Linnet: A Romance
sounds, are exercised and educated? Do you think, if I wanted to pick
out voices for a musical troupe, I would go for them to Holland, or to
Lombardy, or to Hamburg? No, no; I would go right away to the _gründe_
there, the upper forks of the Zillerthal, in the crystal air just below
the glaciers, and pick out my best singers from the cow-boys and the
alp-girls.”
He spoke of what he knew and had long reflected upon. Acquaintance with
his subject supplied in part the unimportant deficiencies of his English
vocabulary; and, besides, he had said the same things before a dozen
times over, to other English travellers.
“Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the _wirth_
paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be
bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.
“Right!” Andreas Hausberger repeated. “Never mind about that! You’d know
I was right if only you’d seen as much of these people as I have. Look
here, Mr Wood, you say it’s desecration to send a girl like Linnet after
butter and cheese in a sennerin’s hut on the lonely mountains. You say I
owe her voice as a treasure to humanity. Wal, I acknowledge the debt,
and I try to discharge it to the best of my ability. I send her to the
hills—the free open hills—where she will breathe fresh air, develop
her throat and lungs, eat wholesome food, grow strong and brown and
hearty. If I clothed her in purple and fine linen, as you wish, and fed
her every day on champagne and turtle, do you really imagine I’d be
doing her a good turn? I’d be ruining her voice for her. In the summer,
she gains breath and good health on the grassy mountains; in the winter,
she gets training and advice and assistance from Lindner and myself, and
whatever other teachers we can find in the Zillerthal.”
“I surrender at discretion,” Florian answered, with a yawn, rising up
and flinging his small person lazily on the home-made sofa. “I admit
your contention. You interest me strangely. Your peasants and your
country girls have finely developed ears and capital voices. No doubt
you’re correct in attributing these splendid gifts to the clearness of
the atmosphere and the wild life of the mountains. I’m a musical critic
in London myself, and I know what a voice is the moment I hear it.
Indeed, after all, what does it matter in the end if these divine
creatures spend a joyless life for years in sordid and squalid
surroundings, provided only, when they burst forth at last in the full
effulgence of their musical prime, they afford _us_, who can appreciate
them, and for whose sake they exist, one vivid thrill of pure artistic
enjoyment?” And he stroked his own smooth and girlish cheek with one
plump hand, lovingly.
“You’re a musical critic, are you?” Andreas Hausberger repeated, with
marked interest, disregarding the last few words of Florian’s flowing
rhapsody. “Then you shall hear Linnet sing. You can say after that
whether I’m right in my system or not.” He opened the door hastily.
“Linnet, Linnet,” he called out in the Tyrolese dialect, “come in here
at once. I want the Herrschaft to hear you singing.”
For a minute after he spoke, there was a flutter and a rustling at the
door outside; somebody seemed to be pushing some unwilling person bit by
bit along the passage. A murmur of whispered voices in the local dialect
floated faintly to Will’s ears. “You must!” “But I can’t.” “You shall!”
“I won’t.” “He says you are to.” “Ah, no; I’m ashamed! Not before those
gentlemen!”
In the end, as it seemed, the first voice had its way. The door opened
brusquely, and Linnet, all trembling, her face in her hands, and crimson
with shame, was pushed bodily forward by unseen arms into the strangers’
presence. For a moment she stood there like a frightened child. Will’s
cheek burned hot with sympathetic tingling. Florian leaned back
philosophically as he lay, and regarded this pretty picture of beauty in
distress with observant complacency. She was charming, so, to be sure!
That red flush became her.
“Sing to the gentlemen,” Andreas Hausberger said, calmly, in a tone of
command. “Take your hands from your face at once; don’t behave like a
baby.”
He spoke in German, but Florian followed him all the same. ’Twas
delicious to watch this pretty little comedy of rustic ingenuousness.
“Oh, I can’t!” Linnet cried, all abashed, removing her hands for a
second from her burning cheeks, and clasping them hard on her throbbing
breast for one fiery moment before she clapped them up hastily again.
“To bid one like this! It’s so hard! It’s so dreadful!”
“Don’t ask her just now,” Will Deverill put in pleadingly. “One can see
she has such a natural shrinking and disinclination at first. Some other
night, perhaps. When we’ve been here a little longer, she may be less
afraid of us.”
Linnet let her hand drop once more, and gave him a grateful glance,
sidling away towards the door like a timid child in her misery. But
Andreas Hausberger, for his part, was not so to be put off. “No, no,” he
said, sternly, fixing his eye with a determined gaze on the poor
shrinking girl; “she must sing if I tell her to. That’s all right. This
shyness is absurd. How can she ever appear on a platform, I should like
to know, before a couple of hundred people, if she won’t sing here when
she’s told before just you two Englishmen? Do as I bid you, Linnet! No
nonsense, my girl! Stand here by the table, and give us ‘The Bride of
Hinter-Dux.’”
Thus authoritatively commanded, poor Linnet took her stand where Andreas
Hausberger motioned her, steadied herself with one trembling little fist
on the edge of the table, raised her eyes to the ceiling away from the
two young men, and, drawing a deep breath, with her throat held out and
her mouth opened tremulously, began to trill forth, in her rich, silvery
voice, a deep bell-like song of her own native mountain. For the first
minute or two she was nervous, and quivered and paused unduly; after
awhile, however, inborn artistic instinct overcame her nervousness: she
let her eyes drop and rest in a flash once or twice on Will Deverill’s.
