Chapter XV: In Which Cartaret Takes Part in the Revival of an Ancient Custom

La vieille humanite porte encore dans ses entrailles la
brutalite primitive; un anthropoide feroce survit en chacun
de nous.--Opinions a Repandre.

For a moment none moved. There was Chitta, groveling on the stone floor of the circular room, her face hidden in her hands; there was Vitoria, her arms outstretched, struck rigid in the act of repulsing Cartaret; and there were the two men--the American white, but determined and unafraid; the Basque with a dull red spreading on his tanned cheeks--facing each other as pugilists, entering the ring, face each other at pause during the fleeting instant before they begin to circle for an opening. Cartaret, with the eye that, in times of high emotion, takes account of even trivial detail, noted how Don Ricardo, who had been forced to stoop in order to pass the doorway, gradually straightened himself with a slow, unconscious expansion of the muscles such as a tiger might employ.

Vitoria was the first to speak: she lowered her arms and turned upon her brother a glance of which the pride proved that her self-possession was regained. She spoke in English, though whether for Cartaret's comprehension, for the servant's mystification, or as an added gibe at Ricardo, the American was unable to determine.

"You came unannounced, brother," she said. "I am not accustomed to such entrances."

The red deepened over Don Ricardo's high cheek-bones, but he bit his lip and seemed to bite down his rage.

"These are not your apartments, Dona Dolorez," he said, adopting, with visible repugnance, the language she employed. "And I am the head of your house." He bent his gray eyes on Cartaret. "Be so good as to come with me, sir," he said. He stood aside from the door. "I follow after my guest."

Cartaret's heart had place only for the last words that Vitoria had said to him. He would not look at her again, and he cared little what might happen to himself, so long as he could draw this irate brother after him and away from the endangered women. Vitoria had said that she hated him: well, he would do what he could to save her, and then leave Alava forever. He passed through the door....

"He is my guest," he heard Don Ricardo saying. "An Eskurola remembers the laws of hospitality."

Cartaret went on to the court-yard. There his host followed him.

"Will you come to my offices?" he asked.

He walked across to the north wing of the castle and into a large room that looked upon the terrace. The ceiling was a mass of blackened rafters; the walls, wainscoted in oak, were hung with ancient arms and armor, with the antlers of deer and the stuffed heads of tusked boar, and with some rags of long-faded tapestry. There was a yawning fire-place at one end, between high bookshelves filled with leather-bound folios, and, near one of the windows, stood an open Seventeenth Century desk massed with dusty papers.

Eskurola waved his guest to a stiff-backed chair. Cartaret, seeing that Don Ricardo intended to remain standing, merely stood beside it.

"Sir," began the Basque, "you have said that you are a stranger to our country and its ways. It is my duty to enlighten you in regard to some details."

He towered nearly half a foot above Cartaret. The nostrils of his beaked nose quivered above his bristling beard, but he kept his voice rigorously to the conversational pitch.

Cartaret, however, was in no mood to hear any more exposition of Vascongada manners and customs. He had had enough of them.

"There's no need of that," he said. "If I've done anything I shouldn't have done, I'm sorry. But I want you to understand that I'm to blame: _I'm_ to blame--and nobody else."

Eskurola went on as if Cartaret had not spoken:

"It is not our custom to present to our ladies such casual strangers as happen to ask shelter of us; nor is it the custom of our ladies to permit such presentations, still less to seek them. Of that last fact, I say but one word more: the Dona Dolorez has been lately from home, and I fear that her contact with the outer world has temporarily dulled the edge of her native sensitiveness."

"Look here," said Cartaret, his hands clenched, "if you mean to imply----"

"Sir!" The Basque's eyes snapped. "I speak of my sister."

"All right then. But you'd better be told a few facts, too. Paris isn't Alava. I met the Dona Dolorez in Paris. We were neighbors. What could be more natural, then, than that, when I came here----"

"Ah-h-h!" Eskurola softly interrupted. In the meshes of his beard, his red lips were smiling unpleasantly. "So that was it! How stupid of me not to have guessed before, sir. I was sure that there had been in Paris something beside Art."

