Linnet: A Romance
by Grant Allen · English · Gutenberg #48296 · 827,740 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Linnet: A Romance
Author: Grant Allen
Release date: February 17, 2015 [eBook #48296]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LINNET: A ROMANCE ***
[Illustration: Grant Allen.]
L I N N E T
_=A R O M A N C E=_
_ B y _ G R A N T A L L E N
_Author of_ “UNDER SEALED ORDERS,”
“MISS CAYLEY’S ADVENTURES,” ETC.
_N e w Y o r k_ : : : N E W A M S T E R D A M
B O O K C O M P A N Y : : : : _M C M_
COPYRIGHT, 1900
BY
NEW AMSTERDAM BOOK COMPANY
NOTE
This story was written in the midst of the scenery which
it describes; but the author desires to acknowledge his
obligations for many touches of local colour to Mr.
Baillie-Grohman’s admirable work on “Tyrol and the
Tyrolese.” The quatrain on p. 283 is quoted, with
some slight modifications (to adapt it to its place
in this novel), from a poem by Mr. William Watson.
CONTENTS
I. “TO INTRODUCE MR FLORIAN WOOD”
II. A FRESH ACQUAINTANCE
III. WITHIN SIGHT OF A HEROINE
IV. ENTER LINNET
V. THE WIRTH’S THEORY
VI. THE ROBBLER
VII. WAGER OF BATTLE
VIII. THE HUMAN HEART
IX. THE MAN OF THE WORLD
X. HAIL, COLUMBIA!
XI. PRIVATE INQUIRY
XII. THE MADDING CROWD
XIII. A FIRST NIGHT
XIV. AND IF FOR EVER
XV. A CRITICAL EVENING
XVI. SCHLOSS TYROL
XVII. CAUGHT OUT
XVIII. TAKEN BY SURPRISE
XIX. SPIRITUAL WEAPONS
XX. FLORIAN ON MATRIMONY
XXI. FORTUNE’S WHEEL
XXII. A WOMAN’S STRATAGEM
XXIII. A PROPHET INDEED!
XXIV. THE ART OF PROPHESYING
XXV. A DRAMATIC VENTURE
XXVI. A WOMAN’S HEART
XXVII. AULD LAND SYNE
XXVIII. SIGNORA CASALMONTE
XXIX. FROM LINNET’S STANDPOINT
XXX. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
XXXI. WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK
XXXII. WEDDED FELICITY
XXXIII. PLAYING WITH FIRE
XXXIV. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
XXXV. GOLDEN HOPES
XXXVI. AN ECCLESIASTICAL QUESTION
XXXVII. BEGINNINGS OF EVIL
XXXVIII. HUSBAND OR LOVER?
XXXIX. DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE
XL. OPEN WAR
XLI. GOD’S LAW—OR MAN’S?
XLII. PRUDENCE
XLIII. LINNET’S RIVAL
XLIV. AND WILL’S
XLV. BY AUTHORITY
XLVI. HOME AGAIN!
XLVII. SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED
XLVIII. THE BUBBLE BURSTS
XLIX. THE PIGEON FLIES HOME
L. ANDREAS HAUSBERGER PAYS
LI. EXIT FRANZ LINDNER
LII. A CONFESSION OF FAITH
L I N N E T
CHAPTER I
“TO INTRODUCE MR FLORIAN WOOD”
’Twas at Zell in the Zillerthal.
Now, whoever knows the Alps, knows the Zillerthal well as the centre of
all that is most Tyrolese in the Tyrol. From that beautiful green
valley, softly smiling below, majestically grand and ice-clad in its
upper forks and branches, issue forth from time to time all the
itinerant zither-players and picturesquely-clad singers who pervade
every capital and every spa in Europe. Born and bred among the rich
lawns of their upland villages, they come down in due time, with a
feather in their hats and a jodel in their throats, true modern
troubadours, setting out on the untried ocean of the outer world—their
voice for their fortune—in search of wealth and adventures. Guitar on
back and green braces on shoulders, they start blithely from home with a
few copper kreuzers in their leather belts, and return again after a
year or two, changed men to behold, their pockets full to bursting with
dollars or louis or good English sovereigns.
Not that you must expect to see the Tyrolese peasant of sober reality
masquerading about in that extremely operatic and brigand-like costume
in the upper Zillerthal. The Alpine minstrel in the sugar-loaf hat,
much-gartered as to the legs, and clad in a Joseph’s coat of many
colours, with whom we are all so familiar in cosmopolitan concert-halls,
has donned his romantic polychromatic costume as an integral part of the
business, and would be regarded with surprise, not unmixed with
contempt, were he to appear in it among the pastures of his native
valley. The ladies in corset-bodices and loose white lawn sleeves, who
trill out startling notes from the back attics of their larynx, or
elicit sweet harmonies from mediæval-looking mandolines in Kursaals and
Alcazars, have purchased their Tyrolese dress direct from some Parisian
_costumier_. The real cowherds and milkmaids of the actual Zillerthal
are much more prosaic, not to say commonplace, creatures. A green string
for a hat-band, with a blackcock’s plume stuck jauntily or saucily at
the back of the hat, and a dirty red lappel to the threadbare coat, is
all that distinguishes the Tyrolese mountaineer of solid fact from the
universal peasant of European Christendom. Indeed, is it not true, after
all, that the stage has led us to expect far too much—in costume and
otherwise—from the tillers of the soil everywhere? Is it not true that
the agricultural and pastoral classes all the world over, in spite of
Theocritus and Thomas Hardy, are apt, when one observes them impartially
in the flesh, to be earthy, grimy, dull-eyed, and unintelligent?
Florian Wood didn’t think so, however, or affected not to think
so—which in his case was probably very much the same thing; for what he
_really_ thought about anything on earth, affectation aside, it would
have puzzled even himself not a little to determine. He was a tiny man
of elegant proportions: so tiny, so elegant, that one felt inclined to
put him under a glass case and stick him on a mantelpiece. He leant his
small arms upon the parapet of a wall as they were approaching Zell,
shifted the knapsack on his back with sylph-like grace, and murmured
ecstatically, with a side glance at the stalwart peasant-women carrying
basketfuls of fodder in huge creels on their backs in the field close
by, “How delicious! How charming! How essentially picturesque! How
characteristically Tyrolean!”
His companion scanned him up and down with an air of some passing
amusement. “Why, I didn’t know you’d ever been in the Tyrol before,” he
objected, bluntly. And, in point of fact, when they started together
from Munich that morning on their autumn tour, Florian Wood had never
yet crossed the Austrian frontier. But what of that? He had got out of
the train some five hours back at Jenbach station, and walked the
sixteen miles from there to Zell; and in the course of the tramp he had
matured his views on the characteristics of the Tyrol.
But he waved one lily-white hand over the earth none the less with airy
dismissal of his friend’s implied criticism. “How often shall I have to
tell you, my dear Deverill,” he said blandly, in his lofty didactic
tone—the tone which, as often happens with very small men, came most
familiarly of all to him—“that you unduly subordinate the ideal to the
real, where you ought rather to subordinate the real to the ideal. This,
you say, is the Tyrol—the solid, uncompromising, geographically
definite Tyrol of the tax-gatherer, the post-master, and the commercial
traveller—bounded on the north by Bavaria, on the south by Italy, on
the east by the rude Carinthian boor, and on the west by the collection
of hotels and pensions marked down on the map as the Swiss Republic.
Very well then; let me see if there’s anything Tyrolese at all to be
found in it. I have instinctive within me a picture of the true, the
ideal Tyrol. I know well its green pastures, its upland slopes, its
innocent peasantry, its fearless chamois-hunters, its beautiful,
guileless, fair-haired maidens. Arriving by rail to-day in this its
prosaic prototype—cast up, as it were, from the train on the sea-coast
of this Bohemia—I turn my eyes with interest upon the imitation Tyrol
of real life, and strive earnestly to discover some faint points of
resemblance, if such there be, with the genuine article as immediately
revealed to me.”
“And you find none?” Deverill put in, smiling.
Florian waved that dainty Dresden china hand expansively once more over
the landscape before him, as if it belonged to him. “Pardon me,” he
said, sententiously; “in many things, I admit, the reality might be
improved upon. The mountains, for example, should be higher, their forms
more varied, their peaks more jagged, their sides more precipitous; the
snow should drape them with more uniform white, regardless of the petty
restrictions of gravity; the river should tear down far rockier ravines,
in more visible cataracts. But Nature has sometimes her happy moments,
too. And I call this one of them! Those women, now, so Millet-like in
their patient toil—how sympathetic! how charming! A less primitive
society, a less idyllic folk, would have imposed such burdens upon a
horse or a donkey. The Tyrol knows better. It is more naïve, more
picturesque—in one word, more original. It imposes them on the willing
neck of beautiful woman!”
“It’s terribly hard work for them,” Deverill answered, observing them
with half a sigh.
“For _them_? Ah, yes, I admit it, of course, poor souls!—but for _me_,
my dear fellow—for _me_, just consider! It gives me a thrill of the
intensest sensibility. In the first place, the picture is a beautiful
one in itself—the figures, the baskets, the frame, the setting. In the
second place, it suggests to the observant mind an Arcadian life, a true
Dorian simplicity. In the third place—which is perhaps the most
important of all—it affords me an opportunity for the luxury of
sympathy. What is the trifling inconvenience of a heavy load on their
backs to these poor ignorant creatures, compared with the refined and
artistic pleasure—of an altruistic kind—which I derive from pitying
them?”
“Florian!” his friend said, surveying him comically from head to foot,
“you really are _impayable_. It’s no use arguing with you; it only
flatters you. You know very well in your heart you never mean a word of
anything you say; so stop your nonsense and put yourself in marching
order again. Let’s get on to Zell, and see what sort of quarters we can
find in the village.”
Florian Wood came down at once from his epicurean clouds, and strode out
with his little legs in the direction of their resting-place. In spite
of his tininess, he was a capital walker. If Nature, as he averred, has
sometimes her happy moments, she certainly had one when she created her
critic. Florian Wood was a young man of a delicate habit of mind and
body—a just and pleasing compromise between a philosopher and a
butterfly. His figure was small but extremely graceful; his limbs were
dainty but well-knit and gazelle-like; his face, though small-featured,
was very intelligent, and distinctly good-humoured; his voice was
melodious and exquisitely modulated. And what Nature had left undone,
his godfathers and godmothers did for him at his baptism when they
christened him Florian. As plain John Wood, to be sure, he would have
been nobody at all; as William or Thomas or Henry or George, he would
have been lost in the multitudinous deep sea of London. But his parents
had the glorious inspiration of dubbing him Florian, and it acted like a
charm: all went well in life with him. A baronetcy would have been a far
less valuable social passport—for there are many baronets, but only one
Florian. Before the romantic rarity of that unique Christian name, the
need for a surname paled and faded away into utter nothingness. Nobody
ever dreamt of calling him “Wood”: they spoke of Florian as they once
spoke of “Randolph.” On this somewhat illogical but very natural ground,
he became from his schooldays upward the spoiled child of society. He
was a toy—a plaything. Clubs hung on his clear voice; women petted and
made much of him. When you talk of a man always by his Christian name
alone, depend upon it, he becomes in the end as one of the family: mere
association of ideas begets in you at last a friendly—nay, almost a
fraternal feeling towards him.
They walked along briskly in the direction of Zell, Florian humming as
he went a few stray snatches of Tyrolese songs (or what pass in the
world for such), by way of putting himself in emotional harmony with the
environment. For Florian was modern, intensely modern. He played with
science as he played with everything else; and he could talk of the
environment by the hour with the best of them, in his airy style, as if
environments and he had been lifelong companions. But Zell itself, when
they got to it, failed somehow to come up to either of their
expectations. Florian would have made the valley narrower, or
transplanted the village three hundred feet higher up the slope of the
hill. As for Will Deverill, less critical of Nature’s handicraft, he
found the inns over-civilised; the _Post_ and the _Bräu_ were too fine
for his taste: they had come thus far in search of solitude and Alpine
wilds, and they lighted instead on a sort of miniature Grindelwald, with
half-a-dozen inns, a respectable café, experienced (or in other words
extortionate) guides, and a regular tourist-trap for the sale of
chamois-horns and carved models of châlets. “This will never do!” Will
Deverill exclaimed, gazing round him in disgust at the Greiderer Hotel
and the comfortable Welschwirth. “This is pure civilisation!”
And Florian, looking down instinctively at his dust-encumbered boots,
murmured with a faint sigh, “A perfect Bond Street!” For Florian loved
to do everything “consummately,”—’twas his own pet adverb; he aimed at
universality, but he aimed quite as much at perfection in detail of the
most Pharisaical description. In Piccadilly, he went clad in a faultless
miniature frock-coat, surmounted by the silken sheen of Lincoln and
Bennet’s glossiest; but if he made up his mind to Alps and snow-fields,
then Alps he would have, pure, simple, and unadulterated. No half-way
houses for him! He would commune at first hand with the eternal hills;
he would behold the free life of the mountain folk in all its
unsophisticated and primitive simplicity.
So he gazed at his Tom Thumb boots with a regretful eye, and murmured
pensively once more, “A perfect Bond Street!”
“What shall we do now?” Will Deverill asked, stopping short and glancing
ahead towards the glaciers that close the valley.
“See that village on the left there,” Florian answered, in a rapt tone
of sudden inspiration, seizing his arm theatrically; “—no, _not_ the
lower one on the edge of the level, but that high-perched group of
little wooden houses with the green steeple by the edge of the ravine:
what a magnificent view of the snow-fields to the south! From there, one
must look at a single glance over all the spreading fingers and
ramifications of the valley.”
“Perhaps there’s no inn there,” Will responded, dubiously.
“No inn! You prate to me of inns?” Florian exclaimed, striking an
attitude. “In full view of these virgin peaks, you venture to raise a
question of mere earthly bedrooms—landlord, waiter, chambermaid! Who
cares where he sleeps—or whether he sleeps at all—in such a village as
that?” He struck his stick on the ground hard to enforce and emphasise
the absoluteness of his determination. “The die is cast,” he cried, with
the Caesaric firmness of five-feet-nothing. “We cross the stream at
once, and we make for the village!”
“Well, there’s probably somewhere we can put up for the night and
reconnoitre the neighbourhood,” Will Deverill answered, as he followed
his friend’s lead. “If the worst comes to the worst, we can fall back
upon Zell; but the priest will most likely find us a lodging.”
No sooner said than done. They mounted the steep slope, and rose by
gentle zig-zags towards the upland hamlet. At each step they took, the
view over the glacier-bound peaks that close the glen to southward,
opened wider and wider. Near an Alpine farmhouse they paused for breath.
It was built of brown wood, toned and darkened by age, with projecting
eaves and basking southern front, where endless cobs of Indian corn in
treble tiers and rows hung out drying in the sunshine. Florian drank in
the pretty picture with the intense enjoyment of youth and health and a
rich sensuous nature. There was a human element, too, giving life to the
foreground. Three Tyrolese children, a boy and two girls, in costumes
more obtrusively national than they had yet observed, stood playing with
one another on the platform in front of the farmhouse. Florian beamed on
them, enchanted. “What innocence!” he cried, ecstatically. “What
untrammelled forms! What freedom of limb! What Hellenic suppleness! How
different from the cramped motions of our London-bred children! You can
see in a moment those vigorous young muscles have strengthened
themselves from the cradle in the bracing air of the mountains—so fresh
they are, so lithe, so gracious, so lissom! I recognise there at once
the true note of the Tyrol.”
As he spoke, the younger girl, playing roughly with the boy, gave him a
violent push which nearly sent him over into a neighbouring puddle. At
that, the elder sister clutched her hard by the wrist and gave her a
good shaking, observing at the same time in very familiar accents:
“Naow then, Mariar-Ann, if you do like that to ’Arry agin, I’ll tike you
stright in, an’ tell your mother.”
It was the genuine unmistakable Cockney dialect!
In an agony of injured nerves, Florian seized the elder girl by the
collar of her dress, and, holding her at arm’s-length, as one might do
some venomous reptile, demanded of her, sternly, in his severest tone:
“Now, where on earth did you ever learn English?”
The little Tyrolese, trembling violently in his grasp, stammered out in
deadly fear: “Wy, o’ course, in London.”
“Pa was a waiter at the Criterion,” the younger sister volunteered in a
shrill little voice from a safe distance; “and ma’s an Englishwoman.
We’ve come ’ere to retire. Pa’s tiken the farm. But _we_ can’t none of
us speak any German.”
Florian relaxed his grasp, a dejected, dispirited, disappointed
mannikin. “Go, wretched little mudlark!” he exclaimed, with a frank
gesture of discomfiture, flinging her from him as he spoke. “There
isn’t, there never was, any objective Tyrol!”
The child retreated prudently to the safe shelter of the doorway, before
venturing on a repartee. Then she put out her tongue and took up a stone
in her hand. “Who are you a-callin’ a mudlark?” she answered, with the
just indignation of injured innocence. “If my pa was ’ere ’e’d punch yer
bloomin’ ’ead for yer.”
It ill became Florian Wood, that man of taste, to bandy words before the
eternal hills with social waifs from the slums of Drury Lane. He strode
on up the path in moody silence. It was some minutes, indeed, before he
had sufficiently recovered from this crushing blow to murmur in a
subdued voice: “What an incongruous circumstance!”
“Not so unusual as you’d suppose, though,” his companion answered with a
smile; for he knew the Tyrol. “There are no people on earth so vagrant
in their ways as the Tyrolese. They go away as pedlars, musicians, or
waiters; but when they’ve made their pile, almost without exception,
they come back in the end to their native valleys. I’ve more than once
met hunters or farmers in these upland glens who spoke to me in English,
not always without a tinge of American accent. Perhaps it’s not so much
that these people emigrate as that they always come back again. They
think other countries good enough to make money in, but the Zillerthal’s
the one place where they’d care to spend it.”
Florian answered nothing. He strode on, sore distressed. The only Tyrol
worth tuppence, he now knew to his cost, was the one he had erected,
anterior to experience, in his own imagination.
CHAPTER II
A FRESH ACQUAINTANCE
It was a steep pull up to the little village on the hill, which Florian
had selected by pure intuition for their immediate headquarters. But
once they had arrived there the glorious panorama which disclosed itself
in one burst to their enchanted eyes made them forget the fatigues of
their long tramp to reach it. The village was a tiny one, but comely and
prosperous; composed of great farm-houses with big boulders piled high
on their shingled roofs to keep them in place, and a quaint old church,
whose tall and tapering spire was prettily tiled with bright green
slates, after the country fashion. Moreover, what was more important
just then to the footsore travellers, a hospitable _wirthshaus_ or
village inn occupied a place of honour on the small green in the centre.
It was cheerful though homely, and clean in a certain rough countrified
way; and it faced due south, toward the sun and the snow-fields. Florian
saw at a glance there would be a ravishing outlook from the bedroom
windows; and Will Deverill, more practical, and better accustomed to
these out-of-the-way nooks, felt inclined to believe they might count at
least on decent beds, plain wholesome fare, fresh trout from the stream,
and sweet venison from the mountains.
The name over the door was Andreas Hausberger. Will entered the inn with
a polite inclination of the head, and inquired in his very best German
of the first man he saw if he could speak with the landlord.
“I am he,” the stranger said, drawing himself up with much dignity.
“This inn is my Schloss. My name is Hausberger.”
Will Deverill surveyed him with a critical air. He had seen such men
before; they are not uncommon in the rural Tyrol. Tall, powerful,
big-built, with a resolute face and a determined mien, he looked like a
man well able to keep order among the noisy frequenters of his rustic
tavern. For the _wirth_ or innkeeper of these remote villages is often,
after the priest, the most important personage of the little community:
he represents the temporal as the _pfarrer_ represents the spiritual
authority. The owner of four or five horses, the entertainer of strange
guests, the dispenser of liquor to the countryside, the organiser of
festivals, marriage-feasts, and dances, the proprietor of the one club
and assembly-room of the village, the _wirth_ is necessarily a man of
mark and of local position, beyond anything that is usual with his kind
elsewhere. In the communal council his voice is supreme; the parlour is
his court-house: he settles all quarrels, attests all deeds, arranges
all assemblies, and assists, as a matter of course, at all rural
ceremonies.
“Can we have rooms here for a week?” Will inquired, still in German.
The landlord led them upstairs and showed them two bedrooms on the first
floor, roughly furnished, but neat, and, as Florian had foreseen, with a
glorious outlook. Will proceeded to inquire, as interpreter for the
party, about various details of price, possibilities as to meals,
excursions in the neighbourhood, and other practical matters. The
landlord answered all in the same self-respecting and almost haughty
tone as before, assuring him in few words as to the excellence of the
bread and the meat, the cleanliness of the beds, the soundness of the
beer, and the advantages and respectability of his establishment in
general. “You will be as well here,” he said, summing up, “as in New
York or London—a little less luxury, perhaps, but quite as much real
and solid comfort.”
“What does he say?” Florian asked, languidly, as the landlord finished.
For, though in his capacity as man of culture, the philosopher of taste
was prepared to give a critical opinion offhand at any moment, on Goethe
or Heine, the Minnesänger, or the Nibelungenlied, he was innocent of
even the faintest acquaintance with the German language. Two words in it
amply served his turn: with _wieviel_ and _ja wohl_, he made the tour of
the Fatherland.
Will explained to him in brief, and in the vulgar tongue, the nature of
the landlord’s somewhat high-flown commendations.
