuade me to it zis morning. I do not care by zis time, were it for twenty Archbishops.”
“Oh dear, what do you mean?” Linnet cried, all aghast, regarding her friend with profound dismay.
Philippina held up her left hand significantly. “Just zat!” she cried, with a little air of petulant triumph, touching a plain gold ring on her third finger. Then she turned to Theodore. “My husband!” she said, smiling, as if to introduce him in his novel capacity.
“I’d arranged it all beforehand,” the American explained, coming to her aid at once with a somewhat exulting air; “I’d got the licence, and put everything well in hand against the Archbishop’s consent; and this morning I felt I wasn’t going to wait knocking about for the blamed thing any longer. So I persuaded Philippina, and Philippina gave way; and we were married by twelve o’clock at a Baptist Chapel, by a minister of religion, as the Act directs, in the presence of the registrar. I expect that’s about as binding as you make ’em in England; an Archbishop himself couldn’t fix it up any firmer with a dozen dispensations.”
“I congratulate you!” Florian cried, fanning his face with his hand. “You’ve done the right thing. Archbishops, I take it, are impracticable anachronisms. It’s absurd to let these priests interfere with one’s individuality in such a private matter.”
But Linnet started back with an awestruck face. “O Philippina,” she cried, “how dreadful! Why, a Catholic wouldn’t think you were married at all! There’s been no sacrament. From the Church’s point of view, you might almost as well not have gone before the registrar.”
Florian laughed down her scruples. The happy bridegroom, never doubting in his own soul the validity of his marriage, invited them all to dine with him that evening at the Criterion before the theatre. But a little later in the afternoon, when the women had left the room, Andreas Hausberger drew Florian mysteriously aside. “Linnet’s quite right,” he whispered in the philosopher’s ear. “I know my countrywomen. Philippina’ll be as happy as the day is long—for a matter of a week or two; and then, when she comes to think over what it is she’s done, she’ll never forgive herself. From the Catholic point of view, this is no marriage at all. Philippina must answer for it sooner or later to the priests: and they won’t be too gentle to her.”
Andreas Hausberger was right. Philippina’s nemesis found her out all too quickly. Just six weeks later, Will Deverill had called round one afternoon at Florian’s rooms in Grosvenor Gardens. They were engaged in discussing Florian’s latest purchase—an etching of a wood-nymph after a new Dutch artist, very pure and precious—when Mr Barnes, that impeccable man-servant, opened the door with a flourish, and announced in his cut-and-dried official voice, “Signora Cazzlemonty; Mrs Theodore Livingstone!”
And Linnet and Philippina burst in upon them like a whirlwind.
Will rose hurriedly to greet them. In a moment, he saw something serious was amiss. Philippina’s eyes were red and swollen with crying; Linnet’s, though less bloodshot, looked weary and anxious. “Why, Madre de Dios, what’s the matter?” Florian exclaimed in his affected way, rushing forward effusively in his brown velvet smoking-coat. “My dear Signora, to what happy star do I owe the honour of this unexpected visit? And all unbidden, too! Such good luck is too infrequent!”
“It’s poor Philippina!” Linnet cried, half-inarticulate with sympathy. “She’s in such a dreadful state. She really doesn’t know what on earth to do about it.”
Florian smiled the calm smile of superior wisdom. “What, already?” he exclaimed, raising one impressive hand. “So soon? So soon? A little rift within the lute, a little tiff with her Theodore? Well, well, dearDiva, we know these offences must needs come, in the best regulated families. They’re part and parcel of our ridiculous marriage system. Will and I are wiser in our generation, you see;wekeep well out of it.”
“No, no; it is not zat!” Philippina cried, excitedly. Then turning to Will, she burst out in German, “I’ve been to see the priest and the bishop to-day, to ask for absolution, and it’s all no use; they’ll neither of them give it to me. I’ve been to ask them again and again these two weeks; but they’re hard like rock; hard, hard, as that mantelpiece: they refuse to forgive me. They say it’s no true marriage at all that I’ve made, but the lusts of the flesh—a sinful union. Ach! what shall I do, what ever shall I do? This is terrible, terrible!” And she wrung her hands hard. “It’ll kill me,” she cried; “it’ll kill me.”
Linnet turned in explanation to the bewildered Florian. “You see,” she said simply, “she’s living in sin now, and they won’t absolve her. She may not take the mass, nor receive the sacraments of the Church in any form. She’s like one excommunicated. If she died to-morrow, they would refuse her extreme unction; she would pass away in her sin, and must go at once, straight, straight to perdition.”
“But surely,” Florian ventured to observe, turning theologian for once, in these peculiar circumstances, “her present life—well, my dear Signora, without rudeness to the lady, we must all admit, it’s—h’m, h’m—how shall I put it? It’s at least quite as innocent as her previous habits.”
