AN ECCLESIASTICAL QUESTION
While _Cophetua’s Adventure_ was running at the Harmony, Will
necessarily saw a good deal of Linnet. Signora Casalmonte was now the
talk of the town. Her name cropped up everywhere. Many men paid her most
assiduous court. She was greatly in request for meets of the
Four-in-hand Club, for Sundays at the Lyric, for picnics at Virginia
Water, for little dinners at Richmond. To all of them Linnet went in her
innocent way—that deeper-seated innocence that sees and knows much
evil, yet passes unscathed through it; for the innocence that springs
from mere ignorance alone is hardly worth counting. Andreas accompanied
her everywhere with marital solicitude; the foolish were wont to say he
was a jealous fellow; wiser heads saw well he was only making sure that
the throat which uttered such valuable notes should take no hurt from
night air or injudicious ices. It was the singer, not the woman, Andreas
guarded so close—the singer herself, and the money she brought him.
For Will Deverill, however, as a special old friend, Andreas always made
very great concessions. He knew it did Linnet good to see much of her
Englishman; and what did Linnet good gave resonance to her voice, and
increased by so much her nett money value. So Will was allowed every
chance of meeting her. When the weather permitted it, the Hausbergers
often went down by the first train on Sunday morning to Leith Hill, or
Hind Head, or Surrey commons; and Florian, and Rue, and Will Deverill,
and Philippina, were frequently of the company. On such occasions, Will
noticed, he was often sent on, as if of set design, to walk in front
with Linnet, while Florian paired in the middle distance with Rue, and
Andreas Hausberger himself, being the heaviest of the six, brought up
the rear with that strapping Philippina. More than once, indeed, it
struck Will as odd how much the last couple lagged behind, and talked
earnestly. He remembered that look Linnet had given him at the theatre
while _Cophetua_ was being arranged for. But, there, Philippina was
always a flirt; and Andreas and she had been very old friends in the
Tyrol together!
On one such excursion, as it chanced, when Rue was not of the party,
Florian brought down his queer acquaintance, the Colorado Seer, and an
American friend who had lately made a hit at a London theatre. This
theatrical gentleman did the English Stage Yankee in drawing-room
comedies to perfection by simply being himself, and was known in private
life as Theodore Livingstone. He was tall and handsome, with peculiar
brown eyes, brown hair and beard, and a brown tweed suit to match that
exactly echoed them. Philippina had always been a susceptible
creature—she was one of those women who take their loves lightly, a
little and often, with no very great earnestness or steadfastness of
purpose. She flirted desperately all that day with the handsome
stranger. Andreas smiled sardonically; he himself was nowhere by Mr
Theodore Livingstone’s side, though he was generally a prime favourite;
and even Florian himself, who had resumed at once in London the amicable
relations broken off on the Küchelberg, felt his attentions slighted in
favour of the new and good-looking American. Philippina, to say the
truth, was all agog with excitement at her fresh acquaintance. When they
lunched on the heather-clad slope of Holmbury, she sat by his side and
drank out of the same cup with him; and when he left them at last to
descend towards Guildford, while the rest made their way back on foot to
Gomshall Station, she was momentarily disconsolate for the loss of her
companion. Not till they had gone a full half-a-mile or more did she
recover sufficiently to bandy words with Florian.
“Philippina has her moments,” Andreas said, with his bitter smile, when
Florian chaffed her a little on her evident captivation, for the brown
eyes and beard of the handsome actor had quite taken her by storm.
“Philippina has her moments. I’ve seen her so before, and I shall see
her so again, I don’t doubt, in future. She’s always _volage_.” And his
lip curled curiously.
“Well, _volatsch_ or not,” Philippina replied, turning round to him
sharply, with one of her arch little looks—Philippina was always famed
for her archness—“_volatsch_ or not, Herr Andreas, I haf always returnt
to my olt frents at last, sooner or later, haf I not?”
“That’s true,” Florian answered, taking the remark to himself, in the
Florianesque manner, and fingering his own smooth chin with his white
hand, lovingly. “And I’m sure, Philippina, if it comes to that, your old
friends have never forgotten you, either. In London or at Meran, they’ve
always been the same—to you, and to everyone.” As he spoke, he gave a
side-long glance at Linnet; for though he had said in his haste, once,
the grapes were sour, he had never ceased in his own heart to admire
them greatly; and since Linnet had come forth from her chrysalis stage,
a full-fledged butterfly of the cosmopolitan world, decked in brilliant
hues, and much praised or desired of all beholders, he had paid her
assiduous court with every device in his power. It was Franz Lindner’s
naïf belief that every woman must yield in the end to money or diamonds,
if you only bid high enough; it was Florian’s, equally naïf, though a
trifle less gross, that every woman must yield in the end to flattery
and address, if you only flatter long enough. So he pressed himself
assiduously upon Linnet’s attention, in season and out of season; and
Linnet, who now regarded such compliments as part of the small change in
which the world pays its successful entertainers, took very little heed
of all his hints and innuendoes.