By way of answer Florian unslung his knapsack, which he flung on the bed
with as much iron determination as his height permitted. “This’ll do,”
he said, decisively—this time in his character as the man of impulse.
“I like the house; I like the place; I like the view; I like the
landlord. He’s a dignified looking old boy in his way, the landlord,
with that independence of mien and that manly chivalry which forms an
integral part of my mental conception of the Tyrolese character. No
bowing and scraping there; no civilised flunkeydom. And that scar on his
face, you observe; what a history it conceals: some free fight on the
hills, no doubt, or some tussle with a wounded bear in his native
forest!”
“Wal, no; not pre-cisely that,” the landlord answered, in very Teutonic
English, strangely tinged with an under-current of a most Western
flavour. “I got that mark in a scrimmage one day on a Mississippi
steamer. It was a pretty hard fight, with a pretty hard lot, too—he was
a real rough customer—one of these professional monte-sharpers that go
up and down on the boats on the lookout for flats; but I settled him,
anyway. He didn’t want another when we’d squared accounts over that gash
on my face. He retired into private life at the St Louis hospital for
the next few voyages.”
Poor Florian collapsed. This was too, too much! He sank on the sofa with
a dejected face, drew a very long breath from the innermost depths of
his manly bosom, and at last gasped out with a violent effort: “Are
there no Tyrolese in the Tyrol at all, then?”
The landlord smiled, a restrained and cautious smile. He was a
self-contained sort of man, very large and roomy. “Why, I’m a Tyroler,
myself,” he said, opening the second window, and bustling about the room
a little—“as Tyrolese as they make ’em; but I’ve been around the world
a bit, for all that, both in Europe and America.”
“You play the zither?” Will inquired, guessing at once what quest was
most likely to have taken him there.
The landlord shook his head. “No; I sing,” he answered. “It was in
charge of a troupe that I went over the water. You know Ludwig Rainer?”
“Who has an hotel on the Achensee?” Will replied. “The well-known jodel
singer? Yes; I’ve stayed there and heard him.”
“Wal, _he_ set the thing going,” Herr Andreas Hausberger continued,
still bustling about the room; “he took over a troupe to New York and
Chicawgo. The first time, he fell in with a pack of scoundrels who
cheated him of everything he made by the trip. The second time, he came
back with a few hundred dollars. The third time, he got into a very good
thing, and made money enough out of his tour to start the Seehof. So _I_
followed suit, but I only saved enough on my first venture to set me up
here in this house in the village. It’s a one-horse affair for a man
like me. Next time, I hope I shall make a little capital to start a big
hotel for foreign tourists and kur-guests at Meran or Innsbruck.”
“Then you mean to go again?” Will Deverill asked, sitting down.
“Why, certainly,” the landlord answered, retreating to the door, “as
soon as ever I can get another good troupe together again.” And with a
ceremonious bow, like a courtly gentleman that he was, he retired
downstairs to superintend the preparation of those fresh mountain trout
he had promised them for dinner.
As soon as he was gone, Florian raised himself on one elbow like a
startled butterfly, with an air of studious vacancy, and stared hard at
Will Deverill. “What an extraordinary country,” he murmured, with a
pensive sigh. “It’s Babel reversed. Everybody seems to speak and
understand every European language. The very babes and sucklings call
one names as one passes, in vile gutter English. It’s really quite
uncanny. Who’d have thought, now, of meeting in an out-of-the-way lost
corner of earth like this, a village innkeeper who’s a man of the world,
a distinguished traveller, an accomplished linguist, and an intelligent
impresario? The ways of Providence are truly mysterious! What a place to
bury such a shining light! Why dump him down so, in this untrodden
valley?”
“Oh, it’s not by any means such a singular case as you suppose,” Will
answered, looking up from the knapsack he was engaged in
unpacking—“above all, in the Zillerthal. I’ve never been here before
myself, but I’ve always been told in other parts of the Tyrol that the
Zillerthalers, men and girls, are every one of them born musicians. And
as for our landlord here, the Tyrolese _wirth_ is always a man of light
and leading in his own society. He opposes the priest, and heads the
liberal party. All the popular leaders in the war of independence in the
Tyrol were monks or innkeepers. Andreas Hofer, himself, you know, had an
inn of his own in the Passer valley.”
“Ah, to be sure,” Florian ejaculated, in an acquiescent tone of a
peculiar calibre, which showed his friend at once he hadn’t the remotest
idea who Andreas Hofer was, or why one should be expected to know
anything about him. Now, want of knowledge on such a point is, of
course, most natural and pardonable in a stranger; but there was no
sufficient reason, Will Deverill thought, for Florian’s pretence at its
possession where he really knew nothing. That, however, was poor
Florian’s foible. He couldn’t bear to have it thought he was ignorant of
anything, from mathematics or music to esoteric Buddhism. If a native of
Siberia had addressed him casually in the Ostiak dialect of the
Tungusian language, Florian would have nodded and smiled a
non-committing assent, as though Ostiak had always been his
mother-tongue, and he had drunk in Tungusian at his nurse’s bosom.
“You know who Andreas Hofer was, of course?” Deverill went on,
persistently. He was a devil of a fellow for not letting you off when he
caught you out in an innocent little piece of social pretension, was
Deverill.
Florian, thus hard pressed, found himself compelled to do what he hated
most in the world—confess his ignorance. “I remember the gentleman’s
respected name, of course!” he said, dubiously, with a sickly smile and
a little forced pleasantry; “but his precise claims to distinction, as
_Men of the Time_ puts it in its cheerful circular, entirely escape my
memory for the moment.”
“He was the leader of the spontaneous Tyrolese peasant movement, you
know, for the expulsion of the French and their Bavarian allies in 1808
or thereabouts,” Will went on, still unpacking. “Napoleon caught him at
last, and had him shot at Mantua. You’ll see his tomb when you go to
Innsbruck, and lots of other mementos of him all over the country
everywhere. He pervades the place. He’s the national hero, in fact—the
martyr of independence—a sort of later and more historical William
Wallace.”
“Dear me, yes; how stupid of me!” Florian cried, clapping his hand to
his head in a sudden burst of pretended recollection. “It comes back to
me now, of course. Good old Andreas Hofer! How could I ever forget him?
The Tyrolese William Tell! The Hampden of the Alps! The undaunted
Caractacus of these snow-clad mountains!”
Deverill pulled off his coat. “If I were you,” he said, drily, “instead
of rhapsodising here, I’d go into my own room, have a jolly good wash,
and get ready for dinner. We must have walked about twenty-two miles
since we got out at Jenbach, and this bracing air gives one a positively
Gargantuan appetite.”
Florian roused himself with a yawn, for though vigorous enough for his
size, he was a lazy creature, and when once he sat down it was with
difficulty he could be prevailed upon to put himself in motion again.
Ten minutes later they were seated at the white-covered table in the
tidy little salon, doing the fullest justice to the delicious broiled
trout, the foaming amber ale, the fresh laid eggs, and the excellent
home-made bread, provided, according to promise, by Herr Andreas
Hausberger.
CHAPTER III
WITHIN SIGHT OF A HEROINE
Next morning early, aroused by the cloister bell, Will Deverill rose,
and looked out of his window. Oh, such an exquisite day! In that clear,
crisp air the summits of the Floitenspitze, the Löffler, and the
Turnerkamp glistened like diamonds in the full morning sunlight. ’Twas a
sight to rejoice his poetic soul. For Will Deverill, though too modest
to give himself airs, like Florian, was a poet by birth, and a
journalist by trade. Nature had designed him for an immortal bard;
circumstances had turned him into an occasional leader-writer. He stood
there entranced for many minutes together. He had pushed the leaded
window open wide when he first rose, and the keen mountain air blew in
at it most refreshingly. All, all was beautiful. He looked out on the
fresh green pastures, the deep glen below, the white stream in its
midst, the still whiter tops of the virgin mountains beyond it. A stanza
for his new poem rose spontaneous in his mind as he leaned his arms on
the low sill and gazed out upon the great glaciers:
“I found it not where solemn Alps and grey
Draw crimson glories from the new-born day,
Nor where huge sombre pines loom overhanging
Niagara’s rainbow spray.”
He was just feeling in his pocket for a pencil to jot down the rough
draft of these few lines, when of a sudden, at the window in the next
room at the side, what should he see but Florian’s pale face peeping
forth most piteously.
“What’s the matter? Haven’t you slept?” Will inquired of his
disconsolate friend with a sympathetic nod.
The epicurean philosopher shook a sad, slow head with a painfully
cheerful air of stoical resignation. “Not a wink since three o’clock,”
he answered, gloomily. “Those dreadful creatures have bothered me
without ceasing.”
“Surely,” Will began, somewhat surprised, “not——”
Florian shook his head wearily. “No, no; not _them_,” he murmured with
melancholy emphasis. “I don’t mind about _them_. They, at least, are
silent, and, besides, if you like, you can get up and catch them. Bells,
bells! my dear fellow; bells, bells, all the morning. They’ve been
tinkling in my ear every blessed minute since the clock struck three.
It’s unendurable, horrible.”
“Oh, the cow-bells!” Will answered, laughing. “Why, for my part, I like
them. They’re a feature of the place; they sound so countrified. I
hardly hear them at all, or if I hear them, they come to me drowsily
through the haze of my dreams like the murmur of water or a nurse’s
lullaby. I find them, to tell you the truth, positively soothing.
Besides,” he added, mischievously, with a malicious little smile, “in
such a village as this, who cares where he sleeps, or whether he sleeps
at all? He should be able to subsist here on scenery and the
affections.”
At the words, Florian’s head disappeared incontinently. That, surely,
was the unkindest cut of all. Thus convicted out of his own mouth, by
his familiar friend, he could but retire abashed to complete his toilet.
That Deverill should have slept all night long, while he lay awake, and
tossed, and turned, and wished ill to the whole ill-omened race of cows,
was bad enough in all conscience; but that he should pretend he _liked_
those disgusting bells was nothing short of atrocious.
He descended a little later to the homely parlour. Will was down there
before him, and had succeeded in ferreting out an old violin from a
corner cupboard. He was musical, was Will—not, to be sure, in the grand
perceptive and critical way, like Florian himself, who played no
instrument and understood all perfectly, but, after the inferior fashion
of the mere dexterous executant, who possesses a certain physical
suppleness and deftness of fingers to elicit from dumb strings the most
delicate fancies of a Mendelssohn or a Chopin. In pursuance of this
lesser gift of his—“the common faculty of the fiddler,” as Florian
called it—Will was just then engaged by the open window in playing over
to himself a pretty little song by some unknown composer. He played it
very well, too, Florian admitted, condescendingly; Will had a capital
ear, indeed, and was not without feeling of a sort, for the finer
touches in musical composition—up to a certain point, you know; not
quite, of course, to the high and delicate level of Florian’s own
cultivated and refined perceptions. It was a charming piece, however—a
very charming piece—and, after a while, Will began singing the words to
it. Florian listened with pleasure and a forgiving smile to the clever
twists and turns of that well-arranged melody.
As he stood there, listening, a little behind, one impressive forefinger
held up in an attitude of discriminative attention, he was aware of two
voices in the street outside catching up the tune naturally, and fitting
it as if in sport to shapeless syllables of their own invention. They
were women’s voices, too, young and rich and powerful; and what was
odder still, to Florian’s immense surprise, they took up their proper
parts as second and third in a concerted piece, like trained musicians.
Strange to find such finished vocalists in a mere peasant hamlet!—but,
there, no doubt they were some of Herr Hausberger’s Transatlantic
performers. Florian moved closer to the window to observe the unknown
but silvery-tongued strangers. As he did so, two plump and rosy-cheeked
mountain lasses, in homespun kirtles, fled, blushing and giggling, with
their hands to their mouths, away from the close scrutiny of the foreign
Herrschaft. Accustomed as he was by this time to marvellous
incongruities in this land of surprises, Florian could hardly believe
his own eyes when he further observed that the two girls with the divine
voices were driving cows home from the pasture to the milking shed.
Great heavens, yes! there was no gainsaying it. Shade of Wagner,
incredible! The accomplished vocalists whose fine sense of melody so
delighted his acute and critical ear were nothing but a pair of common
country milkmaids!
Will Deverill, too, had risen, and, with a friendly nod, was gazing out
appreciation at his unknown accompanists. Florian turned to him, all
amazement. “They _must_ have practised it before,” he cried. “They must
know it all of old. It must certainly be one of their own national
pieces.”
“Oh, no,” the poet replied in a very confident voice. “They can’t
possibly have heard it. It’s quite, quite new. I’m sure about that. It’s
never yet been published.”
“But, my dear fellow,” Florian exclaimed, with much argumentative heat,
“I assure you, none but the most instructed musicians could possibly
take up the right chords like that, and sing them second and third,
without having practised them beforehand. Allow me to know _something_
of the musical art. Even Patti herself——”
“Why, the song’s my own,” Will broke in, much amused, and unable to
restrain himself. “I ought to know; it was I who wrote it.”
“The words! ah, yes, to be sure; the words are nothing. They didn’t sing
_them_, of course; ’twas the melody they caught at. And the melody, I
venture to assert, without fear of contradiction—the melody, from the
peculiar way it modulates into the sub-dominant, must certainly be one
of their own love songs.”
“But I composed the tune too,” Will made answer with a quiet smile.
“It’s never been played before. It came up into my head in the railway
carriage yesterday, and seeing this old fiddle in the cupboard this
morning, I thought I’d try it over before scoring it down, just to hear
how it sounded.”
“_You_ wrote it!” Florian repeated, dazzled and stunned at the news.
“You compose as well as rhyme! You set your own songs to music, do you?
Well, upon my soul, Deverill, I hadn’t till this moment the slightest
idea you had such an accomplishment.”
“Oh, I’m only a beginner,” Will answered, with a faint blush, laying
down the violin,—“or rather an amateur, for I’ve always dabbled in it.
But I’ve only published one song. I just strum to amuse myself. Good
morning, Herr Hausberger; what an exquisite day! We’d better take
advantage of it for a climb up the Rauhenkopf.”
The landlord, dish in hand, bowed his courteous and courtly bow. There
was deference in it, without a tinge of servility. Florian noted with
approbation that mixture of independence and a just self-respect which
formed a component part of his preconceived idea of the Tyrolese
character. Andreas Hausberger was “right,” because he was very much as
Florian would have pictured him. “Yes; a very good day for the ascent,”
the landlord said, quietly. “We will put up some lunch—cold meat and
Pilsener. You’ll get a fine view, if you start in good time, over the
Zementhal glaciers.”
Florian sat down to the table, a trifle crestfallen; but the poached
eggs were excellent, and the coffee fragrant; and he consoled himself
for the cow-bells and the mishap about the song by the reflection that,
after all, these idyllic milkmaids, with the voice of a prima donna and
the manners of Arcadia, were in exact accordance with the operatic ideal
of his own imagined Tyrol. They sang like the Chorus of Happy Peasants;
they behaved as the mountain lass of poetry ought always to behave, and
as the mountain lass of reality often utterly fails to do.
That morning on the Rauhenkopf was to Florian a day of unmixed delights.
He was At Home with Nature. In a vague sort of way, without troubling
himself much to know anything about them, the town-bred philosopher
loved the fragrant fields, the beautiful flowers, the mossy rocks, the
bright birds, the chirping insects. And Will Deverill knew them
all—their names, and where to find them. The ragged, sweet-scented
pinks still loitered late in deep clefts of the glacier-worn rock; a few
stray sky-blue gentians still starred the rich patches of Alpine
pasture; emperors and orange-tips still flaunted their gaudy wings in
full autumn sunshine. Florian drank in all these things with pure
sensuous delight; the sweet sounds of the fields, the smell of tedded
kine filled his æsthetic soul, not so much with direct pleasure, as with
some faint afterglow of literary reminiscence.
At one of the little alp-huts among the higher pastures, Will Deverill
murmured a cheerful “Guten Morgen,” as he passed, to a buxom peasant
lass in a woollen kirtle, who stood busy at her churn by the door of her
châlet. The girl curtseyed, and looked back at them with such a
good-humoured smile that Florian, as an admirer of female beauty,
couldn’t resist the temptation of standing still for a moment to take a
good long gaze at her. “What’s she doing up here alone?” he asked at
last, turning curiously to Will, as the girl still smiled at him. “Does
she come up here every day? It’s a fearful long pull for her. But
then—this charming air! such strength! such agility!”
“Why, she lives here,” Will answered, surprised that anyone shouldn’t
know what to him was such an obvious and familiar fact. “She doesn’t
come up at all, except once in the spring; and in autumn she goes down
again. It must be nearly time for her to go down now, I should say.
There’s not much fodder left in these upper alps here.”
“Lives here!” Florian exclaimed, taken aback. “What?—and sleeps here as
well? You don’t mean to say she sleeps in that little wooden box there?”
“Certainly. She’s a _sennerin_, you know; it’s her business to do it.
All the alp girls live like that; they’ve been born and brought up to
it.”
In his innermost soul, Florian was dying to know what manner of wild
beast a _sennerin_ might be—being undecided in his own mind as to
whether it was most probably the name of a race, a religion, a caste, or
a profession. But it would have been treason to his principles to
confess this fact, so he compromised with his curiosity by murmuring
blandly in reply, “Oh, ay, to be sure, a _sennerin_! I might have
guessed it! Do you think now, Deverill, if we asked her very nicely,
she’d let us go in and inspect her châlet?”
“I’m sure she would,” Will answered, half repressing a smile. “They see
so little of any outsiders while they’re up here on their alps that
they’re only too glad, as a rule, when a stranger visits them. We’ll
give her a couple of kreuzers for a glass of milk; that’ll serve as an
introduction.”
He raised his hat jauntily, and approached the hut with a few words of
apology. The _sennerin_ smiled in return, bobbed, curtseying low, and
welcomed them affably to her hospitable shelter. After a minute’s parley
with Will, the good-humoured young woman brought out a jug of fresh
milk, still frothy from the cow, and poured it out for them liberally in
a blue stoneware mug. Will drank his off at a draught; Florian hated
milk, but as admirer of female beauty—she was a good-looking wench—he
gulped it down to the dregs without even a grimace, and handed the mug
back again. Then Deverill talked for a while with their sunburnt
entertainer in that unknown tongue which Florian didn’t understand;
though he could see from their laughing faces and their quick tones of
repartee that she was a merry brown lass, shy and bashful indeed before
the foreign gentlefolk, but frank and fearless for all that as his soul
could wish, and absolutely free from the absurd conventionalities and
_mauvaise honte_ of the women who dwell in our too civilised cities. She
was no more afraid of men than of oxen. Florian liked that well. Here,
at least, was true freedom; here, at least, was ancestral simplicity of
life; here the woman held her own on equal terms with the man; here love
was unfettered by law or by gold, untrammelled by those hampering
inconvenient restraints of parental supervision, society, or
priestcraft, which impede its true course in our too complex
communities. Florian’s lungs breathed freer in this rarified air: he had
risen above the zone of Mrs Grundy.
At the end of their brisk colloquy, which he followed but in part, the
_sennerin_, with a gesture of countrified courtesy, turned to the door
with a pretty smile and waved Florian into her châlet. “She says you may
look over it and welcome,” Will Deverill explained, interrupting.
Florian, nothing daunted, entered and gazed around. It was a rough log
hut, divided into two rooms by a wooden partition—a big one, with a
door behind, for the cows and calves; and a little one, with a door in
front, for the _sennerin’s_ own bedchamber, kitchen, and parlour. The
chief article of furniture seemed to him to consist of a great black
cauldron, suspended from a crane over the open fireplace, and used—so
Will assured him—as the principal utensil in the manufacture of cheese.
The fire itself blazed in a hole, dug roughly in the floor of native
turf; the edge of this hole, cut out into a rude seat, did duty as sofa,
couch, chair, and chimney-corner. Florian sniffed somewhat dubiously.
“And she sleeps here all alone?” he said, with a suppressed shudder.
This was Arcadian simplicity, he felt, with quite too much of the bloom
off.
“Yes; she sleeps here all alone,” Will answered, undisturbed. “Comes up
in May, when the snow first melts, and goes down in October, when it
begins to lie thick again.”
The _sennerin_, laughing aloud, confirmed his report with many nods and
shrugs, and much good-humoured merriment. It amused her to see the
stranger’s half-incredulous astonishment.
“And aren’t you frightened?” Florian asked, Will interpreting the
question for him.
The _sennerin_ laughed the bare idea to scorn. “Why should I be?” she
exclaimed, brimming over with smiles of naïve surprise at such a
grotesque notion. “There are plenty more girls in all the other huts on
the alps round about. This hut’s Andreas Hausberger’s, and so are that
and that. He owns all these pastures; we come up and herd cows for him.”
“Isn’t it terribly lonely, though?” Florian inquired with open eyes,
reflecting silently to himself that after all there were advantages—of
a sort—in Bond Street.
“Lonely!” the _sennerin_ cried, in her own country dialect. “We’ve no
time to be lonely. We have to mind the cows, don’t you see, worthy
well-born Herr, and give milk to the calves, and make cheese and butter,
and clean our pots and pans, and do everything ourselves for our food
and washing. I can tell you we’re tired enough when the day’s well over,
and we can creep into our loft, and fall asleep on the straw there.”
“And she has no Society?” Florian exclaimed, all aghast at the thought.
For to him the companionship of his brother man, and perhaps even more
of his sister woman, was a necessary of existence.
