Chapter XIV: Something or Other About Traditions

... Since we must part, down right
With happy day; burdens well borne are light.
--Donne: _Eleg. XIII_.

Cartaret was lighted by his host himself to a bedroom high up in the castle and deep within it--a bedroom big enough and dreary enough to hold all the ghosts of Spain. An old man-servant brought him a supper calculated to stay the hunger of a shipwrecked merchant-crew. He lay down in a great four-poster bed both canopied and curtained, and, in spite of his weariness, he tossed for hours, wondering whether Vitoria was also somewhere within those grim walls and what course he was to pursue in regard to her.

The same uncertainty gripped him when breakfast was brought to his bedside in the early morning. Was this, after all, Vitoria's home; and if it was, had she returned to it? Supposing an affirmative answer to these questions, what was he to say to her brother? So far, thank Heaven, Don Ricardo, though he had once or twice looked queerly at the American, had been too polite to make awkward inquiries, but such inquiries were so natural that they were bound soon to be made; and Cartaret could not remain forever an unexplained and self-invited guest in the castle of his almost involuntary host. The guest recalled all that he had heard of the national and family pride and traditions of the Eskurolas, and only his native hopefulness sustained him.

He found his own way down twisting stairs and into a vast court-yard across which servants were passing. The great gate was open, and he stepped through it toward the battlemented terrace that he saw beyond.

His first shock was there. The bridge that he had crossed the night before was indeed a drawbridge and did indeed span the castle-moat, but the bridge was unrailed and that moat was a terrible thing. It was no pit of twenty or thirty feet dug by the hand of man. The terrace to which the castle clung was separated from that to which climbed the steep approach by a natural chasm of at least twelve yards across, with sheer sides, like those of a glacial crevasse, shooting downwards into black invisibility and echoing upward the thunderous rush of unseen waters.

Leaning on the weather-worn wall that climbed along the edge of this precipice and guarded a broad promenade between it and the castle, Cartaret looked with a new sensation at the marvelous scene about him. Behind rose the frowning castle, a maze of parapets and towers, built against that naked, snow-capped, chalcedonous peak. In front, falling away through a hundred gradations of green, a riot of luxuriant vegetation, lay the now apparently uninhabited country through which he had ridden, and beyond this, circling it like the teeth of the celestial dragon that the Chinese believe is to swallow the sun, rose row on row of bare mountains, ridges and pinnacles blue and gray.

A hand fell on Cartaret's shoulder. He turned to find Don Ricardo standing beside him. The giant gave every appearance of having been up and about for hours, and, despite his bulk, he had approached his guest unheard.

"I trust that you, sir, have slept well in my poor house."

Cartaret replied that he had slept like a top.

"And that you could eat of the little breakfast which my servants provided?"

"I made a wonderful breakfast," said Cartaret.

"It is good, sir. If you can bear with my house, it is yours for so long as you care to honor it with your presence."

Cartaret knew that this must be only an exaggerated fashion of speech, but he chose to take it literally.

"That's very good of you," he said. "I haven't ridden for years and I'm rather done up. If you really don't mind, I think I will rest here over another night."

Don Ricardo seemed unprepared for this, but he checked a frown and bowed gravely.

"A year would be too short for me," he vowed.

They fell to talking, the host now trying to turn the conversation into the valley, the guest holding it fast to the castle-heights.

"It is a beautiful place," said Cartaret; "I don't know when I've seen anything to compare with it; and yet I should think you'd find it rather lonely."

"Not lonely, sir," said the Basque. "The hunting in the valley is a compensation. For example, where you see those oaks about the curve of that river, I hunted, not ten days ago, a wolf as large as those for which my ancestors paid the wolf-money."

"Still," Cartaret persisted, "you do live here quite alone, don't you?"

He knew that he was impudent, and he felt that only his host's reverence for the laws of hospitality prevented an open resentment. Nevertheless, Cartaret was bound to find out what he could, and this time he was rewarded.