Linnet made no false pretence of misunderstanding his plain meaning. This was a serious matter, and she felt its full seriousness herself so deeply that she sympathised with Philippina. “You don’t understand,” she answered, gasping; “you don’t at all understand; you can’t throw yourself into our standpoint. You’re not a Catholic, you see, and you don’t feel as we feel about it. To sin once, twice, three times, till seventy times seven, I care not how often—that is simply to sin: and if we repent in our hearts—God is faithful and just—the Church absolves us. But to live in open sin, to persist in one’s wrong, to set the authority and discipline of the Church at defiance—ah! that to us is quite another matter. Philippina may have done wrong sometimes; we are all of us human; Heaven forbid I should judge her”—she spoke very earnestly; “but to continue in sin, to live her life without the sacraments and consolations of the Church, to remain with a man whom no Catholic can recognise as really her husband—that is too, too terrible. And, just think, if she were to die—” Linnet gazed up at him appealingly.
“But thatcan’tbe the Catholic doctrine!” Will exclaimed with great vehemence.
Florian was more practical. “I dare saynot,” he answered, with a shrug—“as the Catholic doctrine is understood by theologians, archbishops, and casuistical text-books. But that’s nothing to the point. It is the Catholic doctrine as these women understand it, and it’s sufficient to make them both supremely unhappy. That’s enough for us. What we’ve got to ask is, how can we help them now out of this hole they’ve got into?”
The longer they talked about it, indeed, the clearer did this central fact come out to them. Philippina had married in haste, without the Church’s consent; she was repenting at leisure now, in the effort to obtain it. And she sat there, cowering and quivering in bodily terror of those pains and penalties of fire and flame which were every whit as real to her to-day in London as they had been long ago by the wayside shrines at St Valentin. Either she must give up her husband, she said, or her hopes of salvation. It was evident that to her mind the little peccadilloes which the Church could absolve were as absolutely nothing; but to live with the husband whom the Church disowned, appalled and alarmed her. Her agonised terror was as genuine as though the danger she feared were actually confronting her. She saw and heard the hissing flames of purgatory. It made Will realise far more keenly than he had ever realised before the deep hold their creed keeps over these Tyrolese women. He couldn’t help thinking how much Linnet would suffer, with her finer mould, and her profounder emotions, under similar circumstances, if even Philippina, that buxom, coarse-fibred girl, took so deeply to heart the Church’s displeasure. He remembered it afterwards at a great crisis of their history; it was one of the events in life that most profoundly affected him.
Philippina, meanwhile, rocked herself up and down, moaning and trembling piteously. Will’s heart was touched. He seized his friend by the arm. “Look here, Florian,” he cried, all sympathy, “we must go at once and see the Archbishop.”
“My dear fellow,” Florian answered, shaking his head, “it isn’t the slightest use. I’ve tried too long. The man’s pure priest. Heart or pity he has none. The bowels of compassion have been all trained out of him. The simplest offence against ecclesiastical law is to him sheer heresy.”
“Never mind,” Will answered. “We can always try.” It struck him, in fact, that the Archbishop might perhaps be more easily moved by himself than by Florian. “Philippina must go with us. We’ll see whether or not we can move the Churchman.”
They drove off together in a cab to Westminster; but Linnet went back by herself to St John’s Wood.
When she reached her home, Andreas met her at the door with a little sneer on his face. Though they lived more simply than everprima donnalived before, his avarice grew more marked as Linnet’s earnings increased; and since Philippina’s marriage he had been unkinder than ever to her. “What did you want with a cab?” he asked, “wasting your money like that. Wherever you’ve been—without my knowledge or consent—you might at least have come home by the Underground, I should fancy.”
Linnet’s face flushed hot. In her anxiety for her friend’s soul, she had never thought of such trifles as the hire of a hansom. “It was for Philippina,” she said, reproachfully, with a good home thrust: and Andreas, wincing, imagined he could detect a faintly personal stress upon Philippina’s name which almost disconcerted him. “She came round here in such a terrible state of distress that I couldn’t help going with her. She can’t get her absolution; she’s almost out of her mind with it.”
Andreas’ face set harder and sterner than ever. He eyed his wife narrowly. “Philippina can settle for her own cabs,” he said with an ugly frown. “What’s Philippina to us or we to Philippina, that we should waste our hard-earned money upon her? Let Philippina pay for the saving of her own precious soul, if she wants to save it. Don’t spend a penny upon her that belongs to your husband.”
An answer struggled hard for utterance upon Linnet’s tongue; but with an effort she repressed it. Andreas hadn’t always thought so little of Philippina—before she married the handsome brown-eyed American. However, Linnet refrained from answering him back as he himself would have answered her. The Blessed Madonna in her hand gave her strength to restrain herself. She merely said, with a little sigh, “I never thought about the cab; it was Florian who called it.”
Andreas turned upon her sharply. “So so!” he exclaimed, with an air of discovery. “You’ve been round to Herr Florian’s! And the other man was there, I suppose! You went by appointment to meet him!”
“Herr Will was there, if you meanhim,” Linnet answered, fiery red, but disdaining the weak subterfuge of a pretended ignorance. “I didn’t go to meet him, though; I didn’t know he was there. He’s gone round with her, poor girl, to see the Archbishop.”
