CHAPTER IX

THE MAN OF THE WORLD

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.”