Linnet: A Romance
That was all Will knew at the time, or the rest of the audience either.
They were only aware that a beautiful young woman in Tyrolese costume
was rendering a mountain song for them as they never before in their
lives had heard such simple melodies rendered. But to Linnet herself, a
strange thing had happened. As her eyes met Will’s, and that wave of
fire ran resistlessly through her, she was conscious of a weird sense
she had never felt before, a sudden failure of sound, a numb deadening
of the music. It was all a vast blank to her. She heard not a note she
herself was uttering. Her ears were as if stopped from without and
within; she knew not how she sang, or whether she sang at all; all she
knew was, that, come what might, for Will’s dear sake, she must keep on
singing. The little access of terror this weird seizure gave her in
itself added much to the quality of her performance. Unable to correct
herself and keep herself straight in her singing by the evidence of her
ears, she devoted extravagant and incredible pains in her throat and
bosom to the mere muscular effort of note-production and
note-modulation. She sang her very best—for Will Deverill was there to
listen and applaud her! Franz Lindner! Who talked of Franz Lindner now?
She could pour out her whole soul in one dying swan-song, now she had
found once more her dear, kind, lost Engländer!
Instinctively, as she sang, her hand toyed with the coral—her left, for
with the right she still clasped Our Lady. A grand Frau had crept in
just behind Will’s back—a smiling, fair-haired Frau, all soft cheeks
and dimpled chin, and aglow with diamonds. She had seated herself on a
chair by Will Deverill’s side. Herr Florian, too, had crept in at the
same time, and taken the next place beside the fair-haired lady. They
nodded and smiled and spoke low to one another. At the sight, Linnet
clutched the coral necklace still harder. She was a very great lady—oh,
the diamonds in her ears!—and she talked to Will Deverill with familiar
carelessness!
And as Linnet clutched the necklet, a shade broke over Rue Palmer’s
face. With a quick little gasp, she leaned across to Will, growing paler
as she recognised that familiar trinket. “Why, _this_ is the girl,” she
whispered, “from the inn at St Valentin.”
And Will whispered back, all unconscious, “Yes; this is the girl. And
now you can see why I sent her the necklet!”
Through the rest of that song, there was breathless silence. At its end,
the old gentlemen and ladies, after a short hushed stillness, broke into
a sudden little burst of applause. There was a moment’s interval, and
then the demonstration renewed itself more vigorously than before.
People turned to one another and said, “What a beautiful voice!” or,
“She sings divinely!” By this time the loungers who held aloof in the
smoking-room were crowding about the doorway. A third time they clapped
their hands; and at each round of applause, Linnet, alternately pale and
flushed with excitement, dropped a little mountain curtsey, and half
cried, and half smiled at them. Her hearing had returned with the first
symptom of clapping hands; she could catch the vague murmur of satisfied
criticism; she could catch Andreas Hausberger’s voice whispering low in
an aside, “Very well sung, Linnet.” But her eyes were fixed on Will, and
on Will alone; and when Will framed his lips to one word of approbation,
the hot blood rushed to her cheeks in a torrent of delight that at last
she had justified her Engländer’s praises.
Linnet was the heroine of that evening’s performance. Andreas Hausberger
sang “He was a jäger bold”; Philippina, looking arch, twanged the
thankless zither. But the audience waited cold till ’twas Linnet’s turn
again. Then, as she rose, they signified their approval once more by
another little storm of applause and encouragement. Linnet curtsied, and
curtsied, and curtsied again, and stared straight at Will Deverill. This
second time she sang in less fear and trembling; she could hear her own
notes now, and Will’s face encouraged her. She acquitted herself, on the
whole, even better than before. Her rich pure voice, though
comparatively untrained, exhibited itself at its best in that pathetic
little ballad of her native hills, “The Alp-girl’s Lover.” She sang it
most dramatically, with one hand pressed hard on her heaving bosom. At
the end, the audience clapped till Linnet was covered with blushes. A
mere scratch performance before some casual tourists in the drawing-room
of an hotel; but to Linnet, it came home as appreciation and praise from
the grandest of gentlefolk.
She sang three songs in all. Her hearers would gladly have made it six;
but Andreas Hausberger knew his trade, and stuck firm to his programme.
When all was finished, the foreign Herrschaft crowded round; Herr
Florian shook Linnet’s hand; Herr Will pressed it tenderly. The grand
lady with the diamonds was graciousness itself. “With a voice like that,
my child,” she said, “you shouldn’t be singing here; you should be
training for the stage in some great musical centre.” Many of the other
guests, too, gathered round and congratulated her. It was noised abroad
in the room that this was the pretty peasant girl’s absolute _début_,
and that Mr Deverill and Mr Wood had met her as a _sennerin_ at an inn
in the Zillerthal. More voices than one praised her voice
enthusiastically. But Will Deverill whispered low, “You have done
yourself justice. As I told you at St Valentin, so I tell you
again—Heaven only knows how high that voice may carry you.”
