Chapter XIII: Further Adventures of an Amateur Botanist

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 constitutional 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 identity. 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 passed 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 reassured 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 passed 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 municipal building and looking, from time to time, at the farmers from the market who passed 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 superstitions of the folk of Northern Alava, that rose. His own mother, being from the North--God 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 assistance in arranging for an expedition to Alegria.

The hotel proprietor stroked a beard so bristling as to threaten his caressing fingers.

"It is a wild country," he remarked.

"That's what they all say," returned Cartaret. "When does the next train leave for it?"

"There is no train. Alegria is a little town in the high Cantabrian Mountains, far from any train."

"Then come along downtown and help me buy a horse," said Cartaret. "I saw a lot of likely-looking ones this morning."

"But, monsieur," expostulated the hotel proprietor, "nobody between here and Alegria speaks French. Nobody in Alegria speaks French--and you do not speak _Eskura_."

"What's that?"

"It is how we Basques name our own tongue."

"Well, I don't care. Get me a guide."

"I fear I cannot, monsieur. The country people do not want Alava to become the prey of tourists, and they will be slow to allow a stranger."

"Have you got a road-map?"

Yes, the proprietor had a road-map--of sorts. It looked faulty, and Cartaret found later that it was more faulty than it looked; but he resolved to make it do, and that afternoon found him in the saddle of a lean and hardy mare, ten miles on his way. He had brought with him a pair of English riding-breeches and leggings--purchased in Paris for no other reason than that he had the money and used to love to ride--his reduced equipment was in saddle-bags, and the road-map in his handiest pocket.

He put up at a little inn that night and rode hard, east by south, all the next day. He rode through fertile valleys where the fields were already yellow with wheat and barley. He came upon patches of Indian corn that made him think of the country about his own Ohio home, and upon flax-fields and fields of hemp. His way lay steadily upward, and in the hills he met with iron-banks and some lead and copper mines. Queerly costumed peasants herded sheep and goats along the roadside; but nobody that Cartaret addressed could understand a word of his speech. The road-map was bad, indeed: twice he lost his way by consulting it and once, he thought, by failing to consult it. A road that the map informed him would lead straight to Alegria ended in a marble-quarry.

Cartaret accosted the only workman in sight.

"Alegria?" he asked.

The man pointed back the way that Cartaret had come.

He followed the direction thus indicated and took a turning that he had missed before. He passed through a countryside of small plains. Then he began to climb again and left these for stretches of bare heath and hills covered with furze. From one hilltop he looked ahead to a vast pile of mountains crowned by two white peaks that shone in the sun like the lances of a celestial guard. The farms were less and less in size and farther and farther apart--tiny farms cultivated with antique implements. Apple-orchards appeared and disappeared, and then, quite suddenly, the hills became mountains, their bases covered by great forests of straight chestnut-trees, gigantic oaks and stately bushes whose limbs met in a dark canopy above the rider's head. At his approach, rabbits scurried, white tails erect, across the road; from one rare clearing a flock of partridges whirred skyward, and once, in the distance, he saw a grazing herd of wild deer.

Late in the afternoon, he came to a wide plateau, surrounded on three sides with mountain-peaks. There was a lake in the center, with a few cottages scattered along its shores, and at one end of the lake a high-gabled, wide-eaved inn, in front of which a short man, dark and wiry and unlike the people of that country, lounged in the sun. He proved to be the innkeeper, a native of Navarre, and, to Cartaret's delight, spoke French.

"Yes," he nodded, "I learned it years ago from a French servant that they used to have at the castle in the old lord's time."

"I've come from Vitoria," Cartaret explained. "Can you tell me how far it is to Alegria?"

"If you have come from Vitoria," was the suspicious answer, "you must have taken the wrong road and come around Alegria. Alegria is a score of miles behind you."

Cartaret swore softly at that road-map. He was tired and stiff, however, and so he dismounted and let the landlord attend to his mare and bring him, at the inn-porch, some black bread and cheese and a small pitcher of _zaragua_, the native cider.

