CHAPTER XXI
ALL this time we 'd been struggling up hill, but abruptly we came to the top of the ascent, and had to go sliding down, along the same shelf, which now seemed narrower than before. Looking ahead, it appeared to have been bitten off round the edge here and there, just at the stiffest zigs and zags of the nightmare road. And far down the mountain the way went winding under our eyes, like the loops of a lasso; short, jerky loops, as we came to each new turn, to which the length of our chassis forced us to bow and curtsey on our slippery, sliding skates. Forward the Aigle had to go until her bonnet hung over the precipice, then to be cautiously backed for a foot or two, before she could glide ticklishly down the next steep gradient.
Involuntarily I shrank back against the cushions, bit my lip, and had to force myself not to catch at the arm of the seat in those giddy seconds when it felt as if we were dropping from sky to earth in a leaky balloon; but if the blood in your veins has been put there by decent ancestors who trail gloriously in a long line behind you, I suppose it 's easier for you not to be a coward than it is for people like the Turnours, who have to be their own ancestors, or buy them at auctions.
The first words my companion spoke to me came as the valley below us narrowed. "Look there," he said, nodding; and my gaze followed the indication, to light joyously upon a distant col, where clustered a friendly little group of human habitations.
The sight was like a signal to relax muscles, for though there was a long stretch still of the appalling road between us and the col, the eye seemed to grasp safety, and cling to it.
"Beyond that col we shall strike the route nationale, which we missed by coming this way," said Mr. Dane; and then it was the motor only which gave voice, until we were close to the oasis in our long desert of danger. That comforting voice was like a song of triumph as the Aigle paused to rest at last before a gendarmerie and a rough, mountain inn. Some men who had been standing in front of the buildings gave us a hearty cheer as we drew up at the door, and grinned a pleasant welcome.
"We have been watching you a long way off," said a tall gendarme to the chauffeur, "and to tell the truth we were not happy. That road has been déclassée for some time now, and is one of the worst in the country, even in fine weather. It was not a very safe experiment, monsieur; but we have been saying to each other it was a fine way to show off your magnificent driving."
Laughing, Jack Dane assured the gendarme that it was not done with any such object, and Sir Samuel, out of the car by this time, with the indignant Lady Turnour, wanted the conversation translated. I obeyed immediately, and he too praised his chauffeur, in a nice manly way which made me the more sorry for him because he had succeeded in marrying his first love.
"I should like to pay you compliments too," said I hurriedly, in a low voice, when Sir Samuel and Lady Turnour had gone to the inn door to revive themselves with blood-warming cordials after their thrilling experience. "I should like to, only—it seems to go beyond compliments."
"I hate compliments, even when I deserve them, which I don't now," replied the young man whom I 'd been comparing sentimentally in my mind with the sun-god, steering his chariot of fire up and down the steeps of heaven from dawn to sunset. "And I 'd hate them above all from my—from my little pal."
Nothing he could have named me would have pleased me as well. During the wild climb, and wilder drop, we had hardly spoken to each other, yet I felt that I could never misunderstand him, or try frivolously to aggravate him again. He was too good for all that, too good to be played with.
"You are a man—a real man," I said to myself. I felt humble compared with him, an insignificant wisp of a thing, who could never do anything brave or great in life; and so I was proud to be called his "pal." When he asked if I, too, did n't need some cordial, I only laughed, and said I had just had one, the strongest possible.
"So have I," he answered. "And now we ought to be going on. Look at those shadows, and it 's a good way yet to Florac, at the entrance of the gorge."
Already night was stretching long gray, skeleton fingers into the late sunshine, as if to warm them at its glow before snuffing it out.
It was easier to say we ought to go, however, than to induce Lady Turnour to get into the car again, after all she had endured, and after that "bearding" which evidently rankled still. She had not forgiven the chauffeur for the courage which for her was merely obstinacy and impudence, nor her husband for encouraging him; but the glow of the cordial in her veins warmed the cockles of her heart in spite of herself (I should think her heart was all cockles, if they are as bristly as they sound); and as it would be dull to stop on this col for the rest of her life, she at last agreed to encounter further dangers.
