CHAPTER XLVI

HOME AGAIN!

Andreas Hausberger was always a wise man in his generation. The moment

he knew Linnet had left his house, he realised forthwith that the one

great danger to his interests lay in the chance of her obtaining a

divorce, and marrying Will Deverill. To prevent such a catastrophe to

his best investment was now the chief object in life of the prudent

_impresario_. He had hurried away from home that first afternoon, it is

true, to make sure how things stood with Philippina and her husband; but

as soon as he found out no serious danger menaced him there, he rushed

back to Avenue Road—to find Linnet flown, without a word to say

whither. Now, Andreas, being a very wise man, and knowing his

countrywomen well, felt tolerably sure Linnet was by far too good a

Catholic to agree to a divorce, even if Will suggested it. She might run

away to her lover in a moment of pique—and so shut herself out from the

benefit of the English law on the subject by misconducting herself in

return; but fly in the face of the Church, insult her creed, defy its

authority, annul its sacraments—oh, never! never! Andreas was certain

Linnet would do—just what Linnet really did; fling herself frankly upon

Will Deverill’s mercy, but refuse to marry him.

Moreover, with his usual worldly wisdom, the _wirth_ of St Valentin saw

at a glance that the Church was the only lever which could ever bring

his revolted wife back to him. She had always disliked him; she now

hated and despised him. But he was still, and must always be, in the

sight of God, her lawful husband. Linnet feared and obeyed the Church,

with the unquestioning faith of the genuine Tyrolese; it was to her a

pure fetish—authoritative, absolute, final. Andreas recognised clearly

that his proper course now was to enlist this mighty engine, if

possible, in his own favour. To guard against all adverse chances, he

must get Linnet back into his power at once, must carry her away from

the sphere of Will’s influence, and, if luck permitted, must hurry her

off to some land where divorce was impossible.

Quick as lightning, he made up his mind. To throw up all her engagements

in London forthwith would, of course, cost money—for she was engaged

under forfeit—and to lose money was indeed a serious consideration.

Still, in the present crisis, the temporary loss of a few stray hundreds

was as nothing in Andreas’s eyes compared with the possible prospective

loss of Linnet’s future earnings. He must risk that and more in order to

snatch her from Will Deverill’s clutches. He had meant to take his wife

to America, on tour, a little later in the year; and he adhered to that

programme: but not till she had quite got over her present fit of

rebellion. For the moment, he judged it best on many grounds to venture

on a bold step—no less a step than to go back with her to St Valentin.

For this sudden resolve, he had ample reasons. In the first place, he

would have her there under the thumb of Austrian law; divorce would be

impossible—nay, even unthinkable. But, in the second place—and on this

point Andreas counted far more—he would have her there in an atmosphere

of unquestioning Catholicism, where all the world would take it for

granted that to marry Will Deverill by judgment of an English court was

an insult to Providence ten thousand times worse than to sin and

repent—nay, even than to sin without pretence of repentance, but

without the vain mockery of a heretical marriage. A few weeks in the

Tyrol, Andreas thought in his wise way, surrounded by all the simple

ideas of her childhood, and exposed to the exhortations of her old

friend, the Herr Vicar, would soon bring Linnet back from this flight of

unbridled fancy to a proper frame of mind again. Besides, the mountain

air would be good for her health after so stormy an episode—ozone,

ozone, ozone!—and he wanted her to be in first-rate singing voice,

before he launched her on the fresh world of New York and Chicago. Lots

of money to be made in New York and Chicago! Once get her well across

the Atlantic in a White Star Liner, and all would be changed; she’d soon

forget Will in the new free life of that Western Golconda.

To enlist the Church on his side was therefore Andreas Hausberger’s

first and chief endeavour. With this object in view, he took the

unwonted step of confessing himself in due form to the priest of the

pro-Cathedral the very day after Linnet left him. ’Twas a well-timed

confession. Andreas admitted to the full his own misconduct—admitted it

with a most exemplary and edifying show of masculine contrition. But

then he went on to point out to the priest that between his wife’s case

and his there was a great gulf fixed, from the point of view of the

ecclesiastical vision. _He_ had sinned, it was true, and deserved

reprehension; but he was anxious, all the same, to remain in close union

as ever with his wife, to admit the obligation and sanctity of the

sacrament. Frau Hausberger, on the other hand, had left his hearth and

home, and seemed now on the very point of falling into the hands of

heretics, who might persuade her to accept the dissolving verdict of a

mere earthly court, and to marry again during her husband’s lifetime, in

open defiance of the Church’s authority. Her soul was thus placed in

very serious jeopardy. If she continued to remain with Will or with

Will’s friends, and if they over-persuaded her to obtain a divorce, she

would become a Protestant, or at any rate would enter into an irregular

union which no Catholic could regard as anything other than legalised

adultery.

