“Where shall we go to-day?” Will inquired next morning, as they sipped their early coffee at the Erzherzog Johann. He was already hard at work on his projected operetta, but ’twas a fad of his to compose in the open air; he went out for a long stroll every morning with Florian, and sat on the hillsides, jotting his thoughts down with a pencil, exactly as they occurred, face to face with Nature.
“Rue won’t meet us to-day, she says,” his friend answered with a yawn. “Her nerves are tired after her walk of yesterday. So, for my part, I vote we go and see Schloss Tyrol. It inspires me, that place,” Florian went on, warming up?—?for he had been reading his guide-book. “It has the interest of a germ, a nucleus, a growing point. I like to think that here we stand before the embryo of a State?—?the very heart and core of the evolving Tyrol. We watch its development, so to speak, from its central cell. It’s the evolution of law, of order, of authority. The robber chiefs of that high stronghold perched aloft on the hills”?—?and Florian extended one small white hand, as was his wont when he perorated?—?“are the centre round which clusters by successive degrees the whole Tyrolese and Austrian history. I see them pushing their power in concentric rings from their eagle’s eyrie on the crags above the valley of the Adige, to Botzen and the Brenner, the basin of the Inn, the Bavarian March, the entire Eastern Alps, from the Engadine to the Dolomites. Their Schloss there is the original and only genuine Tyrol. By successful robbery, which is the basis of all the divine rights of governments, they become the masters and lords of a mighty province; they dictate peace and justice to obedient villagers; they stand out in course of time as an earthly providence. But what were they at first? Why, a den of thieves! There you have the whole evolution of morality in a nutshell?—?the rule of the strong, established and maintained by continued aggression. So I will see Schloss Tyrol; I will be a pilgrim at the shrine; I will refresh myself at the fount of law and order as it exists and envisages itself for these innocent mountains.”
“It’s an interesting place,” Will replied, taking no notice of Florian’s gush, “and it’s well worth visiting. I’ve seen it before. I’ll sit on the rocks outside and write, while you go in and look at it.”
So after breakfast they started up the narrow old road, paved in places with cobble-stones, and overarched in its lower slopes by graceful festoons of trellised vines, that leads from Meran along a shoulder of the hills to the earliest home of the counts of Tyrol. ’Twas a true South Tyrolese November morning. It froze hard through the night, and the ice still lay thick on the pools by the wayside; but in that keen, crisp air, and with that cloudless sky, the sun overhead blazed as warm as summer. Up the Passer valley to their right, as they mounted, the villages and churches on the slopes of the Ifinger stood out in dazzling white against their dark green background. The little mountain path, bordered as usual by countless petty crucifixes and whitewashed shrines, wound in continuous zig-zags up the face of the Küchelberg, a wedge of rounded rock that overlooks the town, draped with vineyards on its sides, and worn smooth on its summits by the titanic ice mills of the glacial epoch. The chapels in particular excited Florian’s interest. “There’s more religion to the square mile in the Tyrol,” he said, “than in any other country I ever visited!”
They rose by slow degrees till they reached the long hog’s back which separated the wild Passer glen from the wider and more luxuriant Adige valley. Florian stood still to gaze. Tier upon tier of vines, in endless galleries, roofed the southern slope as with one leafy arbour; the long shoulder itself on whose top they now stood was green with pastures, and watered by plashing artificial leats which had worn themselves deep beds like natural streamlets. The music of falling water accompanied them all the way; the cow-bells tinkled pleasantly from the fields on either hand; and the views, as they walked along the crest of the ridge, looking down into the two valleys with their villages and klosters, their castles and towers, seemed infinite in the variety of their beauty and interest. Above soared the bare peaks of the Muthspitze and the Tschigatspitze; to the east rose the fissured summits of the cloven Dolomites; the white mass of the Lanser Ferner closed the glen to westward.
After nearly an hour’s walk, as they approached the little village of Dorf Tyrol on the hill-top, they passed a huddled heap of wayside boulders, over whose ledge the stream that had accompanied them so far on their road tumbled from a small sluice in a bickering cataract. Two girls were seated on the brink of the torrent with their backs turned towards them. As the young men approached, one of the girls looked round, and gave a start of surprise. “Why, Linnet,” she cried in German, “here he is again!?—?your Engl?nder!”
