Foes Part 32

She waited for him to come up to her. He took his place upon the steps. All around hung still and sunny s.p.a.ce. The basket of flowers between them was heaped with marigolds, pinks, and pansies.

"For Elspeth," said Gilian.

"It is almost two years. You have ceased to grieve?"

"Ah no! But one learns how to marry grief and gladness."

"Have you learned that? That is a long lesson. But some are quicker than others or had learned much beforehand.... Where is Elspeth?"

"Oh, she is safe, Glenfernie!"

"I wanted her body safe--safe, warm, in my arms!"

"Spirit and spirit. Meet spirit with spirit!"

"No! I crave and hunger and am cold. Unless I warm myself--unless I warm myself--with anger and hatred!"

"I wish it were not so!"

"I had a friend.... I warm myself now in the hunt of a foe--in his look when he sees me!"

Gilian smote her hands together. "So Elspeth would have loved that!

So the smothered G.o.d in you loves that!"

"It is the G.o.d in me that will punish him!"

"Is it--is it, Glenfernie?"

He made a wide gesture of impatience. "Cold--languid--pithless! You, Robin, Strickland, Alison Touris--"

Gilian looked at her basket of marigolds, pinks, and pansies. "That word death.... I bring these here, but Elspeth is with me everywhere!

There is a riddle--there is a strange, huge mistake. She must solve it, she must make that port of all ports--and you and I must make it.... It is a hard, heroic, long adventure!"

"I speak of the pine-tree in the blast, and such as you would give me pansies! I speak of the eagle at the crag-top in the storm, and you offer b.u.t.terflies!"

"Ah, then, go and kill her lover and the man who was your friend!"

Glenfernie rose from the step, in his face strong anger and denial. He stood, seeking for words, looking down upon the seated woman and her flowers. She met him with parted lips and a straight, fearless look.

"Will you take half the flowers, Glenfernie, and put them for Elspeth?"

"No. I cannot go there now!"

"I thought you would not. Now I am Elspeth. I love her. I would give her gladness--serve her. She says, 'Let him alone! Do you not know that his own weird will bring him into dark countries and light countries, and where he is to go? Is your own tree to be made thwart and misshapen, that his may be reminded that there is rightness of growth? He is a tree--he is not a stone, nor will he become a stone.

There is a law a little larger than your fretfulness that will take care of him! I like Glenfernie better when he is not a busybody!'"

Alexander stared at her in anger. "Differences where I thought to find likeness--likenesses where I thought to find differences! He deceived me, fooled me, played upon me as upon a pipe; took my own--"

"Ha!" said Gilian. "So you are going a-hunting for more reasons than one?--Elspeth, Elspeth! come out of it!--for Glenfernie, after all, avenges himself!"

Alexander, looking like his father, spoke slowly, with laboring breath. "Had one asked me, I should have said that you above all might understand. But you, too, betray!" With a sweep of his arms abroad, a gesture abrupt and desolate, he turned. He quitted the sunny bare s.p.a.ce, the kirkyard and the woman sitting with her basket of marigolds and pansies.

But two nights later he came to this place alone.

The moon was full. It hung like a wonder lantern above the hill and the kirk; it made the kirkyard cloth of silver. The yews stood unreal, or with a delicate, other reality. It was neither warm nor cold. The moving air neither struck nor caressed, but there breathed a sense of coming and going, unhurried and unperplexed, from far away to far away. The laird of Glenfernie crossed long gra.s.s to where, for a hundred years, had been laid the dead from White Farm. There was a mound bare to the sunlight thrown from the moon. He saw the flowers that Gilian had brought.

The flowers were colorless in the moonlight--and yet they could be, and were, clothed with a hue of anger from himself. They lay before him purple-crimson. They were withered, but suddenly they had sap, life, fullness--but a distasteful, reminding life, a life in opposition! He took them and threw them away.

Now the mound rested bare. He lay down beside it. He stretched his arms over it. "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!"--and "Elspeth!" But Elspeth did not answer--only the cool sunlight thrown back from the moon.

