FROM LINNET’S STANDPOINT
Yes; it was Linnet indeed! The natural chances of Will’s profession had
thrown them together almost inevitably on the very first night of her
appearance in London.
Linnet had looked forward to that night; she had always expected it.
During those three long years that had passed since they parted, she had
never yet ceased to hope and believe that Andreas would some day take
her to England. And if to England, then to London, and Will Deverill.
But much had happened meanwhile. She was the self-same Linnet still, in
heart and in soul, yet, oh! how greatly changed in externals of every
sort. Those three years and a half had made a new woman of her in art,
in knowledge, in culture, in intellect. She had left the Tyrol a mere
ignorant peasant-girl; she came to London now an educated lady, an
accomplished vocalist, a powerful actress, a finished woman of society.
And it was Will Deverill who had first put into her head and heart the
idea and the desire of attaining such perfect mastery in her chosen
vocation. The capacity, the potentiality, the impulse, the instinct,
were all there beforehand; no polish on earth can ever possibly turn a
common stone into a gem of the first water: the beauty of colour, the
delicacy of grain must be inherent from the outset, only waiting for the
art of the skilful lapidary to bring them visibly out and make them
publicly manifest. So Linnet had been a lady in fibre from the very
first, inheriting the profound Tyrolese capacity for artistic
receptiveness and artistic effort; everything that was beautiful in
external Nature or human handicraft spoke straight to her heart with an
immediate message—spoke so clear that Linnet could not choose but
listen. Still, it was Will Deverill’s words and Will Deverill’s example
that first set her soul upon the true path of development. It was he who
had read her Goethe’s _Faust_ on the Küchelberg; it was he who had
explained to her the rude Romanesque designs on the portal of the
Rittersaal. She had treasured up those first lessons in her inmost
heart: they were the key that unlocked for her the front door of
culture.
Andreas Hausberger, for his part, could never have taught her so. He had
taken her straight from Meran to Verona and Milan. But his soul was
bounded by the one idea of music. Even in the first poignant sorrow of
that hateful honeymoon, however, Linnet had found time to gaze in wonder
at the great amphitheatre, still haunted by the spectral form of the
legendary Dietrich; to cry like a child over the narrow tomb where
Juliet never lay; to tread with silent awe the vast aisles and solemn
crypt of San Zeno Maggiore. At Milan, they loitered long; Andreas set
her to work at once under a famous local teacher, and took her often in
the evening to hear celebrated singers on the stage of La Scala. Such
elements in an artistic education he thoroughly understood, but it never
would have occurred to his mind as any part of a soprano’s training to
make her examine the Luinis and Borgognones of the Brera, or do homage
before the exquisite Botticellis and Peruginos of the Museo
Poldi-Pezzoli. To the _Wirth_ of St Valentin such excursions into the
sister arts would have seemed mere waste of valuable time, for Andreas
regarded music as a branch of trade, and had not that higher wisdom
which understands instinctively how every form of art reflects its
influence indirectly on the musician’s mind and the musician’s
inspiration. That wisdom Linnet possessed, and Andreas, after a few
ineffectual remonstrances, let her go her own way and live her own
artistic life unchecked to the top of her bent—the more so as he
perceived she sang best and most vigorously when least thwarted or
worried. Moreover, many well-advised friends assured him in private it
was desirable for an actress to know as much as possible of costume, of
colour, of posture, and of grouping, which could best be learned by
studying the works of the great early painters.
So Linnet went her way, undeterred by her husband, and educated herself
in general culture at the same time that she received her strict musical
training. She knew Raphael’s Sposalizio as intimately after a while as
she knew her own _châlet_; she gazed on the flowing lines of Luini’s
frescoes till they grew familiar to her eyes as the Stations of the
Cross in the old church at St Valentin. She drank in the cathedral with
an endless joy; she loved its innumerable pinnacles, its thousand
statues in the marble niches: she admired the gloomy antiquity of
mouldering Sant’ Ambrogio, the dim religious aisles of Santa Maria delle
Grazie. Amid surroundings like these, her artistic nature expanded by
degrees as naturally as a bud opens out into a flower before the summer
sunshine. She revelled in the architecture, the pictures, the statuary:
Milan stood to the soul of the peasant-singer as a veritable university.
