PRUDENCE
It was a trying position for Will. He hardly knew what to do. Duty and
love pulled him one way, chivalry and the hot blood of youth the other.
When a beautiful woman makes one an offer like that, it would be
scarcely human, scarcely virile to resist it. And Will was not only a
man but also a poet—for a poet is a man with whom moods and impulses
are stronger than with most of us. As poet, he cared little for mere
conventional rules; it was the consequences to Linnet herself he had
most to think about. But he saw it was no use talking to her from the
standpoint he would have adopted with most ordinary Englishwomen. It was
no use pointing out to her what he himself realised most distinctly,
that her union with Andreas was in its very essence an unholy one, an
insult to her own body, a treason against all that was truest and best
in her being. It ran counter from the very first to the dictates of her
own heart, which are the voice of Nature and of God within us. But to
Linnet, those plain truths would have seemed but the veriest human
sophisms. She looked upon her marriage with Andreas as a holy sacrament
of the Church; and any attempt to set aside that sacrament by an earthly
court, and to substitute for it a verbal marriage that was no marriage
at all to her, but a profound mockery, would have seemed to her soul ten
thousand times worse than avowed desertion and unconcealed wickedness.
Better live in open sin, she thought, though she paid for it with her
body, than insult her God by pretending to invoke his aid and blessing
on an adulterous union.
Will argued feebly with her for a while, but it was all to no purpose.
The teachings of her youth had too firm a hold upon her. He saw she was
quite fixed in her own mind upon one thing; she might stop with him or
she might go back, but she was Andreas Hausberger’s wife by the Church’s
act, and no earthly power could make anything else of her. So Will gave
up the attempt to convince her, as all in vain, at least for the
present. He saw what he had to do first was to provide at once for the
immediate future. Linnet couldn’t remain in his rooms alone with him
that night; to him, at least, so much was certain. For her own dear
sake, he must save her from herself; he must throw at least some decent
veil for the moment over the relations between them.
For Linnet herself, long before this, the die was cast. She felt she had
already deserted her husband; she had sinned in her heart the
unspeakable sin; all the rest was in her eyes mere detail and
convention. But she realised gratefully none the less Will’s goodness
and kindness to her. “You are better to me far than I’ve been to
myself,” she cried, clinging hard to him still; “I’ve wrecked my own
soul, and you would try to save my poor earthly body.” And yet, in the
mere intoxication of being near him and touching him, she more than
half-forgot all else on earth; her warm Southern nature rejoiced in the
light of her poet’s presence. She cared for nothing now; she thought of
nothing, feared nothing; with Will by her side, she would gladly give
her soul to burn for ever in nethermost hell, for the sake of those
precious, those fleeting moments.
“I must find some place for you to spend the night in, Linnet,” Will
said at last seriously. “Even if it were only to save scandal for the
immediate future, I should have to do that; by to-morrow, all the world
in London would be talking of it. But I hope, after a while, when I’ve
reasoned this thing out with you, you may see it all differently—you
may come round to my point of view; and then, you’ll be glad I arranged
things now so as to leave the last loophole of divorce and re-marriage
still open before you.”
Linnet shook her head firmly. “I’m a Catholic,” she said, with a sigh,
“and to me, dear Will, religion means simply the Catholic faith and the
Catholic practice. If I gave up that, I should give up everything.
Either marriage is a sacrament, or it’s nothing at all. It’s to the
sacrament alone that I attach importance. But if you wish me to go, I’ll
go anywhere you take me; though, if I obeyed my own heart, I’d never
move away from your dear side again, my darling, my darling!”
She clung to him with passionate force. Will felt it was hard to drive
her from him against her will—how hard, perhaps, no woman could ever
tell; for with women, the aggressiveness of love is a thing unknown; but
for the love’s sake he bore her, he kept down his longing for her. “Have
you brought any luggage with you?” he asked at last, drawing himself
suddenly back, and descending all at once to the level of the practical.
“A little portmanteau, and—all I need for the night,” Linnet answered
with a deep blush, still clinging hard to him. “My maid’s in the
passage.”
“But how about the theatre this evening?” Will inquired with a little
start. “You know, this was to have been your first appearance this
season.”
Linnet opened her palms outward with a speaking gesture. “The theatre!”
she cried, half-scornfully. “What do I care for the theatre? Now I’ve
come to _you_, Will, what do I care for anything? If I had my own way,
I’d stop here with _you_ for ever and ever. The theatre—well, the
theatre might do as best it could without me!”
Will paused, and reflected. He saw he must absolutely take measures to
protect this hot passionate creature against the social consequences of
her own hot passion. “You’ve got an understudy, I suppose,” he said;
“someone who could fill the part pretty decently in your enforced
absence? They don’t depend altogether upon you, I hope, for to-night’s
performance.”
“Yes; I’ve got an understudy,” Linnet answered, in a very careless
voice, clasping his hand tight in hers, and gripping it hard now and
again, as though understudies were a matter of the supremest
indifference to her. “She doesn’t know her part very well, and I’m the
soul of the piece; but I daresay they could get along with her very
tolerably enough somehow. Besides,” she added, in a little afterthought,
looking down at her wounded arm, “after what Andreas has done to me, I’m
too ill and too shaken to appear to-night, whatever might have happened.
Even if I’d stopped at home, instead of coming here, I couldn’t possibly
have undertaken to sing in public this evening.”
“Very well, then,” Will replied, making up his mind at once. “We must
act accordingly. If that’s the case, the best thing I can do is to go
out and telegraph to the management, without delay, that Signora
Casalmonte is seriously indisposed, and won’t be able to appear in
_Carmen_ this evening.”
