“Let me try,” Linnet pleaded, with such a winning look that Will couldn’t resist her. And to humour her whim, he repeated the simplest of the laughing little love-songs from his book of “Voices.”
The ring of it was pretty—very sweet and musical. Linnet half understood—no more; for the words were too hard for her. But it spurred her on to further effort. “You must lend me some books like that in English,” she said, simply. “I want to be wise, like you and Herr Florian.”
So Will brought her next day from the book-shop in the town the dainty little “Poetry Book of Modern Poets,” in the Tauchnitz edition. He wrote her name in it too; and Linnet took it home, and hid it deep in her box in a white silk handkerchief, and read bits of it by night, very stealthily in her own room, spelling out what it meant with Andreas Hausberger’s dictionary. Long after, she had that precious volume bound in white Florentine vellum, with a crimson fleur-de-lys on the cover, at a house just opposite the Duomo at Florence. But at present she read it in its paper covers. She read other books, too—German books which Will chose for her; not instructive books which were over her head, but poetry and romance and imaginative literature, such as her ardent Tyrolese nature could easily assimilate. Day after day, Will read her aloud something fresh—Undine, the Maid of Orleans, Uhland’s Ballads, Paul Heyse’s short stories—but of all the things he read to her, the one she liked best was a German translation of an English play—a beautiful play by another English poet, whose name was also Will, but who died long ago—a play about two luckless and devoted lovers, called Romeo and Juliet. Linnet cried over that sad story, and Will kissed her tears away; and a little later, when Andreas Hausberger took her to Verona on their way south to Milan, Linnet went of her own accord to see Juliet’s tomb in a courtyard in the town, and wasted much excellent sympathy and sentiment over the shameless imposture of that bare Roman sarcophagus. But she meant very well; and she believed in Juliet even more firmly than she believed in Siegfried and Chriemhild and all the other fine folks to whom Will introduced her.
So three weeks passed away, three glorious golden weeks, and day after day, on those lovely hillsides, Linnet saw her lover. At the end of a fortnight, Rue heard, from various friends at other hotels, of a wonderful singer in a Tyrolese troupe, then performing nightly in the various salons. “Why, that must surely be Linnet!” she said before Will, to the first friend who mentioned it.
“Yes; Linnet—that’s her name,” Rue’s friend assented.
“I knew she was in the town,” Will admitted somewhat sheepishly; for he felt as if he were somehow deceiving Rue, though it never would have entered his good, modest head to suppose she herself could care anything about him, except as a poet in whose work she was kind enough to take a friendly interest.
“Ah, I should love to hear her again!” Rue cried, enthusiastically. “She sings like a nightingale—such a splendid soprano! Let’s find out where she’ll be to-night, and go round in a body to the hotel to hear her!”
But Will demurred strongly. He’d rather not go, he said; he’d stop at home by himself and get on with his operetta. At that, Rue was secretly pleased in her own heart; she felt it throb sensibly. After all, then, her poet didn’t really and truly care for the pretty alp-girl. He knew she was in the town—and, in spite of that knowledge, had spent every evening all the time with herself at the Erzherzog Johann! Nor would Florian go either; he invented some excuse to account for his reluctance. So Rue went with two new girls she had picked up at the hotel, in succession to the giggling inarticulates at Innsbruck. Linnet recognised her in the crowd, for the room was crowded—’twas a nightly ovation now, wherever Linnet sang—and knew her at once as the fair-haired lady. But Florian and Will weren’t with her to-night! That made Linnet’s heart glad. She had come without him! After all, her Engländer didn’t always dance attendance, it seemed, on the fair-haired Frau with the many diamonds!
So easily had Will made two women’s hearts happy, by stopping at home at his hotel that evening! For women think much more of men than men imagine—their poor little breasts live for the most part in a perpetual flutter of love and expectancy.
As the weeks wore away, however, it began to strike Franz Lindner as a singular fact, that Philippina and Linnet severed themselves so much every day from the rest of the troupe, and went up on the hills all alone for exercise. That fierce young Robbler was a true Tyrolese in his treatment of his women. Though he never abated one jot or tittle of his attentions to Linnet, it hardly occurred to him as forming any part of a lover’s duty to accompany his mädchen in her morning rambles. Franz was too much engaged himself, indeed, with the young men of the place in the cafés and beer-gardens, to find much time hanging idle on his hands for female society. He had made many friends in the gay little town. His hat and his feather were well known by this time to half the gilded youth in the Meran restaurants. Andreas Hausberger had turned out the young women on the hills; and there they might stop, so far as Franz Lindner was concerned to prevent them. Andreas Hausberger had been wondrous careful of Linnet’s health of late, since he saw he was likely to make pots of money from her. He had bound them all down by a three years’ engagement, and he knew now that Linnet was worth at least five times the sum he had bargained to pay her. But Franz Lindner’s health might take care of itself; and Franz didn’t think much, personally, of the air of the mountains. He’d had enough of all that in his jäger days; now the chrysalis had burst, and let loose the butterfly; his wander-years had come, and he meant to sip the sweets of advanced civilisation. And he sipped them in the second-rate bars and billiard-rooms of a small town in South Tyrol.