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
SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED
Franz Lindner! And how was Franz Lindner engaged during these stormy days? He was working out by degrees his own scheme in life for making himself rich, and so, as he thought, acceptable to Linnet.
With great difficulty, partly by saving and hoarding with Tyrolese frugality, partly by rare good luck in following a fortunate tip for last autumn’s Cesarewitch, Franz had scraped together at last the five hundred pounds which he required for working his “system” at Monte Carlo. The royal road to wealth now lay open before him. So he started blithely from Victoria one bright spring morning, bound southward straight through by the rapide to Nice, with his heart on fire, and his capital in good Bank of England notes in his pocket. He meant to stop at Nice, not at Monte Carlo itself, because he was advised that living was cheaper in the larger town; and Franz, being a Tyroler, reflected with prudence that even when one’s going to win twenty thousand pounds, it’s best to be careful in the matter of expenditure till one’s sure one’s got them.
At Calais, he found a place in the through carriage for the Riviera. With great presence of mind, indeed, he secured a corner seat by pushing in hastily past a fumbling old lady with an invalid daughter. The opposite corner was already occupied by a handsome man—tall, big-built, rather dark, with brilliant black eyes, and abundant curly hair, of somewhat southern aspect. As Franz entered the carriage, the stranger scanned him, casually, with an observant glance. He had the air of a gentleman this stranger, but he was affable for all that; he entered into conversation very readily with Franz, first in English, then more fully in German, which latter tongue he spoke quite fluently. Part of his education had been acquired at Heidelberg, he said in explanation, before he went to Oxford; ’twas there he had picked up his perfect mastery of German idiom. As a matter of fact, he had picked it up rather by mixing with Jewish shop-boys from Frankfort in Denver City, Colorado; for the stranger was no other than Mr Joaquin Holmes, the Psycho-physical Entertainer, flying southward to restore his fallen fortunes at Monte Carlo.
Fate had used her Seer rather badly of late. His failure to sell Andreas’s letter to Linnet was the last straw that broke the camel’s back of Mr Holmes’s probity. Thought-reading had by this time gone quite out of fashion; Theosophy and occult science were now all in the ascendant. There were no more dollars to be made any longer out of odic force; so Mr Holmes was compelled by adverse circumstances, very much against his will, to take refuge at last in his alternative and less reputable profession of card-sharper. With that end in view, he was now on his way to the Capital of Chance in the Principality of Monaco. Where gamblers most do congregate is naturally the place for a dexterous manipulator of the pack to make his fortune. Mr Holmes was somewhat changed in minor detail as to his outer man, in order to avoid too general recognition. His hair was cut shorter; his beard was cut sharper; his moustache—a hard wrench—was altogether shaved off; and sundry alterations in his mode of dress, especially the addition of a most unnecessary pince-nez, had transformed him, in part, from the aspect of a keen and piercing Transatlantic thought-reader to that of a guileless English mercantile gentleman. But his vivid black eyes were still sharp and eager and shifty as ever; his denuded mouth, now uncovered at the corners, showed still more of a cynical smile than before; and his complete expression was one of mingled astuteness and deferential benevolence—the former, native to his face, the latter, by long use, diligently trained and cultivated.
Before they reached Paris, Seer and singer had put themselves on excellent terms with one another. They had even exchanged names in a friendly way, the Seer giving his, for obvious reasons, as plain Mr Holmes, without the distinguishing Joaquin; it was safer so: there are plenty of Holmeses scattered about through the world, and the name’s not compromising; while, on the other hand, if any London acquaintance chanced to come up and call him by it, such initial frankness avoided complications. Franz Lindner, more cautious and less wise in his way, gave his name unblushingly as Karl von Forstemann, a Vienna proprietor, out of pure foolish secretiveness. He had no reason for changing his ordinary style and title, except that he wished to be taken at Monte Carlo for an Austrian gentleman, not a music-hall minstrel. The Seer smiled blandly at the transparent lie; Franz’s accent and manner no more resembled those of a Viennese Junker than his staring tweed suit and sky-blue tie resembled the costume of an English gentleman.