During the next week, which they spent in journeying towards Vienna,
they gave the Sign to three different persons at places which were on
the way. In a village across the frontier in Bavaria they found a giant
of an old man sitting on a bench under a tree before his mountain
"Gasthaus" or inn; and when the four words were uttered, he stood up and
bared his head as the guide had done. When Marco gave the Sign in some
quiet place to a man who was alone, he noticed that they all did this
and said their "God be thanked" devoutly, as if it were part of some
religious ceremony. In a small town a few miles away he had to search
some hours before he found a stalwart young shoemaker with bright red
hair and a horseshoe-shaped scar on his forehead. He was not in his
workshop when the boys first passed it, because, as they found out
later, he had been climbing a mountain the day before, and had been
detained in the descent because his companion had hurt himself.
When Marco went in and asked him to measure him for a pair of shoes, he
was quite friendly and told them all about it.
"There are some good fellows who should not climb," he said. "When they
find themselves standing on a bit of rock jutting out over emptiness,
their heads begin to whirl round--and then, if they don't turn head over
heels a few thousand feet, it is because some comrade is near enough to
drag them back. There can be no ceremony then and they sometimes get
hurt--as my friend did yesterday."
"Did you never get hurt yourself?" The Rat asked.
"When I was eight years old I did that," said the young shoemaker,
touching the scar on his forehead. "But it was not much. My father was a
guide and took me with him. He wanted me to begin early. There is
nothing like it--climbing. I shall be at it again. This won't do for me.
I tried shoemaking because I was in love with a girl who wanted me to
stay at home. She married another man. I am glad of it. Once a guide,
always a guide." He knelt down to measure Marco's foot, and Marco bent a
little forward.
"The Lamp is lighted," he said.
There was no one in the shop, but the door was open and people were
passing in the narrow street; so the shoemaker did not lift his red
head. He went on measuring.
"God be thanked!" he said, in a low voice. "Do you want these shoes
really, or did you only want me to take your measure?"
"I cannot wait until they are made," Marco answered. "I must go on."
"Yes, you must go on," answered the shoemaker. "But I'll tell you what
I'll do--I'll make them and keep them. Some great day might come when I
shall show them to people and swagger about them." He glanced round
cautiously, and then ended, still bending over his measuring. "They will
be called the shoes of the Bearer of the Sign. And I shall say, 'He was
only a lad. This was the size of his foot.'" Then he stood up with a
great smile.
"There'll be climbing enough to be done now," he said, "and I look to
see you again somewhere."
When the boys went away, they talked it over.
"The hair-dresser didn't want to be a hair-dresser, and the shoemaker
didn't want to make shoes," said The Rat. "They both wanted to be
mountain-climbers. There are mountains in Samavia and mountains on the
way to it. You showed them to me on the map.
"Yes; and secret messengers who can climb anywhere, and cross dangerous
places, and reconnoiter from points no one else can reach, can find out
things and give signals other men cannot," said Marco.
"That's what I thought out," The Rat answered. "That was what he meant
when he said, 'There will be climbing enough to be done now.'"
Strange were the places they went to and curiously unlike each other
were the people to whom they carried their message. The most singular of
all was an old woman who lived in so remote a place that the road which
wound round and round the mountain, wound round it for miles and miles.
It was not a bad road and it was an amazing one to travel, dragged in a
small cart by a mule, when one could be dragged, and clambering slowly
with rests between when one could not: the tree-covered precipices one
looked down, the tossing whiteness of waterfalls, or the green foaming
of rushing streams, and the immensity of farm- and village-scattered
plains spreading themselves to the feet of other mountains shutting them
in were breath-taking beauties to look down on, as the road mounted and
wound round and round and higher and higher.
"How can any one live higher than this?" said The Rat as they sat on the
thick moss by the wayside after the mule and cart had left them. "Look
at the bare crags looming up above there. Let us look at her again. Her
picture looked as if she were a hundred years old."
Marco took out his hidden sketch. It seemed surely one of the strangest
things in the world that a creature as old as this one seemed could
reach such a place, or, having reached it, could ever descend to the
world again to give aid to any person or thing.
Her old face was crossed and recrossed with a thousand wrinkles. Her
profile was splendid yet and she had been a beauty in her day. Her eyes
were like an eagle's--and not an old eagle's. And she had a long neck
which held her old head high.
"How could she get here?" exclaimed The Rat.
"Those who sent us know, though we don't," said Marco. "Will you sit
here and rest while I go on further?"
"No!" The Rat answered stubbornly. "I didn't train myself to stay
behind. But we shall come to bare-rock climbing soon and then I shall be
obliged to stop," and he said the last bitterly. He knew that, if Marco
had come alone, he would have ridden in no cart but would have trudged
upward and onward sturdily to the end of his journey.
