THE ROBBLER
A day or two passed, and the young men from time to time saw, by
glimpses and snatches, a good deal of Linnet. For now the summer season
on the hills was over, and the cows had come back to their stall-fed
existence, the musical alp-girl had leisure on her hands for household
duties. In the morning she helped in the general work of the inn; in the
afternoon she practised much in the parlour upstairs with Andreas
Hausberger and his little company. But in the evenings,—ah, then, the
landlord brought her in more than once, by special request, to sing her
native songs to Will Deverill’s accompaniment on the lame old fiddle
from the corner cupboard. Those were pleasant meetings enough. Gradually
the mountain lass grew less afraid of the strangers; she talked German
more freely with Will Deverill now, and considerably enlarged her
English vocabulary by listening to Florian’s richly-worded harangues on
men, women, and things, and the musical glasses. It surprised Florian
not a little, however, to see that this child of Nature, unlike the
ladies of culture in London drawing-rooms, positively preferred Will’s
society to his own, if such a fact seems credible; though he explained
away in part this unaccountable defect of taste and instinct in one
female heart by the reflection that, after all, Will was able to
converse with her in her own language. His own finer points she could
hardly understand; his words were too deep, his thoughts were too high
for her. Still, it annoyed him that even an unsophisticated alp-girl
should display so singular and so marked a predilection for any other
man when _he_ was present. Indeed, he half made up his mind, irksome as
he felt sure the task would prove, to learn German at once, as a
safeguard against so humiliating a _contretemps_ in future.
In the early part of the next week, Will proposed one day they should
mount the hills behind St Valentin, in search of a rare fern he was
anxious to secure before the snows of winter. Andreas Hausberger,
nodding his head, had heard of it before. It was a well-known rarity;
all botanists who came to the Zillerthal, he said, were sure to go in
search of it. “But I’m not a botanist,” Will burst out deprecatingly,
for to admit that fell impeachment is to number yourself outright in the
dismal roll of scientific Dryasdusts; “I only want the plants because I
love them.”
“That’s all right,” Andreas answered, in his accustomed phrase. “You
want the plant, anyway. That’s the chief thing, ain’t it? Wal, there’s
only one place anywhere about St Valentin that it ever grows, and that’s
the Tuxerloch; without somebody to guide you there you’d never find it.”
“Oh, I won’t have a guide,” Will responded, hastily. “I hate to be
guided. It’s too ignominious. If I can’t find my own way about low
mountains like these, in the forest region, I’d prefer to lose it; and I
certainly won’t pay a man to show me where the fern is.”
“Certainly not,” the _wirth_ answered, with true Tyrolese thrift. “I
didn’t mean that. Why waste your money on one of the regular guides, who
charge you five florins for eating half your lunch for you? But Linnet
knows the way as well as any trained guide of them. It’s not a hard
road; she’ll go along with you and show you it.”
“Oh, dear no,” Will replied, with a little hurried embarrassment, for he
felt it would be awkward to be thrown all day into the society of a
young girl in so equivocal a position. “I’m sure we can find the way all
right ourselves. There are woodcutters on the hills we can ask about the
path; and if it comes to that, I really don’t mind whether I find it or
not—it’s only by way of goal for a day’s expedition.”
Andreas Hausberger, however, was an imperious soul. “Linnet shall go,”
he said, shortly, without making more words about it. “She has nothing
else to do. It’s bad for her to be cooped up in the house too much. A
long walk on the hills will be no end of good for her. That’s what I
always say; when young women come down from the mountains in winter,
they do themselves harm by changing their mode of life all at once too
suddenly, and living in close rooms without half the exercise they used
to take on the alp with their milking and churning.”
So, whether they would or not, the two young men were compelled in the
end to put up as best they might with Linnet’s guidance and company. No
great hardship either, Will thought to himself, as Linnet, bare-headed,
but in her Sunday best, led the way up the green slopes behind the
village inn, with the bounding gait of a holiday alp-girl. As to
Florian, his soul was in the seventh heavens. To see that Oread’s light
foot trip gracefully over the lawns was to him pure joy—a stray breath
of Hellas. What Hellas was like, to be sure—the arid Hellas of
reality—with its dusty dry hills and its basking rocks, Florian had not
in his own soul the very faintest conception. But still, the Hellenic
ideal was none the less near and dear to him. From stray scraps of
Theocritus and his inner consciousness he had constructed for himself an
Arcadia of quite Alpine greenness, and had peopled it with lithe maidens
of uncircumscribed affections. So, whenever he wanted to give anything
in heaven or earth the highest praise in his power, he observed with an
innocent smile that it was utterly Hellenic.
