CHAPTER XXXV

GOLDEN HOPES

Mr Franz Lindner, _alias_ Signor 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 the _Daily 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 which _Cophetua’s Adventure_ suggested 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. The _prima donna’s_ first

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 popular _diva_ looked, if possible, even

more enchantingly beautiful; while the exquisite _naïveté_ with which

she sang the dainty _aria_, ‘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; he _ought_ to 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 his _café_

afterwards. 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!”

“To _my_ country! 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

Carlo _I’ve_ been to. By George, sir, that’s the place to rake the

looees in! You puts down your cash on red or black or numbers, or _ong

cheval_ they 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, _if_ you 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 exactly _earn_ it, 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 the _capital_, 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.