SOMETHING OR OTHER ABOUT TRADITIONS
... Since we must part, down right
With happy day; burdens well borne are light.
--Donne: _Eleg. XIII_.
Cartaret was lighted by his host himself to a bedroom high up in the
castle and deep within it--a bedroom big enough and dreary enough to
hold all the ghosts of Spain. An old man-servant brought him a supper
calculated to stay the hunger of a shipwrecked merchant-crew. He lay
down in a great four-poster bed both canopied and curtained, and, in
spite of his weariness, he tossed for hours, wondering whether Vitoria
was also somewhere within those grim walls and what course he was to
pursue in regard to her.
The same uncertainty gripped him when breakfast was brought to his
bedside in the early morning. Was this, after all, Vitoria's home; and
if it was, had she returned to it? Supposing an affirmative answer to
these questions, what was he to say to her brother? So far, thank
Heaven, Don Ricardo, though he had once or twice looked queerly at the
American, had been too polite to make awkward inquiries, but such
inquiries were so natural that they were bound soon to be made; and
Cartaret could not remain forever an unexplained and self-invited
guest in the castle of his almost involuntary host. The guest recalled
all that he had heard of the national and family pride and traditions
of the Eskurolas, and only his native hopefulness sustained him.
He found his own way down twisting stairs and into a vast court-yard
across which servants were passing. The great gate was open, and he
stepped through it toward the battlemented terrace that he saw beyond.
His first shock was there. The bridge that he had crossed the night
before was indeed a drawbridge and did indeed span the castle-moat,
but the bridge was unrailed and that moat was a terrible thing. It was
no pit of twenty or thirty feet dug by the hand of man. The terrace
to which the castle clung was separated from that to which climbed the
steep approach by a natural chasm of at least twelve yards across,
with sheer sides, like those of a glacial crevasse, shooting downwards
into black invisibility and echoing upward the thunderous rush of
unseen waters.
Leaning on the weather-worn wall that climbed along the edge of this
precipice and guarded a broad promenade between it and the castle,
Cartaret looked with a new sensation at the marvelous scene about him.
Behind rose the frowning castle, a maze of parapets and towers, built
against that naked, snow-capped, chalcedonous peak. In front, falling
away through a hundred gradations of green, a riot of luxuriant
vegetation, lay the now apparently uninhabited country through which
he had ridden, and beyond this, circling it like the teeth of the
celestial dragon that the Chinese believe is to swallow the sun, rose
row on row of bare mountains, ridges and pinnacles blue and gray.
A hand fell on Cartaret's shoulder. He turned to find Don Ricardo
standing beside him. The giant gave every appearance of having been up
and about for hours, and, despite his bulk, he had approached his
guest unheard.
"I trust that you, sir, have slept well in my poor house."
Cartaret replied that he had slept like a top.
"And that you could eat of the little breakfast which my servants
provided?"
"I made a wonderful breakfast," said Cartaret.
"It is good, sir. If you can bear with my house, it is yours for so
long as you care to honor it with your presence."
Cartaret knew that this must be only an exaggerated fashion of speech,
but he chose to take it literally.
"That's very good of you," he said. "I haven't ridden for years and
I'm rather done up. If you really don't mind, I think I will rest here
over another night."
Don Ricardo seemed unprepared for this, but he checked a frown and
bowed gravely.
"A year would be too short for me," he vowed.
They fell to talking, the host now trying to turn the conversation
into the valley, the guest holding it fast to the castle-heights.
"It is a beautiful place," said Cartaret; "I don't know when I've seen
anything to compare with it; and yet I should think you'd find it
rather lonely."
"Not lonely, sir," said the Basque. "The hunting in the valley is a
compensation. For example, where you see those oaks about the curve of
that river, I hunted, not ten days ago, a wolf as large as those for
which my ancestors paid the wolf-money."
"Still," Cartaret persisted, "you do live here quite alone, don't
you?"
He knew that he was impudent, and he felt that only his host's
reverence for the laws of hospitality prevented an open resentment.
Nevertheless, Cartaret was bound to find out what he could, and this
time he was rewarded.
