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Her words sent a thrill of pleasure through Will’s modest soul. He had published but little, and ’twas seldom he heard his own name thus familiarly unhandled. Still, a harassing doubt possessed his soul. Could the Vision of Beauty have seen his name in the visitors’ book of the hotel, noticed the coincidence with the lines in the Illustrated, which he had sent from the Zillerthal, and managed this little coup with feminine adroitness, on purpose to deceive him? Yet she didn’t look guileful. With poetic trustfulness, he cast the evil suggestion at once behind him. “I’m so glad you liked them,” he said, timidly, looking down at his plate, and playing in nervous jerks with his fork in the chicken. “I wrote them in the Tyrol here. They’re fresh-fed from the glaciers.”
The Vision laid down her knife and fork and stared at him, speechless. “You’re not Will Deverill,” she exclaimed, in some excitement, after a moment’s pause.
“That’s my name,” Will answered, somewhat abashed, still perusing his plate. “But I’m very little used to – to – to meeting people who have heard of it.”
The pretty American clasped her hands with delight “Well, I am glad to meet you,” she said, “though I’d have given you the benefit of the Mr, of course, if I’d known it was you. I just love your verses. I have ‘Voices from the Hills’ in my box upstairs, bound in calf, this minute.”
“No; not really?” Will cried, with a young author’s delight at unexpected recognition.
“I’ll go upstairs after dinner and fetch it down to show you,” his pretty admirer answered, with some pride. “And your friend, too, is he a poet?”
“In soul; in soul only!” Florian interposed, airily, dashing in at a tangent; for it irked him thus to play second fiddle to Will’s first hand, and he longed to assert his “proper position.” “I string no sonnets; I play no harmonies; I take the higher place. I sit on a critical throne, weighing and appraising all arts impartially. Deverill rhymes; another man paints; a third man strums; a fourth acts, or carves stone – and all for me. I exercise none of these base handicrafts myself; but I live supreme in the Palace of Art they build, subordinating each in due place to my soul’s delight, like a subtle architect.”
“Just the same as all the rest of us,” the pretty American put in, interrupting his period. “We all do that. We sit still and listen. The difficulty is – to produce, like Mr Deverill.”
Florian stood aghast. To think a mere woman should thus slight his pretensions! But the pretty American, disregarding him, turned to Will once more. “And your friend’s name?” she said, interrogatively.
“My friend’s name,” Will answered, “is Florian Wood. You must know it.”
“Ah, Mr Florian Wood,” the pretty stranger echoed; “I’ve heard of him, of course. I’m glad to meet him. It’s so nice to see people in the flesh at last one has often heard talked about.”
“But you’ve heard about everybody, Mrs Palmer,” the first giggling inarticulate interposed, with a gurgle of admiration.
Florian clapped his hand to his head in theatrical disappointment. “Mrs Palmer!” he cried, markedly. “Did I hear aright, Mrs Palmer? This is indeed a blow! Then, I take it, you’re married!”
From anyone else on earth, the remark would have been rude; from Florian, it was only exaggerated compliment. The Vision of Beauty accepted it as such with American frankness.
“Well, you needn’t go and take a draught of cold poison offhand,” she retorted, a little saucily, “for there’s still a chance for you. Remember, a woman may be maid, wife… or widow.”
“Dear me,” Florian ejaculated, half-choking himself in his haste, “I never thought of that. You don’t mean to say – ”
“Yes, I do,” Mrs Palmer responded, cutting him short with a merry nod. “Any time these last five years. Now, you’re sorry you spoke. Mr Deverill, may I trouble you to pass the mustard?”
