Linnet: A Romance
mountains, has always a most invigorating and enlivening effect upon the
jaded intellect. And Will’s holiday in the Zillerthal had inspired him
by degrees with fresh ideas and scenes for a Tyrolese drama. It was a
drama of the hills, with some poeticised version of Linnet for its
heroine—a half-musical sketch, a little mountain operetta, the songs in
which were to be all of his own composing. Hitherto, he had never taken
himself quite seriously as a composer; but Linnet and Andreas Hausberger
had praised the few pieces he played over for them at St Valentin, and
Rue had thought well of the stray snatches from his notes he had given
them, under protest, on the very untuneful hotel piano. Now the idea
occurred to him to write and compose a little play of his own, while the
picture of Linnet was still fresh in his brain; and this holiday Rue
dangled so temptingly before him would just suffice to get the first
scaffolding of his piece together. The filling in he could manage at his
leisure in London. So Rue won her point; but ’twas Linnet who won it for
her.
“Yes; I’ll go to Meran,” he said at last, after a long break in their
talk, “and I’ll settle down to work there, and I won’t even wait to say
goodbye to Linnet.”
Poets are weak, however, where a woman is concerned. In this respect, it
may be allowed, Apollo’s sons closely resemble the rest of the children
of Adam. Will left Innsbruck, indeed, without bidding Linnet goodbye,
but he couldn’t refrain from just dropping her a line before he went, to
say he must leave her. “To meet you once more,” he wrote, “would be only
to part again. I must say farewell, and this time for ever. But, Linnet,
it makes my heart ache to do it!” You see, he was a poet.
CHAPTER XV
A CRITICAL EVENING
Florian and Rue, as it happened, were very ill-informed as to the
Tyrolese minstrel market, otherwise they would certainly never have
chosen Meran as a place of refuge for Will Deverill against the pressing
temptations of his acquaintance with Linnet. They chose it because it
was a delightful and frequented autumn resort; because the climate was
charming and the sunshine unfailing; because the grape-cure was then on
in full swing in the valley; and because everybody else at Innsbruck
that moment was going there. For those very reasons, the wisdom of the
serpent might have taught them to avoid it: ’twas the innocence of the
dove that led them to fly right into it. In point of fact, Meran is
crowded in October and November. High well-born Graf and consumptive
plebeian disport themselves all day long on the leafy promenades, eating
grapes as they go, beside the band and the Kurhaus. It stands to the
world of Berlin and Vienna as Cannes and Mentone to the world of London.
That was precisely why Andreas Hausberger had marked it out long since,
as the next southward point on their way Riviera-wards.
“Are there many hotels there?” Franz Lindner asked dubiously, much
crestfallen at his own comparative failure with the public of Innsbruck.
A little of his jauntiness had been washed for the moment out of Franz
Lindner’s figure; he looked limper in the back and not so stiff in the
neck—nay, even his hat stood cocked on his head at a less aggressive
angle.
“There isn’t anything else,” Andreas Hausberger answered in his Western
style. “Meran and Obermais are one enormous _gasthaus_. If Linnet does
as well as she has done at Innsbruck, it’ll take us take three weeks or
a month, at least, to get right through with them. We took a good bit,
considering all things, the other evening. I think she draws; I noticed
old gentlemen slipped their florins under their palms into the plate
unobtrusively. Besides, in a Kurort, she’ll soon get talked about.
People at one hotel or pension will speak of us at another—‘Seen this
Tyrolese troupe going about in the place? Pretty girl; sings sweetly.’ I
take it there can’t be less than thirty houses in Meran where we could
get an audience. That carries us well on to the end of November. By that
time, San Remo and Bordighera’ll be filling up fast, and from there we
can go on to Cannes, Nice, Mentone.”
So three days later saw them safe at Meran. To Linnet, that journey from
north to south, across the great ridge of the Alps, seemed like
transplantation into an earthly fairyland. She had never seen the
luscious wealth of vineclad lands before; for North and South Tyrol are
two different countries, one cold, bleak, Germanic, the other soft,
warm, Italian. Meran itself appeared to her ardent imagination more
beautiful than anything eye hath seen or mind conceived of. And, indeed,
it is beautiful. Whoever knows it loves it. A brawling little mountain
stream, the Passer, rushes headlong from the glaciers of the Otzthaler
Alps through a wild upland glen, to join in due time the broader stream
of the Adige, which threads the bleak Vintschgau on its precipitous
course from the lofty snow-fields of the Ortler and the Wild-Spitze.
Near the point where the two unite, on a long tongue of land, the little
town of Meran nestles close among its vines, under shelter of the
rounded ice-worn Küchelberg. It clings with its ancient walls, its
steeples, its watch-towers, as if glued to the lower slopes of the
basking mountain. Linnet gazed at it, delighted. For here, on the south
side of the Alps, looking down the broad valley to sunny Italy, the
vegetation differed greatly, both in richness and in character, from
anything she had ever seen in her native Zillerthal. Indeed, even Italy
itself, parched as it often is with excessive heat, seldom shows such
wild luxuriance of foliage and fruit as these green and well-watered
South Tyrolese valleys. There is a bowery, flowery lavishness and
lushness about it all that defies description. The vines that trail
loose across their trellised archways; the gourds that hang pendent from
their wooden frails; the great yellow pumpkins that lean temptingly over
every terraced wall; the lizards that bask blinking on the sun-smitten
rock-face; the crimson sprays of Virginia creeper that droop in festoons
from the brown verandah wood-work of coquettish châlets, mingled with
the pine-clad slopes and bare snow-sprinkled peaks of the upper
background, make a charming hybrid between Switzerland and Lombardy.
