In the evening, while they dined, the landlord came in to see how they fared, and wish them good appetite: ’tis the custom with distinguished guests in the Tyrol. The moment he entered, Florian, all agog, attacked him at once on the subject of their wonderful find that afternoon on the hillside. “Well, Herr Hausberger,” he cried in his high-flown way, “we’ve seen and heard your Linnet?—?heard her warbling her native wood-notes wild, to the tune of her own cow-bells on her lonely mountains. Now, what do you mean, sir, by turning out a divine singer like that?—?I’m a musical critic myself, and I know what I’m talking about?—?what do you mean by turning her out to make butter and cheese in a solitary hut on an Alpine pasture? It’s sheer desecration, I tell you?—?sheer wicked desecration; there’s nothing, almost, that girl couldn’t do with her voice. She’s a genius?—?a prodigy; she ought to be clothed in purple and fine linen, and fare sumptuously every day on champagne and turtle. And you, sir?—?you send her up to herd cows all alone, in an inclement clime, on a barren hill-top!”

Andreas Hausberger gazed at him with a self-contained smile that was extremely characteristic. He bowed a sarcastic bow which Florian misinterpreted for polite subservience. “Are you running this show or am I?” he asked, after a fresh pause, with a quaint reminiscence of his Western experience.

“You are, undoubtedly,” Florian answered, taken aback at this unexpected assault. “But you ought to run it, all the same, on rational and humane and intelligent principles. You owe this girl’s voice, as a delight and a treasure, to US, the enlightened and critical connoisseurs of two eager continents. Nature produced it that we might enjoy it. It was intended to give us some of those exquisite moments of artistic pleasure which are the sole excuse creative caprice can plead for the manifold defects of the Universe.”

Andreas Hausberger looked down at him with a half-pitying curl on those stern thin lips of his. Florian had attacked him lightly where his position was strongest. “That’s all right,” he said, slowly, with a chilly drawl?—?’twas his favourite expression. “And do you think then,” he went on, bursting forth almost scornfully, in spite of his outward deference, “we Zillerthalers get our fine singing voices and our musical ears by pure chance and accident? Not so, you may be sure of it. It’s no mere coincidence that our men and women can almost without exception sing like birds from their childhood upwards by the light of Nature. What gives them this power? Why, they live their lives long, in summer especially, in the thin clear atmosphere of our higher mountains. There isn’t much sour-stuff in it?—?what do you call it in English??—?oh, oxygen, don’t you? Wal, there isn’t much oxygen in that thin upper air?—?rarefied, I think you say?—?and therefore they’re obliged to fill their lungs well and expand their chests”?—?he swelled himself out as he spoke, and showed off his own splendid girth to the fullest advantage?—?“and that gives them large reservoirs and rich, pure-toned voices.”

“I never thought of that before,” Will Deverill interposed, much struck by the landlord’s plausible reasoning. “I suppose that’s why mountain races, like the Welsh and the Tyrolese, are so often musical. The rarefied air must tend to strengthen and develop the larynx.”

“No; you never thought of that before,” Andreas Hausberger echoed. “You haven’t had to think of it. And you haven’t had to select and train a choir of our Tyrolese peasants. But I have thought of it for years, and satisfied myself it’s true. Is it for nothing, do you suppose, that on our cold mountain tops the vocal chords, as they say, are braced up and tightened? Is it for nothing that in that clear, pure, limpid air the very nerves of the ear, strained hard to catch quickly at distant sounds, are exercised and educated? Do you think, if I wanted to pick out voices for a musical troupe, I would go for them to Holland, or to Lombardy, or to Hamburg? No, no; I would go right away to the grÜnde there, the upper forks of the Zillerthal, in the crystal air just below the glaciers, and pick out my best singers from the cow-boys and the alp-girls.”

He spoke of what he knew and had long reflected upon. Acquaintance with his subject supplied in part the unimportant deficiencies of his English vocabulary; and, besides, he had said the same things before a dozen times over, to other English travellers.

“Perhaps you may be right,” Florian responded, blandly, as the wirth paused for breath in his eager harangue. It was a way of Florian’s to be bland when he saw he was getting the worst of an argument.

“Right!” Andreas Hausberger repeated. “Never mind about that! You’d know I was right if only you’d seen as much of these people as I have. Look here, Mr Wood, you say it’s desecration to send a girl like Linnet after butter and cheese in a sennerin’s hut on the lonely mountains. You say I owe her voice as a treasure to humanity. Wal, I acknowledge the debt, and I try to discharge it to the best of my ability. I send her to the hills?—?the free open hills?—?where she will breathe fresh air, develop her throat and lungs, eat wholesome food, grow strong and brown and hearty. If I clothed her in purple and fine linen, as you wish, and fed her every day on champagne and turtle, do you really imagine I’d be doing her a good turn? I’d be ruining her voice for her. In the summer, she gains breath and good health on the grassy mountains; in the winter, she gets training and advice and assistance from Lindner and myself, and whatever other teachers we can find in the Zillerthal.”

“I surrender at discretion,” Florian answered, with a yawn, rising up and flinging his small person lazily on the home-made sofa. “I admit your contention. You interest me strangely. Your peasants and your country girls have finely developed ears and capital voices. No doubt you’re correct in attributing these splendid gifts to the clearness of the atmosphere and the wild life of the mountains. I’m a musical critic in London myself, and I know what a voice is the moment I hear it. Indeed, after all, what does it matter in the end if these divine creatures spend a joyless life for years in sordid and squalid surroundings, provided only, when they burst forth at last in the full effulgence of their musical prime, they afford us, who can appreciate them, and for whose sake they exist, one vivid thrill of pure artistic enjoyment?” And he stroked his own smooth and girlish cheek with one plump hand, lovingly.