Andreas was wrong, however, in supposing this fancy of Philippina’s for
the brown-eyed American was merely one of the good-humoured Tyrolese
girl’s passing affections. For once, at last, Philippina was fairly
caught in a genuine attachment “’Tis a scratch,” Andreas said at first;
“she’ll soon get over it.” But, as a matter of fact, Philippina didn’t.
On the contrary, the attack grew more and more serious. In a week or
two, she was madly in love with Mr Theodore Livingstone; they had
dropped insensibly into Christian names; it was Theodore this, and
Theodore that, and Theodore the other thing, till Andreas, out of joint,
was fairly sick and tired of it. What was odder still, the good-looking
American on his side returned the feeling with interest. Philippina had
always been a fine-built girl of the buxom beauty type, very large and
vigorous; she was lively, and bright, and head over ears in love; and
the American, though not unaccustomed to female admiration, was
thoroughly taken with her. Before long, it was evident they meant to
make a match of it. Andreas shrugged his shoulders; still, he was amused
and yet piqued by it. Why any man should ever be minded to marry an
actress at all—unless, indeed, there was money in her—fairly passed
his comprehension; he felt sure there was no money in poor dear
Philippina. For every other purpose, the ceremony in such a case is so
absurdly superfluous. However, being a wise and prudent man, who trusted
much to the mitigating effects of time, Andreas threw no obstacles in
their way, and raised no objections. He only observed, in his dry
fashion, more than once to Linnet, “She’ll get tired of him soon; it’s
always the way with these hot first loves; like straw fires, they flare
up fast, and cool down again quickly.” The thought seemed to afford him
much inward consolation.
But though Andreas saw no difficulties in the young people’s way,
Linnet, with her quicker feminine instinct, immediately spied one. “Is
he a Catholic, Philippina?” she asked almost at once, somewhat
doubtfully.
“Ah, no; he isn’t a Catholic,” Philippina answered in German, with a
nonchalant air; “he belongs to some queer kind of American religion, I
know not what. They have lots of assorted religions in America, I’m
told, to suit all tastes. His they call in English a hard-shell Baptist.
So, of course, when we marry, we’ll have to get a dispensation.”
The dispensation, however, proved a harder matter in the end than
Philippina or her lover at all imagined. The Church was obdurate.
Florian, who, as a friend of the house, had been called in to assist in
this domestic difficulty, and who knew an Archbishop—Florian, in his
easy-going Gallio mood, was of opinion that the problem might easily be
solved by Mr Livingstone’s immediate conversion and reception into the
bosom of the Church; a course to which he, for his part, saw no possible
objection. But, greatly to his surprise, the American stuck to his
grotesque and quaintly-named creed with dogged persistence. Why any man
should trouble to haggle about a faith when a woman was in question,
Florian couldn’t understand—he’d have turned Mahommedan himself, or
Esoteric Buddhist, for that matter, with the greatest pleasure if it
gave the lady one moment’s satisfaction; and Mr Livingstone’s own
character hardly led him to expect any greater devotion on his part to
the nice abstractions of dogmatic theology. But the American, though he
dealt largely in fearsome Western oaths, and played poker with a will,
and was not more particular in his domestic relations than most other
members of his own uncensorious profession, yet stood firm as a rock on
the question of recusancy. The Inquisition itself would never have moved
him. He had no particular reason, indeed, for his dogged refusal, except
an innate prejudice against Papistry, prelacy, and all forms of
idolatry; he had no objection of any sort to marrying a Roman Catholic
girl, and bringing up her future children, if any, in the Roman Catholic
religion; but he stood out firm himself for his own personal
Protestantism. “A hard-shell Baptist I was born,” he said, with great
persistence, “and a hard-shell Baptist I’ll die, you bet. I was never a
church member, nor even an inquirer, but a hard-shell Baptist I was and
will be—and be durned to all Papists.”
To Florian, such obstinacy on so unimportant a point seemed simply
incomprehensible; if it had been a critical question, now, about
Pacchiarotto or Baudelaire or Pater’s prose style, he might perhaps have
understood it: but infant baptism! theological quibbles! an obscure
American sect! impossible! incredible! Still, the wise man has to take
the world as he finds it, allowing for all existing follies and errors
of other people’s psychology. So Florian, who was really a good-natured
fellow in a lazy sort of way, when things cost him no trouble, went to
see his friend the Archbishop more than once about the dispensation. He
found the Archbishop, however, even more impracticable on the subject
than the hard-shell Baptist. Those two minds were built, indeed, on such
opposite lines that ’twas impossible they should discuss anything,
except at cross-questions. The Archbishop, tall, thin, ascetic,
ecclesiastical, a churchman to the finger-tips, saw in this proposed
marriage a breach of discipline, a relaxation of the Church’s rules, a
danger to a woman’s immortal soul, and to heaven knows how many souls of
her unborn children. Florian, short, dainty, easy-going, worldly-minded,
tolerant, saw in it all only a question of obliging a jolly,
good-looking, third-rate actress, whom marriage would perhaps reclaim
for a few brief months from a shifting series of less regular
attachments. But the mere fact that she was an actress told against her
with the Archbishop. Why should he make exception in favour of a young
woman of ill-regulated life and flippant conversation, who belonged to a
profession already ill-seen by the Church, and who wished to enter into
one of the most solemn sacraments of life with a professed unbeliever?
