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.”