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.”