The Archbishop interposed endless objections and vexatious delays. He
must refer _this_ matter to Rome, and _that_ one to further personal
deliberation. He must satisfy himself about the state of the young woman
and the young man by actual interviews. Florian, like most others of his
type, was patient of delays, and seldom lost his temper; but he almost
lost it now with that grim, thin old man who could make such a strange
and unnecessary fuss about allowing a third-rate playhouse singing-girl
to contract marriage with a nondescript hard-shell Baptist!
Two or three weeks passed away in this undecided fashion, and still
Florian called almost daily, and still the Archbishop hummed and hawed
and shilly-shallied. Philippina, all the time, grew more and more
visibly eager, and the hard-shell Baptist himself, unable to enter into
his Eminence’s ecclesiastical frame of mind, consigned the Archbishop
and all his Church to eternal perdition ten times a day in sound round
Western phrases. Florian heartily sympathised with him; it was absurd to
treat so slight a matter so seriously. Why, Florian himself, if he’d
been an Archbishop (which he might have been in the great age of Italian
churchmanship), would have granted the girl dispensations enough in less
than half the time to drive a round dozen of husbands abreast, if her
fancy so dictated. His Eminence couldn’t have asked more questions or
insisted on more proof if he’d been buying a Leonardo for the National
Gallery, instead of handing over the precarious possession of a Tyrolese
cow-girl to a handsome but highly-flavoured Western-American mountebank.
At last, when Florian returned, much disturbed, from his sixth or
seventh unsuccessful interview, to Linnet’s house in Avenue Road, where
he was to meet Philippina and her betrothed by special appointment, his
hansom drew up at the door just as Philippina herself and Mr Theodore
Livingstone, in their most Sunday array, disappeared into the vestibule.
Florian followed them fast upstairs into Linnet’s drawing-room. Andreas
Hausberger was there, with Linnet by his side; Philippina and Mr
Livingstone looked radiantly happy, and bursting with excitement.
“Well, the Archbishop still refuses,” Florian exclaimed, with great
disgust, dropping exhausted on a sofa. “I never in my life met such a
stubborn old dromedary. I’ve tried him with reason, and I’ve tried him
with ridicule, and I’ve tried him with authority, but nothing answers.
He’s impervious to any of ’em—a typical pachyderm. I don’t believe,
myself, if you gird at him for a year, you’ll get anything out of him.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Philippina answered, glibly, withdrawing her
light glove. “Teodore and I haf taken ze law into our own hands. He
persuade me to it zis morning. I do not care by zis time, were it for
twenty Archbishops.”
“Oh dear, what do you mean?” Linnet cried, all aghast, regarding her
friend with profound dismay.
Philippina held up her left hand significantly. “Just zat!” she cried,
with a little air of petulant triumph, touching a plain gold ring on her
third finger. Then she turned to Theodore. “My husband!” she said,
smiling, as if to introduce him in his novel capacity.
“I’d arranged it all beforehand,” the American explained, coming to her
aid at once with a somewhat exulting air; “I’d got the licence, and put
everything well in hand against the Archbishop’s consent; and this
morning I felt I wasn’t going to wait knocking about for the blamed
thing any longer. So I persuaded Philippina, and Philippina gave way;
and we were married by twelve o’clock at a Baptist Chapel, by a minister
of religion, as the Act directs, in the presence of the registrar. I
expect that’s about as binding as you make ’em in England; an Archbishop
himself couldn’t fix it up any firmer with a dozen dispensations.”
“I congratulate you!” Florian cried, fanning his face with his hand.
“You’ve done the right thing. Archbishops, I take it, are impracticable
anachronisms. It’s absurd to let these priests interfere with one’s
individuality in such a private matter.”
But Linnet started back with an awestruck face. “O Philippina,” she
cried, “how dreadful! Why, a Catholic wouldn’t think you were married at
all! There’s been no sacrament. From the Church’s point of view, you
might almost as well not have gone before the registrar.”
Florian laughed down her scruples. The happy bridegroom, never doubting
in his own soul the validity of his marriage, invited them all to dine
with him that evening at the Criterion before the theatre. But a little
later in the afternoon, when the women had left the room, Andreas
Hausberger drew Florian mysteriously aside. “Linnet’s quite right,” he
whispered in the philosopher’s ear. “I know my countrywomen.
Philippina’ll be as happy as the day is long—for a matter of a week or
two; and then, when she comes to think over what it is she’s done,
she’ll never forgive herself. From the Catholic point of view, this is
no marriage at all. Philippina must answer for it sooner or later to the
priests: and they won’t be too gentle to her.”