Cartaret's impulse was to fly at the man's throat. His reason, determined to protect the woman that cared no more for him, dictated another course.

"I wanted," he said quietly, "to make your sister my wife."

The effect of this statement was twofold. At first a violent anger shook the Basque, and the veins stood out in ridges along his neck and at his temples, below the red cloth bound about his head. Then, as quickly, the anger passed and was succeeded by a look reminiscent, almost tender.

"You know that no alien can marry one of our people," he said. "You know that now."

Cartaret thought again of Vitoria's parting word to him.

"I know it _now_," he said.

"You are my guest," Eskurola pursued. "I shall tell you something. You have seen me only as what must seem to you a strange and hard man--perhaps a fierce and cruel man. I am the head of my ancient house; on me there depends not only its honor, but also its continuance. Sir, I exact of my relatives no less than I have already exacted of myself."

Cartaret looked at him in amazement. Could it be possible that there had ever been in this medieval mind anything but ruthless pride of race?

"Years ago--but not so many years ago as you, sir, might suppose--there came to this house a young lady. She came here as a governess for my sister, but she was a lady, a person of birth. Also, she spoke your language." He paused, and then went on in a still gentler voice. "Sir, because of her, your language, barbarous as it is, has always been dear to me, and yet, still because of her, I have ever since wanted not to speak it."

Cartaret looked at the floor. Even though this confession of a past weakness was voluntary, it seemed somehow unfair to watch, during it, the man whose pride was so strong.

"And you sent her away?" he found himself asking.

"She went when her work was finished. She went without knowing."

Cartaret raised his eyes. There was no false assumption in the man upon whom they rested: it was impossible to believe that, seeing him thus, a woman would not love him.

"I'll go," said Cartaret. Eskurola's words had assured him of Vitoria's safety. "I'll go now."

"I would not drive you away. You have said that you would be my guest for another night; you may remain as long as you care to remain."

"I'll go," Cartaret repeated. "It isn't you that's driving me. Will you please send up to my room for my saddle-bags, and have my mare brought around?"

Don Ricardo bowed. He went out.

Cartaret stood for some time on the spot where he had been standing throughout the talk with his host. He was thinking of his ruined hopes and of the woman that had ruined them. Once he asked himself what had so changed her; but, when he could find no answer to that question, he asked what the cause could matter, since the effect was so apparent. He walked to a window. He could see that part of the terrace which lay between the gate and the drawbridge, but he saw no sign of his mare. What could Eskurola be doing? He seemed, whatever it was, to be a long time about it.

The oaken door of the room opened and closed with a bang. Don Ricardo stood before it. The dull red had returned to his cheeks.

"Sir," said he, "I have just been having another word with the Dona Dolorez: she informs me that you have had the impertinence to tell her that you love her."

Cartaret laughed bitterly. "In _my_ country," he said, "when a man wants to marry a woman it is customary to say something of that kind."

"You are in Alava, sir, and you speak of a member of my family."

"I was in Paris then."

"But this morning--just now?" Eskurola came a step forward.

"I won't talk any more about it," said Cartaret. "Please have my mare brought around at once."

"No," Eskurola replied: "you shall talk no more about it. Mr. Cartaret, you must fight me."

The American could not believe his ears. He recollected that when the Continental speaks of fighting he does not refer to mere pugilism.

"You're crazy," said Cartaret. "I don't want to fight you."

"So soon as you have passed that gate, you will be my guest no longer. What, sir, you may then want will not matter. You will have to fight me."

Cartaret sat down. He crossed his legs and looked up at his host.

"Is this your little way of persuading me to stay awhile?" he asked.

"You cannot go too soon to please me."

"Then perhaps you'll be good enough to tell me what it's all about."

Eskurola's giant figure bent forward. His eyes blazed down in Cartaret's face.

"You came into this place, the place of my people, under false pretenses. I made you welcome; you were my guest, sir. Yet you used your opportunities to insult my sister."

Cartaret got slowly to his feet. He knew the probable consequences of what he was about to say, but, never shifting his gaze from the Basque's, he said it quietly:

"That's a lie."

