And next morning, indeed, saw them safe at Innsbruck.
’Twas a pull to get away; Will frankly admitted to his own soul he felt it so. But he saw it was right, and he went accordingly. Linnet, he knew, had grown fond of him in those few days; when he asked her once how it was she liked Franz Lindner less now than formerly, she looked up at him with an arch smile, and, after a second’s pause, made the frank avowal: “Perhaps it’s because now . . . I think Englishmen nicer.” At the moment his heart had come up in his mouth with pleasure, as will happen with all of us when a pretty woman lets us see for ourselves she really likes us. But he must go all the same: for Linnet’s sake?—?he must go: if illusion there were, he must at once disillusion her.
As for Linnet herself, she accepted the separation much more readily, to say the truth, than Will ever imagined she could. It half-piqued him, indeed, to find how easily she seemed to acquiesce in the inevitable. She trembled when he told her, to be sure, and tears started to her eyes; but she answered, none the less, in a fairly firm voice, that she always knew the gn?dige Herr must go away in the end; that she hoped he would remember her wherever he went; and she?—?with a deep sigh?—?she could never forget his kindness. That, however, was all. Just a pressure of her fingers, just a kiss on his hand, just a tear that dropped wet on his outstretched palm as she bent her head over it in customary obeisance, and Linnet was gone, and he saw no more of her that evening. In the morning when he stood at the door to bid farewell to the household, he fancied her eyes looked red with crying. But she grasped his hand hard, for all that, and said goodbye without flinching. He gave a florin or two as Trinkgeld to each of the servants at the inn; but to Linnet he felt he couldn’t give anything. She was of different mould. Linnet noticed the omission herself, with a glistening eye?—?and took it, as it was meant, for a social distinction.
The plain truth was, she had always expected Will must soon go away from her. Nor was she indeed as yet what one might fairly call quite in love with him. The very distance between them seemed to forbid the feeling. He was kind, he was sympathetic, he was musical, he was a gentleman, he divined her better qualities, her deeper feelings; he spoke to her more deferentially and with truer respect than any of her own equals had ever yet spoken to her; she couldn’t help feeling flattered that he should like to come out upon the hillside to talk with her; but, as yet, she hardly said to herself she loved him. If she had, what good? Was it likely such a great gentleman from over the seas would care to marry a mere Tyrolese milkmaid? Was it likely, if he did, the wirth and the priest would allow her to marry a Protestant Englishman?
So, from the very outset, save as a passing affection, Will Deverill stood wholly outside poor Linnet’s horizon. She regarded him as a pleasant but short-lived episode. Besides, light loves are the rule with the alp-girl. It was quite in the nature of things for Linnet that a man should take a liking to her, should pay her brief court, should expect from her far greater favours than ever Will Deverill expected, and should give her up in the end for a mere freak of fancy. That was the way of the Zillerthal! So, though the thorn had gone deep, she accepted her fate as just what one might have anticipated, and hardly cried for an hour in her own bed at night, to think those sweet mornings on the pasture by the pinewood were to be over for ever. For of course, in the end, if the wirth so willed, she must marry herself contentedly to Andreas Hausberger.
Acting on Florian’s advice, Will did not even tell his tremulous little friend he was going to Innsbruck. “Better break it off at once,” Florian said, with practical common-sense, “once for all and absolutely. No chance of letters or any nonsense of that sort?—?if the dulcinea can write, which of course is doubtful.” And Will, having made up his mind to the wrench, acquiesced in this sage council. So for Linnet, the two strangers who had loomed so large, and played so leading a part on the stage of her little life for one rapturous fortnight, vanished utterly, as it were, at a single breath, like a dissolving cloud, into the infinite and the unknowable.