The girl’s eye brightened with an unwonted fire as Will explained the
remark to her. “Ah, yes,” she said half-saucily, with a very coquettish
toss of her pretty black head; “when Saturday night comes round then
sure enough our mountain lads climb up from the valley below to visit
us. We have Sunday to ourselves—and them—till Monday morning; for you
know the song says—” and she trilled it out archly in clear, quick
notes—
“With my pouch unhung,
And my rifle slung,
And away to my black-eyed alp-girl!”
She sang it expressively, in a rich full voice, far sweeter than could
have been expected from so stalwart a maiden. Florian saw an opportunity
for bringing out one stray phrase from his slender stock of German. “Das
ist schön,” he cried, clapping his hands; “sehr schön! So schön!” Then
he relapsed into his mother-tongue. “And you sing it admirably!”
Their evident appreciation touched the alp-girl’s vanity. Like most of
her class she had no false modesty. She broke out at once spontaneously
into another native song, with a wild free lilt, which exactly suited
both her voice and character. It was excellently rendered; even Florian,
that stern critic, admitted as much; and as soon as she ended both men
clapped their hands in sincere applause of her unpremeditated
performance. The _sennerin_ looked down modestly when Will praised her
singing. “Ah, you should just hear Linnet!” she cried, in unaffected
self-depreciation.
“And who’s Linnet?” Will asked, smiling at the girl’s perfect frankness.
“Oh, she’s one of Herr Hausberger’s cow-girls,” the _sennerin_
answered, with a little shake of her saucy head. “But you needn’t ask
_her_; she’s a great deal too shy; she won’t give you a chance; she
never sings before strangers.”
“That’s a pity,” Will replied, lightly, not much thinking what he said;
“for if she sings better than you, worthy friend, she must be well worth
hearing.”
The _sennerin_ looked down again. Her ruddy cheek glowed ruddier. Such
praise from such lips discomposed her serenity. Will glanced at his
watch. “We must be going, Florian,” he said. “Half-past twelve already!
I’ve no coppers in my pocket. Have you anything you can offer this lady
gay for her agreeable entertainment?”
Florian pulled out his purse, and took from it gingerly a well-worn
twenty-kreuzer piece—one of those flimsy silvered shams which the
Austrian Government in its paternal stinginess imposes as money upon its
faithful lieges. The _sennerin_ accepted it with a profusion of thanks,
and smothered the generous donor’s hand with unstinted kisses. So much
happiness may a man diffuse in this world of woe with a fourpenny bit,
bestowed in due season! But Florian mistook that customary symbol of
thanks on the alp-girl’s part for an expression of her most heart-felt
personal consideration; and not to be outdone when it came to idyllic
courtship, he lifted her hand in return to his own gracious lips and
kissed it gallantly. Will raised his hat and smiled, without commenting
on this misconception, and with a cheery “Auf wiedersehen!” they went on
their way rejoicing once more up the slopes of the mountain.
CHAPTER IV
ENTER LINNET
Lunch on the summit was delicious that day, and the view was glorious.
But when they returned in the evening to the inn at St Valentin—that
was the name of their village—and described to Andreas Hausberger how
an alp-girl had sung for them in a mountain hut, the _wirth_ listened to
the description with a deprecatory smile, and then said with a little
shrug: “Ah, that was Philippina; she can’t do very much. Her high notes
are too shrill. You should just hear Linnet!”
“Is Linnet such a songstress then?” Florian cried, with that dubious
smile of his.
The _wirth_ looked grave. “She can _sing_,” he said, pointedly. His
dignity was hurt by the young man’s half-sceptical, half-bantering tone.
And your Tyroler is above all things conservative of his dignity.
These repeated commendations of this unknown Linnet, however, with her
quaintly pretty un-German-sounding name, piqued the two Englishmen’s
curiosity in no small degree as to her personality and powers, so that
when the _wirth_ next morning announced after breakfast, with a
self-satisfied smile, “Linnet’s coming down to-day,” Florian and Will
looked across at each other with one accord, and exclaimed in unison,
“Ah, now then, we shall see her!”
And, sure enough, about five o’clock that afternoon, as the strangers
were returning from a long stroll on the wooded heights that overhang
the village, they came unexpectedly, at a turn of the mountain footpath,
where two roads ran together, upon a quaint and picturesque Arcadian
procession. A long string of patient cows, in the cream-coloured coats
of all Tyrolese cattle, wound their way with cautious steps down the
cobble-paved zig-zags. A tinkling bell hung by a leather belt from the
neck of each; garlands of wild flowers festooned their horns; a group of
peasant children assisted at the rude pageant. In front walked a boy,
with a wreath slung across his right shoulder like a sash, leading the
foremost cow most unceremoniously by the horns; the rear was brought up
by a pretty sunburnt girl, with a bunch of soft pasque-flowers stuck
daintily in her brown hair, and a nosegay of bluebells peeping
coquettishly out of her full round bosom. Though vigorous-looking in
figure, and bronzed in face by the sun and the open air, she was of
finer mould and more delicate fibre, Will saw at a glance, than most of
the common peasant women in that workaday valley. Her features were full
but regular; her mouth, though large and very rich in the lips (as is
often the case with singers), was yet rosy and attractive; her eyes were
full of fire, after the true Tyrolese fashion; her rounded throat, just
then trembling with song, had a waxy softness of outline in its curves
and quivers that betrayed in a moment a deep musical nature. For she was
singing as she went, to the jingling accompaniment of some thirty
cow-bells; and not even the sweet distraction of that rustic discord
could hide from Will Deverill’s quick, appreciative ear the fact that he
stood here face to face with a vocalist of rare natural gifts, and some
homespun training.
He paused, behind the wall, as the procession wound round a long double
bend, and listened, all ears, to a verse or two of her simple but
exquisite music.
“This _must_ be Linnet!” he cried at last, turning abruptly to Florian.
And the boy at the head of the procession, now opposite him by the bend,
catching at the general drift of the words with real Tyrolese quickness,
called out with a loud laugh to the singer just above: “Sagt er, das
musz ja Linnet seyn!” and then exploded with merriment at the bare idea
that the Herrschaft should have heard the name and fame of his
companion.
As for the girl herself, surprised and taken aback at this sudden
interruption, she stood still and hesitated. For a moment she paused,
leaning hard on the long stick with which she guided and admonished her
vagrant cows; then she looked up and drew a long breath, looked down and
blushed, looked up once more and smiled, looked down and blushed again.
They had overtaken her unawares where the paths ran together; but as
each was enclosed with a high wall of granite boulders, overgrown with
brambles, she had no chance of perceiving them till they were close upon
her. She broke off her song at once, and stood crimson-faced beside
them.
“Ah, sing again!” Florian cried, folding two dainty palms in a rapture
on his breast, and putting his delicate head on one side in a transport
of enchantment “Why, Deverill, how she sings! what a linnet, indeed! and
how pretty she is, too! For the first time in my life, I really regret I
can’t speak German!”
The singer, looking up, all tremulous to have overheard this unfeigned
homage, made answer, to Florian’s equal delight and surprise, “I can
speak a little English.”
It would be more correct, perhaps, to put it that what she actually
said, was: “Ei kann schpiek a liddle Ennglisch”; but Florian, in his joy
that any means of inter-communication existed between them at all, paid
small heed at the time to these slight Teutonic defects in her delivery
of our language.
“You can speak English!” he exclaimed, overjoyed, for it would have been
a real calamity to him to find a pretty girl in the place, with a
beautiful voice, and he unable to converse in any known tongue with her.
“How delightful! How charming! How quite too unexpected! I’m so glad to
know that! For had it been otherwise, I should really have had to learn
German to talk with you!”
This overstrained compliment, though it rose quite naturally to
Florian’s practised lips, and was far more genuine than a great deal of
his talk, made the girl blush and stammer with extreme embarrassment.
She was unaccustomed, indeed, to such lavish praise, above all from the
gentlefolk. Was the _gnädige Herr_ making fun of her, she wondered? She
grew hot and uncomfortable. Fortunately for her self-possession,
however, Will Deverill intervened with a more practical remark. “You
speak English, do you?” he repeated. “That’s odd, in these parts. One
would hardly have thought that! How did you come to learn it?”
“My father was a guide,” the girl answered, slowly, making a pause at
each word, and picking her way with difficulty through the insidious
pit-falls of British pronunciation. (She called it _fahder_.) “He taked
plenty Ennglish gentlemen up the mountains before time. I learn so well
from him, as also from many of the Ennglish gentlemen. Then, too, I take
lesson from Herr Hausberger in winters, and from Ennglish young lady at
the farm by Martinsbrunn.”
Florian gazed at his companion with an agonised look of mingled alarm
and horror. “Do you know who she means?” he cried, seizing Will’s arm.
“This is too, too terrible! The girl on the hillside who sticks out her
tongue! that horrible little Cockney! She’ll teach this innocent child
to say ‘naow,' and ‘lidy'! At last I feel I have a mission in life. We
must save her from this fate! We must instruct her ourselves in pure
educated English!”
“And how do you come to be called Linnet?” Will inquired with some
interest, a new light breaking in upon him. “That’s surely an English
name. Who was it first called you so?”
“An Ennglish gentleman when I was all quite small,” the girl replied,
with much difficulty, searching her phrases with studious care. “He stop
at my father’s hut on our alp many nights—I know not how man says
it—so must he go up the mountains. I sing to him often when he come
down at evening. My right name is called in German, Lina; but the
gentleman, says he, that I sing like a bird. A linnet, that is in
Ennglish a singing-bird. Therefore, Linnet he call me. The name please
my father much, who make a great deal of me; so from that time in
forwards, all folk in the village call me also Linnet.”
Will broke out into German. “They’re quite right,” he said, politely,
though with less ecstasy than Florian; “for you do indeed sing like a
real song-bird. I’m so sorry we interrupted you; pray go on with your
song again.”
But Linnet hung her head. “No, no,” she answered, hastily, in her own
native tongue, glad to find he spoke German. “I didn’t know I was
overheard. If I’d been singing for such as you, I’d not have chosen a
little country song like that. And besides”—she broke off suddenly,
with a coy wave of her brown hand, “I can’t sing before strangers the
same as I can before my own people.” And she tapped the hindmost heifer
with her rod as she spoke, to set the line in motion; for the cows,
after their kind, had taken advantage of the pause to put down their
heads to the ground, and browse placidly at the green weeds that
bordered the wayside.
At one touch of her wand the bells tinkled once more; the long string
got under way; the children by the side recommenced their loud shouts of
rustic merry-making. For the return of the cows from the alp is a little
festival in the villages; it ends the long summer’s work on the mountain
side, and brings back the unmarried girls from their upland exile to
their homes in the valley. Linnet drove her herd now, however, more
soberly and staidly. The free merriment of Arcadia had faded out of the
ceremony. One touch of civilisation had dispelled the dream. She knew
she was observed; she knew the two strangers were waiting to hear if she
would trill forth her wild song again, for they followed close at her
heels, talking rapidly among themselves in their own language—so
rapidly, indeed, that Linnet could hardly snatch here and there by the
way a single word of their earnest conversation. Once or twice she
looked back at them, half-timidly, half-provokingly.
“Sing again!” Florian cried, clasping his hands in entreaty.
But the wayward alp-girl only laughed her coy refusal.
“No, no,” she said in her patois, with a little shake of her beautiful
head; “that must not be so. I sing no more now. I must drive home my
cows. They are tired from the mountains.”
“But, I say,” Florian cried at last, bursting in upon his mountain nymph
with this very colloquial and unpoetic adjuration; “look here, you know,
Fräulein Linnet, you say you learn English from our landlord, Herr
Hausberger. Now, what does he want to teach you for?”
Linnet turned round to him with a naïve air of unaffected surprise.
“Why, when he teach me Ennglish songs,” she said, “I will know what mean
the words. Also, I have remembered a little—a very little—since the
Ennglish gentleman teach me at my father’s. Besides, too, shall I not
need it when I go to Enngland?”
“Go to England!” Florian repeated, all amazed at the frank remark. She
seemed to take it for granted they must know all her plans. “When you go
to England! Oh, he means to take you there, then! You’re one of his
troupe, I suppose; or you’re going to be one.”
“I am not gone away yet,” Linnet answered, not a little abashed to find
herself the centre of so much unwonted interest; “but I go next time; I
will sing with his band. All summers, I stop on the mountain and milk;
with the winter, come I down to the house to practise.”
“But you don’t mean to say,” Will put in, in German (it was easier so
for Linnet to answer him), “he lets a singer like you live out by
herself in a châlet on the hills with the cows all summer?”
Linnet held up her hands, palm outward, with a pretty little gesture of
polite deprecation. Her movements were always naturally graceful. “Why
not?” she said, brightly, in German, with no little suppressed merriment
at his astonished face. “That’s Andreas Hausberger’s plan; he believes
in that way; he calls it his system. He says we Zillerthalers owe our
beautiful voices—for they tell us we can sing a great deal better than
the people in any other valley about—to our open-air life on the very
high mountains. The air there is thin, and it suits our throats, he
says.” She clasped her hand to her own as she spoke, that beautiful,
well-developed, clear-toned organ, with a natural gesture of unconscious
reverence. “It develops them—that’s his word; he believes there’s
nothing like it. _Entwickelung; entwickelung!_ I get more good, he
thinks, for my voice in the summer on the alp than I get from all my
lessons in the winter in the valley. For the throat itself comes
first—that’s what Andreas holds—and afterwards the teaching. Not for
worlds would he let me miss my summer life on the mountains.”
“And how long has he been training you?” Will inquired with real
interest. This was so strange a page of life thus laid open before him.
“Oh, for years and years, _gnädige Herr_,” Linnet answered, shyly, for
so much open attention on the young man’s part made her awkwardly
self-conscious. “Ever since my father died, he has always been teaching
me.”
“Has your father been dead long?” Will inquired.
Linnet crossed herself devoutly. “He was killed eight years ago on the
20th of August last,” she said, looking up as she spoke towards the
forest-clad mountains. “May Our Dear Lady and all holy saints deliver
his honoured soul from the fires of purgatory!”
“But your mother’s alive still, I suppose, Fräulein,” Florian put in
with a killing smile; he had been straining his ears, and was delighted
to have caught the general drift of the conversation.
“Yes; thanks to the Blessed Virgin, my mother live still,” Linnet
answered in English. “And I keep her comfortable, as for a widow woman,
from that which Andreas Hausberger pay me for the summer, as also for
the singing. But for what, mein Herr, do you make to call me Fräulein?
Do you wish to mock at me? I am only an alp-girl, and I am call just
Linnet.”
She flushed as she spoke, and turned hastily to Will. “Tell him,” she
said in German, with an impatient little toss of one hand towards
Florian, “that it isn’t pretty of him to make fun of poor peasant girls
like that. Why does he call me such names? He knows very well I am no
real Fräulein.”
Florian raised his hat at once in his dimpled small hand, with that
courtly bow and smile so much admired in Bond Street. “Pardon me,” he
said, with more truth and feeling than was usual with him; “you have a
superb voice; with a gift like that, you are a Fräulein indeed. It
extorts our homage. Heaven only knows to what height it may some day
lead you.”
CHAPTER V
THE WIRTH’S THEORY
In the evening, while they dined, the landlord came in to see how they
fared, and wish them good appetite: ’tis the custom with distinguished
guests in the Tyrol. The moment he entered, Florian, all agog, attacked
him at once on the subject of their wonderful find that afternoon on the
hillside. “Well, Herr Hausberger,” he cried in his high-flown way,
“we’ve seen and heard your Linnet—heard her warbling her native
wood-notes wild, to the tune of her own cow-bells on her lonely
mountains. Now, what do you mean, sir, by turning out a divine singer
like that—I’m a musical critic myself, and I know what I’m talking
about—what do you mean by turning her out to make butter and cheese in
a solitary hut on an Alpine pasture? It’s sheer desecration, I tell
you—sheer wicked desecration; there’s nothing, almost, that girl
couldn’t do with her voice. She’s a genius—a prodigy; she ought to be
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day on
champagne and turtle. And _you_, sir—you send her up to herd cows all
alone, in an inclement clime, on a barren hill-top!”
Andreas Hausberger gazed at him with a self-contained smile that was
extremely characteristic. He bowed a sarcastic bow which Florian
misinterpreted for polite subservience. “Are _you_ running this show or
am I?” he asked, after a fresh pause, with a quaint reminiscence of his
Western experience.
“_You_ are, undoubtedly,” Florian answered, taken aback at this
unexpected assault. “But you ought to run it, all the same, on rational
and humane and intelligent principles. You owe this girl’s voice, as a
delight and a treasure, to US, the enlightened and critical connoisseurs
of two eager continents. Nature produced it that _we_ might enjoy it. It
was intended to give us some of those exquisite moments of artistic
pleasure which are the sole excuse creative caprice can plead for the
manifold defects of the Universe.”
Andreas Hausberger looked down at him with a half-pitying curl on those
stern thin lips of his. Florian had attacked him lightly where his
position was strongest. “That’s all right,” he said, slowly, with a
chilly drawl—’twas his favourite expression. “And do you think then,”
he went on, bursting forth almost scornfully, in spite of his outward
deference, “we Zillerthalers get our fine singing voices and our musical
ears by pure chance and accident? Not so, you may be sure of it. It’s no
mere coincidence that our men and women can almost without exception
sing like birds from their childhood upwards by the light of Nature.
What gives them this power? Why, they live their lives long, in summer
especially, in the thin clear atmosphere of our higher mountains. There
isn’t much sour-stuff in it—what do you call it in English?—oh,
oxygen, don’t you? Wal, there isn’t much oxygen in that thin upper
air—rarefied, I think you say—and therefore they’re obliged to fill
their lungs well and expand their chests”—he swelled himself out as he
spoke, and showed off his own splendid girth to the fullest
advantage—“and that gives them large reservoirs and rich, pure-toned
voices.”
“I never thought of that before,” Will Deverill interposed, much struck
by the landlord’s plausible reasoning. “I suppose that’s why mountain
races, like the Welsh and the Tyrolese, are so often musical. The
rarefied air must tend to strengthen and develop the larynx.”
“No; you never thought of that before,” Andreas Hausberger echoed. “You
haven’t had to think of it. And you haven’t had to select and train a
choir of our Tyrolese peasants. But I have thought of it for years, and
satisfied myself it’s true. Is it for nothing, do you suppose, that on
our cold mountain tops the vocal chords, as they say, are braced up and
tightened? Is it for nothing that in that clear, pure, limpid air the
very nerves of the ear, strained hard to catch quickly at distant
sounds, are exercised and educated? Do you think, if I wanted to pick
out voices for a musical troupe, I would go for them to Holland, or to
Lombardy, or to Hamburg? No, no; I would go right away to the _gründe_
there, the upper forks of the Zillerthal, in the crystal air just below
the glaciers, and pick out my best singers from the cow-boys and the
alp-girls.”
He spoke of what he knew and had long reflected upon. Acquaintance with
his subject supplied in part the unimportant deficiencies of his English
vocabulary; and, besides, he had said the same things before a dozen
times over, to other English travellers.
“Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the _wirth_
paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be
bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.
“Right!” Andreas Hausberger repeated. “Never mind about that! You’d know
I was right if only you’d seen as much of these people as I have. Look
here, Mr Wood, you say it’s desecration to send a girl like Linnet after
butter and cheese in a sennerin’s hut on the lonely mountains. You say I
owe her voice as a treasure to humanity. Wal, I acknowledge the debt,
and I try to discharge it to the best of my ability. I send her to the
hills—the free open hills—where she will breathe fresh air, develop
her throat and lungs, eat wholesome food, grow strong and brown and
hearty. If I clothed her in purple and fine linen, as you wish, and fed
her every day on champagne and turtle, do you really imagine I’d be
doing her a good turn? I’d be ruining her voice for her. In the summer,
she gains breath and good health on the grassy mountains; in the winter,
she gets training and advice and assistance from Lindner and myself, and
whatever other teachers we can find in the Zillerthal.”
“I surrender at discretion,” Florian answered, with a yawn, rising up
and flinging his small person lazily on the home-made sofa. “I admit
your contention. You interest me strangely. Your peasants and your
country girls have finely developed ears and capital voices. No doubt
you’re correct in attributing these splendid gifts to the clearness of
the atmosphere and the wild life of the mountains. I’m a musical critic
in London myself, and I know what a voice is the moment I hear it.
Indeed, after all, what does it matter in the end if these divine
creatures spend a joyless life for years in sordid and squalid
surroundings, provided only, when they burst forth at last in the full
effulgence of their musical prime, they afford _us_, who can appreciate
them, and for whose sake they exist, one vivid thrill of pure artistic
enjoyment?” And he stroked his own smooth and girlish cheek with one
plump hand, lovingly.
“You’re a musical critic, are you?” Andreas Hausberger repeated, with
marked interest, disregarding the last few words of Florian’s flowing
rhapsody. “Then you shall hear Linnet sing. You can say after that
whether I’m right in my system or not.” He opened the door hastily.
“Linnet, Linnet,” he called out in the Tyrolese dialect, “come in here
at once. I want the Herrschaft to hear you singing.”
For a minute after he spoke, there was a flutter and a rustling at the
door outside; somebody seemed to be pushing some unwilling person bit by
bit along the passage. A murmur of whispered voices in the local dialect
floated faintly to Will’s ears. “You must!” “But I can’t.” “You shall!”
“I won’t.” “He says you are to.” “Ah, no; I’m ashamed! Not before those
gentlemen!”
