

E-text prepared by Joseph E. Loewenstein, M.D.



LINDA TRESSEL

by

ANTHONY TROLLOPE

First published anonymously in serial form October, 1867,
through May, 1868, in _Blackwood's Magazine_ and in book form
in 1868. Trollope's authorship was acknowledged when the book
was re-published a decade later.







CHAPTER I


The troubles and sorrows of Linda Tressel, who is the heroine of the
little story now about to be told, arose from the too rigid virtue
of her nearest and most loving friend,--as troubles will sometimes
come from rigid virtue when rigid virtue is not accompanied by sound
sense, and especially when it knows little or nothing of the softness
of mercy.

The nearest and dearest friend of Linda Tressel was her aunt, the
widow Staubach--Madame Charlotte Staubach, as she had come to be
called in the little town of Nuremberg where she lived. In Nuremberg
all houses are picturesque, but you shall go through the entire city
and find no more picturesque abode than the small red house with the
three gables close down by the river-side in the Schuett island--the
little island made by the river Pegnitz in the middle of the town.
They who have seen the widow Staubach's house will have remembered
it, not only because of its bright colour and its sharp gables,
but also because of the garden which runs between the house and
the water's edge. And yet the garden was no bigger than may often
nowadays be seen in the balconies of the mansions of Paris and of
London. Here Linda Tressel lived with her aunt, and here also Linda
had been born.

Linda was the orphan of Herr Tressel, who had for many years been
what we may call town-clerk to the magistrates of Nuremberg. Chance
in middle life had taken him to Cologne--a German city indeed, as was
his own, but a city so far away from Nuremberg that its people and
its manners were as strange to him as though he had gone beyond the
reach of his own mother-tongue. But here he had married, and from
Cologne had brought home his bride to the picturesque, red, gabled
house by the water's side in his own city. His wife's only sister had
also married, in her own town; and that sister was the virtuous but
rigid aunt Charlotte, to live with whom had been the fate in life of
Linda Tressel.

It need not be more than told in the fewest words that the town-clerk
and the town-clerk's wife both died when Linda was but an infant, and
that the husband of her aunt Charlotte died also. In Nuremberg there
is no possession so much coveted and so dearly loved as that of the
house in which the family lives. Herr Tressel had owned the house
with the three gables, and so had his father before him, and to the
father it had come from an uncle whose name had been different,--and
to him from some other relative. But it was an old family property,
and, like other houses in Nuremberg, was to be kept in the hands of
the family while the family might remain, unless some terrible ruin
should supervene.

When Linda was but six years old, her aunt, the widow, came to
Nuremberg to inhabit the house which the Tressels had left as an only
legacy to their daughter; but it was understood when she did so that
a right of living in the house for the remainder of her days was to
belong to Madame Staubach because of the surrender she thus made
of whatever of a home was then left to her in Cologne. There was
probably no deed executed to this effect; nor would it have been
thought that any deed was necessary. Should Linda Tressel, when
years had rolled on, be taken as a wife, and should the husband
live in the red house, there would still be room for Linda's aunt.
And by no husband in Nuremberg, who should be told that such an
arrangement had been anticipated, would such an arrangement be
opposed. Mothers-in-law, aunts, maiden sisters, and dependent female
relatives, in all degrees, are endured with greater patience and
treated with a gentler hand in patient Bavaria than in some lands
farther west where life is faster, and in which men's shoulders
are more easily galled by slight burdens. And as poor little Linda
Tressel had no other possession but the house, as all other income,
slight as it might be, was to be brought with her by aunt Charlotte,
aunt Charlotte had at least a right to the free use of the roof over
her head. It is necessary that so much should be told; but Linda's
troubles did not come from the divided right which she had in her
father's house. Linda's troubles, as has before been said, sprang not
from her aunt's covetousness, but from her aunt's virtue--perhaps we
might more truly say, from her aunt's religion.

Nuremberg is one of those German cities in which a stranger finds it
difficult to understand the religious idiosyncrasies of the people.
It is in Bavaria, and Bavaria, as he knows, is Roman Catholic. But
Nuremberg is Protestant, and the stranger, when he visits the two
cathedrals--those of St. Sebald and St. Lawrence--finds it hard to
believe that they should not be made to resound with masses, so like
are they in all respects to other Romanist cathedrals which he has
seen. But he is told that they are Lutheran and Protestant, and he
is obliged to make himself aware that the prevailing religion of
Nuremberg is Lutheran, in spite of what to him are the Catholic
appearances of the churches. Now the widow Staubach was among
Protestants the most Protestant, going far beyond the ordinary
amenities of Lutheran teaching, as at present taught, in her
religious observances, her religious loves, and her religious
antipathies. The ordinary Lutheran of the German cities does not wear
his religion very conspicuously. It is not a trouble to him in his
daily life, causing him to live in terror as to the life to come.
That it is a comfort to him let us not doubt. But it has not on him
generally that outward, ever palpable, unmistakable effect, making
its own of his gait, his countenance, his garb, his voice, his words,
his eyes, his thoughts, his clothes, his very sneeze, his cough, his
sighs, his groans, which is the result of Calvinistic impressions
thoroughly brought home to the mind and lovingly entertained in the
heart. Madame Staubach was in truth a German Anabaptist, but it will
be enough for us to say that her manners and gait were the manners
and gait of a Calvinist.

While Linda Tressel was a child she hardly knew that her aunt was
peculiar in her religious ideas. That mode of life which comes to a
child comes naturally, and Linda, though she was probably not allowed
to play as freely as did the other bairns around her, though she
was taken more frequently to the house of worship which her aunt
frequented, and targed more strictly in the reading of godly books,
did not know till she was a child no longer, that she was subjected
to harder usage than others endured. But when Linda was eleven, the
widow was persuaded by a friend that it was her duty to send her
niece to school; and when Linda at sixteen ceased to be a school
girl, she had learned to think that the religion of her aunt's
neighbours was a more comfortable religion than that practised by
her aunt; and when she was eighteen, she had further learned to
think that the life of certain neighbour girls was a pleasanter life
than her own. When she was twenty, she had studied the subject more
deeply, and had told herself that though her spirit was prone to
rebel against her aunt