Linnet: A Romance
must go with us. It’s useless trying to keep you and your Oread apart
any longer, so I won’t attempt it. Two’s company, three’s none. The only
thing left for a wise man like me—is just to walk on in front and take
a German lesson from Fräulein Philippina.”
Fortunately for Florian, too, Philippina proved to be one of those gay
and easy-going young ladies with whom the want of a common tongue
wherein to express one’s thoughts forms a very slight barrier to the
course of conversation. Already at her châlet he had guessed as much;
and now on the hill-top, they walked along side by side, chatting and
laughing as they went, with expressive eyes, and making themselves
mutually understood as much by nods and becks and wreathèd smiles—so
Florian poetically phrased it in his silent soul—as by any articulate
form of the German language. Before they had reached the Schloss they
stood already on excellent terms with one another, and Florian even
consoled himself for the enforced loss of Linnet’s society with the
reflection that Philippina was, after all, in many ways “a great deal
more practical.”
But Linnet, walking behind, was in the seventh heavens. She had found
her Engländer once more, and that alone would have been enough for her.
But that wasn’t all; this second chance meeting, perfectly natural as it
was—for Andreas had but followed the stream of tourists
southward—impressed her simple mind with the general idea that the
world, after all, wasn’t as big as she had supposed it, and that she’d
be liable now to meet the _gnädige Herr_ wherever she went, quite
casually and accidentally. Not, indeed, that she troubled her head much
just then about the future in any way: with Will by her side, she lived
wholly in the present. She didn’t even ask him why he had gone away from
Innsbruck without coming to say goodbye to her in person; she didn’t
utter a single word of reproach or complaint; she accepted all that; she
took it all for granted. Will never could marry her; she didn’t expect
him to marry her: a gentleman like him couldn’t marry a peasant-girl; a
Catholic like herself couldn’t marry a heretic who scarcely bowed the
knee to Our Blessed Lady. But she loved him for all that, and she was
happy if he would but let her walk beside him. And in this she was
purely and simply womanly. True love doesn’t ask any end beyond itself:
it is amply satisfied with being loved and loving.
And Will? Well, Will had a poet’s nature, and the poet lives in the
passing emotion. Only a man of moods can set moods before us. Like
Linnet herself, Will thought little of the future when Linnet was beside
him. He meant her no harm, as he said truly to Florian; but he meant her
no good either: he meant nothing at all but to walk by her side, and
hold her hand in his, and feel his heart beat hard, and her finger-touch
thrill through him. Walking thus as in a mist, they passed Dorf Tyrol;
and the road at once grew wilder and more romantic. It grew also more
sequestered, with deeper bends and nooks, as it turned the corners of
little ravines and gulleys, where they could look at one another more
frankly with the eager eyes of young love; and once, Will raised his
hand to Linnet’s nut-brown cheek, and pressed it tenderly. Linnet said
nothing, but the hot blood rushed to her face with mingled shame and
pleasure; and who was so glad as she that Will Deverill should touch
her!
The path wound round a deep gorge, overhanging a torrent, with Schloss
Tyrol itself frowning beyond on its isolated crag—a picturesque and
half-ruinous mediæval fortress, almost isolated on a peninsular mass of
crumbling mud-cliff, interspersed with the ice-worn débris of
pre-historic glaciers. ’Tis a beautiful spot. Pretty Alpine rills,
tearing headlong down the sides, have carved out for themselves steep
ravines which all but island the castle; their banks rise up sheer as
straight walls of cliff, displaying on their faces the grey mud of the
moraine, from which the ice-worn boulders project boldly here and there,
or tumble from time to time to encumber the littered beds of the streams
that dislodged them. But what struck Florian most of all, as he paused
and looked, was the curious effect produced where a single large boulder
has resisted the denuding action of the streams and the rainfall, so as
to protect the tapering column of hardened mud beneath it. Each big rock
thus stood paradoxically perched on the summit of a conical pillar,
called locally an earth-pyramid, and forming, Florian thought, the most
singular element in this singular landscape. Close to its end the track
bends round an elbow to skirt the ravine, and then plunges for a hundred
yards or more into a dark and narrow underground passage through the
isthmus of moraine stuff, before drawing up at the portcullis of the
dismantled fortress. A more romantically mysterious way of approaching a
mediæval stronghold Florian could hardly imagine: it reminded him of
Ivanhoe or the Castle of Otranto.
But as Florian and Philippina disappeared under the shadow of the
darkling archway, Will found himself alone for one moment with Linnet,
screened from observation by the thick trellis-work of the vineyards.
They were walking close together, whispering in one another’s ears those
eternal nothings which lovers have whispered in the self-same tones, but
in a hundred tongues, for ten thousand ages. Occasion favoured them.
Will glanced round for a moment; then with a rapid movement he drew the
trembling girl to himself, half unresisted. Her cheek was flushed,
partly with joy, partly with fear, that he should dare to lay hands on
her. His boldness thrilled her through with a delicious thrill—the true
womanly joy in being masterfully handled. “No, no,” she cried in a faint
voice; “you mustn’t, you mustn’t.” But she said it shyly, as one who
half-wishes her words to fail of their effect: and Will never heeded her
“no”—and oh, how glad she was that Will never heeded it! He held her
face up to his, and bent his own down tenderly. Linnet tried to draw
back, yet pursed up her lips at the same time and let him kiss her when
he tried; but she made him try first, though when at last he succeeded,
she felt the kiss course trembling through her inmost being.