In the end, as it seemed, the first voice had its way. The door opened
brusquely, and Linnet, all trembling, her face in her hands, and crimson
with shame, was pushed bodily forward by unseen arms into the strangers’
presence. For a moment she stood there like a frightened child. Will’s
cheek burned hot with sympathetic tingling. Florian leaned back
philosophically as he lay, and regarded this pretty picture of beauty in
distress with observant complacency. She was charming, so, to be sure!
That red flush became her.
“Sing to the gentlemen,” Andreas Hausberger said, calmly, in a tone of
command. “Take your hands from your face at once; don’t behave like a
baby.”
He spoke in German, but Florian followed him all the same. ’Twas
delicious to watch this pretty little comedy of rustic ingenuousness.
“Oh, I can’t!” Linnet cried, all abashed, removing her hands for a
second from her burning cheeks, and clasping them hard on her throbbing
breast for one fiery moment before she clapped them up hastily again.
“To bid one like this! It’s so hard! It’s so dreadful!”
“Don’t ask her just now,” Will Deverill put in pleadingly. “One can see
she has such a natural shrinking and disinclination at first. Some other
night, perhaps. When we’ve been here a little longer, she may be less
afraid of us.”
Linnet let her hand drop once more, and gave him a grateful glance,
sidling away towards the door like a timid child in her misery. But
Andreas Hausberger, for his part, was not so to be put off. “No, no,” he
said, sternly, fixing his eye with a determined gaze on the poor
shrinking girl; “she must sing if I tell her to. That’s all right. This
shyness is absurd. How can she ever appear on a platform, I should like
to know, before a couple of hundred people, if she won’t sing here when
she’s told before just you two Englishmen? Do as I bid you, Linnet! No
nonsense, my girl! Stand here by the table, and give us ‘The Bride of
Hinter-Dux.’”
Thus authoritatively commanded, poor Linnet took her stand where Andreas
Hausberger motioned her, steadied herself with one trembling little fist
on the edge of the table, raised her eyes to the ceiling away from the
two young men, and, drawing a deep breath, with her throat held out and
her mouth opened tremulously, began to trill forth, in her rich, silvery
voice, a deep bell-like song of her own native mountain. For the first
minute or two she was nervous, and quivered and paused unduly; after
awhile, however, inborn artistic instinct overcame her nervousness: she
let her eyes drop and rest in a flash once or twice on Will Deverill’s.
They were kindly eyes, Will’s; they reassured and encouraged her.
“Bravo!” they seemed to say; “you’re rendering it admirably.” Emboldened
by his friendly glance, she took heart and went through with it. Towards
the end, her courage and self-possession returned, for, like all
Tyrolese, she was brave and self-reliant in her inmost soul, though shy
at first sight, and bashful on the surface. The two last stanzas she
sang to perfection. As she finished, Will looked up and said simply,
“Thank you; that was beautiful, beautiful.” But Florian clapped his
hands in obtrusive applause. “Well done!” he cried; “well done! you have
given us such a treat. We can forgive Herr Hausberger now for insisting
on a performance.”
“And you must accustom yourself to an audience,” the _wirth_ said in
German, with that same quiet air of iron resolution Will had already
marked in him. “If ever you’re to face a whole roomful of people, you
must be able first to come in upon the platform without all this silly
fuss and hang-back nonsense.”
Linnet’s nostrils quivered. She steadied herself with her hand on the
table once more, and made answer boldly, “I think I could more easily
face a roomful of people I’d never seen than sing before two in the
parlour of the inn here; that seems less personal. But,” she added
shyly, with half an appealing glance towards Will, “I’m not so nervous
now. If this gentleman wishes, I—I would sing another song to him?”
And so she did—a second and a third. As she went on, she grew braver,
and sang each time more naturally. At last the _wirth_ dismissed her.
Linnet curtsied, and disappeared. “Well, what do you say to her now?”
the landlord asked in a tone of triumph, turning round to the young men
as the door closed behind her.
Florian assumed his most studiously judicial air. The perfect critic
should, above all things, be critical. Before Linnet’s face, indeed, he
had been enthusiastic enough, as politeness and due respect for her sex
demanded; but behind her back, and in her teacher’s presence, regard for
his reputation compelled him to adopt the severest tone of incorruptible
impartiality. “I think,” he said slowly, fingering his chin in one hand,
and speaking with great deliberation, like a recognised authority, “with
time and training she ought to serve your purpose well for popular
entertainments. Her organ, though undeveloped, is not wholly without
some natural power and compass.”
“And _I_ think,” Will Deverill added, with a glow of generous
enthusiasm, “you’ve lighted on one of the very finest voices in all
Europe.”
CHAPTER VI
THE ROBBLER
A day or two passed, and the young men from time to time saw, by
glimpses and snatches, a good deal of Linnet. For now the summer season
on the hills was over, and the cows had come back to their stall-fed
existence, the musical alp-girl had leisure on her hands for household
duties. In the morning she helped in the general work of the inn; in the
afternoon she practised much in the parlour upstairs with Andreas
Hausberger and his little company. But in the evenings,—ah, then, the
landlord brought her in more than once, by special request, to sing her
native songs to Will Deverill’s accompaniment on the lame old fiddle
from the corner cupboard. Those were pleasant meetings enough. Gradually
the mountain lass grew less afraid of the strangers; she talked German
more freely with Will Deverill now, and considerably enlarged her
English vocabulary by listening to Florian’s richly-worded harangues on
men, women, and things, and the musical glasses. It surprised Florian
not a little, however, to see that this child of Nature, unlike the
ladies of culture in London drawing-rooms, positively preferred Will’s
society to his own, if such a fact seems credible; though he explained
away in part this unaccountable defect of taste and instinct in one
female heart by the reflection that, after all, Will was able to
converse with her in her own language. His own finer points she could
hardly understand; his words were too deep, his thoughts were too high
for her. Still, it annoyed him that even an unsophisticated alp-girl
should display so singular and so marked a predilection for any other
man when _he_ was present. Indeed, he half made up his mind, irksome as
he felt sure the task would prove, to learn German at once, as a
safeguard against so humiliating a _contretemps_ in future.
In the early part of the next week, Will proposed one day they should
mount the hills behind St Valentin, in search of a rare fern he was
anxious to secure before the snows of winter. Andreas Hausberger,
nodding his head, had heard of it before. It was a well-known rarity;
all botanists who came to the Zillerthal, he said, were sure to go in
search of it. “But I’m not a botanist,” Will burst out deprecatingly,
for to admit that fell impeachment is to number yourself outright in the
dismal roll of scientific Dryasdusts; “I only want the plants because I
love them.”
“That’s all right,” Andreas answered, in his accustomed phrase. “You
want the plant, anyway. That’s the chief thing, ain’t it? Wal, there’s
only one place anywhere about St Valentin that it ever grows, and that’s
the Tuxerloch; without somebody to guide you there you’d never find it.”
“Oh, I won’t have a guide,” Will responded, hastily. “I hate to be
guided. It’s too ignominious. If I can’t find my own way about low
mountains like these, in the forest region, I’d prefer to lose it; and I
certainly won’t pay a man to show me where the fern is.”
“Certainly not,” the _wirth_ answered, with true Tyrolese thrift. “I
didn’t mean that. Why waste your money on one of the regular guides, who
charge you five florins for eating half your lunch for you? But Linnet
knows the way as well as any trained guide of them. It’s not a hard
road; she’ll go along with you and show you it.”
“Oh, dear no,” Will replied, with a little hurried embarrassment, for he
felt it would be awkward to be thrown all day into the society of a
young girl in so equivocal a position. “I’m sure we can find the way all
right ourselves. There are woodcutters on the hills we can ask about the
path; and if it comes to that, I really don’t mind whether I find it or
not—it’s only by way of goal for a day’s expedition.”
Andreas Hausberger, however, was an imperious soul. “Linnet shall go,”
he said, shortly, without making more words about it. “She has nothing
else to do. It’s bad for her to be cooped up in the house too much. A
long walk on the hills will be no end of good for her. That’s what I
always say; when young women come down from the mountains in winter,
they do themselves harm by changing their mode of life all at once too
suddenly, and living in close rooms without half the exercise they used
to take on the alp with their milking and churning.”
So, whether they would or not, the two young men were compelled in the
end to put up as best they might with Linnet’s guidance and company. No
great hardship either, Will thought to himself, as Linnet, bare-headed,
but in her Sunday best, led the way up the green slopes behind the
village inn, with the bounding gait of a holiday alp-girl. As to
Florian, his soul was in the seventh heavens. To see that Oread’s light
foot trip gracefully over the lawns was to him pure joy—a stray breath
of Hellas. What Hellas was like, to be sure—the arid Hellas of
reality—with its dusty dry hills and its basking rocks, Florian had not
in his own soul the very faintest conception. But still, the Hellenic
ideal was none the less near and dear to him. From stray scraps of
Theocritus and his inner consciousness he had constructed for himself an
Arcadia of quite Alpine greenness, and had peopled it with lithe maidens
of uncircumscribed affections. So, whenever he wanted to give anything
in heaven or earth the highest praise in his power, he observed with an
innocent smile that it was utterly Hellenic.
Linnet led them on, talking unaffectedly as she went, by long ridge-like
spurs, up vague trails through the woods, and over spongy pastures. As
elsewhere on their walks, Florian noted here and there little
whitewashed shrines at every turn of the road, and endless rude
crucifixes where ghastly white limbs seemed to writhe and struggle in
realistic torture. Of a sudden, by one of these, Linnet dropped on her
knees—all at once without a word of warning; she dropped as if
mechanically, her lips moving meanwhile in muttered prayer. Florian
gazed at her curiously; Will stood by expectant, in a reverent and
mutely sympathetic attitude. For some minutes the girl knelt there,
murmuring low to herself. As she rose from her knees, she turned gravely
to Will. “Here my father has died,” she said, with solemn slowness in
her broken English. “He has slipped from that rock. The fall has killed
him. Will you say, for his soul’s repose, before you go, a
_Vaterunser_?”
She looked up at him pleadingly, as if she thought the prayers of so
great a gentleman must carry weight of their own in Our Lady’s councils.
With infinite gentleness, Will bowed his head in acquiescence, and,
after a moment’s hesitation, not to hurt her feelings, dropped on his
knees himself and bent his neck in silent prayer before the tawdry
little oratory. It was one of those rough shrines, painted by unskilled
fingers, where naked souls in rude flames of purgatory plead for aid
with clasped hands and outstretched arms to placidly unheeding
blue-robed Madonnas. Underneath, an inscription, with N’s turned the
wrong way, and capitals mixed with smaller letters, informed the
passer-by that, “Here, on the 20th of August 188-, the virtuous guide
and experienced woodcutter, Josef Telser of St Valentin, perished by a
fall from a slippery rock during a dangerous thunderstorm. The pious
wanderer is hereby implored to say three Paternosters, of his charitable
good-will, to redeem a tortured soul from the fires of purgatory.”
Will knelt there for a minute or two, muttering the Paternosters out of
pure consideration for Linnet’s sensitive feelings. When he rose from
his knees again, he saw the girl herself had moved off a little way to
pick a few bright ragworts and Michaelmas daisies that still lingered on
these bare heights, for a bouquet to lay before the shrine of Our Lady.
Like all her countrywomen, she was profoundly religious—or, if you
choose to put it so, profoundly superstitious. (’Tis the point of view
alone that makes all the difference.) Florian, a little apart, with his
hand on his cheek and his head on one side, eyed the oratory
sentimentally. “How sweet it is,” he said, after a pause, with an
expansive smile, “to see this poor child, with her childlike faith, thus
throwing herself on her knees in filial submission before her father’s
cenotaph! How delightful is the sentiment that prompts such respect for
the memory of the dead! How eloquent must be the words of her simple
colophon!” Florian was fond of colophons; he didn’t know what they were,
but he always thought them so very Hellenic!
Will’s face was graver. With one finger he pointed to the uncompromising
flames of that most material purgatory. “I’m afraid,” he said,
seriously, “to her, poor child, this act of worship envisages itself in
a very different fashion. She prays to hasten the escape of her father’s
soul from what she takes to be a place of very genuine torture.”
Florian looked closer. As yet, he had never observed the subsidiary
episode of the spirits in their throes of fiery torment, which forms a
component part of all these wayside oratories. He inspected the rude
design with distant philosophical interest. “This is quaint,” he said,
“most quaint. I admire its art immensely. The point about it all that
particularly appeals to me is the charming superiority of Our Lady’s
calm soul to the essentially modern vice of pity. There she sits on her
throne, unswerved and unswerving, not even deigning to contemplate with
that marked squint in her eye the extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable
position of her petitioners beneath her. I admire it very much. I find
it quite Etruscan.”
“To you and me—yes, quaint—nothing more than that,” Will responded,
soberly; “but to Linnet, it’s all real—fire, flames, and torments; she
believes what she sees there.”
As he spoke, the girl came back, with her nosegay in her hand, and,
tying it round with a thread from a little roll in her pocket, laid it
reverently on the shrine with a very low obeisance. “You see,” she said
to Will, speaking in English once more, for Andreas Hausberger wished
her to take advantage of this unusual opportunity for acquiring the
language, “my poor father is killed in the middle of his sins; he falls
from the rock and is taken up dead; there is no priest close by; he has
not confessed; he has not had absolution; he has no viaticum; no oil to
anoint him. That makes it that he must go straight down to purgatory.”
And she clasped her hands as she spoke in very genuine sympathy.
“Then all these shrines,” Florian said, looking up a little surprised,
“are they all of them where somebody has been killed by accident?”
“The most of them,” Linnet answered, as who should say _of course_; “so
many of our people are that way killed, you see; it is thunderstorms, or
snow-slides, or trees that fall, or floods on rivers, things that I
cannot say, for I know not the names how to speak them in English. And,
as no priest is by, so shall they go to purgatory. For that, we make
shrines to release them from their torments.”
They had gone on their way by this time, and reached a corner of the
path where it turned abruptly in zig-zags round a great rocky precipice.
Just as they drew abreast of it, and were passing the corner, a young
man came suddenly on them from the opposite direction. He was a fiery
young man, dressed in the native Tyrolese costume of real life; his hand
held a rifle; his conical hat was gaily decked behind, like most of his
countrymen’s, with a blackcock’s feather. The stranger’s mien was
bold—nay, saucy and defiant. He looked every inch a typical Alpine
jäger. As he confronted them he paused, and glared for a moment at
Linnet. Next instant he raised his hat with half-sarcastic politeness;
then, in a very rapid voice, he said something to their companion in a
_patois_ so pronounced that Will Deverill himself, familiar as he was
with land and people, could make nothing out of it. But Linnet,
unabashed, answered him back once or twice in the same uncouth dialect.
Their colloquy grew warm. The stranger seemed angry; he waved his hand
toward the Englishmen, and appeared, as Will judged, to be asking their
pretty guide what she did in such company. As for Linnet, her answers
were evidently of the sort which turneth away wrath, though on this
hot-headed young man they were ineffectually bestowed. He stamped his
foot once or twice; then he turned to Will Deverill.
“Who sent you out with the _sennerin_?” he asked, haughtily, in good
German.
Will answered him back with calm but cold politeness. “Herr Hausberger,
our _wirth_,” he said, “asked the Fräulein to accompany us, as she knew
the place where a certain fern I wished to find on the hills was
growing.”
“I know where it grows myself,” the _jäger_ replied, with a defiant air.
“Let her go back to the inn; it is far for her to walk. I can show you
the way to it.”
“Certainly _not_,” Will retorted, in most decided tones. “The Fräulein
has been good enough to accompany us thus far; I can’t allow her now to
go back alone to the village.”
“She’s used to it,” the man said, gruffly, with half a sneer, his
fingers twitching.
“That may be,” Will retorted, with quiet self-possession; “but _I’m_ not
used to allowing her to do so.”
For a minute the stranger put one sturdy foot forward, held his head
haughtily, with his hat on one side, and half lifted his fist, as if
inclined to rush forthwith upon the offending Englishman, and settle the
question between them then and there by open violence. But Linnet,
biting her lip and knitting her brow in suspense, rushed in to separate
them. “Take care what you do,” she cried hurriedly in English to Will.
“Don’t let him strike. Stand away of him. He’s a Robbler!”
“A _what_?” Will replied, half smiling at her eagerness, for he was not
at all alarmed himself by her truculent fellow-countryman.
“A Robbler,” Linnet repeated, looking up at him pleadingly. “You know
not what that is? Then will I tell you quickly. The feather in his hat,
it is turned the wrong way. When a Tyrolese does so, he wills thereby to
say he will make himself a Robbler. Therefore, if any one speaks angry
to him, it is known he will strike back. It is—I cannot say what it
means in English, but it invites to fight; it is the sign of a
challenge.”
“Well, Robbler or no Robbler, I’m not afraid of him,” Will answered,
with quiet determination; “and if he _will_ fight, why, of course, he
must take what he gets for it.”
“Perhaps,” Linnet said, simply, gazing back at him, much surprised, “in
your own country you are also a Robbler.”
The _naïveté_ of her remark made Will laugh in spite of himself. That
laugh saved bloodshed. The Tyrolese, on his part, seeing the absurdity
of the situation all at once, broke into a smile himself; and, with that
unlucky smile, his sole claim to Robblerhood vanished incontinently.
Linnet saw her advantage. In a moment, she had poured into the young
man’s ear a perfect flood of explanatory eloquence in their native
dialect. Gradually the Robbler’s defiant attitude relaxed; his face grew
calmer; he accepted her account. Then he turned to Will with a more
mollified manner: “You may go on,” he said, graciously, with a regal nod
of his head; “I allow the _sennerin_ to continue her way with you.”
As for Will, he felt half inclined, at first, to resent the lordly air
of the Robbler’s concession. On second thoughts, however, for Linnet’s
sake, in his ignorance of who the young man might be, and the nature of
his claim upon her, he judged it better to avoid any quarrel of any sort
with a native of the valley. So he raised his hat courteously, and let
the stranger depart, with a very bad grace, along the road to the
village.
“What did you tell him?” he asked of Linnet, as the Robbler went his
way, singing defiantly to himself, down the grassy zig-zag.
“Oh, I told him,” Linnet answered, with a little flush of excitement,
“Andreas Hausberger had sent me that you might teach me English.”
“Is he your brother?” Will asked, not that he thought that likely, but
because it was less pointed than if he had asked her outright, “Is this
young man your lover?”
Linnet shook her head. “Ah, no,” she answered, with a very decided air;
“he’s nothing at all to me—not even my friend. I do not so much as care
for him. He’s only Franz Lindner. But then, he was jealous because he
see that I walk with you. He has no right of that; I am not anything to
him; yet still he must be jealous if somebody speak to me. It is because
he is a Robbler, and must do like that. A Robbler shall always fight if
any man shall walk or talk with his maiden. Though I am _not_ his
maiden, but he would have me to be it. So will he fight with anyone who
shall walk or talk with me. But when I tell him Andreas Hausberger send
me that I may learn English, then he go away quietly. For Franz Lindner,
or any other Robbler, will not fight with a stranger so well as with a
Tyroler.”
CHAPTER VII
WAGER OF BATTLE
That evening at the _Wirthshaus_, as things turned out, Will and Florian
had an excellent opportunity afforded them of observing for themselves
the manners and customs of the Tyrolese Robbler. There was a dance at
the inn—a prodigious dance, of truly national severity. It was the eve
of a wedding, and, as is usual on such occasions, the peasants of the
neighbourhood had assembled in full force to drink good luck to the
forthcoming union. The _Gaststube_ or bar-room was crowded with a gay
throng of bright and merry faces. The young men were there, jaunty,
bold, and defiant; the old men, austere and stern of feature from the
hardships of long life among the grim-faced mountains. Groups of
black-eyed lasses stood about the room and bandied repartee with their
gaily-dressed admirers; matrons, unspoilt by conventional restraint,
instead of checking their mirth, looked on smiling and abetting them.
Through the midst, the Herr Vicar strolled, stout and complaisant, an
easy-going man; not his to stem the tide of their innocent merriment; so
long as they confessed twelve times a year, and subscribed to release
their parents’ souls from purgatory, he sanctified by his presence the
beer and the dances. Andreas Hausberger, too, flitted here and there
through the crowd with an anxious eye; ’twas his task to provide for and
protect the bodies of his guests, as ’twas the Herr Vicar’s to save
their priceless souls from undue temptation.
At one end of the room, on a little raised platform, the music sat
installed;—a trombone, a zither, and a wooden hackbrettle made up the
whole orchestra. Scarcely had the performers struck up an enlivening
tune when the men, selecting as partners the girls of their choice,
began to dance round the hall in the very peculiar and (to say the whole
truth) extremely ungraceful Tyrolean fashion. Will and Florian had heard
from the landlord beforehand of the expected feast, to which they were
not invited; but, “at the sound of the harp, sackbut, psaltery, and all
kinds of music,” as Florian phrased it, their curiosity was so deeply
aroused that they crept from their sitting-room and peeped cautiously in
at the door of the _Tanzboden_. The sight that met their eyes in that
close-packed hall was sufficiently striking. Even Florian allowed this
was utterly Arcadian. For a minute or two, just at first, the young men
and maidens, grasping each other wildly round the neck and waist with
both their arms, in a sort of bear-like death-hug, whirled and eddied in
a maze round and round the room, stamping their heavy boots, till Will
almost trembled for the stability of the rafters. For some time that was
all: they twisted and twirled in closely-coupled pairs, clasped breast
to breast, like so many dancing dervishes. But, of a sudden, at a change
of the music, as if by magic, with one accord, the whole figure altered.
