HAIL, COLUMBIA!
And next morning, indeed, saw them safe at Innsbruck.
’Twas a pull to get away; Will frankly admitted to his own soul he felt
it so. But he saw it was right, and he went accordingly. Linnet, he
knew, had grown fond of him in those few days; when he asked her once
how it was she liked Franz Lindner less now than formerly, she looked up
at him with an arch smile, and, after a second’s pause, made the frank
avowal: “Perhaps it’s because now . . . I think Englishmen nicer.” At
the moment his heart had come up in his mouth with pleasure, as will
happen with all of us when a pretty woman lets us see for ourselves she
really likes us. But he must go all the same: for Linnet’s sake—he must
go: if illusion there were, he must at once disillusion her.
As for Linnet herself, she accepted the separation much more readily, to
say the truth, than Will ever imagined she could. It half-piqued him,
indeed, to find how easily she seemed to acquiesce in the inevitable.
She trembled when he told her, to be sure, and tears started to her
eyes; but she answered, none the less, in a fairly firm voice, that she
always knew the _gnädige Herr_ must go away in the end; that she hoped
he would remember her wherever he went; and _she_—with a deep sigh—she
could never forget his kindness. That, however, was all. Just a pressure
of her fingers, just a kiss on his hand, just a tear that dropped wet on
his outstretched palm as she bent her head over it in customary
obeisance, and Linnet was gone, and he saw no more of her that evening.
In the morning when he stood at the door to bid farewell to the
household, he fancied her eyes looked red with crying. But she grasped
his hand hard, for all that, and said goodbye without flinching. He gave
a florin or two as _Trinkgeld_ to each of the servants at the inn; but
to Linnet he felt he couldn’t give anything. She was of different mould.
Linnet noticed the omission herself, with a glistening eye—and took it,
as it was meant, for a social distinction.
The plain truth was, she had always expected Will must soon go away from
her. Nor was she indeed as yet what one might fairly call quite in love
with him. The very distance between them seemed to forbid the feeling.
He was kind, he was sympathetic, he was musical, he was a gentleman, he
divined her better qualities, her deeper feelings; he spoke to her more
deferentially and with truer respect than any of her own equals had ever
yet spoken to her; she couldn’t help feeling flattered that he should
like to come out upon the hillside to talk with her; but, as yet, she
hardly said to herself she loved him. If she had, what good? Was it
likely such a great gentleman from over the seas would care to marry a
mere Tyrolese milkmaid? Was it likely, if he did, the _wirth_ and the
priest would allow her to marry a Protestant Englishman?
So, from the very outset, save as a passing affection, Will Deverill
stood wholly outside poor Linnet’s horizon. She regarded him as a
pleasant but short-lived episode. Besides, light loves are the rule with
the alp-girl. It was quite in the nature of things for Linnet that a man
should take a liking to her, should pay her brief court, should expect
from her far greater favours than ever Will Deverill expected, and
should give her up in the end for a mere freak of fancy. That was the
way of the Zillerthal! So, though the thorn had gone deep, she accepted
her fate as just what one might have anticipated, and hardly cried for
an hour in her own bed at night, to think those sweet mornings on the
pasture by the pinewood were to be over for ever. For of course, in the
end, if the _wirth_ so willed, she must marry herself contentedly to
Andreas Hausberger.
Acting on Florian’s advice, Will did not even tell his tremulous little
friend he was going to Innsbruck. “Better break it off at once,” Florian
said, with practical common-sense, “once for all and absolutely. No
chance of letters or any nonsense of that sort—if the dulcinea can
write, which of course is doubtful.” And Will, having made up his mind
to the wrench, acquiesced in this sage council. So for Linnet, the two
strangers who had loomed so large, and played so leading a part on the
stage of her little life for one rapturous fortnight, vanished utterly,
as it were, at a single breath, like a dissolving cloud, into the
infinite and the unknowable.