Linnet led them on, talking unaffectedly as she went, by long ridge-like
spurs, up vague trails through the woods, and over spongy pastures. As
elsewhere on their walks, Florian noted here and there little
whitewashed shrines at every turn of the road, and endless rude
crucifixes where ghastly white limbs seemed to writhe and struggle in
realistic torture. Of a sudden, by one of these, Linnet dropped on her
knees—all at once without a word of warning; she dropped as if
mechanically, her lips moving meanwhile in muttered prayer. Florian
gazed at her curiously; Will stood by expectant, in a reverent and
mutely sympathetic attitude. For some minutes the girl knelt there,
murmuring low to herself. As she rose from her knees, she turned gravely
to Will. “Here my father has died,” she said, with solemn slowness in
her broken English. “He has slipped from that rock. The fall has killed
him. Will you say, for his soul’s repose, before you go, a
_Vaterunser_?”
She looked up at him pleadingly, as if she thought the prayers of so
great a gentleman must carry weight of their own in Our Lady’s councils.
With infinite gentleness, Will bowed his head in acquiescence, and,
after a moment’s hesitation, not to hurt her feelings, dropped on his
knees himself and bent his neck in silent prayer before the tawdry
little oratory. It was one of those rough shrines, painted by unskilled
fingers, where naked souls in rude flames of purgatory plead for aid
with clasped hands and outstretched arms to placidly unheeding
blue-robed Madonnas. Underneath, an inscription, with N’s turned the
wrong way, and capitals mixed with smaller letters, informed the
passer-by that, “Here, on the 20th of August 188-, the virtuous guide
and experienced woodcutter, Josef Telser of St Valentin, perished by a
fall from a slippery rock during a dangerous thunderstorm. The pious
wanderer is hereby implored to say three Paternosters, of his charitable
good-will, to redeem a tortured soul from the fires of purgatory.”
Will knelt there for a minute or two, muttering the Paternosters out of
pure consideration for Linnet’s sensitive feelings. When he rose from
his knees again, he saw the girl herself had moved off a little way to
pick a few bright ragworts and Michaelmas daisies that still lingered on
these bare heights, for a bouquet to lay before the shrine of Our Lady.
Like all her countrywomen, she was profoundly religious—or, if you
choose to put it so, profoundly superstitious. (’Tis the point of view
alone that makes all the difference.) Florian, a little apart, with his
hand on his cheek and his head on one side, eyed the oratory
sentimentally. “How sweet it is,” he said, after a pause, with an
expansive smile, “to see this poor child, with her childlike faith, thus
throwing herself on her knees in filial submission before her father’s
cenotaph! How delightful is the sentiment that prompts such respect for
the memory of the dead! How eloquent must be the words of her simple
colophon!” Florian was fond of colophons; he didn’t know what they were,
but he always thought them so very Hellenic!
Will’s face was graver. With one finger he pointed to the uncompromising
flames of that most material purgatory. “I’m afraid,” he said,
seriously, “to her, poor child, this act of worship envisages itself in
a very different fashion. She prays to hasten the escape of her father’s
soul from what she takes to be a place of very genuine torture.”
Florian looked closer. As yet, he had never observed the subsidiary
episode of the spirits in their throes of fiery torment, which forms a
component part of all these wayside oratories. He inspected the rude
design with distant philosophical interest. “This is quaint,” he said,
“most quaint. I admire its art immensely. The point about it all that
particularly appeals to me is the charming superiority of Our Lady’s
calm soul to the essentially modern vice of pity. There she sits on her
throne, unswerved and unswerving, not even deigning to contemplate with
that marked squint in her eye the extremely unpleasant and uncomfortable
position of her petitioners beneath her. I admire it very much. I find
it quite Etruscan.”
“To you and me—yes, quaint—nothing more than that,” Will responded,
soberly; “but to Linnet, it’s all real—fire, flames, and torments; she
believes what she sees there.”
As he spoke, the girl came back, with her nosegay in her hand, and,
tying it round with a thread from a little roll in her pocket, laid it
reverently on the shrine with a very low obeisance. “You see,” she said
to Will, speaking in English once more, for Andreas Hausberger wished
her to take advantage of this unusual opportunity for acquiring the
language, “my poor father is killed in the middle of his sins; he falls
from the rock and is taken up dead; there is no priest close by; he has
not confessed; he has not had absolution; he has no viaticum; no oil to
anoint him. That makes it that he must go straight down to purgatory.”
And she clasped her hands as she spoke in very genuine sympathy.
“Then all these shrines,” Florian said, looking up a little surprised,
“are they all of them where somebody has been killed by accident?”
“The most of them,” Linnet answered, as who should say _of course_; “so
many of our people are that way killed, you see; it is thunderstorms, or
snow-slides, or trees that fall, or floods on rivers, things that I
cannot say, for I know not the names how to speak them in English. And,
as no priest is by, so shall they go to purgatory. For that, we make
shrines to release them from their torments.”
They had gone on their way by this time, and reached a corner of the
path where it turned abruptly in zig-zags round a great rocky precipice.
