For some four or five mornings after this hillside interview, Florian noticed every day a most unaccountable fancy on Will Deverill’s part for solitary walks at early dawn before breakfast. Neither dew nor hoar-frost seemed to damp his ardour. Florian rose betimes himself, to be sure, but Will had always already distanced him. And on every one of those five mornings, when Will said farewell to Linnet by the big grey boulder, he used the same familiar formula of leave-taking, “You’ll be here again to-morrow?” And every time, Linnet, thrilling and trembling inwardly, answered back the same one conscience-salving word, “Perhaps,” which oracular and highly hypothetical promise she nevertheless most amply fulfilled with great regularity on the following morning. For, when Will arrived at the trysting-place, he always found Linnet was there before him; and she rose from her rocky seat with a blush of downcast welcome, which a less modest man than he might easily have attributed to its true motive. To Will, however, most unassuming of men and poets, she was only an interesting alp-girl, who liked to meet him on the hillside for a lesson in English. Though, to be sure, why it was necessary to give the lesson alone in the open air at six o’clock in the morning, and, still more, why the professor should have thought it needful to hold the pupil’s hand in his own for many minutes together, to enforce his points, Will himself would no doubt have been hard put to explain on philological principles. Moreover, strange to say, for Linnet’s sake, the conversation was conducted mostly in German.
Lookers-on, however, see most of the game. On the sixth such morning, it occurred casually to Florian as he lay abed and reflected, to get up early himself and go out on the hillside. Not that the airy epicurean philosopher was by any means afflicted with the essentially vulgar vice of curiosity. He was far too deeply occupied with Mr Florian Wood to think of expending much valuable attention on the habits and manners of less-interesting personalities. But in this particular case he felt he had a positive Duty to perform. Now, a Duty had for Florian all the luxury of novelty. He was troubled with few such, and whenever he found one, he made the most of it. Just at present, he was persuaded Will Deverill was on the eve of “getting himself into an entanglement” with the beautiful milkmaid who so paradoxically preferred his society to Florian’s. Plain Duty, therefore, to Will himself, to Mrs Deverill mère, to the just expectations of the ladies of England (who had clearly a prior claim on Will’s fortune and affection), compelled Florian to interfere before things went too far, so as to save his friend from the consequences of his own possible folly. Animated by these noble impulses, Florian did not even shrink from leaving a very snug bed at five o’clock that cold morning, and waiting at the window, like a private detective, till Will took his way up the path to the hillside.
About six, Will emerged from the door of the inn. Florian gave him law, five minutes law—just rope enough to hang himself. Then, marking from the back window which way Will had gone, he followed the trail up hill with all the novel zest of an amateur policeman. Skulking along the pinewood, he came upon them from behind, by the same path which Will himself had taken on the morning when he followed Linnet first to the boulder in the pasture. Then, treading softly over the green turf with muffled footfall, he was close upon the unconscious pair before they knew or suspected it. The ill-advised young people were seated side by side on a little ledge of rock that protruded from the green-sward. Will leant eagerly forward, holding Linnet’s hand, and looking hard into her eyes; the girl herself drew back, and cast down her glance, as if half fearing the ardour of his evident advances. Respect for the conventions made Florian cough lightly before disturbing their interview. At the sound, both looked up. Some five feet nothing of airy observant humanity beamed blandly down upon them. Linnet gave a little cry, started up in surprise, hid her crimson face hurriedly between two soft brown hands, and then, yielding to the first impulse of her shy rustic nature, fled away without one word, leaving Will face to face with that accusing moralist.
The epicurean philosopher seated himself, like stern justice in miniature, beside his erring friend. His face was grave: when Florian did gravity, he did it, as life did everything else, “consummately.” For a minute or two he only stared hard at Will, slowly nodding his head like an earthenware mandarin, and stroking his smooth chin in profound meditation. At the end of that time, he delivered his bolt, point blank. “Tomorrow,” he said, calmly, “we go on to Innsbruck.”
“Why so?” Will asked, with a dogged air of dissent.
