CHAPTER XIV

AND IF FOR EVER

“It’s no use wasting words,” Florian observed, with decision. “As our

old friend Homer justly remarks, ‘Great is the power of words; wing’d

words may make this way or that way.’ I’m a practical man myself: I

stick close to the facts; they’re solid; they’re tangible; they’re not

to be evaded. I won’t allow myself to be argued out of a reasonable

conviction. I put it like this: if it was right for you, as you

admitted, to leave St Valentin, then, by parity of reasoning, it’s right

for you now to leave Innsbruck instantly. Mill, Whately, and Jevons

would allow that that’s logic. Why did we come here? Partly, no doubt,

to instruct ourselves in the contents of this most interesting town; but

mainly, I submit, to deliver you forthwith from your milkmaid’s

clutches. Why should we go away again? Partly because we’ve seen all

that Innsbruck contains of historical or artistic; but largely, also,

because the milkmaid insists upon pursuing us through the land and

jingling her bells till she compels us to listen to her.”

“She didn’t know we were here,” Will interjected, bristling up.

“She didn’t know we were here, that’s true; but she’s followed us all

the same, cow-bells and pails and all, and we must break away at once

from her. I’ve said so to Rue, and Rue fully agrees with me. As I told

you before, if you mean the girl harm,—well and good; I don’t meddle

with you. But if you mean to go on shilly-shallying like this,—saying

goodbye for ever—and sending her coral necklets; meeting her again at

hotels—and applauding her rapturously; saying goodbye once more—and

letting it run, for aught I know to the contrary, to diamonds and

rubies—why, what I say is this, I’ve seen the same thing tried on more

than once before, and my experience is, the man who begins by meaning

only to flirt with a girl, sinks down, down, down, by gradual degrees,

till at last he loses every relic of self-respect—and ends by marrying

her!”

Will fingered his under lip, and knit his brow reflectively. “At least,”

he said, “I must see her and tell her I’m going away again.”

Stern justice once more embodied itself as Florian. “Certainly _not_,”

the little man answered, with an emphatic shake of the head. “If you say

goodbye, she’ll want to know where you’re going. If she knows where

you’re going, she’ll want, of course, to follow you. If you don’t mean

her harm, then, hang it all, my dear fellow, you _must_ mean her

good—which is far more dangerous. There are only two possible _motifs_

in such an affair—_ou le bon, ou le mauvais_. You must mean the first,

if you don’t mean the second. I’ve talked it over with Rue, and Rue

entirely supports me. For the poor girl’s own sake, she says, it’s your

duty at once to run away from the spot, post haste, and leave her.”

A little later in the day, on the slopes behind Mühlan, Will thrashed it

out himself, _tête-à-tête_ with Rue, seated close by her side on the

grassy upland. “She’s in love with you, poor thing,” Rue said very

seriously. “You mayn’t see it yourself; sometimes, you know, Mr

Deverill—I can’t always say Will; it seems so forward—sometimes, you

know, you men—even the best of you—are unkind to us poor women through

pure excess of modesty. You don’t realise how much a girl may really

think of you. Your very want of self-conceit may make you blind to her

feelings. But consider what you must seem to a child like Linnet. You’re

a gentleman, a poet, a man of the great world, wholly removed from her

sphere in knowledge, position, culture. She looks up to you, vaguely and

dimly no doubt, with a shrinking respect, as some one very grand and

great and solemn. But your attentions flatter her. Florian has told me

all about how you met her at St Valentin. Now, even a lady,” and Rue

looked down as she spoke, and half stifled a sigh, “even a lady might be

pleased at attracting the notice of such a man as you; how much more

then a peasant-girl! I watched her close last night when you first came

into the room, and I saw such a red flush break over her throat and

cheeks, like a wave surging upwards, as I never saw before on any

woman’s face—though long ago . . . myself . . . when I was _very_ young

. . . I think I may have felt it. And I knew what it meant at once; I

said to myself as I looked, ‘That girl loves Mr Deverill.’”

“I think she’s fond of me,” Will admitted modestly. “I didn’t notice it

so much myself, I confess, at St Valentin; but last night, I won’t deny

I watched her hard, and I could see she was really very pleased to meet

me.”

Rue looked grave. “Mr Deverill,” she said in a serious voice, “a woman’s

heart is not a thing to trifle with—I’m an old married woman myself,

you see, and I can speak to you plainly. You may think very little

yourself—for I know you’re not conceited—of the effect you’re likely

to produce on women. I’ve known cruel things done, before now, by very

good men, just because they never realised how much store women set on

their passing attentions. You’ve only to look at Linnet to see she has a

deeply passionate nature. Now, I beg of you, don’t play fast and loose

with it any longer. If you don’t mean anything, don’t see her again. The

more you see of her, the worse it will be for her.”

