“It’s too late to prevent it now!” Franz answered, shaking his head, with a settled gloom on his countenance. “It’s all over by this. She’s his wife already. They were married on Friday.”
At those words Will felt his heart stand still within him. He gasped for breath. He steadied himself mechanically. Never till that moment had he known how much he loved the Tyrolese singer-girl, and now the blow had come, he couldn’t even believe it. “Married!” he faltered out in a broken voice; “what, married already! Linnet married to that man! Oh, impossible! Impossible!”
“But it’s _true_, all the same,” Franz answered sturdily. “Philippina was there, and she saw them married. She came back last night to collect their things and pack up for Italy. She’s to meet them to-morrow by the mid-day train, at a place called Verona.”
“But how did he do it in the time?” Will exclaimed still incredulous, and clinging still to the last straw with a drowning man’s instinct. “Your Austrian law has so many formalities. Perhaps it’s a story the man has made up on purpose to deceive us. He may have told Philippina, and she may be in league with him.”
Franz shook his head with gloomy determination. “No, no,” he said; “it won’t do; don’t flatter your soul with that; there’s no doubt at all in the world about it. He’s as deep as a well, and as false as a fox, and he’d laid all his plans very cunningly beforehand. He made the arrangements and swore to the Civil Act without consulting Linnet. He and the priest were in league, and the priest helped him out with it. At the very last moment, Andreas carried her off, and before she could say nay, he went straight through and married her.”
Will’s brain reeled round; his mind seemed to fail him. The sense of his loss, his irreparable loss, deadened for the moment every other feeling. Linnet gone from him for ever! Linnet married to somebody else!—and that somebody else so cold, so calculating, so cruel a man as Andreas Hausberger! It was terrible to contemplate. “He must have forced her to do it!” the Englishman cried in his distress. “But how could she ever consent? How could she ever submit? I can’t believe it! I can’t even understand it!”
“He didn’t exactly force her,” Franz answered, tilting his hat still more angrily on one side of his head. “But he brought the Herr Vicar from St Valentin to persuade her; and you know what priests are, and you know what women! The Herr Vicar just turned on purgatory and all the rest of it to frighten the poor child—so Philippina says. She was crying all the time. She cried in the train, and she cried on the road, and she cried in the church, and she cried at the altar! She cried worst of all when Herr Andreas took her home to the _Wirthshaus_ to supper. . . . But I’ll be even with him yet.” And Franz tapped his knife once more. “When I meet him again—ten thousand devils!—this goes right up to the hilt in the base black heart of him!”