"There is good enough to live with me," said Don Ricardo stiffly, "my
lady sister, the Dona Dolorez Eulalia Vitoria." He looked out across
the chasm.
Cartaret caught his breath. There was an awkward pause. Then, glancing
up, he saw, coming toward them along the terrace, the figure of a
woman-servant that seemed startlingly familiar.
It was Chitta. She was bent, no doubt, on some household errand to her
master, whose face was luckily turned away--luckily because, when she
caught sight of Cartaret, her jaw dropped and her knees gave under
her.
Cartaret had just time to knit his brows with the most forbidding
scowl he could assume. The old woman clasped her hands in what was
plainly a prayer to him to be silent concerning all knowledge of her
and her mistress. A moment more, and Don Ricardo was giving her orders
in the Basque tongue.
"Our servants," he said apologetically when she had gone, "are
faithful, but stupid." His gray eyes peered at Cartaret searchingly.
"Very stupid, sir," he added. "For instance, you, sir, know something
of our customs; you know that centuries-old tradition--the best of
laws--makes it the worst of social crimes for a Basque to marry any
save a Basque----"
He stopped short, holding Cartaret with his eyes. Cartaret nodded.
"Very well, sir," Ricardo continued: "one time a lady of our house--it
was years upon years ago, when Wellington and the English were
here--fell in love, or thought that she did, with a British officer.
For an Englishman, his degree was high, but had he been the English
King it would have served him nothing among us. Knowing of course that
the head of our house would never consent to such a marriage, this
lady commanded her most loyal servant to assist in an elopement. Now,
the Basque servant must obey her mistress, but also the Basque servant
must protect the honor of the house that she has the privilege to
serve. This one sought to do both things. She assisted in the
elopement and brought the lady to the English camp. Then, thus having
been faithful to one duty, she was faithful to the other: before the
wedding, she killed both her mistress and herself." He turned
quickly. "Sir, I have pressing duties in the valley, and you are too
weary to ride with me: my poor house is at your disposal."
Cartaret leaned against the parapet and, when his host was out of
earshot, whistled softly.
"What a delightful _raconteur_," he mused. "I wonder if he meant me to
draw any special moral from that bit of family-history."
He waited until, a quarter of an hour later, he saw Don Ricardo and
two servants ride across the drawbridge and wind their way toward the
valley. He waited until the green forest engulfed them. What he was
going to do might be questionable conduct in a guest, but there was no
time to waste over nice points of etiquette. He was going to find
Vitoria.
He started for the court-yard. His plan was to accost the first
servant that he encountered and mention Chitta's name, but this
trouble was saved him. In the shadowy gateway, he found Chitta
crouching.
She glanced to right and left, saw that they were unobserved, passed
beyond a narrow door that opened into the gate, and led Cartaret up a
spiral stone staircase to the entrance of a circular room in one of
the twin gate-towers. There she turned and left him alone with
Vitoria.
In the center of that bare room, standing beside one of the bowmen's
windows that commanded the approach to the castle, the Lady of the
Rose awaited him. For an instant, he scarcely recognized her. She was
gowned in a single-piece Basque dress of embroidered silk, closely
fitted about her full lithe figure to below the hips, the skirt
widening and hanging loosely about her slim ankles. A black silk
scarf, in sharp contrast to the embroidery, was sewn to the dress and
drawn tightly over the right shoulder, across the bust, and then
draped beneath the left hip. But the glory of her blue-black hair was
as he had first seen it in the twilight of his far-off studio; the
creamy whiteness of her cheeks was just touched with pink, and her
blue eyes, under curling lashes, seemed at first the frank eyes that
he loved.
"Vitoria!" he cried.
She drew back. She raised one hand, its pink palm toward him.
"You should not have done this," she said in a rapid whisper. "How did
you find me? How did you come here?" Her voice was kind, but steady.
Cartaret stood still. This he had not looked for. His cheeks were
flushed, and the lines about his mouth deepened, as they always did at
moments of crisis, and made his face very firm.
