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.”
As she spoke, a great pang passed suddenly through her bosom: Our Lady had answered that prayer; would she answer the other one? Would she grant Linnet’s wish to love Will Deverill less? Staring before her in an agony, she sobbed at the bare thought. It was horrible, hateful! A flood of conflicting emotion came over her like a wave. Sinful as she felt it herself to be, she knew she never meant that prayer she had uttered. Love Will Deverill less? Forget him? Oh, impossible! She might be breaking every commandment in her heart at once, but she couldn’t frame that prayer she must and would love him!
Oh, foolishness of men, who think they can bind the human heart with a vow! You may promise to do or leave undone what you will; but promise to feel or not to feel! The bare idea is preposterous!