“It does you no harm to be hungry,” Andreas answered, philosophically. “Nobody ever reproached himself afterwards for having eaten too little. A taste of something to eat, after playing a trying part like Melinda, before you go to bed, helps you to sleep sound, and keeps you well and healthy; but a square meal at this hour can’t be good for anybody. It interferes with rest; and what interferes with rest, tells, of course, upon the voice—which is very serious. You may have a bit of that sweetbread, if you like—no; that’s a great deal too much; half that quantity, if you please, Mr Florian. Pull your woollen thing over your shoulder, so, Linnet; there’s a draught from that door! I can’t have you getting as hoarse as a frog to-night, with the Prince and Princess coming to hear you on Monday!”
“Why on earth does she stand it?” Florian asked of Will afterwards, as they walked home together down the unpeopled Strand. “I can’t make it out. There she’s earning Heaven only knows how much a night, and filling the treasury; yet she allows this fellow to bully her and badger her like this; to dictate to her how much she’s to eat and to drink; to make her whole life one perpetual torment to her. Why doesn’t she rise and strike for freedom, I wonder? He’d have to come to terms; she’s too useful to him, you see, for him to risk a quarrel with her.”
“She’s too good—that’s where it is,” Will responded, with a tinge of stifled sadness in his voice; “and, besides, she doesn’t care for him.”
“Of course she doesn’t,” Florian answered, airily. “How could she, indeed!—a mass of selfishness like him!—so mean, so sordid! But that only makes it all the stranger she should ever put up with it. If she doesn’t love him, why on earth does she permit him to dictate to her as he does—to order her and domineer over her?”
“Ah, that’s how it looks to you,” Will answered, with a sigh; “but Linnet—well, Linnet sees things otherwise. You must remember, Florian, above all things, she’s a Catholic. She doesn’t love that man, but she’s entered with him into the sacrament of marriage. To her, it has all a religious significance. The less she loves Andreas, the more does she feel she must honour and obey him, and be a good true wife to him. If she loved him, she might perhaps sometimes rebel a little; because she doesn’t love him, she has become a mere slave to do his bidding.”
“I suppose that’s it,” Florian answered, swinging his stick in his hand, and stepping along gingerly. “Drôle de croyance, isn’t it? Still, I call it disgraceful. An exquisite creature like that—a divinely-inspired singer, a supply-moulded form of Hellenic sculpture, whom the Gods above have given us as a precious gift for the common delight and the common enjoyment—to be thwarted and pulled up short at every twist and turn—and by whom, I’d like to know? Why, by a Tyrolese innkeeper—a mere village host—who arrogates to himself the right of monopolising what Heaven meant for us all—Ach! I call it detestable, just simply detestable. He hardly allows her enough to eat and drink. She might just as well be a sennerin on her hillside again, for any pleasure or delight she gets out of her success, tied and hampered as she is with this creature Hausberger.”
“That’s quite true,” Will replied. “She was happier in the Zillerthal. She has money, and fine dresses, and jewellery, and applause; but, for any good they can do her, she might as well be without them. Hausberger treats her as a mere machine for making money for him. He’s careful to see the machine works thoroughly well, and doesn’t get out of order—absurdly careful, in fact, for he’s by nature over-cautious; but as for allowing her to enjoy anything of what she earns herself, in any reasonable way—why, it never even occurs to him.”
“Do you think he’s unkind to her?” Florian asked, somewhat carelessly. “I mean, do you think he ill-treats her—keeps her short, and so forth?”
“He doesn’t actively ill-treat her, I’m sure,” Will answered with confidence; “he has far too great a sense of the value of her health to do anything to injure it. And I don’t suppose he even keeps her actually short; she’s always beautifully dressed, of course—that’s part of the advertisement; and he takes her about as much as he can, without risk to her voice, and lavishes a certain sort of wooden care upon her. But I don’t think he ever regards her as a human being at all; he regards her as a delicate musical instrument in which he has invested money, and out of which, during a given number of years, he has to recoup himself and make his fortune. As to sympathy between them, why, naturally, that’s quite out of the question; he’s a harsh, stern man who hardly knows how to be kind, I should say, to anyone.”
Florian brought down his stick on the pavement with a bang. “It’s atrocious,” he said, snorting; “I declare, quite atrocious. Here’s this exquisite creature—a banquet fit for the Gods—with her superb voice and her queenly beauty; a creature almost too ethereal for ordinary humanity to touch or handle; one that should be reserved by common consent for the delectation of the very pink and pick of the species”—and he drew himself up to his five feet nothing with a full consciousness of his own claim to be duly enrolled in that select category—“here’s this exquisite creature, who should be held in trust, as it were, for the noblest and truest and best of our kind—a Koh-i-noor among women—flung away upon a solid, stolid, three-per-cent. investing, money-grubbing, German-speaking beerhouse-keeper. Pah! It makes me sick! This Danae to a Satyr! How a Greek would have writhed at it!”