"Does it matter how?" he asked. "Not all the width of the world could
have kept me away. There's something I've got to know and know
instantly."
"But you should not have come, and you must go immediately!
Listen--no, listen to me now! I am not Vitoria Urola in these
mountains; whether I want it or not, I have to be the Dona Dolorez
Ethenard-Eskurola. That would perhaps sound amusing in the rue du Val
de Grace; here it is a serious matter: the most serious matter in this
little mountain-world. You will have to listen to me."
Cartaret folded his arms.
"Go on," he said.
"Last Winter," she continued, her face challenging his, "I had a time
of rebellion against all these things amongst which I had been brought
up. I had never been farther away from this place than Alegria, but I
had had French and English governesses, and I read books and dreamed
dreams. I loved to paint; I thought that I could learn to be a real
artist, but I knew that my brother would think that a shame in an
Eskurola and would never permit his unmarried sister to go to a
foreign city to study. Nevertheless, I was hungry for the great world
outside--for the real world--and so I took poor Chitta, gathered what
jewels were my own and not family-jewels, and ran away."
She looked from the window to the road that led into the valley; but
the road was still deserted.
"Chitta sold the jewels," she presently went on. "They brought very
little; but to me, who had never used money, it seemed much. We went
to Paris: I and Chitta, who, because she had often been so far as
Vitoria before, became as much my guardian as she was my servant--and
I was long afraid to go but a little distance in the streets without
her: the streets terrified me, and, after one fright, she made me
promise to go nowhere without her. So we took the room that you know
of. We were used to regarding my brother as all-powerful; we feared
that he would find us. Therefore, we would let no one know who we were
or whence we came. Now that is over." Her voice trembled a little. She
made a hopeless gesture. "It is all over, and we have come back to our
own people." She raised her head proudly; she had regained her
self-control: to Cartaret, she seemed to have regained an ancient
pride. "I have learned that I must be what I was born to be."
He squared his jaw.
"A slave to your brother's will," he said.
"A creature," she answered with steady gaze--"a creature of the will
of God."
"But this is nonsense!" He came forward. "This sort of thing may have
been all very well in the Fourteenth Century; but we're living in the
Twentieth, and it doesn't go now. Oh,"--he flung out a hand--"I know
all about your old laws and traditions! I dare say they're extremely
quaint and all that, and I dare say there was a time when they had
some reason in them; but that time isn't this time, and I refuse to
hear any more about them. I won't let them interfere with me."
She flashed crimson.
"You speak for yourself, sir: permit me to speak for myself."
His answer was to seize her hands.
"Let me go!" she ordered.
"I'll never let you go," said he.
"Let me go. You are a brave man to restrain a woman! Shall I call a
servant?"
She struggled fiercely, panting.
"I've got to make you understand me," he protested, holding fast her
hands. "I didn't mean any harm to your traditions or your customs.
Whatever you love I'll try to love too--just so long as it doesn't
hurt you. But _this_ does hurt you. Tell me one thing: Why did you
leave Paris? What was it made you change your mind?" He saw in her
face the signs of an effort to disregard the demand. "Tell me why you
left Paris," he repeated.
Her eyes wavered. The lids fluttered.
"That night," she began in an uneven tone, "I gave you to understand,
that night----"
"You gave me to understand that you loved me."
He said it fearlessly, and, on the edge of a sob, she fearlessly
answered him. She had ceased to struggle. Her hands lay still and cold
in his.
"I told you that love had brought me a sword."
"You've changed. What has changed you?"
"I have not changed. I have only come back to these unchangeable
mountains, to this unchanging castle, to the ancient laws and customs
of my people--their ancient and unalterable laws. I had to come back
to them," she said, "because I realized that it was not in me to be
false to all that my fathers have for centuries been true to."
Cartaret leaned forward. He could not believe that this was her only
reason; he could not understand that the sway of any custom can be so
powerful. He held her hands tighter. His eyes searched her quailing
eyes.
"Do you love me? That's all I want to know, and I'll attend to
everything else. I've no time for sparring. I've got to know if you
love me. I've got to know that, right here and now."
