But Linnet, walking behind, was in the seventh heavens. She had found her Engländer once more, and that alone would have been enough for her. But that wasn’t all; this second chance meeting, perfectly natural as it was—for Andreas had but followed the stream of tourists southward—impressed her simple mind with the general idea that the world, after all, wasn’t as big as she had supposed it, and that she’d be liable now to meet the gnädige Herr wherever she went, quite casually and accidentally. Not, indeed, that she troubled her head much just then about the future in any way: with Will by her side, she lived wholly in the present. She didn’t even ask him why he had gone away from Innsbruck without coming to say goodbye to her in person; she didn’t utter a single word of reproach or complaint; she accepted all that; she took it all for granted. Will never could marry her; she didn’t expect him to marry her: a gentleman like him couldn’t marry a peasant-girl; a Catholic like herself couldn’t marry a heretic who scarcely bowed the knee to Our Blessed Lady. But she loved him for all that, and she was happy if he would but let her walk beside him. And in this she was purely and simply womanly. True love doesn’t ask any end beyond itself: it is amply satisfied with being loved and loving.
And Will? Well, Will had a poet’s nature, and the poet lives in the passing emotion. Only a man of moods can set moods before us. Like Linnet herself, Will thought little of the future when Linnet was beside him. He meant her no harm, as he said truly to Florian; but he meant her no good either: he meant nothing at all but to walk by her side, and hold her hand in his, and feel his heart beat hard, and her finger-touch thrill through him. Walking thus as in a mist, they passed Dorf Tyrol; and the road at once grew wilder and more romantic. It grew also more sequestered, with deeper bends and nooks, as it turned the corners of little ravines and gulleys, where they could look at one another more frankly with the eager eyes of young love; and once, Will raised his hand to Linnet’s nut-brown cheek, and pressed it tenderly. Linnet said nothing, but the hot blood rushed to her face with mingled shame and pleasure; and who was so glad as she that Will Deverill should touch her!
The path wound round a deep gorge, overhanging a torrent, with Schloss Tyrol itself frowning beyond on its isolated crag—a picturesque and half-ruinous mediæval fortress, almost isolated on a peninsular mass of crumbling mud-cliff, interspersed with the ice-worn débris of pre-historic glaciers. ’Tis a beautiful spot. Pretty Alpine rills, tearing headlong down the sides, have carved out for themselves steep ravines which all but island the castle; their banks rise up sheer as straight walls of cliff, displaying on their faces the grey mud of the moraine, from which the ice-worn boulders project boldly here and there, or tumble from time to time to encumber the littered beds of the streams that dislodged them. But what struck Florian most of all, as he paused and looked, was the curious effect produced where a single large boulder has resisted the denuding action of the streams and the rainfall, so as to protect the tapering column of hardened mud beneath it. Each big rock thus stood paradoxically perched on the summit of a conical pillar, called locally an earth-pyramid, and forming, Florian thought, the most singular element in this singular landscape. Close to its end the track bends round an elbow to skirt the ravine, and then plunges for a hundred yards or more into a dark and narrow underground passage through the isthmus of moraine stuff, before drawing up at the portcullis of the dismantled fortress. A more romantically mysterious way of approaching a mediæval stronghold Florian could hardly imagine: it reminded him of Ivanhoe or the Castle of Otranto.
But as Florian and Philippina disappeared under the shadow of the darkling archway, Will found himself alone for one moment with Linnet, screened from observation by the thick trellis-work of the vineyards. They were walking close together, whispering in one another’s ears those eternal nothings which lovers have whispered in the self-same tones, but in a hundred tongues, for ten thousand ages. Occasion favoured them. Will glanced round for a moment; then with a rapid movement he drew the trembling girl to himself, half unresisted. Her cheek was flushed, partly with joy, partly with fear, that he should dare to lay hands on her. His boldness thrilled her through with a delicious thrill—the true womanly joy in being masterfully handled. “No, no,” she cried in a faint voice; “you mustn’t, you mustn’t.” But she said it shyly, as one who half-wishes her words to fail of their effect: and Will never heeded her “no”—and oh, how glad she was that Will never heeded it! He held her face up to his, and bent his own down tenderly. Linnet tried to draw back, yet pursed up her lips at the same time and let him kiss her when he tried; but she made him try first, though when at last he succeeded, she felt the kiss course trembling through her inmost being.
