The Azure Rose Part 25

The happiness of the good old times is a mere dream in every age; but to keep on the laws of the old times, in preserving to reform, in reforming to preserve, is the true life of a free people.--Freeman: _The Norman Conquest_.

"Vitoria," explained the guard, whom Cartaret inveigled into conversation next morning, "is the capital of the province of Alava."

"Eh?" said Cartaret. "Then there's more than one Vitoria, my friend.

If I'd only studied geography when I was at school, it might have saved me a week now."

He tried to make talk with a hatless Englishman in tweeds, who was smoking a briar-pipe in the corridor.

"Vitoria," said the Englishman, "is one of the places where Wellington beat the French under Joseph Buonaparte and Jourdan, in the Peninsular War."

"Didn't the Spanish help?" asked Cartaret.

"They thought they did," said the Englishman.

Cartaret had had small time in Paris to learn anything about the strange people and the strange country for which he was bound; but, had he had weeks for study, he would have learned little more.

Centuries had availed almost nothing to the scholars that sought to explain them. The origin of their race and language still unknown, the Basques, proud and wild, free and self-sufficient, have held to themselves their sea and mountain-fortresses from the dawn of recorded history. The successive tides of the Suavi, the Franks and the Goths have swept through those rugged valleys, and left the Basque unmixed and untainted. From the days of the Roman legions to those of the Napoleonic armies, he has withstood the onslaughts of every conqueror of Western Europe, unconquered and unchanged. The rivers of his legends draw direct from the source of all legends; the boundary of his customs is as unalterable as the foundation of his Pyrenees. The engines of imperial slaughter, the steady blows of progress, the erosion of time itself, have left him as they found him: the serene despair of the philologist, the Sphynx of ethnology, the riddle of the races of mankind.

Cartaret picked up the scanty threads of the Basques' known chronicle.

He learned that these Celtiberi had preserved an independence which outlasted the Western Empire, gave no more than a nominal allegiance to Leovigild, to Wamba and to Charlemagne, cast their fortunes with the Moors at Roncesvalles and, in the eleventh century, formed a free confederation of three separate republics under a ruler of their own blood and choice, whose tenure was dependent upon const.i.tutional guarantees and whose power was wholly executive. Even the yoke of Spain, hated as it was, had failed materially to affect this form of government and could be justly regarded as little save a name. The three provinces--the Vascongadas as they were called: the sea-coast Viscaza and Guipuzcoa and the inland Alava--retained their ancient ident.i.ty. Somewhere among their swift rivers and well-nigh inaccessible mountains must be the house of her whom he sought.

Because of the name that she had given him, Cartaret headed now for Vitoria.

Twice he had to change his train, each time for a worse. From Bayonne he crossed the Spanish border at Hendaya, whence the railway, after running west along the rocky coast of the Bay of Biscay, turned southward toward the heights about Tolosa. All afternoon the scenery was varied and romantic. The hard-clay soil, cultivated with painful care by young giants and graceful amazons, gave place to pine-forests, to tree-cloaked hills, to mountains dark with mystery.

Twilight fell, then night. Cartaret could now see nothing of the landscape through which he was jolted, but, from the puffing of the engine, the slow advance, the frightful swinging about curves, it was clear to him that he was being hauled, in a series of half-circles, up long and steep ascents.

"What station is this?" he asked a French-speaking guard that pa.s.sed his window at a stop where the air was cool and sweet with the odor of pine. The lantern showed only a good-natured face in a world of darkness.

"Ormaiztegua, monsieur," said the guard.

"What?" said Cartaret. "Say it slow, please, and say it plainly: I am a stranger and of tender years."

The guard repeated that outlandish name.

"And now which way do we go?" Cartaret inquired.

"North again to Zumarraga."

"North again?" repeated Cartaret. "Look here: I'm in a hurry. Isn't there any more direct route to Vitoria?"

"Evidently monsieur does not know the Pyrenees."

From Zumarraga, the train bent yet again southward, out of Guipuzcoa across the Navarra line.

"Aren't we late?" asked Cartaret.

"But a little," the guard rea.s.sured him: "scarcely two hours."

At last, when they had climbed that precipitous spur of the Pyrenees which forms the northern wall of Alava; after they had stopped once to harness an extra locomotive, and stopped again to unharness it; after they had descended again, ascended again and once more descended--this last time for what seemed but a little way--the train came to the end of this stage of Cartaret's journey. He alighted on a smoky platform only partially illuminated by more smoky lamps and had himself driven to the hotel that the first accessible cabby recommended.

