In spite of the lateness of the season, and Will’s preoccupation, that visit to the Dolomites turned out a complete success. Rue was in excellent spirits; Florian was in fine form; Nature smiled compliance, as he consummately phrased it?—?in other words, the weather was lovely, the mountains clear of cloud, the horses fresh, and the roads (for Austria) in very good order. Their capacious carriage held its party of five comfortably,?—?for Rue, with her wonted wisdom, had consulted Mrs Grundy’s feelings by inviting an old Indian colonel and his wife, whose acquaintance she had picked up at the Erzherzog Johann, to accompany them on their trip, and chaperon the expedition. Rue herself enjoyed those four days immensely. She had lots of long talks with Will on the hillsides, and she noticed Will spoke much?—?though always in an abstract and highly impersonal way?—?of the human heart, its doubts and its difficulties. He was thinking of Linnet, who engaged his thoughts much during that enforced absence; but Rue imagined he was thinking of himself and her, and was glad accordingly. She was growing very fond of her English poet. She hoped and half-believed he in turn was growing fond of her.

As for Will, now he was away from Linnet for awhile, he began to think much more seriously than he had ever thought before of the nature of his relations with her, and the end to which they were inevitably leading him. As long as Linnet was near, as long as he could hold her hand in his, and look deep into her eyes, and hear that wonderful voice of hers carolling out some sweet song for his ear alone among the clambering vineyards,?—?why, he could think of nothing else but the passing joy and delight of her immediate presence. Imperceptibly, and half-unconsciously to himself, she had grown very dear to him. But now that he was away from her, and alone with Rue, he began to realise how much he longed to be once more by her side?—?how little he was prepared to do without her, how deeply she had entwined herself into his inmost being. Again and again the question presented itself to his mind, “When I go back to Meran, on what footing shall I stand with her? If I find it so hard to run away for four days, how shall I ever run away from her for ever and ever?”

Besides, during those few happy weeks at Meran, Linnet had begun to reveal herself to him as another person. He was catching faint glimpses now of the profounder depths of that deeply artistic, though as yet almost wholly undeveloped, character. The books he had read to her she understood so fast; the things he had told her she caught at so readily; the change to new scenes seemed so soon to quicken and stimulate all her latent faculties. Had not Nature said of her, as of Wordsworth’s country lass, “She shall be mine and I will make A lady of my own”? For that she was a lady indeed had been forcing itself every day more and more plainly upon Will’s mind, as he walked and talked with her. At Innsbruck, he had thought more than once to himself, “How could one dream in a world where there are women like Rue, of tying oneself for life to this sweet-voiced alp-girl?” Among the Dolomites, three weeks later, he asked himself rather, “How could one ever be content with mere brightness and sunniness like that charming Rue’s, in a world which holds women so tender, so true, and so passionate as Linnet?”

Slowly, bit by bit, he began to wonder how he could muster up courage to tear himself away again?—?and, if he did, for how long he could manage to keep away from her? And then, as he debated, there arose in his mind the profounder question of justice or injustice to Linnet. Was it right of him so deeply to engage her affections, unless he meant by it something real, something sure, something definite? She loved him so well that to leave her now would surely break her heart for her. What end could there be to this serious complication save the end he had so strenuously denied to Florian?

On the very last evening of their drive through those great bare unearthly peaks that look down upon Botzen, Florian came into Will’s room for an evening gossip. They sat up long over the smouldering embers of a fragrant pinewood fire. There’s nothing more confidential than young men’s confabulations over a smouldering hearth in the small hours of the morning. The two friends talked?—?and talked, and talked, and talked?—?till at last Will was moved to make a clean breast of his feelings in the matter to Florian. He put his dilemma neatly. He acknowledged he was going just where Florian had said he would go. “I pointed out the noose to you,” the epicurean philosopher observed, with bland self-satisfaction, “and you’ve run your neck right into it. Instead of playing with her like a doll as a sensible man would have done, you’ve simply gone ahead and lost your heart outright to her. Foolish, foolish, exceedingly foolish; but, just what I expected from you. I said from the very first, ‘Now mark my words, Deverill, as sure as eggs is eggs, you’ll end by marrying her.’”