Andreas drew himself up very stiff. He hadn’t quite liked that stress Linnet put on Philippina’s name, and he wasn’t sorry accordingly for this stray chance of a diversion. “So Herr Will was there!” he repeated, with a meaning smile, “What a singular coincidence! You’ve been seeing too much altogether of Herr Will of late. I’m not a jealous man, but mind you, Linnet, I draw a line somewhere.”
Linnet’s face was crimson. “It’s notyouwho have had cause to feel jealous,” she answered, quietly. “Herr Will is too good a man to act . . . well, to act as you would do. Youknowwhat you say or what you hint at isn’t true. You’re put out because——”
“Because what?” Andreas asked, provokingly, as she broke off and hesitated.
But Linnet brushed past him, and went up to her own room without answering a word. She was too proud to finish the sentence she had begun, “Because Philippina has given you up and married the American.”
She had known it all along—known it, and never minded. But she felt in her heart the reason why; she had never loved Andreas, so how could she be jealous of him? He had married her as a very sound investment; he had never pretended to care for her at all in herself; and she, in turn, had never pretended to care for him. But now, in an agony of remorse and terror, she flung herself on her bed and, with white hands clasped, besought Our Lady, with all the strength she possessed, to save her from despising and hating her husband. She had never loved him, to be sure; but to her, as a Catholic, marriage was a most holy sacrament of the Church, and she must try to live up to it. She prayed, too, for strength to love Will Deverill less—to forget him, to neglect him. Yet, even as she prayed, she thought to herself ten thousand times over how different it would all have been if she had married Will Deverill; how much she would have loved him; how true at heart she would have been to him. All heretic that he was, his image rose up between herself and Our Lady. She wiped her brimming eyes, and, with sobs and entreaties, begged hard to love him less, begged hard to be forgiven that she loved him now so dearly.
Yet, even in her own distress, Linnet thought of Philippina. She prayed hard, too, for Philippina. She begged Our Lady, with tears and sighs, to soften the obdurate Archbishop’s heart, and make smooth for Philippina the path to Paradise. For, in a way, she really liked that big, bouncing alp-girl. Unlike as they were in mould, they both came from St Valentin; Philippina was to Linnet the one tie she still possessed that bound her in memory to the land of her birth—the land where her father and mother lay dead, awaiting their souls’ return from the flames of purgatory.
That evening at the theatre, Philippina burst in upon her with a radiant face, as she dressed for her part inCophetua’s Adventure. “It’s all right,” she cried aloud in German, half-wild with joy. “Mr Deverill has managed it! He spoke to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop saidYes; and he gave me absolution then and there on the spot, and I went home for Theodore; and I’m to spend to-night at a lodging-house alone, and he’ll marry us with all the rites of the Church to-morrow.”
Linnet clasped her hand tight. “I’m so glad, dear,” she answered. “I knew he’d give way if Herr Will only spoke to him. Herr Will’s so kind and good, no mortal on earth can refuse him anything. He’s a heretic, to be sure, but, O Philippina, there’s no Catholic like him! . . . Besides,” she added, after a pause, rearranging the folds in the Beggar Maid’s dress with pretended pre-occupation, “I prayed Our Lady that she might soften the Archbishop’s heart; and Our Lady heard my prayer; she always hears me.”
As she spoke, a great pang passed suddenly through her bosom: Our Lady had answeredthatprayer; would she answerthe other one? Would she grant Linnet’s wish to love Will Deverill less? Staring before her in an agony, she sobbed at the bare thought. It was horrible, hateful! A flood of conflicting emotion came over her like a wave. Sinful as she felt it herself to be, sheknewshe never meant that prayer she had uttered. Love Will Deverill less? Forget him? Oh, impossible! She might be breaking every commandment in her heart at once, but shecouldn’tframe that prayer she must and would love him!
Oh, foolishness of men, who think they can bind the human heart with a vow! You may promise todoor leave undone what you will; but promise tofeelor not to feel! The bare idea is preposterous!
The Hausbergers spent that winter in Italy. Andreas thought the London air was beginning to tell upon Linnet’s throat, and he took good care, accordingly, to get her an autumn engagement in Vienna, followed by a winter one at Rome and Naples. The money was less, to be sure, but in the end ’twould repay him. Linnet was an investment, and he managed his investment with consummate prudence. Before they went away, however, he and Linnet had another slight difference of opinion about Will Deverill. On the very morning of their departure, a bouquet arrived at the door in Avenue Road, with a neat little note attached, which Linnet opened and read with undisguised eagerness. Bouquets and notes were not infrequent arrivals at that house, indeed, and Andreas, as a rule, took little or no notice of them—unless accompanied by a holder of the precious metals. But Linnet flushed so with pleasure as she read this particular missive that Andreas leaned across and murmured casually, “What’s up? Let me look at it.”
“I’d—I’d rather not, if you don’t mind,” Linnet answered, colouring up, and half-trying to hide it.