Just as they drew abreast of it, and were passing the corner, a young
man came suddenly on them from the opposite direction. He was a fiery
young man, dressed in the native Tyrolese costume of real life; his hand
held a rifle; his conical hat was gaily decked behind, like most of his
countrymen’s, with a blackcock’s feather. The stranger’s mien was
bold—nay, saucy and defiant. He looked every inch a typical Alpine
jäger. As he confronted them he paused, and glared for a moment at
Linnet. Next instant he raised his hat with half-sarcastic politeness;
then, in a very rapid voice, he said something to their companion in a
_patois_ so pronounced that Will Deverill himself, familiar as he was
with land and people, could make nothing out of it. But Linnet,
unabashed, answered him back once or twice in the same uncouth dialect.
Their colloquy grew warm. The stranger seemed angry; he waved his hand
toward the Englishmen, and appeared, as Will judged, to be asking their
pretty guide what she did in such company. As for Linnet, her answers
were evidently of the sort which turneth away wrath, though on this
hot-headed young man they were ineffectually bestowed. He stamped his
foot once or twice; then he turned to Will Deverill.
“Who sent you out with the _sennerin_?” he asked, haughtily, in good
German.
Will answered him back with calm but cold politeness. “Herr Hausberger,
our _wirth_,” he said, “asked the Fräulein to accompany us, as she knew
the place where a certain fern I wished to find on the hills was
growing.”
“I know where it grows myself,” the _jäger_ replied, with a defiant air.
“Let her go back to the inn; it is far for her to walk. I can show you
the way to it.”
“Certainly _not_,” Will retorted, in most decided tones. “The Fräulein
has been good enough to accompany us thus far; I can’t allow her now to
go back alone to the village.”
“She’s used to it,” the man said, gruffly, with half a sneer, his
fingers twitching.
“That may be,” Will retorted, with quiet self-possession; “but _I’m_ not
used to allowing her to do so.”
For a minute the stranger put one sturdy foot forward, held his head
haughtily, with his hat on one side, and half lifted his fist, as if
inclined to rush forthwith upon the offending Englishman, and settle the
question between them then and there by open violence. But Linnet,
biting her lip and knitting her brow in suspense, rushed in to separate
them. “Take care what you do,” she cried hurriedly in English to Will.
“Don’t let him strike. Stand away of him. He’s a Robbler!”
“A _what_?” Will replied, half smiling at her eagerness, for he was not
at all alarmed himself by her truculent fellow-countryman.
“A Robbler,” Linnet repeated, looking up at him pleadingly. “You know
not what that is? Then will I tell you quickly. The feather in his hat,
it is turned the wrong way. When a Tyrolese does so, he wills thereby to
say he will make himself a Robbler. Therefore, if any one speaks angry
to him, it is known he will strike back. It is—I cannot say what it
means in English, but it invites to fight; it is the sign of a
challenge.”
“Well, Robbler or no Robbler, I’m not afraid of him,” Will answered,
with quiet determination; “and if he _will_ fight, why, of course, he
must take what he gets for it.”
“Perhaps,” Linnet said, simply, gazing back at him, much surprised, “in
your own country you are also a Robbler.”
The _naïveté_ of her remark made Will laugh in spite of himself. That
laugh saved bloodshed. The Tyrolese, on his part, seeing the absurdity
of the situation all at once, broke into a smile himself; and, with that
unlucky smile, his sole claim to Robblerhood vanished incontinently.
Linnet saw her advantage. In a moment, she had poured into the young
man’s ear a perfect flood of explanatory eloquence in their native
dialect. Gradually the Robbler’s defiant attitude relaxed; his face grew
calmer; he accepted her account. Then he turned to Will with a more
mollified manner: “You may go on,” he said, graciously, with a regal nod
of his head; “I allow the _sennerin_ to continue her way with you.”
As for Will, he felt half inclined, at first, to resent the lordly air
of the Robbler’s concession. On second thoughts, however, for Linnet’s
sake, in his ignorance of who the young man might be, and the nature of
his claim upon her, he judged it better to avoid any quarrel of any sort
with a native of the valley. So he raised his hat courteously, and let
the stranger depart, with a very bad grace, along the road to the
village.
“What did you tell him?” he asked of Linnet, as the Robbler went his
way, singing defiantly to himself, down the grassy zig-zag.
“Oh, I told him,” Linnet answered, with a little flush of excitement,
“Andreas Hausberger had sent me that you might teach me English.”
“Is he your brother?” Will asked, not that he thought that likely, but
because it was less pointed than if he had asked her outright, “Is this
young man your lover?”
Linnet shook her head. “Ah, no,” she answered, with a very decided air;
“he’s nothing at all to me—not even my friend. I do not so much as care
for him. He’s only Franz Lindner. But then, he was jealous because he
see that I walk with you. He has no right of that; I am not anything to
him; yet still he must be jealous if somebody speak to me. It is because
he is a Robbler, and must do like that. A Robbler shall always fight if
any man shall walk or talk with his maiden. Though I am _not_ his
maiden, but he would have me to be it. So will he fight with anyone who
shall walk or talk with me. But when I tell him Andreas Hausberger send
me that I may learn English, then he go away quietly. For Franz Lindner,
or any other Robbler, will not fight with a stranger so well as with a
Tyroler.”