The Azure Rose Part 27

"With his servants. He has, of course, many servants."

"He is not married?"

Still eyeing the gold-piece, the landlord answered:

"No. There was something, once, long ago, that men say--but I know nothing. The Don Ricardo is the last of his house. Unless he marries, the Eskurolas will cease. However, he will marry."

"You seem certain of it."

"Naturally, monsieur. He will marry in order that the Eskurolas do not cease."

"Yes-s-s." Cartaret hesitated before his next question. "So he's alone up there? I mean--I mean there's no other member of his family with him now?"

Instantly the innkeeper's face became blank.

"I know nothing----" he began.

"But the lord at the castle knows!" interrupted Cartaret. "I said it first that time. The lord at the castle must know everything."

"He does," said the landlord simply.

Cartaret rose. He pushed the gold-piece across the table.

"That sentiment earns it," said he. "Bring my mare, please. And you might point out the way to this castle. I've a mind to run up there."

The innkeeper looked at him oddly, but, when the mare had been brought around, pointed a lean brown finger across the lake toward the mountains that ended in twin white peaks: the peaks that Cartaret had seen a few hours since and that now seemed to him to be the crests of which he had dreamed when first he saw the Azure Rose.

"The road leads from the head of the lake, monsieur," said the innkeeper: "you cannot lose your way."

Cartaret followed the instructions thus conveyed. After three miles'

riding, a curved ascent had shut the lake and the cottages from view, had shut from view every trace of human habitation. He rode among scenery that, save for the gra.s.sy bridle-path, was as wild as if it had never before been known of man.

It was a ravishing country, a fairy-country of blue skies and fleecy clouds; of acicular summits and sharp-edged crags; of mist-hung valleys shimmering in the sun; of black chasms dizzily bridged by scarlet-flowered vines. The road ran along the edges of precipices and wreathed the gray outcropping rock; thick ropes of honeysuckle festooned the limbs of ancient trees and perfumed all the air. Here a blue cliff hid its distant face behind a bridal-veil of descending spray, broken by a dozen rainbows; there, down the terrifying depths of a vertical wall, roared a white and mighty cataract. The traveler's ears began to listen for the song of the hamadryad from the branches of the oak; his eyes to seek the flashing limbs of a frightened nymph; here if anywhere the G.o.ds of the elder-revelation still held sway.

Evening, which comes so suddenly in the Cantabrians, was falling before the luxuriant verdure lessened and he came to a break in the forest. Below him, billow upon billow, the foothills fell away in rolling waves of green. Above, the jagged circle of the horizon was a line of salient summits and tapering spires of every tint of blue--turquoise, indigo, mauve--mounting up and up like the seats in a t.i.tanic amphitheater, to the royal purple of the sky.

Cartaret had turned in his saddle to look at the magnificent panorama. Now, turning forward, he saw, rising ahead of him--ten miles or more ahead, but so gigantic as to seem bending directly above him and tottering to crush him and the world at his feet--one of the peaks that the innkeeper had indicated. It was a mountain piled upon the mountains, a sheer mountain of naked chalcedonous rock, rising to a snow-topped pinnacle; and, at its foot, almost at the extreme edge of the timber-line, a broad, muricated natural gallery, stood a vast Gothic pile, a somber, rambling ma.s.s of wall and tower: the castle of the Eskurolas.

Almost as Cartaret looked, the sun went down behind that peak and wrapped the way in utter darkness. The traveler regarded with something like dismay the last faint glow that vanished from the west.

"So sorry you had to go," he said, addressing the departed lord of day. He tried to look about him. "A nice fix I'm in," he added.

He attempted to ride on in the dark, but, remembering the precipices, dared not touch rein. He thought of trusting to the instinct of the mare, but that soon failed him: the animal came to a full stop. The stillness grew profound, the night impenetrable.

Then, suddenly, there was a wild cacophony from the forest on his left. It shook the air and set the echoes clanging from cliff to cavern. The mare reared and snorted. Lights danced among the trees; the lights became leaping flames; the noise was identifiable as the clatter of dogs and the shouts of men. Cartaret subdued his mare just as a torch-bearing party of picturesquely-garbed hunters plunged into the road directly in front of him and came, at sight of him, to a stand.

In the flickering light from a trio of burning pine-knots, the sight was enough strange. There were six men in all: three of them, in peasant costume, bearing aloft the torches, and two more, similarly dressed, holding leashes at which huge boar-hounds tugged. A pair of torch-bearers carried a large bough from the shoulder of one to the shoulder of the other, and suspended feet upward from this bough--bending with the weight--was a great, gray-black boar, its woolly hair red with blood, the coa.r.s.e bristles standing erect like a comb along its spine, its two enormous tusks prism-shaped and shining like prisms in the light from the pine-knots.

