Linnet: A Romance. Allen Grant
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“Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the wirth paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.
“Right!” Andreas Hausberger repeated. “Never mind about that! You’d know I was right if only you’d seen as much of these people as I have. Look here, Mr Wood, you say it’s desecration to send a girl like Linnet after butter and cheese in a sennerin’s hut on the lonely mountains. You say I owe her voice as a treasure to humanity. Wal, I acknowledge the debt, and I try to discharge it to the best of my ability. I send her to the hills – the free open hills – where she will breathe fresh air, develop her throat and lungs, eat wholesome food, grow strong and brown and hearty. If I clothed her in purple and fine linen, as you wish, and fed her every day on champagne and turtle, do you really imagine I’d be doing her a good turn? I’d be ruining her voice for her. In the summer, she gains breath and good health on the grassy mountains; in the winter, she gets training and advice and assistance from Lindner and myself, and whatever other teachers we can find in the Zillerthal.”
“I surrender at discretion,” Florian answered, with a yawn, rising up and flinging his small person lazily on the home-made sofa. “I admit your contention. You interest me strangely. Your peasants and your country girls have finely developed ears and capital voices. No doubt you’re correct in attributing these splendid gifts to the clearness of the atmosphere and the wild life of the mountains. I’m a musical critic in London myself, and I know what a voice is the moment I hear it. Indeed, after all, what does it matter in the end if these divine creatures spend a joyless life for years in sordid and squalid surroundings, provided only, when they burst forth at last in the full effulgence of their musical prime, they afford us, who can appreciate them, and for whose sake they exist, one vivid thrill of pure artistic enjoyment?” And he stroked his own smooth and girlish cheek with one plump hand, lovingly.
“You’re a musical critic, are you?” Andreas Hausberger repeated, with marked interest, disregarding the last few words of Florian’s flowing rhapsody. “Then you shall hear Linnet sing. You can say after that whether I’m right in my system or not.” He opened the door hastily. “Linnet, Linnet,” he called out in the Tyrolese dialect, “come in here at once. I want the Herrschaft to hear you singing.”
For a minute after he spoke, there was a flutter and a rustling at the door outside; somebody seemed to be pushing some unwilling person bit by bit along the passage. A murmur of whispered voices in the local dialect floated faintly to Will’s ears. “You must!” “But I can’t.” “You shall!” “I won’t.” “He says you are to.” “Ah, no; I’m ashamed! Not before those gentlemen!”
In the end, as it seemed, the first voice had its way. The door opened brusquely, and Linnet, all trembling, her face in her hands, and crimson with shame, was pushed bodily forward by unseen arms into the strangers’ presence. For a moment she stood there like a frightened child. Will’s cheek burned hot with sympathetic tingling. Florian leaned back philosophically as he lay, and regarded this pretty picture of beauty in distress with observant complacency. She was charming, so, to be sure! That red flush became her.
“Sing to the gentlemen,” Andreas Hausberger said, calmly, in a tone of command. “Take your hands from your face at once; don’t behave like a baby.”
He spoke in German, but Florian followed him all the same. ’Twas delicious to watch this pretty little comedy of rustic ingenuousness.
“Oh, I can’t!” Linnet cried, all abashed, removing her hands for a second from her burning cheeks, and clasping them hard on her throbbing breast for one fiery moment before she clapped them up hastily again. “To bid one like this! It’s so hard! It’s so dreadful!”
“Don’t ask her just now,” Will Deverill put in pleadingly. “One can see she has such a natural shrinking and disinclination at first. Some other night, perhaps. When we’ve been here a little longer, she may be less afraid of us.”
Linnet let her hand drop once more, and gave him a grateful glance, sidling away towards the door like a timid child in her misery. But Andreas Hausberger, for his part, was not so to be put off. “No, no,” he said, sternly, fixing his eye with a determined gaze on the poor shrinking girl; “she must sing if I tell her to. That’s all right. This shyness is absurd. How can she ever appear on a platform, I should like to know, before a couple of hundred people, if she won’t sing here when she’s told before just you two Englishmen? Do as I bid you, Linnet! No nonsense, my girl! Stand here by the table, and give us ‘The Bride of Hinter-Dux.’ ”
Thus authoritatively commanded, poor Linnet took her stand where Andreas Hausberger motioned her, steadied herself with one trembling little fist on the edge of the table, raised her eyes to the ceiling away from the two young men, and, drawing a deep breath, with her throat held out and her mouth opened tremulously, began to trill forth, in her rich, silvery voice, a deep bell-like song of her own native mountain. For the first minute or two she was nervous, and quivered and paused unduly; after awhile, however, inborn artistic instinct overcame her nervousness: she let her eyes drop and rest in a flash once or twice on Will Deverill’s. They were kindly eyes, Will’s; they reassured and encouraged her. “Bravo!” they seemed to say; “you’re rendering it admirably.” Emboldened by his friendly glance, she took heart and went through with it. Towards the end, her courage and self-possession returned, for, like all Tyrolese, she was brave and self-reliant in her inmost soul, though shy at first sight, and bashful on the surface. The two last stanzas she sang to perfection. As she finished, Will looked up and said simply, “Thank you; that was beautiful, beautiful.” But Florian clapped his hands in obtrusive applause. “Well done!” he cried; “well done! you have given us such a treat. We can forgive Herr Hausberger now for insisting on a performance.”
“And you must accustom yourself to an audience,” the wirth said in German, with that same quiet air of iron resolution Will had already marked in him. “If ever you’re to face a whole roomful of people, you must be able first to come in upon the platform without all this silly fuss and hang-back nonsense.”
Linnet’s nostrils quivered. She steadied herself with her hand on the table once more, and made answer boldly, “I think I could more easily face a roomful of people I’d never seen than sing before two in the parlour of the inn here; that seems less personal. But,” she added shyly, with half an appealing glance towards Will, “I’m not so nervous now. If this gentleman wishes, I – I would sing another song to him?”
And so she did – a second and a third. As she went on, she grew braver, and sang each time more naturally. At last the wirth dismissed her. Linnet curtsied, and disappeared. “Well, what do you say to her now?” the landlord asked in a tone of triumph, turning round to the young men as the door closed behind her.
Florian assumed his most studiously judicial air. The perfect critic should, above all things, be critical. Before Linnet’s face, indeed, he had been enthusiastic enough, as politeness and due respect for her sex demanded; but behind her back, and in her teacher’s presence, regard for his reputation compelled him to adopt the severest tone of incorruptible impartiality. “I think,” he said slowly, fingering his chin in one hand, and speaking with great deliberation, like a recognised authority, “with time and training she ought to serve your purpose well for popular entertainments. Her organ, though undeveloped, is not wholly without some natural power and compass.”
“And I think,” Will Deverill added, with a glow of generous enthusiasm, “you’ve lighted on one of the very finest voices in all Europe.”
CHAPTER VI
THE ROBBLER
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