A week or two later, one bright spring afternoon, Will was strolling by himself down the sunny side of Bond Street. All the world was there?—?for the world was in town?—?and the pavements were crowded. But Will moved through the stream of well-dressed dawdlers, seeing and hearing little. In the midst of all that idle throng, his head was full of melodies; he was working up rhymes to ready-made tunes, undisturbed by the hubbub and din of London. Of a sudden, somebody stopped and stood straight in front of him. “Mr Deverill, I believe!” a tuneful voice said, brusquely. Will’s eyes returned at once from heaven to earth, and saw standing before them?—?a tall young man, of somewhat defiant aspect, dressed in the black frock coat and shiny silk hat of Metropolitan respectability.

Will paused, and surveyed him. He was a good-looking young man, with much swagger in his air, and a black moustache on his upper lip; but his face seemed somehow strangely familiar to Will, while his voice stirred at once some latent chord in the dim depths of his memory. But he wasn’t one of Will’s fine London acquaintances?—?the poet saw that much at once by the cheap pretentiousness of his coat and hat, the flaring blue of his made-up silk tie, the obtrusive glitter of the false diamond pin which adorned its centre. The stranger’s get-up, indeed, was redolent of the music halls. Yet he was handsome for all that, with a certain strange air of native distinction, not wholly concealed by the vulgar tone of his costume and his solicitous jewellery. Will held out his hand with that dubitative air which we all of us display in the first moment of uncertainty towards half-recognised acquaintances.

“I see you have forgotten me, zen,” the stranger said, in very decent English, drawing himself up with great dignity, and twirling his black moustache airily between one thumb and forefinger. “It is long, to be sure, since we met in ze Tyrol. And I have changed much since zen, no doubt: I have mixed with ze world; I have grown what you call in English cosmopolitan. But I see it comes back; I see you remember me now; my voice recalls it to you.”

Will grasped his hand more cordially. “Yes, perfectly, when you speak,” he said; “though you are very much changed indeed, as you say; but I see you’re Franz Lindner.”

“Yes; I’m Mr Franz Lindner,” the stranger replied, half-imperceptibly correcting him?—?for it was indeed the Robbler. Will scanned him from head to foot, and took him in at a glance. He was a fiery young man still, and his mien, as of old, was part fierce, part saucy. But, oh, what a difference the change of dress had made in him! No conical hat, no blackcock’s feather now, whether “turned” or otherwise. In his Tyrolese costume, with his rifle in his hand, and his cartridges at his side, Franz Lindner had looked and moved of yore a typical Alpine jÄger. But, in black frock-coat and shiny tall hat, strolling like a civilised snob that he was down the flags of Bond Street, all the romance and poetry had faded utterly out of him. The glamour was gone. He looked and moved for all the world to-day like any other young man of the baser mock-swell sort, dressed up in his Sunday best to lounge and ogle and bandy vulgar chaff in Burlington Arcade with his predestined companions.

“Why, what has brought you to London, then?” Will asked, much astonished.

“Art, art,” the transfigured Robbler responded, offhand, with inimitable swagger. “You must surely zen know my stage name, zough you don’t seem to have heard me.” He pulled out a printed card, and handed it to Will with a flourish. “I am ze Signor Francesco,” he continued, “all ze world is talking about.” And he threw back his chin and cocked his head on one side, looking, even as he spoke, more pretentious than ever.

“Oh, indeed!” Will answered with a bewildered little laugh. But it was the non-committing “Oh, indeed!” of mere polite acquiescence.

Franz Lindner caught the tinge of implied non-recognition in the Englishman’s voice, and hastened to add, as if parenthetically, “I perform at ze Pavilion.”

“What, the London Pavilion at the top of the Hay market?” Will exclaimed, beginning to realise.

Franz Lindner looked hurt. “I’ve seen your name often enough,” he said, asserting himself still more vigorously as Will seemed to know less of him; “and I sought, as you were a pillar of ze profession yourself, you would certainly have seen mine, if it were only on ze posters. I’m advertised largely. All London rings wis me. Ze County Council has even taken notice of me. I’m a public character! And I have had ze intention more zan once of looking you up, as also Mr Florian. But zere, here in London our time is so occupied! You and I, who are public men, wis professional engagements?—?we are ever overtaxed; we know not how to find ze leisure or ze space for ze claims of friendship.”

“Have you been long in London?” Will asked, turning down with him towards Piccadilly.