CHAPTER XI
PRIVATE INQUIRY
During the rest of the young men’s stay at Innsbruck the pretty American was, as Florian remarked, “a distinct feature.” Such is the fickleness of man, indeed, that she almost superseded poor Linnet in their minds as an object of interest. She was attractive beyond a doubt; she was clever; she was lively; and she was so delighted to make a real live poet’s acquaintance, that Will hardly knew how to receive her almost obtrusive attentions. She brought him butter in a lordly dish, as Florian phrased it. That same evening, in the salon, according to promise, she came down with “Voices from the Hills,” Will’s thin little volume of fugitive verse, which she had had gorgeously bound in red calf in Paris, and made that sensitive young bard blush up to his eyes with modesty, by insisting on pointing out which pieces she liked best, in a voice that was audible to half the guests in the establishment. Ossian’s Tomb was her favourite – she knew that one by heart; but Khosru Khan was sweet too; and Sister Clare made her cry; and then Gwyn! – ah, that dear Gwyn was just too lovely for anything!
And yet, Will liked her. In spite of her open praise, and his blushes, he liked her. The surest way to a poet’s heart is to speak well of his poetry. And besides, he said to himself, Mrs Palmer had discrimination. She noted in his verse the metrical variety, the pictorial skill, the strong sense of colour – just the qualities of his poor muse on which he himself most prided himself. No artist cares for praise except for those characteristics of his art which he feels to be his strong ones. Mrs Palmer gave Will that, and he liked the incense.
Florian had said at St Valentin that Will needed change of air, change of scene, change of company. And at Innsbruck he got them. The pretty American, having found her poet, didn’t mean to let him slip again too soon from her clutches. With the pertinacity of her compatriots, she fastened herself at once upon the two young Englishmen. Not obtrusively, to be sure, not ungracefully, not awkwardly, not as a European woman might have done the same thing, but with that occidental frankness and oblivion of sex which makes up half the charm of the charming American. The very next morning, at the early breakfast, she happened to occupy a small table close by them. They chatted together through the meal; at the end of it Will mentioned, in a casual sort of way that he was going down the street to the shop where Mrs Palmer had bought the coral necklet. The dainty young widow seized her cue. “I am going down that way myself,” she said. “Let me come and show you. I won’t take a minute to run up for my hat. I’m not one of those women who can never go out for a morning stroll without spending half-an-hour before their mirrors, tittivating.” And, in spite of Will’s assurance that he could find the shop very well by himself, she was as good as her word, and insisted on accompanying them.
She had been charming in evening dress; she was more charming still in her girlish straw hat and neat tailor-made costume, as she tripped lightly downstairs to them. Florian, by her side, while they walked through the streets, cast sheep’s eyes askance up at her. Even Will, more mindful of poor Linnet’s desertion, was not wholly insensible to that taking smile, those pearly white teeth, that dainty small nose, those rounded contours. They turned down the road in the direction of the Maria-Theresien Strasse. Will knew of old that quaintest and most picturesque of European High Streets, with its queer gabled roofs, its rococo façades, its mediæval towers, its arcades and pillars. But to Florian, it all came with the added charm of novelty. Twice or thrice on their way, the spirit moved him to stop and perorate. Each time, the pretty widow cut him short at once with some quick retort of truly American practicality. At the shop, Will selected a second necklet, exactly like the one Mrs Palmer had chosen. “I gave her nothing before I came away,” he said, turning to Florian, and only indicating by that very indefinite pronoun, the intended recipient of his beautiful gift. “One couldn’t give her money. ’Twould have been a positive insult. But this ought to look well on that smooth brown neck of hers.”
“For your sister, of course,” Mrs Palmer said, pointedly.
“No; not for my sister,” Will admitted, with a quiet smile. “For a girl at the inn we’ve just left at St Valentin.”
Mrs Palmer said “Oh!” ’Twas an American oh. It deprecated the fact – and closed the episode. Cosmopolitan though she was, it surprised her not a little that Will should allude to such persons in a lady’s company. But there! these poets, you know – so many things must be condoned to them. Because they have loved much, much must be forgiven them. They have licence to break hearts and the most brittle of the commandments, with far less chance of blame than their even Christians.