Each man, letting his partner go, began suddenly to perform a series of
strange antics and evolutions around her, the relics of some
pre-historic dance, of which the snapping of fingers and uttering of
_heuchs_ in a Highland fling are but a faint and colourless
reminiscence. As the reel went on, the music grew gradually faster and
faster, and the motions of the men still more savage and fantastic. The
two Englishmen looked on in astonishment and admiration. Such agility
and such verve they had never before seen or even dreamt of. Could these
rustic cavaliers be really made of india-rubber? They twisted and turned
and contorted themselves all the time with such obliviousness of their
bones, and such extraordinary energy! They smacked their lips and
tongues as they went; they jumped high into the air; they bent back till
their heads touched the ground behind; they bounded upright once more to
regain their position like elastic puppets, and, in between whiles, they
slapped their resounding thighs with their horny hands; they crowed like
cocks; they whistled like capercailzie; they stamped on the ground with
their hob-nailed shoes; they shouted and sang, and clicked their tongues
in their cheeks, and made unearthly noises deep down in their throats
for which language has as yet no articulate equivalent. Florian gazed
and glowered. And well he might; ’twas an orgie of strange sound, a
phantasmagoria of whirling and eddying motion.
While all this was going on, the two young Englishmen stood undecided
and observant by the lintel of the door, even Florian half-abashed at so
much unwonted merriment. But after a while, the Herr Vicar, whose
acquaintance they had already made among the stones of the churchyard,
spied them out by the entrance, and, with one hospitable fat forefinger
extended and crooked, beckoned them into the _Tanzboden_. “Come on,” he
cried, “come on; there’s room enough for all; our people are still glad
to entertain the Herr strangers: for some, unawares, have thus
entertained angels.”
So encouraged by the authorised mouthpiece of the parish, Will and
Florian stepped boldly into the crowded room, and watched the little
groups of stalwart young men and nut-brown lasses with all the interest
of unexpected novelty. The scene was indeed a picturesque and curious
one. Every Tyrolese is, or has been, or wishes to be thought, a mountain
hunter. So each man wore his hat, adorned with the trophies of his
prowess in the chase; with some, ’twas a _gamsbart_, or so-called
chamois’ beard—the tuft of coarse hair that grows high like a crest
along the creature’s back in the pairing season; with others, ’twas the
tail-feathers of the glossy blackcock, stuck saucily on one side, with
that perky air of self-satisfied assurance so characteristic of hot
youth in the true-born Tyroler. Glancing around the room, however, Will
saw at a single look that two young men alone among that eager crowd
wore their feathers with a difference—the “hook” being turned round in
the opposite direction from all their neighbours’. One of these two was
a tall and big-built young man of very florid complexion, with a scar on
his forehead; the other was their fiery friend of that morning on the
hills, Franz Lindner. From what Linnet had said, Will guessed at once by
the turn of the feather that both young men went in for being considered
Robblers.
As he turned to impart his conjecture to Florian, Linnet caught his eye
mutely from a corner by the mantelpiece. She wasn’t taking part in the
reel herself, so, undaunted by his experience of Franz Lindner that day,
Will strolled over to her side, followed close at heel by Florian. “You
don’t dance?” he said, bending over her with as marked politeness as he
would have shown to a lady in a London drawing-room.
“No; I may not,” Linnet answered, in her pretty broken English, with a
smile of not unnatural womanly pleasure that the strangers should thus
single her out before all her folk for so much personal attention. “I
have refuse Franz Lindner, so may I not dance this time with any one. It
is our custom so. When a girl shall refuse to dance with a man first,
she may not that turn accept any other. Nor may he, in turn, ask her
again that evening.”
“How delightful!” Florian cried, effusively. “Franz Lindner’s loss is
our gain, Fräulein Linnet. No; don’t frown at me like that; it _must_ be
Fräulein; I’ve too much respect for you to call you otherwise. But,
anyhow, we’ll sit out this dance and talk with you.”
“And I,” Will put in with a quiet smile, “I’ll call you Linnet, because
you prefer it.”
“Thank you,” Linnet said, shyly, with a grateful flash of her eyes, and
a side glance towards Franz Lindner; “it seems less as if you mock at
me.”
As they spoke, the figure changed of a sudden once more to a still
stranger movement. The women, falling apart, massed themselves together
in a central group, in attitudes expressive of studied indifference and
inattention to the men; their partners, on the contrary, placing
themselves full in front of them, began a series of most extraordinary
twists and twirls, accompanied by loud cries or snapping of fingers, and
endeavoured by every means in the power, both of lungs and limbs, to
compel their disdainful coquettes to take notice of their antics. While
they stood there and watched—Linnet with eyes askance on Franz
Lindner’s face—Andreas Hausberger strolled up, and took his place
beside them.
“Why, that’s the blackcock’s call!” Will exclaimed, with a start of
recognition, as the dancers, with one accord, uttered all in a chorus a
shrill and piercing note of challenge and defiance. “I’ve heard it on
the mountains.”
“Yes,” the _wirth_ assented; “that’s the blackcock’s call, and this,
that they’re doing, is the blackcock’s love-dance. In the springtime, on
the mountains, you know, the blackcocks and the grey hens assemble in
their dancing place—their _Tanzboden_ we call it, just the same as we
call this one. There, the hens stand aside, and pretend to be coy, and
take no notice of their mates, like the girls in this dance here; while
the blackcock caper in front of them, and flap their wings, and fluff
their necks, and do all they know to display their strength and beauty.
Whoever dances the most and best, gets most of the hens to join his
harem. So our young men have got up this love-dance to imitate them;
they flap their arms the same way, and give the blackcock’s challenge.
Nature’s pretty much the same above and below, I guess—especially here
in the Tyrol, where we haven’t yet learned to hide our feelings under
smooth silk hats as you do in England. But it’s all good for trade, and
that’s the great thing. It makes them thirsty. You’ll see, after this
bout, the beer will flow like water.”
And, sure enough, the _wirth_ was right. As soon as the dance was ended,
young men and maidens, with equal zest, betook themselves, all alike, to
the consolations of the beer-jug. Their thirst was mighty. And no
wonder, indeed, for this Tyrolese dancing is no drawing-room game, but
hard muscular exercise. Andreas Hausberger looked on with a cynical
smile on those thin, cold lips of his. “It’s good for trade,” he
murmured again, half to himself, once or twice, as the girls at the bar
filled the beer-mugs merrily; “very good for trade. So are all
amusements. That’s the way the foolish get rid of their money—and the
wise get hold of it.”
After the beer came a pause, a long, deep-drawn pause; and then two
young men, standing out from the throng, began to sing alternately at
one another in short Tyrolese stanzas. One of them was Franz Lindner;
the other was the young man with the scar on his forehead, whom Linnet
described as her cousin Fridolin. What they sang, neither Florian nor
Will could make out, for the words of the song were in the roughest form
of the mountain dialect; but it was clear from their manner, and the way
they flung out their words point blank at one another’s heads, that they
improvised as they went, like Virgilian shepherds, and that their
remarks were by no means either polite or complimentary in substance or
character. The rest stood round in a circle and listened, laughing
heartily at times as each in turn scored a point now and then off his
angry rival; while Linnet and the other girls blushed again and again at
some audacious retort, though the bolder among the women only tittered
to themselves or looked up with arch glances at each risky allusion.
Andreas Hausberger too, stood by, all alert to keep the peace; it was
plain from the quick light in his resolute eye, and the rapid upward
movement of his twitching hand, he was ready at a moment’s notice to
intervene between the combatants, and put a stop in the nick of time to
the scoffing contest of defiance and derision.
The song, however, passed off without serious breach of the peace. Then
more dances followed, more beer, and more bucolic contests. As the
evening wore on, the fun grew fast and furious. On the stroke of twelve,
the Herr Vicar withdrew—not one hour too early; his flock were fast
getting beyond control of his counsels. Linnet and a few others of the
more modest-looking girls now sat out from the dance; the rest continued
to whirl round and round the room in still wilder and more fantastic
movements than ever. Andreas Hausberger was now yet more clearly on the
alert. A stray spark would raise a flame in that magazine of gunpowder.
Suddenly, at the end of the first dance after the priest’s departure,
the young man with the scar on his forehead, called Cousin Fridolin,
came forward unexpectedly to where Linnet sat aside between Will
Deverill and Florian. He had danced with her once before in the course
of the evening, and Will observed that through that dance Franz
Lindner’s eyes had never been taken off his rival and Linnet. But now
the tall young man came forward with a dash, and without one word of
warning, placed his conical hat, blackcock’s feather and all, with a
jodel of challenge, on Linnet’s forehead. They had seen the same thing
done before more than once that evening, and Linnet had explained to
them that the custom was equivalent to a declaration of love for the
lady so honoured—’twas as much as to say, “This girl is mine; who
disputes it?” But as the tall young man stood back with a smile of
triumph on his handsome lips, one hand on his hip, staring fixedly at
Linnet, Franz Lindner sprang forth with a face as black as night, and a
brow like thunder. Trembling with rage, he seized the hat from her head,
and tore hastily from its band the offending plume. “Was kost die
Feder?” he cried, in a tone of angry contempt, holding it up in his hand
before the eyes of its owner; “Was kost die Feder?” which is, being
interpreted, “How much for your feather?”
Quick as lightning, the answer rang out, “Fünf Finger und ein
Griff”—“Five fingers and a grip.” It is the customary challenge of the
Tyrolese Robbler, and the customary acceptance.
Before Will had time to understand what was happening next, in the crack
of a finger, in the twinkle of an eye, the two young men had closed,
with hands and arms and bodies, and were grappling with each other in a
deadly struggle. All night long they had been watching and provoking one
another; all night long they had vied in their attentions to Linnet, and
their studious interchange of mutual insults. Sooner or later a fight
seemed inevitable. Now, flown with insolence and beer, and heated from
the dance, they flung themselves together, with one accord, like two
tigers in their fury. Linnet clapped her hands to her ears, and shut her
eyes in horror. For a minute or two, it seemed to every looker-on as
though there would be bloodshed in the inn that evening. Florian
observed this little episode with philosophic interest; ’twas pleasant
to watch these simple dramas of the primary emotions—love, jealousy,
passion—still working themselves out as on the stage of Hellas. He had
never before seen them so untrammelled in their play; he stood here face
to face with Homeric simplicity.
In five minutes, however, to his keen disappointment, the whole scene
was finished. Andreas Hausberger, that cool, calm man of the world,
perceiving at a glance that such contests in his inn were very bad for
trade, and that ’twould be a pity for him to lose by a violent death so
good a singer, or so constant a customer, interposed his heavy hand
between the angry combatants. Your half-tipsy man, be he even a
Tyrolese, though often quarrelsome, is usually placable. A short
explanation soon set everything right again. Constrained by Herr
Andreas, with his imperious will, the two Robblers consented, after
terms interchanged, to drown their differences in more mugs of beer, and
then retire for the evening. The young man with the scar, whom they
called Cousin Fridolin, regretted that he had interfered with Franz
Lindner’s maiden, but excused his act as a mere hasty excess of cousinly
feeling. Franz Lindner in return, not to be outdone in magnanimity,
though still with flashing eyes, and keen side-glance at Linnet,
regretted that he had offered such indignity in his haste to the
dishonoured symbol of his comrade’s championship. Hands were shaken all
round; cuts and bruises were tended; and, almost as soon as said, to
Florian’s infinite disgust, the whole party had settled down by the
tables once more, on an amicable basis, to beer and conversation.
But before they retired from that evening’s revel, Linnet murmured to
Will in a tone of remonstrance very real and aggrieved, “Franz Lindner
had no right to call me his _Mädchen_.”
CHAPTER VIII
THE HUMAN HEART
Next morning Will woke of himself very early. He jumped out of bed at
once, and crossed, as he stood, to the open window. The sun had just
risen. Light wisps of white cloud crawled slowly up the mountains; the
dewdrops on the grass-blades sparkled in the silent rays like
innumerable opals. ’Twas the very time for an early stroll! But the air,
though keen, had the rawness and chill of an autumn morning. Will
sniffed at it dubiously. He had half a mind to turn in again and take an
hour’s more sleep. Should he dress and go out, or let the world have
time to get warmed and aired before venturing abroad in it?
As he debated and shivered, however, a sight met his eye which
determined him at once on the more heroic course of action. It was
Linnet, in her simple little peasant dress, turning up the hill-path
that led behind the _wirthshaus_. Now, a chance of seeing Linnet alone
without Florian was not to be despised; she interested him so much, and,
besides, he wanted to ask her the whole truth about the Robblers.
Without more ado, therefore, he dressed himself hastily, and strolled
out of the inn. She hadn’t gone far, he felt sure; he would find her
close by, sitting by herself on the open grass-slope beyond the belt of
pinewood.
And so, sure enough, he did. He came upon her unseen. She was seated
with her back to him on a round boulder of grey stone, pouring her full
throat in spontaneous music. For a minute or two, Will stood still, and
listened and looked at her. He could see from his point of vantage, a
little on one side behind the boulder, the rise and fall of her swelling
bosom, the delicate trills under her rich brown chin. And then—oh, what
melody! Will drank it in greedily. He was loth to disturb her, so
delicious was this outpouring of her soul in song. For, like her
namesake of the woods, Linnet sang best when she sang of her own accord,
delivering her full heart of pure internal impulse.
At last she ceased, and turned. Her eye fell upon Will She started and
blushed; she had expected no such audience. The young man raised his
hat. “You’re alone,” he said, “Linnet?”
The girl looked up all crimson. “Yes; I came out that I should be
alone,” she answered, shyly, “I did not wish to see anyone. I wished for
time to think many things over.”
“Then you don’t want me to stop?” Will broke in, somewhat crestfallen,
yet drawing a step nearer.
“Oh, no; I do not mean that,” Linnet answered in haste, laying her hand
on her bosom. Then she burst into German, which came so much easier to
her. “I wanted to get away from all the others,” she said, looking up at
him pleadingly—and, as she looked, Will saw for the first time that big
tears stood brimming in her lustrous eyes; “I knew they would tease me
about—about what happened last evening, and I didn’t wish to hear it
till I had thought over with myself what way I should answer them.”
“Then you’re not afraid of _me_?” Will asked, with a little thrill. She
was only an alp-girl, but she sang like a goddess; and it’s always
pleasant, you know, to find a woman trusts one.
“I want you to stop,” Linnet answered, simply.
She motioned him with one hand to a seat on a little heap of dry stones
hard by. Will threw himself down on the heap in instant obedience to her
mute command, and leaned eagerly forward. “Well, so this Robbler man
wants to have you, Linnet,” he said, with some earnestness; “and you
don’t want to have him. And he would have fought for you last night,
against the man with the scar; and the girls in the inn will tease you
about it this morning.”
“Yes; the girls will tease me,” Linnet answered, “and will say cruel
things, for some of them are not fond of me, because, you see, Franz
Lindner and the other man, my cousin Fridolin, are both of them
Robblers, and would both of them fight for me. Now, a village that has a
Robbler is always very proud of him; he’s its champion and head; and if
a Robbler pays attention to a girl, it’s a very great honour. So some of
the other girls don’t like it at all, that the Robblers of two villages
should quarrel about _me_. Though Gott in Himmel knows I’ve not
encouraged either of them.”
“And would you marry Franz Lindner?” Will asked, with genuine interest.
It seemed to him a pity—nay, almost a desecration—that this beautiful
girl, with her splendid voice, and all the possibilities it might
enclose for the future, should throw herself away upon a Tyrolese
hunter, whom the self-confidence engendered by mere muscular strength
had turned for local eyes into a petty hero.
“No; I don’t think I would _marry_ him,” Linnet answered, after a short
pause, with a deliberative air, as though weighing well in her own mind
all the pros and cons of it. “He’d take me if I chose, no doubt, and so
also would Fridolin. Franz says he has left three other girls for me.
But I don’t like him, of course, any better for that. He ought to have
kept to them.”
“And you like him?” Will went on, drawing circles with his stick on the
grass as he spoke, and glancing timidly askance at her.
“Yes; I like him—well enough,” Linnet responded, doubtfully. “I liked
him better once, perhaps. But of late, I care less for him. I never
cared for him much indeed; I was never his _Mädchen_. He had no right to
say that, no right at all, at all—for with us, you know, in Tyrol, that
means a great deal. How much, I couldn’t tell you. But I never gave him
any cause at all to say so.”
“And of late you like him less?” Will inquired, pressing her hard with
this awkward question. Yet he spoke sympathetically. He had no reason
for what he said, to be sure—no reason on earth. He spoke at random,
out of that pure instinctive impulse which leads every man in a pretty
girl’s presence, mean he little or much, to make at least the best of
every passing advantage. ’Tis pure virility that: the natural Adam
within us. I wouldn’t give ten cents for the too virtuous man who by
“ethical culture” has educated it out of him.
Linnet looked down at her shoes—for she possessed those luxuries. “Yes;
of late I like him less,” she answered, somewhat tremulously.
“Why so?” Will insisted. His lips, too, quivered.
Linnet raised her dark eyes and met his for one instant. “I’ve seen
other people since; perhaps I like other people better,” she answered,
candidly.
“What other people?” Will asked, all on fire.
“Oh, that would be telling,” Linnet answered, with an arch look.
“Perhaps my cousin Fridolin—or perhaps the young man with the yellow
beard—or perhaps the gnädige Herr’s honoured friend, Herr Florian.”
Will drew figures with his stick on the grass for a minute or two. Then
he looked up and spoke again. “But, in any case,” he said, “you don’t
mean, whatever comes, to marry Franz Lindner?” It grieved him to think
she should so throw herself away upon a village bully.
Linnet plucked a yellow ragwort and pulled out the ray-florets one by
one as she answered, “I shan’t have the chance. For, to tell you the
truth, I think Andreas Hausberger means himself to marry me.”
At the words, simply spoken, Will drew back, all aghast. The very notion
revolted him. As yet, he was not the least little bit in his own soul
aware he was in love with Linnet. He only knew he admired her voice very
much; for the rest, she was but a simple, beautiful, unlettered peasant
girl. It doesn’t occur, of course, to an English gentleman in Will
Deverill’s position, to fall in love at first sight with a Tyrolese
milkmaid. But Andreas Hausberger! the bare idea distressed him. The man
was so cold, so cynical, so austere, so unlovable! and Will more than
half-suspected him of avaricious money-grubbing. The girl was so
beautiful, so simple-hearted, so young, and Heaven only knew to what
point of success that voice might lead her. “Oh no,” he burst out,
impetuously; “you can’t really mean that?—you never could dream—don’t
tell me you could—of accepting that man Andreas Hausberger as a
husband!”
“Why not?” the girl said, calmly. “He’s rich and well to do. I could
keep my mother in such comfort then, and pay for such masses for my
father’s soul—far more than if I took Franz Lindner or my cousin
Fridolin, who are only _jägers_. Andreas Hausberger’s a _wirth_, the
richest man in St Valentin; he has horses and cows and lands and
pastures. And if he says I must, how can I well refuse him?”
She looked up at him with a look of childlike appeal. In a moment,
though with an effort, Will realised to himself how the question looked
to her. Andreas Hausberger was her master, and had always been her
master. She must do as he bid, for he was very masterful. He was her
teacher, too, and would help her to make her fortune as a singer in the
world, if ever she made it. He was rich, as the folk of the village
counted riches, and could manage that things should be pleasant or
unpleasant for her, as it suited his fancy. In a community where men
still fought with bodily arms for their brides, Andreas Hausberger’s
will might well seem law to his _sennerin_ in any such matter.
“Besides,” Linnet went on, plucking another ragwort, and similarly
demolishing it, “if I didn’t want to take him, the Herr Vicar would make
me. For the Herr Vicar would do, of course, as Andreas Hausberger wished
him. And how could I dare disobey the Herr Vicar’s orders?”
To this subtle question of religion and morals Will Deverill, for his
part, had no ready-made answer. Church and State, it was clear, were
arrayed against him. So, after casting about for a while in his own mind
in vain for a reply, he contented himself at last with going off
obliquely on a collateral issue. “And you think,” he said, “Andreas
Hausberger really wants to marry you?”
“Well, he never quite _told_ me so,” Linnet replied, half-deprecatingly,
as who fears to arrogate to herself too great an honour, “and perhaps
I’m wrong; but still I _think_ he means it. And I think it’ll perhaps
depend in part upon how he finds the foreign Herrschaft like my singing.
For that, he says little to me about it at present. But if he sees I do
well, and am worth making his wife—for he’s the best husband a girl
could get in St Valentin—in that case, ja wohl, I believe he’ll ask
me.”
She said it all naturally, as so much matter of course. But Will’s
poetic soul rebelled against the sacrifice. “Surely,” he cried, “you
must love some one else; and why not, then, take the man you love,
whoever he may be, and leave Andreas Hausberger’s money to perish with
him?”
“So!” Linnet said quickly—the pretty German “so!” Her fingers trembled
as she twitched at the rays of the ragwort. She plucked the florets in
haste, and flung them away one by one. First love’s conversation deals
largely in pauses. “The man one might love,” she murmured at last with a
petulant air, “doesn’t always love one. How should he, indeed? It is not
in nature. For, doesn’t the song say, ‘Who loves me, love I not; whom I
love, loves me not?’ But what would the Herr Vicar say if he heard me
talking like this with the foreign gentlefolk? He’d tell me it was sin.