“I don’t say I’ll marry her now,” Will replied, somewhat sheepishly. “How can I, indeed? I’ve got nothing to marry on. I find it hard enough work to keep body and soul together for myself in London, without thinking of an engagement to keep somebody else’s into the bargain.”

“Then what do you mean to do?” Florian inquired, with sound common-sense. “If you don’t mean to marry her, and you don’t mean to harm her, and you can’t go away from her, and you can’t afford to stop with her,?—?why, what possible new term are you going to introduce into human relations and the English language to cover your ways with her?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know,” Will answered, in a somewhat hopeless and helpless voice, piling the embers together in the centre as he spoke, just to keep them alight for some minutes longer. “There’s the rub. I admit it. Nobody feels it more than I do. But I don’t see any possible kind of way out of it. I’ve been thinking to myself?—?or perhaps half-thinking?—?I might manage it like this, if Linnet would assent to it. We might get married first?——”

Florian raised one warning hand, and nodded his shapely head up and down two or three times solemnly. “I told you so,” he interposed, in a tone of most mitigated and mournful triumph. “There we get at it at last. You have said the word. I was sure ’twould come to that. Marry, marry, marry!”

“And then,” Will went on, with a very shamefaced air, never heeding his comment, “what’s enough for one’s enough for two, they say?—?or very nearly. I thought we might live in lodgings quite quietly for awhile, somewhere cheap, in London?——”

“Not live,” Florian corrected gravely, with another sage nod of that sapient head; “lurk, linger, vegetate. A very sad end! A most dismal downfall! I see it all: Surrey side, thirty shillings a week; cold mutton for dinner; bread and cheese for lunch; an ill-furnished parlour, a sloppy-faced slavey! I know the sort of thing. Pah! My gorge rises at it!”

“And then, I could get Linnet’s voice trained and prepared for the stage,” Will continued, perusing his boots, “and work very hard myself to keep us both alive till she could come out in public. In a year or two, I feel sure, if I watched her close and saw her capabilities, I could write and compose some good piece of my own to suit her exactly. With me to make the songs, and Linnet to interpret them, I believe, sooner or later, we ought easily to earn a very good livelihood. But it’d be a hard pull first; I don’t conceal that from myself. We’d have a struggle for life, though in the end, I feel sure, we’d live it down and conquer.”

Florian lighted a cigarette and watched the thin blue smoke curl upward, languidly. “Love’s young dream!” he mused to himself with a placid smile of superior wisdom. “I know the style of old. Bread and cheese and kisses! Very charming, very charming! Chorus hymeneal of the most approved pattern. So odd, so interesting! I’ve often asked myself what it is in the world that leads otherwise sensible and intelligent fellows to make wrecks of their lives in this incredible way?—?and all for the sake of somebody else’s daughter! Why this insane desire to relieve some other man of his natural responsibilities? I account for it in my own mind on evolutionary principles. Marriage, it seems to me, is an irrational and incomprehensible civilised instinct, by which the individual sacrifices himself on the shrine of duty for the benefit of the species. Have you ever heard of the lemmings?”

“The lemmings!” Will repeated, unable to conceive the connection in Florian’s mind between two such totally dissimilar and unrelated subjects. “Not those little brown animals like rats or marmots they have in Norway?”