Will’s transaction completed, Mrs Palmer proceeded to buy a second similar set on her own account, for presentation to the second of the giggling inarticulates. “Poor girl!” she said, good-humouredly, “she looked so envious last night when I gave the other to Eva Powell, I couldn’t bear to think I’d left her out in the cold. Thirty florins, I think you said? Ah, yes; that’s twelve dollars. Not much to make a poor little girl so happy!”
From this, and various other circumstances which occurred in the course of their first few days at Innsbruck, it began to dawn dimly upon Florian’s open mind that their American friend, though she knew not the Van Rensselaers, the Vanderbilts, and the Livingstones, must have been “comfortably left” by the late Mr Palmer. It was clear she had money for every whim and fancy. She took frequent drives, up the Brenner or down the Innthal, in a roomy two-horse carriage specially ordered from the livery stables; and she always gave a seat to one at least of the giggling inarticulates; and then, “on the girl’s account, you know,” with good-natured zeal, asked Will and Florian to take part in the expedition. “It’s so good for them, of course,” she said, “to see a little, when they can, of young men’s society. They’re each of them here with an invalid mamma – throat and lungs, poor things – you know the kind of person; and before I came, they had nobody to talk to, not even one another, for they were far too much afraid of a mutual snub ever to utter a syllable. I’ve tried to bring them out a bit, and make life worth living for them. But without a young man – at that age – no amusement’s worth anything. Do come, Mr Deverill – there’s a good soul, just to humour them.”
And Will and Florian, it must be candidly allowed, fell in with a good grace with her philanthropic projects. Though, to be sure, when once the carriage got under way, they seemed much more desirous of amusing the pretty American herself, than of seconding her schemes for drawing out the latent conversational powers of the giggling inarticulates, who contented themselves chiefly with leaning back in their seats, and listening open-mouthed to Florian’s flamboyant disquisitions. That, however, is a detail. Will attempted at first to pay his share of the carriage; but such interference with her plans Mrs Palmer most manfully and successfully resisted. She wanted to give the girls a little outing, she said; Will might come or he might stop; but she wasn’t going to let any other person pay for her well-meant attention to her poor little protégées. To that point she stuck hard, through thick and thin. They must come as her guests if they came as anything.
From this, and sundry other events that came under his knowledge by occulter channels, Florian grew strengthened in his idea that the late Mr Palmer, whoever he might have been, had at least “cut up well,” and, what was more to the point, had cut up entirely in his widow’s favour. Now this was business; for Florian, incurious as he was by nature where mere gossip was concerned, liked to know what was what in the matrimonial market. As he was wont to put it sweetly to his friends at the Savile, he wasn’t going to throw himself away on a woman for nothing. He had an income of his own, just sufficient to supply him with the bare necessaries of life – such as stalls at the opera and hansoms ad libitum; and, this being so, he had no intention of giving up that singular franchise which young men call “their liberty,” except in return for valuable consideration. But if good things were going, he liked at least to know of them; some day, perhaps, if some lady bribed him high enough, he might possibly consent to retire by her side into the Philistine gloom of wedded respectability.
So he pushed his inquiries hard into the Vision’s antecedents, wholly without effect, during the first few days of their stay at Innsbruck.
A few nights later, however, as they sat in the salon after a long day’s tramp to the summit of the Patscher Kopf, Florian found himself cast casually into conversation with an American old maid, belonging to the most virulent type and class of old maidhood – “of the cat-kind, catty,” he said afterwards to Will Deverill; one of those remarkable persons who have pervaded cosmopolitan hotels for years together, and are on intimate terms with the domestic skeletons in every cupboard. Miss Beard, as she was called, favoured Florian at full length with the histories and antecedents of the giggling inarticulates, their papas and mammas, and all their forebears; informing him with much gusto how one of them had paid ninepence in the pound to his creditors, and another had been cashiered from the navy for embezzlement. Then she proceeded in the same strain to demolish the unprepossessing gentleman of nonconformist exterior, who had been guilty, it seemed, of the social crime of retail business. Miss Beard was inclined, indeed, to believe he was nothing more than a retired chemist; but she wasn’t even sure – with hushed and bated breath – that it mightn’t be as bad as grocery and provisions. All these, and many other unimportant details, Florian’s soul endured, possessing itself in patience for many minutes together, in the fervent hope that at last this living encyclopædia of genealogical knowledge would come round to the character of the Vision of Beauty.