By seven that night, the young Englishmen found themselves once more in
the full flood of civilisation. The electric light shed its beams on
their hotel; a Parisian _chef de cuisine_ turned out sweetbreads and
ices of elaborate art to pamper their palates. Once more, Florian donned
with joy the black coat of Bond Street. They had penetrated the
Zillerthal with their knapsacks on their backs; but two leather
portmanteaus, enclosing the fuller garb of civilised life, awaited their
advent at Innsbruck. Thus restored to society, with a rosebud in his
buttonhole, the dainty little man descended radiant to the
_salle-à-manger_. He welcomed the change; after three whole weeks of
unadulterated Nature, he had tired of Arcadia. And he loved
_tables-d’hôte_: ’twas a field for the prosecution of social conquests.
“A man goes there on his merits,” he said briskly to Will, as they
dressed for dinner, “neither handicapped nor yet unduly weighted. Nobody
knows who he is, and he knows nobody. So he starts there on the flat,
without fear or favour; and if at the end of ten minutes he hasn’t
managed to make himself the centre of a conversational circle, he may
retire into private life as a social failure.”
On this particular evening, however, in spite of several brilliant and
manful efforts, Florian didn’t somehow succeed in attracting an audience
quite so readily as usual. The environment was against him. On his right
sat a lady whom he discovered by a side glance at the name written
legibly on the napkin ring by her plate, to be the Honourable Mrs
Medway, and who was so profoundly filled with a sense of the importance
of her own Honourableness that she feared to contaminate herself or her
daughter by conversation with her neighbours till she had satisfied her
mind by sure and certain warranty that they too belonged to the Right
Set in England. Pending proof to that effect, her answers to his
questions were both curt and monosyllabic. This nettled Florian, who
prided himself with truth on his extensive knowledge of all the “smart
people.” To his left, beyond Will, on the other hand, sat a
stolid-looking gentleman of nonconformist exterior and provincial garb,
whose conversation, though ample, betrayed at times the inelegant idiom
and accent of the Humber. Him Florian the silver-tongued carefully
avoided. Opposite, was a vacant place, on either side of which sat two
young girls of seventeen or thereabouts in the acutest stage of giggling
inarticulateness. Florian listened, and despaired. Here was a coterie,
indeed, for a brilliant talker and a man of culture!
But just as they finished the soup, to his intense relief, a ray of
light seemed to pierce of a sudden the gathering gloom of the dinner
table. The drawing-room door opened, and through its portal a Vision of
Beauty in an evening dress floated, Hellenic goddess-wise, into the
_salle-à-manger_. It made its way straight to the vacant chair, nodded
and smiled recognition to the bread-and-butter gigglers and the
Honourable Mrs Medway, bowed demurely, continental-way, to the newly
come strangers, and glided off at once, without a pause or break, into a
general flow all round of graceful, easy conversation. Florian gazed,
and succumbed. This was a real live woman! Ripe, but not too ripe, soft
and rounded of outline, with a bewitching mouth, a row of pearly teeth,
and a cheek that wore only its own natural roses, she might have
impressed at first sight a less susceptible heart by far than the
epicurean sage’s. As she seated herself, she drew from her pocket a
little cardboard box, which she handed with a charming smile to one of
the giggling inarticulates. “Those are the set you admired, I think,”
she said, with unconscious grace. “I hope I’ve got the right ones. I was
passing the shop on my way back from my drive, and I thought I’d just
drop in and bring them back as you liked them so.”
The giggling inarticulate gave a jerky little scream of unmixed delight
as she opened the box and took out from it with tremulous hands a pretty
set of coral necklet, brooch, and earrings. “Not for _me_!” she cried,
gasping; “not for me—for a present! You don’t really mean to _give_
them to _me_! They’re too lovely, too delicious!”
