So, from that day forth, Franz Lindner’s life was changed. He began to work on quite a new basis. Hitherto, like most others of his trade and class, he had spent all he earned as fast as he got it. Now, he began to save and lay by for love, with the thrift of his countrymen. One great object in life swam clear before his eyes; he must manage to scrape together five hundred pounds, and take it to Monte Carlo, where he could make it by a stroke or two of that wonder-working roulette-table into twenty thousand. And, with twenty thousand pounds, he didn’t for a moment doubt he’d be able to pay his suit once more to Linnet.
CHAPTER XXXVI
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.”
CHAPTER XXXVII
BEGINNINGS OF EVIL
Andreas Hausberger was right. Philippina’s nemesis found her out all too quickly. Just six weeks later, Will Deverill had called round one afternoon at Florian’s rooms in Grosvenor Gardens. They were engaged in discussing Florian’s latest purchase – an etching of a wood-nymph after a new Dutch artist, very pure and precious – when Mr Barnes, that impeccable man-servant, opened the door with a flourish, and announced in his cut-and-dried official voice, “Signora Cazzlemonty; Mrs Theodore Livingstone!”
And Linnet and Philippina burst in upon them like a whirlwind.
Will rose hurriedly to greet them. In a moment, he saw something serious was amiss. Philippina’s eyes were red and swollen with crying; Linnet’s, though less bloodshot, looked weary and anxious. “Why, Madre de Dios, what’s the matter?” Florian exclaimed in his affected way, rushing forward effusively in his brown velvet smoking-coat. “My dear Signora, to what happy star do I owe the honour of this unexpected visit? And all unbidden, too! Such good luck is too infrequent!”
“It’s poor Philippina!” Linnet cried, half-inarticulate with sympathy. “She’s in such a dreadful state. She really doesn’t know what on earth to do about it.”
Florian smiled the calm smile of superior wisdom. “What, already?” he exclaimed, raising one impressive hand. “So soon? So soon? A little rift within the lute, a little tiff with her Theodore? Well, well, dear Diva, we know these offences must needs come, in the best regulated families. They’re part and parcel of our ridiculous marriage system. Will and I are wiser in our generation, you see; we keep well out of it.”
“No, no; it is not zat!” Philippina cried, excitedly. Then turning to Will, she burst out in German, “I’ve been to see the priest and the bishop to-day, to ask for absolution, and it’s all no use; they’ll neither of them give it to me. I’ve been to ask them again and again these two weeks; but they’re hard like rock; hard, hard, as that mantelpiece: they refuse to forgive me. They say it’s no true marriage at all that I’ve made, but the lusts of the flesh – a sinful union. Ach! what shall I do, what ever shall I do? This is terrible, terrible!” And she wrung her hands hard. “It’ll kill me,” she cried; “it’ll kill me.”
Linnet turned in explanation to the bewildered Florian. “You see,” she said simply, “she’s living in sin now, and they won’t absolve her. She may not take the mass, nor receive the sacraments of the Church in any form. She’s like one excommunicated. If she died to-morrow, they would refuse her extreme unction; she would pass away in her sin, and must go at once, straight, straight to perdition.”
“But surely,” Florian ventured to observe, turning theologian for once, in these peculiar circumstances, “her present life – well, my dear Signora, without rudeness to the lady, we must all admit, it’s – h’m, h’m – how shall I put it? It’s at least quite as innocent as her previous habits.”
Linnet made no false pretence of misunderstanding his plain meaning. This was a serious matter, and she felt its full seriousness herself so deeply that she sympathised with Philippina. “You don’t understand,” she answered, gasping; “you don’t at all understand; you can’t throw yourself into our standpoint. You’re not a Catholic, you see, and you don’t feel as we feel about it. To sin once, twice, three times, till seventy times seven, I care not how often – that is simply to sin: and if we repent in our hearts – God is faithful and just – the Church absolves us. But to live in open sin, to persist in one’s wrong, to set the authority and discipline of the Church at defiance – ah! that to us is quite another matter. Philippina may have done wrong sometimes; we are all of us human; Heaven forbid I should judge her” – she spoke very earnestly; “but to continue in sin, to live her life without the sacraments and consolations of the Church, to remain with a man whom no Catholic can recognise as really her husband – that is too, too terrible. And, just think, if she were to die – ” Linnet gazed up at him appealingly.
