The Azure Rose Part 29

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 G.o.d."

"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, pa.s.sionless 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 superst.i.tion 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.