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. “This is quaint,” he said, “most quaint. I admire its art immensely. The point about it all that particularly appeals to me is the charming superiority of Our Lady’s calm soul to the essentially modern vice of pity. There she sits on her throne, unswerved and unswerving, not even deigning to contemplate with that marked squint in her eye the extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable position of her petitioners beneath her. I admire it very much. I find it quite Etruscan.”
“To you and me – yes, quaint – nothing more than that,” Will responded, soberly; “but to Linnet, it’s all real – fire, flames, and torments; she believes what she sees there.”
As he spoke, the girl came back, with her nosegay in her hand, and, tying it round with a thread from a little roll in her pocket, laid it reverently on the shrine with a very low obeisance. “You see,” she said to Will, speaking in English once more, for Andreas Hausberger wished her to take advantage of this unusual opportunity for acquiring the language, “my poor father is killed in the middle of his sins; he falls from the rock and is taken up dead; there is no priest close by; he has not confessed; he has not had absolution; he has no viaticum; no oil to anoint him. That makes it that he must go straight down to purgatory.” And she clasped her hands as she spoke in very genuine sympathy.
“Then all these shrines,” Florian said, looking up a little surprised, “are they all of them where somebody has been killed by accident?”
“The most of them,” Linnet answered, as who should say of course; “so many of our people are that way killed, you see; it is thunderstorms, or snow-slides, or trees that fall, or floods on rivers, things that I cannot say, for I know not the names how to speak them in English. And, as no priest is by, so shall they go to purgatory. For that, we make shrines to release them from their torments.”
They had gone on their way by this time, and reached a corner of the path where it turned abruptly in zig-zags round a great rocky precipice. Just as they drew abreast of it, and were passing the corner, a young man came suddenly on them from the opposite direction. He was a fiery young man, dressed in the native Tyrolese costume of real life; his hand held a rifle; his conical hat was gaily decked behind, like most of his countrymen’s, with a blackcock’s feather. The stranger’s mien was bold – nay, saucy and defiant. He looked every inch a typical Alpine jäger. As he confronted them he paused, and glared for a moment at Linnet. Next instant he raised his hat with half-sarcastic politeness; then, in a very rapid voice, he said something to their companion in a patois so pronounced that Will Deverill himself, familiar as he was with land and people, could make nothing out of it. But Linnet, unabashed, answered him back once or twice in the same uncouth dialect. Their colloquy grew warm. The stranger seemed angry; he waved his hand toward the Englishmen, and appeared, as Will judged, to be asking their pretty guide what she did in such company. As for Linnet, her answers were evidently of the sort which turneth away wrath, though on this hot-headed young man they were ineffectually bestowed. He stamped his foot once or twice; then he turned to Will Deverill.
“Who sent you out with the sennerin?” he asked, haughtily, in good German.
Will answered him back with calm but cold politeness. “Herr Hausberger, our wirth,” he said, “asked the Fräulein to accompany us, as she knew the place where a certain fern I wished to find on the hills was growing.”
“I know where it grows myself,” the jäger replied, with a defiant air. “Let her go back to the inn; it is far for her to walk. I can show you the way to it.”
“Certainly not,” Will retorted, in most decided tones. “The Fräulein has been good enough to accompany us thus far; I can’t allow her now to go back alone to the village.”
“She’s used to it,” the man said, gruffly, with half a sneer, his fingers twitching.
“That