“Because,” Florian answered, with crushing dialectic, “we never intended to spend our whole time on the upper Zillerthal, did we?”
This sudden flank movement took Will fairly by surprise. For Florian was quite right. Their plan of campaign on leaving London included the South Tyrol, Verona, and Milan. “But a day or two longer,” he put in, half-imploringly, thus caught off his guard. “Just a day or two longer to . . . to settle things up a bit.”
Stern justice was inexorable. “Not one other night,” Florian answered, severely. “The lotus has by this time been sufficiently eaten. I see what this means. I know now why you’ve kept me here so long at St Valentin. With Innsbruck and Cortina and the untrodden Dolomites beckoning me on to come, you’ve planted me plump in this hole, and kept me here at your side—all for the sake of one Tyrolese cow-girl. In the name of common morality,” and Florian frowned like a very puisne judge, “I protest against these most irregular and improper proceedings.”
“I never meant the girl any harm,” Will answered, with a faint flush.
“That’s just it, my dear fellow. I know very well you didn’t. That’s the head and front of your offending. If you had meant her harm, of course I could much more readily have forgiven you.”
“Florian,” Will said, looking up, “let’s be serious, please, for once. This is a serious matter.”
Florian pursed his thin lips, and knitted his white brow judicially. “H’m, h’m,” he said, with slow deliberateness. “It’s as bad as that, is it? Why, Deverill, I assure you, I’ve rarely—if ever—been as serious as this in all my life before. Don’t look at me like that. I mean just what I say. I’m not thinking about the girl, but about you, my dear fellow. The morals of these parts, as you very well know, are primitive—primitive. It won’t do her much harm, even if it gets noised about, to have been seen on the hills, alone in the grey dawn, hand in hand with an Englishman. This is no place for Oriental seclusion of women. Indeed, from what I hear, the Arcadian relations of these unchaperoned alp-girls with their lovers from the plains must be something truly sweet in their unaffected simplicity. Herr Hausberger was telling me last night that when an alp-girl marries, all the hunters and peasants, her discarded lovers, whom she has admitted to the intimacy of her châlet on the mountains, leave a cradle at the door of her chosen husband on the night of the wedding. The good man wakes up the morning after his marriage to find staring him in the face, on his own threshold, these tangible proofs of his wife’s little slips in her spinster existence. . . . It’s a charming custom. I find it quite economical. He knows the worst at once. It saves him the trouble, so common among ourselves, of finding them out for himself piecemeal in the course of his later relations.”
“You are wandering from the question,” Will interrupted, testily. He didn’t quite relish these generalised innuendoes against poor Linnet’s character.
“Not at all, not at all,” Florian went on very gravely. “The point of these remarks lies in the application thereof, as Captain Cuttle puts it. . . . When Linnet marries, you mean, I suppose, to increase the number of the delicate little offerings presented at her door by——”
Will started up and glared at him. “You shall not speak like that,” he cried in a very angry voice, “of such a girl as Linnet.”
The little man waved one dainty white hand with a deprecating gesture towards his excited friend. “This is too bad,” he said, sighing, “very bad indeed, far worse than I imagined. I said it on purpose, just to see what you were driving at. And I find out the worst. If you mean the girl no harm, and take a slighting little jest on her to heart like that, why your case is desperate—an aggravated attack, complicated by incipient matrimonial symptoms. You need change of air, change of scene, change of company. Law of Medes and Persians, it’s Innsbruck to-morrow! You go with me as I bid, or I go without you. Demur, and I leave you at once to your fate. You may stop with your cow-girl.”
“Don’t speak of her by that name!” Will broke in, half-angrily.
But Florian, for his part, was provokingly cool. “All A is A,” he said, calmly, with irresistible logic—“and every cow-girl’s a cow-girl. I’ll call her a boutrophista, or a neat-herding Phyllis, if it gives you any pleasure. That’s neither here nor there. The point’s just this—You mean the girl no harm: then what the deuce do you mean? Are you going to marry her?”