"These are a strange people here," he said as the landlord took a chair opposite.

The landlord shook his swarthy head.

"I do not speak ill of them," said he. His tone implied that such a course would be unwise. "They call themselves," he went on after a ruminative pause, "the direct descendants of those Celtiberi whom the old Romans could never conquer, and I can well believe it of them. However, I know nothing: the lord at the castle knows."

"They don't like the Spaniards?" asked Cartaret.

"They hate us," said the innkeeper.

"Why?"

"I do not know. Perhaps because Spain rules them--so much as any power could. But I know nothing: the lord at the castle knows."

"What's his name?"

The question fell thoughtlessly from the lips of the American, but he had no sooner uttered it than he surmised its answer:

"The Don Ricardo Ethenard-Eskurola d'Alegria."

Cartaret produced a gold-piece and spun it on the rude table before him.

"An important man, isn't he?"

The innkeeper was eyeing the money, but his reply was cautious:

"How--'important'?"

"Rich?"

"The old lord lost much when there was the great rising for Don Carlos. But an Ethenard-Eskurola does not need riches."

"Then he's lucky. How does that happen?"

"Because his family is the most ancient and powerful in all the Vascongadas. There is no family older in Spain, nor any prouder." It was plainly one subject of which this alien was permitted to know something. "They have been lords of this land since before the time that men made chronicles. The papers in the castle go back to the Fifteenth Century--to the time when _Eskura_ was first turned into an alphabet. They were at Roncesvalles; they made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and fought in the crusades. One of them was Lord-Lieutenant of Jerusalem when Godfrey de Bouillon was its King. There was an Ethenard-Eskurola at La Isla de los Faisanes when the French Louis XI arranged there with our Henry the marriage of the Duc de Guienne. Always they have been lords and over-lords--always."

"I see," said Cartaret. "And the present lord lives near here at the castle?"

"As all his fathers lived before him. At their place and in their manner. What they did, he does; what they believed, he believes. Monsieur, even the ancient Basque traditions of hospitality are there a law infringeable. Were you his bitterest blood-enemy and knocked at the castle-gate for a night's shelter, he himself, Ricardo d'Alegria, would greet you and wait upon you, and keep you safe until morning."

"And then shoot my head off?" suggested Cartaret.

The innkeeper smiled: "I know nothing; but the lord at the castle knows."

"I suppose he hasn't a drop of any blood but Basque blood in him?"

"Monsieur, there is but one way in which a foreigner may marry even the humblest Basque, and that is by some act that saves the Basque's entire line. Thus even the humblest. As for the grandee at the castle, if I so much as asked him that question, so proud is he of his nationality and family that likely he would kill me."

"He must be a pleasant neighbor," said the American. "He lives alone?"

"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 grassy 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 gods 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 Titanic 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 mass 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 coarse 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 bass 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 nobility. 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 assent.

"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 unencumbered torch-bearer to lead, and, by the light of the pine-knots, the party began its ten-mile climb.

The night air, at that altitude, 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, sex 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."

Cartaret was glad that the darkness hid his flushed cheek as he answered:

"I have recently heard of that contingency."

"It never occurs," said Eskurola quickly, "because the Basque always chooses not to permit himself to be saved. It is a traditional law among us as strong as that against the disgrace of suicide."

Their feet were sounding over a bridge: the bridge, as Cartaret reflected, to the castle's moat. Through the light of the torches, the great gray walls of the pile climbed above him and disappeared into the night. A studded door, with mighty heaving of bolts, swung open before them, and they passed through into a vaulted gateway. The pine-knots cast dancing shadows on the stones.

Into what medieval world was he being admitted? Did Vitoria indeed inhabit it? And if she did, what difficulties and dangers must he overcome before ever he could take her thence?

Don Ricardo was speaking.

"I welcome you to my poor home," he said.

Cartaret's heart beat high. He was ready for any difficulty, for any danger....

With a solemn boom the great gate swung shut behind him. He felt that it had shut out the Twentieth Century.