"There is good enough to live with me," said Don Ricardo stiffly, "my lady sister, the Dona Dolorez Eulalia Vitoria." He looked out across the chasm.

Cartaret caught his breath. There was an awkward pause. Then, glancing up, he saw, coming toward them along the terrace, the figure of a woman-servant that seemed startlingly familiar.

It was Chitta. She was bent, no doubt, on some household errand to her master, whose face was luckily turned away--luckily because, when she caught sight of Cartaret, her jaw dropped and her knees gave under her.

Cartaret had just time to knit his brows with the most forbidding scowl he could assume. The old woman clasped her hands in what was plainly a prayer to him to be silent concerning all knowledge of her and her mistress. A moment more, and Don Ricardo was giving her orders in the Basque tongue.

"Our servants," he said apologetically when she had gone, "are faithful, but stupid." His gray eyes peered at Cartaret searchingly. "Very stupid, sir," he added. "For instance, you, sir, know something of our customs; you know that centuries-old tradition--the best of laws--makes it the worst of social crimes for a Basque to marry any save a Basque----"

He stopped short, holding Cartaret with his eyes. Cartaret nodded.

"Very well, sir," Ricardo continued: "one time a lady of our house--it was years upon years ago, when Wellington and the English were here--fell in love, or thought that she did, with a British officer. For an Englishman, his degree was high, but had he been the English King it would have served him nothing among us. Knowing of course that the head of our house would never consent to such a marriage, this lady commanded her most loyal servant to assist in an elopement. Now, the Basque servant must obey her mistress, but also the Basque servant must protect the honor of the house that she has the privilege to serve. This one sought to do both things. She assisted in the elopement and brought the lady to the English camp. Then, thus having been faithful to one duty, she was faithful to the other: before the wedding, she killed both her mistress and herself." He turned quickly. "Sir, I have pressing duties in the valley, and you are too weary to ride with me: my poor house is at your disposal."

Cartaret leaned against the parapet and, when his host was out of earshot, whistled softly.

"What a delightful _raconteur_," he mused. "I wonder if he meant me to draw any special moral from that bit of family-history."

He waited until, a quarter of an hour later, he saw Don Ricardo and two servants ride across the drawbridge and wind their way toward the valley. He waited until the green forest engulfed them. What he was going to do might be questionable conduct in a guest, but there was no time to waste over nice points of etiquette. He was going to find Vitoria.

He started for the court-yard. His plan was to accost the first servant that he encountered and mention Chitta's name, but this trouble was saved him. In the shadowy gateway, he found Chitta crouching.

She glanced to right and left, saw that they were unobserved, passed beyond a narrow door that opened into the gate, and led Cartaret up a spiral stone staircase to the entrance of a circular room in one of the twin gate-towers. There she turned and left him alone with Vitoria.

In the center of that bare room, standing beside one of the bowmen's windows that commanded the approach to the castle, the Lady of the Rose awaited him. For an instant, he scarcely recognized her. She was gowned in a single-piece Basque dress of embroidered silk, closely fitted about her full lithe figure to below the hips, the skirt widening and hanging loosely about her slim ankles. A black silk scarf, in sharp contrast to the embroidery, was sewn to the dress and drawn tightly over the right shoulder, across the bust, and then draped beneath the left hip. But the glory of her blue-black hair was as he had first seen it in the twilight of his far-off studio; the creamy whiteness of her cheeks was just touched with pink, and her blue eyes, under curling lashes, seemed at first the frank eyes that he loved.

"Vitoria!" he cried.

She drew back. She raised one hand, its pink palm toward him.

"You should not have done this," she said in a rapid whisper. "How did you find me? How did you come here?" Her voice was kind, but steady.

Cartaret stood still. This he had not looked for. His cheeks were flushed, and the lines about his mouth deepened, as they always did at moments of crisis, and made his face very firm.

