The Azure Rose Part 33

Don Ricardo was lowering his pistol, and his pistol was smoking. He had fired. Moreover, he had aimed truly. But he had chosen his weapon honorably--it was the one that did not hold a bullet.

Cartaret was dazed, but knew instantly what to do. As if it was the performance of an act long since subconsciously decided upon, he raised his own pistol slowly--the death-laden pistol--and shot straight up into the air....

The smoke was still circling about the American's head when he saw Eskurola striding toward him. The Basque's face was a study of humiliation and dismay.

"What is this?" he demanded. "After I have tried to kill you, you do not kill me? You refuse to kill me? You inflict the greatest insult and the only one that I cannot resent?"

Cartaret threw down his pistol: it frightened him now. "I don't know whether it's an insult to let you live or not," he said, "and I don't care a d.a.m.n. Where's my mare?"

He went to the gate. It was opened by the French-speaking servant, wide-eyed now, but with his curiosity inarticulate. Cartaret mounted.

His hand trembled as he gathered up the reins. He was angry at this and at the comedy that Fate had made of his attempted heroism. Was there ever before, he reflected, a duel the two princ.i.p.als of which were angry because they survived?

Eskurola was standing at the edge of the unrailed drawbridge that crossed the precipitous abyss. It was evident even to Cartaret that the Basque was still too amazed to think, much less speak, coherently; that something beyond his comprehension had occurred; that a phenomenon hitherto unknown had wrecked his cosmos.

"Sir," he began, "will you not return first into the castle and there----"

"If you don't get out of my way," said Cartaret, "I'll ride you into this chasm!"

Don Ricardo drew dumbly aside, and Cartaret rode on. With Vitoria relentless and unattainable, abjured by the woman he had loved, robbed even of the chance to give his life for her, he was riding anywhere to get away from Alava, was fleeing from his sense of loss and failure.

He rode as fast as the steep descent permitted, and only once, at a sharp twist of the way, a full mile down the mountain, did he allow himself to turn in his saddle and look back.

There was Eskurola, a silhouette against the gray walls. Behind him rose the castle of his fathers, and back of it the great peak towered, through a hundred flashing colors, to its shining crown of eternal snow.

CHAPTER XVI

AND LAST

It must be a very dear and intimate reality for which people will be content to give up a dream.--Hawthorne: _The Marble Faun_.

Summer held Paris in his arms when Cartaret returned there--held her, wearied from the dance with Spring, in his warm arms, and was rocking her to sleep. Romance had crowded commerce from the boulevards; poets wrote their verses at the marble-topped tables along the awninged pavements; the lesser streets were lovers' lanes.

For Cartaret had not hurried. Once the Pyrenees were behind him, he felt growing upon him a dread of any return to the city in which he had first met and loved the Lady of the Rose; and only the necessity of settling his affairs there--of collecting his few possessions, paying two or three remaining bills and bidding a last good-by to his friends--drew him forward. He lingered at one town after the other, caring nothing for what he saw, but hating the thought of even a week in a Paris without her. Vaguely he had decided to return to America, though what of interest life could hold there, or anywhere, for him he could not imagine: some dull business routine, most likely--for he would never paint again--and the duller the better. Thus he wasted a fortnight along the Loire and among the chateaux of Touraine and found himself at last leaving his train in the Gare D'Orsay at the end of a Summer afternoon.

He made for his own room with the objectless hurry of a native American, his feet keeping time to a remembered stanza of Andrew Lang:

"In dreams she grows not older The lands of Dream among, Though all the world wax colder, Though all the songs be sung; In dreams doth he behold her Still fair and kind and young."

Taciturn Refrogne seemed no more surprised to see him than if he had gone out but an hour since: the trade of the Parisian concierge slays surprise early.

"A letter for monsieur," said Refrogne.

Cartaret took it from the grimy paw that was extended out of the concierge's cave. He went on up the stairs.

The door of the magic Room Opposite--in all probability commonplace enough now--stood slightly ajar, and Cartaret felt a new pang as he glanced at it. He pa.s.sed on to his own room.

His own room! It was precisely as he had seen it last--a little dustier, and far more dreary, but with no other change. The table at which she had leaned, the easel on which he had painted those portraits of her, were just as when he had left them. He went to the window at which he used to store the provisions that Chitta looted, and there he opened the envelope Refrogne had given him. It contained only one piece of paper: A Spanish draft on the Comptoir General for a hundred and twenty francs, and on the back, in a labored English script, was written:

"For repayment of the sum advanced to my servant, Chitta Grekekora.

