href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@48296@[email protected]#ch31" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">XXXI. WHEN GREEK MEETS GREEK

XXXII. WEDDED FELICITY

XXXIII. PLAYING WITH FIRE

XXXIV. AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

XXXV. GOLDEN HOPES

XXXVI. AN ECCLESIASTICAL QUESTION

XXXVII. BEGINNINGS OF EVIL

XXXVIII. HUSBAND OR LOVER?

XXXIX. DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE

XL. OPEN WAR

XLI. GOD’S LAW⁠—OR MAN’S?

XLII. PRUDENCE

XLIII. LINNET’S RIVAL

XLIV. AND WILL’S

XLV. BY AUTHORITY

XLVI. HOME AGAIN!

XLVII. SEEMINGLY UNCONNECTED

XLVIII. THE BUBBLE BURSTS

XLIX. THE PIGEON FLIES HOME

L. ANDREAS HAUSBERGER PAYS

LI. EXIT FRANZ LINDNER

LII. A CONFESSION OF FAITH

LINNET

CHAPTER I

“TO INTRODUCE MR FLORIAN WOOD”

’Twas at Zell in the Zillerthal.

Now, whoever knows the Alps, knows the Zillerthal well as the centre of all that is most Tyrolese in the Tyrol. From that beautiful green valley, softly smiling below, majestically grand and ice-clad in its upper forks and branches, issue forth from time to time all the itinerant zither-players and picturesquely-clad singers who pervade every capital and every spa in Europe. Born and bred among the rich lawns of their upland villages, they come down in due time, with a feather in their hats and a jodel in their throats, true modern troubadours, setting out on the untried ocean of the outer world⁠—⁠their voice for their fortune⁠—in search of wealth and adventures. Guitar on back and green braces on shoulders, they start blithely from home with a few copper kreuzers in their leather belts, and return again after a year or two, changed men to behold, their pockets full to bursting with dollars or louis or good English sovereigns.

Not that you must expect to see the Tyrolese peasant of sober reality masquerading about in that extremely operatic and brigand-like costume in the upper Zillerthal. The Alpine minstrel in the sugar-loaf hat, much-gartered as to the legs, and clad in a Joseph’s coat of many colours, with whom we are all so familiar in cosmopolitan concert-halls, has donned his romantic polychromatic costume as an integral part of the business, and would be regarded with surprise, not unmixed with contempt, were he to appear in it among the pastures of his native valley. The ladies in corset-bodices and loose white lawn sleeves, who trill out startling notes from the back attics of their larynx, or elicit sweet harmonies from mediæval-looking mandolines in Kursaals and Alcazars, have purchased their Tyrolese dress direct from some Parisian costumier. The real cowherds and milkmaids of the actual Zillerthal are much more prosaic, not to say commonplace, creatures. A green string for a hat-band, with a blackcock’s plume stuck jauntily or saucily at the back of the hat, and a dirty red lappel to the threadbare coat, is all that distinguishes the Tyrolese mountaineer of solid fact from the universal peasant of European Christendom. Indeed, is it not true, after all, that the stage has led us to expect far too much⁠—in costume and otherwise⁠—from the tillers of the soil everywhere? Is it not true that the agricultural and pastoral classes all the world over, in spite of Theocritus and Thomas Hardy, are apt, when one observes them impartially in the flesh, to be earthy, grimy, dull-eyed, and unintelligent?

Florian Wood didn’t think so, however, or affected not to think so⁠—which in his case was probably very much the same thing; for what he really thought about anything on earth, affectation aside, it would have puzzled even himself not a little to determine. He was a tiny man of elegant proportions: so tiny, so elegant, that one felt inclined to put him under a glass case and stick him on a mantelpiece. He leant his small arms upon the parapet of a wall as they were approaching Zell, shifted the knapsack on his back with sylph-like grace, and murmured ecstatically, with a side glance at the stalwart peasant-women carrying basketfuls of fodder in huge creels on their backs in the field close by, “How delicious! How charming! How essentially picturesque! How characteristically Tyrolean!”

His companion scanned him up and down with an air of some passing amusement. “Why, I didn’t know