Imagine for yourself an ancient German town, with mouldering walls and
high turrets, like Boppard or Andernach, and crenellated castles of
quaint mediæval architecture, but with arcaded streets and Italian
loggias, plumped down incongruously in the midst of this half-Alpine,
half-southern scenery, and you get a very fair bird’s-eye view indeed,
in its way, of the main traits of Meran.
On the very first morning of her arrival in the town, Linnet took her
way out with Franz Lindner and Philippina along the brawling stream that
forms the centre and rallying point of the gay little watering-place.
Meran is all parade, winter-garden, and band, and they walked through
its midst to see and be seen of the lounging Herrschaft. They were
dressed in full costume; ’twas a form of advertisement Andreas greatly
believed in. Franz held himself erect, with his feather still stuck
Robbler-wise, and his defiant air, as he strode through the crowd that
lined the promenade—the gayest, most varied, and most fashionable
throng Linnet had ever set eyes on. He and Philippina stared hard at the
world that displayed itself before them. German Jews from Frankfort,
great Viennese bankers, the round-faced, engaging Bavarian fräuleins,
the tall and tailor-made English lawn-tennis misses. Linnet gazed at
them, too, but cast her eyes now and then from the people and the shops
to the great cleft mountain peaks that soared everywhere high and
clear-cut into the sky above them.
In the lower part of their walk the river was smooth, and the roadway
was bordered by fantastic _pensions_ and quaint Tyrolese buildings; but
in the upper part, which they reached beyond a single bold arch of
stone-work that spanned the Passer, precipitous rocks began to hem it
in, the river assumed the guise of a foaming torrent, and the ruined
fortress of the Zenoburg, with its Romanesque portal, frowned down from
high above them on a water-worn gorge where the stream forced its way in
a dashing cataract. A little platform overhangs the very edge of the
cascade. Linnet stood there long, leaning over the iron rail, and gazing
with delight at the white foam beneath, and the placid deep green of the
calm rock-basin that received the mountain stream as it leapt from the
precipice.
Franz and Philippina wouldn’t let her remain there, however. With the
restlessness of their kind, they were eager to explore this new world
more fully. They strolled through the town, and up the hills behind,
where all seemed fresh and southern and romantic to Linnet. Through
green alleys of vines, trained like bowers over their heads, they
mounted at last by a cloven ravine to the chestnut-covered slopes, where
they looked down like a map on the vast garden of the Etschthal. It was
a wonderful view. Linnet drank it in eagerly. In front crouched the town
with its huddling red roofs wedged in between the hill and the scurrying
river; beyond lay a wide plain of such luxuriant tilth as Linnet till
then had never dreamt of. Villages and churches clustered thick by the
dozen on slope and hill-top; but what added the last touch of charm to
the strange scene in Linnet’s eyes was the extraordinary number and
variety of its feudal châteaux. Every height was crowned by its
castellated Schloss, ivy-clad Planta, huge sun-smitten Labers, the
terraced front of Rametz, the frowning bastions of Fragsburg: Franz
Lindner, with his keen eyes, could count no less than forty-three of
them. The exhilaration of the fresh scene, and of the southern trees and
creepers, so different from the stunted pines of their own chilly
Zillerthal, filled Linnet with a certain vague and indefinable delight:
had but her Engländer been there, she would have been perfectly happy.
Andreas Hausberger had taken charge of the health of his troupe, in
strict accordance with his own favourite theories. The two girls were to
walk on the hills for three hours every morning. They were to dine thus
and thus. They were to do or avoid this, that, or the other thing. He
himself had gone off meanwhile to one of the smaller hotels to make
arrangements beforehand for that evening’s concert. One of the smaller
hotels, _bien entendu_, for Andreas knew well the money value of mere
gossip as a means of advertisement. Not till he had seen what impression
Linnet made on the public of the lesser houses would he launch her on
the Meranhof or the Erzherzog Johann. That ensured him the full benefit
of the talk of the town. A shrewd man, Andreas Hausberger! By the time
he reached those larger and richer houses in his nightly rounds, he
didn’t doubt the world of Meran would have heard and tattled much of his
new-found singer; people would say to one another, “Don’t miss the
Tyrolese troupe that’s coming to us to-night; they say there’s one girl
in it worth seeing and hearing.” For Andreas was above all things a man
of the world; he never threw away the chance of earning an extra gulden.
That evening, in due course, their concert came off at the Austria at
Obermais. You know the Austria?—a small but select and aristocratic
_pension_, much affected by the Von So-and-so’s of Berlin and Vienna.
The result (in net cash) surpassed the prudent Andreas’s highest
expectations. Though no Will Deverill was there to inspire her efforts,
Linnet sang divinely. Indeed, to say the truth, though she had met him
and lost him once more at Innsbruck, that meeting and losing, instead of