"Does it matter how?" he asked. "Not all the width of the world could have kept me away. There's something I've got to know and know instantly."

"But you should not have come, and you must go immediately! Listen--no, listen to me now! I am not Vitoria Urola in these mountains; whether I want it or not, I have to be the Dona Dolorez Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val de Grace; here it is a serious matter: the most serious matter in this little mountain-world. You will have to listen to me."

Cartaret folded his arms.

"Go on," he said.

"Last Winter," she continued, her face challenging his, "I had a time of rebellion against all these things amongst which I had been brought up. I had never been farther away from this place than Alegria, but I had had French and English governesses, and I read books and dreamed dreams. I loved to paint; I thought that I could learn to be a real artist, but I knew that my brother would think that a shame in an Eskurola and would never permit his unmarried sister to go to a foreign city to study. Nevertheless, I was hungry for the great world outside--for the real world--and so I took poor Chitta, gathered what jewels were my own and not family-jewels, and ran away."

She looked from the window to the road that led into the valley; but the road was still deserted.

"Chitta sold the jewels," she presently went on. "They brought very little; but to me, who had never used money, it seemed much. We went to Paris: I and Chitta, who, because she had often been so far as Vitoria before, became as much my guardian as she was my servant--and I was long afraid to go but a little distance in the streets without her: the streets terrified me, and, after one fright, she made me promise to go nowhere without her. So we took the room that you know of. We were used to regarding my brother as all-powerful; we feared that he would find us. Therefore, we would let no one know who we were or whence we came. Now that is over." Her voice trembled a little. She made a hopeless gesture. "It is all over, and we have come back to our own people." She raised her head proudly; she had regained her self-control: to Cartaret, she seemed to have regained an ancient pride. "I have learned that I must be what I was born to be."

He squared his jaw.

"A slave to your brother's will," he said.

"A creature," she answered with steady gaze--"a creature of the will of God."

"But this is nonsense!" He came forward. "This sort of thing may have been all very well in the Fourteenth Century; but we're living in the Twentieth, and it doesn't go now. Oh,"--he flung out a hand--"I know all about your old laws and traditions! I dare say they're extremely quaint and all that, and I dare say there was a time when they had some reason in them; but that time isn't this time, and I refuse to hear any more about them. I won't let them interfere with me."

She flashed crimson.

"You speak for yourself, sir: permit me to speak for myself."

His answer was to seize her hands.

"Let me go!" she ordered.

"I'll never let you go," said he.

"Let me go. You are a brave man to restrain a woman! Shall I call a servant?"

She struggled fiercely, panting.

"I've got to make you understand me," he protested, holding fast her hands. "I didn't mean any harm to your traditions or your customs. Whatever you love I'll try to love too--just so long as it doesn't hurt you. But _this_ does hurt you. Tell me one thing: Why did you leave Paris? What was it made you change your mind?" He saw in her face the signs of an effort to disregard the demand. "Tell me why you left Paris," he repeated.

Her eyes wavered. The lids fluttered.

"That night," she began in an uneven tone, "I gave you to understand, that night----"

"You gave me to understand that you loved me."

He said it fearlessly, and, on the edge of a sob, she fearlessly answered him. She had ceased to struggle. Her hands lay still and cold in his.

"I told you that love had brought me a sword."

"You've changed. What has changed you?"

"I have not changed. I have only come back to these unchangeable mountains, to this unchanging castle, to the ancient laws and customs of my people--their ancient and unalterable laws. I had to come back to them," she said, "because I realized that it was not in me to be false to all that my fathers have for centuries been true to."

Cartaret leaned forward. He could not believe that this was her only reason; he could not understand that the sway of any custom can be so powerful. He held her hands tighter. His eyes searched her quailing eyes.

"Do you love me? That's all I want to know, and I'll attend to everything else. I've no time for sparring. I've got to know if you love me. I've got to know that, right here and now."

She shook her head.

