"Oh, no, sir. Had any one written at this season, when I am honoured by your presence, I should have answered that we were full, or the house closed--or any excuse which occurred to me. But no strangers have ever remained in Heiligengelt, or arrived, so late; and I was taken unawares when my son Alois drove them up last night. They are here but for a few days, on their way to Salzbrück, and so home, the pretty Miss de Courcy said; and I thought----"
"You did quite right, Frau Johann. Has my messenger come with letters?"
"Yes, Your--yes, sir; just now also a telegram was brought up by another messenger, who came in a great hurry, and has but lately gone." The chamois-hunter shrugged his shoulders and gave vent to an impatient sigh. "It is too much to expect that I should be left in peace for a single day, even here," he muttered as he moved toward the stairs.
To reach Frau Johann's best sitting-room (selfishly occupied, according to one opinion, by the gentlemen absent all day upon the mountains) he was obliged to pass a door through which issued unusual sounds. Involuntary he paused. Some one was striking the preliminary chords of a _volkslied_ on his favourite instrument, a Rhaetian improvement upon the zither. As he lingered, listening, a voice began to sing--such a voice! Softly seductive as the purling of a brook through a meadow; rich as the deepest notes of a nightingale in its first passion for the moon.
The song was the heartbroken cry of an old Rhaetian peasant, who, lying near death in a strange land, longs for the sunrise light on the mountain-tops at home, more earnestly than for heaven.
The listener did not move until the voice had died into silence. He knew, though he could not see, who the singer had been. It was impossible for the fat lady at the window, or the thin lady with the Baedeker, to own a voice like that. Only one there was who could so exhale her soul in the perfume of sound. To his fancy, it was like hearing the fragrance of a lily breathed aloud. In reality, it was Sylvia, with childish vanity, showing off her prettiest accomplishment, in order that the impression she had made might be deepened.
The man outside the door had heard many golden voices--golden in all senses of the word--but never before one which so strangely stirred his spirit, stirred it with a pain that was bitter sweet and a vague yearning for something he had never known. If he had been asked what was the thing for which he sighed, he could not, if he would, have told; for a man cannot explain that inner part of himself which he has never even tried to understand.