“You’re a musical critic, are you?” Andreas Hausberger repeated, with marked interest, disregarding the last few words of Florian’s flowing rhapsody. “Then you shall hear Linnet sing. You can say after that whether I’m right in my system or not.” He opened the door hastily. “Linnet, Linnet,” he called out in the Tyrolese dialect, “come in here at once. I want the Herrschaft to hear you singing.”

For a minute after he spoke, there was a flutter and a rustling at the door outside; somebody seemed to be pushing some unwilling person bit by bit along the passage. A murmur of whispered voices in the local dialect floated faintly to Will’s ears. “You must!” “But I can’t.” “You shall!” “I won’t.” “He says you are to.” “Ah, no; I’m ashamed! Not before those gentlemen!”

In the end, as it seemed, the first voice had its way. The door opened brusquely, and Linnet, all trembling, her face in her hands, and crimson with shame, was pushed bodily forward by unseen arms into the strangers’ presence. For a moment she stood there like a frightened child. Will’s cheek burned hot with sympathetic tingling. Florian leaned back philosophically as he lay, and regarded this pretty picture of beauty in distress with observant complacency. She was charming, so, to be sure! That red flush became her.

“Sing to the gentlemen,” Andreas Hausberger said, calmly, in a tone of command. “Take your hands from your face at once; don’t behave like a baby.”

He spoke in German, but Florian followed him all the same. ’Twas delicious to watch this pretty little comedy of rustic ingenuousness.

“Oh, I can’t!” Linnet cried, all abashed, removing her hands for a second from her burning cheeks, and clasping them hard on her throbbing breast for one fiery moment before she clapped them up hastily again. “To bid one like this! It’s so hard! It’s so dreadful!”

“Don’t ask her just now,” Will Deverill put in pleadingly. “One can see she has such a natural shrinking and disinclination at first. Some other night, perhaps. When we’ve been here a little longer, she may be less afraid of us.”

Linnet let her hand drop once more, and gave him a grateful glance, sidling away towards the door like a timid child in her misery. But Andreas Hausberger, for his part, was not so to be put off. “No, no,” he said, sternly, fixing his eye with a determined gaze on the poor shrinking girl; “she must sing if I tell her to. That’s all right. This shyness is absurd. How can she ever appear on a platform, I should like to know, before a couple of hundred people, if she won’t sing here when she’s told before just you two Englishmen? Do as I bid you, Linnet! No nonsense, my girl! Stand here by the table, and give us ‘The Bride of Hinter-Dux.’”

Thus authoritatively commanded, poor Linnet took her stand where Andreas Hausberger motioned her, steadied herself with one trembling little fist on the edge of the table, raised her eyes to the ceiling away from the two young men, and, drawing a deep breath, with her throat held out and her mouth opened tremulously, began to trill forth, in her rich, silvery voice, a deep bell-like song of her own native mountain. For the first minute or two she was nervous, and quivered and paused unduly; after awhile, however, inborn artistic instinct overcame her nervousness: she let her eyes drop and rest in a flash once or twice on Will Deverill’s. They were kindly eyes, Will’s; they reassured and encouraged her. “Bravo!” they seemed to say; “you’re rendering it admirably.” Emboldened by his friendly glance, she took heart and went through with it. Towards the end, her courage and self-possession returned, for, like all Tyrolese, she was brave and self-reliant in her inmost soul, though shy at first sight, and bashful on the surface. The two last stanzas she sang to perfection. As she finished, Will looked up and said simply, “Thank you; that was beautiful, beautiful.” But Florian clapped his hands in obtrusive applause. “Well done!” he cried; “well done! you have given us such a treat. We can forgive Herr Hausberger now for insisting on a performance.”

“And you must accustom yourself to an audience,” the wirth said in German, with that same quiet air of iron resolution Will had already marked in him. “If ever you’re to face a whole roomful of people, you must be able first to come in upon the platform without all this silly fuss and hang-back nonsense.”

Linnet’s nostrils quivered. She steadied herself with her hand on the table once more, and made answer boldly, “I think I could more easily face a roomful of people I’d never seen than sing before two in the parlour of the inn here; that seems less personal. But,” she added shyly, with half an appealing glance towards Will, “I’m not so nervous now. If this gentleman wishes, I?—?I would sing another song to him?”

And so she did?—?a second and a third. As she went on, she grew braver, and sang each time more naturally. At last the wirth dismissed her. Linnet curtsied, and disappeared. “Well, what do you say to her now?” the landlord asked in a tone of triumph, turning round to the young men as the door closed behind her.

Florian assumed his most studiously judicial air. The perfect critic should, above all things, be critical. Before Linnet’s face, indeed, he had been enthusiastic enough, as politeness and due respect for her sex demanded; but behind her back, and in her teacher’s presence, regard for his reputation compelled him to adopt the severest tone of incorruptible impartiality. “I think,” he said slowly, fingering his chin in one hand, and speaking with great deliberation, like a recognised authority, “with time and training she ought to serve your purpose well for popular entertainments. Her organ, though undeveloped, is not wholly without some natural power and compass.”

“And I think,” Will Deverill added, with a glow of generous enthusiasm, “you’ve lighted on one of the very finest voices in all Europe.”

CHAPTER VI