CHAPTER XXV

Ian traveled toward a pa.s.s through the Pyrenees. Behind him stretched difficult, hazardous, slow travel--weeks of it. Behind those weeks lay the voyage to Lisbon, and from Lisbon in a second boat north to Vigo.

From Vigo to this day of forested slopes and brawling streams, steadily worsening road, ruder dwellings, more primitive, impoverished folk, rolled a time of difficulties small and great, like the mountain pebbles for number. It took will and wit at strain to dissolve them all, and so make way out of Spain into France--through France--to Paris, where were friends.

Spanish travel was difficult at best--Spanish travel with scarcely any gold to travel on found the "best" quite winnowed out. Slow at all times, it grew, lacking money, to be like one of those dreams of r.e.t.a.r.dation. Ian gathered and blew upon his philosophy, and took matters at last with some amus.e.m.e.nt, at times, even, with a sense of the enjoyable.

He was not quite penniless. Those who had helped in his escape from Edinburgh had provided him gold. But, his voyage paid for, he must buy at Vigo fresh apparel and a horse. When at last he rode eastward and northward he was poor enough! Food and lodging must be bought for himself and his steed. Inns and innkeepers, chance folk applied to for guidance, petty officials in perennially suspicious towns--twenty people a day stood ready to present a spectral aspect of leech and gold-sucker! He was expert in traveling, but usually he had borne a purse quite like that of Fortunatus. Now he must consider that he might presently have to sell his horse--and it was not a steed of Roland's, to bring a great price! He might be compelled to go afoot into France. He might be sufficiently blessed if the millennium did not find him yet living by his wits in Spain. It was Spanish, that prospect! Turn what? Ian asked himself. Bull-fighter--fencing-master-- gipsy--or brigand? He played with the notion of fencing-master. But he would have to sell his horse to provide room and equipment, and he must turn aside to some considerable town. Brigand would be easier, in these wild forests and rock fortresses that climbed and stood upon the sky-line. Matter enough for perplexity! But the sweep of forest and mountain wall was admirable--admirable the air, the freedom from the Edinburgh prison. Except occasionally, in the midst of some intensification of annoyance, he rode and maneuvered undetected.

Past happenings might and did come across him in waves. He remembered, he regretted; he pursued a dialectic with various convenient divisions of himself. But all that would be lost for long times in the general miraculous variety of things! On the whole, going through Spain in the autumn weather, even with poverty making mouths alongside, was not a sorry business! Zest lived in pitting vigor and wit against mole hills threatening an aggregation into mountains! As for time, what was it, anyhow, to matter so much? He owned time and a wide world.

Delay and delay and delay. In one town the alcalde kept him a week, denying him the road beyond while inquiries were made as to his ident.i.ty or non-ident.i.ty with some famed outlaw escaping from justice.

Further on, his horse fell badly lame and he stayed day after day in a miserable village, lounging under a cork-tree, learning patois. There was a girl with great black eyes. He watched her, two or three times spoke to her. But when she saw how he must haggle over the price of food and lodging she laughed, and returned to the side of a muleteer with a sash and little bells upon his hat.

All along the road fell these r.e.t.a.r.dations. Then as the mountains loomed higher, the spirit of contradiction apparently grew tired and fell behind. For several days he traveled quite easily. "My Lady Fortune," asked Ian, "what is up your sleeve?"

The air stayed smiling and sweet. In a town half mountain, half plain, he made friends at the inn with Don Fernando, son of an ancient, proud, decaying house, poor as poverty. Don Fernando had been in Paris, knew by hearsay England, and had heard Scotland mentioned.

Spaniard and Scot drank together. The former was drawn into almost love of Ian. Here was a help against boundless ennui! Ian and his horse, and the small mail strapped behind the saddle, finally went off with Don Fernando to spend a week in his old house on the hillside just without the town. Here was poverty also, but yet sufficient acres to set a table and pour good wine and to make the horse forget the famine road behind him. Here were lounging and siesta, rest for body and mind, sweet "do well a very little!" Don Fernando would have kept the guest a second week and then a third.