“And Mrs Palmer, who sits opposite me,” he adventured gently after awhile, when Miss Beard reached a pause in her caustic comments; “she seems a nice little thing in her way, though, of course, a mere butterfly. She comes from New York. I suppose you know her?”
Miss Beard drew herself up with that offended dignity which only an American woman of the “very best class” can exhibit in perfection when you suspect her of an acquaintance with a person moving in a social grade less exalted than the sphere she herself revolves in. “I don’t know her,” she said, markedly, “but I know, of course, who she is. She’s the widow of Palmer – the well-known Palmer – the notorious Palmer, who – but there! – you’ve been in the States; you must know all about him.”
“Not Palmer the murderer!” Florian exclaimed in surprise. “She’s too young for that, surely.”
“No; not Palmer the murderer,” Miss Beard responded in a very shrill voice with considerable acerbity. “He was at least a gentleman. I can’t say as much for this lady’s husband. She’s the widow of Palmer, the dry-goodsman in Broadway.”
“Oh, indeed,” Florian cried, deeply interested in this discovery – for it meant much money. “I remember the place well – a palatial building in the Renaissance style at the corner of a street near the junction with Fifth Avenue. These princes of commerce in your Western world represent in our midst to-day the great signiors of the Adriatic who held the gorgeous East in fee, and whose Gothic façades, rich in arch and tracery, still line the long curve of the Grand Canal for us. They are the satraps of finance. The world in our times is ruled once more – as in Venice of old, in the heyday of its splendour – by the signet-ring of the merchant. Palmer was one of these – a paladin of silken bales, a Doge Dandolo of Manhattan, a potentate in the crowded marts of the Samarcand of the Occident.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Miss Beard retorted in an acrid tone, eyeing him sternly through her pince-nez, “but I say he was a dry-goodsman.”
Florian descended at a bound from the open empyrean to the solid earth of commonplace. “Well, at any rate, he was rich,” he said, letting the paladins slide. “He must have died worth millions.”
“His estate was proved,” Miss Beard said, curtly, “at a sum in dollars which totals out – let me see – fives into 35 – ah, yes, to exactly seven hundred and eighty-four thousand pounds sterling.”
Florian gave a little gasp. “That’ll do,” he said, with slow emphasis. “And he left it?” he suggested, after a second’s pause, with an interrogative raising of his broad white forehead.
“And he left it, every cent,” Miss Beard responded, “without deduction of any sort, to that fly-away little inanity.”
Florian drew a deep breath. “Then she’s rich,” he said, musing; “rich beyond the utmost dreams of avarice.”
“Well, of course she is,” Miss Beard answered, with a sharp little snap, as though every one knew that. “If she wasn’t, could she go tearing about Europe as she does, herself and her maid, buying everything she sees, and making presents right and left – to everyone she comes across. She’d give her own soul away if anybody asked her for it. Little empty-headed fool! She’s not fit to be trusted with the use of money. But, of course, one can’t know her, however rich she may be. We draw the line in the States at keeping shop. And, besides, she was never brought up among cultivated people.”
As she spoke, Florian noted several things silently to himself. He noted, first, that Mrs Palmer spoke the English tongue many degrees more correctly, and more pleasantly as well, than her would-be critic. He noted, second, that her very generosity was counted for blame to her by this narrower nature. He noted, third, that in republican America, even more than in monarchical and aristocratic England, Mrs Palmer’s cleverness, her information, her reading, her culture, were as dust in the balance in Society’s eyes, compared with the damning and indelible fact that her late lamented husband had owned a dry-goods store. But, being a worldly-wise man, Florian noted these things in his own heart alone. Externally, he took no overt notice of them. On the contrary, he continued his talk in the same bland and honey-sweet tone as ever. “Still, she’d be a catch in her way,” he said, with a condescending smile, “for any man who didn’t object to swallow her antecedents.”