“No; certainly not,” Will answered. She was a very nice girl, and he loved to talk with her—there was something so sweetly unsophisticated in her ways that she charmed and attracted him. But marry her? No; the very word surprised him; he had never even dreamt of it. In the first place (though as yet he hadn’t as much as thought about that), he had nothing to marry upon. And in the second place, if he had, could he take a Tyrolese milkmaid fresh from the cowsheds in his tow to London, and present her to his friends as Mrs Will Deverill?
“Then what the deuce do you mean?” Florian repeated, persistently. His sound common-sense, when he chose to let it loose from his veneer of affectation, was no mean commodity.
Thus driven to bay, Will was forced to reply with a somewhat sheepish air, “I don’t know that I mean anything. I’ve never tried to formulate my state of mind to myself. She’s a very nice girl . . . for her class and sort . . . and I like to talk to her.”
“And when you talk to her, you like to hold her hand and lean forward like this, and stare with all your eyes, and look for all the world as if you wanted to devour her! Oh yes; I’ve seen you. No, no, Will, it won’t do; I’ve been there myself, and I know all about it. Looking at the matter impartially, as a man of the world”—and Florian, drawing himself up, assumed automatically, as those words rolled out, his most magisterial attitude—“what I’m really afraid of is that you’ll get gradually dragged into this rustic syren’s vortex, and be swallowed up before you know it in the treacherous sea of matrimony. However, you don’t believe that, and I know enough of the world to know very well it’s no use, therefore, arguing out that aspect of the case with you. No fellow will ever believe he can be such a fool—till he catches himself in church face to face at last with the awful reality. I prefer, accordingly, to go on the other tack with you. If you don’t mean to marry the girl, then, whether you know it or not, you mean no good to her. I dare say you’ve got all sorts of conventional notions in your head—which, thank heaven, I don’t share—about honour and so forth . . . how a cow-girl’s virtue—I beg your pardon, a boutrophista’s, or a neat-herding Phyllis’s—is as sacred at your hands as the eldest daughter’s of a hundred marquises. But that’s neither here nor there. If you don’t marry the girl, and you don’t ruin the girl, there’s only one thing left possible—you must break the girl’s heart for her. Between ourselves, being, I flatter myself, a tolerable psychologist, I don’t for a moment suppose that’s what would actually happen; you’d get yourself entangled, and you’d go on and on, and you’d flounder and struggle, and you’d marry her in the end, just to save the girl misery. But we’ll do poojah to your intellect at the expense of your heart, and we’ll put it the other way, as you seem to prefer it. Very well, then; sooner or later you’ll have to leave this place. No doubt, after what I’ve seen this morning, it’ll cost the girl a wrench—her vanity must be flattered by receiving so much undisguised attention from a real live gentleman. But, sooner or later, as I say, come it must, of course; and sooner, on the whole, will be better for her than later. The longer you stop, the more she’ll fall in love with you; the quicker you get away from her the less it’ll hurt her.”
He spoke the words of wisdom—according to his kind. Will rose again with an effort, and started homeward. As they walked down the pasture, and through the belt of pinewood, he said never a word. But he thought all the more on Florian’s counsel. Till that morning, he had never tried to face the question himself: he liked the girl—that was all; she sang like a linnet; and he loved to be near her. But the longer he stopped, the harder for her would be the inevitable breaking off. Just beyond the pinewood Florian halted and fronted him. “See here, Will,” he said, kindly, but with the world’s common sense, “it isn’t that I care twopence myself what becomes of the girl—girls like that are just made for you and me to play skittles with; if you meant her any harm I wouldn’t for the world interfere with any other man’s little fancies. All I want is to get you away from the place before you’ve time to commit yourself. I use the other argument as an argumentum ad hominem only. But as that it has its weight. The longer you stop, the harder it’ll be in the end for her.”
Will drew a deep breath. His mind was made up now. “Very well, then,” he said, slowly, though with an evident struggle; “if I must go, I must go. I won’t haggle over a day. Let us make it to-morrow.”