A girl should not speak of her heart to strangers. I have spoken too
much. But I couldn’t help it, somehow. The _gnädige Herr_ is always so
kind to me. You lead me on to confess. You can understand these things,
I think, so much better than the others.”
She rose, half-hesitating. Will Deverill, for his part, rose in turn and
faced her. For a second each paused; they looked shyly at one another.
Will thought her a charming girl—for a common milkmaid. Linnet thought
him a kind, good friend—for one of the great unapproachable foreign
Herrschaft. Will held out one frank hand. Linnet gave him the tips of
her brown fingers timidly. He clasped them in his own while a man might
count ten. “Shall you be here . . . to-morrow . . . about the same
time?” he inquired, before he let them drop, half hesitating.
“Perhaps,” Linnet answered, looking down demurely. Then blushing, she
nodded at him, half curtsied, and sprang away. She gave a rapid glance
to right and left, to see if she was perceived, darted lightly down the
hill, and hurried back to the _wirthshaus_.
But all that day long, Will was moody and silent. He thought much to
himself of this strange idea that Andreas Hausberger, that saturnine
man, was to marry this beautiful musical alp-girl.
CHAPTER IX
THE MAN OF THE WORLD
For some four or five mornings after this hillside interview, Florian
noticed every day a most unaccountable fancy on Will Deverill’s part for
solitary walks at early dawn before breakfast. Neither dew nor
hoar-frost seemed to damp his ardour. Florian rose betimes himself, to
be sure, but Will had always already distanced him. And on every one of
those five mornings, when Will said farewell to Linnet by the big grey
boulder, he used the same familiar formula of leave-taking, “You’ll be
here again to-morrow?” And every time, Linnet, thrilling and trembling
inwardly, answered back the same one conscience-salving word, “Perhaps,”
which oracular and highly hypothetical promise she nevertheless most
amply fulfilled with great regularity on the following morning. For,
when Will arrived at the trysting-place, he always found Linnet was
there before him; and she rose from her rocky seat with a blush of
downcast welcome, which a less modest man than he might easily have
attributed to its true motive. To Will, however, most unassuming of men
and poets, she was only an interesting alp-girl, who liked to meet him
on the hillside for a lesson in English. Though, to be sure, why it was
necessary to give the lesson alone in the open air at six o’clock in the
morning, and, still more, why the professor should have thought it
needful to hold the pupil’s hand in his own for many minutes together,
to enforce his points, Will himself would no doubt have been hard put to
explain on philological principles. Moreover, strange to say, for
Linnet’s sake, the conversation was conducted mostly in German.
Lookers-on, however, see most of the game. On the sixth such morning, it
occurred casually to Florian as he lay abed and reflected, to get up
early himself and go out on the hillside. Not that the airy epicurean
philosopher was by any means afflicted with the essentially vulgar vice
of curiosity. He was far too deeply occupied with Mr Florian Wood to
think of expending much valuable attention on the habits and manners of
less-interesting personalities. But in this particular case he felt he
had a positive Duty to perform. Now, a Duty had for Florian all the
luxury of novelty. He was troubled with few such, and whenever he found
one, he made the most of it. Just at present, he was persuaded Will
Deverill was on the eve of “getting himself into an entanglement” with
the beautiful milkmaid who so paradoxically preferred his society to
Florian’s. Plain Duty, therefore, to Will himself, to Mrs Deverill
_mère_, to the just expectations of the ladies of England (who had
clearly a prior claim on Will’s fortune and affection), compelled
Florian to interfere before things went too far, so as to save his
friend from the consequences of his own possible folly. Animated by
these noble impulses, Florian did not even shrink from leaving a very
snug bed at five o’clock that cold morning, and waiting at the window,
like a private detective, till Will took his way up the path to the
hillside.
About six, Will emerged from the door of the inn. Florian gave him law,
five minutes law—just rope enough to hang himself. Then, marking from
the back window which way Will had gone, he followed the trail up hill
with all the novel zest of an amateur policeman. Skulking along the
pinewood, he came upon them from behind, by the same path which Will
himself had taken on the morning when he followed Linnet first to the
boulder in the pasture. Then, treading softly over the green turf with
muffled footfall, he was close upon the unconscious pair before they
knew or suspected it. The ill-advised young people were seated side by
side on a little ledge of rock that protruded from the green-sward. Will
leant eagerly forward, holding Linnet’s hand, and looking hard into her
eyes; the girl herself drew back, and cast down her glance, as if half
fearing the ardour of his evident advances. Respect for the conventions
made Florian cough lightly before disturbing their interview. At the
sound, both looked up. Some five feet nothing of airy observant humanity
beamed blandly down upon them. Linnet gave a little cry, started up in
surprise, hid her crimson face hurriedly between two soft brown hands,
and then, yielding to the first impulse of her shy rustic nature, fled
away without one word, leaving Will face to face with that accusing
moralist.
The epicurean philosopher seated himself, like stern justice in
miniature, beside his erring friend. His face was grave: when Florian
did gravity, he did it, as life did everything else, “consummately.” For
a minute or two he only stared hard at Will, slowly nodding his head
like an earthenware mandarin, and stroking his smooth chin in profound
meditation. At the end of that time, he delivered his bolt, point blank.
“Tomorrow,” he said, calmly, “we go on to Innsbruck.”
“Why so?” Will asked, with a dogged air of dissent.
“Because,” Florian answered, with crushing dialectic, “we never intended
to spend our whole time on the upper Zillerthal, did we?”
This sudden flank movement took Will fairly by surprise. For Florian was
quite right. Their plan of campaign on leaving London included the South
Tyrol, Verona, and Milan. “But a day or two longer,” he put in,
half-imploringly, thus caught off his guard. “Just a day or two longer
to . . . to settle things up a bit.”
Stern justice was inexorable. “Not one other night,” Florian answered,
severely. “The lotus has by this time been sufficiently eaten. I see
what this means. I know now why you’ve kept me here so long at St
Valentin. With Innsbruck and Cortina and the untrodden Dolomites
beckoning me on to come, you’ve planted me plump in this hole, and kept
me here at your side—all for the sake of one Tyrolese cow-girl. In the
name of common morality,” and Florian frowned like a very puisne judge,
“I protest against these most irregular and improper proceedings.”
“I never meant the girl any harm,” Will answered, with a faint flush.
“That’s just it, my dear fellow. I know very well you didn’t. That’s the
head and front of your offending. If you _had_ meant her harm, of course
I could much more readily have forgiven you.”
“Florian,” Will said, looking up, “let’s be serious, please, for once.
This is a serious matter.”
Florian pursed his thin lips, and knitted his white brow judicially.
“H’m, h’m,” he said, with slow deliberateness. “It’s as bad as that, is
it? Why, Deverill, I assure you, I’ve rarely—if ever—been as serious
as this in all my life before. Don’t look at me like that. I mean just
what I say. I’m not thinking about the girl, but about _you_, my dear
fellow. The morals of these parts, as you very well know, are
primitive—primitive. It won’t do _her_ much harm, even if it gets
noised about, to have been seen on the hills, alone in the grey dawn,
hand in hand with an Englishman. This is no place for Oriental seclusion
of women. Indeed, from what I hear, the Arcadian relations of these
unchaperoned alp-girls with their lovers from the plains must be
something truly sweet in their unaffected simplicity. Herr Hausberger
was telling me last night that when an alp-girl marries, all the hunters
and peasants, her discarded lovers, whom she has admitted to the
intimacy of her châlet on the mountains, leave a cradle at the door of
her chosen husband on the night of the wedding. The good man wakes up
the morning after his marriage to find staring him in the face, on his
own threshold, these tangible proofs of his wife’s little slips in her
spinster existence. . . . It’s a charming custom. I find it quite
economical. He knows the worst at once. It saves him the trouble, so
common among ourselves, of finding them out for himself piecemeal in the
course of his later relations.”
“You are wandering from the question,” Will interrupted, testily. He
didn’t quite relish these generalised innuendoes against poor Linnet’s
character.
“Not at all, not at all,” Florian went on very gravely. “The point of
these remarks lies in the application thereof, as Captain Cuttle puts
it. . . . When Linnet marries, you mean, I suppose, to increase the
number of the delicate little offerings presented at her door by——”
Will started up and glared at him. “You shall not speak like that,” he
cried in a very angry voice, “of such a girl as Linnet.”
The little man waved one dainty white hand with a deprecating gesture
towards his excited friend. “This is too bad,” he said, sighing, “very
bad indeed, far worse than I imagined. I said it on purpose, just to see
what you were driving at. And I find out the worst. If you mean the girl
no harm, and take a slighting little jest on her to heart like that, why
your case is desperate—an aggravated attack, complicated by incipient
matrimonial symptoms. You need change of air, change of scene, change of
company. Law of Medes and Persians, it’s Innsbruck to-morrow! You go
with me as I bid, or I go without you. Demur, and I leave you at once to
your fate. You may stop with your cow-girl.”
“Don’t speak of her by that name!” Will broke in, half-angrily.
But Florian, for his part, was provokingly cool. “All A is A,” he said,
calmly, with irresistible logic—“and every cow-girl’s a cow-girl. I’ll
call her a boutrophista, or a neat-herding Phyllis, if it gives you any
pleasure. That’s neither here nor there. The point’s just this—You mean
the girl no harm: then what the deuce _do_ you mean? Are you going to
marry her?”
“No; certainly not,” Will answered. She was a very nice girl, and he
loved to talk with her—there was something so sweetly unsophisticated
in her ways that she charmed and attracted him. But marry her? No; the
very word surprised him; he had never even dreamt of it. In the first
place (though as yet he hadn’t as much as thought about that), he had
nothing to marry upon. And in the second place, if he had, could he take
a Tyrolese milkmaid fresh from the cowsheds in his tow to London, and
present her to his friends as Mrs Will Deverill?
“Then what the deuce _do_ you mean?” Florian repeated, persistently. His
sound common-sense, when he chose to let it loose from his veneer of
affectation, was no mean commodity.
Thus driven to bay, Will was forced to reply with a somewhat sheepish
air, “I don’t know that I mean anything. I’ve never tried to formulate
my state of mind to myself. She’s a very nice girl . . . for her class
and sort . . . and I like to talk to her.”
“And when you talk to her, you like to hold her hand and lean forward
like this, and stare with all your eyes, and look for all the world as
if you wanted to devour her! Oh yes; I’ve seen you. No, no, Will, it
won’t do; I’ve been there myself, and I know all about it. Looking at
the matter impartially, as a man of the world”—and Florian, drawing
himself up, assumed automatically, as those words rolled out, his most
magisterial attitude—“what I’m really afraid of is that you’ll get
gradually dragged into this rustic syren’s vortex, and be swallowed up
before you know it in the treacherous sea of matrimony. However, _you_
don’t believe that, and I know enough of the world to know very well
it’s no use, therefore, arguing out that aspect of the case with you. No
fellow will ever believe _he_ can be such a fool—till he catches
himself in church face to face at last with the awful reality. I prefer,
accordingly, to go on the other tack with you. If you don’t mean to
marry the girl, then, whether you know it or not, you mean no good to
her. I dare say you’ve got all sorts of conventional notions in your
head—which, thank heaven, I don’t share—about honour and so forth
. . . how a cow-girl’s virtue—I beg your pardon, a boutrophista’s, or a
neat-herding Phyllis’s—is as sacred at your hands as the eldest
daughter’s of a hundred marquises. But that’s neither here nor there. If
you don’t _marry_ the girl, and you don’t _ruin_ the girl, there’s only
one thing left possible—you must break the girl’s heart for her.
Between ourselves, being, I flatter myself, a tolerable psychologist, I
don’t for a moment suppose that’s what would actually happen; you’d get
yourself entangled, and you’d go on and on, and you’d flounder and
struggle, and you’d marry her in the end, just to save the girl misery.
But we’ll do poojah to your intellect at the expense of your heart, and
we’ll put it the other way, as you seem to prefer it. Very well, then;
sooner or later you’ll have to leave this place. No doubt, after what
I’ve seen this morning, it’ll cost the girl a wrench—her vanity must be
flattered by receiving so much undisguised attention from a real live
gentleman. But, sooner or later, as I say, come it must, of course; and
sooner, on the whole, will be better for her than later. The longer you
stop, the more she’ll fall in love with you; the quicker you get away
from her the less it’ll hurt her.”
He spoke the words of wisdom—according to his kind. Will rose again
with an effort, and started homeward. As they walked down the pasture,
and through the belt of pinewood, he said never a word. But he thought
all the more on Florian’s counsel. Till that morning, he had never tried
to face the question himself: he liked the girl—that was all; she sang
like a linnet; and he loved to be near her. But the longer he stopped,
the harder for her would be the inevitable breaking off. Just beyond the
pinewood Florian halted and fronted him. “See here, Will,” he said,
kindly, but with the world’s common sense, “it isn’t that I care
twopence myself what becomes of the girl—girls like that are just made
for you and me to play skittles with; if you meant her any harm I
wouldn’t for the world interfere with any other man’s little fancies.
All I want is to get you away from the place before you’ve time to
commit yourself. I use the other argument as an _argumentum ad hominem_
only. But as that it has its weight. The longer you stop, the harder
it’ll be in the end for her.”
Will drew a deep breath. His mind was made up now. “Very well, then,” he
said, slowly, though with an evident struggle; “if I must go, I must go.
I won’t haggle over a day. Let us make it to-morrow.”
CHAPTER X
HAIL, COLUMBIA!
And next morning, indeed, saw them safe at Innsbruck.
’Twas a pull to get away; Will frankly admitted to his own soul he felt
it so. But he saw it was right, and he went accordingly. Linnet, he
knew, had grown fond of him in those few days; when he asked her once
how it was she liked Franz Lindner less now than formerly, she looked up
at him with an arch smile, and, after a second’s pause, made the frank
avowal: “Perhaps it’s because now . . . I think Englishmen nicer.” At
the moment his heart had come up in his mouth with pleasure, as will
happen with all of us when a pretty woman lets us see for ourselves she
really likes us. But he must go all the same: for Linnet’s sake—he must
go: if illusion there were, he must at once disillusion her.
As for Linnet herself, she accepted the separation much more readily, to
say the truth, than Will ever imagined she could. It half-piqued him,
indeed, to find how easily she seemed to acquiesce in the inevitable.
She trembled when he told her, to be sure, and tears started to her
eyes; but she answered, none the less, in a fairly firm voice, that she
always knew the _gnädige Herr_ must go away in the end; that she hoped
he would remember her wherever he went; and _she_—with a deep sigh—she
could never forget his kindness. That, however, was all. Just a pressure
of her fingers, just a kiss on his hand, just a tear that dropped wet on
his outstretched palm as she bent her head over it in customary
obeisance, and Linnet was gone, and he saw no more of her that evening.
In the morning when he stood at the door to bid farewell to the
household, he fancied her eyes looked red with crying. But she grasped
his hand hard, for all that, and said goodbye without flinching. He gave
a florin or two as _Trinkgeld_ to each of the servants at the inn; but
to Linnet he felt he couldn’t give anything. She was of different mould.
Linnet noticed the omission herself, with a glistening eye—and took it,
as it was meant, for a social distinction.
The plain truth was, she had always expected Will must soon go away from
her. Nor was she indeed as yet what one might fairly call quite in love
with him. The very distance between them seemed to forbid the feeling.
He was kind, he was sympathetic, he was musical, he was a gentleman, he
divined her better qualities, her deeper feelings; he spoke to her more
deferentially and with truer respect than any of her own equals had ever
yet spoken to her; she couldn’t help feeling flattered that he should
like to come out upon the hillside to talk with her; but, as yet, she
hardly said to herself she loved him. If she had, what good? Was it
likely such a great gentleman from over the seas would care to marry a
mere Tyrolese milkmaid? Was it likely, if he did, the _wirth_ and the
priest would allow her to marry a Protestant Englishman?
So, from the very outset, save as a passing affection, Will Deverill
stood wholly outside poor Linnet’s horizon. She regarded him as a
pleasant but short-lived episode. Besides, light loves are the rule with
the alp-girl. It was quite in the nature of things for Linnet that a man
should take a liking to her, should pay her brief court, should expect
from her far greater favours than ever Will Deverill expected, and
should give her up in the end for a mere freak of fancy. That was the
way of the Zillerthal! So, though the thorn had gone deep, she accepted
her fate as just what one might have anticipated, and hardly cried for
an hour in her own bed at night, to think those sweet mornings on the
pasture by the pinewood were to be over for ever. For of course, in the
end, if the _wirth_ so willed, she must marry herself contentedly to
Andreas Hausberger.
Acting on Florian’s advice, Will did not even tell his tremulous little
friend he was going to Innsbruck. “Better break it off at once,” Florian
said, with practical common-sense, “once for all and absolutely. No
chance of letters or any nonsense of that sort—if the dulcinea can
write, which of course is doubtful.” And Will, having made up his mind
to the wrench, acquiesced in this sage council. So for Linnet, the two
strangers who had loomed so large, and played so leading a part on the
stage of her little life for one rapturous fortnight, vanished utterly,
as it were, at a single breath, like a dissolving cloud, into the
infinite and the unknowable.
By seven that night, the young Englishmen found themselves once more in
the full flood of civilisation. The electric light shed its beams on
their hotel; a Parisian _chef de cuisine_ turned out sweetbreads and
ices of elaborate art to pamper their palates. Once more, Florian donned
with joy the black coat of Bond Street. They had penetrated the
Zillerthal with their knapsacks on their backs; but two leather
portmanteaus, enclosing the fuller garb of civilised life, awaited their
advent at Innsbruck. Thus restored to society, with a rosebud in his
buttonhole, the dainty little man descended radiant to the
_salle-à-manger_. He welcomed the change; after three whole weeks of
unadulterated Nature, he had tired of Arcadia. And he loved
_tables-d’hôte_: ’twas a field for the prosecution of social conquests.
“A man goes there on his merits,” he said briskly to Will, as they
dressed for dinner, “neither handicapped nor yet unduly weighted. Nobody
knows who he is, and he knows nobody. So he starts there on the flat,
without fear or favour; and if at the end of ten minutes he hasn’t
managed to make himself the centre of a conversational circle, he may
retire into private life as a social failure.”
On this particular evening, however, in spite of several brilliant and
manful efforts, Florian didn’t somehow succeed in attracting an audience
quite so readily as usual. The environment was against him. On his right
sat a lady whom he discovered by a side glance at the name written
legibly on the napkin ring by her plate, to be the Honourable Mrs
Medway, and who was so profoundly filled with a sense of the importance
of her own Honourableness that she feared to contaminate herself or her
daughter by conversation with her neighbours till she had satisfied her
mind by sure and certain warranty that they too belonged to the Right
Set in England. Pending proof to that effect, her answers to his
questions were both curt and monosyllabic. This nettled Florian, who
prided himself with truth on his extensive knowledge of all the “smart
people.” To his left, beyond Will, on the other hand, sat a
stolid-looking gentleman of nonconformist exterior and provincial garb,
whose conversation, though ample, betrayed at times the inelegant idiom
and accent of the Humber. Him Florian the silver-tongued carefully
avoided. Opposite, was a vacant place, on either side of which sat two
young girls of seventeen or thereabouts in the acutest stage of giggling
inarticulateness. Florian listened, and despaired. Here was a coterie,
indeed, for a brilliant talker and a man of culture!
But just as they finished the soup, to his intense relief, a ray of
light seemed to pierce of a sudden the gathering gloom of the dinner
table. The drawing-room door opened, and through its portal a Vision of
Beauty in an evening dress floated, Hellenic goddess-wise, into the
_salle-à-manger_. It made its way straight to the vacant chair, nodded
and smiled recognition to the bread-and-butter gigglers and the
Honourable Mrs Medway, bowed demurely, continental-way, to the newly
come strangers, and glided off at once, without a pause or break, into a
general flow all round of graceful, easy conversation. Florian gazed,
and succumbed. This was a real live woman! Ripe, but not too ripe, soft
and rounded of outline, with a bewitching mouth, a row of pearly teeth,
and a cheek that wore only its own natural roses, she might have
impressed at first sight a less susceptible heart by far than the
epicurean sage’s. As she seated herself, she drew from her pocket a
little cardboard box, which she handed with a charming smile to one of
the giggling inarticulates. “Those are the set you admired, I think,”
she said, with unconscious grace. “I hope I’ve got the right ones. I was
passing the shop on my way back from my drive, and I thought I’d just
drop in and bring them back as you liked them so.”
The giggling inarticulate gave a jerky little scream of unmixed delight
as she opened the box and took out from it with tremulous hands a pretty
set of coral necklet, brooch, and earrings. “Not for _me_!” she cried,
gasping; “not for me—for a present! You don’t really mean to _give_
them to _me_! They’re too lovely, too delicious!”