“She would,” Miss Beard replied, with austere self-respect, “if people care to mix in that sort of society. For myself, I’ve been used to a different kind of life. I couldn’t put up with it.”
Florian was audacious. He posed the one last question he still wished to ask, boldly. “And there’s no awkward clause, I suppose,” he said, without even the apology of a blush, “in her husband’s will, of that nasty so-long-as-my-said-wife-remains-unmarried character?”
Miss Beard took up her Galignani with crushing coldness. She didn’t care to discuss such people’s prospects from such a standpoint. Their matrimonial affairs were beneath her notice. For fine old crusted prejudice of a social sort, commend me, so far as my poor knowledge goes, to the members of good New Yorker families. “To the best of my knowledge and belief,” she murmured, acridly, without raising her eyes, “the property’s left for her own sole use and benefit, without any restriction. But I’m sure I don’t know. If you want to find out you’d better ask her. I don’t burden my mind with these people’s business.”
Then Florian knew the Vision of Beauty was a catch not to be despised by a man of culture. Such wealth as that, no gentleman could decline, in justice to himself, if she gave him the refusal of it.
CHAPTER XII
THE MADDING CROWD
Andreas Hausberger was a dictator. He kept his own counsel till the moment of action grew ripe for birth in the womb of time; then, heeding no man, he gave his orders. Three days after Will Deverill’s departure from St Valentin, he called up Linnet to his office suddenly. “The dressmaker has brought home your new costume,” he said in his curt way. “Go upstairs and put it on. Then come down and let me see you.”
Linnet, much wondering what this mood might portend, went up to her own room and tried on her new gew-gaws. Puffed white sleeves, laced corset, crimson kirtle, high shoes, flowered kerchief at her bosom, silver dirk in her hair; Linnet wasn’t over-vain, as girls go in this world, but tricked out in such finery, she gazed in her glass, and, to tell the whole truth, admired herself consumedly. If only her Englishman could have seen her in that dress! But she stifled her sigh, and tripped lightly downstairs again, with the buoyancy of youth, when conscious of a perfectly becoming costume, for Andreas Hausberger’s scrutiny.
The wirth scanned her, well satisfied. “On Monday,” he said, briefly, in that iron voice, “we set out on our tour, and go first to Innsbruck.”
It was earlier by a week than he at first intended; but he saw it would be hard, if he stopped at St Valentin, to keep Fridolin’s hands from Franz’s throat much longer. So, by way of minimising the adverse chances, he made up his mind to start as soon as possible for his winter season. He meant to begin modestly with entertainments at hotels among the Tyrolese winter resorts, and the towns of the Riviera; and then, when his troupe had got over its first access of stage fright, and grown used to an audience, to go across for the summer to England or America.
So, for the next few days Linnet was busy as a bee with preparations for her first journey into the great wide world outside the Zillerthal. As yet, her native valley had bounded her view – she had never gone even as far as Jenbach. Expectation and preparation kept her mind well employed during that busy week, and prevented it from dwelling too much or too long on the kindly Engländer, who had vanished from her ken across the sea to England. For, that he had gone straight home, Linnet never even doubted. On the afternoon of Andreas Hausberger’s exciting announcement, indeed, a little registered parcel came by post for her to St Valentin. It bore the postmark of Wilten, where Will had intentionally dropped it into the letter-box, on purpose to conceal from her his exact whereabouts. Linnet scanned it close, and read the name correctly, but was too innocent of the topography of her native country to know that Wilten is the name of a village on the outskirts of Innsbruck. When she asked Andreas Hausberger where Wilten was, a little later in the day, without showing him the postmark, he confirmed her belief by answering at once that ’twas a town in England, not far from Salisbury. So he had thought of her over sea, then, and sent her this beautiful costly present from his own country. She tried it on that night before her tiny square mirror. As Will had rightly judged, it set off the rich tints of her creamy brown neck to the best advantage.