But they did not reach the crags, as they had thought must be
inevitable. Suddenly half-way to the sky, as it seemed, they came to a
bend in the road and found themselves mounting into a new green
world--an astonishing marvel of a world, with green velvet slopes and
soft meadows and thick woodland, and cows feeding in velvet pastures,
and--as if it had been snowed down from the huge bare mountain crags
which still soared above into heaven--a mysterious, ancient, huddled
village which, being thus snowed down, might have caught among the rocks
and rested there through all time.
There it stood. There it huddled itself. And the monsters in the blue
above it themselves looked down upon it as if it were an incredible
thing--this ancient, steep-roofed, hanging-balconied, crumbling cluster
of human nests, which seemed a thousand miles from the world. Marco and
The Rat stood and stared at it. Then they sat down and stared at it.
"How did it get here?" The Rat cried.
Marco shook his head. He certainly could see no explanation of its being
there. Perhaps some of the oldest villagers could tell stories of how its
first chalets had gathered themselves together.
An old peasant driving a cow came down a steep path. He looked with a
dull curiosity at The Rat and his crutches; but when Marco advanced and
spoke to him in German, he did not seem to understand, but shook his
head saying something in a sort of dialect Marco did not know.
"If they all speak like that, we shall have to make signs when we want
to ask anything," The Rat said. "What will she speak?"
"She will know the German for the Sign or we should not have been sent
here," answered Marco. "Come on."
They made their way to the village, which huddled itself together
evidently with the object of keeping itself warm when through the winter
months the snows strove to bury it and the winds roared down from the
huge mountain crags and tried to tear it from among its rocks. The doors
and windows were few and small, and glimpses of the inside of the houses
showed earthen floors and dark rooms. It was plain that it was counted a
more comfortable thing to live without light than to let in the cold.
It was easy enough to reconnoiter. The few people they saw were
evidently not surprised that strangers who discovered their unexpected
existence should be curious and want to look at them and their houses.
The boys wandered about as if they were casual explorers, who having
reached the place by chance were interested in all they saw. They went
into the little Gasthaus and got some black bread and sausage and some
milk. The mountaineer owner was a brawny fellow who understood some
German. He told them that few strangers knew of the village but that
bold hunters and climbers came for sport. In the forests on the mountain
sides were bears and, in the high places, chamois. Now and again, some
great gentlemen came with parties of the daring kind--very great
gentlemen indeed, he said, shaking his head with pride. There was one
who had castles in other mountains, but he liked best to come here.
Marco began to wonder if several strange things might not be true if
great gentlemen sometimes climbed to the mysterious place. But he had
not been sent to give the Sign to a great gentleman. He had been sent to
give it to an old woman with eyes like an eagle which was young.
He had a sketch in his sleeve, with that of her face, of her
steep-roofed, black-beamed, balconied house. If they walked about a
little, they would be sure to come upon it in this tiny place. Then he
could go in and ask her for a drink of water.
They roamed about for an hour after they left the Gasthaus. They went
into the little church and looked at the graveyard and wondered if it
was not buried out of all sight in the winter. After they had done this,
they sauntered out and walked through the huddled clusters of houses,
examining each one as they drew near it and passed.
"I see it!" The Rat exclaimed at last. "It is that very old-looking one
standing a little way from the rest. It is not as tumbled down as most
of them. And there are some red flowers on the balcony."
"Yes! That's it!" said Marco.
They walked up to the low black door and, as he stopped on the
threshold, Marco took off his cap. He did this because, sitting in the
doorway on a low wooden chair, the old, old woman with the eagle eyes
was sitting knitting.
There was no one else in the room and no one anywhere within sight. When
the old, old woman looked up at him with her young eagle's eyes, holding
her head high on her long neck, Marco knew he need not ask for water or
for anything else.
"The Lamp is lighted," he said, in his low but strong and clear young
voice.
She dropped her knitting upon her knees and gazed at him a moment in
silence. She knew German it was clear, for it was in German she answered
him.
"God be thanked!" she said. "Come in, young Bearer of the Sign, and
bring your friend in with you. I live alone and not a soul is within
hearing."
She was a wonderful old woman. Neither Marco nor The Rat would live long
enough to forget the hours they spent in her strange dark house. She
kept them and made them spend the night with her.
"It is quite safe," she said. "I live alone since my man fell into the
crevasse and was killed because his rope broke when he was trying to
save his comrade. So I have two rooms to spare and sometimes climbers
are glad to sleep in them. Mine is a good warm house and I am well known
in the village. You are very young," she added shaking her head. "You
are very young. You must have good blood in your veins to be trusted
with this."
"I have my father's blood," answered Marco.
"You are like some one I once saw," the old woman said, and her eagle
eyes set themselves hard upon him. "Tell me your name."