Andreas snatched the paper unceremoniously from her trembling hands. He recognised the handwriting. “Ho, Will Deverill!” he cried, with a sneer. “Let’s see what he says! It’s poetry, is it, then? He drops into verse!” And he glanced at it angrily.
“To Linnet.”“Fair fortune gild your southward track,Dear bird of passage, taking wing.For me, when April wafts you back,Will not the spring be twice the spring?”
“To Linnet.”“Fair fortune gild your southward track,Dear bird of passage, taking wing.For me, when April wafts you back,Will not the spring be twice the spring?”
“To Linnet.”“Fair fortune gild your southward track,Dear bird of passage, taking wing.For me, when April wafts you back,Will not the spring be twice the spring?”
“To Linnet.”
“Fair fortune gild your southward track,
Dear bird of passage, taking wing.
For me, when April wafts you back,
Will not the spring be twice the spring?”
It was imprudent of Will, to be sure; but we are all of us aleetleimprudent at times (present company of course excepted); and some small licence in these matters is accorded by common consent to poets. But Andreas was angry, and more than merely angry; he was suspicious as well—beginning to be afraid, in fact, of his hold over Linnet. At first, when he came to England, the wiseimpresariowas so sure of his wife—so sure of keeping her, and all the money she brought him, in his own hands—that he rather threw her designedly into Will’s company than otherwise. He saw she sang better when she was much with Will; and for the sake of her singing, he lumped the little question of personal preference. But of late he had begun really to fear Will Deverill. It occurred to him at odd moments as just within the bounds of possibility, after all, that Will might some day rob him of his wife altogether,—and to rob him of his wife was to rob him of his most serious and profitable property. Why, the sale of her presents alone—bracelets, bouquet-holders, rings, and such like trifles—was quite a small fortune to him. And, all Catholic that she was, and devout at that—a pure woman who valued her own purity high—quite unlike Philippina—Andreas felt none the less she might conceivably go off in the end with Will Deverill. The heart is always a very vulnerable point in women. He might attack her through the heart, or some such sentimental rubbish; and Linnet had a heart such a fellow as that could strike chords upon easily.
So Andreas looked at the flowers and simple little versicles with an angry eye. Then he said, in his curt way, “Pretty things to address to a married woman, indeed! Pack them up and send them back again!”
Linnet flushed, and flared up. For once in her life, her temper failed her. “I won’t,” she answered, firmly. “I shall keep them if I choose. There’s nothing in them a poet mayn’t rightly say to a married woman. If there was, you know quite well I wouldn’t allow him to say it. . . . Besides,” she went on, warmly, “you wouldn’t have asked me to send them back if they’d been pearls or diamonds. You kept the duke’s necklet.” And she hid the note in her bosom before the very eyes of her husband.
Andreas was not a noisy man. He knew a more excellent way than that to carry his point in the end—by biding his time, and watching and waiting. So he said no more for the moment, except to mutter a resounding High German oath, as he flung the flowers, paper cover and all, into the dining-room fireplace. In half-an-hour more, they were at Charing Cross, on their way to Vienna. Linnet kept Will’s verses inside the bosom of her dress, and close to her throbbing heart. Andreas asked no more about them just then, but, all that winter through, he meditated his plan of action for the future, in silence.
Their two months at Vienna were a great success, professionally. Linnet went on to Rome laden with the spoils of susceptible Austrians. For the first few weeks after their arrival in Italy, she noticed that Andreas received no letters in Philippina’s handwriting; but, after that time, notes in a familiar dark-hued scrawl began to arrive for him—at first, once a fortnight or so, then, later, much more frequently. Andreas read them before Linnet’s eyes, and burnt them cautiously, without note or comment. Linnet was too proud to allude to their arrival in any way.
Early in April, with the swallows and sand-martins, they returned to England. The spring was in the air, and Andreas thought the bracing north would suit Linnet’s throat better now than that soft and relaxing Italian atmosphere. On the very day when they reached Avenue Road, Philippina came to see them. She greeted Andreas warmly; Linnet kissed her on both cheeks. “Well, dear,” she said in German, clasping her friend’s hand hard, “and how’s your husband?”
“What! that dreadful man!Ach, lieber Gott, my dear, don’t speak of him!” Philippina cried, holding up both her hands in holy horror. Linnet smiled a quiet smile. Florian’s forecast was correct; Andreas’s words had come true. Her hot first love had cooled down again as quickly as it had flared up, all aglow, like a straw fire in the first instance.
Then Philippina began, in her usual voluble style, to pour forth the full gravamen of her charges against Theodore. She was living with him still, oh yes, she was living with him,—for appearance’ sake, you understand; and then besides—Philippina dropped her eyes with a conventional smile, and glanced side-long at Andreas—there were contingencies . . . well . . . which made it necessary, don’t you know, to keep in with him for the present. But he was a dreadful man, all the same, and she had quite seen through him. She wished to goodness she had taken Herr Hausberger’s excellent advice at first, and never, never married him. “Though there! when once one’s married to a man, like him or lump him, my dear, the best thing one can do is to drag along with him somehow, for the children’s sake, of course”—and Philippina simpered once more like the veriest school-girl.