A beautiful gift! A real lady might have worn it! Later on, when Linnet had diamonds and rubies at command, there was no trinket she prized among all her jewels like Will Deverill’s coral.
At last the eventful morning itself arrived. The little troupe set out on foot down the mountain to Mairhofen. There, their boxes, sent on over-night, awaited them. They drove in a large open brake to Jenbach – Andreas Hausberger, Franz Lindner, Linnet herself, Philippina, and the two other singers who composed the party. At Jenbach, they descended at the door of the railway station. For the first time in her life, Linnet saw, half-alarmed, a puffing and snorting machine, a sort of iron devil, breathing flames like purgatory, burst with smoke and stench upon the crowd by the waiting-room. Though she had heard all about it often enough before, and could see for herself that this great scurrying creature, for all its noise and bustle, kept rigidly to the rails as it approached the platform, she yet drew back in pure physical terror and surprise at the swiftness and irresistibility of the fire-fiend’s motion.
She had scant time to think, however, for scarce had it come to rest when Andreas Hausberger, little heeding, bundled them all unceremoniously into a third-class compartment; and before Linnet had leisure to recover her self-possession, the engine had uttered one wild discordant shriek, and with ringing of bells and rattlings of wheels in her ears, she found herself, willy-nilly, beyond hope of release, whirled along at the break-neck pace of what you and I know as an Austrian slow train, over the jolting rails, up the broad Inn valley.
In spite of her terror – for she knew the railway as yet chiefly by hearing reports of collisions and accidents – Linnet enjoyed to the full that first steam-borne journey. She whirled past turreted towers like Hall and Volders, which to you and me commend themselves as the absolute quintessence of old-world quaintness, but which, to Linnet’s young eyes, accustomed only to St Valentin and the grassy Alps, envisaged themselves rather in glowing hues as the kingdoms of the world and all their glory. They had been late to start, and their drive from Mairhofen had been tolerably leisurely, so dusk was closing in when they arrived at Innsbruck. Oh, the bustle, the din, the whirling awe of that arrival! Electric lamps lighted up the broad Platz in front of the station; on either side rose great hotels, grander and more palatial than any buildings on earth Linnet’s poor little fancy had ever yet dreamed of. Not to one of these, however, of course, did Andreas Hausberger take his little troupe of minstrels. But even the humbler inn on the south side of the Theresien Strasse, to which they repaired on foot, bearing their boxes between them, seemed to Linnet’s inexperienced and impressionable eye a most princely caravanserai. After the noise and bustle in that busy railway junction, which made her brain whirl with the unaccustomed dizziness of a great city, the comparative rest and quiet of the Golden Eagle seemed a positive relief both of mind and body. That night she slept little. Her head swam with excitement; for this was the first step on her journey through the world, which might lead her perhaps at last to England. And in England, she thought to herself once or twice with a little thrill, who could tell but peradventure she might meet.. Will Deverill?
For she knew little as yet of how big the world is, and how long you may live in it, going to and fro, without necessarily knocking up against this one or that of its component units.
Next morning they rose betimes, and went out into the street to view the city. For to Linnet, as to Mrs Palmer, a city it was – and a very great one. Such streets and streets seemed to frighten and appal her. Florian had admired in that picturesque old capital of a mountain land, the antiquated tone, the eighteenth-century flavour, the mediæval survivals, the air as of a world elsewhere gone from us utterly. But to Linnet, though it was beautiful and impressive too, it was above all things magnificent, grandiose, stately, imposing. She gazed with open eyes at the Golden Roof, admired the bronze statues at the base of the Anna Column, looked up with silent awe at the front of the Landhaus, and thought the Rudolfsbrunnen, with its attendant griffins and dragons, a wonderful work of art for the world’s delectation.
