It was with no little trepidation that Will mounted the KÜchelberg on the morning after his return to Meran from the Dolomites. Would Linnet be there, he wondered, or would he somehow miss her? He didn’t know why, but a certain vague foreboding of possible evil possessed his soul. He was dimly conscious to himself of danger ahead. He couldn’t feel reassured till he stood once more face to face with Linnet.

When he arrived at the appointed place, however, by the Station of the Cross which represented the Comforting of the Daughters of Jerusalem, a cold shudder of alarm came over him suddenly. No Linnet there! Not a sign of her to be seen! And hitherto she had always kept her tryst before him. He took out his watch and looked. Ha, a moment’s respite! In his eagerness, he had arrived five minutes early. But Linnet was usually, even so, five minutes ahead of him. He couldn’t make it out; this was ominous, very!

With heart standing still, he waited a quarter of an hour?—?half-an-hour?—?three-quarters. And still no Linnet came!?—?And still he watched eagerly. He paced up and down, looking again and again at his watch with impatience. Could she have mistaken the place? Yet he told her plain enough! On the bare chance of some error, he would try the other stations. He went to them all, one by one, from the Crown of Thorns to the Calvary. The same luck still! No Linnet at any of them! Then he mounted the great boss of ice-worn rock with the bench on its top, that commands far and wide the whole expanse of the KÜchelberg. Gazing down on every side upon the long, low hog’s back, he saw nobody all around save the women in the fields, watching their cows at pasture, and the men with the carts urging overtasked oxen to drag too heavy a load up the cobble-paved hill-track.

Thoroughly alarmed by this time, and uncertain how to act, Will determined to take a very bold measure. He descended the hill once more, and, passing under the archway of the old town gate, and through the narrow streets, and past the high-towered parish church, he made his way straight to Andreas Hausberger’s inn in the street that is called Unter den Lauben. At the doorway, Franz Lindner, all on fire, was standing. Wrath smouldered in his face; his hat was cocked fiercely; his feather, turned Robblerwise, looked angrier, more defiant, more aggressive than ever. But to Will’s immense surprise, the village champion, instead of scowling challenge at him, or receding under the arch, stepped forward with outstretched palm to meet him. He grasped Will’s hand hard. His pressure struck some note of a common misfortune.

“You’ve come to look for Linnet?” he said, holding his head very haughtily. “She wasn’t on the hill? She’d promised to meet you there? Well, we’re both in the same box, it seems. He’s done two of us at once. This is indeed a dirty trick Andreas Hausberger has played upon us!”

“What do you mean?” Will cried, aghast, clapping his hand to his head. “Where’s Linnet? I want to see her.”

“You won’t see her ever again as Lina Telser, that’s sure,” the Robbler answered aloud, with an indignant gesture. His wrath against Andreas had wholly swallowed up all memory of his little quarrel on the hills with Will Deverill. It was common cause now. Andreas had outwitted both of them.

“You can’t mean to tell me?——” Will cried, drawing back in horror.

Franz took him up sharply. “Yes; I do mean to tell you just what I say,” he answered, knitting his brows. “Andreas Hausberger has gone off with her ... to St Valentin ... to marry her.”

It was a bolt from the blue?—?an unforeseen thunder-stroke. Will raised his hat from his brow, and held his hand on his stunned and astonished forehead. “To marry her!” he repeated, half-dazed at the bare thought. “Andreas Hausberger to marry her!?—?to marry Linnet! Oh no; it can’t be true; you never can mean it!”

Franz stared at him doggedly. “He gave me the slip on Wednesday morning,” he answered, with a resounding German oath. “He went off quite secretly. May the Evil One requite him! He knew if he told me beforehand I’d have planted my good knife to the handle in his heart. So he said never a word, but went off unexpectedly, with Linnet and Philippina, leaving the rest of us here stranded, but cancelling all engagements for the next three evenings. The white-livered cur! He’ll never dare to come back again! He knows if I meet him now?—?it’ll be this in his black heart!” And Franz tapped significantly the short hunting knife that stuck out from his leather belt in true jÄger fashion.