As soon as she had finished the recital of her troubles with that dreadful man, she went on to remark, in the most offhand way, that Will Deverill, presuming on his altered fortunes, had taken new and larger rooms in a street in St James’s. They were beautiful rooms—oh yes, of course—and Herr Florian had furnished them,ach, so schön, so schön, was never anything like it. She saw Herr Florian often now; yes, he was always so kind, and sent her flowers weekly—such lovely flowers. Herr Will had heard that Linnet was coming back; and he was hoping to see her. He would be round there that very night, he had told her so himself just half-an-hour ago in Regent Street.
At those words, Andreas rose, without warning of any sort, and touched the electric bell. The servant entered.
“You remember Mr Deverill?” he said to the girl; “the tall, fair gentleman, with the light moustache, who called often last summer?”
“Oh yes, sir, I mind him well,” the girl answered, promptly “him as brought the bokay for Mrs Hausberger the morning you was going away to the Continent last October.”
It was an awkward reminiscence, though she didn’t intend it so. Andreas frowned still more angrily than before at the suggestion. “That’s the man!” he cried, savagely. “Now, Ellen, if he calls to-night and asks for your mistress, say she isn’t at home, and won’t be at home in future to Mr Deverill.”
His voice was cold and stern. Linnet started from her chair. Her face flushed crimson. That Andreas should so shame her before Philippina and her own servant—it was hateful, it was intolerable! She turned to the girl with a tinge of unwonted imperiousness in her tone. “Say nothing of the sort, Ellen,” she cried, in a very firm voice, standing forth and confronting her. “If Mr Deverill comes, show him up to the drawing-room.”
Andreas stood still and glared at her. He said never a word, but he clenched his fists hard, and pressed his teeth together. The girl looked from one to the other in feeble indecision, and then began to whimper. “Which of you am I to take my orders from?” she burst out, with a little sob. “From you, or my mistress?”
“From me!” Linnet answered, in a very settled voice. “This house is mine, and you aremyservant. I earn the money that keeps it all going. Mr Hausberger has no right to dictate to me here whom I may see or not in my own drawing-room.”
The girl hesitated for a moment, and then left the room with evident reluctance. As soon as she was gone, Andreas turned fiercely to his wife. “This is open war,” he said, with a scowl; “open war, Frau Hausberger. This is sheer rebellion. You are wrong in what you say. The house is mine, and all that’s in it; I took it in my own name, I furnished it, I pay the rent of it. The money you earn is mine; I have your own signature to the document we drew up before I invested my hard cash in getting you trained and educated. I’m your husband, and if you disobey me, I’ll take you where I choose. Now mind, my orders are, you don’t receive Mr Deverill in this house this evening. Philippina, you are my witness. You hear what I say. If she does, all the world will know what to think of it. She’ll receive him against my wish, and in my absence. Every civilised court puts only one construction on such an act of open disobedience.”
He went out into the hall, fiery hot, and returned with his hat. “I’m going out,” he said, curtly. “I don’t want to coerce you. I leave it in your own hands whether you’ll see this man alone against my will or not, Frau Hausberger. But, recollect, if you see him, I shall take my own course. I’ll not be bearded like this before my own servants by a woman—a woman I’ve raised from the very dregs of the people, and put by my own act in a position she’s unfit for.”
Linnet’s blood was up. “You can go, sir,” she said, briefly. “If Mr Deverill calls, I shall see for myself whether or not I care to receive him.”
Andreas strode out all on fire. As soon as he was gone, Linnet sank into a chair, buried her face in her hands, pressed her nails against her brow, and sobbed long and violently. The little Madonna in Britannia metal gave scant comfort to her soul. She rocked herself to and fro in unspeakable misery. Though she had spoken up so bravely to Andreas to his face, she knew well in her heart this was the end of everything. As a wife, as a Catholic, let him be ever so unworthy, let him be ever so unkind, her duty was plain. She must never, in his absence, receive Will Deverill!
Her strength was failing fast. She knew that well. Dear Lady, protect her! If she saw Will after this, Heaven knew what might happen—for, oh, in her heart, how she loved him, how she loved him! She had prayed to the Blessed Frau that she might love Will Deverill less; but she never meant it. The more she prayed, the better she loved him. And now, why, the Madonna was crumpled up almost double in her convulsive grasp. Philippina leant over her with a half-frightened air. Linnet rose and rang the bell. It was terrible, terrible. Though it broke her poor heart, she would obey the Church; she would obey her husband. “If Mr Deverill calls,” she said, half-inaudibly, to the servant, once more, “you may tell him . . . I’m not at home.”
The Church had conquered.
Then she sank back in her chair, sobbing and crying bitterly.
