Grant Allen.
L I N N E T
A R O M A N C E
By GRANT ALLEN
Author of “UNDER SEALED ORDERS,”
“MISS CAYLEY’S ADVENTURES,” ETC.
New York : : : NEW AMSTERDAM
BOOK COMPANY : : : : MCM
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
LINNET
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.