Linnet: A Romance
ineffectual remonstrances, let her go her own way and live her own
artistic life unchecked to the top of her bent—the more so as he
perceived she sang best and most vigorously when least thwarted or
worried. Moreover, many well-advised friends assured him in private it
was desirable for an actress to know as much as possible of costume, of
colour, of posture, and of grouping, which could best be learned by
studying the works of the great early painters.
So Linnet went her way, undeterred by her husband, and educated herself
in general culture at the same time that she received her strict musical
training. She knew Raphael’s Sposalizio as intimately after a while as
she knew her own _châlet_; she gazed on the flowing lines of Luini’s
frescoes till they grew familiar to her eyes as the Stations of the
Cross in the old church at St Valentin. She drank in the cathedral with
an endless joy; she loved its innumerable pinnacles, its thousand
statues in the marble niches: she admired the gloomy antiquity of
mouldering Sant’ Ambrogio, the dim religious aisles of Santa Maria delle
Grazie. Amid surroundings like these, her artistic nature expanded by
degrees as naturally as a bud opens out into a flower before the summer
sunshine. She revelled in the architecture, the pictures, the statuary:
Milan stood to the soul of the peasant-singer as a veritable university.
It was the first time, too, that Linnet had ever found herself in a
bustling, business-like, modern city. The hurry and scurry were as new
as the art to her. The throng of men and women in the crowded streets,
the Piazza, brilliant with the flare of glowing lamps, the great
glass-roofed gallery where the gilded Lombard youth promenaded by night
in twos and threes, or sipped absinthe before the doors of dazzling
cafés: all these were quite fresh, and all these were, in their way,
too, an element of education. There are many who can see no more in
Milan than this: they know it only as the most go-ahead and modernised
of Italian cities. Linnet knew better. To her it was the town of
Leonardo and his disciples, of the great marble pile whose infinite
detail escapes and eludes the most observant eye, of the vast and
stately opera house where _Otello_ and _Carmen_ first unfolded their
wonders of sight and sound to her ecstatic senses. Wiser in her
generation, she accepted it aright as the vestibule and ante-chamber of
artistic Italy.
From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less
long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at
Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were
to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half
forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover—and her
husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the
Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place;
Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent,
entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what
moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra
Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful!
Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at
Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound
before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a
strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the
Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new
sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious
palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great
thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never
known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year
in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford.
Then Rome—the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the
loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres,
the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord
of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic
nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So
her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning
fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could
possibly teach her.
As spring returned, they went northward through Lombardy and the Brenner
once more on their way to Munich. Her own Tyrol looked more beautiful
than ever as they passed, with its unmelted snows lying thick on the
mountains. But, save for a night at Innsbruck, they might not stop
there. Yet, even after that short lapse of time in southern cities, oh,
how different, how altered little Innsbruck seemed to her! She had
thought it before such a grand big town; she thought it now so much
shrunken, so old-world, so quaint, so homely. And then, no Will Deverill
was there, as before, to brighten it. The mountains gazed down as of old
from their precipitous crags upon the nestling town; they were Tyrolese
and home-like; and therefore she loved them. But everything had a
smaller and meaner air than six months earlier; the queer old High
Street was just odd, not magnificent; the Anna Säule was dwarfed, the
Rathhaus had grown smaller. She had only seen Milan, Florence, Rome,
meanwhile; but Milan, Florence, Rome, made Innsbruck sink at once to its
proper place as a mere provincial capital. While they waited for the
Munich train next morning, she strolled into the Hofkirche, to see once
more Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant figures. She started at the
sight. After the Venus and the Laocoon it surprised her to think she
could so lately have stood awestruck before those naïf bronze abortions!
That summer they spent in Germany, almost wholly at Munich. There Linnet
went through a course of musical training under a well-known teacher,
and there, too, she had ample opportunities, at the same time, of
cultivating to the full her general artistic faculties. Next winter,
back to Italy—this time to Venice, Rome, and Naples. Linnet learnt much
once more; it was all so glorious; the Grand Canal, St Mark’s, the
Academy, the Frari, Sorrento, Capri, Pozzuoli, the great operas at San
Carlo. So she stored her brain all the time with fresh experiences of
men, women, and things; with pictures of places, of architecture, of
sculpture, of scenery. Everywhere her quick mind assimilated at once all
that was best and most valuable in what she saw or listened to; by eye
and by ear alike, she was half-unconsciously educating herself.