It was the first time, too, that Linnet had ever found herself in a
bustling, business-like, modern city. The hurry and scurry were as new
as the art to her. The throng of men and women in the crowded streets,
the Piazza, brilliant with the flare of glowing lamps, the great
glass-roofed gallery where the gilded Lombard youth promenaded by night
in twos and threes, or sipped absinthe before the doors of dazzling
cafés: all these were quite fresh, and all these were, in their way,
too, an element of education. There are many who can see no more in
Milan than this: they know it only as the most go-ahead and modernised
of Italian cities. Linnet knew better. To her it was the town of
Leonardo and his disciples, of the great marble pile whose infinite
detail escapes and eludes the most observant eye, of the vast and
stately opera house where _Otello_ and _Carmen_ first unfolded their
wonders of sight and sound to her ecstatic senses. Wiser in her
generation, she accepted it aright as the vestibule and ante-chamber of
artistic Italy.
From Milan they went on in due time to Florence. There they stopped less
long, for opportunities of learning were not by any means so good as at
Milan and Naples. But those few short weeks in the City of the Soul were
to Linnet as a dream of some artistic Paradise; they made her half
forget, for the moment at least, her lost English lover—and her
husband’s presence. The Duomo, the Palazzo Vecchio, the Loggia, the
Piazza, the old bridge across the Arno, the enchanted market-place;
Michael Angelo’s tomb, Giotto’s crusted campanile! What hours she spent,
entranced, in the endless halls of the Uffizi and the Pitti; what
moments of hushed awe and rapt silence of soul before the pallid Fra
Angelicos in the dim cells of San Marco. Ach, Gott, it was beautiful!
Linnet gazed with the intense delight of her mountain nature at
Raphael’s Madonnas and Andrea’s Holy Families; she stood spellbound
before the exquisite young David of the Academia; she wandered with a
strange thrill among the marvellous della Robbias and Donatellos of the
Bargello. The Tyrolese temperament is before all things artistic. A new
sense seemed quickened within Linnet’s soul as she trod those glorious
palaces instinct with memories of the Medici and their compeers. A great
thirst for knowledge possessed her heart. She read as she had never
known how to read before. That Florentine time was as her freshman year
in the splendid quadrangles of this Italian Oxford.
Then Rome—the Vatican, the Colosseum, the monuments, St Peter’s, the
loud organs, the singing boys, the incense, the purple robes and mitres,
the great guttering candles! All that could awake in unison every chord
of religion and its sister art, in that simple religious artistic
nature, was there to gratify her! It was glorious! it was wonderful! So
her winter passed away, her first winter with Andreas; she was learning
fast, both with eye and with ear, all that Italy and its masters could
possibly teach her.
As spring returned, they went northward through Lombardy and the Brenner
once more on their way to Munich. Her own Tyrol looked more beautiful
than ever as they passed, with its unmelted snows lying thick on the
mountains. But, save for a night at Innsbruck, they might not stop
there. Yet, even after that short lapse of time in southern cities, oh,
how different, how altered little Innsbruck seemed to her! She had
thought it before such a grand big town; she thought it now so much
shrunken, so old-world, so quaint, so homely. And then, no Will Deverill
was there, as before, to brighten it. The mountains gazed down as of old
from their precipitous crags upon the nestling town; they were Tyrolese
and home-like; and therefore she loved them. But everything had a
smaller and meaner air than six months earlier; the queer old High
Street was just odd, not magnificent; the Anna Säule was dwarfed, the
Rathhaus had grown smaller. She had only seen Milan, Florence, Rome,
meanwhile; but Milan, Florence, Rome, made Innsbruck sink at once to its
proper place as a mere provincial capital. While they waited for the
Munich train next morning, she strolled into the Hofkirche, to see once
more Maximilian’s tomb with its attendant figures. She started at the
sight. After the Venus and the Laocoon it surprised her to think she
could so lately have stood awestruck before those naïf bronze abortions!
