Lunch on the summit was delicious that day, and the view was glorious. But when they returned in the evening to the inn at St Valentin?—?that was the name of their village?—?and described to Andreas Hausberger how an alp-girl had sung for them in a mountain hut, the wirth listened to the description with a deprecatory smile, and then said with a little shrug: “Ah, that was Philippina; she can’t do very much. Her high notes are too shrill. You should just hear Linnet!”
“Is Linnet such a songstress then?” Florian cried, with that dubious smile of his.
The wirth looked grave. “She can sing,” he said, pointedly. His dignity was hurt by the young man’s half-sceptical, half-bantering tone. And your Tyroler is above all things conservative of his dignity.
These repeated commendations of this unknown Linnet, however, with her quaintly pretty un-German-sounding name, piqued the two Englishmen’s curiosity in no small degree as to her personality and powers, so that when the wirth next morning announced after breakfast, with a self-satisfied smile, “Linnet’s coming down to-day,” Florian and Will looked across at each other with one accord, and exclaimed in unison, “Ah, now then, we shall see her!”
And, sure enough, about five o’clock that afternoon, as the strangers were returning from a long stroll on the wooded heights that overhang the village, they came unexpectedly, at a turn of the mountain footpath, where two roads ran together, upon a quaint and picturesque Arcadian procession. A long string of patient cows, in the cream-coloured coats of all Tyrolese cattle, wound their way with cautious steps down the cobble-paved zig-zags. A tinkling bell hung by a leather belt from the neck of each; garlands of wild flowers festooned their horns; a group of peasant children assisted at the rude pageant. In front walked a boy, with a wreath slung across his right shoulder like a sash, leading the foremost cow most unceremoniously by the horns; the rear was brought up by a pretty sunburnt girl, with a bunch of soft pasque-flowers stuck daintily in her brown hair, and a nosegay of bluebells peeping coquettishly out of her full round bosom. Though vigorous-looking in figure, and bronzed in face by the sun and the open air, she was of finer mould and more delicate fibre, Will saw at a glance, than most of the common peasant women in that workaday valley. Her features were full but regular; her mouth, though large and very rich in the lips (as is often the case with singers), was yet rosy and attractive; her eyes were full of fire, after the true Tyrolese fashion; her rounded throat, just then trembling with song, had a waxy softness of outline in its curves and quivers that betrayed in a moment a deep musical nature. For she was singing as she went, to the jingling accompaniment of some thirty cow-bells; and not even the sweet distraction of that rustic discord could hide from Will Deverill’s quick, appreciative ear the fact that he stood here face to face with a vocalist of rare natural gifts, and some homespun training.
He paused, behind the wall, as the procession wound round a long double bend, and listened, all ears, to a verse or two of her simple but exquisite music.
“This must be Linnet!” he cried at last, turning abruptly to Florian.
And the boy at the head of the procession, now opposite him by the bend, catching at the general drift of the words with real Tyrolese quickness, called out with a loud laugh to the singer just above: “Sagt er, das musz ja Linnet seyn!” and then exploded with merriment at the bare idea that the Herrschaft should have heard the name and fame of his companion.
As for the girl herself, surprised and taken aback at this sudden interruption, she stood still and hesitated. For a moment she paused, leaning hard on the long stick with which she guided and admonished her vagrant cows; then she looked up and drew a long breath, looked down and blushed, looked up once more and smiled, looked down and blushed again. They had overtaken her unawares where the paths ran together; but as each was enclosed with a high wall of granite boulders, overgrown with brambles, she had no chance of perceiving them till they were close upon her. She broke off her song at once, and stood crimson-faced beside them.
“Ah, sing again!” Florian cried, folding two dainty palms in a rapture on his breast, and putting his delicate head on one side in a transport of enchantment “Why, Deverill, how she sings! what a linnet, indeed! and how pretty she is, too! For the first time in my life, I really regret I can’t speak German!”
The singer, looking up, all tremulous to have overheard this unfeigned homage, made answer, to Florian’s equal delight and surprise, “I can speak a little English.”
It would be more correct, perhaps, to put it that what she actually said, was: “Ei kann schpiek a liddle Ennglisch”; but Florian, in his joy that any means of inter-communication existed between them at all, paid small heed at the time to these slight Teutonic defects in her delivery of our language.
“You can speak English!” he exclaimed, overjoyed, for it would have been a real calamity to him to find a pretty girl in the place, with a beautiful voice, and he unable to converse in any known tongue with her. “How delightful! How charming! How quite too unexpected! I’m so glad to know that! For had it been otherwise, I should really have had to learn German to talk with you!”
This overstrained compliment, though it rose quite naturally to Florian’s practised lips, and was far more genuine than a great deal of his talk, made the girl blush and stammer with extreme embarrassment. She was unaccustomed, indeed, to such lavish praise, above all from the gentlefolk. Was the gn?dige Herr making fun of her, she wondered? She grew hot and uncomfortable. Fortunately for her self-possession, however, Will Deverill intervened with a more practical remark. “You speak English, do you?” he repeated. “That’s odd, in these parts. One would hardly have thought that! How did you come to learn it?”
“My father was a guide,” the girl answered, slowly, making a pause at each word, and picking her way with difficulty through the insidious pit-falls of British pronunciation. (She called it fahder.) “He taked plenty Ennglish gentlemen up the mountains before time. I learn so well 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, Fr?ulein 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 na?ve 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 chalet 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, gn?dige 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, Fr?ulein,” 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 Fr?ulein? 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 Fr?ulein.”
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 Fr?ulein indeed. It extorts our homage. Heaven only knows to what height it may some day lead you.”