"I mean it!" I said.
"I"m glad," he answered. "I was going to tell you not to be nervous, for we shall win through all right with this powerful car. But now I will save my breath."
"You may," I said, "I"m very happy." And so I was, though I had the most curious sensation in my toes, as if they were being done up in curl papers.
On we climbed, creeping along the high shelf which was so untidily loaded with rough, fallen stones and layers of mud, powdered with bits of ice from the rocky wall that seemed sheathed in gla.s.s. Icicles dangled heavy diamond fringes low over the roof of the car; snow lay in dark hollows which the sun could never reach even in summer noons; and as we ploughed obstinately on, always mounting, the engine trembling, our fat tyres splashed into a custardy slush of whitish brown. The shelf had been slippery before; now, slopping over with this thick mush of melting snow or mud, it was like driving through gallons of ice pudding.
The great Aigle began to tremble and waltz on the surface that was no surface; yet it would have been impossible to go back. I saw by my companion"s set face how real was the danger we were in; I saw, as the car skated first one way, then another, that there were but a few inches to spare on either side of the road shelf; the side which was a rocky wall, the side which was a precipice; I saw, too, how the man braced himself to this emergency, when three lives besides his own depended on his nerve and skill, almost upon his breath--for it seemed as if a breath too long, a breath too short, might hurl us down--down--I dared not look or think how far. Yet the fixed look of courage and self-confidence on his face was inspiring. I trusted him completely, and I should have been ashamed to feel fear.
But it was at this moment, when all hung upon the driver"s steadiness of eye and hand, that Lady Turnour chose to begin emitting squeaks of childish terror. I hadn"t known I was nervous, and only found out that I was highly strung by the jump I gave at her first shriek behind me. If the chauffeur had started--but he didn"t. He showed no sign of having heard.
I would not venture to turn, and look round, lest the slightest movement of my body so near his arm might disturb him; but poor Sir Samuel, driven to desperation by his wife"s hysterical cries, pushed down the gla.s.s again.
"Good Lord, Dane, this is appalling!" he said. "My wife can"t bear it.
Isn"t it possible for us to--to--" he paused, not knowing how to end so empty a sentence.
"All that"s possible to do I"m doing," returned the chauffeur, still looking straight ahead. And instead of advising the foolish old bridegroom to shake the bride or box her ears, as surely he was tempted to do, he added calmly that her ladyship must not be too anxious. We were going to get out of this all right, and before long.
"Tell him to go back. I _shall_ go back!" wailed Lady Turnour.
"Dearest, we can"t!" her husband a.s.sured her.
"Then tell him to stop and let me get out and walk. This is too awful.
He wants to kill us."
"_Can_ you stop and let us get out?" pleaded Sir Samuel.
"To stop here would be the most dangerous thing we could do," was the answer.
"You hear, Emmie, my darling."
"I hear. Impudence to dictate to you! Whatever _you_ are willing to do, _I_ won"t be bearded."
One would have thought she was an oyster. But she was quite right in not wishing to add a beard to her charms, as already a moustache was like those coming events that cast a well-defined shadow before. For an instant I half thought that Mr. Dane would try and stop, her tone was so furious, but he drove on as steadily as if he had not a pa.s.senger more fit for Bedlam than for a motor-car.
Seeing that Dane stuck like grim death to his determination and his steering-wheel, Sir Samuel shut the window and devoted himself to calming his wife who, I imagine, threatened to tear open the door and jump out. The important thing was that he kept her from doing it, perhaps by bribes of gold and precious stones, and the Aigle moved on, writhing like a wounded snake as she obeyed the hand on the wheel. If the slightest thing should go wrong in the steering-gear, as we read of in other motor-cars each time we picked up a newspaper--but other cars were not in charge of Mr. Jack Dane. I felt sure, somehow, that nothing would ever go wrong with a steering-gear of whose destiny he was master.
Not a word did he speak to me, yet I felt that my silence of tongue and stillness of body was approved of by him. He had said that we would be "out of this before long," so I believed we would; but suddenly my eyes told me that something worse than we had won through was in store for us ahead.
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 la.s.so; short, jerky loops, as we came to each new turn, to which the length of our cha.s.sis 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 _decla.s.see_ 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 a.s.sured 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-G.o.d, 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, didn"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 c.o.c.kles of her heart in spite of herself (I should think her heart was _all_ c.o.c.kles, 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 hadn"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 cl.u.s.ters 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 haven"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."