“To go out!” Linnet cried, clutching his arm in dismay. “Oh, dear Will,
don’t do that! Don’t leave me for a moment. Suppose Andreas were to
come, and to find me here alone? What on earth could I do? What on earth
could I say to him?”
Will stroked her cheek once more, that beautiful soft cheek that he
loved so dearly, as he answered in a grave and very serious tone, “Now,
Linnet, you must be brave; and, above all, you must be practical. This
is a crisis in our lives. A great deal depends upon it. If you love me,
you must do as I advise you in this emergency. You have done quite right
to come away from Andreas—instantly, the very moment you discovered
this letter—the very moment he offered you such unmanly violence. In
that, you were true woman. You’re in the right now, and if you behave
circumspectly, all the world will admit it; all the world will say so.
But you mustn’t stop here one second longer than is absolutely
necessary. You must spend the night with some friend whom we know, some
lady of position and unblemished reputation; and the world must think
you went straight from your husband’s roof to hers, when all these
things happened.”
Linnet drew back, all aghast. “What, go from you!” she cried: “this
first night of our love. O Will, dear Will! Go, go right away from you!”
“Yes,” Will answered firmly. “For the moment, the one thing needful is
to find such a shelter for you. If you took refuge in a hotel or private
lodging to-night, people would whisper and hint—you know what they
would hint; we must stop their hateful whisperings! Now, darling, you
mustn’t say _no_; you must act as I advise. I’m going out at once to
find that lady. I shall ask my sister first—she’s a clergyman’s wife,
and nothing looks so well as a clergyman’s wife in England. But if _she_
objects, I must try some other woman. You’re agitated to-night, and I
should be doing you a gross wrong if I took advantage now of your love
and your agitation. Though it isn’t you and myself I’m thinking of at
all; you and I know, you and I understand one another. Let me not to the
marriage of true minds admit impediment; it isn’t that that I trouble
for—it’s the hateful prying eyes and lying tongues of other people. For
myself, darling, my creed is quite other than your priests’; I hold
that, here to-night, you are mine, and I am yours; God and Nature have
joined us, by the witness of our own hearts”; his voice sank solemnly,
“and whom God hath joined together,” he added, in a very grave tone,
“let not man put asunder.” He paused and hesitated. “But, for to-night,”
he went on, “we must make some temporary arrangement; to-morrow and
afterwards, we may settle for the future with one another at our
leisure. When you look at it more calmly, dearest, you may change your
mind about the matter of the divorce; till then, we must be cautious,
and, in any case, we must take care to give the wicked world no handle
against you.”
Linnet clutched him tight still. “But if you go,” she cried, all
eagerness, “you won’t leave me; I may go with you.”
Her voice was so pleading, it cut Will to the quick to be obliged to
refuse her. He leant over her tenderly. “My Linnet,” he cried, caressing
her with one strong hand as he spoke, “I’d give worlds to be able to say
_yes_; I can’t bear to say _no_ to you. But for your own dear sake, once
more, I must, I must. I can’t possibly let you go with me. Just consider
this; how foolish it would be for me to let you be seen with me,
to-night, on foot or in a cab, in the streets of London. All the world
would say—with truth—you’d run away from your husband, and rushed
straight into the arms of your lover. You and I know you’ve done
perfectly right in that. But the world—the world would never know it.
We must never let them have the chance of saying what, after their kind,
we feel sure they would say about it.”
He rose from his chair. She clung to him, passionately. “Oh, take me
with you, Will!” she cried, in a perfect fever of love. “Suppose Andreas
was to come! Suppose he was to try and carry me off by force against my
will! Oh, take me, take me with you!—don’t leave me here, alone, to
Andreas!”
Sadly against his wish, Will disengaged her arms and untwined her
fingers. He did it very tenderly but with perfect firmness. “No,
darling,” he said, in a quiet tone of command; “let go! I must leave you
here alone; it’s imperative. And it’s wisest so; it’s right; it’s the
best thing to do for you. You are mine in future—you were always
mine—and we shall have plenty of time to love one another as we will,
hereafter. But to-night I must see you suffer no harm by this first
false step of yours. My servant knows your husband well. He shall wait
in the hall; and, if Andreas comes, deny us both to him. Your maid can
come up here with you. I’ll take care no evil happens to you in any way
in my absence. Trust me, trust me for this, Linnet; you needn’t be
afraid of me.”
With a sudden change of front, Linnet held up her face to him. “I can
always trust you, dear Will,” she cried. “I have always trusted you. All
these long, long years I’ve known and seen how you yearned for one
kiss—and would never take it. All these long, long years, I’ve known
how you hungered and thirsted for my love—and kept down your own heart,
letting only your eyes tell me a little—a very little—while your lips
kept silence. The other men asked me many things, and asked me
often—you know a singer’s life, what it is, and what rich people think
of us, that they have but to offer us gold, and we will yield them
anything. I never gave to one of them what I was keeping for you, my
darling; I said to myself, ‘I am Andreas’s by the sacrament of the
Church; but Will’s, Will’s, Will’s, by my own heart, and by the law of
my nature!’ I trusted you then; I’ll trust you always. Good-bye, dear
heart; go quick: come back again quick to me!”
She held the ripe red flower of her lips pursed upward towards his face.
Will printed one hard kiss on that rich full mouth of hers. Then, sorely
against his will, he tore himself away, and, in a tumult of warring
impulses, descended the staircase.