That summer they spent in Germany, almost wholly at Munich. There Linnet
went through a course of musical training under a well-known teacher,
and there, too, she had ample opportunities, at the same time, of
cultivating to the full her general artistic faculties. Next winter,
back to Italy—this time to Venice, Rome, and Naples. Linnet learnt much
once more; it was all so glorious; the Grand Canal, St Mark’s, the
Academy, the Frari, Sorrento, Capri, Pozzuoli, the great operas at San
Carlo. So she stored her brain all the time with fresh experiences of
men, women, and things; with pictures of places, of architecture, of
sculpture, of scenery. Everywhere her quick mind assimilated at once all
that was best and most valuable in what she saw or listened to; by eye
and by ear alike, she was half-unconsciously educating herself.
But that wasn’t all. She had ideas as well of still higher education.
Will Deverill had given her the first key to books—and books are the
gateways of the deepest knowledge. Partly to escape from the monotony of
Andreas Hausberger’s conversation, partly also quite definitely to fit
herself for the place in the world she was hereafter to fill—when she
went to England—Linnet turned to books as new friends and companions.
German literature first of all, and especially the dramatic. Andreas was
wise enough in his generation to approve of that; he was aware that
acquaintance with plays and with romantic works in general forms no
small integral part of an opera-singer’s equipment. German literature,
then, first—Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, Richter, Paul Heyse,
Freiligrath—German literature first, but after it English. Andreas
approved of that, too, for was there not much money to be made out of
England and America? It was well Linnet should enlarge her English
vocabulary; well, too, she should know the plays and novels on which
_Romeo e Giulietta_, and _Lucia di Lammermoor_, and _I Puritani_ were
founded. But Linnet herself had other reasons of her own for wishing to
study English. Though she looked upon Will Deverill as something utterly
lost to her, a bright element in her life now faded away for ever, she
yet cherished the memory of that one real love episode so deep in her
heart that, for her Englishman’s sake, she loved England and English.
She looked forward to the time when she should go to England; not so
much because she thought she should ever meet Will Deverill
there—Naples and Munich had taught her vaguely to appreciate the
probable vastness of London—but because it was the country where Will
Deverill lived, and it spoke the tongue Will had made so dear to her. So
she read every English book she could easily obtain—Shakespeare,
Milton, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray—and she took oral lessons in
conversational English, which as Andreas justly remarked, would improve
her accent, and enable her to sing better in English opera.
Thus three years passed away, and Linnet in their course saw much of the
Continent. They got as far north and west at times as Leipzig, Brussels,
and even Paris. But they always spent their winters in Italy; it was
best for Linnet’s throat, Andreas thought; it gave her abundance of
fresh air and sunshine; and besides, the Italian style of teaching was
better suited, he felt sure, to her ardent, excitable Tyrolese
temperament, than the colder and more learned Bavarian method.
’Twas at Naples, accordingly, that Linnet came out first as Signora
Casalmonte. But after a short season there, Andreas was quite
sufficiently assured of ultimate success to venture upon taking his
prize at once to England. He would sell his goods, like a prudent
merchant that he was, in the dearest market. When Linnet first learned
she was to go to London, a certain strange thrill of joy and hope and
fear coursed through her irresistibly. London! that was the place where
Will Deverill lived! London! that was the place where she soon might
meet him!
She clasped the little metal Madonna that still hung from her neck,
convulsively. “Our Dear Frau, oh, protect me! Save me, oh, save me from
the thoughts of my own heart! Help me to think of him less! Help me to
try and forget him!”
She was Andreas Hausberger’s wife now, and she meant to be true to him.
