Linnet: A Romance

He laughed aloud in their faces. The three men drew on cautiously. Franz waited till they came up. Then Ludwig Dangl, mustering up courage to take the first step, stood forward and laid hands on him. Straightway Franz seized his assailant round the body with a wrestler’s grip. Ludwig tried to disengage himself; but ’twas a narrow and dangerous spot for wrestling. With a sudden wrench, Franz lifted him from the ground. Holding him grasped in his arms, he looked over the edge of the precipice. Next instant, he had leaped, with Ludwig Dangl in his embrace. One loud cry burst at once from both their straining throats. A cry of wild triumph; a cry of fierce despair. Then all was silence.

The other two men, looking awestruck and horrified over the edge of the crag, saw them fall two hundred feet sheer into the soft snow beneath. It received them gently. Not a sign marked the spot where the two bodies sank in. The soft snow closed over them. But they must have been dead many seconds before they reached the bottom.

CHAPTER LII

A CONFESSION OF FAITH

It was a terrible time for Linnet, those few days at the inn, while she waited to bury her murdered husband. She felt so lonely, here among her own people; her isolation came out even more vividly than she could have expected: she had outgrown them, that was the fact, and they could no longer sympathise with her. Their very deference and respect chilled her heart to the core in that appalling season of solitary wretchedness: they regarded her just in the light of the great lady from London, too grand and too fine for them to venture upon comforting her. So Linnet was forced to have out her dark hour by herself, and be content for the rest with the respectful silence of her poor fellow-country-people.

The first night, in particular, was a very painful trial to her. By evening, they had brought back Franz’s body from the snowdrift; and now it lay with Ludwig Dangl beside her dead husband’s in the dancing-hall that stood just below the very room where Linnet had to spend the first night of her widowhood. Though she kept the candle burning, and the crucifix by her side, the awful sense of solitude through the long slow hours, with those three hostile corpses lying side by side in the hall beneath her, made her shudder with affright each time she woke with a start from a snatch of hurried sleep, much disturbed by hateful dreams, to the reality of her still more hateful position.

Early next morning, however, a messenger arrived post haste from Zell, with a telegram directed to Frau Hausberger, St Valentin. Linnet tore it open mechanically, half dreading some fresh surprise. As she read it, she drew a deep breath. Oh, that dear, dear Rue! This was quite too good of her. “Have heard of your trouble, and sympathise with you deeply. Am on my way to join you. Shall reach St Valentin to-morrow evening.”

It was a measure to Linnet of how English she had become, that, as she stood on the platform at Jenbach next day, awaiting the arrival of Rue’s train from Innsbruck, she felt as though she were expecting the advent of some familiar home-friend, coming to cheer her solitude in a land of strangers. When at last the train drew up, Rue leapt from the carriage into her rival’s arms, and caressed her tenderly. Linnet looked sweet in her simple dark dress, the plainest she possessed, for she hadn’t yet had time to get her mourning ready. “How did you hear of it all, you dear kind Rue?” she inquired, half-hysterically, clasping her new friend to her bosom in a sudden outburst of sated sympathy. “It couldn’t surely have got so soon into the English papers.”

“No, dear,” Rue answered, in her tenderest tone, laying one soft hand soothingly on the pale cheek as she answered. “I’d written to St Valentin beforehand, to some one whose address Will Deverill gave me, asking for news of you every day, and enclosing money; and he telegraphed to me at once as soon as all this happened. His name’s Fridolin Telser, and Will says he is a cousin of yours. So, of course, as soon as I heard, I felt I must come out, post haste, to join you; for I knew, Linnet, how lonely you’d be – and how much in need of a woman’s sympathy.”

Linnet answered nothing. That “of course” was too much for her. She burst into tears instead, and sobbed her full heart out contentedly on Rue’s friendly shoulder. They drove back to St Valentin hand-in-hand together. That night, Rue slept with her, in a little room in the village; and though they talked for hours with one another, and only dozed at intervals, Linnet rose next morning fresher and stronger by far than she had felt at any time since the day of the murder.

Rue stopped on with her all that week, till Andreas was buried, and she could leave St Valentin. Linnet shrank now from taking anything that had ever been his. The Wirthshaus was to be sold: Cousin Fridolin bought it at a low price with his hoarded savings, and the proceeds were to be devoted to a new school for the village. The Herr Vicar, too, was richer by many masses for the repose of the unworthy soul which Linnet felt sure had now much need of his orisons. Nor were even Franz Lindner and Ludwig Dangl forgotten: the shrine on the hill-top, by the Chamois Rocks, marking the spot whence they took their fatal leap, was erected, the guides will tell you, “by the famous singer, Casalmonte, who came originally from this village.”

Rue went back with her friend to London, stopping a week or two by the way at quiet country spots in the Bavarian Highlands, on the Rhine, and in Belgium. ’Twas early June when they reached town. Rue wouldn’t hear of Linnet’s returning to her old house in St John’s Wood, where everything would remind her of that hateful past: she insisted that her “new sister,” as she called her, must share for the present her home in Hans Place, till other arrangements could be made for her. “Besides,” she added, with a little smile, full of deeper import, “it’ll save scandal, you know. You mustn’t live alone. It’s best you should stop in some other woman’s house, till you’ve arrived at some fixed understanding as to your future.”