Mr Joaquin Holmes was making a morning call one of those days on Mrs Theodore Livingstone—better known to the readers of these pages as Philippina—at her furnished apartments in Bury Street, Bloomsbury. Of late, Mr Joaquin Holmes had been down on his luck; and the weather in London that day was certainly not of a sort to propitiate the nerves of a man who had been raised on the cloudless skies of Southern Colorado. Though it was early April, a settled gloom, as of November, brooded impartially over city and suburbs. Mr Joaquin Holmes was by no means happy. Society in London had grown tired of his seership; the Psycho-physical Entertainment at the Assyrian Hall attracted every night an ever-dwindling audience; Maskelyne and Cooke had learnt to counterfeit all the best of his tricks; and things in general looked so black just then for the trade of prophet that the Seer was beginning to wonder in his own inmost soul whether he wouldn’t be compelled before long to fall back for a while on his more lucrative but less reputable alternative profession of gambler and card-sharper. However, being a man of sentiment, he consoled himself meanwhile by a morning call on Mrs Theodore Livingstone.
Philippina was looking her very best that afternoon, attired in a coquettish costume, halfpeignoir, half tea-gown, especially designed for the reception of such casual visitors. And Mr Joaquin Holmes was one of Philippina’s most devoted admirers. Florian had introduced him long ago to the good-natured singer, before her marriage, and the Seer had ever since been numbered among her most frequent and attentive callers. He could talk with her in German; for, as befits his trade, he was an excellent linguist; and Philippina was glad when she could relieve herself for a while from the constant strain of speaking English by an occasional return to the free tongue of her Fatherland. Theodore was out, she said, glibly, with her accustomed volubility; oh yes, he was out, and he wouldn’t be back, she supposed, till dinner. No fear about that; the horrid man never came near her now, except at meal times, or to go down to the theatre. He was off, she had no doubt, with some of his hateful companions in some billiard-room or something, wasting the money that ought to go to the support of the household. If it weren’t for herself, and for someverykind friends, Philippina really didn’t know what on earth would become of them.
The Seer smiled sweetly. He was an engaging man, and when he flooded Philippina with the light of his great eyes she thought him really as nice as anybody on earth, except Herr Andreas. They sat there long, and chatted in that peculiar vein which Philippina affected when she found herself alone with one of her male admirers. She was a born flirt, Philippina, and though she was a matron now, with a distinct tendency to grow visibly stouter on good English fare, she had still all that archness and that liveliness of manner which had captivated Florian the first morning they met her on the hill-top at St Valentin.
As they sat there, exchanging a quiet fire of repartee, with manyach’sandso’sof very Teutonic playfulness, the lodging-house servant came up with a note, which Philippina tore open and read through somewhat eagerly. The Seer noticed that as she read it her colour deepened—such signs of feeling seldom escaped the eyes of that observant thought-reader. He noticed also that the envelope, though directed in English letters, bore evident traces of a German hand in the twists and twirls of the very peculiar manuscript. He could see from where he sat an unmistakable curl over theuof Bury Street. A curl like that could only have been produced by a person accustomed to German writing.
Philippina crumpled the envelope, and looked vacantly at the fireplace. The fire wasn’t lighted, for the day, though damp and dark, was by no means chilly. The Seer noted that glance: so she wanted to burn it, then! Philippina, unheeding him, poked the envelope through the bars of the grate with the aid of the tongs, but laid the note itself on the table by her side, a little uneasily. The Seer, with that native quickness of perception which had made him into a thought-reader, divined at once what was passing through her mind; she must destroy that note before Theodore returned, and she was anxious in her own soul for a chance of destroying it.
Joaquin Holmes spotted a mystery—perhaps an intrigue; but, in any case, a mystery. Now little family affairs of this sort were part and parcel of his stock-in-trade; there was nothing so useful to him in life as possession of a secret. And Philippina was indeed an open book; he could read her as easily as he could read a pack of cards with the tips of his fingers. The longer he stopped, the more obviously and evidently Philippina fidgeted; the more she fidgeted, the longer he determined, as he phrased it to himself with Western frankness, “to stop and see the fun out.” Philippina grew more and more silent as time went by; the Seer talked on and on with more unceasing persistence. Meanwhile, the fog without grew denser and denser. At last, of a sudden, it descended, pitch dark, with that surprising rapidity we all know so well in our smoky metropolis. Philippina yawned; she saw there was no help for it. It was a case for the gas. “Will you ring the bell, Mr Holmes?” she asked languidly, in German.
The Seer seized his chance, and rose briskly to obey her. As he brushed past her side, Philippina, in a quiver, put out her hand for her letter. The room was black as night. She fumbled for it in vain; a cold chill came over her. “Why, where’s that paper?” she exclaimed, in a tone of most evident and undisguised dismay. “I wish I had a match. It was lying here a minute ago.”
Mr Holmes stood calmly in the dark, with his hand upon the bell-handle. He was in no hurry to ring it. “You’ll have to wait now,” he said, in his very coolest manner, “till the servant comes up. Unfortunately, I don’t happen to have a match about me.”
“There are some upon the mantelpiece, perhaps,” Philippina faltered, unwilling to rise and move away from the table that held that compromising letter.
“Oh, that’s all right!” the Seer said quietly, in his slow Western drawl. “Don’t trouble yourself about me. I can see very well in the dark without one.” Then he began to read aloud, “Du liebste Philippina!”
