Linnet: A Romance. Allen Grant

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a concerted piece, like trained musicians. Strange to find such finished vocalists in a mere peasant hamlet! – but, there, no doubt they were some of Herr Hausberger’s Transatlantic performers. Florian moved closer to the window to observe the unknown but silvery-tongued strangers. As he did so, two plump and rosy-cheeked mountain lasses, in homespun kirtles, fled, blushing and giggling, with their hands to their mouths, away from the close scrutiny of the foreign Herrschaft. Accustomed as he was by this time to marvellous incongruities in this land of surprises, Florian could hardly believe his own eyes when he further observed that the two girls with the divine voices were driving cows home from the pasture to the milking shed. Great heavens, yes! there was no gainsaying it. Shade of Wagner, incredible! The accomplished vocalists whose fine sense of melody so delighted his acute and critical ear were nothing but a pair of common country milkmaids!

      Will Deverill, too, had risen, and, with a friendly nod, was gazing out appreciation at his unknown accompanists. Florian turned to him, all amazement. “They must have practised it before,” he cried. “They must know it all of old. It must certainly be one of their own national pieces.”

      “Oh, no,” the poet replied in a very confident voice. “They can’t possibly have heard it. It’s quite, quite new. I’m sure about that. It’s never yet been published.”

      “But, my dear fellow,” Florian exclaimed, with much argumentative heat, “I assure you, none but the most instructed musicians could possibly take up the right chords like that, and sing them second and third, without having practised them beforehand. Allow me to know something of the musical art. Even Patti herself – ”

      “Why, the song’s my own,” Will broke in, much amused, and unable to restrain himself. “I ought to know; it was I who wrote it.”

      “The words! ah, yes, to be sure; the words are nothing. They didn’t sing them, of course; ’twas the melody they caught at. And the melody, I venture to assert, without fear of contradiction – the melody, from the peculiar way it modulates into the sub-dominant, must certainly be one of their own love songs.”

      “But I composed the tune too,” Will made answer with a quiet smile. “It’s never been played before. It came up into my head in the railway carriage yesterday, and seeing this old fiddle in the cupboard this morning, I thought I’d try it over before scoring it down, just to hear how it sounded.”

      “You wrote it!” Florian repeated, dazzled and stunned at the news. “You compose as well as rhyme! You set your own songs to music, do you? Well, upon my soul, Deverill, I hadn’t till this moment the slightest idea you had such an accomplishment.”

      “Oh, I’m only a beginner,” Will answered, with a faint blush, laying down the violin, – “or rather an amateur, for I’ve always dabbled in it. But I’ve only published one song. I just strum to amuse myself. Good morning, Herr Hausberger; what an exquisite day! We’d better take advantage of it for a climb up the Rauhenkopf.”

      The landlord, dish in hand, bowed his courteous and courtly bow. There was deference in it, without a tinge of servility. Florian noted with approbation that mixture of independence and a just self-respect which formed a component part of his preconceived idea of the Tyrolese character. Andreas Hausberger was “right,” because he was very much as Florian would have pictured him. “Yes; a very good day for the ascent,” the landlord said, quietly. “We will put up some lunch – cold meat and Pilsener. You’ll get a fine view, if you start in good time, over the Zementhal glaciers.”

      Florian sat down to the table, a trifle crestfallen; but the poached eggs were excellent, and the coffee fragrant; and he consoled himself for the cow-bells and the mishap about the song by the reflection that, after all, these idyllic milkmaids, with the voice of a prima donna and the manners of Arcadia, were in exact accordance with the operatic ideal of his own imagined Tyrol. They sang like the Chorus of Happy Peasants; they behaved as the mountain lass of poetry ought always to behave, and as the mountain lass of reality often utterly fails to do.

      That morning on the Rauhenkopf was to Florian a day of unmixed delights. He was At Home with Nature. In a vague sort of way, without troubling himself much to know anything about them, the town-bred philosopher loved the fragrant fields, the beautiful flowers, the mossy rocks, the bright birds, the chirping insects. And Will Deverill knew them all – their names, and where to find them. The ragged, sweet-scented pinks still loitered late in deep clefts of the glacier-worn rock; a few stray sky-blue gentians still starred the rich patches of Alpine pasture; emperors and orange-tips still flaunted their gaudy wings in full autumn sunshine. Florian drank in all these things with pure sensuous delight; the sweet sounds of the fields, the smell of tedded kine filled his æsthetic soul, not so much with direct pleasure, as with some faint afterglow of literary reminiscence.

      At one of the little alp-huts among the higher pastures, Will Deverill murmured a cheerful “Guten Morgen,” as he passed, to a buxom peasant lass in a woollen kirtle, who stood busy at her churn by the door of her châlet. The girl curtseyed, and looked back at them with such a good-humoured smile that Florian, as an admirer of female beauty, couldn’t resist the temptation of standing still for a moment to take a good long gaze at her. “What’s she doing up here alone?” he asked at last, turning curiously to Will, as the girl still smiled at him. “Does she come up here every day? It’s a fearful long pull for her. But then – this charming air! such strength! such agility!”

      “Why, she lives here,” Will answered, surprised that anyone shouldn’t know what to him was such an obvious and familiar fact. “She doesn’t come up at all, except once in the spring; and in autumn she goes down again. It must be nearly time for her to go down now, I should say. There’s not much fodder left in these upper alps here.”

      “Lives here!” Florian exclaimed, taken aback. “What? – and sleeps here as well? You don’t mean to say she sleeps in that little wooden box there?”

      “Certainly. She’s a sennerin, you know; it’s her business to do it. All the alp girls live like that; they’ve been born and brought up to it.”

      In his innermost soul, Florian was dying to know what manner of wild beast a sennerin might be – being undecided in his own mind as to whether it was most probably the name of a race, a religion, a caste, or a profession. But it would have been treason to his principles to confess this fact, so he compromised with his curiosity by murmuring blandly in reply, “Oh, ay, to be sure, a sennerin! I might have guessed it! Do you think now, Deverill, if we asked her very nicely, she’d let us go in and inspect her châlet?”

      “I’m sure she would,” Will answered, half repressing a smile. “They see so little of any outsiders while they’re up here on their alps that they’re only too glad, as a rule, when a stranger visits them. We’ll give her a couple of kreuzers for a glass of milk; that’ll serve as an introduction.”

      He raised his hat jauntily, and approached the hut with a few words of apology. The sennerin smiled in return, bobbed, curtseying low, and welcomed them affably to her hospitable shelter. After a minute’s parley with Will, the good-humoured young woman brought out a jug of fresh milk, still frothy from the cow, and poured it out for them liberally in a blue stoneware mug. Will drank his off at a draught; Florian hated milk, but as admirer of female beauty – she was a good-looking wench – he gulped it down to the dregs without even a grimace, and handed the mug back again. Then Deverill talked for a while with their sunburnt entertainer in that unknown tongue which Florian didn’t understand; though he could see from their laughing faces and their quick tones of repartee that she was a merry brown lass, shy and bashful indeed before the foreign gentlefolk, but frank and fearless for all that as his soul could wish, and absolutely free from the absurd conventionalities and mauvaise honte of the women who dwell in our too civilised cities. She was no more afraid of men than of oxen. Florian liked that well. Here, СКАЧАТЬ