It was in Rue’s drawing-room, accordingly, a few weeks later, that Linnet for the first time saw Will Deverill once more after all that had happened. With the same generous self-restraint he had always shown wherever Linnet’s reputation was concerned, Will had denied himself for many days the pleasure of calling upon her. When at last he came, Linnet made up her mind beforehand she should receive him with becoming calmness and dignity. But the moment Will entered the room, and took her two hands in his, and looked deep into her dark eyes, and stood there silent, thrilling through from head to foot at sight of her, yet rejoicing in heart at his one love recovered – why, as for Linnet, she just looked up at him, and drew short gasps of breath, and held his hands tight in her own, and then with a sweet half-unconscious self-surrender let herself fall slowly, slowly upon his bosom. There he allowed her to lie long without speaking one word to her. What need of words between those two who understood one another instinctively? what chance of concealing the hope and joy each felt, and knew, and communicated, unspoken, by mere contact to the other? For touch is to love the most eloquent of the senses.

At last they found words, and talked long and eagerly. There was no question between them now in what relation they must henceforth stand to one another. It was mere details of time, and place, and propriety – the when and how and where – that interested them at present. “But you can get a dispensation for me?” Linnet asked, nestling close to him.

Will smiled a gentle smile. “There’s little need of dispensation, for you and me, my darling,” he said, holding her hand tenderly. “You would have given me yourself once, in spite of the Church and the world: you can surely give me yourself now without a qualm of conscience, when the Church and the world will both smile approval. To me, Linnet, the whole sanctity of a union between us lies infinitely deeper than any man’s sanction, be he priest or Pope or king or lawgiver. As I said to you, once before, you are mine, and I am yours, not by any artificial bond, but by the voice of our hearts, which is the voice of nature and of God within us: and whom God hath joined together, man cannot join firmer, nor yet put asunder. But if it pleases you to ask some priest’s leave for the union no priest on earth can possibly make sacreder – yes; set your heart at rest about that, darling; – I’ve seen the Archbishop already, and he’s promised to get you the regular papal dispensation.”

Linnet leant back, and gazed up at him. Her gaze was half fear, half frank admiration. “Dearest Will,” she said, pleadingly, in her pretty foreign English, “you’re a man, I’m a woman, and therefore illogical: forgive me. I’ve been brought up to think one way, which I know is a dreadful way: my own heart tells me how foolish and cruel and wicked it is to think so; and yet – may the Blessed Madonna and all holy saints forgive me for saying it – I should be afraid of their anger and the eternal hell if I dared to disbelieve in what seems so cruel. You speak to me of another way, which my own heart tells me is just and pure and good and beautiful – which my head approves as common-sense and sound reasoning; and yet – may the Blessed Madonna forgive me again – though I try hard to believe it, the teachings of my childhood rise up at every step and prevent my accepting it. I can’t understand this mystery of open war between God and our hearts – between God, who made them, on the one hand, and what is best, not what is worst, within them, on the other. I pray for light, but no light comes. Why should God’s law fight so hard against God’s instincts in our souls – against all that we feel to be purest, noblest, truest, best in our nature?”

“Not God’s law,” Will said gently, smoothing her hand with his own, “but the priests’, Linnet, the priests’, – which is something quite different. God’s law is never some precept beyond and outside us: it is the law of our own being, the law of our own hearts, the law of the native instincts and impulses that stir us. Your marriage with Andreas, were it twenty times blessed by priest or by Pope, was from the very first moment an unholy and unnatural one. It was a sin against purity and your own body; it was a legalised lie, a lifelong adultery. You felt its shame yourself, and shrank from the man physically. Your heart was not his, so how could your body be? Even the laws of men would have allowed you to leave him and come home to me, whose complement and mate you are by nature, after his treatment of you that day, and your discovery of his letter to Philippina. But the laws of your Church, which are not the laws of men but the laws of priests – and therefore worse and more unnatural than even the common laws of mankind – forbade you to take advantage of the loophole of escape which divorce would permit you from that wicked union your priests had imposed upon you. The Church or the law that bids you live with a man you loathe and despise, that Church or law dishonours your own nature; that Church and that law is not of God, nor even of man, but of priests and the devil. The Church or the law that forbids you to live with the man your own heart dictates and points out to you, is equally of the devil. And see how it proves itself so! It needed the intervention of Franz Lindner’s knife to free you from your false union with Andreas Hausberger! Can that Church and that law be right or sound which make a murder the one loophole by which a soul can free itself from the unholy bond they would unwillingly impose upon it? Your own heart told you it was wrong and dishonouring to live with Andreas; your own heart shrank from his loveless embraces; your own heart showed you it was right to leave him, and fly away to the man you loved, the man that loved you. Will you believe that God’s law is worse than your own heart? Will you think there’s something divine in an institution of men which compels you to degrade and dishonour your own body, to sin so cruelly against your own pure instincts? Nothing can be wickeder, I say, than for a woman to sell herself or to yield herself in any way to a man she loathes. No Church and no law can make right of that wrong: it’s degrading and debasing to her moral nature. The moment a woman feels she gives herself up against her own free will and the instincts of her own heart, she is living in sin – and you know it, Linnet – though all the priests and all the Popes on earth should stretch robed arms and hands to bless and absolve her.”

He spoke with fierce conviction. Linnet nestled against his breast: his words overcame her. “I know it, Will, I know it,” she exclaimed, half-hysterically. “My heart told me so always – but I couldn’t believe it. I can’t believe it now, – though I know you’re right when I hear you speak so. Perhaps, some day, when I’ve lived with you long enough, I shall come to think and feel as you do… But for the present, my darling, I’m so glad, oh, so glad, – don’t laugh at me for saying it – that you’ve got a dispensation.”