Don Ricardo leaped backward. It was doubtless the first time in his life that such a phrase had been addressed to him, and he received it as he might have received a blow. Both in mind and body, he staggered.

"My sister has told me----" he began.

"I don't want to hear any more, senor. I've said all that I have to say." Cartaret thrust his hands into the pockets of his riding-breeches and, turning his back on Eskurola, looked out of the window.

"Now," the Basque was saying, as his mental balance reasserted itself--"now we must indeed fight."

Cartaret himself was thinking rapidly and by no means clearly. To say that dueling was not an American custom would avail him nothing--would be interpreted as cowardice; to fight with a man bred as Don Ricardo was evidently bred would be to walk out to death. Cartaret looked at the panorama of the mountains. Well, why not death? Less than an hour ago his whole life had been mined, had been sent crashing about his head. The only thing that he cared for in life was taken from him: Vitoria had herself declared that she hated him. Nor that alone--the thought burned in his brain: she had told this wild brother of hers that he, Cartaret, had insulted her; she had incited Eskurola to battle--perhaps to save herself, perhaps to salve some strange Basque conception of honor or pride. So be it; Cartaret could render her one more service--the last: if he allowed himself to be killed by this half-savage who so serenely thought that he was better than all the rest of the world, Don Ricardo's wounded honor would be healed, and Vitoria--now evidently herself in danger or revengeful--would be either safe or pacified. The Twentieth Century had never entered these mountains, and Cartaret, entering them, had left his own modernity behind.

"All right," said he, "since you're so confounded hungry for it, I'll fight you. Anything to oblige."

He looked about to find Eskurola bowing gratefully: the man's eyes seemed to be selecting the spot on their enemy's body at which to inflict the fatal wound.

"I am glad, sir, that you see reason," said Don Ricardo.

"I'm not sure that I see reason," said Cartaret, "but I'm going to fight you."

"I do not suppose that you can use a rapier, Mr. Cartaret?"

It was clear that not to understand the rapier was to be not quite a gentleman; but Cartaret made the confession. "Not that it matters," he reflected.

"But you can shoot?"

Cartaret remembered the boyish days when he had taken prizes for his marksmanship with a revolver. It was the one folly of his youth that he had continued, and he found a certain satisfaction (so much did Eskurola's pride impress him) in admitting this, albeit he did not mean to use the accomplishment now.

"I carry this with me," said he, producing his automatic revolver.

Don Ricardo scarcely glanced at it.

"That is not the weapon for a marksman," he said. "Nevertheless, let me see what you can do. None will be disturbed; these walls are sound-proof." He took a gold coin, an alfonso, from his pocket and flung it into the air. "Shoot!" he commanded.

Cartaret had expected nothing of the sort. He fired and missed. The report roared through the room; the acrid taste of the powder filled the air. Eskurola caught the descending coin in his hand. Cartaret saw that his failure had annoyed Don Ricardo, and this in its turn annoyed the American.

"I didn't know you were going to try me," he said, "and I'm not used to marking up the ceilings of my friends' houses. Try again."

The Basque, without comment, flung up the alfonso a second time, and a second time Cartaret fired. Eskurola reached for the coin as before, but this time it flew off at an angle and struck the farther wall. When they picked it up, they found that it had been hit close to the edge of the disk.

"Not the center," said Don Ricardo.

"Indeed?" said Cartaret. What sort of shot would please the man? "Suppose you try."

Eskurola explained that he was not accustomed to such a revolver, but he would not shirk the challenge; and there was no need for him to shirk it: when Cartaret recovered the alfonso after Don Ricardo had shot, there was a mark full in its middle.

"So much for His Spanish Majesty," said the Basque, as he glanced at the mark made by his bullet in the face upon the coin. "We shall use dueling-pistols. I have them here." He went to the desk.

Cartaret had no doubt that Eskurola had them there: he probably had a rack and thumbscrews handy below-stairs.

"We shall have to dispense with the formality of a surgeon," Don Ricardo was saying.