There was no reason why he should not tell it to her.
"It is Marco Loristan," he said.
"What! It is that!" she cried out, not loud but low.
To Marco's amazement she got up from her chair and stood before him,
showing what a tall old woman she really was. There was a startled, even
an agitated, look in her face. And suddenly she actually made a sort of
curtsey to him--bending her knee as peasants do when they pass a shrine.
"It is that!" she said again. "And yet they dare let you go on a journey
like this! That speaks for your courage and for theirs."
But Marco did not know what she meant. Her strange obeisance made him
feel awkward. He stood up because his training had told him that when a
woman stands a man also rises.
"The name speaks for the courage," he said, "because it is my father's."
She watched him almost anxiously.
"You do not even know!" she breathed--and it was an exclamation and not
a question.
"I know what I have been told to do," he answered. "I do not ask
anything else."
"Who is that?" she asked, pointing to The Rat.
"He is the friend my father sent with me," said Marco smiling. "He
called him my aide-de-camp. It was a sort of joke because we had played
soldiers together."
It seemed as if she were obliged to collect her thoughts. She stood with
her hand at her mouth, looking down at the earth floor.
"God guard you!" she said at last. "You are very--very young!"
"But all his years," The Rat broke in, "he has been in training for just
this thing. He did not know it was training, but it was. A soldier who
had been trained for thirteen years would know his work."
He was so eager that he forgot she could not understand English. Marco
translated what he said into German and added: "What he says is true."
She nodded her head, still with questioning and anxious eyes.
"Yes. Yes," she muttered. "But you are very young." Then she asked in a
hesitating way:
"Will you not sit down until I do?"
"No," answered Marco. "I would not sit while my mother or grandmother
stood."
"Then I must sit--and forget," she said.
She passed her hand over her face as though she were sweeping away the
sudden puzzled trouble in her expression. Then she sat down, as if she
had obliged herself to become again the old peasant she had been when
they entered.
"All the way up the mountain you wondered why an old woman should be
given the Sign," she said. "You asked each other how she could be of
use."
Neither Marco nor The Rat said anything.
"When I was young and fresh," she went on. "I went to a castle over the
frontier to be foster-mother to a child who was born a great noble--one
who was near the throne. He loved me and I loved him. He was a strong
child and he grew up a great hunter and climber. When he was not ten
years old, my man taught him to climb. He always loved these mountains
better than his own. He comes to see me as if he were only a young
mountaineer. He sleeps in the room there," with a gesture over her
shoulder into the darkness. "He has great power and, if he chooses to do
a thing, he will do it--just as he will attack the biggest bear or climb
the most dangerous peak. He is one who can bring things about. It is
very safe to talk in this room."
Then all was quite clear. Marco and The Rat understood.
No more was said about the Sign. It had been given and that was enough.
The old woman told them that they must sleep in one of her bedrooms. The
next morning one of her neighbors was going down to the valley with a
cart and he would help them on their way. The Rat knew that she was
thinking of his crutches and he became restless.
"Tell her," he said to Marco, "how I have trained myself until I can do
what any one else can. And tell her I am growing stronger every day.
Tell her I'll show her what I can do. Your father wouldn't have let me
come as your aide if I hadn't proved to him that I wasn't a cripple.
Tell her. She thinks I'm no use."
Marco explained and the old woman listened attentively. When The Rat got
up and swung himself about up and down the steep path near her house she
seemed relieved. His extraordinary dexterity and firm swiftness
evidently amazed her and gave her a confidence she had not felt at
first.
"If he has taught himself to be like that just for love of your father,
he will go to the end," she said. "It is more than one could believe,
that a pair of crutches could do such things."
The Rat was pacified and could afterwards give himself up to watching
her as closely as he wished to. He was soon "working out" certain things
in his mind. What he watched was her way of watching Marco. It was as if
she were fascinated and could not keep her eyes from him. She told them
stories about the mountains and the strangers who came to climb with
guides or to hunt. She told them about the storms, which sometimes
seemed about to put an end to the little world among the crags. She
described the winter when the snow buried them and the strong ones were
forced to dig out the weak and some lived for days under the masses of
soft whiteness, glad to keep their cows or goats in their rooms that
they might share the warmth of their bodies. The villages were forced to
be good neighbors to each other, for the man who was not ready to dig
out a hidden chimney or buried door to-day might be left to freeze and
starve in his snow tomb next week. Through the worst part of the winter
no creature from the world below could make way to them to find out
whether they were all dead or alive.
