Linnet plucked a yellow ragwort and pulled out the ray-florets one by one as she answered, “I shan’t have the chance. For, to tell you the truth, I think Andreas Hausberger means himself to marry me.”
At the words, simply spoken, Will drew back, all aghast. The very notion revolted him. As yet, he was not the least little bit in his own soul aware he was in love with Linnet. He only knew he admired her voice very much; for the rest, she was but a simple, beautiful, unlettered peasant girl. It doesn’t occur, of course, to an English gentleman in Will Deverill’s position, to fall in love at first sight with a Tyrolese milkmaid. But Andreas Hausberger! the bare idea distressed him. The man was so cold, so cynical, so austere, so unlovable! and Will more than half-suspected him of avaricious money-grubbing. The girl was so beautiful, so simple-hearted, so young, and Heaven only knew to what point of success that voice might lead her. “Oh no,” he burst out, impetuously; “you can’t really mean that? – you never could dream – don’t tell me you could – of accepting that man Andreas Hausberger as a husband!”
“Why not?” the girl said, calmly. “He’s rich and well to do. I could keep my mother in such comfort then, and pay for such masses for my father’s soul – far more than if I took Franz Lindner or my cousin Fridolin, who are only jägers. Andreas Hausberger’s a wirth, the richest man in St Valentin; he has horses and cows and lands and pastures. And if he says I must, how can I well refuse him?”
She looked up at him with a look of childlike appeal. In a moment, though with an effort, Will realised to himself how the question looked to her. Andreas Hausberger was her master, and had always been her master. She must do as he bid, for he was very masterful. He was her teacher, too, and would help her to make her fortune as a singer in the world, if ever she made it. He was rich, as the folk of the village counted riches, and could manage that things should be pleasant or unpleasant for her, as it suited his fancy. In a community where men still fought with bodily arms for their brides, Andreas Hausberger’s will might well seem law to his sennerin in any such matter.
“Besides,” Linnet went on, plucking another ragwort, and similarly demolishing it, “if I didn’t want to take him, the Herr Vicar would make me. For the Herr Vicar would do, of course, as Andreas Hausberger wished him. And how could I dare disobey the Herr Vicar’s orders?”
To this subtle question of religion and morals Will Deverill, for his part, had no ready-made answer. Church and State, it was clear, were arrayed against him. So, after casting about for a while in his own mind in vain for a reply, he contented himself at last with going off obliquely on a collateral issue. “And you think,” he said, “Andreas Hausberger really wants to marry you?”
“Well, he never quite told me so,” Linnet replied, half-deprecatingly, as who fears to arrogate to herself too great an honour, “and perhaps I’m wrong; but still I think he means it. And I think it’ll perhaps depend in part upon how he finds the foreign Herrschaft like my singing. For that, he says little to me about it at present. But if he sees I do well, and am worth making his wife – for he’s the best husband a girl could get in St Valentin – in that case, ja wohl, I believe he’ll ask me.”
She said it all naturally, as so much matter of course. But Will’s poetic soul rebelled against the sacrifice. “Surely,” he cried, “you must love some one else; and why not, then, take the man you love, whoever he may be, and leave Andreas Hausberger’s money to perish with him?”
“So!” Linnet said quickly – the pretty German “so!” Her fingers trembled as she twitched at the rays of the ragwort. She plucked the florets in haste, and flung them away one by one. First love’s conversation deals largely in pauses. “The man one might love,” she murmured at last with a petulant air, “doesn’t always love one. How should he, indeed? It is not in nature. For, doesn’t the song say, ‘Who loves me, love I not; whom I love, loves me not?’ But what would the Herr Vicar say if he heard me talking like this with the foreign gentlefolk? He’d tell me it was sin. A girl should not speak of her heart to strangers. I have spoken too much. But I couldn’t help it, somehow. The gnädige Herr is always so kind to me. You lead me on to confess. You can understand these things, I think, so much better than the others.”
She rose, half-hesitating. Will Deverill, for his part, rose in turn and faced her. For a second each paused; they looked shyly at one another. Will thought her a charming girl – for a common milkmaid. Linnet thought him a kind, good friend – for one of the great unapproachable foreign Herrschaft. Will held out one frank hand. Linnet gave him the tips of her brown fingers timidly. He clasped them in his own while a man might count ten. “Shall you be here.. to-morrow.. about the same time?” he inquired, before he let them drop, half hesitating.
“Perhaps,” Linnet answered, looking down demurely. Then blushing, she nodded at him, half curtsied, and sprang away. She gave a rapid glance to right and left, to see if she was perceived, darted lightly down the hill, and hurried back to the wirthshaus.
But all that day long, Will was moody and silent. He thought much to himself of this strange idea that Andreas Hausberger, that saturnine man, was to marry this beautiful musical alp-girl.
CHAPTER IX
THE MAN OF THE WORLD
For some four or five mornings after this hillside interview, Florian noticed every day a most unaccountable fancy on Will Deverill’s part for solitary walks at early dawn before breakfast. Neither dew nor hoar-frost seemed to damp his ardour. Florian rose betimes himself, to be sure, but Will had always already distanced him. And on every one of those five mornings, when Will said farewell to Linnet by the big grey boulder, he used the same familiar formula of leave-taking, “You’ll be here again to-morrow?” And every time, Linnet, thrilling and trembling inwardly, answered back the same one conscience-salving word, “Perhaps,” which oracular and highly hypothetical promise she nevertheless most amply fulfilled with great regularity on the following morning. For, when Will arrived at the trysting-place, he always found Linnet was there before him; and she rose from her rocky seat with a blush of downcast welcome, which a less modest man than he might easily have attributed to its true motive. To Will, however, most unassuming of men and poets, she was only an interesting alp-girl, who liked to meet him on the hillside for a lesson in English. Though, to be sure, why it was necessary to give the lesson alone in the open air at six o’clock in the morning, and, still more, why the professor should have thought it needful to hold the pupil’s hand in his own for many minutes together, to enforce his points, Will himself would no doubt have been hard put to explain on philological principles. Moreover, strange to say, for Linnet’s sake, the conversation was conducted mostly in German.
Lookers-on, however, see most of the game. On the sixth such morning, it occurred casually to Florian as he lay abed and reflected, to get up early himself and go out on the hillside. Not that the airy epicurean philosopher was by any means afflicted with the essentially vulgar vice of curiosity. He was far too deeply occupied with Mr Florian Wood to think of expending much valuable attention on the habits and manners of less-interesting personalities. But in this particular case he felt he had a positive Duty to perform. Now, a Duty had for Florian all the luxury of novelty. He was troubled with few such, and whenever he found one, he made the most of it. Just at present, he was persuaded Will Deverill was on the eve of “getting himself into an entanglement” with the beautiful milkmaid who so paradoxically preferred his society to Florian’s. Plain Duty, therefore, to Will himself, to Mrs Deverill mère, to the just expectations of the ladies of England (who had clearly a prior claim on Will’s fortune and affection), compelled Florian to interfere before things went too far, so as to save his friend from the consequences of his own possible folly. Animated by these noble impulses, Florian did not even shrink from leaving a very snug bed at five o’clock that cold morning, and waiting at the window, like a private detective, till Will took his way up the path to the hillside.
About six, Will emerged from the door of the inn. Florian gave him law, five minutes law – just rope enough to hang himself. Then, marking from the back window which way Will had gone, he followed the trail up hill with all the novel zest of an amateur policeman. Skulking