The Azure Rose: A Novel

CHAPTER XIV

SOMETHING OR OTHER ABOUT TRADITIONS

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 Doña 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 Doña Dolorez Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val de Grâce; 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.

CHAPTER XV

IN WHICH CARTARET TAKES PART IN THE REVIVAL OF AN ANCIENT CUSTOM

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, Doña 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 Doña 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 Doña 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 Doña 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, señor. 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, señor,” 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, señor.”

“Go then. Also see that the Doña 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, señor,” 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.

CHAPTER XVI

AND LAST