While she talked, she watched Marco as if she were always asking herself
some question about him. The Rat was sure that she liked him and greatly
admired his strong body and good looks. It was not necessary for him to
carry himself slouchingly in her presence and he looked glowing and
noble. There was a sort of reverence in her manner when she spoke to
him. She reminded him of Lazarus more than once. When she gave them
their evening meal, she insisted on waiting on him with a certain
respectful ceremony. She would not sit at table with him, and The Rat
began to realize that she felt that he himself should be standing to
serve him.
"She thinks I ought to stand behind your chair as Lazarus stands behind
your father's," he said to Marco. "Perhaps an aide ought to do it. Shall
I? I believe it would please her."
"A Bearer of the Sign is not a royal person," answered Marco. "My father
would not like it--and I should not. We are only two boys."
It was very wonderful when, after their supper was over, they all three
sat together before the fire.
The red glow of the bed of wood-coal and the orange yellow of the flame
from the big logs filled the room with warm light, which made a mellow
background for the figure of the old woman as she sat in her low chair
and told them more and more enthralling stories.
Her eagle eyes glowed and her long neck held her head splendidly high as
she described great feats of courage and endurance or almost superhuman
daring in aiding those in awesome peril, and, when she glowed most in
the telling, they always knew that the hero of the adventure had been
her foster-child who was the baby born a great noble and near the
throne. To her, he was the most splendid and adorable of human beings.
Almost an emperor, but so warm and tender of heart that he never forgot
the long-past days when she had held him on her knee and told him tales
of chamois- and bear-hunting, and of the mountain-tops in midwinter.
He was her sun-god.
"Yes! Yes!" she said. "'Good Mother,' he calls me. And I bake him a
cake on the hearth, as I did when he was ten years old and my man was
teaching him to climb. And when he chooses that a thing shall be
done--done it is! He is a great lord."
The flames had died down and only the big bed of red coal made the room
glow, and they were thinking of going to bed when the old woman started
very suddenly, turning her head as if to listen.
Marco and The Rat heard nothing, but they saw that she did and they sat
so still that each held his breath. So there was utter stillness for a
few moments. Utter stillness.
Then they did hear something--a clear silver sound, piercing the pure
mountain air.
The old woman sprang upright with the fire of delight in her eyes.
"It is his silver horn!" she cried out striking her hands together. "It
is his own call to me when he is coming. He has been hunting somewhere
and wants to sleep in his good bed here. Help me to put on more
faggots," to The Rat, "so that he will see the flame of them through the
open door as he comes."
"Shall we be in the way?" said Marco. "We can go at once."
She was going towards the door to open it and she stopped a moment and
turned.
"No, no!" she said. "He must see your face. He will want to see it. I
want him to see--how young you are."
She threw the door wide open and they heard the silver horn send out its
gay call again. The brushwood and faggots The Rat had thrown on the
coals crackled and sparkled and roared into fine flames, which cast
their light into the road and threw out in fine relief the old figure
which stood on the threshold and looked so tall.
And in but a few minutes her great lord came to her. And in his green
hunting-suit with its green hat and eagle's feather he was as splendid
as she had said he was. He was big and royal-looking and laughing and
he bent and kissed her as if he had been her own son.
"Yes, good Mother," they heard him say. "I want my warm bed and one of
your good suppers. I sent the others to the Gasthaus."
He came into the redly glowing room and his head almost touched the
blackened rafters. Then he saw the two boys.
"Who are these, good Mother?" he asked.
She lifted his hand and kissed it.
"They are the Bearers of the Sign," she said rather softly. "'The Lamp
is lighted.'"
Then his whole look changed. His laughing face became quite grave and
for a moment looked even anxious. Marco knew it was because he was
startled to find them only boys. He made a step forward to look at them
more closely.
"The Lamp is lighted! And you two bear the Sign!" he exclaimed. Marco
stood out in the fire glow that he might see him well. He saluted with
respect.
"My name is Marco Loristan, Highness," he said. "And my father sent me."
The change which came upon his face then was even greater than at first.
For a second, Marco even felt that there was a flash of alarm in it. But
almost at once that passed.
"Loristan is a great man and a great patriot," he said. "If he sent you,
it is because he knows you are the one safe messenger. He has worked too
long for Samavia not to know what he does."
Marco saluted again. He knew what it was right to say next.
"If we have your Highness's permission to retire," he said, "we will
leave you and go to bed. We go down the mountain at sunrise."
"Where next?" asked the hunter, looking at him with curious intentness.
"To Vienna, Highness," Marco answered.
His questioner held out his hand, still with the intent interest in his
eyes.
"Good night, fine lad," he said. "Samavia has need to vaunt itself on
its Sign-bearer. God go with you."
He stood and watched him as he went toward the room in which he and his
aide-de-camp were to sleep. The Rat followed him closely. At the little
back door the old, old woman stood, having opened it for them. As Marco
passed and bade her good night, he saw that she again made the strange
obeisance, bending the knee as he went by.