“But that can’t be the Catholic doctrine!” Will exclaimed with great vehemence.
Florian was more practical. “I dare say not,” he answered, with a shrug – “as the Catholic doctrine is understood by theologians, archbishops, and casuistical text-books. But that’s nothing to the point. It is the Catholic doctrine as these women understand it, and it’s sufficient to make them both supremely unhappy. That’s enough for us. What we’ve got to ask is, how can we help them now out of this hole they’ve got into?”
The longer they talked about it, indeed, the clearer did this central fact come out to them. Philippina had married in haste, without the Church’s consent; she was repenting at leisure now, in the effort to obtain it. And she sat there, cowering and quivering in bodily terror of those pains and penalties of fire and flame which were every whit as real to her to-day in London as they had been long ago by the wayside shrines at St Valentin. Either she must give up her husband, she said, or her hopes of salvation. It was evident that to her mind the little peccadilloes which the Church could absolve were as absolutely nothing; but to live with the husband whom the Church disowned, appalled and alarmed her. Her agonised terror was as genuine as though the danger she feared were actually confronting her. She saw and heard the hissing flames of purgatory. It made Will realise far more keenly than he had ever realised before the deep hold their creed keeps over these Tyrolese women. He couldn’t help thinking how much Linnet would suffer, with her finer mould, and her profounder emotions, under similar circumstances, if even Philippina, that buxom, coarse-fibred girl, took so deeply to heart the Church’s displeasure. He remembered it afterwards at a great crisis of their history; it was one of the events in life that most profoundly affected him.
Philippina, meanwhile, rocked herself up and down, moaning and trembling piteously. Will’s heart was touched. He seized his friend by the arm. “Look here, Florian,” he cried, all sympathy, “we must go at once and see the Archbishop.”
“My dear fellow,” Florian answered, shaking his head, “it isn’t the slightest use. I’ve tried too long. The man’s pure priest. Heart or pity he has none. The bowels of compassion have been all trained out of him. The simplest offence against ecclesiastical law is to him sheer heresy.”
“Never mind,” Will answered. “We can always try.” It struck him, in fact, that the Archbishop might perhaps be more easily moved by himself than by Florian. “Philippina must go with us. We’ll see whether or not we can move the Churchman.”
They drove off together in a cab to Westminster; but Linnet went back by herself to St John’s Wood.
When she reached her home, Andreas met her at the door with a little sneer on his face. Though they lived more simply than ever prima donna lived before, his avarice grew more marked as Linnet’s earnings increased; and since Philippina’s marriage he had been unkinder than ever to her. “What did you want with a cab?” he asked, “wasting your money like that. Wherever you’ve been – without my knowledge or consent – you might at least have come home by the Underground, I should fancy.”
Linnet’s face flushed hot. In her anxiety for her friend’s soul, she had never thought of such trifles as the hire of a hansom. “It was for Philippina,” she said, reproachfully, with a good home thrust: and Andreas, wincing, imagined he could detect a faintly personal stress upon Philippina’s name which almost disconcerted him. “She came round here in such a terrible state of distress that I couldn’t help going with her. She can’t get her absolution; she’s almost out of her mind with it.”
Andreas’ face set harder and sterner than ever. He eyed his wife narrowly. “Philippina can settle for her own cabs,” he said with an ugly frown. “What’s Philippina to us or we to Philippina, that we should waste our hard-earned money upon her? Let Philippina pay for the saving of her own precious soul, if she wants to save it. Don’t spend a penny upon her that belongs to your husband.”