But Ian shook his head, laughed, embraced him, promised a return of good when the great stream made it possible, and set forth upon his further travel. The horse looked sleek, almost fat. The Scot's jaded wardrobe was cleaned, mended, refreshed. Living with Don Fernando were an elder sister and an ancient cousin who had fallen in love with the big, handsome Don, traveling so oddly. These had set hand-maidens to work, with the result that Ian felt himself spruce as a newly opened pink. And Don Fernando gave him a traveling-cloak--very fine--a last year's gift, it seemed, from a grandee he had obliged. Cold weather was approaching and its warmth would be grateful. Ian's great need was for money in purse. These new friends had so little of that that he chose not to ask for a loan. After all, he could sell the cloak!

The day was fine, the country mounting as it were by stairs toward the mountains. Before him climbed a string of pack-mules. The merchant owning them and their lading traveled with a guard of stout young men.

For some hours Ian had the merchant for companion and heard much of the woes of the region and the times, the miseries of travel, the cursed inns, bandits licensed and unlicensed, craft, violence, and robbery! The merchant bewailed all life and kept a hawk eye upon his treasure on the Spanish road. At last he and his guard, his mules and muleteers, turned aside into a skirting way that would bring him to a town visible at no great distance. Left alone, Ian viewed from a hilltop the roofs of this place, with a tower or two starting up like warning fingers. But his road led on through a mountain pa.s.s.

The earth itself seemed to be climbing. The mountain shapes, little and big, gathered in herds. Cliffs, ravines, the hoa.r.s.e song of water, the faces of few human folk, and on these written "Mountains, mountains! Live as we can! Catch who catch can!" After a time the road was deprived of even these faces. The Scot thought of home mountains.

He thought of the Highlands. Above him and at some distance to the right appeared a distribution of cliffs that reminded him of that hiding-place after Culloden. He looked to see the birchwood, the wheeling eagle. The sun was at noon. Riding in a solitude, he almost dozed in the warm light. The Highlands and the eagle wheeling above the crag.... Black Hill and Glenfernie and White Farm and Alexander.... Life generally, and all the funny little figures running full tilt, one against another....

His horse sprang violently aside, then stood trembling. Forms, some ragged, some attired with a violent picturesqueness, had started from without a fissure in the wood and from behind a huge wayside rock. Ian knew them at a glance for those brigands of whom he had heard mention and warning enough. Don Fernando had once described their practices.

Resistance was idle. He chose instead a genial patience for his tower, and within it keen wits to keep watch. With his horse he was taken by the fierce, bedizened dozen up a gorge to so complete and secure a robber hold that Nature, when she made it, must have been in robber mood. Here were found yet others of the band, with a bedecked and mustached chief. He was aware that property, not life, answered to their desires. His horse, his fine cloak, his weapons, the small mail and its contents, with any article of his actual wearing they might fancy, and the little, little, little money within his purse--all would be taken. All in the luck! To-day to thee, to-morrow to me. What puzzled him was that evidently more was expected.

When they condescended to direct speech he could understand their language well enough. Nor did they indulge in over-brutal handling; they kept a measure and reminded him sufficiently of old England's own highwaymen. Of course, like old England's own, they would become atrocious if they thought that circ.u.mstances indicated it. But they did not seem inclined to go out of their way to be murderous or tormenting. The only sensible course was to take things good-naturedly and as all in the song! The worst that might happen would be that he must proceed to France afoot, without a penny, lacking weapons, Don Fernando's cloak--all things, in short, but the bare clothing he stood in. To make loss as small as possible there were in order suavity, coolness, even gaiety!

And still appeared the perplexing something he could not resolve. The over-fine cloak, the horse now in good condition, might have something to do with it, contrasting as they certainly did with the purse in the last stages of emaciation. And there seemed a studying of his general appearance, of his features, even. Two men in especial appeared detailed to do this. At last his ear caught the word "ransom."