Will listened, and ruminated. Rue’s words had more effect on him by far

than Florian’s. For one thing, she was a woman, and she treated the

matter earnestly, where Florian only treated it with the condescending

flippancy of his native clubland. To Rue, in her true womanliness, an

alp-girl’s heart was still a sacred object; to Florian, ’twas a toy for

the superior creature, man, as he said, “to play skittles with.” But

then, again, Florian had dwelt much to him on the chance of his finally

marrying Linnet. To Will himself, that contingency seemed too remote to

contemplate. As he sat by Rue’s side on the grassy upland, and heard Rue

speak so gently to him in her well-turned sentences, the distance

between a refined and educated lady like that and a musical alp-girl

appeared to his mind too profound to be bridged over. Was it likely, in

a world which held such women as Rue, he ever could marry such a girl as

Linnet? Now, Rue herself never spoke of marriage between Linnet and

himself as even possible. She took it for granted the end must be either

Linnet’s ruin or Linnet’s desertion. And all she urged him was not to

break the poor child’s heart for her. So, where Florian’s worldly wisdom

fell somewhat flat on his ears, Rue’s feminine sympathy and tact

produced a deep effect upon him.

“It’ll make her very sad, I’m afraid, if she doesn’t see me again,” he

said, looking down, with masculine shyness.

“I know it will,” Rue answered, pushing her point with advantage. “I

could see that last night. But all the more reason, then, you shouldn’t

let it go any further.”

“Well, but must I _never_ see her again?” Will inquired with an anxious

air. For his own sake, even, that counsel of perfection was a very hard

saying.

Rue’s face grew still graver. “No; I think you must _never_ see her

again,” she answered, seriously. “Remember what it involves. Remember

what she is; how dazzled she must be by a gentleman’s advances. The more

you see of her, the more she’ll think of it—the more she’ll love you,

confide in you, lean on you. That’s only womanly. We all of us do it

. . . with a man we admire and feel greater and better than us. And you

and she, after all, are both of you human. Some day, perhaps, carried

away by a moment of emotion—” She broke off quite suddenly, and let her

silence say the rest. “And then,” she went on, after a long pause, “when

all’s lost and all’s done, you’ll be sorry, poor child, you’ve spoilt

and wrecked her whole life for her. . . .” She paused again, and grew

crimson. “Mr Deverill—Will—” she said, faltering, “I wouldn’t speak to

you like this if I didn’t feel I was doing it to save this poor child in

the end from untold misery. It’s not only the material consequences I’m

thinking of now (though those are bad enough), but the girl’s own

heart—for I can see she has got one. If you don’t go away, sooner or

later you’ll break it. What other end can there be to an affair like

this between a poet like you and a Tyrolese peasant girl?”

What other end, indeed! Will knew it, and felt it. He saw she was right.

And her words thrilled through him. When a beautiful woman discusses

your personal affections in such a strain as this it isn’t in human

nature (in its male embodiment) not to tingle through and through in

pure instinctive response with her. While Rue spoke like that, Will felt

he must indeed see no more of Linnet. “But where must I go?” he asked,

vaguely, just to distract the talk from his own potential misdeeds.

Their original idea was Cortina and the Dolomites.

The innocent question fell in pat with Rue’s plans. Already that morning

she had talked it over with Florian; and Florian, for the furtherance of

his own designs, had agreed it would be best for them to alter their

route, as things stood, in favour of a new project which Rue suggested.

She was going to Meran herself, for a month or six weeks of bright

autumn weather, on her way down to Italy. Why shouldn’t they come there,

too, she asked, and keep the family together? Florian, not unmindful of

her seven hundred thousand pounds, admitted at once the cogency of her

reasoning. It would be quite delightful, he said—in point of fact,

consummate. But would Will consent to it? Then Rue expounded to him her

views about Will and his future in life—how he ought to retire to the

wilderness for forty days, after the manner of the prophets, to

meditate, and, if possible, to begin some great work, which should bring

in the end name and fame and honour to him. Florian admitted, just to

humour her, that if Will had the chance, and chose to buckle to, he

might really produce something quite worth looking at. “Persuade him to

it,” he said, in his mellifluous tones. “To you, Rue, it comes so easy,

you see, to be persuasive. One word from your lips is worth fifty from

mine. Make him stop away for three months from that dear, delightful,

distracting London, and begin some big thing that the world must listen

to.”