“More zan two years now,” the Robbler answered briskly, lounging on at his own pace, with a cane in his gloved hand, and staring hard, as he passed, at every pretty girl he saw on foot or in the carriages. “After I leave you at Meran, I worked my way slowly?—?singing, singing, ever singing?—?by degrees to Paris. But Paris didn’t suit me; zere is too much blague zere; zey go in for buffoons; zey laugh at a man of modest merit. I hate blague myself. So zen I came on pretty soon to London. At first I had to sing in common low music halls?—?sous side and zat; but talent, talent is sure to make its way in ze end. I rose very quick, and now?—?I am at ze head of my branch of ze profession.”

“You sing, of course?” Will interposed, restraining a smile at the Robbler’s delicious self-satisfaction. The man himself was the very same as ever, to be sure; but ’twas strange what a difference mere externals had made in him!

“Yes; I sing, and sometimes, too, I play ze zither. But mostly, I sing. It surprises me, indeed, you should not have heard of my singing.”

“And what’s the particular branch of which you’re the acknowledged head?” Will asked, still amused at the Tyroler’s complacency.

Franz Lindner held his head very high in the air, and gave a twirl to his cane, as he answered, with much importance, “My line is ze Mammoss Continental Comique; ze serio-comic foreigner; zey call me Frenchy. I sing ze well-known songs in broken English zat are in everybody’s mous?—?‘Mossoo Robert is my name,’ or ‘Lay-ces-terre Squarre,’ or ‘Ze leetle black dawg,’ or ‘Zat lohvely Matilda.’ I wonder you have not heard of me. ‘Mossoo Robert’ is all ze talk of London. Frank Wilkins writes songs especially for my voice. If you look in ze music shops, you will see on ze covers, ‘Written expressly for Signor Francesco.’ Signor Francesco?—?zat’s me!” And he tapped his breast, and swelled himself visibly.

“I remember to have seen the name, I think,” Will answered, with a slight internal shudder, well pleased, none the less, to give some tardy salve to his companion’s wounded vanity. “I’m glad you’ve got on, and delighted to find you have such kindly recollections of me.”

Franz Lindner laughed. “Oh, zat!” he said, snapping his fingers in the air very jauntily. “I was a hot young man zen; I knew little of ze world. You mustn’t sink much of what a young man did in ze days before he knew how Society is managed. I owe you no grudge. We were bose of us younger. Besides, our friend Hausberger has wiped out our old scores. I have transferred to him, entire, all my feelings in ze matter.”

“That’s well,” Will replied, anxious indeed to learn whether the Tyroler had heard anything fresh of late years about Linnet. “And Hausberger himself? What of him ... and his wife? Have you ever knocked up against them?”

The Robbler’s brow gathered; his hand clenched his cane hard. It was clear civilisation and cosmopolitanism, however neatly veneered, hadn’t made much serious change in his underlying nature. “Zat rascal!” he exclaimed, bringing his stick down on the pavement with a noisy little thud; “zat rogue; zat liar! If ever I had come across him, it would be bad for his head. Sousand devils, what a man! ... Here, we’re close to ze Cri; will you come and have a drink? We can talk zis over afterward. I like to offer somesing to a friend new discovered.”

“It’s not much in my line,” Will answered, smiling; “but still, for old times’ sake, I’ll go in and have a glass with you.” To say the truth, he was so eager to find out what Franz might have to communicate that he stretched a point for once, and broke through his otherwise invariable rule never to drink anything anywhere except at meal times.

Franz stalked along Piccadilly, and strode airily into the Criterion like one who knew his way well about the London restaurants. “What’ll you take?” he asked of Will in an assured tone, which showed the question in English was a very familiar one to him.

“Whatever you take yourself,” Will answered, much amused, for the Tyroler was far more at home than himself in a London bar, and far more at his ease with the London barmaid.

“Two half porters and two small Scotch, miss,” the Robbler cried briskly to the tousely-haired young woman who attended to his call. “You’ll find it a very good mixture for zis time of day, Mr Deverill. I always take it myself. It softens ze organ.”

The young woman fulfilled the order with unwonted alacrity?—?Franz was a favourite at the bar, and gave his commands leaning across it with the arch smile of an habituÉ?—?and Will then discovered that the mixture in question consisted of a glass of Dublin stout, well fortified with a thimbleful of Highland whisky. He also observed, what he had not at first sight noticed, that Franz Lindner’s face, somewhat redder than of old, bore evidence, perhaps, of too frequent efforts for the softening of the organ. Franz nodded to the barmaid.