Philippina made a wild dash across the room in his direction. This was horrible! He had abstracted it! But the Seer, unabashed, took a step or two backward with great deliberation. “That’s all right!” he said again, in a languid tone of the blandest unconcern. “There’s nothing fresh here; you needn’t trouble yourself. It’s only a little note from a very old friend, signed, ‘Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.’ ”
Philippina darted once more blindly in the direction of the voice; Joaquin Holmes heard her coming, and stepped aside noiselessly. He passed his practised finger-tips again over the lines of the writing. “Very pretty!” he said, smiling. “Very nice, indeed—for Signora Casalmonte! Why, I fancied you were her friend. This is charming, charming! And only to think so prudent a man as our dear friend Hausberger should have ventured to write such a compromising letter! ‘At three o’clock to-morrow, at the usual place,’ he says. Dear me, that’s interesting! So you’ve met him there before! And what a fool the man must be to go and put it on paper!”
Philippina clasped her hands, and dashed wildly against the sofa. “Oh, give it back to me!” she cried, really alarmed. “What will Andreas ever say! Howcanyou be so cruel? And my husband—my husband!”
The American, still wholly undisconcerted by her cries, popped the paper inside his breast-coat pocket, buttoned it up securely, drew a match-box from his waistcoat, and lighted the gas with a calm air of triumph. “Now, don’t be a fool, Philippina,” he said, taking hold of her by those plump round arms of hers, and pushing her back with conspicuous calmness into an easy-chair. “Compose yourself! Compose yourself! There’s nothing new in all this; we all know whatyouare—Theodore Livingstone, I suppose, just as well as the rest of us. Why trouble to give yourself these airs of tragic virtue? To tell you the truth, my dear girl, they don’t at all become you. Nobody expects miracles from an actress nowadays—not even her husband. Besides, I’m not going to make money out ofyou; you’re a very nice girl, and you’ve always been kind to me; so why should I want to show this letter to Theodore? What’s Theodore to me, or I to Theodore, that I should bother my head to uphold his domestic dignity? No, no, my child; that’s not the game. I hold the letter as a threat over Andreas Hausberger. Hausberger’s rich, don’t you see, and his wife’s his fortune. What’s more, she hates him, and he keeps her always precious short of money. She’ll be ready to pay anything for a letter like this; it’s a handle againsthim; and he, for his part, well—he’ll make any terms she likes rather than drive her away from him.”
He took up his hat, and made a courtly bow. “Good-bye, Philippina,” he said, smiling; “this’ll never come out at all, as far as regards yourself and your husband. Hausberger’d pay me well to keep the thing out of court; but I shan’t take it tohim; I’ll go and offer it direct, money down, to the Casalmonte.”
He walked lightly to the door, leaving Philippina petrified. He turned into the street: the fog began to lift again. He walked briskly on in the direction of Portland Place. Before he crossed the Regent’s Park, he had made up his mind to his plan of action. It was no use trying to blackmail a cool hand like Andreas; he must offer the letter, as he said, direct to Linnet. He didn’t doubt she would gladly seize on the pretext for a divorce, or at least a rupture. It would give her a good excuse for going away from the man whom his observation and instinct had rightly taught him she despised and detested.
He rang at the door in Avenue Road. By a lucky chance, he found Linnet in—and alone: her husband, she said, was out; he had gone for the day, she thought, with a party down to Greenwich.
The Seer didn’t mince matters. With American directness, he went straight to the root of things. “I’m glad of that,” he said, coolly, “for I didn’t want to see him. I wanted to see you alone. I’ve got something against him I want to sell you.”
“Something against him?” Linnet cried, puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr Holmes; and why on earth should you think I’d care to buy it?”
“Now, just you look here,” the Seer went on, holding the letter, face downward, before him and fumbling it with his fingers; “why shouldn’t we speak straight? What’s the good of going beating about the bush like this? Let’s talk fair and square. You hate your husband.”
Linnet rose and faced him. She was flushed and angry. “You’ve no right to say that,” she cried. “I never told you so.”
The Seer smiled sweetly. “I wouldn’t be a thought-reader,” he answered, with unaffected frankness, “if I needed to betolda thing in order to know it. But that’s neither here nor there. Don’t let’s quarrel about these trifles. The real thing’s this. I have a letter in my hand here that may be of very great use to you, if you want to get away from this man—as you do—and to marry Mr Deverill.”
Linnet’s face was crimson with shame and indignation. “How dare you say such a thing, sir!” she cried, trying to move towards the door. “Youknowit isn’t true. I never dreamt of marrying him.”
By a quick flank movement, the Seer sprang in front of her and cut off her retreat. “That won’t do,” he said, sharply. “You can’t deceive me like that. Remember, I can read your inmost thoughts as readily as I can read this letter in my hand. I’ll read it to you now. It’s to your friend Mrs Livingstone.” And, without a passing tremor on that handsome face or a quiver in his voice, he read out with his fingers the short compromising note, from “Thou dearest Philippina” down to “Thy ever affectionate, Andreas Hausberger.”
