Linnet: A Romance
from him, as also from many of the Ennglish gentlemen. Then, too, I take
lesson from Herr Hausberger in winters, and from Ennglish young lady at
the farm by Martinsbrunn.”
Florian gazed at his companion with an agonised look of mingled alarm
and horror. “Do you know who she means?” he cried, seizing Will’s arm.
“This is too, too terrible! The girl on the hillside who sticks out her
tongue! that horrible little Cockney! She’ll teach this innocent child
to say ‘naow,' and ‘lidy'! At last I feel I have a mission in life. We
must save her from this fate! We must instruct her ourselves in pure
educated English!”
“And how do you come to be called Linnet?” Will inquired with some
interest, a new light breaking in upon him. “That’s surely an English
name. Who was it first called you so?”
“An Ennglish gentleman when I was all quite small,” the girl replied,
with much difficulty, searching her phrases with studious care. “He stop
at my father’s hut on our alp many nights—I know not how man says
it—so must he go up the mountains. I sing to him often when he come
down at evening. My right name is called in German, Lina; but the
gentleman, says he, that I sing like a bird. A linnet, that is in
Ennglish a singing-bird. Therefore, Linnet he call me. The name please
my father much, who make a great deal of me; so from that time in
forwards, all folk in the village call me also Linnet.”
Will broke out into German. “They’re quite right,” he said, politely,
though with less ecstasy than Florian; “for you do indeed sing like a
real song-bird. I’m so sorry we interrupted you; pray go on with your
song again.”
But Linnet hung her head. “No, no,” she answered, hastily, in her own
native tongue, glad to find he spoke German. “I didn’t know I was
overheard. If I’d been singing for such as you, I’d not have chosen a
little country song like that. And besides”—she broke off suddenly,
with a coy wave of her brown hand, “I can’t sing before strangers the
same as I can before my own people.” And she tapped the hindmost heifer
with her rod as she spoke, to set the line in motion; for the cows,
after their kind, had taken advantage of the pause to put down their
heads to the ground, and browse placidly at the green weeds that
bordered the wayside.
At one touch of her wand the bells tinkled once more; the long string
got under way; the children by the side recommenced their loud shouts of
rustic merry-making. For the return of the cows from the alp is a little
festival in the villages; it ends the long summer’s work on the mountain
side, and brings back the unmarried girls from their upland exile to
their homes in the valley. Linnet drove her herd now, however, more
soberly and staidly. The free merriment of Arcadia had faded out of the
ceremony. One touch of civilisation had dispelled the dream. She knew
she was observed; she knew the two strangers were waiting to hear if she
would trill forth her wild song again, for they followed close at her
heels, talking rapidly among themselves in their own language—so
rapidly, indeed, that Linnet could hardly snatch here and there by the
way a single word of their earnest conversation. Once or twice she
looked back at them, half-timidly, half-provokingly.
“Sing again!” Florian cried, clasping his hands in entreaty.
But the wayward alp-girl only laughed her coy refusal.
“No, no,” she said in her patois, with a little shake of her beautiful
head; “that must not be so. I sing no more now. I must drive home my
cows. They are tired from the mountains.”
“But, I say,” Florian cried at last, bursting in upon his mountain nymph
with this very colloquial and unpoetic adjuration; “look here, you know,
Fräulein Linnet, you say you learn English from our landlord, Herr
Hausberger. Now, what does he want to teach you for?”
Linnet turned round to him with a naïve air of unaffected surprise.
“Why, when he teach me Ennglish songs,” she said, “I will know what mean
the words. Also, I have remembered a little—a very little—since the
Ennglish gentleman teach me at my father’s. Besides, too, shall I not
need it when I go to Enngland?”
“Go to England!” Florian repeated, all amazed at the frank remark. She
seemed to take it for granted they must know all her plans. “When you go
to England! Oh, he means to take you there, then! You’re one of his
troupe, I suppose; or you’re going to be one.”
“I am not gone away yet,” Linnet answered, not a little abashed to find
herself the centre of so much unwonted interest; “but I go next time; I
will sing with his band. All summers, I stop on the mountain and milk;
with the winter, come I down to the house to practise.”
“But you don’t mean to say,” Will put in, in German (it was easier so
for Linnet to answer him), “he lets a singer like you live out by
herself in a châlet on the hills with the cows all summer?”
Linnet held up her hands, palm outward, with a pretty little gesture of
polite deprecation. Her movements were always naturally graceful. “Why
not?” she said, brightly, in German, with no little suppressed merriment
at his astonished face. “That’s Andreas Hausberger’s plan; he believes
in that way; he calls it his system. He says we Zillerthalers owe our
beautiful voices—for they tell us we can sing a great deal better than
the people in any other valley about—to our open-air life on the very
high mountains. The air there is thin, and it suits our throats, he
says.” She clasped her hand to her own as she spoke, that beautiful,
well-developed, clear-toned organ, with a natural gesture of unconscious
reverence. “It develops them—that’s his word; he believes there’s
nothing like it. _Entwickelung; entwickelung!_ I get more good, he
thinks, for my voice in the summer on the alp than I get from all my
lessons in the winter in the valley. For the throat itself comes
first—that’s what Andreas holds—and afterwards the teaching. Not for
worlds would he let me miss my summer life on the mountains.”