"Don't!" she whispered.

"Do you love me?" he relentlessly persisted.

"To love in Paris is one thing: here I may not love."

"You may not--but _do_ you?"

"Don't. Please don't. Oh!"--her red lips parted, her breath came fast--"if love were all----"

"It _is_ all!" he declared. He slipped both her cold hands into his right hand and put his freed arm about her waist. "Vitoria," he whispered, drawing her to him, "it _is_ all. It's all that matters, all that counts. It can mock all custom and defy all law. I love you, Vitoria." Slowly her eyes closed; slowly she sank against his arm; slowly her head drooped backward, and slowly he bent toward its parted, unresisting lips---- "And love's the one thing in the world worth living and dying for."

At that word, she came to sudden life. With one wrench, she had darted from his arms. Instantly she had recovered self-control.

"No, no, no!" she cried. "Go away! There is danger here. Oh, go away!"

The suddenness of her action shattered his delirium. He read in her words only her reply to the question that he had put to her.

Impossible as it would have seemed a moment since, that negative meant a catastrophic denial of any love for him. He glanced at the old walls that surrounded them--at all the expressions of a remorseless self in which he could have no part. He felt, with a sudden certainty, that these things were of her, and she of them--that what she meant by her distinction between herself in Paris and this other self here was the vast difference between a Byzantine empress breaking plebeian hearts in the alleys of her capital and that same woman on her throne, passionless and raised above the reach of men's desires.

The most modest of young fellows is always a little vain, and his vanity is always wounded; it is ever seeking hurts, anxious to suffer: Cartaret was no exception to human rules. He told his heart that Vitoria's words meant but one thing: She had entertained herself with him during an incognito escapade and, now that the escapade was finished, wanted no reminders. A Byzantine empress? This was worse: the empress gave, if only to take away. What Vitoria must mean was that even her momentary softening toward him on this spot was no more than momentary. She was saying that, having had her amusement by making him love her, she was now returned to her proper station, where to love her was to insult her. He had been her plaything, and now she was tired of it.

"Very well," he said, "if you think my love is worth so little. If you can't brave one miserable medieval superstition for it, then I've got the answer to what I asked you, and you're right: I'd better go." He turned to the narrow door at the head of the spiral stairs. "I know," he said, as if to the stone walls about them, "that I'm not worth much sacrifice; but my love has been worth a sacrifice. Some day you'll understand what my love might have meant. Some day, when you're old, you'll look from one of these windows out over these valleys and mountains and think of what could have happened--what there was once, just this one time, one chance for." He half faced her. "Other men will love you, many of them. They'll love your happiness and grace and beauty as well, I dare say, as I do and always will. But you'll remember one man that loved your soul; you'll remember me----"

Vitoria was swaying dizzily. Her recaptured self-command visibly wavered. She leaned against the rough wall. He leaped toward her, but she had the strength left to warn him away.

"No, no, no!" she repeated. "I do not----" She raised her hands to the vaulted roof. By a tremendous effort she became again mistress of herself--and of him. "Why will you not understand? I do not love you. Go!"

At that moment a cry rang out. It was a cry from the gateway. It was the cry of Chitta, who came bounding into the narrow room and hurled herself at her mistress's feet.

Before any one of the trio could speak, there was the clatter of a galloping horse on the road, the thunder of hoofs over the drawbridge above that frightful chasm.

"Go!" shrieked Vitoria. "Will you never go? Do you not understand what this means? Do you not know who is coming here?"

Chitta set up a loud wail.

"I don't care who's coming here," said Cartaret. "If there's any danger----"

Vitoria leaped over the prostrate servant and began pushing Cartaret away.

"I hate you!" she cried. "Do you hear that? _I hate you!_ Now will you go?"

He looked at her, and his face hardened.

"I'll go," he said.

He turned away.

"My brother!" gasped Vitoria.

Don Ricardo came in at the door of the tower-room.