From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover—and her husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place; Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent, entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful! Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford.
Then Rome—the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres, the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could possibly teach her.
As spring returned, they went northward through Lombardy and the Brenner once more on their way to Munich. Her own Tyrol looked more beautiful than ever as they passed, with its unmelted snows lying thick on the mountains. But, save for a night at Innsbruck, they might not stop there. Yet, even after that short lapse of time in southern cities, oh, how different, how altered little Innsbruck seemed to her! She had thought it before such a grand big town; she thought it now so much shrunken, so old-world, so quaint, so homely. And then, no Will Deverill was there, as before, to brighten it. The mountains gazed down as of old from their precipitous crags upon the nestling town; they were Tyrolese and home-like; and therefore she loved them. But everything had a smaller and meaner air than six months earlier; the queer old High Street was just odd, not magnificent; the Anna Säule was dwarfed, the Rathhaus had grown smaller. She had only seen Milan, Florence, Rome, meanwhile; but Milan, Florence, Rome, made Innsbruck sink at once to its proper place as a mere provincial capital. While they waited for the Munich train next morning, she strolled into the Hofkirche, to see once more Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant figures. She started at the sight. After the Venus and the Laocoon it surprised her to think she could so lately have stood awestruck before those naïf bronze abortions!
That summer they spent in Germany, almost wholly at Munich. There Linnet went through a course of musical training under a well-known teacher, and there, too, she had ample opportunities, at the same time, of cultivating to the full her general artistic faculties. Next winter, back to Italy—this time to Venice, Rome, and Naples. Linnet learnt much once more; it was all so glorious; the Grand Canal, St Mark’s, the Academy, the Frari, Sorrento, Capri, Pozzuoli, the great operas at San Carlo. So she stored her brain all the time with fresh experiences of men, women, and things; with pictures of places, of architecture, of sculpture, of scenery. Everywhere her quick mind assimilated at once all that was best and most valuable in what she saw or listened to; by eye and by ear alike, she was half-unconsciously educating herself.
But that wasn’t all. She had ideas as well of still higher education. Will Deverill had given her the first key to books—and books are the gateways of the deepest knowledge. Partly to escape from the monotony of Andreas Hausberger’s conversation, partly also quite definitely to fit herself for the place in the world she was hereafter to fill—when she went to England—Linnet turned to books as new friends and companions. German literature first of all, and especially the dramatic. Andreas was wise enough in his generation to approve of that; he was aware that acquaintance with plays and with romantic works in general forms no small integral part of an opera-singer’s equipment. German literature, then, first—Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Richter, Paul Heyse, Freiligrath—German literature first, but after it English. Andreas approved of that, too, for was there not much money to be made out of England and America? It was well Linnet should enlarge her English vocabulary; well, too, she should know the plays and novels on which Romeo e Giulietta, and Lucia di Lammermoor, and I Puritani were founded. But Linnet herself had other reasons of her own for wishing to study English. Though she looked upon Will Deverill as something utterly lost to her, a bright element in her life now faded away for ever, she yet cherished the memory of that one real love episode so deep in her heart that, for her Englishman’s sake, she loved England and English. She looked forward to the time when she should go to England; not so much because she thought she should ever meet Will Deverill there—Naples and Munich had taught her vaguely to appreciate the probable vastness of London—but because it was the country where Will Deverill lived, and it spoke the tongue Will had made so dear to her. So she read every English book she could easily obtain—Shakespeare, Milton, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray—and she took oral lessons in conversational English, which as Andreas justly remarked, would improve her accent, and enable her to sing better in English opera.
Thus three years passed away, and Linnet in their course saw much of the Continent. They got as far north and west at times as Leipzig, Brussels, and even Paris. But they always spent their winters in Italy; it was best for Linnet’s throat, Andreas thought; it gave her abundance of fresh air and sunshine; and besides, the Italian style of teaching was better suited, he felt sure, to her ardent, excitable Tyrolese temperament, than the colder and more learned Bavarian method.
’Twas at Naples, accordingly, that Linnet came out first as Signora Casalmonte. But after a short season there, Andreas was quite sufficiently assured of ultimate success to venture upon taking his prize at once to England. He would sell his goods, like a prudent merchant that he was, in the dearest market. When Linnet first learned she was to go to London, a certain strange thrill of joy and hope and fear coursed through her irresistibly. London! that was the place where Will Deverill lived! London! that was the place where she soon might meet him!
She clasped the little metal Madonna that still hung from her neck, convulsively. “Our Dear Frau, oh, protect me! Save me, oh, save me from the thoughts of my own heart! Help me to think of him less! Help me to try and forget him!”
She was Andreas Hausberger’s wife now, and she meant to be true to him. Love him she never could, but she could at least be true to him. Not in deed alone, but in thought and in word, as Our Dear Frau knew, she strove hard to be faithful.
Then came the first fluttering excitement and disappointment of London—that dingy Eldorado, so rich, so miserable—the dim, dank streets, the glare, the gloom, the opulence, the squalor of our fog-bound metropolis! For a week or two, thank Heaven, Linnet was too busy at arrangements and rehearsals to think of surroundings. They were the weeks during which Will was away in the Provinces, or he must almost certainly have heard of and attended the preliminary performances of the forthcoming opera. The final day arrived, and Linnet, all tremulous at the greatness of the stake, had to make her first appearance before that stolid sea of unsympathetic, hide-bound English faces. She had peeped at them from the wings before the curtain rose; oh, how her heart sank within her. The respectable sobriety of stalls and boxes, the square-jawed brutality of pit and gallery, the cynical aspect of the gentlemen of the press, in their faultless evening clothes and unruffled shirt-fronts—all contrasted so painfully with the vivid excitement and frank expectancy of the Neapolitan audiences to which alone she had hitherto been accustomed. One brighter thought, and only one, sustained her—Dear Lady, forgive her that she should think of it now! these were all Herr Will’s people, and they spoke Herr Will’s tongue; as Herr Will was kind, would not they too be kind to her?