"Come, come, that's my brave little darling!" we heard Sir Samuel coo to her, and dared not meet each other's eyes.
The road, from which we ought never to have strayed, was splendid in engineering and surface, and we winged down to earth in a flight from the clouds. Ice and snow were left behind on the heights, and the Aigle gaily careered down the slopes like a wild thing released from a weary bondage. As we whirled earthwards, embankments and railway bridges showed here and there by our side, but we lost all such traces of feverish modern civilization as we swept into the dusky hollow at the bottom of which Florac lay, like a sunken town engulfed by a dark lake.
We did not pause in the curiously picturesque place, which looked no more than a village, with its gray-brown houses and gray brown shadows huddled confusedly together. Probably it looked much the same when the Camisards used to hide themselves and their gunpowder in caves near by; and certainly scarce a stone or brick had been added or removed since Stevenson's eyes saw the town, and his pen wrote of it, as he turned away there from the Tarn region, instead of being the first Englishman to explore it. And what a wild region it looked as we and the Aigle were swallowed up in the yawning mouth of the gorge!
In an every-day world, above and outside, no doubt it was sunset, as on other evenings which we had known and might know again; but this hidden, underground country had no place in an every-day world. It seemed almost as if my brother and I (I can't count the Turnours, for they were so unsuitable that they temporarily ceased to exist for us) were explorers arriving in an air-ship, unannounced, upon the planet Mars.
The moon, a glinting silver shield, shimmered pale through ragged red clouds like torn and blood-stained flags; and the walls of the gorge into which we penetrated, bleakly glittering here and there where the moon touched a vein of mica, were the many-windowed castles of the Martians, who did not yet know that they had visitors from another world.
There were fantastic villages, too, whose builders and inhabitants must have drawn their architectural inspiration from strange mountain forms and groupings, after the fashion of those small animals who defend themselves by looking as much as possible like their surroundings. And if by some mistake we had n't landed on Mars, we were in gnome-land, wherever that might be.
There was no ordinary twilight here. The brown-gray of rocks and wild rock-villages was flushed with red and shadowed with purple; but as the moon drank up the ruddy draught of sunset, the landscape crouched and hunched its shoulders into shapes ever more extraordinary. The white light spilled down from the tilted crescent like silver rain, and bleached the few pink peach-blossoms, which bloomed timidly under the shelter of snow-mountains, to the pallor of fluttering night-moths, throwing out their clusters in sharp contrast against dark rocks. The River Tarn, gliding onward through the gorge toward the Garonne, was scaled with steel on its emerald back, like a twisting serpent. Over a bed of gravel, white as scattered pearls, the sequined lengths coiled on; and the snake-green water, the strange burnt-coral vegetation like a trail of blood among the pearls, the young foliage of trees, filmy as wisps of blowing gauze, were the only vestiges of colour that the moon allowed to live in the under-world which we had reached. But above, on the roof of that world—"les Causses"—where we had left ice and snow, we could see purple chimneys of rock rising to an opal sky, and now and then a mountain bonfire, like a great open basket of witch-rubies, glowing beneath the moon.
"This is the last haunt of the fairies," I said under my breath, but the man by my side heard the murmur.
"I thought you'd find that out," he said. "Trust you to get telepathic messages from the elf-folk! Why, this gorge teems with fairy tales and legends of magic, black and white. The Rhine Valley and the Black Forest together have n't as many or as wonderful ones. I should like you to hear the stories from some of the village people or the boatmen. They believe them to this day."
"Why, of course," I said, gravely. Then, a question wanted so much to be asked, that when I refused it asked itself in a great hurry, before I could even catch it by its lizard-tail. "Was she with you when you were here before?"
"She?" he echoed. "I don't understand."
"The lady of the battlement garden," I explained, ashamed and repentant now that it was too late.
He did not answer for a moment Then he laughed, an odd sort of laugh. "Oh, my romance of the battlement garden?Yes, she was with me in this gorge. She is with me now."
