A great deal has been said, to not much purpose, about the vagaries of the feminine heart; but its masculine counterpart is equally mysterious. The seat of Charlie Cartaret’s emotions furnishes a case in point.

Cartaret had resolved never to tell Vitoria that he loved her, and he told her. Similarly, when he told her, he sought to make it clear to her, quite sincerely, that he nursed no hope of winning her for his wife, and, now that she was gone, hope took possession of his breast and brought with it determination. Why not? Had she not amazingly confessed her love for him? That left him, as he saw it, no reason for abnegation; it made sacrifice wrong for them both. The secret difficulty at which she hinted became something that it was now as much his duty, as it was his highest desire, to remove. For the rest, though he could now no more than previously consider offering her a union with a man condemned to a lifelong poverty, there remained for him no task save the simple one of acquiring affluence. What could seem easier—for a young man in love?

The more he thought about it, the more obvious his course became. During all his boyhood, art had been his single passion; during all his residence in Paris he had flung the best that was in him upon the altar of his artistic ambition; but now, without a single pang of regret, he resolved to give up art forever. He would see Vitoria on the morrow and come to a practical understanding with her: was he not always a practical man? Then he would reopen negotiation with his uncle and ask for a place in the elder Cartaret’s business. Perhaps it would not even be necessary for him to return to America: he had the brilliant idea that his uncle’s business—which was to say, the great monopoly of which his uncle’s holdings were a small part—had never been properly “pushed” in France, and that Charles Cartaret was the man of all men to push it. The mystery that dear Vitoria made of some private obstacle? That, of course, was but the exaggeration of a sensitive girl; it was the long effect of some parental command or childish vow. He had only to wrest from her the statement of it in order to prove it so. It was some unpractical fancy wholly beneath the regard of a practical, and now wholly assured, man of affairs.

By way of beginning a conservative business-career, Charlie went to the front window and, as he had done one day not long since, emptied his pockets for the delight of the hurdy-gurdy grinder. Then, singing under his breath, and inwardly blessing every pair of lovers that he passed, he went out for a long walk in the twilight.

He walked along the Quai D’Orsay, beside which the crowded little passenger-steamers were tearing the silver waters of the Seine; crossed the white Pont de l’Alma; struck through the Trocadero gardens, and so, by the rue de Passy and the shaded Avenue Ingrez, came to the railway bridge, crossed it and strolled along the Allée des Fortifications. He walked until the night overtook him, and only then turned back through Auteuil and over the Pont Grenelle toward home.

Alike in the perfumed shadows beneath the trees and under the yellow lamps of the Boulevard de Mont Parnasse, he walked upon the clouds of resolution. The city that has in her tender keeping the dust of many lovers, cradled him and drew him forward. Her soft breath fanned his cheek, her sweet voice whispered in his ears:

“Trust me and obey me! Did I not know and shelter Gabrielle d’Estrées and her royal suitor? Have I not had a care for De Musset and for Heine? In that walled garden over there, Balzac dreamed of Mme. Hanska. Along this street Chopin wandered with George Sand.”

That whisper followed him to his room, still thrilling with Vitoria’s visit. It charmed him into a wonderful sense of her nearness, into a belief that he was keeping ward over her as long as he sat by his windows and watched the stars go down and the pink dawn climb the eastern sky. It lulled him at last to sleep with his head upon his arms and his arms upon the mottled table.

He overslept. It must have been nearly noon when he woke, and then he was wakened only by a pounding at the door of his room. Fat Mme. Refrogné had brought him a cable-message. When she had gone, he opened it, surprised at once by its extravagant length. It was from Cora; a modern miracle had happened: there was oil in the black keeping of the plot of ground that only sentiment had so long bade them retain in the little Ohio town. Cartaret was rich....

When the first force of the shock was over, when he could realize, in some small measure, what that message meant to him, Cartaret’s earliest thought was of the Lady of the Rose. Holding the bit of paper as tightly as if it were itself his riches and wanted to fly away on the wings that had brought it, he staggered, like a drunken man, to the door of the Room Opposite.

He knocked, but received no answer. A clock struck mid-day. Vitoria had probably gone to her class, and Chitta to her marketing.

A mad impulse to spread the good news possessed him. It was as if telling the news were recording a deed that there was only a brief time to record: he must do it at once in order to secure title. He knew that his friends, if they were in funds, would soon be gathered at the Café Des Deux Colombes.

When he passed the rue St. André Des Arts, he remembered Fourget. Cartaret was ashamed that his memory had been so tardy. Fourget had helped him in his heavy need; Fourget should be the first to know of his affluence....