“Precisely,” Florian answered, waving his cigarette airily. “Those little brown animals like rats or marmots they have in Norway. You put it like a dictionary. Well, every year or two, you know, an irresistible desire seizes on many myriads of those misguided rodents at once, to march straight to the sea in a body together, plunge boldly into the water, and swim out in a straight line, without rhyme or reason, till they can swim no farther but drown themselves by cartloads. What’s the origin of this swarmery? It’s only an instinct which keeps down the number of the lemmings, and so acts as a check against over-population. A beautiful and ingenious provision of Nature they call it!” and Florian smiled sweetly. “I’ve always thought,” he went on, puffing a contemptuous ring of smoke from his pursed-up lips, “that marriage among mankind was a very similar instinct. It’s death to the individual?—?mental and moral death; but it ensures at least a due continuance of the species. The wise man doesn’t marry; he knows too well for that; he stands by and looks on; but he leaves no descendants, and his wisdom dies with him. Whereas the foolish burden themselves with a wife and family, and become thereby the perpetuators of their race in future. It’s a wonderful dispensation; I admire it?—?at a distance!”

“But you said you’d marry yourself,” Will objected, “if you met the right person; and, to tell you the truth, Florian, I fancied you’d been rather markedly attentive to Rue for the last few weeks or so.”

Florian stroked a smooth small chin with five meditative fingers. “That’s quite another matter,” he answered, in a self-satisfied tone. “Circumstances, it has been well remarked by an anonymous thinker, alter cases. If an Oriental potentate in all his glory were to order me to flop down on my marrow-bones before him and kiss his imperial foot as an act of pure homage, I should take my proud stand as a British subject, and promptly decline so degrading a ceremony. But if he offered me a thousand pounds down to comply with his wishes, I would give the polite request my most earnest consideration. If he made it ten thousand, I would almost certainly accede; and if he went to half-a-million, which is a fortune for life, well, no gentleman on earth could dream of disputing the question any further with him. Just so, I say, with marriage. If a lady desires me, without due cause assigned, to become her abject slave, and serve her alone for a lifetime, I will politely but firmly answer, ‘No, thank you.’ If she confers upon me, incidentally, a modest competence, I shall perpend for a moment, and murmur, ‘Well, possibly.’ But if she renders me independent and comfortable for life, with a chance of surrounding myself with books, pictures, music, without a moment’s hesitation I shall answer, ‘Like a bird,’ to her. Slavery, in short, though in itself disagreeable, may be mitigated or altogether outweighed by concomitant advantages.”

“Florian,” Will said, earnestly, “I don’t know what you mean. You speak a foreign language to me. If I felt like that, I could never bring myself to marry any woman. If I married at all, I must do it for the sake of the girl I loved?—?and to make her happy.”

Florian gazed at him compassionately. “Quixotic,” he answered low, shaking his sculpturesque head once or twice with a face of solemn warning. “Quixotic, exceedingly! The pure lemming instinct; they will rush into it! It’s the moth and the candle again: dazzle, buzz, and flutter,?—?and pom! pom! pom!?—?in a second, you’re caught, and sizzled hot in the flame, and reduced to ashes. That’s how it’ll be with you, my dear fellow: you’ll go back to Meran and, by Jingo, to-morrow, you’ll go straight up the hill, and ask the cow-girl to marry you.”

“I think I will,” the poet answered, taking up his candlestick with a sigh to leave the room. “I think I will, Florian. I’ll fight it out to the bitter end, sloppy slavey and all, on your threatened south side, in those dingy lodgings.” And he took himself off with a hurried nod to his bland companion.

Florian rose, and closed the door behind the poet softly. He had played his cards well, remarkably well, that evening. If he wanted to drive Will into proposing to Linnet, he had gone the right way to effect his object. “And I,” he thought to himself with a contented smile, “will stand a fair chance with Rue, without fear of a rival, when once he’s gone off and got well married to his cow-girl. It’ll be interesting to ask them to a nice little dinner, from their Surrey side garret, at our snug small den in Park Lane or South Kensington. Park Lane’s the most fashionable, but South Kensington’s the pleasantest:

Such a palace of art as it will be, too! I can see it now, in my mind’s eye, Horatio!?—?Botticellis, Della Robbias, Elzevirs, Stradivariuses! William Morris on the floor! Lewis Day on the ceiling! It rises like an exhalation, all beautiful to behold! Such things might I do?—?with Rue’s seven hundred thousand!”

CHAPTER XXI