"It doesn't look as if one would be needed," Cartaret smiled; "and it doesn't look as if we were to have seconds, either."

The Basque turned sharply. "We are the only gentlemen within miles, and we cannot have servants for witnesses. Moreover, an Eskurola needs no seconds, either of his choosing to watch his safety, or of his enemy's to suspect his honor."

He pressed a spring, released a secret drawer in the desk and found what he was seeking: a box of polished mahogany. Opening the lid, he beckoned to Cartaret. There, on a purple velvet lining, lay a beautifully kept pair of dueling-pistols, muzzle-loaders of the Eighteenth Century pattern and of about .32 caliber, their long octagonal barrels of shining dark blue steel, their curved butts of ivory handsomely inlaid with a Moorish design in gold.

"Listen," said Eskurola, "as we are to have no seconds, I shall write a line to exculpate you in case you survive me. Then"--his gray eyes shone; he seemed to take a satisfaction that was close to delight in arranging these lethal details--"also as we are to have no seconds to give a signal, we shall have but one true shot between us. Certainly. Are we not men, we two? And we have proved ourselves marksmen. You cannot doubt me, but I have a man that speaks French, so that you shall see that I do not trick you, sir."

He went to the door and called into the court-yard. Presently there answered him a man whom Cartaret recognized as one of those who, the night before, held the dogs in leash.

"Murillo Gomez," said Eskurola, in a French more labored than his English, "in five minutes this gentleman and I shall want the terrace to ourselves. You will close the gate when we go out. You will remain on this side of it, and you will permit none to pass. Answer me in French."

The servant's face showed no surprise.

"_Oui, senor_," he said.

"Now you will take these pistols and bring them back without delay. In the armory you will load one with powder and shot, the other with powder only. Neither this gentleman nor I must know which is which. You understand?"

The servant's face was still impassive.

"_Oui, senor._"

"Go then. Also see that the Dona Dolorez remains in her own apartments. And hurry."

The servant disappeared with the pistols. Eskurola, apologizing gravely, went to the desk and wrote--apparently the lines of which he had spoken. He sanded them, folded the paper, lit a candle and sealed the missive with an engraved jade ring that he wore on the little finger of his left hand.

"This is your first duel, sir?" he said to Cartaret. He said it much as an Englishman at luncheon might ask an American guest whether he had ever eaten turbot.

"Yes," said Cartaret.

"Well, you may have what the gamblers of London call 'beginner's luck.'"

The servant knocked at the door.

"Will you be so good as to take the pistols?" asked Don Ricardo in English of Cartaret. "It appears better if I do not speak with him. Thank you. And please to tell him in French that he may have your mare and saddle-bags ready in the gateway within five minutes, in case you should want them."

Cartaret obeyed.

Eskurola again held the door for his guest to pass.

"After you, sir," he said.

They crossed the court-yard leisurely and shoulder to shoulder, for all the world as if they were two friends going out to enjoy the view. Any one observing them from the windows, had there been any one, would have said that Don Ricardo was pointing out to Cartaret the beauties of the scene. In reality he was saying:

"With your agreement, we shall fix the distance at ten paces, and I shall step it. There is no choice for light, and the wind is at rest. Therefore, there being no person to count for us, I shall ask you to toss a coin again, this time that I may call it: if I fail to do so, you fire first; if I succeed, I fire first. Permit me to advise you, sir, that, if you are unaccustomed to the hair-trigger, it is as well that you be careful lest you lose your shot."

Eskurola's manners were apparently never so polished as when he was about to kill or be killed. He measured off the ground and marked the stand for each, always asking Cartaret's opinion. He stood while Cartaret again tossed a glittering gold-piece in the air.

"Tails!" cried Don Ricardo. "I always prefer," he explained, "to see this king with his face in the dust. Let us look at him together, so that there will be no mistake."

The piece lay with its face to the terrace.

"I win," said Eskurola. "I shoot first. It is bad to begin well."

