Linnet: A Romance
and then, yielding to the first impulse of her shy rustic nature, fled
away without one word, leaving Will face to face with that accusing
moralist.
The epicurean philosopher seated himself, like stern justice in
miniature, beside his erring friend. His face was grave: when Florian
did gravity, he did it, as life did everything else, “consummately.” For
a minute or two he only stared hard at Will, slowly nodding his head
like an earthenware mandarin, and stroking his smooth chin in profound
meditation. At the end of that time, he delivered his bolt, point blank.
“Tomorrow,” he said, calmly, “we go on to Innsbruck.”
“Why so?” Will asked, with a dogged air of dissent.
“Because,” Florian answered, with crushing dialectic, “we never intended
to spend our whole time on the upper Zillerthal, did we?”
This sudden flank movement took Will fairly by surprise. For Florian was
quite right. Their plan of campaign on leaving London included the South
Tyrol, Verona, and Milan. “But a day or two longer,” he put in,
half-imploringly, thus caught off his guard. “Just a day or two longer
to . . . to settle things up a bit.”
Stern justice was inexorable. “Not one other night,” Florian answered,
severely. “The lotus has by this time been sufficiently eaten. I see
what this means. I know now why you’ve kept me here so long at St
Valentin. With Innsbruck and Cortina and the untrodden Dolomites
beckoning me on to come, you’ve planted me plump in this hole, and kept
me here at your side—all for the sake of one Tyrolese cow-girl. In the
name of common morality,” and Florian frowned like a very puisne judge,
“I protest against these most irregular and improper proceedings.”
“I never meant the girl any harm,” Will answered, with a faint flush.
“That’s just it, my dear fellow. I know very well you didn’t. That’s the
head and front of your offending. If you _had_ meant her harm, of course
I could much more readily have forgiven you.”
“Florian,” Will said, looking up, “let’s be serious, please, for once.
This is a serious matter.”
Florian pursed his thin lips, and knitted his white brow judicially.
“H’m, h’m,” he said, with slow deliberateness. “It’s as bad as that, is
it? Why, Deverill, I assure you, I’ve rarely—if ever—been as serious
as this in all my life before. Don’t look at me like that. I mean just
what I say. I’m not thinking about the girl, but about _you_, my dear
fellow. The morals of these parts, as you very well know, are
primitive—primitive. It won’t do _her_ much harm, even if it gets
noised about, to have been seen on the hills, alone in the grey dawn,
hand in hand with an Englishman. This is no place for Oriental seclusion
of women. Indeed, from what I hear, the Arcadian relations of these
unchaperoned alp-girls with their lovers from the plains must be
something truly sweet in their unaffected simplicity. Herr Hausberger
was telling me last night that when an alp-girl marries, all the hunters
and peasants, her discarded lovers, whom she has admitted to the
intimacy of her châlet on the mountains, leave a cradle at the door of
her chosen husband on the night of the wedding. The good man wakes up
the morning after his marriage to find staring him in the face, on his
own threshold, these tangible proofs of his wife’s little slips in her
spinster existence. . . . It’s a charming custom. I find it quite
economical. He knows the worst at once. It saves him the trouble, so
common among ourselves, of finding them out for himself piecemeal in the
course of his later relations.”
“You are wandering from the question,” Will interrupted, testily. He
didn’t quite relish these generalised innuendoes against poor Linnet’s
character.
“Not at all, not at all,” Florian went on very gravely. “The point of
these remarks lies in the application thereof, as Captain Cuttle puts
it. . . . When Linnet marries, you mean, I suppose, to increase the
number of the delicate little offerings presented at her door by——”
Will started up and glared at him. “You shall not speak like that,” he
cried in a very angry voice, “of such a girl as Linnet.”
The little man waved one dainty white hand with a deprecating gesture
towards his excited friend. “This is too bad,” he said, sighing, “very
bad indeed, far worse than I imagined. I said it on purpose, just to see
what you were driving at. And I find out the worst. If you mean the girl
no harm, and take a slighting little jest on her to heart like that, why
your case is desperate—an aggravated attack, complicated by incipient
matrimonial symptoms. You need change of air, change of scene, change of
company. Law of Medes and Persians, it’s Innsbruck to-morrow! You go
with me as I bid, or I go without you. Demur, and I leave you at once to
your fate. You may stop with your cow-girl.”
“Don’t speak of her by that name!” Will broke in, half-angrily.
But Florian, for his part, was provokingly cool. “All A is A,” he said,
calmly, with irresistible logic—“and every cow-girl’s a cow-girl. I’ll
call her a boutrophista, or a neat-herding Phyllis, if it gives you any
pleasure. That’s neither here nor there. The point’s just this—You mean
the girl no harm: then what the deuce _do_ you mean? Are you going to
marry her?”
“No; certainly not,” Will answered. She was a very nice girl, and he
loved to talk with her—there was something so sweetly unsophisticated
in her ways that she charmed and attracted him. But marry her? No; the
very word surprised him; he had never even dreamt of it. In the first
place (though as yet he hadn’t as much as thought about that), he had
nothing to marry upon. And in the second place, if he had, could he take
a Tyrolese milkmaid fresh from the cowsheds in his tow to London, and
present her to his friends as Mrs Will Deverill?