An answer struggled hard for utterance upon Linnet’s tongue; but with an effort she repressed it. Andreas hadn’t always thought so little of Philippina – before she married the handsome brown-eyed American. However, Linnet refrained from answering him back as he himself would have answered her. The Blessed Madonna in her hand gave her strength to restrain herself. She merely said, with a little sigh, “I never thought about the cab; it was Florian who called it.”
Andreas turned upon her sharply. “So so!” he exclaimed, with an air of discovery. “You’ve been round to Herr Florian’s! And the other man was there, I suppose! You went by appointment to meet him!”
“Herr Will was there, if you mean him,” Linnet answered, fiery red, but disdaining the weak subterfuge of a pretended ignorance. “I didn’t go to meet him, though; I didn’t know he was there. He’s gone round with her, poor girl, to see the Archbishop.”
Andreas drew himself up very stiff. He hadn’t quite liked that stress Linnet put on Philippina’s name, and he wasn’t sorry accordingly for this stray chance of a diversion. “So Herr Will was there!” he repeated, with a meaning smile, “What a singular coincidence! You’ve been seeing too much altogether of Herr Will of late. I’m not a jealous man, but mind you, Linnet, I draw a line somewhere.”
Linnet’s face was crimson. “It’s not you who have had cause to feel jealous,” she answered, quietly. “Herr Will is too good a man to act.. well, to act as you would do. You know what you say or what you hint at isn’t true. You’re put out because – ”
“Because what?” Andreas asked, provokingly, as she broke off and hesitated.
But Linnet brushed past him, and went up to her own room without answering a word. She was too proud to finish the sentence she had begun, “Because Philippina has given you up and married the American.”
She had known it all along – known it, and never minded. But she felt in her heart the reason why; she had never loved Andreas, so how could she be jealous of him? He had married her as a very sound investment; he had never pretended to care for her at all in herself; and she, in turn, had never pretended to care for him. But now, in an agony of remorse and terror, she flung herself on her bed and, with white hands clasped, besought Our Lady, with all the strength she possessed, to save her from despising and hating her husband. She had never loved him, to be sure; but to her, as a Catholic, marriage was a most holy sacrament of the Church, and she must try to live up to it. She prayed, too, for strength to love Will Deverill less – to forget him, to neglect him. Yet, even as she prayed, she thought to herself ten thousand times over how different it would all have been if she had married Will Deverill; how much she would have loved him; how true at heart she would have been to him. All heretic that he was, his image rose up between herself and Our Lady. She wiped her brimming eyes, and, with sobs and entreaties, begged hard to love him less, begged hard to be forgiven that she loved him now so dearly.
Yet, even in her own distress, Linnet thought of Philippina. She prayed hard, too, for Philippina. She begged Our Lady, with tears and sighs, to soften the obdurate Archbishop’s heart, and make smooth for Philippina the path to Paradise. For, in a way, she really liked that big, bouncing alp-girl. Unlike as they were in mould, they both came from St Valentin; Philippina was to Linnet the one tie she still possessed that bound her in memory to the land of her birth – the land where her father and mother lay dead, awaiting their souls’ return from the flames of purgatory.
That evening at the theatre, Philippina burst in upon her with a radiant face, as she dressed for her part in Cophetua’s Adventure. “It’s all right,” she cried aloud in German, half-wild with joy. “Mr Deverill has managed it! He spoke to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop said Yes; and he gave me absolution then and there on the spot, and I went home for Theodore; and I’m to spend to-night at a lodging-house alone, and he’ll marry us with all the rites of the Church to-morrow.”
Linnet clasped her hand tight. “I’m so glad, dear,” she answered. “I knew he’d give way if Herr Will only spoke to him. Herr Will’s so kind and good, no mortal on earth can refuse him anything. He’s a heretic, to be sure, but, O Philippina, there’s no Catholic like him!.. Besides,” she added, after a pause, rearranging the folds in the Beggar Maid’s dress with pretended pre-occupation, “I prayed Our Lady that she might soften the Archbishop’s heart; and Our Lady heard my prayer; she always hears me.”