It was but a moment, yet that moment to her was worth many eternities.
For a second of time she nestled against him confidingly, for now he was
hers, and she was his for ever. Their lips had sealed it. But before he
could steal another, she had broken away from him again, and stood
half-penitent, half-overjoyed, by the roadside, a little way from him.
“No more now!” she said, gravely, lifting one finger in command; “we
must follow Herr Florian.” And with that, they plunged at once into the
gloom of the tunnel.
What happened by the way, no one knows save themselves; but, two minutes
later, with blushing cheeks, they rejoined their companions by the
gateway of the castle. Even flushed as she was, Linnet couldn’t help
admiring it. It was beautiful, wonderful. The ancient wealth and dignity
of the first counts of Schloss Tyrol remain well reflected to this day
in the rude magnificence of their Romanesque residence. Linnet looked up
with wonder at the round-arched portal of the principal doorway, richly
carved with quaint squat figures of grotesque fancy, naïve, not to say
childish and uncouth, in design, but admirable and exquisite in
execution. “Tenth-century workmanship!” Florian said, with a bland
smile, as he looked up at it, condescendingly; and Will, pulling himself
together again, explained to the two girls in detail the various
meanings of the queer little figures. Here were Adam and Eve; here Jonah
and the whale; here saints revelled in Heaven; here, lost souls rolled
in torment. Linnet gazed, and admired the beauty of the door—but still
more, Will’s learning. If only she could understand such things as that!
But there!—he was so wise, and she so ignorant!
They passed into the hall—that stately old Rittersaal, adorned with
marble carvings of the same infantile type—and looked sheer down from
the windows a thousand feet on to the valley below, with the falls of
the Adige behind, and a sea of tumultuous porphyritic mountains surging
and rolling in the farther background. ’Twas a beautiful view in itself,
rendered more beautiful still by its picturesque setting of
semi-circular arches, divided and supported by slender shafts of
polished alabaster. To an untutored girl of Linnet’s native artistic
temperament, it was delightful to pass through those lordly halls and
into that exquisite chapel with its quaint old frescoes, in company with
somebody who could explain their whole meaning to her simple
intelligence so well as Will Deverill. Though she felt her own
ignorance—felt it acutely, sensitively—she felt at the same time how
fast she could learn from such a teacher; and as she dropped on her
knees before the twelfth-century Madonna in the spangled shrine of that
antiquated chantry, it was not for herself alone that she murmured below
her breath, in very tremulous tones, an Ave Maria.
Will and Florian talked, too, of the Schloss and its history. Linnet
listened with all her ears, though she hardly understood half the
English words they used to describe it—how it commanded the whole vast
plain of Meran and Botzen, the widest and most populous in the Eastern
Alps, one basking garden of vines and Indian corn and fruit-trees,
thickly dotted with hamlets, churches, and castles. “You can see why the
counts who lived here spread their power and their name by slow degrees
over the whole of this country,” Will said, as they gazed down on it.
And then he went on to talk of how the Counts of Tyrol gradually
absorbed Meran and Botzen, and in course of time, by their possession of
the Brenner route, the great mediæval highway from Italy to Germany,
acquired the over-lordship of the whole wide tract which is now called
after them. Oh, what grand words he used! Linnet listened, and wondered
at them. She caught, from time to time, the name of Margaret
Maultasch—that Meg of the Pocket-Mouth who made over her dominions to
the house of Austria—and learned from stray hints how the Counts of the
new line moved their capital northward from Meran to Innsbruck. It was
marvellous how Herr Will, who was a stranger from England, should know
so much more about her people’s history than she herself did! But there!
what did she say? Herr Will knew everything.
Florian and Philippina went off by themselves after awhile among the
ruins of the ramparts. Linnet was left alone with Will again by the
windows of the Rittersaal. All this historical talk had inflamed her
eager mind with vague hopes and possibilities. Why should not she too
know? Why should not she too be fit for him, like the fair-haired lady?
“Herr Will,” she said at last, turning round to him with a shy look in
her shrinking eyes, “How I wish you could teach me! How I wish you could
tell me how to learn such things! We shall be here for a month. Why
shouldn’t I begin? Why shouldn’t I learn now? We may see each other
often.”
“Will you be on the hill behind the town to-morrow?” Will asked,
half-ashamed of himself for these endless breakings-off, and these fresh
re-commencements.
“Perhaps,” Linnet answered timidly, in her accustomed phrase; “if
Philippina will come . . . and if she doesn’t tell Andreas.”
“Where will you be?” Will inquired, taking her hand in his own once more
and holding it.
Linnet looked down and paused. “I _might_ be near the cross at the turn
of the road by the second oratory, about ten o’clock,” she said very
low, “if Our Lady permits me.”
Will pressed her hand hard. “And where do you sing to-night?” he asked,
with a little smile of pleasure. “I must come and hear you.”