Linnet faced him, unmoved externally but with a throbbing heart. The Seer, as he finished it, darted a triumphant glance at her.
“Well?” Linnet said quietly, drawing herself up to her full height.
“Well, what’ll you give me for that, in plain black and white?” the Seer asked, with a calm tone of unquestioned victory.
“Nothing!” Linnet answered, moving once more towards the door. “It’s nothing fresh to me. I knew all that, oh, long ago.”
“Knew it? Ah, yes, no doubt,” the Seer answered, with a curl of those handsome lips. “There’s nothing much in that. Of course we all knew it. But it’s not enoughknowingit. You want it written down in plain black and white, to put in evidence against him. You see he acknowledges—”
Linnet cut him short sharply. “To put it in evidence?” she repeated, staring at him with a bewildered look. “In evidence against whom? What on earth can you mean? To put in evidence where? I don’t understand you.”
“Now, don’t let’s waste useful time,” the Seer interposed seriously. “This is a practical matter. There’s no knowing how soon your husband may return. I just mean business. I want to hear, straight and short, what you’ll give for this letter. We all know very well you’ve got enough already to prove the count of cruelty upon. You’ve only got to prove the other thing in order to get a regular divorce from him. And the proof of it’s here, in plain black and white, under his own very hand, in this letter I’ve read to you. Now, what do you offer? If you name my figure, it’s yours; if you don’t—well, Philippina’s a very good friend of mine; here goes—I’ll burn it!”
He held it over the fire, which was burning in the grate, as he looked hard into her eyes. Linnet drew back a pace or two, and faced him proudly. “Mr Holmes,” she said, in her very coldest voice, “you entirely misunderstand. You reckon without your host. You forget I’m a Catholic. Divorce to me means absolutely nothing. I’m Andreas Hausberger’s wife before the eye of God, and all the law-courts on earth could never make me otherwise—could never set me free to be anyone else’s. So your letter would be absolutely no use at all to me. I knew pretty well, long since, the main fact it implies; and it mattered very little to me. Andreas Hausberger is my husband—as such, I obey him, by the law of God—but he never had my heart; and I never had his. On no ground whatsoever do I value your document.”
The Seer, in turn, drew back in incredulous amazement. Was she trying to cheapen him? He interpreted her words after his own psychology. “No; you don’t mean that,” he said, with an unbelieving air. “You’d get a divorce if you could, of course, like anyone else; and you’d marry that man Deverill. Don’t think I’m such a fool as not to know how you feel to him. But you’re seeming to hang back so as to knock down my price. You want to get it a bargain. You think you can best me. Now, don’t let’s lose time haggling. Make me an offer, money down, and I’ll tell you at once whether or not I’ll entertain it.”
Linnet gazed at him in unspeakable scorn and contempt. “Do you think,” she said, advancing a step, “I’d bargain with you to buy a wretched thing like that! If I wanted to leave my husband, I’d leave him outright, letter or no letter. I stop with him now, of my own free will, by the Church’s command, and from a sense of duty.”
So far as the Seer was concerned, this strange woman spoke a foreign language. Duty was a word that didn’t enter into his vocabulary. He scanned her from head to foot, as one might scan some queer specimen of an unknown wild species. “You can’t possibly meanthat,” he cried, with a discordant little laugh, for he was used to the free Western notions on these subjects. “Come now, buy it or not!” he went on, dangling the letter before her face, between finger and thumb. “It’s going, going, going! Won’t you make me a bid for it?”
He shook it temptingly, held it aloft; it was valuable evidence. As he did so, the paper slipped all of a sudden from his grasp, and fell fluttering at Linnet’s feet. Mr Holmes was quick, but Linnet was quicker still. Before he could stoop to pick it up, she had darted down upon it and seized it. Then, with lightning haste, she thrust it inside her dress, in the shelter of her bosom. The baffled Seer seized her hand—too late to prevent her.
“Give it back to me!” he cried, twisting her wrist as he spoke. “How dare you take it? That’s a dirty trick to play a man. It’s mine, I say; give it back to me!”
Though he hurt her wrist and frightened her, Linnet stood her ground well. She was stronger than he thought—with all the stored-up strength of her mountain rearing. She pushed him back with a sudden burst of explosive energy. “You’re wrong,” she cried, indignantly. “It never was yours,—though I don’t know how you got it. You must have stolen it, no doubt, or intercepted it by some vile means, and then tried to make money out of it. I don’t want it myself, but I won’t give it back. It belongs to Philippina, and I mean to return it to her.”
“That’s a lie!” the Seer answered, catching her hands with a hasty dash, and trying to force her on her knees. “Damn your tricks; I’ll have it back again!” And, in the heat of his rage, he tried to unfasten her dress and snatch it from her bosom.
She tore herself away. The Seer followed her, still struggling. It was a hand-to-hand grapple. He fought her for it wildly.
At that very moment, before Linnet had time to scream for help, the door opened suddenly, and—Andreas Hausberger entered.