The old dealer, his bushy brows drawn tight together, his spectacles gleaming, was trying to say “No” to a lad with a picture under his arm—a crestfallen lad that was a stranger to Cartaret.

“Let me see the picture,” said Cartaret, without further preface. He put out a ready hand.

The boy blushed. Cartaret had been abrupt and did not present the appearance of a possible purchaser.

“If you please,” urged Cartaret. “I may care to buy.”

Fourget gaped. The boy turned up his canvas—an execrable daub.

“I’ll buy that,” said Cartaret.

“Are you mad?” asked Fourget.

“Bring back that picture to M. Fourget in half an hour,” pursued the heedless American, “and he will give you for it two hundred francs that he will have lent me and that I shall have left with him.”

He pushed the stammering lad out of the shop and turned to Fourget.

“Are you drunk?” asked the dealer, changing the form of his suspicions.

“Fourget,” cried Cartaret, clapping his friend on the back, “I shall never be hungry again—never—never—never! Look at that.” He produced the precious cable-message. “That piece of paper will feed me all my life long. It will buy me houses, horses, motors, steamship-tickets. It looks like paper, Fourget.” He spread it under Fourget’s nose. “But it isn’t; it’s a dozen suits of clothes a year; it’s a watch-and-chain, a diamond scarf-pin (if I’d wear one!); it’s a yacht. It’s an oil-well, Fourget—and a godsend!”

Fourget took it in his blue-veined hands. His hands trembled.

“Oh, I forgot,” said Cartaret. “It is in English. Let me translate.” He translated.

When Charlie looked up from his reading, he found Fourget busily engaged in polishing his spectacles. Perhaps the old man’s eyes were weak and could not bear to be without their glasses: they certainly were moist.

“I do not see so well as I once saw,” the dealer was explaining: his voice was very gruff indeed. “You are wholly certain that this is no trick which one plays upon you?”

Cartaret was wholly certain.

Fourget made a valiant attempt at expressing his congratulations in a mere Anglo-Saxon handshake. He found it quite inadequate, and this annoyed him.

“The world,” he growled, “loses a possibly fair artist and gets an idle millionaire.”

“You get a new shop,” vowed Cartaret. “Don’t shake your head! I’ll make it a business proposition: I’ve had enough trouble by being suspected of charity. I’m going to buy an interest, and I shan’t want my money sunk in anything dark and unsanitary.”

Fourget shook his gray head again.

“Thank you with all my heart, my friend,” he said; “but no. This little shop meets my little needs and will last out my little remaining days. I would not leave it for the largest establishment on the boulevards.”

They talked until Cartaret again bethought him of the café in the rue Jacob.

“But you will lend me the two hundred francs,” he asked, “and give it to that boy for his picture?” How much a boy that boy seemed now: he was just the boy that Cartaret had been in the long ago time that was yesterday!

“Since you insist; but truly, my dear monsieur, myself I was about to weaken and purchase the terrible thing when you interrupted and saved me.” ...

The money from Seraphin’s latest magnum opus not being yet exhausted, Seraphin’s friends were lunching at the Café Des Deux Colombes, with little Pasbeaucoup fluttering between them and the kitchen, and Madame, expressionless under her mountain of hair, stuffed into the wire cage and bulging out of it. The company rose when they espied Cartaret, the cadaverous poet Garnier picking up his plate of roast chicken so as not to lose, in his welcoming, time that might be given to eating.

Cartaret felt at first somewhat ashamed before them. He felt the contrast between his changed fortunes and their fortunes unchanged. At last, however, the truth escaped him, and then he felt more ashamed than ever, so unenvious were the congratulations that they poured upon him.

Devignes’ round belly shook with delight. Garnier even stopped eating.

“Now you may have the leisure for serious work, which,” squeaked Varachon through his broken nose, “your art has so badly needed.”

Seraphin said nothing, but put his hand on Cartaret’s shoulder and gripped it hard.

Houdon embraced the fortunate one.

“Did I not always tell you?” he demanded of Seraphin. “Did I not say he was a disguised millionaire?”

“But he has but now got his money,” Seraphin protested.

“Poof!” said Houdon, dismissing the argument with a trill upon his invisible piano. “La-la-la!”

“Without doubt to mark the event you will give a dinner?” suggested Garnier.

“Without doubt,” said Houdon.