"I wonder if she is thinking about you to-night?" I asked, knowing he meant that the mysterious lady was carried along on this journey in his spirit, as I was in the car.
"Not seriously, if at all," he answered, with what seemed to me a forced lightness. "But I am thinking of her—thoughts which she will probably never know."
Then I did wish that I, too, had a hidden sorrow in my life, a man in the background, but as unlike Monsieur Charretier as possible, for whose love I could call upon my brother's sympathy. And I suppose it was because he had some one, while I had no one, in this strange, hidden fairyland like a secret orchard of jewelled fruits, that I felt suddenly very sad.
He pointed out Castlebouc, a spellbound château on a towering crag that held it up as if on a tall black finger, above a village which might have fallen off a canvas by Gustave Doré. Farther on lay a strange place called Prades, memorable for a huge buttress of rock exactly like the carcass of a mammoth petrified and hanging on a wall. Then, farther on still, over the black face of the rocks flashed a whiteness of waving waters, pouring cascades like bridal veils whose lace was made of mountain snows.
"Here we are at Ste. Enemie," said Mr. Dane. "Don't you remember about her—'King Dagobert's daughter, ill-fated and fair to look upon?' Well, at this village of hers we must either light our lamps or rest for the night, which ever Sir Samuel—I mean her ladyship—decides."
So he stopped, in a little town which looked a place of fairy enchantment under the moon. And as the song of the motor changed into jogging prose with the putting on of the brakes, open flew the door of an inn. Nothing could ever have looked half so attractive as the rosy glow of the picture suddenly revealed. There was a miniature hall and a quaint stairway—just an impressionist glimpse of both in play of firelight and shadow. With all my might I willed Lady Turnour to want to stay the night. The whole force of my mind pressed upon that part of her "transformation" directly over the deciding-cells of her brain.
The chauffeur jumped down, and respectfully inquired the wishes of his passengers. Would they remain here, if there were rooms to be had, and take a boat in the morning to make the famous descent of the Tarn, while the car went on to meet them at Le Rosier, at the end of the Gorge? Or would they, in spite of the darkness, risk ⸺"
"We 'll risk nothing," Lady Turnour promptly cut him short. "We 've run risks to-day till I feel as if I 'd been in my grave and pulled out again. No more for me, by dark, thank you, if I have to sleep in the car!"
"I hope your ladyship won't have to do that," returned my Fellow Worm, alive though trodden under foot. "I have never spent a night in Ste. Enemie, but I 've lunched here, and the food is passable. I should think the rooms would be clean, though rough ⸺"
"I don't find this country attractive enough to pay us for any hardships," said the mistress of our fate. "I never was in such a dreary, God-forsaken waste! Are there no decent hotels to get at?"
Patiently he explained to her, as he had to me, how the better hotels which the Gorge of the Tarn could boast were not yet open for the summer. "If we had not had such a chapter of accidents we should have run through as far as this early in the day, and could then have followed the good motoring road down the gorge, seeing its best sights almost as well as from the river; but ⸺"
"Whose fault were the accidents, I should like to know?" demanded the lady. But obviously there was no answer to that question from a servant to a mistress.
"Shall I inquire about rooms?" the chauffeur asked, calmly.
And it ended in Sir Samuel going in with him, conducted by a smiling and somewhat excited young person who had been holding open the door.
They must have been absent for ten minutes, which seemed half an hour. Then, when Lady Turnour had begun muttering to herself that she was freezing, Sir Samuel bustled back, in a cheerfulness put on awkwardly, like an ill-fitting suit of armour in a pageant. "My dear, they 're very full, but two French gentlemen were kind enough to give up their room to us, and the landlady 'll put them out somewhere ⸺"
"What, you and I both squashed into one room!" exclaimed her ladyship, forgetful, in haughty horror, of her lodging-house background.
"But it 's all they have. It 's that or the motor, since you won't risk ⸺"
"Oh, very well, then, I suppose it can't kill me!" groaned the bride, stepping out of the car as if from tumbril to scaffold.