“Here’s our meeting!” he said to Will. “Shall we step a little aside here? We can talk wisout overhearing.”

They drew aside to a round table for their unfinished gossip. “You’re not in town often, I suppose,” the Tyroler began, scanning his companion from head to foot with a critical scrutiny.

“Why, I live here,” Will answered, taken aback?—?“in Craven Street, Strand; I’ve always lived here.”

“Oh, indeed,” the Robbler responded, with a somewhat superior air; “I sought from your costume you’d just come up from ze country.”

Will smiled good-humouredly. He was wearing, in point of fact, a soft slouch hat and a dusty brown suit of somewhat poetical cut, which contrasted in more ways than one with the music-hall singer’s too elaborate parody of the glossy silk chimney-pot and regulation frock-coat of the orthodox Belgravian.

Then Franz came back at a bound to the subject he had quitted on the flags of Piccadilly. He explained, with much circumlocution and many needless expletives, how he had heard from time to time, through common friends at St Valentin, that Andreas Hausberger and his wife had fluctuated of late years between summer at Munich, Leipzig, Stuttgart, and winter at Milan, Florence, Naples, Venice. Linnet got on with him very well?—?oh, very well indeed?—?yes; Linnet, you know, was just the sort of girl to get on very well with pretty nearly anyone. No doubt by this time she’d settled down into tolerably amicable relations with Andreas Hausberger! Any children? Oh dear, no; Hausberger’d take care of that; a public singer’s time is far too valuable to be wasted on the troubles of a growing young family. Had she come out yet? Well, yes; that is to say, from time to time she’d sung at concerts in Munich, Florence, and elsewhere. Successfully? Of course; she’d a very good voice, as voices go, for her sort, and training was sure to do something at least for it. Franz had heard rumours she was engaged next season for San Carlo at Naples; you might count upon Hausberger’s doing his very best, now he’d invested his savings in preparing her for the stage, to make money out of his bargain.

Through all Franz said, however, there ran still, as of yore, one constant thread of undying hatred to the man who had outwitted him at Meran and St Valentin. “Then you haven’t forgiven him yet?” Will inquired at last, after one such spiteful allusion to Andreas’s meanness.

The Robbler’s hand moved instinctively of itself to his left breast pocket. He had changed his coat, but not his customs. “I carry it here still,” he answered, with the same old defiant air, just defining with finger and thumb the vague outline of the knife that bulged between them through the glossy broadcloth. “It’s always ready for him. Ze day I meet him?—?” and he stopped short suddenly, with a face like a bulldog’s.

“You Tyrolers have long memories,” Will answered, with a little shudder. “It’s very unfashionable you know, to stab a rival in London.”

Franz showed his handsome teeth. “Unfashionable or not,” he replied, with a shrug, “it is so I was born; it is so I live ever. As we say in ze song, I am made zat way. I cannot help it. I never forget an injury.... Zough, mind you,” he continued, after a telling little pause, during which he drove many times an imaginary knife into an invisible enemy, “it isn’t so much now zat I grudge him Linnet. Let him keep his fine Frau. Zere are better girls in ze world, you and I have found out, zan Lina Telser?—?to-day Frau Hausberger. We were younger zen; we are men of ze world now; we know higher sings, I sink, zan a Zillerthal sennerin. What I feel wis him at present is not so much zat he took away ze girl, as zat he played me so mean a trick to take her.”

Will smiled to himself in silence. How strangely human feelings and ideas differ! He himself had never forgotten the beautiful alp-girl with the divine voice; in the midst of London drawing-rooms he never ceased to miss her; while Franz Lindner thought he had left Linnet far, far behind, since he became acquainted with those higher and nobler types, the music-hall stars of the London Pavilion! “There’s no accounting for tastes,” people say; oh, most inept of proverbs! surely it’s easy for anyone to account for the reasons which made Linnet appear so different now in Franz Lindner’s eyes and in her English poet’s.

But before Franz and Will parted at the Circus that afternoon, they had made mutual promises, for old acquaintance’s sake?—?Franz, that he would graciously accept a stall, on an off-night, at the Duke of Edinburgh’s, to see Will’s new piece, The Duchess of Modena; and Will, that he would betake himself to the London Pavilion one of these next few evenings, to hear Signor Francesco, alias the Frenchy, in his celebrated and universally encored impersonation of Mossoo Robert in Regent Street.

CHAPTER XXVIII