She shook her head.
"Don't!" she whispered.
"Do you love me?" he relentlessly persisted.
"To love in Paris is one thing: here I may not love."
"You may not--but _do_ you?"
"Don't. Please don't. Oh!"--her red lips parted, her breath came
fast--"if love were all----"
"It _is_ all!" he declared. He slipped both her cold hands into his
right hand and put his freed arm about her waist. "Vitoria," he
whispered, drawing her to him, "it _is_ all. It's all that matters,
all that counts. It can mock all custom and defy all law. I love you,
Vitoria." Slowly her eyes closed; slowly she sank against his arm;
slowly her head drooped backward, and slowly he bent toward its
parted, unresisting lips---- "And love's the one thing in the world
worth living and dying for."
At that word, she came to sudden life. With one wrench, she had darted
from his arms. Instantly she had recovered self-control.
"No, no, no!" she cried. "Go away! There is danger here. Oh, go away!"
The suddenness of her action shattered his delirium. He read in her
words only her reply to the question that he had put to her.
Impossible as it would have seemed a moment since, that negative meant
a catastrophic denial of any love for him. He glanced at the old walls
that surrounded them--at all the expressions of a remorseless self in
which he could have no part. He felt, with a sudden certainty, that
these things were of her, and she of them--that what she meant by her
distinction between herself in Paris and this other self here was the
vast difference between a Byzantine empress breaking plebeian hearts
in the alleys of her capital and that same woman on her throne,
passionless and raised above the reach of men's desires.
The most modest of young fellows is always a little vain, and his
vanity is always wounded; it is ever seeking hurts, anxious to suffer:
Cartaret was no exception to human rules. He told his heart that
Vitoria's words meant but one thing: She had entertained herself with
him during an incognito escapade and, now that the escapade was
finished, wanted no reminders. A Byzantine empress? This was worse:
the empress gave, if only to take away. What Vitoria must mean was
that even her momentary softening toward him on this spot was no more
than momentary. She was saying that, having had her amusement by
making him love her, she was now returned to her proper station, where
to love her was to insult her. He had been her plaything, and now she
was tired of it.
"Very well," he said, "if you think my love is worth so little. If you
can't brave one miserable medieval superstition for it, then I've got
the answer to what I asked you, and you're right: I'd better go." He
turned to the narrow door at the head of the spiral stairs. "I know,"
he said, as if to the stone walls about them, "that I'm not worth much
sacrifice; but my love has been worth a sacrifice. Some day you'll
understand what my love might have meant. Some day, when you're old,
you'll look from one of these windows out over these valleys and
mountains and think of what could have happened--what there was once,
just this one time, one chance for." He half faced her. "Other men
will love you, many of them. They'll love your happiness and grace and
beauty as well, I dare say, as I do and always will. But you'll
remember one man that loved your soul; you'll remember me----"
Vitoria was swaying dizzily. Her recaptured self-command visibly
wavered. She leaned against the rough wall. He leaped toward her, but
she had the strength left to warn him away.
"No, no, no!" she repeated. "I do not----" She raised her hands to the
vaulted roof. By a tremendous effort she became again mistress of
herself--and of him. "Why will you not understand? I do not love you.
Go!"
At that moment a cry rang out. It was a cry from the gateway. It was
the cry of Chitta, who came bounding into the narrow room and hurled
herself at her mistress's feet.
Before any one of the trio could speak, there was the clatter of a
galloping horse on the road, the thunder of hoofs over the drawbridge
above that frightful chasm.
"Go!" shrieked Vitoria. "Will you never go? Do you not understand what
this means? Do you not know who is coming here?"
Chitta set up a loud wail.
"I don't care who's coming here," said Cartaret. "If there's any
danger----"
Vitoria leaped over the prostrate servant and began pushing Cartaret
away.
"I hate you!" she cried. "Do you hear that? _I hate you!_ Now will you
go?"
He looked at her, and his face hardened.
"I'll go," he said.
He turned away.
"My brother!" gasped Vitoria.
Don Ricardo came in at the door of the tower-room.