But that wasn’t all. She had ideas as well of still higher education.
Will Deverill had given her the first key to books—and books are the
gateways of the deepest knowledge. Partly to escape from the monotony of
Andreas Hausberger’s conversation, partly also quite definitely to fit
herself for the place in the world she was hereafter to fill—when she
went to England—Linnet turned to books as new friends and companions.
German literature first of all, and especially the dramatic. Andreas was
wise enough in his generation to approve of that; he was aware that
acquaintance with plays and with romantic works in general forms no
small integral part of an opera-singer’s equipment. German literature,
then, first—Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Richter, Paul Heyse,
Freiligrath—German literature first, but after it English. Andreas
approved of that, too, for was there not much money to be made out of
England and America? It was well Linnet should enlarge her English
vocabulary; well, too, she should know the plays and novels on which
_Romeo e Giulietta_, and _Lucia di Lammermoor_, and _I Puritani_ were
founded. But Linnet herself had other reasons of her own for wishing to
study English. Though she looked upon Will Deverill as something utterly
lost to her, a bright element in her life now faded away for ever, she
yet cherished the memory of that one real love episode so deep in her
heart that, for her Englishman’s sake, she loved England and English.
She looked forward to the time when she should go to England; not so
much because she thought she should ever meet Will Deverill
there—Naples and Munich had taught her vaguely to appreciate the
probable vastness of London—but because it was the country where Will
Deverill lived, and it spoke the tongue Will had made so dear to her. So
she read every English book she could easily obtain—Shakespeare,
Milton, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray—and she took oral lessons in
conversational English, which as Andreas justly remarked, would improve
her accent, and enable her to sing better in English opera.
Thus three years passed away, and Linnet in their course saw much of the
Continent. They got as far north and west at times as Leipzig, Brussels,
and even Paris. But they always spent their winters in Italy; it was
best for Linnet’s throat, Andreas thought; it gave her abundance of
fresh air and sunshine; and besides, the Italian style of teaching was
better suited, he felt sure, to her ardent, excitable Tyrolese
temperament, than the colder and more learned Bavarian method.
’Twas at Naples, accordingly, that Linnet came out first as Signora
Casalmonte. But after a short season there, Andreas was quite
sufficiently assured of ultimate success to venture upon taking his
prize at once to England. He would sell his goods, like a prudent
merchant that he was, in the dearest market. When Linnet first learned
she was to go to London, a certain strange thrill of joy and hope and
fear coursed through her irresistibly. London! that was the place where
Will Deverill lived! London! that was the place where she soon might
meet him!
She clasped the little metal Madonna that still hung from her neck,
convulsively. “Our Dear Frau, oh, protect me! Save me, oh, save me from
the thoughts of my own heart! Help me to think of him less! Help me to
try and forget him!”
She was Andreas Hausberger’s wife now, and she meant to be true to him.
Love him she never could, but she could at least be true to him. Not in
deed alone, but in thought and in word, as Our Dear Frau knew, she
strove hard to be faithful.
Then came the first fluttering excitement and disappointment of
London—that dingy Eldorado, so rich, so miserable—the dim, dank
streets, the glare, the gloom, the opulence, the squalor of our
fog-bound metropolis! For a week or two, thank Heaven, Linnet was too
busy at arrangements and rehearsals to think of surroundings. They were
the weeks during which Will was away in the Provinces, or he must almost
certainly have heard of and attended the preliminary performances of the
forthcoming opera. The final day arrived, and Linnet, all tremulous at
the greatness of the stake, had to make her first appearance before that
stolid sea of unsympathetic, hide-bound English faces. She had peeped at
them from the wings before the curtain rose; oh, how her heart sank
within her. The respectable sobriety of stalls and boxes, the
square-jawed brutality of pit and gallery, the cynical aspect of the
gentlemen of the press, in their faultless evening clothes and unruffled
shirt-fronts—all contrasted so painfully with the vivid excitement and
frank expectancy of the Neapolitan audiences to which alone she had
hitherto been accustomed. One brighter thought, and only one, sustained
her—Dear Lady, forgive her that she should think of it now! these were
all Herr Will’s people, and they spoke Herr Will’s tongue; as Herr Will
was kind, would not they too be kind to her?
So, plucking up heart of grace, though trembling all over, she tripped
down the stage rocks with her free gait of a _sennerin_. To her joy and
surprise, a burst of applause rose responsive at once from those