The Azure Rose Part 30

"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 pus.h.i.+ng Cartaret away.

"I hate you!" she cried. "Do you hear that? _I hate you!_ Now will you go?"

He looked at her, and his face hardened.

"I'll go," he said.

He turned away.

"My brother!" gasped Vitoria.

Don Ricardo came in at the door of the tower-room.

CHAPTER XV

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There's no need of that," he said. "If I've done anything I shouldn't have done, I'm sorry. But I want you to understand that I'm to blame: _I'm_ to blame--and n.o.body else."

Eskurola went on as if Cartaret had not spoken:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know it _now_," he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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