“Then what the deuce _do_ you mean?” Florian repeated, persistently. His
sound common-sense, when he chose to let it loose from his veneer of
affectation, was no mean commodity.
Thus driven to bay, Will was forced to reply with a somewhat sheepish
air, “I don’t know that I mean anything. I’ve never tried to formulate
my state of mind to myself. She’s a very nice girl . . . for her class
and sort . . . and I like to talk to her.”
“And when you talk to her, you like to hold her hand and lean forward
like this, and stare with all your eyes, and look for all the world as
if you wanted to devour her! Oh yes; I’ve seen you. No, no, Will, it
won’t do; I’ve been there myself, and I know all about it. Looking at
the matter impartially, as a man of the world”—and Florian, drawing
himself up, assumed automatically, as those words rolled out, his most
magisterial attitude—“what I’m really afraid of is that you’ll get
gradually dragged into this rustic syren’s vortex, and be swallowed up
before you know it in the treacherous sea of matrimony. However, _you_
don’t believe that, and I know enough of the world to know very well
it’s no use, therefore, arguing out that aspect of the case with you. No
fellow will ever believe _he_ can be such a fool—till he catches
himself in church face to face at last with the awful reality. I prefer,
accordingly, to go on the other tack with you. If you don’t mean to
marry the girl, then, whether you know it or not, you mean no good to
her. I dare say you’ve got all sorts of conventional notions in your
head—which, thank heaven, I don’t share—about honour and so forth
. . . how a cow-girl’s virtue—I beg your pardon, a boutrophista’s, or a
neat-herding Phyllis’s—is as sacred at your hands as the eldest
daughter’s of a hundred marquises. But that’s neither here nor there. If
you don’t _marry_ the girl, and you don’t _ruin_ the girl, there’s only
one thing left possible—you must break the girl’s heart for her.
Between ourselves, being, I flatter myself, a tolerable psychologist, I
don’t for a moment suppose that’s what would actually happen; you’d get
yourself entangled, and you’d go on and on, and you’d flounder and
struggle, and you’d marry her in the end, just to save the girl misery.
But we’ll do poojah to your intellect at the expense of your heart, and
we’ll put it the other way, as you seem to prefer it. Very well, then;
sooner or later you’ll have to leave this place. No doubt, after what
I’ve seen this morning, it’ll cost the girl a wrench—her vanity must be
flattered by receiving so much undisguised attention from a real live
gentleman. But, sooner or later, as I say, come it must, of course; and
sooner, on the whole, will be better for her than later. The longer you
stop, the more she’ll fall in love with you; the quicker you get away
from her the less it’ll hurt her.”
He spoke the words of wisdom—according to his kind. Will rose again
with an effort, and started homeward. As they walked down the pasture,
and through the belt of pinewood, he said never a word. But he thought
all the more on Florian’s counsel. Till that morning, he had never tried
to face the question himself: he liked the girl—that was all; she sang
like a linnet; and he loved to be near her. But the longer he stopped,
the harder for her would be the inevitable breaking off. Just beyond the
pinewood Florian halted and fronted him. “See here, Will,” he said,
kindly, but with the world’s common sense, “it isn’t that I care
twopence myself what becomes of the girl—girls like that are just made
for you and me to play skittles with; if you meant her any harm I
wouldn’t for the world interfere with any other man’s little fancies.
All I want is to get you away from the place before you’ve time to
commit yourself. I use the other argument as an _argumentum ad hominem_
only. But as that it has its weight. The longer you stop, the harder
it’ll be in the end for her.”
Will drew a deep breath. His mind was made up now. “Very well, then,” he
said, slowly, though with an evident struggle; “if I must go, I must go.
I won’t haggle over a day. Let us make it to-morrow.”
CHAPTER X
HAIL, COLUMBIA!
And next morning, indeed, saw them safe at Innsbruck.
’Twas a pull to get away; Will frankly admitted to his own soul he felt
it so. But he saw it was right, and he went accordingly. Linnet, he
knew, had grown fond of him in those few days; when he asked her once
how it was she liked Franz Lindner less now than formerly, she looked up
at him with an arch smile, and, after a second’s pause, made the frank
avowal: “Perhaps it’s because now . . . I think Englishmen nicer.” At
the moment his heart had come up in his mouth with pleasure, as will
happen with all of us when a pretty woman lets us see for ourselves she
really likes us. But he must go all the same: for Linnet’s sake—he must
go: if illusion there were, he must at once disillusion her.
As for Linnet herself, she accepted the separation much more readily, to
say the truth, than Will ever imagined she could. It half-piqued him,
indeed, to find how easily she seemed to acquiesce in the inevitable.
She trembled when he told her, to be sure, and tears started to her
eyes; but she answered, none the less, in a fairly firm voice, that she
always knew the _gnädige Herr_ must go away in the end; that she hoped
he would remember her wherever he went; and _she_—with a deep sigh—she
could never forget his kindness. That, however, was all. Just a pressure
of her fingers, just a kiss on his hand, just a tear that dropped wet on
his outstretched palm as she bent her head over it in customary
obeisance, and Linnet was gone, and he saw no more of her that evening.
In the morning when he stood at the door to bid farewell to the
household, he fancied her eyes looked red with crying. But she grasped
his hand hard, for all that, and said goodbye without flinching. He gave
a florin or two as _Trinkgeld_ to each of the servants at the inn; but