Cartaret said that he would give a dinner that very evening if Pasbeaucoup would strain the Median laws of the establishment so far as to trust him for a few days, and Pasbeaucoup, receiving the necessary nod from Madame, said that they would be but too happy to trust M. Cartarette for any sum and for any length of time that he might choose to name.

So Cartaret left them for a few hours and went back to his room at the earliest possible moment for finding Vitoria returned from her class. This time he not only knocked: he tried, in his haste, the knob of the door, and the door, swinging open, revealed an empty room, stripped of even its furniture.

He nearly fell downstairs to the cave of Refrogné.

“Where are they?” he demanded.

Had monsieur again been missing strawberries? Where were what?

“Where is Mlle. Urola—where are the occupants of the room across from mine?” Cartaret’s frenzied tones implied that he would hold the concierge personally responsible for whatever might have happened to his neighbors.

“Likely they are occupying some other room by this time,” growled Refrogné. “I was unaware that they were such great friends of monsieur.”

“They are. Where are they?”

“In that case, they must have told monsieur of their contemplated departure.”

“Do you mean they’ve moved to another room in this house?”

“But no.”

“Then where have they gone?”

They had gone away. They had paid their bill honestly, even the rent for the unconsumed portion of the month, and gone away. That was all it was an honest concierge’s business to know.

“When did they go?”

“Early this morning.”

“Didn’t they leave any address?”

“None. Why should they? Mademoiselle never received letters.”

Cartaret could bear no more. Even the man that hauled away the furniture had only taken it to the shop from which it had been leased. Refrogné had seen the two women get into a cab with their scanty luggage and had heard them order themselves driven to the Gare d’Orsay. That was the end of the trail....

Cartaret climbed to his own room. Thrust under the door, where he had missed it in the rush of his hopeful exit that morning, was an envelope. It did not hold the expected note of explanation. It held only a pressed rose, yellow now, and dry and odorless.

CHAPTER XII

NARRATING HOW CARTARET BEGAN HIS QUEST OF THE ROSE

For a great while Cartaret remained as a man stunned. It was only very slowly that there came to him the full realization of his loss, and then it came with all the agony with which a return to life is said to come to one narrowly saved from death by drowning.

Blindly his brain bashed itself against the mysterious wall of Vitoria’s flight. Why had she gone? Where had she gone? Why had she left no word? A thousand times that day these unanswerable questions whirled through his dizzy consciousness. Had he offended her? He had explained his one offense, and she had given no sign of having taken any other hurt. Was she indeed a revolutionist from some strange country, summoned away, without a moment’s warning, by the inner council of her party? Revolutionist conspirators did not go to art-classes and do not walk only under the chaperonage of an ancient duenna. Was she, then, that claimant to power that he had once imagined her, now gone to seize her rights? Things of that sort did not, Cartaret knew, occur in these prosy days. Then why had she gone, and where, and why had she left no word for him? Again these dreary questions began their circle.

Less than twenty-four hours ago, he had thought that money would resolve all his troubles. Money! Fervently he wished himself poor again—poor again, as yesterday, with Her across the landing in the Room Opposite.

Somehow, he did not forget his friends and the dinner he had promised them. He went to the Deux Colombes and ordered the dinner.

“Say to them, Pasbeaucoup,” he gave instructions, “that I am indisposed and shall not be able to dine with them. Say that we shall all dine together some other night—very soon I hope. Say that I am sorry.”

He was bitter now against all the world. “What will they care, as long as they have the dinner?” he reflected.

Pasbeaucoup cared. He expressed great concern for monsieur’s health.

“That,” thought Cartaret, “is because I’m rich. A month or two ago and they wouldn’t trust me: they’d have let me starve.”

He went back to his desolate room and to his dreary questioning. He was there, with his head in his hands, when Seraphin found him.

Seraphin’s suit was still new, and it was evident that he had dressed carefully his twin wisps of whisker in honor of Cartaret’s celebration. The Frenchman’s face was grave.

“Why aren’t you dining?” sneered Cartaret.

Seraphin passed by the sneer.

“They told me that you were ill,” he said, simply.

“And you came to see if it was true?”

“I came to see if I could be of any assistance.”

(“Ah,” ran Cartaret’s unjust thoughts, “it’s very evident you’re rich now, Charlie!”)

“Nobody else came with you,” he said.

Seraphin hesitated. He twirled his soft hat in his hands.

“They thought—all but Houdon, who still persists that you have been rich always—they thought that, now that you were rich, you might prefer other society.”

“You didn’t think it?”

“I did not.”