“And you haven’t followed him?” Will exclaimed, taken aback at the man’s inaction. “You know all this, and you haven’t gone after him to prevent the wedding!” In an emergency like the present one, with Linnet’s happiness at stake, he was only too ready to accept as an ally even the village bully.

Franz shrugged his broad shoulders. “How could I?” he asked, helplessly. “Have I money at command? Have I wealth like the wirth, to pay my fare all the way from Meran to Jenbach?”

Will drew back with a deep sigh. He had never thought of that difficulty. It’s so natural to us all to have money in our pockets, or at least at our command, for any great emergency, that we seldom realise how insuperable a barrier a bare hundred miles may often seem to men of other classes. It was as impossible for Franz Lindner to get from Meran to St Valentin at a day’s notice as for most of us to buy up the house of Rothschild.

“Come with me!” Will cried, starting up. “The man has cheated us vilely. Come with me to St Valentin, Herr Franz?—?forget our differences?—?and before he has time to get through with the legal formalities, help me, help me, to prevent this nefarious wedding!”

“It’s too late to prevent it now!” Franz answered, shaking his head, with a settled gloom on his countenance. “It’s all over by this. She’s his wife already. They were married on Friday.”

At those words Will felt his heart stand still within him. He gasped for breath. He steadied himself mechanically. Never till that moment had he known how much he loved the Tyrolese singer-girl, and now the blow had come, he couldn’t even believe it. “Married!” he faltered out in a broken voice; “what, married already! Linnet married to that man! Oh, impossible! Impossible!”

“But it’s true, all the same,” Franz answered sturdily. “Philippina was there, and she saw them married. She came back last night to collect their things and pack up for Italy. She’s to meet them to-morrow by the mid-day train, at a place called Verona.”

“But how did he do it in the time?” Will exclaimed still incredulous, and clinging still to the last straw with a drowning man’s instinct. “Your Austrian law has so many formalities. Perhaps it’s a story the man has made up on purpose to deceive us. He may have told Philippina, and she may be in league with him.”

Franz shook his head with gloomy determination. “No, no,” he said; “it won’t do; don’t flatter your soul with that; there’s no doubt at all in the world about it. He’s as deep as a well, and as false as a fox, and he’d laid all his plans very cunningly beforehand. He made the arrangements and swore to the Civil Act without consulting Linnet. He and the priest were in league, and the priest helped him out with it. At the very last moment, Andreas carried her off, and before she could say nay, he went straight through and married her.”

Will’s brain reeled round; his mind seemed to fail him. The sense of his loss, his irreparable loss, deadened for the moment every other feeling. Linnet gone from him for ever! Linnet married to somebody else!?—?and that somebody else so cold, so calculating, so cruel a man as Andreas Hausberger! It was terrible to contemplate. “He must have forced her to do it!” the Englishman cried in his distress. “But how could she ever consent? How could she ever submit? I can’t believe it! I can’t even understand it!”

“He didn’t exactly force her,” Franz answered, tilting his hat still more angrily on one side of his head. “But he brought the Herr Vicar from St Valentin to persuade her; and you know what priests are, and you know what women! The Herr Vicar just turned on purgatory and all the rest of it to frighten the poor child?—?so Philippina says. She was crying all the time. She cried in the train, and she cried on the road, and she cried in the church, and she cried at the altar! She cried worst of all when Herr Andreas took her home to the Wirthshaus to supper.... But I’ll be even with him yet.” And Franz tapped his knife once more. “When I meet him again?—?ten thousand devils!?—?this goes right up to the hilt in the base black heart of him!”

“Can I see Philippina?” Will gasped out, white as death.

“Yes; certainly you can see her,” the Robbler answered with a burst, leading him in through the dark archway to the sunless courtyard. “Come this way into the parlour. She’s upstairs just now, but I’ll bring her down to speak to you.”