Philippina went with her, her companion on the alp. Linnet noticed with much surprise – for she knew not as yet the difference in fibre between them – that Philippina, though as interested as herself in the shops and their contents, seemed wholly unimpressed by these other and vastly more attractive features of a civilised city. For Linnet had been gifted by nature, to the fullest degree, with the profound Tyrolese artistic susceptibility. Though her mind came to art as a blank page, it responded to the stimulus, once presented to its ken, as the sensitive plate of a photographic camera responds in every line to the inspiring picture.
As they strolled through the town, by Andreas Hausberger’s express desire – for the wise impresario had arranged their first appearance for that very evening, and wished the girls to come to it fresh, after a morning’s exercise – they paid comparatively little heed to what most of us regard as by far the most striking characteristic of Innsbruck – the great limestone crags that seem on every side to tower and overhang the very roofs of the city. They were accustomed, indeed, to crags, and made very small case of them. It was the houses, the shops, the noise, the crowd, the gaiety, that chiefly struck them. Innsbruck to Linnet was as a little Paris. But as they went on their way through the bustling streets, they came at last to a church door, which Linnet’s profound religious nature could hardly pass by without one minute’s prayer for Our Lady’s aid at this critical turning-point of her artistic history.
Philippina, nothing loth, for her part, opined it could do them no harm to make favour above with the blessed saints for this evening’s work by a little Pater Noster. The blessed saints dearly love attentions: much may be done with them by a small wax candle! So they opened the door, and stepped into the Hofkirche.
Even those of us who know well the world and its art, can remember vividly the strange start of surprise with which we gazed round for the first time on that oddest and most bizarre of Christian temples. It isn’t so much beautiful, indeed, as unexpected and startling. To push open the church door and find oneself at once ringed round and guarded close, as it were, by that great circle of mailed knights and bronze-wimpled ladies, who watch the long sleep of the kneeling Maximilian on his cenotaph in the centre, gives one a thrill of a novel sort from which some tinge of dim awe can hardly ever be wholly absent. There they stand, on their low pedestals, a congregation of bronze ancestors round their descendant’s tomb – Theodoric the Ostrogoth and King Arthur the Briton, Mary of Burgundy and Eleonora of Portugal – strange efforts of struggling art in its first faint steps towards the attainment of the beautiful – naïf, ungainly, crude, rising only once or twice within measurable distance of the ideal in the few figures cast in metal by Peter Vischer of Nuremberg. But to Linnet, a woman grown, instinct with the innate artistic taste of her countrymen, yet innocent till then of all forms of art save the saints and purgatories of her mountain chapels, the Hofkirche was a glimpse of some new and unseen world of infinite possibilities. She went through it all piecemeal with open-mouthed interest. Philippina could only laugh at the quaint vizors of the knights, the quainter dresses of the ladies. But Linnet was almost shocked Philippina should laugh at them. She herself half forgot her intended prayer to Our Lady in her delight and surprise at those wonderful figures and those beautiful bas-reliefs. She read all the names on the bases conscientiously; they didn’t mean much to her, to be sure – her historical ideas didn’t get as far as “Clovis, King of the Franks,” or even as “Count Frederick of Tyrol with the Empty Pockets”; but in a vague sort of way she gathered for herself that these were statues of archdukes and mighty heroes, keeping watch and ward silently round the great dead emperor who knelt in the centre on his marble sarcophagus. Good luck, too, attended them. The little hump-backed sacristan, seeing two pretty girls looking through the grating at the reliefs on its sides, relaxed his stony heart without the customary kreuzers, and admitted them within the railing to inspect at their leisure those exquisite pictures in marble which Thorwaldsen declared the most perfect work of their kind in the whole of Christendom. Philippina found the dresses quite grotesquely old-fashioned; but Linnet, hardly knowing why she lingered so long, gazed at each scene in detail with the profoundest interest.
