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!

CHAPTER XLVII