One thing Linnet noticed for herself, unprompted. That first appearance
in operatic peasant dress as a musician in a troupe, had raised her at a
bound in the scale of social precedence. At St Valentin, she was an
alp-girl; at Innsbruck, all those fine-dressed ladies and gentlemen
accepted her at first sight as a public singer. They spoke to her with a
politeness to which she was hitherto unused. They bent forward towards
her with a quiet sort of deference and equality which she felt
instinctively the very same persons would never have shown to the
_sennerin_ in her châlet. Their curiosity was less frank; their
questions were less blunt and better put than she was used to. It was
partly the costume, no doubt, but partly also the function: she was a
peasant girl in the Zillerthal; at Innsbruck she was a member of the
musical profession.
She had only a second or two with Will that night. While the other
guests crowded round her, uttering their compliments for the most part
in rather doubtful German, which Linnet answered (by Andreas
Hausberger’s wise advice) in her pretty broken English, Will dropped but
a few words of praise and congratulation. After all was over, however,
and they were going away for the night to the Golden Eagle, he stood at
the door, bare-headed, his hat in his hand, to say goodbye to her.
Andreas Hausberger’s keen eye watched their interview close. Will held
Linnet’s hand—that transfigured Linnet’s, in her snow-white sleeves and
her corset-laced bodice—held it lingering in his own with a mutual
pressure, as he murmured, not too low for Andreas to overhear (’twas
wisest so), “I’m pleased to see you wore my necklet.”
And Linnet, half-afraid how she should answer him aright, with Andreas
standing by and straining his ear for every word, replied in German,
with a timid smile, raising her eyes to his shyly, “I’m so glad you were
pleased. I wanted to wear it. It’s a beautiful present. Thank you so
very much for it.”
That was all. She had no more talk than just that with her Engländer.
But she went back to the Golden Eagle, and lay awake all night thinking
of him. Of him, and of the fair-haired Frau who sat smiling by his side.
That fair-haired Frau gave Linnet some pangs of pain. Not that she was
jealous; that ugliest of all the demons that beset human nature had no
place, thank Heaven, in Linnet’s great heart. But she thought to herself
with a sigh how much fitter for Will was that grand fair Frau than ever
she herself could be. How could she expect him to make anything of
_her_, when he could sit and talk all day long in great covered courts
with grand ladies like that, his natural equals? He could think, after
the Frau, no more of _her_, than she, after him, could think of Franz
Lindner. And yet—and at that thought the billowy wave of fire broke
over her once more from head to foot—he had left the grand lady in the
room outside to come in and hear her song the moment he recognised her!
In the _salon_ that same evening, when Linnet was gone, Rue stood
talking for a minute by the fireside to Will Deverill. “She sings like
an angel,” the pretty American said, with unaffected admiration of the
peasant girl’s gifts. “What a glorious voice! Florian’s quite right.
It’s a pity she doesn’t get it properly trained at once. It’s fit for
anything.”
“So I think,” Will answered, looking her frankly in the face. “She needs
teaching, of course—the very best teaching. But if only she gets it, I
see no reason to doubt she might do what she likes with it.”
“And she’s beautiful, too,” Rue went on, without one marring touch of
any feminine _but_. “How queenly she’d look as a Mary Stuart or a
Cleopatra! Your necklet suits her well.” She paused, and reflected a
second. “It’s a pity,” she went on, musingly, as if half to herself,
“she shouldn’t have the brooch and the earrings to match it!”
And next day, sure enough, at the Golden Eagle, about one o’clock, when
Linnet went up to her own room after early dinner, she found on her
dressing-table a small cardboard box containing some coral ornaments to
go with the necklet, and this little inscription in a feminine hand
inside it:—“For Linnet, from one who admired last night her beautiful
singing.”
Then Linnet knew at least that the fair-haired lady too had a great
heart, and owed her no grudge for the possession of Will Deverill’s
necklet. For she divined by pure instinct what admirer had sent them.
CHAPTER XIV
AND IF FOR EVER
“It’s no use wasting words,” Florian observed, with decision. “As our
old friend Homer justly remarks, ‘Great is the power of words; wing’d
words may make this way or that way.’ I’m a practical man myself: I
stick close to the facts; they’re solid; they’re tangible; they’re not
to be evaded. I won’t allow myself to be argued out of a reasonable
conviction. I put it like this: if it was right for you, as you
admitted, to leave St Valentin, then, by parity of reasoning, it’s right
for you now to leave Innsbruck instantly. Mill, Whately, and Jevons
would allow that that’s logic. Why did we come here? Partly, no doubt,
to instruct ourselves in the contents of this most interesting town; but
mainly, I submit, to deliver you forthwith from your milkmaid’s
clutches. Why should we go away again? Partly because we’ve seen all
that Innsbruck contains of historical or artistic; but largely, also,
because the milkmaid insists upon pursuing us through the land and
jingling her bells till she compels us to listen to her.”
“She didn’t know we were here,” Will interjected, bristling up.
“She didn’t know we were here, that’s true; but she’s followed us all
the same, cow-bells and pails and all, and we must break away at once
from her. I’ve said so to Rue, and Rue fully agrees with me. As I told
you before, if you mean the girl harm,—well and good; I don’t meddle
with you. But if you mean to go on shilly-shallying like this,—saying
goodbye for ever—and sending her coral necklets; meeting her again at
hotels—and applauding her rapturously; saying goodbye once more—and
letting it run, for aught I know to the contrary, to diamonds and
rubies—why, what I say is this, I’ve seen the same thing tried on more