Love him she never could, but she could at least be true to him. Not in
deed alone, but in thought and in word, as Our Dear Frau knew, she
strove hard to be faithful.
Then came the first fluttering excitement and disappointment of
London—that dingy Eldorado, so rich, so miserable—the dim, dank
streets, the glare, the gloom, the opulence, the squalor of our
fog-bound metropolis! For a week or two, thank Heaven, Linnet was too
busy at arrangements and rehearsals to think of surroundings. They were
the weeks during which Will was away in the Provinces, or he must almost
certainly have heard of and attended the preliminary performances of the
forthcoming opera. The final day arrived, and Linnet, all tremulous at
the greatness of the stake, had to make her first appearance before that
stolid sea of unsympathetic, hide-bound English faces. She had peeped at
them from the wings before the curtain rose; oh, how her heart sank
within her. The respectable sobriety of stalls and boxes, the
square-jawed brutality of pit and gallery, the cynical aspect of the
gentlemen of the press, in their faultless evening clothes and unruffled
shirt-fronts—all contrasted so painfully with the vivid excitement and
frank expectancy of the Neapolitan audiences to which alone she had
hitherto been accustomed. One brighter thought, and only one, sustained
her—Dear Lady, forgive her that she should think of it now! these were
all Herr Will’s people, and they spoke Herr Will’s tongue; as Herr Will
was kind, would not they too be kind to her?
So, plucking up heart of grace, though trembling all over, she tripped
down the stage rocks with her free gait of a _sennerin_. To her joy and
surprise, a burst of applause rose responsive at once from those
seemingly irresponsive dress-coated stalls, those stolidly brutal and
square-faced pittites. Her mere beauty stirred them. Even the gentlemen
of the press, smiling cynically still, drummed their fingers gently on
the flat tops of their opera-hats. Thus encouraged, Linnet opened her
mouth and sang. Her throat rose and fell in a rhythmical tide. She
rendered the first stanza of her first song almost faultlessly. She
knew, herself, she had never sung better. Then came a brief pause before
she went on to the second. During that pause, she raised her eyes to a
box of the first tier. The Blessed Madonna in Britannia metal on the
oval pendant, ever faithful at a pinch, almost crumpled in her grasp as
she looked and started. It was Will she saw there, Will, Will, her dear
Englishman; and Herr Florian by his elbow, and the grand foreign Frau,
the fair-haired Frau, the Frau with the diamonds, ever still beside
them!
In a second, Linnet felt from head to foot a great thrill break over
her. It broke like a wave of fire, in long, undulating movement, as she
had felt it at Innsbruck. The wave rose from her feet, as before, and
coursed hot through her limbs, and burnt bright in her body, till it
came out as a crimson flush on neck and chin and forehead. Then it
descended once more, thrilling through her as it went, in long,
undulating movement, from her neck to her feet again. She felt it as
distinctly as she could feel Our Blessed Lady clenched hard in her
little fist. Her Englishman was there, whom she thought she had lost; as
at Innsbruck, so in London, he had come to hear her sing her first song
in public!
All at once, yet again, the same strange seizure came over her. As her
eyes met Will’s, and that wave of fire ran resistlessly through her, she
was conscious of a weird sense she had known but once in all her life
before—a sudden failure of sound, a numb deadening of the orchestra.
Not a note struck her ear. It was all a vast blank to her.
Instinctively, as she sang, her right hand toyed with Will’s coral
necklet, but her left, with all its might, still gripped and clasped Our
Lady with trembling fingers. She heard not a word she herself was
uttering; she knew not how she sang, or whether she sang at all; in an
agony of terror, of remorse, of shame, she kept her eyes fixed on the
conductor’s _bâton_. By its aid alone she kept true to her
accompaniment. But her heart went up silently in one great prayer to Our
Lady. When she felt this at Innsbruck she knew it was love. If it meant
love still—Andreas Hausberger’s wife—Oh! Blessed Mother, help! Oh!
Dear Lady, protect her!