“Yes, I do,” the Vision of Beauty responded, beaming. “I wanted to give
you some little souvenir some time before you went, and I didn’t know
what you’d like; so, as you said you admired these, I thought I’d best
go in at once as I passed and buy them. They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Florian eyed them with the lenient glance of a man of taste who
appraises and appreciates a beautiful woman’s selection. When the
bread-and-butter gigglers had exhausted upon them their slender stock of
laudatory adjectives—their _oh’s_ and _just look’s_, and _dear me,
aren’t they beautiful’s_—he broke in with his bland smile, and, laying
the necklet in a curve on the white tablecloth before him, began to
discourse with much unction in the Florianic tongue, on the æsthetic
points of this pretty trifle. For it _was_ a pretty necklet, there was
no denying that; its lance-like pendants were delicately shaped and most
gracefully arranged; it was one of those simple half-barbaric designs
which retain to our day all the naïve beauty of primitive
unsophisticated human workmanship. Florian found in it reminiscences of
Eve in Eden. And he said so in that luxuriantly florid style of which he
was so great and so practical a master. He called attention with suave
tones to the distinctly precious suggestions of archaic influence in the
shaping of the pendants; to the exquisite nature of coral as a
decorative object, cast up blushing on our shores by the ungarnered
sea—a material whose use we inherit from our innocent ancestors, when
wild in woods the noble savage ran, his limbs untrammelled by clinging
draperies—when beauty unadorned was adorned the most in the subtle and
sinuous curves of its own lissome figure. Necklets and armlets, he
observed, with one demonstrative white forefinger held poised above the
salmon, are the string-courses, so to speak, of this our natural human
architecture; they serve to emphasise and throw out into stronger relief
the structural points of the grand design, to call attention to the
exquisite native fulness of a faultless torso.
The giggling inarticulates dropped their chins and stared. They were not
quite sure whether such talk was proper. But the Vision of Beauty, more
at home in the world, was not in the least alarmed at Florian’s torrent
of eloquence. On the contrary, she answered him back, as he himself
remarked a little later to Will, like the lords of the council, with
grace, wisdom, and understanding. Florian brightened, and flowed on. He
loved a listener who could toss the ball back to him as fast as he
tossed it. And the Vision of Beauty answered him back with lightning
speed, and bore her share with credit in the conversation. It was
evident as she went on that she knew her Europe. Was it Munich Florian
touched upon with the light hand of his craft?—she discoursed of the
Van der Weydens and Crivellis in the Pinakothek, like one to the manner
born, and had views of her own which were bold, if not prudent, about
the meaning and arrangement of the Aeginetan marbles. Was it Florence he
attacked?—she was at home at San Marco, and knew her way like a
Baedeker round the rooms at the Pitti. Will listened and marvelled,
talking little himself, but giving Florian and the Vision of Beauty
their heads. It surprised him much to find one female brain could store
in its teeming cells so much miscellaneous knowledge.
At last, at a brief break in Florian’s flood of speech, Will found space
to inquire, for a purpose of his own, “Would you mind my asking where
you got that necklet?”
The Vision of Beauty handed the lid of the box to him. It bore, on a
label, the name and address of the jeweller at whose shop she had bought
it. “It’s on the way up,” she said, carelessly, “to this hotel from the
city.”
That one Shibboleth betrayed her. Florian started in surprise. “Why,” he
cried with open eyes, “then you must be an American.”
The beautiful stranger smiled and nodded. “Yes, _sir_,” she said with
marked emphasis, as if to clinch the assertion of her western
nationality. “I _am_ an American, and I don’t want to hide it. But you
pay what you consider a compliment to the purity of my English all the
same, if you mean that till now you haven’t even suspected it.”
Florian made some politely condescending remark, of the sort so
obnoxious to the late Mr Lowell, as to the correctness and delicacy of
her English accent, and then, in order to show himself quite abreast of
the times, inquired expansively if she knew the Van Rensselaers.
“No; I haven’t had that pleasure,” the Vision of Beauty answered,
curtly.
“The Livingstones, perhaps?” Florian adventured, in tentative tones.
The Vision shook her head.
“My friends the Vanderbilts?” Florian essayed once more, eager to find a
connecting link. “I stayed with them at Newport.”
“No; nor yet the Vanderbilts,” the Vision answered, smiling.
Florian paused and reflected. “Ah, then, you’re from Boston, no doubt,”
he suggested, with charitable promptitude. The fine friends he had
mentioned, at whose houses he had stopped, were all New Yorkers.