The justness and soundness of Herr Hausberger’s views deeply impressed

the candid mind of his confessor. It is pleasant indeed, in these

degenerate days, to find a layman who so thoroughly enters into the

Church’s idea as to the obligation of the sacraments. Moreover, to let a

well-known lamb of the flock thus stray from the fold before the eyes of

all Europe—and on such a question—the confessor saw well would be a

serious calamity. Indeed, the Church had somewhat prided itself in its

way on Signora Casalmonte. It had pointed to her more than once as a

conspicuous example of pure Catholic life under trying circumstances. A

Tyrolese peasant-girl, brought up in a country where Catholic influences

still bear undisputed sway, and transplanted to the most dangerous and

least approved of professions, she had comported herself on the stage,

in spite of every temptation, with conspicuous modesty and religious

feeling. Beautiful, graceful, much admired, much sought after in all the

capitals of Europe, she had resisted the many snares that beset a

singer’s career, and had shown a singular instance of pure domestic life

in a sphere where such life is, alas, too uncommon. So much could the

lessons of the Church effect; so great was the lasting power of early

Catholic influences.

And now, if they must eat their own words publicly, and go back on their

own encomiums, if Linnet, on whom they had prided themselves as a

shining example of the success of their method, was to go off before the

eyes of all the world with a non-Catholic poet—worse still, if she was

to fly in the face of their most cherished principles, and request a

divorce at the hands of purely secular judges, Catholicism itself would

receive a serious blow in the eyes of many doubtful or wavering

adherents. A person like the Casalmonte commands public attention. Of

course, if the worst came to the worst, it would be easy enough for the

Church to disown her; easy enough to remark, with a casual little sneer,

that Rome had never approved of the theatrical profession—above all,

for women. Still, it is a good pastor’s duty, if possible, to save,

above all things, the souls of his flock; and the first thing to do, it

was clear, the confessor thought, was to bring the Casalmonte back again

into subjection to her own husband. They must strain every nerve to

prevent her obtaining or even demanding a divorce; they must strive, if

they could, to obviate a gross and open scandal.

Actuated by such motives, and by many others of a more technical

character, the confessor, after some demur, consented at last to the

somewhat unusual course of calling upon the lost lamb, if her

whereabouts could be found, and endeavouring to save her either from

open sin or still more open rebellion. As soon as he learned she hadn’t

gone off with Will Deverill, but was quietly staying with a wealthy

American lady, an intimate friend of her suspected lover’s, the priest

made up his sapient mind at once this meant a determination to seek a

divorce, which must instantly be combated by every means in his power.

So he worked upon Linnet’s susceptible Southern nature by striking

successively all the profoundest chords of religion, shame, penitence,

remorse, and terror. He appalled her with the authoritative voice of the

Church; he convicted her of sin; he overawed her with the mysterious

sanctity of a divine sacrament. Before he had finished his harangue,

Linnet crouched and cowered in abject fear before him. She loved Will

with all her heart: she would always love him; she hated Andreas with

all her soul: she couldn’t help but hate him. Still, if God and the

Church so ordained, she would follow that man she hated, till death them

did part; she would forsake that man she loved, though her heart broke

with love for him.

Andreas seized his opportunity; he struck while the iron was hot. His

brougham was at the door; he had sent their luggage on to Charing Cross

before him. In haste and trembling, he hurried Linnet away, hardly even

waiting for Ellen to bring down the portmanteau with her jewellery and

necessaries. They drove straight to Charing Cross, and took the Club

train southwards. That night they spent in Paris. Linnet, heart-broken

but calm, insisted on separate rooms; for that, at least, she must

stipulate; she would follow him, she said, as the Church directed, to

the bitter end, but never again while he lived should he dare to lay

those heavy hands of his upon her. Next morning, they took the early

express to Innsbruck, _via_ Zurich and the Vorarlberg. Two evenings

later, they sat together at St Valentin.

How strange it all seemed to her now, that familiar old world of her own

native Tyrol! Everything was there, just as of yore, to be sure—land,

people, villages—but oh, how small, how petty, how mean, how shrunken!