It was said so frankly that even Cartaret’s present mood could not resist its sincerity. Charlie frowned and put both his hands on Seraphin’s shoulders.

“Dieudonné,” he said, “I’m in trouble.”

“I feared it.”

“Not money-trouble.”

“I feared that it was not money-trouble.”

“You understood?”

“I guessed. You have been so happy of late, while you were so poor, that to absent yourself from this gayety when you were rich——” An expressive gesture finished the sentence. “Besides,” added Seraphin, “one cannot be happy long, and when you told me that you had money, I feared that you would lose something else.”

Cartaret wrung the hand of his friend.

“Go back,” he said. “Go back and tell them that it’s not pride. Tell them it’s illness. I am ill. It was good of you to come here, but there’s nothing you can do just now. To-morrow, or next day, perhaps I can talk to you about it. Perhaps. But not now. I couldn’t talk to any one now. Good-night.”

He sat down again—sat silent for many hours after he had heard Seraphin’s footsteps die away down the stairs. He heard the hurdy-gurdy and thought that he could not bear it. He heard the other lodgers return. He heard the strange sounds—the creaking boards, the complaining stairway, the whispering of curtains—which are the night-sounds of every house. In the ear of his mind, he heard the voices of his distant guests:

Because he grew afraid of the ghosts of doubt that haunt the darkness, he lighted his lamp; but for a long time the ghosts remained.

This was the very room in which he had told her that he loved her; this desert place was once the garden in which he had said that little of what was so much. She had stood by that table (so shabby now!) and made it a wonderful thing. She had touched that curtain; her fingers, at parting, had held that rattling handle of the shattered door. He half thought that the door might open and reveal her, even now. Memory joined hands with love to make her poignantly present. Her lightest word, her least action: his mind retained them and rehearsed them every one. The music of her laughter, the melody of her grace, wove spells in the lamplit room; but they ceased as she had ceased; they left the song unfinished, they stopped in the middle of a bar.

He wondered whether it must always remain unfinished, this allegro of love in what, without it, would be the dull biographic symphony of his life; whether he would grow to be an old man with no memories but broken memories to warm his heart; and whether even this memory would become as the mere memory of a beautiful portrait seen in youth, a Ghirlandaio’s or a Guido Reni’s work, some other man’s vision, a part of the whole world’s rich heritage, a portion of the eternal riddle of existence.

“So short a time ago,” crooned the ghosts—“and doubtless she has already forgotten you. You have but touched her hands: how could you hope that you had touched her heart? She will be happy, though she knows that you are unhappy; glad, though you are desolate. You gave her your dreams to keep, your hopes, your faith in love and womankind: and this is what she did with them! They are withered like that rose.”

He had put the yellow thing against his heart, where once he had put it when it was fresh and pure. He drew it out now and looked at it. What did it mean—that message of the rose? That, as she had once treasured the flower, so now she would treasure in its place her memory of him?

“It means,” chanted the ghosts, “that her friendship is as dead as this dry flower!”

Did it? He would make one trial more.

Vivid as was her face in his mind, he brought to the lamp his pictures of her. She had liked those pictures; in spite of herself, she had shown him that she liked them——

(The ghosts were crooning:

“Though you had the brush of Diego Velasquez, she would not heed you now!”)

Had he painted her—he had tried to—as she should have been? Or had he painted her as she really was?

He searched the pictures. Her eyes seemed to look at him with a long farewell in their blue-black depths, the parted lips to tremble on a sob. A light was born in the canvas—the reflected light of his own high faith revived. Whatever separated them, it was by no will of hers. No, there was no ghost in all the fields of night that he would listen to again: in that pictured face there was as much of pride as there was of beauty, but there was nothing of either cruelty or deceit. Yes, he had only touched her hand, but certainly hand had never yet touched hand as his touched hers. He was sure of it and sure of her. A short acquaintance—it had been long enough to prove her. A few broken words in the twilight—they were volumes. The merest breath of feeling—it would last them to their graves.

He would move earth and Heaven to find Vitoria: the wine of that resolution rang in his ears and fired his heart. The sun, coming up over the Panthéon in a glory of red and gold, sent into Cartaret’s room a shining messenger of royal encouragement before whose sword the ghosts forever fled. The lover was almost gay again: here was new service for her; here, for him, was work, the best surcease of sorrow. He felt like an athlete trained to the minute and crouching for the starter’s pistol-shot. He believed in Vitoria! He believed in her, and so he could not doubt his own ability to discover her in the face of all hardships and to win her against all odds; he believed in her and in himself, and so he could not doubt God.