"Ricardo B. F. R. Ethenard-Eskurola (d'Alegria)."

A limb of wisteria had climbed to the window and hung a cl.u.s.ter of its purple flowers on the sill. Below, Refrogne's lilacs were in full bloom, and the laughter of Refrogne's children rose from among them as piercing sweet as the scent of the flowers. Cartaret took a match from his pocket, struck it and set the bit of paper aflame. He held it until the flame burnt his fingers, crushed it in his palm and watched the ashes circle slowly downward toward the lilac-trees.

The sun had set and, as Cartaret walked aimlessly toward the front windows, the long shadows of the twilight were deepening from wall to wall. Summer was in all the air.

So much the same! He leaned forward and looked down into the silent rue du Val-de-Grace. He was thinking how she had once stood where he was leaning now; thinking how he had leaned there so often, looking for her return up that narrow thoroughfare, waiting for the sound of her light footfall on the stair. So much the same, indeed: the unchanged street outside, the unchanged room within; the room in which he had found her on that February night. Here she had admitted that she loved him, and here she had said the good-by that he would not understand--a few short weeks ago. And now he was back--back after having heard her repudiate him, back after losing her forever.

Fate works everywhere, but her favorite workshop is Paris. Something was moving in the deepest shadow in the room--the shadow about the doorway. Blue-black hair and long-lashed eyes of violet, lips of red and cheeks of white and pink; the incredible was realized, the miracle had happened: Vitoria was here.

He was beside her in a single bound. He thought that he cried her name aloud; in reality, his lips moved without speech.

"Wait," she said. She drew away from him; but the statues of the Greek G.o.ds in the Luxembourg gardens must have felt the thrill in the evening air as she faced him. She was looking at him bravely with only the least tremor of her lips. "Do you--do you still love me?" she asked.

Her voice was like a violin; her words dazed him.

"Love you? I--I can't tell you how much--I--haven't the words to say----"

He seized the hand with which she had checked him and kissed its unjeweled fingers.

"What is it?... Why did you say you hated me?... What has brought you back?... Is is true? Is it _true_?"

From Refrogne's garden came the last good-night-song of the birds.

"Love you? Why, from the day I left you--no, from that night I found you here, I've thought nothing but Vitoria, dreamed nothing but Vitoria----"

Now incoherent and afraid, then with hectic eloquence and finally with a complete abandon, he poured out his soul in libation to her. With the first word of it, she saw that she was forgiven.

"I came," she said, "to--to tell you this: You know now that I ran away from Paris because I loved you and knew that I could not marry you; but you do not know why I said that terrible thing which I said in the tower-room. I was afraid of what my brother might do to you.

That is why I would not take your kisses. To try to make you leave before he found you, I said what first came to my mind as likely to drive you away. I said it at what fearful cost! I blasphemed against my love for you."

Cartaret was recovering himself. Love gives all, but it demands everything.

"Your brother said that I had offered you some insult. He said you'd told him so. I thought you'd told him that in order to make him all the angrier against me."

"Ever since Chitta and I returned to our home, he had been suspecting," she said. "He would not forgive me for going away. Chitta he tortured, but she told him nothing. Me, he kept almost a prisoner.

When you came, I knew that he would soon guess what was true, so I sent for you that morning to send you away, and when that failed and he found us together, I told him that we loved each other, because I hoped that he would spare the man I loved, even though he would never let me--let me marry that man. I should have known him too well to think that, but I was too afraid to reason--too afraid for your sake.

He was so proud that he would not repeat it to you as I said it to him: he repeated it in the way least hateful to him--and after you had gone, I found that all I had done served only to make him try to kill you. Of this I knew nothing until hours later. Then--then----"

The birds had ceased their song, but the scent of the lilacs still rose from the garden.

"Don't you understand now?" she asked, her cheeks crimson in the fading light. "I guessed you did not understand then; but don't you understand now?"

He stood bewildered. She had to go through with it.

"My brother had to live--you made him live. To kill himself is the worst disgrace that a Basque can put upon his family. Besides, the thing was done; you had fired into the air; nothing that he might do would undo that. At the bridge he tried to tell you so, but you rode by. You know--my brother told it you--that one reason which allows a foreigner to marry a Basque. We Eskurolas pay our debts; to let you go a creditor for that was to put a stain upon our house indelibly. I would have accepted the disgrace and made my brother continue to accept it, had you not now said that you still loved me; but you have said it. Oh, do--do, please, understand!" She stamped her foot. "My brother is the last man of our name. In saving him, you saved the house of Eskurola."