It was but a moment, yet that moment to her was worth many eternities. For a second of time she nestled against him confidingly, for now he was hers, and she was his for ever. Their lips had sealed it. But before he could steal another, she had broken away from him again, and stood half-penitent, half-overjoyed, by the roadside, a little way from him. “No more now!” she said, gravely, lifting one finger in command; “we must follow Herr Florian.” And with that, they plunged at once into the gloom of the tunnel.
What happened by the way, no one knows save themselves; but, two minutes later, with blushing cheeks, they rejoined their companions by the gateway of the castle. Even flushed as she was, Linnet couldn’t help admiring it. It was beautiful, wonderful. The ancient wealth and dignity of the first counts of Schloss Tyrol remain well reflected to this day in the rude magnificence of their Romanesque residence. Linnet looked up with wonder at the round-arched portal of the principal doorway, richly carved with quaint squat figures of grotesque fancy, naïve, not to say childish and uncouth, in design, but admirable and exquisite in execution. “Tenth-century workmanship!” Florian said, with a bland smile, as he looked up at it, condescendingly; and Will, pulling himself together again, explained to the two girls in detail the various meanings of the queer little figures. Here were Adam and Eve; here Jonah and the whale; here saints revelled in Heaven; here, lost souls rolled in torment. Linnet gazed, and admired the beauty of the door—but still more, Will’s learning. If only she could understand such things as that! But there!—he was so wise, and she so ignorant!
They passed into the hall—that stately old Rittersaal, adorned with marble carvings of the same infantile type—and looked sheer down from the windows a thousand feet on to the valley below, with the falls of the Adige behind, and a sea of tumultuous porphyritic mountains surging and rolling in the farther background. ’Twas a beautiful view in itself, rendered more beautiful still by its picturesque setting of semi-circular arches, divided and supported by slender shafts of polished alabaster. To an untutored girl of Linnet’s native artistic temperament, it was delightful to pass through those lordly halls and into that exquisite chapel with its quaint old frescoes, in company with somebody who could explain their whole meaning to her simple intelligence so well as Will Deverill. Though she felt her own ignorance—felt it acutely, sensitively—she felt at the same time how fast she could learn from such a teacher; and as she dropped on her knees before the twelfth-century Madonna in the spangled shrine of that antiquated chantry, it was not for herself alone that she murmured below her breath, in very tremulous tones, an Ave Maria.
Will and Florian talked, too, of the Schloss and its history. Linnet listened with all her ears, though she hardly understood half the English words they used to describe it—how it commanded the whole vast plain of Meran and Botzen, the widest and most populous in the Eastern Alps, one basking garden of vines and Indian corn and fruit-trees, thickly dotted with hamlets, churches, and castles. “You can see why the counts who lived here spread their power and their name by slow degrees over the whole of this country,” Will said, as they gazed down on it. And then he went on to talk of how the Counts of Tyrol gradually absorbed Meran and Botzen, and in course of time, by their possession of the Brenner route, the great mediæval highway from Italy to Germany, acquired the over-lordship of the whole wide tract which is now called after them. Oh, what grand words he used! Linnet listened, and wondered at them. She caught, from time to time, the name of Margaret Maultasch—that Meg of the Pocket-Mouth who made over her dominions to the house of Austria—and learned from stray hints how the Counts of the new line moved their capital northward from Meran to Innsbruck. It was marvellous how Herr Will, who was a stranger from England, should know so much more about her people’s history than she herself did! But there! what did she say? Herr Will knew everything.
Florian and Philippina went off by themselves after awhile among the ruins of the ramparts. Linnet was left alone with Will again by the windows of the Rittersaal. All this historical talk had inflamed her eager mind with vague hopes and possibilities. Why should not she too know? Why should not she too be fit for him, like the fair-haired lady? “Herr Will,” she said at last, turning round to him with a shy look in her shrinking eyes, “How I wish you could teach me! How I wish you could tell me how to learn such things! We shall be here for a month. Why shouldn’t I begin? Why shouldn’t I learn now? We may see each other often.”
“Will you be on the hill behind the town to-morrow?” Will asked, half-ashamed of himself for these endless breakings-off, and these fresh re-commencements.