Linnet turned, with a crimson flush on her nut-brown face, to think that Philippina should speak so openly of Will, as of some one that belonged to her. But her cheek, to say the truth, was hardly redder than Will’s own, as he heard himself so described by the laughing sennerin as Linnet’s Engl?nder. He couldn’t conceal from himself, however, the fact that he was glad to meet Linnet under whatever circumstances. With a wondering heart, he went up and took her hand. “Why, when did you come here?” he asked, all astonished.
“The day before yesterday,” Linnet answered, tingling.
“And she sang last night at the Austria,” Philippina put in, with her good-humoured smile, “and made a great success, too, I can tell you that; and took, oh, ever and ever so much money. Herr Andreas is so pleased. He goes chuckling to himself. I think he thinks Linnet will make his fortune.”
“And how long do you stop here?” Will inquired, half-anxiously, half-eagerly.
“About a month,” Linnet answered, looking deep into his eyes, and keeping down the rising tears as well as she could in her own. “And you, Herr Will? how long do you mean to remain here?”
“A month or six weeks,” Will replied with a thrill. Then he added, gazing hard at her, in spite of Florian, “so I hope we may still have many chances of meeting?”
Florian flung his fragile form at full length on the heap of stones by their side, and began to laugh unrestrainedly. “Well, it’s no use fighting against fate,” he cried, looking up at the blushing pair, with philosophic indulgence for the errors and foibles of youth and beauty and the poetic temperament. “You must go your own way, I suppose. I retire from the contest. I’ve done my very best, dear boy, to preserve you from yourself; but the stars in their courses seem to fight against Sisera.” He extended both his small hands with paternal unction. “Bless you, my children,” he cried, theatrically. “Be happy. Be happy.”
“Which way are you walking?” Will asked in German, to cover his confusion.
“Well, we were going towards the Schloss,” Philippina replied, smiling. “But the climb’s rather stiff, so we sat down for awhile by these stones, just to rest on the hill-top.”
“The finger of fate again!” Florian cried, much amused, raising his hands deprecatingly. “Well, Will, there’s no help for it; I see they must go with us. It’s useless trying to keep you and your Oread apart any longer, so I won’t attempt it. Two’s company, three’s none. The only thing left for a wise man like me?—?is just to walk on in front and take a German lesson from Fr?ulein Philippina.”
Fortunately for Florian, too, Philippina proved to be one of those gay and easy-going young ladies with whom the want of a common tongue wherein to express one’s thoughts forms a very slight barrier to the course of conversation. Already at her chalet he had guessed as much; and now on the hill-top, they walked along side by side, chatting and laughing as they went, with expressive eyes, and making themselves mutually understood as much by nods and becks and wreathèd smiles?—?so Florian poetically phrased it in his silent soul?—?as by any articulate form of the German language. Before they had reached the Schloss they stood already on excellent terms with one another, and Florian even consoled himself for the enforced loss of Linnet’s society with the reflection that Philippina was, after all, in many ways “a great deal more practical.”
But Linnet, walking behind, was in the seventh heavens. She had found her Engl?nder once more, and that alone would have been enough for her. But that wasn’t all; this second chance meeting, perfectly natural as it was?—?for Andreas had but followed the stream of tourists southward?—?impressed her simple mind with the general idea that the world, after all, wasn’t as big as she had supposed it, and that she’d be liable now to meet the gn?dige Herr wherever she went, quite casually and accidentally. Not, indeed, that she troubled her head much just then about the future in any way: with Will by her side, she lived wholly in the present. She didn’t even ask him why he had gone away from Innsbruck without coming to say goodbye to her in person; she didn’t utter a single word of reproach or complaint; she accepted all that; she took it all for granted. Will never could marry her; she didn’t expect him to marry her: a gentleman like him couldn’t marry a peasant-girl; a Catholic like herself couldn’t marry a heretic who scarcely bowed the knee to Our Blessed Lady. But she loved him for all that, and she was happy if he would but let her walk beside him. And in this she was purely and simply womanly. True love doesn’t ask any end beyond itself: it is amply satisfied with being loved and loving.
And Will? Well, Will had a poet’s nature, and the poet lives in the passing emotion. Only a man of moods can set moods before us. Like Linnet herself, Will thought little of the future when Linnet was beside him. He meant her no harm, as he said truly to Florian; but he meant her no good either: he meant nothing at all but to walk by ............