Part 27 (1/2)

”With his servants. He has, of course, many servants.”

”He is not married?”

Still eyeing the gold-piece, the landlord answered:

”No. There was something, once, long ago, that men say--but I know nothing. The Don Ricardo is the last of his house. Unless he marries, the Eskurolas will cease. However, he will marry.”

”You seem certain of it.”

”Naturally, monsieur. He will marry in order that the Eskurolas do not cease.”

”Yes-s-s.” Cartaret hesitated before his next question. ”So he's alone up there? I mean--I mean there's no other member of his family with him now?”

Instantly the innkeeper's face became blank.

”I know nothing----” he began.

”But the lord at the castle knows!” interrupted Cartaret. ”I said it first that time. The lord at the castle must know everything.”

”He does,” said the landlord simply.

Cartaret rose. He pushed the gold-piece across the table.

”That sentiment earns it,” said he. ”Bring my mare, please. And you might point out the way to this castle. I've a mind to run up there.”

The innkeeper looked at him oddly, but, when the mare had been brought around, pointed a lean brown finger across the lake toward the mountains that ended in twin white peaks: the peaks that Cartaret had seen a few hours since and that now seemed to him to be the crests of which he had dreamed when first he saw the Azure Rose.

”The road leads from the head of the lake, monsieur,” said the innkeeper: ”you cannot lose your way.”

Cartaret followed the instructions thus conveyed. After three miles'

riding, a curved ascent had shut the lake and the cottages from view, had shut from view every trace of human habitation. He rode among scenery that, save for the gra.s.sy bridle-path, was as wild as if it had never before been known of man.

It was a ravis.h.i.+ng country, a fairy-country of blue skies and fleecy clouds; of acicular summits and sharp-edged crags; of mist-hung valleys s.h.i.+mmering in the sun; of black chasms dizzily bridged by scarlet-flowered vines. The road ran along the edges of precipices and wreathed the gray outcropping rock; thick ropes of honeysuckle festooned the limbs of ancient trees and perfumed all the air. Here a blue cliff hid its distant face behind a bridal-veil of descending spray, broken by a dozen rainbows; there, down the terrifying depths of a vertical wall, roared a white and mighty cataract. The traveler's ears began to listen for the song of the hamadryad from the branches of the oak; his eyes to seek the flas.h.i.+ng limbs of a frightened nymph; here if anywhere the G.o.ds of the elder-revelation still held sway.

Evening, which comes so suddenly in the Cantabrians, was falling before the luxuriant verdure lessened and he came to a break in the forest. Below him, billow upon billow, the foothills fell away in rolling waves of green. Above, the jagged circle of the horizon was a line of salient summits and tapering spires of every tint of blue--turquoise, indigo, mauve--mounting up and up like the seats in a t.i.tanic amphitheater, to the royal purple of the sky.

Cartaret had turned in his saddle to look at the magnificent panorama. Now, turning forward, he saw, rising ahead of him--ten miles or more ahead, but so gigantic as to seem bending directly above him and tottering to crush him and the world at his feet--one of the peaks that the innkeeper had indicated. It was a mountain piled upon the mountains, a sheer mountain of naked chalcedonous rock, rising to a snow-topped pinnacle; and, at its foot, almost at the extreme edge of the timber-line, a broad, muricated natural gallery, stood a vast Gothic pile, a somber, rambling ma.s.s of wall and tower: the castle of the Eskurolas.

Almost as Cartaret looked, the sun went down behind that peak and wrapped the way in utter darkness. The traveler regarded with something like dismay the last faint glow that vanished from the west.

”So sorry you had to go,” he said, addressing the departed lord of day. He tried to look about him. ”A nice fix I'm in,” he added.

He attempted to ride on in the dark, but, remembering the precipices, dared not touch rein. He thought of trusting to the instinct of the mare, but that soon failed him: the animal came to a full stop. The stillness grew profound, the night impenetrable.

Then, suddenly, there was a wild cacophony from the forest on his left. It shook the air and set the echoes clanging from cliff to cavern. The mare reared and snorted. Lights danced among the trees; the lights became leaping flames; the noise was identifiable as the clatter of dogs and the shouts of men. Cartaret subdued his mare just as a torch-bearing party of picturesquely-garbed hunters plunged into the road directly in front of him and came, at sight of him, to a stand.

In the flickering light from a trio of burning pine-knots, the sight was enough strange. There were six men in all: three of them, in peasant costume, bearing aloft the torches, and two more, similarly dressed, holding leashes at which huge boar-hounds tugged. A pair of torch-bearers carried a large bough from the shoulder of one to the shoulder of the other, and suspended feet upward from this bough--bending with the weight--was a great, gray-black boar, its woolly hair red with blood, the coa.r.s.e bristles standing erect like a comb along its spine, its two enormous tusks prism-shaped and s.h.i.+ning like prisms in the light from the pine-knots.

A deep ba.s.s voice issued a challenge in _Eskura_. It came from the sixth member of the party, unmistakably in command.

He was one of the biggest men Cartaret had ever seen. He must have stood six-feet-six in his boots and was proportionately broad, deep-chested and long-armed. In one hand he held an old-fas.h.i.+oned boar-spear--its blade was red--as a sportsman that scorns the safety of a boar-hunt with a modern rifle.