What a way to take an adorable adventure! I was sorry for Sir Samuel, but dimly I felt that I ought to be still sorrier for a woman temperamentally unable to enjoy anything as it ought to be enjoyed. Next year, maybe, she will look back on the experience and tell her friends that it was "fun"; but oh, the pity of it, not to gather the flowers of the Present, to let them wither, and never pluck them till they are dried wrecks of the Past!
I was ready to dance for joy as I followed her ladyship into the miniature hall which, if not quite so alluring when viewed from the inside, had a friendly, welcoming air after the dark mountains and cold white moonlight. I did n't know yet what arrangements had been made for my stable accommodation, if any, but I felt that I should n't weep if I had to sit up all night in a warm kitchen with a purry cat and a snory dog.
The stairs were bare, and our feet clattered crudely as we went up, lighted by a stout young girl with bared arms, who carried a candle. "What a hole!" snapped Lady Turnour; but when the door of a bedroom was opened for her by the red-elbowed one, she cried out in despair. "Is this where you expect me to sleep, Samuel? I 'm surprised at you! I 'm not sure it is n't an insult!"
"My darling, what can I do?" implored the unfortunate bridegroom.
The red-elbowed maiden, beginning to take offence, set the candlestick down on a narrow mantelpiece, with a slap, and removed herself from the room with the dignity of a budding Jeanne d'Arc. We all three filed in, I in the rear; and for one who won't accept the cup of life as the best champagne the prospect certainly was depressing.
The belongings of the "two gentlemen" who were giving up their rights in a lady's favour, had not yet been transferred to the "somewhere outside." Those slippers under the bed could have belonged to no species of human being but a commercial traveller; and on the table and one chair were scattered various vague collars, neckties, and celluloid cuffs. There was no fire in the fireplace, nor, by the prim look of it, had there ever been one in the half century or so since necessity called for an inn to be built.
I snatched from the chair a waistcoat tangled up in some suspenders, and Lady Turnour, flinging herself down in her furs, burst out crying like a cross child.
"If this is what you call adventure, Samuel, I hate it," she whimpered. "You would bring me motoring! I want a fire. I want hot water. I want them now. And I want the room cleared and all these awful things taken away this instant. I don't consider them decent. Whatever happens, I shan't dream of getting into that bed to-night, and I don't feel now as if I should eat any dinner."
Distracted, Sir Samuel looked piteously at me, and I sprang to the rescue. I assured her ladyship that everything should be made nice for her before she quite knew what had happened. If she would have patience for five minutes, only five, she should have everything she wanted. I would see to it myself. With that I ran away, followed by Sir Samuel's grateful eyes. But, once downstairs, I realized what a task I had set myself.
The whole establishment had gone mad over us. There had been enough to do before, with the house full of ces messieurs, les commis voyageurs, but it was comparatively simple to do for them. For la noblesse Anglaise it was different.
There were no men to be seen, and the three or four women of the household were scuttling about crazily in the kitchen, like hens with their heads cut off. The patronage was so illustrious and so large; there was so much to do and all at once, therefore nobody tried to do anything but cackle and plump against one another.
Enter Me, a whirlwind, demanding an immediate fire and hot water for washing. Landlady and assistants were aghast. There had never been anything in any bedroom fireplace of the inn less innocent than paper flowers; bedroom fireplaces were for paper flowers; while as for washing it was a bétise to want to do so in the evening, especially with hot water, which was a madness at any time, unless by doctor's orders. Besides, did not mademoiselle see that everybody had more than they could do already, in preparing dinner for the great people! There was plenty of time to put the bedroom in order when it should be bedtime. If the noble lady were so fatigued that she must lie down, why, the bed had only been slept in for one night by two particularly sympathetic messieurs. It would be presque un crime to change linen after so brief an episode, nevertheless for a client of such importance it should eventually be done.
For a moment I was dashed by this volume of eloquence, but not for long, for I was pledged. A wild glance round the kitchen showed me a kettle standing empty in a corner. I seized it, and though it was heavy, swung it to an open door near which I could see a ghostly pump. I flew out, and seized that ghost by its long and rigid arm.
"Let me," said a voice.
It was the voice of Mr. Jack Dane.