“No; not from Boston,” the Vision answered with prompt negation.
“Washington, I suppose?” Florian adventured again. They were the only
three places a self-respecting American could admit she came from
without shipwreck of her dignity. He would not pay so much grace and
eloquence the very bad compliment, as it seemed to him, of supposing it
could “register” from St Louis or New Orleans.
The pretty woman smiled once more, a self-restrained smile. “I come from
New York,” she said, simply. “I’ve lived there long. It’s my native
place. But there are a good many of us there who don’t aspire to know
the Roosevelts or the Livingstones.”
Florian withdrew, with quiet tact, from this false departure. He led
aside the conversation, by graceful degrees, to the old Dutch families,
the New England stock—Emerson, Longfellow, Channing, the Concord set:
Howells, James, and Stedman, the later American poets. On these last he
waxed warm. But the Vision of Beauty, herself cosmopolitan to the core,
was all for our newest school of English bards. She doted on Lang and
Austin Dobson.
“And have you seen the last _Illustrated_?” she asked, after awhile,
with a burst of enthusiasm. “It’s on the table in the _salon_ there. And
there are three, oh, such lovely, lovely stanzas in it,—‘Among Alps,’
by Will Deverill.”
Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had
published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus
familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could
the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the
hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the _Illustrated_,
which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little _coup_
with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look
guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once
behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down
at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken.
“I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.”
The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless.
“You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a
moment’s pause.
“That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his
plate. “But I’m very little used to—to—to meeting people who have
heard of it.”
The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I _am_ glad to
meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr,
of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have
‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.”
“No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at
unexpected recognition.
“I’ll go upstairs after dinner and fetch it down to show you,” his
pretty admirer answered, with some pride. “And your friend, too, is he a
poet?”
“In soul; in soul only!” Florian interposed, airily, dashing in at a
tangent; for it irked him thus to play second fiddle to Will’s first
hand, and he longed to assert his “proper position.” “I string no
sonnets; I play no harmonies; I take the higher place. I sit on a
critical throne, weighing and appraising all arts impartially. Deverill
rhymes; another man paints; a third man strums; a fourth acts, or carves
stone—and all for _me_. I exercise none of these base handicrafts
myself; but I live supreme in the Palace of Art they build,
subordinating each in due place to my soul’s delight, like a subtle
architect.”
“Just the same as all the rest of us,” the pretty American put in,
interrupting his period. “We all do that. We sit still and listen. The
difficulty is—to produce, like Mr Deverill.”
Florian stood aghast. To think a mere woman should thus slight his
pretensions! But the pretty American, disregarding him, turned to Will
once more. “And your friend’s name?” she said, interrogatively.
“My friend’s name,” Will answered, “is Florian Wood. You must know it.”
“Ah, Mr Florian Wood,” the pretty stranger echoed; “I’ve heard of him,
of course. I’m glad to meet him. It’s so nice to see people in the flesh
at last one has often heard talked about.”
“But _you’ve_ heard about everybody, Mrs Palmer,” the first giggling
inarticulate interposed, with a gurgle of admiration.
Florian clapped his hand to his head in theatrical disappointment.
“_Mrs_ Palmer!” he cried, markedly. “Did I hear aright, _Mrs_ Palmer?
This is indeed a blow! Then, I take it, you’re married!”
From anyone else on earth, the remark would have been rude; from
Florian, it was only exaggerated compliment. The Vision of Beauty
accepted it as such with American frankness.
“Well, you needn’t go and take a draught of cold poison offhand,” she
retorted, a little saucily, “for there’s still a chance for you.
Remember, a woman may be maid, wife, . . . or widow.”
“Dear me,” Florian ejaculated, half-choking himself in his haste, “I
never thought of that. You don’t mean to say——”
“Yes, I do,” Mrs Palmer responded, cutting him short with a merry nod.
“Any time these last five years. Now, you’re sorry you spoke. Mr
Deverill, may I trouble you to pass the mustard?”