Vitoria is a curious city of nearly 150,000 inhabitants, situated on a hill overlooking the Plain of Alava. Cartaret, waking with the sun, could see from his window the Campillo, the oldest portion of the town, crowning the hill-crest, an almost deserted jumble of ruined walls and ancient towers, surrounded by public-gardens and topped by the twelfth-century Cathedral of St. Mary, the effect of its Gothic arches sadly lessened by ugly modern additions to the pile. Below, the Vitoria Antigua clung to the hillside, a maze of narrow, twisting streets; and still lower lay the new town, a place of wide thoroughfares and shady walks, among which was Cartaret's hotel.

He breakfasted early and, having no leisure for sight-seeing, asked his way to the city's administrative-offices. He pa.s.sed rows of hardware-factories, wine and wool warehouses, paper-mills and tanneries, wide yards in which rows of earthenware lay drying, and plazas where the horse and mule trade flourished, and so came at last to the arcaded market-place opposite which was the building that he was in search of; the offices were not yet open for the day.

He sat down to wait at a table under an awning and before a cafe that faced the market. The market was full of country-folk, men and women, all of great height and splendid physique, and Cartaret saw at once that the latter wore the same sort of peculiar head-dress that, in Paris, had distinguished Chitta.

A loquacious waiter, wholly unintelligible, was accosting him.

Cartaret, guessing that he was expected to pay for his chair with an order for drink, made signs to fit that conjecture, and the waiter brought him a flask of the native _chacoli_. It was a poor wine, and Cartaret did not care for it, but he sat on, pretending to, watching the white munic.i.p.al building and looking, from time to time, at the farmers from the market who pa.s.sed into the cafe and out of it.

He half expected to see Chitta among their womenfolk: Chitta, of whom he would so lately have said that he never wanted to see her again!

The farmers all gravely bowed to him, and Cartaret, of course, bowed in return. Finally it occurred to him that he might get news from one of them and so, one by one, he would stop them with an inquiry as to whether they spoke French. A dozen failures were convincing him of his folly, when their result was ruined by the appearance of a rosy-cheeked young man in a wide hat and swathed legs, who appeared to be more prosperous than his neighbors and who replied to Cartaret in a French that the American could understand.

"Then do sit down and have a drink with me," urged Cartaret. "I'm a stranger here and I'd be greatly obliged to you if you would."

The young man agreed. He explained complacently that the folk of Alava, though invariably hospitable, generally distrusted strangers, but that he had had advantages, having been sent to the Jesuit school in St. Jean Pied-de-Port. He was the one chance in a thousand: he knew something of what Cartaret wanted to learn.

Had he ever heard of a rose, a white rose, called the Azure Rose?

Had he not heard! It was one of the foolish superst.i.tions of the folk of Northern Alava, that rose. His own mother, being from the North--G.o.d rest her soul--had not been exempt: when he was sent into France to school, she had pinned an Azure Rose against his heart in order to insure his return home.

"Then it grows in the North?"

"For the most part, yes, monsieur, and even there it is something rare: that, without doubt, is why it is esteemed so dearly by the common folk. It grows only near the snows, the high snows. There are but few white peaks there, and on them a few such roses. The country beyond Alegria is the place of all places for them. If monsieur wants to find the Azure Rose, he should go to the wild country beyond Alegria."

"Do you know that country?" asked Cartaret.

The young man shrugged. He ought to know it: he had been brought up there. But it was no place for strangers; it was very wild.

"I wonder," said Cartaret, hope shining in his brown eyes--"I wonder if you ever heard of a family there by the name of Urola?"

The farmer shook his head. Urola? No, he had never heard of Urola. But stay: there was the great family, the Ethenard-Eskurola d'Alegria.

Eskurola was somewhat like Urola; indeed, Urola was part of Eskurola.

Perhaps, monsieur----

Cartaret was leaning far over the table.

"Is there," he asked, "a young lady in that family named Vitoria?"

The farmer reflected.

"There was one daughter," he said; "a little girl when I was a lad.

She was the Lady Dolorez. She had, however, many names: people of great houses among us have many names, monsieur, and Vitoria is not uncommonly among them. Vitoria? Yes, I think she was also called Vitoria."

"Did she speak English?"

"It was likely, monsieur." Nearly all of the Ethenard-Eskurolas spoke English, because one of their so numerous ancestors was the great Don Miguel Ricardo d'Alava, general under the Duke of Wellington, who valued him above all his generals in that Spanish campaign. Since then there had always been English teachers for the children of the house.

So much was common knowledge.

It was enough for Cartaret. Within the hour he was summoning the proprietor of his hotel to his a.s.sistance in arranging for an expedition to Alegria.