The singer, looking up, all tremulous to have overheard this unfeigned homage, made answer, to Florian’s equal delight and surprise, “I can speak a little English.”
It would be more correct, perhaps, to put it that what she actually said, was: “Ei kann schpiek a liddle Ennglisch”; but Florian, in his joy that any means of inter-communication existed between them at all, paid small heed at the time to these slight Teutonic defects in her delivery of our language.
“You can speak English!” he exclaimed, overjoyed, for it would have been a real calamity to him to find a pretty girl in the place, with a beautiful voice, and he unable to converse in any known tongue with her. “How delightful! How charming! How quite too unexpected! I’m so glad to know that! For had it been otherwise, I should really have had to learn German to talk with you!”
This overstrained compliment, though it rose quite naturally to Florian’s practised lips, and was far more genuine than a great deal of his talk, made the girl blush and stammer with extreme embarrassment. She was unaccustomed, indeed, to such lavish praise, above all from the gentlefolk. Was the gnädige Herr making fun of her, she wondered? She grew hot and uncomfortable. Fortunately for her self-possession, however, Will Deverill intervened with a more practical remark. “You speak English, do you?” he repeated. “That’s odd, in these parts. One would hardly have thought that! How did you come to learn it?”
“My father was a guide,” the girl answered, slowly, making a pause at each word, and picking her way with difficulty through the insidious pit-falls of British pronunciation. (She called it fahder.) “He taked plenty Ennglish gentlemen up the mountains before time. I learn so well from him, as also from many of the Ennglish gentlemen. Then, too, I take lesson from Herr Hausberger in winters, and from Ennglish young lady at the farm by Martinsbrunn.”
Florian gazed at his companion with an agonised look of mingled alarm and horror. “Do you know who she means?” he cried, seizing Will’s arm. “This is too, too terrible! The girl on the hillside who sticks out her tongue! that horrible little Cockney! She’ll teach this innocent child to say ‘naow,' and ‘lidy'! At last I feel I have a mission in life. We must save her from this fate! We must instruct her ourselves in pure educated English!”
“And how do you come to be called Linnet?” Will inquired with some interest, a new light breaking in upon him. “That’s surely an English name. Who was it first called you so?”
“An Ennglish gentleman when I was all quite small,” the girl replied, with much difficulty, searching her phrases with studious care. “He stop at my father’s hut on our alp many nights—I know not how man says it—so must he go up the mountains. I sing to him often when he come down at evening. My right name is called in German, Lina; but the gentleman, says he, that I sing like a bird. A linnet, that is in Ennglish a singing-bird. Therefore, Linnet he call me. The name please my father much, who make a great deal of me; so from that time in forwards, all folk in the village call me also Linnet.”
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.