By seven that night, the young Englishmen found themselves once more in the full flood of civilisation. The electric light shed its beams on their hotel; a Parisian chef de cuisine turned out sweetbreads and ices of elaborate art to pamper their palates. Once more, Florian donned with joy the black coat of Bond Street. They had penetrated the Zillerthal with their knapsacks on their backs; but two leather portmanteaus, enclosing the fuller garb of civilised life, awaited their advent at Innsbruck. Thus restored to society, with a rosebud in his buttonhole, the dainty little man descended radiant to the salle-à-manger. He welcomed the change; after three whole weeks of unadulterated Nature, he had tired of Arcadia. And he loved tables-d’h?te: ’twas a field for the prosecution of social conquests. “A man goes there on his merits,” he said briskly to Will, as they dressed for dinner, “neither handicapped nor yet unduly weighted. Nobody knows who he is, and he knows nobody. So he starts there on the flat, without fear or favour; and if at the end of ten minutes he hasn’t managed to make himself the centre of a conversational circle, he may retire into private life as a social failure.”
On this particular evening, however, in spite of several brilliant and manful efforts, Florian didn’t somehow succeed in attracting an audience quite so readily as usual. The environment was against him. On his right sat a lady whom he discovered by a side glance at the name written legibly on the napkin ring by her plate, to be the Honourable Mrs Medway, and who was so profoundly filled with a sense of the importance of her own Honourableness that she feared to contaminate herself or her daughter by conversation with her neighbours till she had satisfied her mind by sure and certain warranty that they too belonged to the Right Set in England. Pending proof to that effect, her answers to his questions were both curt and monosyllabic. This nettled Florian, who prided himself with truth on his extensive knowledge of all the “smart people.” To his left, beyond Will, on the other hand, sat a stolid-looking gentleman of nonconformist exterior and provincial garb, whose conversation, though ample, betrayed at times the inelegant idiom and accent of the Humber. Him Florian the silver-tongued carefully avoided. Opposite, was a vacant place, on either side of which sat two young girls of seventeen or thereabouts in the acutest stage of giggling inarticulateness. Florian listened, and despaired. Here was a coterie, indeed, for a brilliant talker and a man of culture!
But just as they finished the soup, to his intense relief, a ray of light seemed to pierce of a sudden the gathering gloom of the dinner table. The drawing-room door opened, and through its portal a Vision of Beauty in an evening dress floated, Hellenic goddess-wise, into the salle-à-manger. It made its way straight to the vacant chair, nodded and smiled recognition to the bread-and-butter gigglers and the Honourable Mrs Medway, bowed demurely, continental-way, to the newly come strangers, and glided off at once, without a pause or break, into a general flow all round of graceful, easy conversation. Florian gazed, and succumbed. This was a real live woman! Ripe, but not too ripe, soft and rounded of outline, with a bewitching mouth, a row of pearly teeth, and a cheek that wore only its own natural roses, she might have impressed at first sight a less susceptible heart by far than the epicurean sage’s. As she seated herself, she drew from her pocket a little cardboard box, which she handed with a charming smile to one of the giggling inarticulates. “Those are the set you admired, I think,” she said, with unconscious grace. “I hope I’ve got the right ones. I was passing the shop on my way back from my drive, and I thought I’d just drop in and bring them back as you liked them so.”
The giggling inarticulate gave a jerky little scream of unmixed delight as she opened the box and took out from it with tremulous hands a pretty set of coral necklet, brooch, and earrings. “Not for me!” she cried, gasping; “not for me?—?for a present! You don’t really mean to give them to me! They’re too lovely, too delicious!”
“Yes, I do,” the Vision of Beauty responded, beaming. “I wanted to give you some little souvenir some time before you went, and I didn’t know what you’d like; so, as you said you admired these, I thought I’d best go in at once as I passed and buy them. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Florian eyed them with the lenient glance of a man of taste who appraises and appreciates a beautiful woman’s selection. When the bread-and-butter gigglers had exhausted upon them their slender stock of laudatory adjectives?—?their oh’s and just look’s, and dear me, aren’t they beautiful’s?—?he broke in with his bland smile, and, laying the necklet in a curve on the white tablecloth before him, began to discourse with much unction in the Florianic tongue, on the ?sthetic points of this pretty trifle. For it was a pretty necklet, there was no denying that; its lance-like pendants were delicately shaped and most gracefully arranged; it was one of those simple half-barbaric designs which retain to our day all the na?ve beauty of primitive unsophisticated human workmanship. Florian found in it reminiscences of Eve in Eden. And he said so in that luxuriantly florid style of which he was so great and so practical a master. He called attention with suave tones to the distinctly preci............