Linnet: A Romance. Allen Grant

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 didn’t mean that. Why waste your money on one of the regular guides, who charge you five florins for eating half your lunch for you? But Linnet knows the way as well as any trained guide of them. It’s not a hard road; she’ll go along with you and show you it.”

      “Oh, dear no,” Will replied, with a little hurried embarrassment, for he felt it would be awkward to be thrown all day into the society of a young girl in so equivocal a position. “I’m sure we can find the way all right ourselves. There are woodcutters on the hills we can ask about the path; and if it comes to that, I really don’t mind whether I find it or not – it’s only by way of goal for a day’s expedition.”

      Andreas Hausberger, however, was an imperious soul. “Linnet shall go,” he said, shortly, without making more words about it. “She has nothing else to do. It’s bad for her to be cooped up in the house too much. A long walk on the hills will be no end of good for her. That’s what I always say; when young women come down from the mountains in winter, they do themselves harm by changing their mode of life all at once too suddenly, and living in close rooms without half the exercise they used to take on the alp with their milking and churning.”

      So, whether they would or not, the two young men were compelled in the end to put up as best they might with Linnet’s guidance and company. No great hardship either, Will thought to himself, as Linnet, bare-headed, but in her Sunday best, led the way up the green slopes behind the village inn, with the bounding gait of a holiday alp-girl. As to Florian, his soul was in the seventh heavens. To see that Oread’s light foot trip gracefully over the lawns was to him pure joy – a stray breath of Hellas. What Hellas was like, to be sure – the arid Hellas of reality – with its dusty dry hills and its basking rocks, Florian had not in his own soul the very faintest conception. But still, the Hellenic ideal was none the less near and dear to him. From stray scraps of Theocritus and his inner consciousness he had constructed for himself an Arcadia of quite Alpine greenness, and had peopled it with lithe maidens of uncircumscribed affections. So, whenever he wanted to give anything in heaven or earth the highest praise in his power, he observed with an innocent smile that it was utterly Hellenic.

      Linnet led them on, talking unaffectedly as she went, by long ridge-like spurs, up vague trails through the woods, and over spongy pastures. As elsewhere on their walks, Florian noted here and there little whitewashed shrines at every turn of the road, and endless rude crucifixes where ghastly white limbs seemed to writhe and struggle in realistic torture. Of a sudden, by one of these, Linnet dropped on her knees – all at once without a word of warning; she dropped as if mechanically, her lips moving meanwhile in muttered prayer. Florian gazed at her curiously; Will stood by expectant, in a reverent and mutely sympathetic attitude. For some minutes the girl knelt there, murmuring low to herself. As she rose from her knees, she turned gravely to Will. “Here my father has died,” she said, with solemn slowness in her broken English. “He has slipped from that rock. The fall has killed him. Will you say, for his soul’s repose, before you go, a Vaterunser?”

      She looked up at him pleadingly, as if she thought the prayers of so great a gentleman must carry weight of their own in Our Lady’s councils. With infinite gentleness, Will bowed his head in acquiescence, and, after a moment’s hesitation, not to hurt her feelings, dropped on his knees himself and bent his neck in silent prayer before the tawdry little oratory. It was one of those rough shrines, painted by unskilled fingers, where naked souls in rude flames of purgatory plead for aid with clasped hands and outstretched arms to placidly unheeding blue-robed Madonnas. Underneath, an inscription, with N’s turned the wrong way, and capitals mixed with smaller letters, informed the passer-by that, “Here, on the 20th of August 188-, the virtuous guide and experienced woodcutter, Josef Telser of St Valentin, perished by a fall from a slippery rock during a dangerous thunderstorm. The pious wanderer is hereby implored to say three Paternosters, of his charitable good-will, to redeem a tortured soul from the fires of purgatory.”

      Will knelt there for a minute or two, muttering the Paternosters out of pure consideration for Linnet’s sensitive feelings. When he rose from his knees again, he saw the girl herself had moved off a little way to pick a few bright ragworts and Michaelmas daisies that still lingered on these bare heights, for a bouquet to lay before the shrine of Our Lady. Like all her countrywomen, she was profoundly religious – or, if you choose to put it so, profoundly superstitious. (’Tis the point of view alone that makes all the difference.) Florian, a little apart, with his hand on his cheek and his head on one side, eyed the oratory sentimentally. “How sweet it is,” he said, after a pause, with an expansive smile, “to see this poor child, with her childlike faith, thus throwing herself on her knees in filial submission before her father’s cenotaph! How delightful is the sentiment that prompts such respect for the memory of the dead! How eloquent must be the words of her simple colophon!” Florian was fond of colophons; he didn’t know what they were, but he always thought them so very Hellenic!

      Will’s face was graver. With one finger he pointed to the uncompromising flames of that most material purgatory. “I’m afraid,” he said, seriously, “to her, poor child, this act of worship envisages itself in a very different fashion. She prays to hasten the escape of her father’s soul from what she takes to be a place of very genuine torture.”

      Florian looked closer. As yet, he had never observed the subsidiary episode of the spirits in their throes of fiery torment, which forms a component part of all these wayside oratories. He inspected the rude design with distant philosophical interest. СКАЧАТЬ