“Yes, I do,” the Vision of Beauty responded, beaming. “I wanted to give
you some little souvenir some time before you went, and I didn’t know
what you’d like; so, as you said you admired these, I thought I’d best
go in at once as I passed and buy them. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Florian eyed them with the lenient glance of a man of taste who
appraises and appreciates a beautiful woman’s selection. When the
bread-and-butter gigglers had exhausted upon them their slender stock of
laudatory adjectives—their _oh’s_ and _just look’s_, and _dear me,
aren’t they beautiful’s_—he broke in with his bland smile, and, laying
the necklet in a curve on the white tablecloth before him, began to
discourse with much unction in the Florianic tongue, on the æsthetic
points of this pretty trifle. For it _was_ a pretty necklet, there was
no denying that; its lance-like pendants were delicately shaped and most
gracefully arranged; it was one of those simple half-barbaric designs
which retain to our day all the naïve beauty of primitive
unsophisticated human workmanship. Florian found in it reminiscences of
Eve in Eden. And he said so in that luxuriantly florid style of which he
was so great and so practical a master. He called attention with suave
tones to the distinctly precious suggestions of archaic influence in the
shaping of the pendants; to the exquisite nature of coral as a
decorative object, cast up blushing on our shores by the ungarnered
sea—a material whose use we inherit from our innocent ancestors, when
wild in woods the noble savage ran, his limbs untrammelled by clinging
draperies—when beauty unadorned was adorned the most in the subtle and
sinuous curves of its own lissome figure. Necklets and armlets, he
observed, with one demonstrative white forefinger held poised above the
salmon, are the string-courses, so to speak, of this our natural human
architecture; they serve to emphasise and throw out into stronger relief
the structural points of the grand design, to call attention to the
exquisite native fulness of a faultless torso.
The giggling inarticulates dropped their chins and stared. They were not
quite sure whether such talk was proper. But the Vision of Beauty, more
at home in the world, was not in the least alarmed at Florian’s torrent
of eloquence. On the contrary, she answered him back, as he himself
remarked a little later to Will, like the lords of the council, with
grace, wisdom, and understanding. Florian brightened, and flowed on. He
loved a listener who could toss the ball back to him as fast as he
tossed it. And the Vision of Beauty answered him back with lightning
speed, and bore her share with credit in the conversation. It was
evident as she went on that she knew her Europe. Was it Munich Florian
touched upon with the light hand of his craft?—she discoursed of the
Van der Weydens and Crivellis in the Pinakothek, like one to the manner
born, and had views of her own which were bold, if not prudent, about
the meaning and arrangement of the Aeginetan marbles. Was it Florence he
attacked?—she was at home at San Marco, and knew her way like a
Baedeker round the rooms at the Pitti. Will listened and marvelled,
talking little himself, but giving Florian and the Vision of Beauty
their heads. It surprised him much to find one female brain could store
in its teeming cells so much miscellaneous knowledge.
At last, at a brief break in Florian’s flood of speech, Will found space
to inquire, for a purpose of his own, “Would you mind my asking where
you got that necklet?”
The Vision of Beauty handed the lid of the box to him. It bore, on a
label, the name and address of the jeweller at whose shop she had bought
it. “It’s on the way up,” she said, carelessly, “to this hotel from the
city.”
That one Shibboleth betrayed her. Florian started in surprise. “Why,” he
cried with open eyes, “then you must be an American.”
The beautiful stranger smiled and nodded. “Yes, _sir_,” she said with
marked emphasis, as if to clinch the assertion of her western
nationality. “I _am_ an American, and I don’t want to hide it. But you
pay what you consider a compliment to the purity of my English all the
same, if you mean that till now you haven’t even suspected it.”
Florian made some politely condescending remark, of the sort so
obnoxious to the late Mr Lowell, as to the correctness and delicacy of
her English accent, and then, in order to show himself quite abreast of
the times, inquired expansively if she knew the Van Rensselaers.
“No; I haven’t had that pleasure,” the Vision of Beauty answered,
curtly.
“The Livingstones, perhaps?” Florian adventured, in tentative tones.
The Vision shook her head.
“My friends the Vanderbilts?” Florian essayed once more, eager to find a
connecting link. “I stayed with them at Newport.”
“No; nor yet the Vanderbilts,” the Vision answered, smiling.
Florian paused and reflected. “Ah, then, you’re from Boston, no doubt,”
he suggested, with charitable promptitude. The fine friends he had
mentioned, at whose houses he had stopped, were all New Yorkers.
“No; not from Boston,” the Vision answered with prompt negation.
“Washington, I suppose?” Florian adventured again. They were the only
three places a self-respecting American could admit she came from
without shipwreck of her dignity. He would not pay so much grace and
eloquence the very bad compliment, as it seemed to him, of supposing it
could “register” from St Louis or New Orleans.
The pretty woman smiled once more, a self-restrained smile. “I come from
New York,” she said, simply. “I’ve lived there long. It’s my native
place. But there are a good many of us there who don’t aspire to know
the Roosevelts or the Livingstones.”
Florian withdrew, with quiet tact, from this false departure. He led
aside the conversation, by graceful degrees, to the old Dutch families,
the New England stock—Emerson, Longfellow, Channing, the Concord set:
Howells, James, and Stedman, the later American poets. On these last he
waxed warm. But the Vision of Beauty, herself cosmopolitan to the core,
was all for our newest school of English bards. She doted on Lang and
Austin Dobson.
“And have you seen the last _Illustrated_?” she asked, after awhile,
with a burst of enthusiasm. “It’s on the table in the _salon_ there. And
there are three, oh, such lovely, lovely stanzas in it,—‘Among Alps,’
by Will Deverill.”
Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had
published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus
familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could
the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the
hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the _Illustrated_,
which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little _coup_
with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look
guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once
behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down
at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken.
“I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.”
The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless.
“You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a
moment’s pause.
“That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his
plate. “But I’m very little used to—to—to meeting people who have
heard of it.”
The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I _am_ glad to
meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr,
of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have
‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.”
“No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at
unexpected recognition.
“I’ll go upstairs after dinner and fetch it down to show you,” his
pretty admirer answered, with some pride. “And your friend, too, is he a
poet?”
“In soul; in soul only!” Florian interposed, airily, dashing in at a
tangent; for it irked him thus to play second fiddle to Will’s first
hand, and he longed to assert his “proper position.” “I string no
sonnets; I play no harmonies; I take the higher place. I sit on a
critical throne, weighing and appraising all arts impartially. Deverill
rhymes; another man paints; a third man strums; a fourth acts, or carves
stone—and all for _me_. I exercise none of these base handicrafts
myself; but I live supreme in the Palace of Art they build,
subordinating each in due place to my soul’s delight, like a subtle
architect.”
“Just the same as all the rest of us,” the pretty American put in,
interrupting his period. “We all do that. We sit still and listen. The
difficulty is—to produce, like Mr Deverill.”
Florian stood aghast. To think a mere woman should thus slight his
pretensions! But the pretty American, disregarding him, turned to Will
once more. “And your friend’s name?” she said, interrogatively.
“My friend’s name,” Will answered, “is Florian Wood. You must know it.”
“Ah, Mr Florian Wood,” the pretty stranger echoed; “I’ve heard of him,
of course. I’m glad to meet him. It’s so nice to see people in the flesh
at last one has often heard talked about.”
“But _you’ve_ heard about everybody, Mrs Palmer,” the first giggling
inarticulate interposed, with a gurgle of admiration.
Florian clapped his hand to his head in theatrical disappointment.
“_Mrs_ Palmer!” he cried, markedly. “Did I hear aright, _Mrs_ Palmer?
This is indeed a blow! Then, I take it, you’re married!”
From anyone else on earth, the remark would have been rude; from
Florian, it was only exaggerated compliment. The Vision of Beauty
accepted it as such with American frankness.
“Well, you needn’t go and take a draught of cold poison offhand,” she
retorted, a little saucily, “for there’s still a chance for you.
Remember, a woman may be maid, wife, . . . or widow.”
“Dear me,” Florian ejaculated, half-choking himself in his haste, “I
never thought of that. You don’t mean to say——”
“Yes, I do,” Mrs Palmer responded, cutting him short with a merry nod.
“Any time these last five years. Now, you’re sorry you spoke. Mr
Deverill, may I trouble you to pass the mustard?”
CHAPTER XI
PRIVATE INQUIRY
During the rest of the young men’s stay at Innsbruck the pretty American
was, as Florian remarked, “a distinct feature.” Such is the fickleness
of man, indeed, that she almost superseded poor Linnet in their minds as
an object of interest. She was attractive beyond a doubt; she was
clever; she was lively; and she was so delighted to make a real live
poet’s acquaintance, that Will hardly knew how to receive her almost
obtrusive attentions. She brought him butter in a lordly dish, as
Florian phrased it. That same evening, in the _salon_, according to
promise, she came down with “Voices from the Hills,” Will’s thin little
volume of fugitive verse, which she had had gorgeously bound in red calf
in Paris, and made that sensitive young bard blush up to his eyes with
modesty, by insisting on pointing out which pieces she liked best, in a
voice that was audible to half the guests in the establishment.
_Ossian’s Tomb_ was her favourite—she knew that one by heart; but
_Khosru Khan_ was sweet too; and _Sister Clare_ made her cry; and then
_Gwyn_!—ah, that dear _Gwyn_ was just too lovely for anything!
And yet, Will liked her. In spite of her open praise, and his blushes,
he liked her. The surest way to a poet’s heart is to speak well of his
poetry. And besides, he said to himself, Mrs Palmer had discrimination.
She noted in his verse the metrical variety, the pictorial skill, the
strong sense of colour—just the qualities of his poor muse on which he
himself most prided himself. No artist cares for praise except for those
characteristics of his art which he feels to be his strong ones. Mrs
Palmer gave Will that, and he liked the incense.
Florian had said at St Valentin that Will needed change of air, change
of scene, change of company. And at Innsbruck he got them. The pretty
American, having found her poet, didn’t mean to let him slip again too
soon from her clutches. With the pertinacity of her compatriots, she
fastened herself at once upon the two young Englishmen. Not obtrusively,
to be sure, not ungracefully, not awkwardly, not as a European woman
might have done the same thing, but with that occidental frankness and
oblivion of sex which makes up half the charm of the charming American.
The very next morning, at the early breakfast, she happened to occupy a
small table close by them. They chatted together through the meal; at
the end of it Will mentioned, in a casual sort of way that he was going
down the street to the shop where Mrs Palmer had bought the coral
necklet. The dainty young widow seized her cue. “I am going down that
way myself,” she said. “Let me come and show you. I won’t take a minute
to run up for my hat. I’m not one of those women who can never go out
for a morning stroll without spending half-an-hour before their mirrors,
tittivating.” And, in spite of Will’s assurance that he could find the
shop very well by himself, she was as good as her word, and insisted on
accompanying them.
She had been charming in evening dress; she was more charming still in
her girlish straw hat and neat tailor-made costume, as she tripped
lightly downstairs to them. Florian, by her side, while they walked
through the streets, cast sheep’s eyes askance up at her. Even Will,
more mindful of poor Linnet’s desertion, was not wholly insensible to
that taking smile, those pearly white teeth, that dainty small nose,
those rounded contours. They turned down the road in the direction of
the Maria-Theresien Strasse. Will knew of old that quaintest and most
picturesque of European High Streets, with its queer gabled roofs, its
rococo façades, its mediæval towers, its arcades and pillars. But to
Florian, it all came with the added charm of novelty. Twice or thrice on
their way, the spirit moved him to stop and perorate. Each time, the
pretty widow cut him short at once with some quick retort of truly
American practicality. At the shop, Will selected a second necklet,
exactly like the one Mrs Palmer had chosen. “I gave her nothing before I
came away,” he said, turning to Florian, and only indicating by that
very indefinite pronoun, the intended recipient of his beautiful gift.
“One couldn’t give her _money_. ’Twould have been a positive insult. But
this ought to look well on that smooth brown neck of hers.”
“For your sister, _of course_,” Mrs Palmer said, pointedly.
“No; not for my sister,” Will admitted, with a quiet smile. “For a girl
at the inn we’ve just left at St Valentin.”
Mrs Palmer said “Oh!” ’Twas an American _oh_. It deprecated the
fact—and closed the episode. Cosmopolitan though she was, it surprised
her not a little that Will should allude to such persons in a lady’s
company. But there! these poets, you know—so many things must be
condoned to them. Because they have loved much, much must be forgiven
them. They have licence to break hearts and the most brittle of the
commandments, with far less chance of blame than their even Christians.
Will’s transaction completed, Mrs Palmer proceeded to buy a second
similar set on her own account, for presentation to the second of the
giggling inarticulates. “Poor girl!” she said, good-humouredly, “she
looked so envious last night when I gave the other to Eva Powell, I
couldn’t bear to think I’d left her out in the cold. Thirty florins, I
think you said? Ah, yes; that’s twelve dollars. Not much to make a poor
little girl so happy!”
From this, and various other circumstances which occurred in the course
of their first few days at Innsbruck, it began to dawn dimly upon
Florian’s open mind that their American friend, though she knew not the
Van Rensselaers, the Vanderbilts, and the Livingstones, must have been
“comfortably left” by the late Mr Palmer. It was clear she had money for
every whim and fancy. She took frequent drives, up the Brenner or down
the Innthal, in a roomy two-horse carriage specially ordered from the
livery stables; and she always gave a seat to one at least of the
giggling inarticulates; and then, “on the girl’s account, you know,”
with good-natured zeal, asked Will and Florian to take part in the
expedition. “It’s so good for them, of course,” she said, “to see a
little, when they can, of young men’s society. They’re each of them here
with an invalid mamma—throat and lungs, poor things—you know the kind
of person; and before I came, they had nobody to talk to, not even one
another, for they were far too much afraid of a mutual snub ever to
utter a syllable. I’ve tried to bring them out a bit, and make life
worth living for them. But without a young man—at that age—no
amusement’s worth anything. _Do_ come, Mr Deverill—there’s a good soul,
just to humour them.”
And Will and Florian, it must be candidly allowed, fell in with a good
grace with her philanthropic projects. Though, to be sure, when once the
carriage got under way, they seemed much more desirous of amusing the
pretty American herself, than of seconding her schemes for drawing out
the latent conversational powers of the giggling inarticulates, who
contented themselves chiefly with leaning back in their seats, and
listening open-mouthed to Florian’s flamboyant disquisitions. That,
however, is a detail. Will attempted at first to pay his share of the
carriage; but such interference with her plans Mrs Palmer most manfully
and successfully resisted. She wanted to give the girls a little outing,
she said; Will might come or he might stop; but she wasn’t going to let
any other person pay for her well-meant attention to her poor little
protégées. To that point she stuck hard, through thick and thin. They
must come as her guests if they came as anything.
From this, and sundry other events that came under his knowledge by
occulter channels, Florian grew strengthened in his idea that the late
Mr Palmer, whoever he might have been, had at least “cut up well,” and,
what was more to the point, had cut up entirely in his widow’s favour.
Now this was business; for Florian, incurious as he was by nature where
mere gossip was concerned, liked to know what was what in the
matrimonial market. As he was wont to put it sweetly to his friends at
the Savile, he wasn’t going to throw himself away on a woman for
nothing. He had an income of his own, just sufficient to supply him with
the bare necessaries of life—such as stalls at the opera and hansoms
_ad libitum_; and, this being so, he had no intention of giving up that
singular franchise which young men call “their liberty,” except in
return for valuable consideration. But if good things were going, he
liked at least to know of them; some day, perhaps, if some lady bribed
him high enough, he might possibly consent to retire by her side into
the Philistine gloom of wedded respectability.
So he pushed his inquiries hard into the Vision’s antecedents, wholly
without effect, during the first few days of their stay at Innsbruck.
A few nights later, however, as they sat in the _salon_ after a long
day’s tramp to the summit of the Patscher Kopf, Florian found himself
cast casually into conversation with an American old maid, belonging to
the most virulent type and class of old maidhood—“of the cat-kind,
catty,” he said afterwards to Will Deverill; one of those remarkable
persons who have pervaded cosmopolitan hotels for years together, and
are on intimate terms with the domestic skeletons in every cupboard.
Miss Beard, as she was called, favoured Florian at full length with the
histories and antecedents of the giggling inarticulates, their papas and
mammas, and all their forebears; informing him with much gusto how one
of them had paid ninepence in the pound to his creditors, and another
had been cashiered from the navy for embezzlement. Then she proceeded in
the same strain to demolish the unprepossessing gentleman of
nonconformist exterior, who had been guilty, it seemed, of the social
crime of retail business. Miss Beard was inclined, indeed, to believe he
was nothing more than a retired chemist; but she wasn’t even sure—with
hushed and bated breath—that it mightn’t be as bad as grocery and
provisions. All these, and many other unimportant details, Florian’s
soul endured, possessing itself in patience for many minutes together,
in the fervent hope that at last this living encyclopædia of
genealogical knowledge would come round to the character of the Vision
of Beauty.
“And Mrs Palmer, who sits opposite me,” he adventured gently after
awhile, when Miss Beard reached a pause in her caustic comments; “she
seems a nice little thing in her way, though, of course, a mere
butterfly. She comes from New York. I suppose you know her?”
Miss Beard drew herself up with that offended dignity which only an
American woman of the “very best class” can exhibit in perfection when
you suspect her of an acquaintance with a person moving in a social
grade less exalted than the sphere she herself revolves in. “I don’t
_know_ her,” she said, markedly, “but I know, of course, who she is.
She’s the widow of Palmer—the well-known Palmer—the notorious Palmer,
who—but there!—you’ve been in the States; you must know all about
him.”
“Not Palmer the murderer!” Florian exclaimed in surprise. “She’s too
young for that, surely.”
“No; _not_ Palmer the murderer,” Miss Beard responded in a very shrill
voice with considerable acerbity. “_He_ was at least a _gentleman_. I
can’t say as much for this lady’s husband. She’s the widow of Palmer,
the dry-goodsman in Broadway.”
“Oh, indeed,” Florian cried, deeply interested in this discovery—for it
meant much money. “I remember the place well—a palatial building in the
Renaissance style at the corner of a street near the junction with Fifth
Avenue. These princes of commerce in your Western world represent in our
midst to-day the great signiors of the Adriatic who held the gorgeous
East in fee, and whose Gothic façades, rich in arch and tracery, still
line the long curve of the Grand Canal for us. They are the satraps of
finance. The world in our times is ruled once more—as in Venice of old,
in the heyday of its splendour—by the signet-ring of the merchant.
Palmer was one of these—a paladin of silken bales, a Doge Dandolo of
Manhattan, a potentate in the crowded marts of the Samarcand of the
Occident.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Miss Beard retorted in an acrid tone,
eyeing him sternly through her _pince-nez_, “but I say he was a
dry-goodsman.”
Florian descended at a bound from the open empyrean to the solid earth
of commonplace. “Well, at any rate, he was rich,” he said, letting the
paladins slide. “He must have died worth millions.”
“His estate was proved,” Miss Beard said, curtly, “at a sum in dollars
which totals out—let me see—fives into 35—ah, yes, to exactly seven
hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds sterling.”
Florian gave a little gasp. “That’ll do,” he said, with slow emphasis.
“And he left it?” he suggested, after a second’s pause, with an
interrogative raising of his broad white forehead.
“And he left it, every cent,” Miss Beard responded, “without deduction
of any sort, to that fly-away little inanity.”
Florian drew a deep breath. “Then she’s rich,” he said, musing; “rich
beyond the utmost dreams of avarice.”
“Well, of course she is,” Miss Beard answered, with a sharp little snap,
as though every one knew that. “If she wasn’t, could she go tearing
about Europe as she does, herself and her maid, buying everything she
sees, and making presents right and left—to everyone she comes across.
She’d give her own soul away if anybody asked her for it. Little
empty-headed fool! She’s not fit to be trusted with the use of money.
But, of course, one can’t _know_ her, however rich she may be. We draw
the line in the States at keeping shop. And, besides, she was never
brought up among cultivated people.”
As she spoke, Florian noted several things silently to himself. He
noted, first, that Mrs Palmer spoke the English tongue many degrees more
correctly, and more pleasantly as well, than her would-be critic. He
noted, second, that her very generosity was counted for blame to her by
this narrower nature. He noted, third, that in republican America, even
more than in monarchical and aristocratic England, Mrs Palmer’s
cleverness, her information, her reading, her culture, were as dust in
the balance in Society’s eyes, compared with the damning and indelible
fact that her late lamented husband had owned a dry-goods store. But,
being a worldly-wise man, Florian noted these things in his own heart
alone. Externally, he took no overt notice of them. On the contrary, he
continued his talk in the same bland and honey-sweet tone as ever.
“Still, she’d be a catch in her way,” he said, with a condescending
smile, “for any man who didn’t object to swallow her antecedents.”
“She would,” Miss Beard replied, with austere self-respect, “if people
care to mix in that sort of society. For myself, I’ve been used to a
different kind of life. _I_ couldn’t put up with it.”
Florian was audacious. He posed the one last question he still wished to
ask, boldly. “And there’s no awkward clause, I suppose,” he said,
without even the apology of a blush, “in her husband’s will, of that
nasty so-long-as-my-said-wife-remains-unmarried character?”
Miss Beard took up her Galignani with crushing coldness. She didn’t care
to discuss such people’s prospects from such a standpoint. Their
matrimonial affairs were beneath her notice. For fine old crusted
prejudice of a social sort, commend me, so far as my poor knowledge
goes, to the members of good New Yorker families. “To the best of my
knowledge and belief,” she murmured, acridly, without raising her eyes,
“the property’s left for her own sole use and benefit, without any
restriction. But I’m sure I don’t know. If you want to find out you’d
better ask her. I don’t burden my mind with these people’s business.”
Then Florian knew the Vision of Beauty was a catch not to be despised by
a man of culture. Such wealth as that, no gentleman could decline, in
justice to himself, if she gave him the refusal of it.