St Valentin had dwindled down to a mere collection of farm-houses; the

church, whose green steeple once looked so tall and great, had grown

short and stumpy and odd and squalid-looking; the _Wirthshaus_, that

once prosperous and commodious inn, seemed in her eyes to-day a mere

fourth-rate little simple country tavern. To all of us, when we revisit

well-known scenes of our childhood, space seems to have shrunk, the

world to have grown smaller and meaner and uglier. But to Linnet, the

change seemed even greater than to most of us. She had been taken

straight away from that petty hamlet, and elevated with surprising

rapidity into European fame—a popular favourite of Milan and Naples,

Rome and Paris, Munich and Brussels, London and Vienna. The break in her

life had been sudden and enormous; she had passed at once, as it were,

from the village inn to the courts of kings and the adulation of great

cities. And now, when she came back again, all was blank and dreary. The

dear mother was dead; Will Deverill was away, and she might not see him;

the Herr Vicar turned out a greasy, frowsy Austrian parish priest;

Cousin Fridolin had a fat wife and two dirty-faced babies. The poetry

seemed to have faded out of the Tyrol she once knew; the very cow-bells

rang harsh—and Will Deverill, who could make music of them, was away

over in London.

Only Nature itself remained to console her. And Andreas in his wisdom

allowed her to commune much with Nature. The eternal hills had still

some slight balm for her wounded spirit. Linnet and her husband stopped

as guests at the _Wirthshaus_; it was Andreas’s still, but he had let it

to Cousin Fridolin. In the morning, after Linnet had gulped down the

coffee and roll that seemed to half choke her, she would stroll up the

hill behind the village inn, and sit on the boulders, just above the

belt of pine wood, where she had sat long ago hand in hand with Will

Deverill. The village children sometimes came and gazed at her, and

whispered to one another in an awestruck undertone how this was Lina

Telser, who once minded cows in a châlet on the Alps, and who was now

the Casalmonte, a great, rich singer in England, with diamonds in her

box, and grand rings on her fingers. Linnet dressed very simply for this

mountain life, and tried to seem the same as of yore to Cousin Fridolin,

and the priest, and the good old neighbours: but, ah me, how changed was

the world of the Tyrol! And how curious it seemed to hear the same

familiar chatter still running on about the same old gossips, the same

petty jealousies, the same narrow hopes, and fears, and ideals, when she

herself had passed through so much, meanwhile—had known other men, new

ideas, strange cities!

So for a fortnight, Linnet lived on, scarcely speaking to Andreas, but

sitting by herself on those springtide hills, where the globe-flowers

scattered gold with a stintless hand and the orchids empurpled whole

wide tracts of the meadows. She sat there—and thought of Will—and

obeyed the Church—and followed Andreas. Yet, oh, how strange that God

and our hearts should be thus at open war! that Nature should tell us

one thing and the Church another! ’Twas a consequence of the Fall of

Man, the Herr Vicar assured her; for the heart, the heart is deceitful

above all things, and desperately wicked. And it was desperately wicked

of her, no doubt, to think so much about Will; but there—Church or no

Church, Linnet couldn’t help thinking of him.

She was resigned, in a way; very much resigned; her heart had been

crushed once for all when she married Andreas. It had flared up in a

fitful flicker of open rebellion when she left his house and flung

herself fiercely on Will Deverill’s bosom; and then—Will himself had

bruised the broken reed, had quenched the smoking flax, and sent her

away hurt, bleeding, and humiliated. He did it for her own sake, she

knew, but, oh, she would have loved him better if he’d been a little

less thoughtful for her, less noble, less generous! Loved him better? Oh

no; to love him better would be impossible! But they would both have

been happier, with the world well lost, and present love for the reward

of Paradise closed to them hereafter.

Purgatory? Ah, what did she care for their purgatory now! To count one

year of love fulfilled with Will, she would gladly give her poor body to

be burnt in burning hell for ever and ever. It was the Church that

intervened to prevent it, not she; for herself, she was Will’s; she

could live for him, she could die for him, she could lose her own soul

for him.

She never said a word to Cousin Fridolin and his wife, or to the people

of St Valentin, of her relations with Andreas. Still, the villagers

guessed them all. Simple villagers know more of the world than we

reckon. She was rich, she was grand, they said, since she’d married the

_Wirth_, and become a great lady: but she wasn’t happy with Herr

Andreas; he was cold and unkind to her. Those marks on her little

wrists—they were surely the impress of Herr Andreas’s big fingers;

those red eyes, that pale face—they were surely the result of Herr

Andreas’s infidelities. Money, after all, isn’t everything in this

world: Lina Telser had diamonds and pearls at command, and she drank

fine red wine, specially brought from Innsbruck; but she would have been

happier, people thought at St Valentin in the Zillerthal, if she’d

married Cousin Fridolin, or even Franz Lindner!