Cartaret smiled. With such a marksman as this Basque to shoot at one, the speech became the merest pleasantry. There was only the question of the choice of the pistol, and as to that----

"If you will open the box, I shall choose," Eskurola was saying. Evidently the choice was also to go to the winner of the toss. Cartaret was certain this would not have been the case if the toss had gone otherwise. "I must touch neither until I have chosen, although the additional powder in the blank pistol tends toward making their weight equal."

Mechanically Cartaret opened the mahogany box. Don Ricardo scarcely glanced at the pair of beautiful and deadly weapons lying on the purple velvet: he took the one farther from him.

"Pray remember the hair-trigger," he continued: "you might easily wound yourself. Now, if you please: to our places."

Each man took off his hat and coat and stood at his post in his white shirt, his feet together, his right side fronting his enemy, his pistol pointing downwards from the hand against his right thigh.

"Are you ready, sir?" asked Eskurola.

For a flashing instant Cartaret wanted to scream with hysterical laughter: the whole proceeding seemed so archaic, so grotesque, so useless. Then he thought of how little he had to lose and of whom he might serve in losing that little....

"Ready, senor," he said.

If only she could, for only that last moment, love him! That last moment, for he made no doubt of the end of this adventure. The Basque had been too punctilious in all his arrangements: from the first Cartaret had been sure that Don Ricardo and the French-speaking servant had played this tragic farce before, and that the master so arranged matters as easily to choose the one pistol that held death in its mouth. To convict him was impossible, and, were it possible, would be but to strike a fatal blow at the honor of that family which Vitoria held so dear. How false his vanity had played him! What was he that a goddess should not cease to love him when she chose? Enough and more that she had loved him once; an ultimate blessing could she love him a moment more. But once again, then: but that one instant! To see her pitiful eyes upon him, to hear her pure lips whisper the last good-by like music in his dying ears!

He saw the arm of his enemy slowly--slowly--rising, without speed and without hesitation, as the paw of a great cat rises to strike, but with a claw of shining steel.

Cartaret would look his last on the scene that her eyes had known when she was a child, that her eyes would know long after his--so soon now!--were closed forever. It was mid-morning; the golden sun was half-way to the zenith. At Cartaret's left, above the walls, the turrets and towers of the Gothic castle, rose the sheer front of that sheer chalcedonous peak. Its top was crowned with the dazzling and eternal snow; its face was waxen, almost translucent; its outcroppings of crypto-crystalline quartz, multi-toned by the wind and rain of centuries, caught the sunlight and flamed in every gradation of blue and yellow, of onyx, carnelian and sard. To the right lay the wide and peaceful valley, mass after mass of foliage, silver-green and emerald, and, above that, the ridges of the vast, scabrous amphitheater: beetling peaks of gray, dark pectinated cones, fusiform apexes, dancing lancets and swords' points, a hundred beetling crags and darting spires under a turquoise sky.

(Eskurola's arm was rising ... rising....)

Her face came before his eyes; not the face of the woman that sent him from the tower-room, but the face of The Girl that had parted from him in his shabby studio: the frame of blue-black hair, the clear cheek touched with healthy pink, the red lips and white teeth, the level brows, the curling lashes and the frank violet eyes.... Into his own eyes came a mist; it blotted out the landscape.

He dragged his glance back to his executioner. He must meet death face forward. A horrid fear beset him that he had been tardy in this--had seemed ever so little to waver.

But Eskurola had observed no faltering, and had not faltered: his arm still crept upward. It must all have happened in the twinkling of an eye, then: that impulse toward mad laughter, that thought of what he had suffered, that realization of the landscape, even the memory of her face--the Lady of the Rose.

Don Ricardo's arm had just risen a trifle above his shoulder and then come back to its level.... It would come now--the flash, the quick pang that would outstrip and shut out the very sound of the explosion--come now and be over.

The man was taking an aim, careful, deadly....

But if everything else had been quick, this was an eternity. Cartaret could feel the Basque's eye, he could see that the leveled pistol-barrel covered his throat directly below the ear. He wanted to shout out to Eskurola to shoot; to say, "You've got me!" He ground his teeth to enforce his tongue to silence. And still he waited. Good God, would the man never fire?

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 damn. 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 principals 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.