In a minute or two more, sure enough, Philippina appeared in her very best dress, looking bright and smiling. She was garrulous as usual, and most gay and lively. “Oh yes; they had been to St Valentin, and no mistake?—?the Herr Vicar going with them?—?no scandal of any sort?—?and ’twas a very grand affair; never anything like it! Andreas Hausberger had spared no expense or trouble; red wine at the supper, and fiddlers for the dance, and all the world of the valley bidden to the feast on the night of the wedding! Linnet had cried a good deal; ach, yes, she had cried, how she had cried?—?but cried!?—?mein Gott, it was wonderful! But there, girls always will cry when they’re going to be married; and you know, Herr Will,” archly, “she was very, very fond of you.” For herself, Philippina couldn’t think what the child had to cry about?—?except, of course, what you call her feelings; but all she could say was, she’d be very glad herself to make such a match as Lina Telser was making. Why, would the gnÄdige Herr believe it? Herr Andreas was going to take her to a place called Mailand, away off in Italy, to train her for the stage?—?the operatic stage?—?and make in the end a real grand lady of her!

Will sat down on a wooden chair by the rough little table, held his face in his hands, and listened all aghast to Philippina’s artless outpourings. The sennerin, unheeding his obvious distress, went on to describe in her most glowing terms the magnificence of the wedding, and of the wirth’s entertainment. St Valentin hardly knew itself. Andreas had had a wedding-dress, oh, a beautiful wedding-dress, made beforehand, as a surprise, at Meran for Linnet?—?a white silk wedding-dress from a Vienna clothes-maker’s on the Promenade, by the Stephanie Garten; it was cut to measure from an old bodice of Linnet’s, which he abstracted all unknown from her box on purpose; and it fitted her like a glove, and she was ever so much admired in it. And all the young men thought Andreas the luckiest dog in the whole Tyrol; and cousin Fridolin had almost wanted to fight him for his bride; but Linnet intervened, and wouldn’t let them have it out for her. “And on the morning after the marriage,” Philippina concluded, with wide open eyes, “there wasn’t a cradle at the door, though Linnet was a sennerin?—?not one single cradle.”

“Of course not!” Franz Lindner cried, bridling up at the bare suggestion, and frowning native wrath at her.

“But perhaps if you’d been there, Franz?——” Philippina put in saucily, and then broke off short, like a discreet maiden.

The Robbler rose above himself in his generous indignation that anyone should dare even to hint such things about their peerless Linnet. He clenched his fist hard. “If a man had said that, my girl,” he cried, fingering his knife involuntarily, “though she’s Andreas Hausberger’s wife, he’d have paid with his blood for it.”

Philippina for a moment stood silent and overawed. Then, recovering herself at once, with a sudden little recollection, she thrust her hand into her bosom and drew out a small note, which she passed to Will openly. “Oh, I forgot,” she exclaimed; “I was to give you this, Herr Will. Linnet asked me to take it to you on the morning of her marriage.”

Will opened it, and read. It was written in a shaky round hand like a servant’s, and its German orthography was not wholly above criticism. But it went to Will’s heart like a dagger for all that.

“Dear Herr Will,” it began, simply, “I write to you to-night, the last night that I may, on the eve of my wedding; for to-morrow I may not. When Andreas asked me first, it seemed to me impossible. But the Herr Vicar told me it was sin to love a heretic; you did not mean to marry me, and if you did, you would drag my soul down to eternal perdition. And then, the good Mother, and the dear Father in purgatory! So between them they made me do it, and I dared not refuse. It is hard to refuse when one’s priest commands one. Yet, dear Herr Will, I loved you; ah, how I loved you! and I know it is sin; but, may Our Dear Frau forgive me, as long as I live, I shall always love you! Though I never must see you again.?—?Your heart-broken Linnet.”

Will folded it reverently, and slipped it into the pocket just over his heart. “And tell her, Philippina,” he said, “when you see her at Verona, I had come back to-day to ask her to marry me.”

CHAPTER XXII