A deep ba.s.s voice issued a challenge in _Eskura_. It came from the sixth member of the party, unmistakably in command.

He was one of the biggest men Cartaret had ever seen. He must have stood six-feet-six in his boots and was proportionately broad, deep-chested and long-armed. In one hand he held an old-fashioned boar-spear--its blade was red--as a sportsman that scorns the safety of a boar-hunt with a modern rifle.

The torchlight, flickering over his tanned and bearded face, showed features handsome and aquiline, fashioned with a severe n.o.bility.

Instead of a hat, a scarf of red silk was wrapped about his black curls and knotted at one side. His eyes, under eagle-brows, were fierce and gray. Cartaret instinctively recalled his early ideas of a dark Wotan in the _Nibelungen-Lied_.

The American dismounted. He said, in English:

"You are the Don Ricardo Ethenard-Eskurola?"

He had guessed rightly: the big man bowed a.s.sent.

"I'm an American," explained Cartaret. "The innkeeper down in the valley told me your castle was near here, so I thought that this was you. I'm rather caught here by the darkness. I wonder if----" He noted Eskurola's eye and did not like it. "I wonder if there's another inn--one somewhere near here."

The Basque frowned. For a moment he said nothing. When he did speak it was in the slow, but precise, English that Cartaret had first heard from the lips of the Lady of the Rose.

"You, sir, are upon my land----"

"I'm very sorry," said Cartaret.

"And," continued Don Ricardo, "I could not permit to go to a mere inn any gentleman whom darkness has overtaken upon the land of the Eskurolas. It is true: on my land merely, you are not my guest; according to our customs, I am permitted to fight a duel, if need arises, with a gentleman that is on my land." He smiled: he had, in the torchlight, a fearsome smile. "But on my land, you are in the way of becoming my guest. Will you be so good as to accompany me to my poor house and accept such entertainment as my best can give you?"

Cartaret accepted, and, in the act, thought the acceptance too ready.

"Pray remount," urged Eskurola.

But Cartaret said that he would walk with his host, and so the still trembling mare was given to an unenc.u.mbered torch-bearer to lead, and, by the light of the pine-knots, the party began its ten-mile climb.

The night air, at that alt.i.tude, was keen even in Summer, and the way was dark. The American had an uneasy sense that he was often toiling along the edges of invisible abysses, and once or twice, from the forest, he heard the scurry of a fox and saw the green eyes of a lynx.

He tried to make conversation and, to his surprise, found himself courteously met more than half way.

"I know very little of this part of Spain," he said: "nothing, in fact, except what I've learned in the past few days and what the innkeeper down there told me."

"We Basques do not call this a part of Spain," Eskurola corrected him in a voice patently striving to be gentle; "and the innkeeper knows little. He is but a poor thing from Navarre."

"Yes," Cartaret agreed; "the staple of his talk was the statement that he knew nothing at all."

Eskurola smiled.

"That is the truth," said he.

He went on to speak freely enough of his own people. He explained something of their almost Mongolian language: its genderless nouns; its countless diminutives; its endless compounds formed by mere juxtaposition and elision; its staggering array of affixes to supply all ordinary grammatical distinctions, doing away with our need of periphrasis and making the ending of a word determine its number and person and mood, the case and number of the object, and even the rank, s.e.x and number of the persons addressed.

He talked with a modesty so formed as really to show his high pride in everything that was Basque. When Cartaret pressed him, he told, with only a pretense of doubt in his voice, how the Celtiberi considered themselves descendants of the ocean-engulfed Atalantes, and former owners of all the Spanish peninsula. Even now, he insisted, they were the sole power over themselves from the bold coast-line of Vizcaya to the borders of Navarre and had so been long before Sancho the Wise was forced to grant them a _fuero_. They had always named their own governors and fixed their own taxes by republican methods. The sign of the Vascongadas, the three interlaced hands with the motto _Iruracacabat_, signified three-in-one, because delegates from their three parliaments met each year to care for the common interests of all; but there was no written pact between them: the Basques were people of honor.

Spain? Don Ricardo disliked its mention. St. Mary of Salvaterra! The Basque parliaments named a deputation that negotiated with representatives of the Escorial and preserved Basque liberties and law. If Madrid called that sovereignty, it was welcome to the term.

"We remain untouched by Spain," he said, "and untouched by the world.

Our legends are still Grecian, our customs are what the English call 'iron-clad.' Basque blood is Basque and so remains. It never mixes. It could mix in only one contingency."