Linnet. Allen Grant

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      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, Fräulein 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 naïve 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 châlet 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, gnädige 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, Fräulein,” 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 Fräulein? 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 Fräulein.”

      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 Fräulein indeed. It extorts our homage. Heaven only knows to what height it may some day lead you.”

CHAPTER V

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THE WIRTH’S THEORY

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      In the evening, while they dined, the landlord came in to see how they fared, and wish them good appetite: ’tis the custom with distinguished guests in the Tyrol. The moment he entered, Florian, all agog, attacked him at once on the subject of their wonderful find that afternoon on the hillside. “Well, Herr Hausberger,” he cried in his high-flown way, “we’ve seen and heard your Linnet⁠—⁠heard her warbling her native wood-notes wild, to the tune of her own cow-bells on her lonely mountains. Now, what do you mean, sir, by turning out a divine singer like that⁠—⁠I’m a musical critic myself, and I know what I’m talking about⁠—⁠what do you mean by turning her out to make butter and cheese in a solitary hut on an Alpine pasture? It’s sheer desecration, I tell you⁠—⁠sheer wicked desecration; there’s nothing, almost, that girl couldn’t СКАЧАТЬ