“And how long has he been training you?” Will inquired with real
interest. This was so strange a page of life thus laid open before him.
“Oh, for years and years, _gnädige Herr_,” Linnet answered, shyly, for
so much open attention on the young man’s part made her awkwardly
self-conscious. “Ever since my father died, he has always been teaching
me.”
“Has your father been dead long?” Will inquired.
Linnet crossed herself devoutly. “He was killed eight years ago on the
20th of August last,” she said, looking up as she spoke towards the
forest-clad mountains. “May Our Dear Lady and all holy saints deliver
his honoured soul from the fires of purgatory!”
“But your mother’s alive still, I suppose, Fräulein,” Florian put in
with a killing smile; he had been straining his ears, and was delighted
to have caught the general drift of the conversation.
“Yes; thanks to the Blessed Virgin, my mother live still,” Linnet
answered in English. “And I keep her comfortable, as for a widow woman,
from that which Andreas Hausberger pay me for the summer, as also for
the singing. But for what, mein Herr, do you make to call me Fräulein?
Do you wish to mock at me? I am only an alp-girl, and I am call just
Linnet.”
She flushed as she spoke, and turned hastily to Will. “Tell him,” she
said in German, with an impatient little toss of one hand towards
Florian, “that it isn’t pretty of him to make fun of poor peasant girls
like that. Why does he call me such names? He knows very well I am no
real Fräulein.”
Florian raised his hat at once in his dimpled small hand, with that
courtly bow and smile so much admired in Bond Street. “Pardon me,” he
said, with more truth and feeling than was usual with him; “you have a
superb voice; with a gift like that, you are a Fräulein indeed. It
extorts our homage. Heaven only knows to what height it may some day
lead you.”
CHAPTER V
THE WIRTH’S THEORY
In the evening, while they dined, the landlord came in to see how they
fared, and wish them good appetite: ’tis the custom with distinguished
guests in the Tyrol. The moment he entered, Florian, all agog, attacked
him at once on the subject of their wonderful find that afternoon on the
hillside. “Well, Herr Hausberger,” he cried in his high-flown way,
“we’ve seen and heard your Linnet—heard her warbling her native
wood-notes wild, to the tune of her own cow-bells on her lonely
mountains. Now, what do you mean, sir, by turning out a divine singer
like that—I’m a musical critic myself, and I know what I’m talking
about—what do you mean by turning her out to make butter and cheese in
a solitary hut on an Alpine pasture? It’s sheer desecration, I tell
you—sheer wicked desecration; there’s nothing, almost, that girl
couldn’t do with her voice. She’s a genius—a prodigy; she ought to be
clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day on
champagne and turtle. And _you_, sir—you send her up to herd cows all
alone, in an inclement clime, on a barren hill-top!”
Andreas Hausberger gazed at him with a self-contained smile that was
extremely characteristic. He bowed a sarcastic bow which Florian
misinterpreted for polite subservience. “Are _you_ running this show or
am I?” he asked, after a fresh pause, with a quaint reminiscence of his
Western experience.
“_You_ are, undoubtedly,” Florian answered, taken aback at this
unexpected assault. “But you ought to run it, all the same, on rational
and humane and intelligent principles. You owe this girl’s voice, as a
delight and a treasure, to US, the enlightened and critical connoisseurs
of two eager continents. Nature produced it that _we_ might enjoy it. It
was intended to give us some of those exquisite moments of artistic
pleasure which are the sole excuse creative caprice can plead for the
manifold defects of the Universe.”
Andreas Hausberger looked down at him with a half-pitying curl on those
stern thin lips of his. Florian had attacked him lightly where his
position was strongest. “That’s all right,” he said, slowly, with a
chilly drawl—’twas his favourite expression. “And do you think then,”
he went on, bursting forth almost scornfully, in spite of his outward
deference, “we Zillerthalers get our fine singing voices and our musical
ears by pure chance and accident? Not so, you may be sure of it. It’s no
mere coincidence that our men and women can almost without exception
sing like birds from their childhood upwards by the light of Nature.
What gives them this power? Why, they live their lives long, in summer
especially, in the thin clear atmosphere of our higher mountains. There
isn’t much sour-stuff in it—what do you call it in English?—oh,
oxygen, don’t you? Wal, there isn’t much oxygen in that thin upper
air—rarefied, I think you say—and therefore they’re obliged to fill
their lungs well and expand their chests”—he swelled himself out as he
spoke, and showed off his own splendid girth to the fullest
advantage—“and that gives them large reservoirs and rich, pure-toned
voices.”
“I never thought of that before,” Will Deverill interposed, much struck
by the landlord’s plausible reasoning. “I suppose that’s why mountain
races, like the Welsh and the Tyrolese, are so often musical. The
rarefied air must tend to strengthen and develop the larynx.”
“No; you never thought of that before,” Andreas Hausberger echoed. “You
haven’t had to think of it. And you haven’t had to select and train a
choir of our Tyrolese peasants. But I have thought of it for years, and
satisfied myself it’s true. Is it for nothing, do you suppose, that on
our cold mountain tops the vocal chords, as they say, are braced up and
tightened? Is it for nothing that in that clear, pure, limpid air the
very nerves of the ear, strained hard to catch quickly at distant