To inspire a great work is a mission in life for a woman—to be some

Petrarch’s Laura, some Dante’s Beatrice. So, when Will asked

plaintively, “Where must I go?” that afternoon, Rue answered with prompt

decision, “Why, of course, to Meran. I’m going there myself. You must

come with us and stop there.”

“What for?” Will inquired, not wholly untouched in soul—for proximity

counts for much, and they were sitting close together—that the pretty

American should so desire his company.

Then Rue began to explain, to persuade, to reason. And reason from those

lips was profoundly conclusive. No syllogism on earth could have failed

to convince from them. Meran was the prettiest place in South Tyrol, she

said; the pleasantest climate for the autumn months, the loveliest

scenery. The sun always shone, and the birds always sang there. Though

it froze underfoot, you could bask on the hill-tops. But that wasn’t

all;—and she leaned forward confidentially—she wanted to speak to him

again about that subject she had broached the other day on the Lanser

Kopf. When a pretty woman interests herself in your private concerns,

she’s always charming; when she pays you the delicate flattery of

stimulating you to use “your own highest powers”—that’s the proper

phrase—she’s quite irresistible. So Will Deverill found Rue. Why, she

asked, should he go back so soon to London? This devotion to mere

journalism was penny-wise and pound-foolish. Could he afford to stay

away for six weeks at Meran—just barely afford it—and settle himself

down at a quiet hotel to some really big work that would make him

famous?

Will, drawing a deep breath, and looking wistfully into her eyes,

admitted his funds in hand would permit him, with care, such a

hard-working holiday.

Then Rue pressed him close. She brought ghee to his vanity. She was

convinced if he stopped in this keen mountain air, among these glorious

Alps, fresh inspired from Nature, he could turn out a poem, a play, a

romance, some great thing of its kind, that the world _must_ listen to.

He had it in him, she felt sure, to make his name famous. Nothing

venture, nothing have. If he didn’t believe in himself enough to risk

six weeks of his precious time on the effort to sketch out something

really worthy of him, then all she could say was—and she flooded him as

she spoke with the light of her lustrous eyes—he believed in himself

far less—oh, so far, far less—than his friends believed in him.

Florian had told her Will held no regular staff-appointment on any

London paper; he was an occasional journalist, unattached, earning a

precarious livelihood, in fear and trembling, by reviews and poems and

descriptive articles in half-a-dozen assorted dailies and weeklies. Why

shouldn’t he give them up for awhile, then, and play boldly and manfully

for some larger stake, some stake such as she knew he could well attain

to? And she quoted Queen Elizabeth—or was it Walter Raleigh?—

“He either fears his fate too much,

Or his desert is small,

Who will not put it to the touch

To lose, or win it all.”

Now, this line of argument, as it happened, exactly fell in, for a

special reason of his own, with Will’s mood for the moment. A holiday,

we all know, especially in the pure and stimulating air of the

mountains, has always a most invigorating and enlivening effect upon the

jaded intellect. And Will’s holiday in the Zillerthal had inspired him

by degrees with fresh ideas and scenes for a Tyrolese drama. It was a

drama of the hills, with some poeticised version of Linnet for its

heroine—a half-musical sketch, a little mountain operetta, the songs in

which were to be all of his own composing. Hitherto, he had never taken

himself quite seriously as a composer; but Linnet and Andreas Hausberger

had praised the few pieces he played over for them at St Valentin, and

Rue had thought well of the stray snatches from his notes he had given

them, under protest, on the very untuneful hotel piano. Now the idea

occurred to him to write and compose a little play of his own, while the

picture of Linnet was still fresh in his brain; and this holiday Rue

dangled so temptingly before him would just suffice to get the first

scaffolding of his piece together. The filling in he could manage at his

leisure in London. So Rue won her point; but ’twas Linnet who won it for

her.

“Yes; I’ll go to Meran,” he said at last, after a long break in their

talk, “and I’ll settle down to work there, and I won’t even wait to say

goodbye to Linnet.”

Poets are weak, however, where a woman is concerned. In this respect, it

may be allowed, Apollo’s sons closely resemble the rest of the children

of Adam. Will left Innsbruck, indeed, without bidding Linnet goodbye,

but he couldn’t refrain from just dropping her a line before he went, to

say he must leave her. “To meet you once more,” he wrote, “would be only

to part again. I must say farewell, and this time for ever. But, Linnet,

it makes my heart ache to do it!” You see, he was a poet.