They were kindly eyes, Will’s; they reassured and encouraged her.
“Bravo!” they seemed to say; “you’re rendering it admirably.” Emboldened
by his friendly glance, she took heart and went through with it. Towards
the end, her courage and self-possession returned, for, like all
Tyrolese, she was brave and self-reliant in her inmost soul, though shy
at first sight, and bashful on the surface. The two last stanzas she
sang to perfection. As she finished, Will looked up and said simply,
“Thank you; that was beautiful, beautiful.” But Florian clapped his
hands in obtrusive applause. “Well done!” he cried; “well done! you have
given us such a treat. We can forgive Herr Hausberger now for insisting
on a performance.”
“And you must accustom yourself to an audience,” the _wirth_ said in
German, with that same quiet air of iron resolution Will had already
marked in him. “If ever you’re to face a whole roomful of people, you
must be able first to come in upon the platform without all this silly
fuss and hang-back nonsense.”
Linnet’s nostrils quivered. She steadied herself with her hand on the
table once more, and made answer boldly, “I think I could more easily
face a roomful of people I’d never seen than sing before two in the
parlour of the inn here; that seems less personal. But,” she added
shyly, with half an appealing glance towards Will, “I’m not so nervous
now. If this gentleman wishes, I—I would sing another song to him?”
And so she did—a second and a third. As she went on, she grew braver,
and sang each time more naturally. At last the _wirth_ dismissed her.
Linnet curtsied, and disappeared. “Well, what do you say to her now?”
the landlord asked in a tone of triumph, turning round to the young men
as the door closed behind her.
Florian assumed his most studiously judicial air. The perfect critic
should, above all things, be critical. Before Linnet’s face, indeed, he
had been enthusiastic enough, as politeness and due respect for her sex
demanded; but behind her back, and in her teacher’s presence, regard for
his reputation compelled him to adopt the severest tone of incorruptible
impartiality. “I think,” he said slowly, fingering his chin in one hand,
and speaking with great deliberation, like a recognised authority, “with
time and training she ought to serve your purpose well for popular
entertainments. Her organ, though undeveloped, is not wholly without
some natural power and compass.”
“And _I_ think,” Will Deverill added, with a glow of generous
enthusiasm, “you’ve lighted on one of the very finest voices in all
Europe.”
CHAPTER VI
THE ROBBLER
A day or two passed, and the young men from time to time saw, by
glimpses and snatches, a good deal of Linnet. For now the summer season
on the hills was over, and the cows had come back to their stall-fed
existence, the musical alp-girl had leisure on her hands for household
duties. In the morning she helped in the general work of the inn; in the
afternoon she practised much in the parlour upstairs with Andreas
Hausberger and his little company. But in the evenings,—ah, then, the
landlord brought her in more than once, by special request, to sing her
native songs to Will Deverill’s accompaniment on the lame old fiddle
from the corner cupboard. Those were pleasant meetings enough. Gradually
the mountain lass grew less afraid of the strangers; she talked German
more freely with Will Deverill now, and considerably enlarged her
English vocabulary by listening to Florian’s richly-worded harangues on
men, women, and things, and the musical glasses. It surprised Florian
not a little, however, to see that this child of Nature, unlike the
ladies of culture in London drawing-rooms, positively preferred Will’s
society to his own, if such a fact seems credible; though he explained
away in part this unaccountable defect of taste and instinct in one
female heart by the reflection that, after all, Will was able to
converse with her in her own language. His own finer points she could
hardly understand; his words were too deep, his thoughts were too high
for her. Still, it annoyed him that even an unsophisticated alp-girl
should display so singular and so marked a predilection for any other
man when _he_ was present. Indeed, he half made up his mind, irksome as
he felt sure the task would prove, to learn German at once, as a
safeguard against so humiliating a _contretemps_ in future.
In the early part of the next week, Will proposed one day they should
mount the hills behind St Valentin, in search of a rare fern he was
anxious to secure before the snows of winter. Andreas Hausberger,
nodding his head, had heard of it before. It was a well-known rarity;
all botanists who came to the Zillerthal, he said, were sure to go in
search of it. “But I’m not a botanist,” Will burst out deprecatingly,
for to admit that fell impeachment is to number yourself outright in the
dismal roll of scientific Dryasdusts; “I only want the plants because I
love them.”
“That’s all right,” Andreas answered, in his accustomed phrase. “You
want the plant, anyway. That’s the chief thing, ain’t it? Wal, there’s
only one place anywhere about St Valentin that it ever grows, and that’s
the Tuxerloch; without somebody to guide you there you’d never find it.”
“Oh, I won’t have a guide,” Will responded, hastily. “I hate to be
guided. It’s too ignominious. If I can’t find my own way about low
mountains like these, in the forest region, I’d prefer to lose it; and I
certainly won’t pay a man to show me where the fern is.”
“Certainly not,” the _wirth_ answered, with true Tyrolese thrift. “I