CHAPTER XII
THE MADDING CROWD
Andreas Hausberger was a dictator. He kept his own counsel till the
moment of action grew ripe for birth in the womb of time; then, heeding
no man, he gave his orders. Three days after Will Deverill’s departure
from St Valentin, he called up Linnet to his office suddenly. “The
dressmaker has brought home your new costume,” he said in his curt way.
“Go upstairs and put it on. Then come down and let me see you.”
Linnet, much wondering what this mood might portend, went up to her own
room and tried on her new gew-gaws. Puffed white sleeves, laced corset,
crimson kirtle, high shoes, flowered kerchief at her bosom, silver dirk
in her hair; Linnet wasn’t over-vain, as girls go in this world, but
tricked out in such finery, she gazed in her glass, and, to tell the
whole truth, admired herself consumedly. If only her Englishman could
have seen her in that dress! But she stifled her sigh, and tripped
lightly downstairs again, with the buoyancy of youth, when conscious of
a perfectly becoming costume, for Andreas Hausberger’s scrutiny.
The _wirth_ scanned her, well satisfied. “On Monday,” he said, briefly,
in that iron voice, “we set out on our tour, and go first to Innsbruck.”
It was earlier by a week than he at first intended; but he saw it would
be hard, if he stopped at St Valentin, to keep Fridolin’s hands from
Franz’s throat much longer. So, by way of minimising the adverse
chances, he made up his mind to start as soon as possible for his winter
season. He meant to begin modestly with entertainments at hotels among
the Tyrolese winter resorts, and the towns of the Riviera; and then,
when his troupe had got over its first access of stage fright, and grown
used to an audience, to go across for the summer to England or America.
So, for the next few days Linnet was busy as a bee with preparations for
her first journey into the great wide world outside the Zillerthal. As
yet, her native valley had bounded her view—she had never gone even as
far as Jenbach. Expectation and preparation kept her mind well employed
during that busy week, and prevented it from dwelling too much or too
long on the kindly Engländer, who had vanished from her ken across the
sea to England. For, that he had gone straight home, Linnet never even
doubted. On the afternoon of Andreas Hausberger’s exciting announcement,
indeed, a little registered parcel came by post for her to St Valentin.
It bore the postmark of Wilten, where Will had intentionally dropped it
into the letter-box, on purpose to conceal from her his exact
whereabouts. Linnet scanned it close, and read the name correctly, but
was too innocent of the topography of her native country to know that
Wilten is the name of a village on the outskirts of Innsbruck. When she
asked Andreas Hausberger where Wilten was, a little later in the day,
without showing him the postmark, he confirmed her belief by answering
at once that ’twas a town in England, not far from Salisbury. So he had
thought of her over sea, then, and sent her this beautiful costly
present from his own country. She tried it on that night before her tiny
square mirror. As Will had rightly judged, it set off the rich tints of
her creamy brown neck to the best advantage.
A beautiful gift! A real lady might have worn it! Later on, when Linnet
had diamonds and rubies at command, there was no trinket she prized
among all her jewels like Will Deverill’s coral.
At last the eventful morning itself arrived. The little troupe set out
on foot down the mountain to Mairhofen. There, their boxes, sent on
over-night, awaited them. They drove in a large open brake to
Jenbach—Andreas Hausberger, Franz Lindner, Linnet herself, Philippina,
and the two other singers who composed the party. At Jenbach, they
descended at the door of the railway station. For the first time in her
life, Linnet saw, half-alarmed, a puffing and snorting machine, a sort
of iron devil, breathing flames like purgatory, burst with smoke and
stench upon the crowd by the waiting-room. Though she had heard all
about it often enough before, and could see for herself that this great
scurrying creature, for all its noise and bustle, kept rigidly to the
rails as it approached the platform, she yet drew back in pure physical
terror and surprise at the swiftness and irresistibility of the
fire-fiend’s motion.
She had scant time to think, however, for scarce had it come to rest
when Andreas Hausberger, little heeding, bundled them all
unceremoniously into a third-class compartment; and before Linnet had
leisure to recover her self-possession, the engine had uttered one wild
discordant shriek, and with ringing of bells and rattlings of wheels in
her ears, she found herself, willy-nilly, beyond hope of release,
whirled along at the break-neck pace of what you and I know as an
Austrian slow train, over the jolting rails, up the broad Inn valley.
In spite of her terror—for she knew the railway as yet chiefly by
hearing reports of collisions and accidents—Linnet enjoyed to the full
that first steam-borne journey. She whirled past turreted towers like
Hall and Volders, which to you and me commend themselves as the absolute
quintessence of old-world quaintness, but which, to Linnet’s young eyes,
accustomed only to St Valentin and the grassy Alps, envisaged themselves
rather in glowing hues as the kingdoms of the world and all their glory.
They had been late to start, and their drive from Mairhofen had been
tolerably leisurely, so dusk was closing in when they arrived at
Innsbruck. Oh, the bustle, the din, the whirling awe of that arrival!
Electric lamps lighted up the broad Platz in front of the station; on
either side rose great hotels, grander and more palatial than any
buildings on earth Linnet’s poor little fancy had ever yet dreamed of.
Not to one of these, however, of course, did Andreas Hausberger take his
little troupe of minstrels. But even the humbler inn on the south side
of the Theresien Strasse, to which they repaired on foot, bearing their
boxes between them, seemed to Linnet’s inexperienced and impressionable
eye a most princely caravanserai. After the noise and bustle in that
busy railway junction, which made her brain whirl with the unaccustomed
dizziness of a great city, the comparative rest and quiet of the Golden
Eagle seemed a positive relief both of mind and body. That night she
slept little. Her head swam with excitement; for this was the first step
on her journey through the world, which might lead her perhaps at last
to England. And in England, she thought to herself once or twice with a
little thrill, who could tell but peradventure she might meet . . . Will
Deverill?
For she knew little as yet of how big the world is, and how long you may
live in it, going to and fro, without necessarily knocking up against
this one or that of its component units.
Next morning they rose betimes, and went out into the street to view the
city. For to Linnet, as to Mrs Palmer, a city it was—and a very great
one. Such streets and streets seemed to frighten and appal her. Florian
had admired in that picturesque old capital of a mountain land, the
antiquated tone, the eighteenth-century flavour, the mediæval survivals,
the air as of a world elsewhere gone from us utterly. But to Linnet,
though it was beautiful and impressive too, it was above all things
magnificent, grandiose, stately, imposing. She gazed with open eyes at
the Golden Roof, admired the bronze statues at the base of the Anna
Column, looked up with silent awe at the front of the Landhaus, and
thought the Rudolfsbrunnen, with its attendant griffins and dragons, a
wonderful work of art for the world’s delectation.
Philippina went with her, her companion on the alp. Linnet noticed with
much surprise—for she knew not as yet the difference in fibre between
them—that Philippina, though as interested as herself in the shops and
their contents, seemed wholly unimpressed by these other and vastly more
attractive features of a civilised city. For Linnet had been gifted by
nature, to the fullest degree, with the profound Tyrolese artistic
susceptibility. Though her mind came to art as a blank page, it
responded to the stimulus, once presented to its ken, as the sensitive
plate of a photographic camera responds in every line to the inspiring
picture.
As they strolled through the town, by Andreas Hausberger’s express
desire—for the wise impresario had arranged their first appearance for
that very evening, and wished the girls to come to it fresh, after a
morning’s exercise—they paid comparatively little heed to what most of
us regard as by far the most striking characteristic of Innsbruck—the
great limestone crags that seem on every side to tower and overhang the
very roofs of the city. They were accustomed, indeed, to crags, and made
very small case of them. It was the houses, the shops, the noise, the
crowd, the gaiety, that chiefly struck them. Innsbruck to Linnet was as
a little Paris. But as they went on their way through the bustling
streets, they came at last to a church door, which Linnet’s profound
religious nature could hardly pass by without one minute’s prayer for
Our Lady’s aid at this critical turning-point of her artistic history.
Philippina, nothing loth, for her part, opined it could do them no harm
to make favour above with the blessed saints for this evening’s work by
a little Pater Noster. The blessed saints dearly love attentions: much
may be done with them by a small wax candle! So they opened the door,
and stepped into the Hofkirche.
Even those of us who know well the world and its art, can remember
vividly the strange start of surprise with which we gazed round for the
first time on that oddest and most bizarre of Christian temples. It
isn’t so much beautiful, indeed, as unexpected and startling. To push
open the church door and find oneself at once ringed round and guarded
close, as it were, by that great circle of mailed knights and
bronze-wimpled ladies, who watch the long sleep of the kneeling
Maximilian on his cenotaph in the centre, gives one a thrill of a novel
sort from which some tinge of dim awe can hardly ever be wholly absent.
There they stand, on their low pedestals, a congregation of bronze
ancestors round their descendant’s tomb—Theodoric the Ostrogoth and
King Arthur the Briton, Mary of Burgundy and Eleonora of
Portugal—strange efforts of struggling art in its first faint steps
towards the attainment of the beautiful—naïf, ungainly, crude, rising
only once or twice within measurable distance of the ideal in the few
figures cast in metal by Peter Vischer of Nuremberg. But to Linnet, a
woman grown, instinct with the innate artistic taste of her countrymen,
yet innocent till then of all forms of art save the saints and
purgatories of her mountain chapels, the Hofkirche was a glimpse of some
new and unseen world of infinite possibilities. She went through it all
piecemeal with open-mouthed interest. Philippina could only laugh at the
quaint vizors of the knights, the quainter dresses of the ladies. But
Linnet was almost shocked Philippina should laugh at them. She herself
half forgot her intended prayer to Our Lady in her delight and surprise
at those wonderful figures and those beautiful bas-reliefs. She read all
the names on the bases conscientiously; they didn’t mean much to her, to
be sure—her historical ideas didn’t get as far as “Clovis, King of the
Franks,” or even as “Count Frederick of Tyrol with the Empty Pockets”;
but in a vague sort of way she gathered for herself that these were
statues of archdukes and mighty heroes, keeping watch and ward silently
round the great dead emperor who knelt in the centre on his marble
sarcophagus. Good luck, too, attended them. The little hump-backed
sacristan, seeing two pretty girls looking through the grating at the
reliefs on its sides, relaxed his stony heart without the customary
kreuzers, and admitted them within the railing to inspect at their
leisure those exquisite pictures in marble which Thorwaldsen declared
the most perfect work of their kind in the whole of Christendom.
Philippina found the dresses quite grotesquely old-fashioned; but
Linnet, hardly knowing why she lingered so long, gazed at each scene in
detail with the profoundest interest.
While down in the town Linnet was thus engaged, high up in the hills
Will Deverill sat alone by Mrs Palmer’s side on an outcrop of rock near
the summit of the Lanser Kopf. Florian had gone off for a minute or two
round the corner by the mountain indicator, with the giggling
inarticulates. Mrs Palmer, pointing her moral with the ferrule of her
parasol on the grass in front of her, was discoursing to Will earnestly
of his work and his prospects. “I want to see you do something really
great, Mr Deverill,” she said, with genuine fervour, looking deep into
his eyes; “something larger in scale and more worthy of your
genius—something that gives full scope to your dramatic element. I
don’t like to see you frittering away your talents on these exquisite
little lyrics—beautiful gems in their way, to be sure, but that way not
the highest. I want to see you settled down for a long spell of hard
work at some big undertaking—an epic, a play, a grand opera, a
masterpiece. I know you could do it if only you took the time. You
should go to some quiet place where there’s nothing to distract you, and
make your mind up to work, to write something more lasting than even
that lovely _Gwyn_, or that exquisite _Ossian_!”
Will looked down and sighed. ’Tis pleasant to be appreciated by a
beautiful woman. And every man thinks, if he had but the chance, he
could show the world yet the sort of stuff that’s in him. “I only wish I
could,” he answered, regretfully. “But I’ve my living to earn. That ties
me down still to the treadmill of journalism. When my holiday’s
over—the first for two years—I must get back once more, well content,
to Fleet Street and drudgery.”
Mrs Palmer sighed too. She felt his difficulty. Her parasol played more
nervously on the grass than before. She answered nothing, but she
thought a great deal. How small a matter for her to secure this young
poet whom she admired so much, six months of leisure for an immortal
work—and yet, how impossible! There was only one way, she knew that
very well; and the first step towards that way must come, not from her,
but from this modest Will Deverill.
’Twas a passing thought, half formed, or scarce half formed, in the
pretty widow’s mind. But nothing came of it. As she paused, and sighed,
and played trembling with her parasol, and doubted what to answer him,
Florian came up once more with the giggling inarticulates, “Well, Mr
Wood?” she said, looking up, just by way of saying something, for the
pause was an awkward one.
“Pardon me,” the mannikin of culture answered in his impressive way; “my
name is Florian.”
“But _I_ can’t call you so,” Mrs Palmer answered, recovering herself,
with a merry little laugh.
“It’s usual in Society,” Florian responded with truth. “Just ask Will
Deverill.”
Will nodded assent. “Quite true,” he admitted. “Men and women alike in
London know him only as Florian. It’s a sort of privilege he has, an
attribute of his own. He’s arrogated it to himself, and the world at
large acquiesces in his whim, and grants it.”
“It makes things seem so much more real and agreeable, you see, as Dick
Swiveller said to the marchioness,” Florian continued blandly. “Now
suppose we five form an elective family, a little brotherhood of our
own, a freemasonry of culture, and call one another, like brothers and
sisters, by our Christian names only! Wouldn’t that be delightful! I’ve
just been explaining to Ethel and Eva that I mean henceforth to Ethel
and Eva them. Soul gets nearer to soul without these flimsy barriers.
I’m Florian; this is Will; and you, Mrs Palmer, your Christian name
is——?”
The pretty widow drew back with a little look of alarm. “Oh no,” she
said, shortly; “I never could tell you my given name for anything. It’s
much too dreadful.” She pulled out a pencil from the pocket at her side.
“See here,” she said to Will, writing down one word for him on the
silver-cased tablets that hung pendant from her delicate Oriental
chatelaine, “there’s a name, if you like, for two Puritan parents to
burden the life of their poor innocent child with! Don’t tell Mr
Wood—or Florian if he wishes it; he’d make fun of it behind my back,
I’m perfectly certain. I know his way. To him nothing, not even a
woman’s name, is sacred.”
Will glanced at the word curiously. He couldn’t forbear a quiet smile.
“It’s bad enough, I must admit,” he answered, perforce. The Vision of
Beauty had been christened Jerusha!
“But I make it _Rue_ for short,” she added, after a moment, with a
deprecating smile.
Florian caught at the word, enraptured. “The very thing!” he cried,
eagerly. “Capital, capital, capital! ‘There’s rue for you, and here’s
some for me: we may call it herb-o’-grace o’ Sundays.’ But Rue shall be
your weekday name for the Brotherhood. Let’s read the roll-call!
Florian, Will, Rue, Ethel, Eva! Those are our names henceforth among
ourselves. We scorn formalities! No mystery for us. We abolish the
_misters_!”
And so indeed it was. As Will, Rue, and Florian, those three of the
Elective House knew each other thereafter.
CHAPTER XIII
A FIRST NIGHT
’Twas with no little trepidation that Linnet arrayed herself that
eventful night for her first appearance on this or any other public
platform. When her hair was dressed and her costume complete, Philippina
declared, with good-humoured admiration, she looked just lovely—for
Philippina at least was never jealous of her. And Philippina was right:
Linnet did look beautiful. She had tied her crossed kerchief very low
about the neck, so as to leave her throat bare for the better display of
Will Deverill’s corals. They became her admirably. Andreas Hausberger
inspected his prima donna with well-satisfied eye. The wise impresario
had heard, of course, where the necklet came from; but that didn’t in
the least disturb his serenity. Will Deverill was gone, evaporated into
space; and the coral at least was “good for trade,” inasmuch as it
enhanced and set off to the utmost the nut-brown alp-girl’s almost
gipsy-like beauty. For the sake of trade, Andreas could pardon much. And
Will Deverill in England was no serious rival.
At eight o’clock sharp the concert was to begin at one of the big
hotels. To the guests in the house it was just a matter of “some music,
I hear, to-night—the usual thing, don’t you know—Tyrolese singers with
a zither in the _salon_.” But to Linnet, oh, the difference! It was the
most important musical event, the most momentous performance in the
world’s history. She trembled like a child at the thought of standing
forth and singing her simple mountain songs alone, in a fine-furnished
room, before all those grand well-dressed and well-fed Britons. She
would have given thousands (in kreuzers), if only she had them, to
forego that ordeal. But Andreas Hausberger said “You must,” and she had
to obey him. And the blessed Madonna, in Britannia metal, on an oval
pendant, gave her courage for the trial.
By eight o’clock sharp, then, the troupe trooped in. Electric light, red
velveted chairs, soft carpet on the floor, gilded mirrors by the
mantelpiece and opposite console. So much grandeur and magnificence
fairly took poor Linnet’s breath away. ’Twas with difficulty she
faltered across the open space to a chair by the table which was placed
at one end of the room for the use of the performers. Then she raised
her eyes timidly—to know the worst. Some twenty-five people, more or
less listless all of them, composed the audience. Some leaned back in
their chairs and crossed their hands resignedly, as who expects to be
bored, and makes up his mind betimes to bear his boredom patiently. Some
read the latest _Times_ or the Vienna papers, hardly deigning to look up
as the performers entered. ’Twas a lugubrious function; more chilling
reception prima donna never met with. Linnet clutched the blessed
Madonna in her pocket convulsively. One breath of mild applause alone
reached her ears. “Pretty girl,” one stout Briton observed aloud in his
own tongue to his plentiful mate. Linnet looked down and blushed, for he
was staring straight at her.
“Let’s sit it out, here,” Florian exclaimed in the smoking-room. The
folding doors stood open, so that all might hear; but their group sat a
little apart—Will, Rue, and he—in the farther corner, away from the
draught, and out of sight of the musicians. “It’s more comfortable
so—just the family by itself; and besides, I’ve a theory of my own that
one should hear the zither through an open door; it mitigates and
modifies the metallic twang of the instrument.”
Will and Rue were all acquiescence. Next to a _tête-à-tête_, a
_parti-à-trois_ is the pleasantest form of society. So they kept their
seats still, in the rocking-chairs by the corner, and let the sound
float idly in to them through the open portal.
Linnet waited, all trembling. Thank heaven, it wasn’t her part to begin.
Franz Lindner came first with a solo on the zither. Bold, confident,
defiant, with his hat stuck a little on one side of his head, and his
feather in his band, turned Robbler-wise, wrong way, quite as jaunty as
ever, Franz faced his audience as if his life had been passed in
first-class hotels, and an Edison light had been the lamp of his
childhood. Nothing daunted or disconcerted by the novelty of the
circumstances, he played his piece through with a certain reckless
brilliancy, wholly in keeping with the keynote of the Tyrolese
character. Florian observed outside, with connoiseur complacency, that
the fellow had _brio_. But the audience went on unmoved with its _Times_
and its _Tagblatt_. The audience was chilling; Franz Lindner, accustomed
to his own mercurial and magnetic fellow-countrymen, could hardly
understand it. His self-love was mortified. He had expected a triumph, a
sudden burst of wild applause; he received instead a faint clap of the
hands from Ethel and Eva, and an encouraging nod from the mercantile
gentleman of nonconformist exterior.
Franz sat down—a smouldering and seething volcano.
Then came Linnet’s turn. She rose, all tremulous, in her pretty costume,
with her beautiful face and her shrinking timidity. Old gentlemen peeped
askance over the edge of their papers at the good-looking girl; young
ladies took stock of her abundant black hair and her dainty kerchief.
“She’s going to sing,” Ethel whispered. “Isn’t she pretty, Eva? And just
look, how very odd, she’s got a necklet exactly like the ones Mrs Palmer
gave us!”
As they gazed and gurgled, Linnet opened her mouth, and began her song,
quivering. She trembled violently, but her very trembling increased the
nightingale effect of those beautiful trills which form so marked a
feature in all Tyrolese singing. Her throat rose and fell; her clear
voice flooded the room with bell-like music. At the very first line, the
old gentlemen laid their _Times_ contentedly on their laps, and beamed
attention through their spectacles; the old ladies let the
knitting-needles stand idle in their hands, and looked up with parted
lips to listen. Andreas Hausberger was delighted. Never in her life had
Linnet sung so before. Occasion had brought her out. And he could judge
of her here more justly than at home; he was quite sure now he had found
a treasure.
But at the very first sound of her well-known voice, Will started from
his chair. He clapped his hands, fingers apart, to his cheeks in wonder,
and stared hard at Florian. Florian in return opened his eyes very wide,
leaned back in his seat with a sudden smile of recognition, and stared
hard at Will, with a certain amused indulgence. Then both with one voice
cried out all at once in surprise, “That’s Linnet!”
After that, it was Florian who first broke the forced silence. “I see in
this the finger of fate,” he murmured slowly. But Will didn’t want to
see the finger of fate, or any other abstraction; what he wished to see,
then and there, was his recovered Linnet. It was thoughtless, perhaps,
to disturb her song; but young blood is thoughtless. Without a moment’s
hesitation, he walked unobtrusively but hastily into the room in front,
and took a seat near the door, just opposite Linnet. Andreas Hausberger
didn’t notice him, his eyes were firmly fixed on Linnet’s face, watching
anxiously to see how his pupil would acquit herself in this her first
great ordeal. But Linnet—Linnet saw him, and felt from head to foot a
great thrill break over her, like a wave of fire, in long undulating
movement. The wave rose f
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