He understood something of the difficulties that presented themselves. He knew scarcely anything of the woman whom he sought; his only clews were her name and the name of the rose; he must first find to what country those names belonged, and to find that country he might have to seek through all the world. He could not ask help of the police; he would not summon to his assistance those vile rats who call themselves private-detectives. It was a task for himself alone; it was a task that must occupy his every working-hour; but it was a task that he would accomplish.

A second cable-message interrupted him at his ablutions. It was from his uncle, and it read:

This brought Cartaret to the realization that he was in a paradoxical position: he was a penniless millionaire. He went to Fourget’s and borrowed some money. Thence he went to the cable-office in the Avenue de l’Opera. There had been, he now recalled, an offer—a really dazzling offer—mentioned in his sister’s message; but more practical matters had driven it from his mind. He therefore sent his uncle this:

His uncle had been very annoying: Charlie should have been at work at the Bibliothèque Nationale a full half-hour ago. He had resolved to begin with the floral clew.

He went there immediately and asked what books they had about flowers; they told him that they had many thousand. Cartaret narrowed his field; he said what he wanted was a book on roses, and he was told that he might choose any of hundreds that were at hand. In despair, he ordered brought to him any one that began with an “A”; he would work through the alphabet.

By closing-time he had reached “Ac.” He hurried out into the fresh breeze that blew down through the public square and the narrow rue Colbert, and so cut across to the cable-office.

He wanted to send a message mentioning a little matter he had forgotten that morning. As it happened, the operator had just received a message for Charlie. It was again from his uncle, and said that the sale would be consummated early next day. There was about it a brevity more severe than even cables require: the elder Cartaret patently disapproved of the communication that his nephew had sent him. Still, the sale seemed to be assured, and that was the main thing, so Charlie put the word “Five” in place of the word “One” in the message he was drafting, and sent it off:

He interrupted his library-researches the next day to make a sporadic raid upon florist-shops along the boulevards, but found no florist that had ever heard of the Azure Rose.

The answer to his latest cable-message came the next day at noon. He had resumed his search at the Bibliothèque and instructed the cable-clerk to hold all messages until he should call for them. He called for this at lunch-time:

Cartaret groaned at this procrastination.

“And my uncle brags of his American hustle!” he cried.

He filed his reply:

“Be sure to put in the punctuation marks,” he admonished the pretty clerk.

He dashed back to the library. During the next hundred and twenty hours, he divided his time between botanical researches and one side of the following cable-conversation:

“Come home.”

“Can’t.”

“Why?”

“Busy.”

“How?”

“Botanizing. But if you don’t send me immediately that little bit of all that belongs to me, I’ll knock off work to find out the reason why.”

The money arrived just as his credit in short-credit Paris was everywhere close to the breaking-point, and just as he gave up hope of ever finding what he wanted at the great library, where he had driven every sub and deputy librarian to the brink of insanity. Money, however, brings resourcefulness: Cartaret then remembered the Jardin des Plantes, where he had once been with Vitoria.

No official knew anything about the Azure Rose, but an old gardener (Cartaret was trying them all) gave him hope. He was a little Gascon, that gardener, with white hair and blue eyes, and his long labor had bent him forward, as if the earth in which he worked had one day laid hold of his shoulders and never since let go.

“I had a brother once who was a fainéant and so a great traveler. He spoke of such a rose,” the Gascon nodded; “but I cannot remember what it was that he told me.”

“Here are five francs to help you remember,” said Cartaret.

The old man took the money and thanked him.

“But I cannot remember what my brother told me,” he said, “except that the rose was found nowhere but in the Basque provinces of Spain.” ...

A half-hour later Cartaret had bought his traveling-kit, which included a forty-five caliber automatic revolver. Forty minutes later he had paid Refrogné ten months’ rent in advance, together with a twenty-five franc tip, and directed that his room be held against his return. An hour later he was sheepishly handing Seraphin a bulky package, evidently containing certain canvases, and saying to him:

“These are something I wouldn’t leave about and couldn’t bring myself to store, and you’re—well, I think you’ll understand.”

At twelve o’clock that night, from an opened window in his compartment of a sleeping-car on a southward-speeding train de luxe, Cartaret was looking up at the yellow stars somewhere about Tours.

“Good-night, Vitoria!” he was whispering. “Good-night, and—God keep you!”

He was a very practical man.

CHAPTER XIII

FURTHER ADVENTURES OF AN AMATEUR BOTANIST

“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 café 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 café 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.