"No more afternoon calls on chateaux for me, after _that_ experience,"
I gasped, when we were safely seated in the homelike vehicle which I had not sufficiently appreciated before.
"Oh, I shall be disappointed if you won"t go with me to the Chateau of St. Pierre which we saw in the photograph--that quaint ma.s.s of towers and pinnacles, on the very top of a peaked rock," said the Boy. "I"ve been looking forward to it more than to anything else, but I shan"t have courage to do it alone."
"Courage?" I echoed. "After the brazen way in which you stalked through the scattered belongings of the family at Aymaville, you would stop at nothing."
"In other words, I suppose you think me a typical Yankee boy? But I really was nervous, and inclined to apologise to somebody for being alive. That"s why I can"t go through another such ordeal without company; yet I wouldn"t miss this eleventh-century castle for a bag of your English sovereigns."
"If only it had been left alone, and not restored!" I groaned. "In that case we should meet no one but bats."
"We? Then you will go with me?"
"I suppose so," I sighed. "It can"t add more than a dozen grey hairs, and what are they among so many?"
A few kilometres further on we reached the "bizarre monticule," from which sprouted a still more bizarre chateau. From our low level, it was impossible to tell where the rock stopped, and where the castle began, so deftly had man seized every point of vantage offered by Nature--and "points" they literally were.
The ascent from the road to the chateau was much like climbing a fire-escape to the top of a New York sky-sc.r.a.per, but we earned the right to cry "Excelsior!" at last, had we not by that moment been speechless. History now repeated itself. I rang; the castle gate was opened, but this time by a major-domo who had already in some marvellous way learned that strangers might be expected.
Never was so appallingly hospitable a man, and I trusted that even the Boy suffered from his kindness. Madame la Baronne, who was away for the afternoon, would chide him if guests were allowed to leave her house without refreshment. Eat we must, and drink we must, in the beautiful hall evidently used as a sitting-room by the absent chatelaine. Her wine and her cakes were served on an ancient silver tray, almost as old as the family traditions, and it was not until we had done to both such justice as the major-domo thought fair that he would consent to let us go further.
The house was really of superlative interest, though spoiled here and there by eccentric modern decoration. Much of the window gla.s.s had remained intact through centuries; the walls were twelve feet thick; the oak-beamed ceilings magnificent, and the secret stairways and rooms in the thickness of the walls, bewildering; but when our conductor began leading us into the bedrooms in daily use by the ladies of the castle, my gorge rose. "This is awful," I said. "I can"t go on. What if Madame la Baronne returns and finds a strange man and a boy in her bedroom? Good heavens, now he"s opening the door of the bath!"
"We must go on," whispered the Boy, convulsed with silent laughter.
"If we don"t, the major-domo won"t understand our scruples. He"ll think we"re tired, and don"t appreciate the castle. It would never do to hurt his feelings, when he has been so kind."
"To the bitter end, then," I answered desperately; and no sooner were the words out of my mouth than the bitter end came. It consisted of a collision with the Baronne"s dressing-jacket, which hung from a hook, and tapped me on the shoulder with one empty frilled sleeve, in soft admonition. I could bear no more. One must draw the line somewhere, and I drew the line at intruding upon ladies" dressing-jackets in their most sacred fastnesses.
If I had been a woman, my pent-up emotion at this moment would have culminated in hysterics, but being a man, I merely bolted, stumbling, as I fled, over my absent hostess" bedroom slippers. I scuttled down a winding flight of tower stairs, broke incontinently into a lighted region which turned out to be a kitchen, startled the cook, apologised incontinently, and somehow found myself, like Alice in Wonderland, back in the great entrance hail. There, starting at every sound, lest a returning family party should catch me "lurking," I awaited the Boy.
We left, finally, showering francs and compliments; but I crawled out a decrepid wreck, and refused pitilessly to do more than view the exterior of other chateaux. It was evening when we saw our white hotel once more, and a haze of starlight dusted the sky and all the blue distance with silver powder.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
CHAPTER XIV
The Path of the Moon
"And then they came to the turnstile of night."
--RUDYARD KIPLING.
This was to be our last night at Aosta, perhaps our last night together, for the Boy"s plans kept his name company in some secret "hidie hole" of his mind. As, for the third time, we dined on the loggia, before the rising of the moon, we drifted into talk of intimate things. It was I who began it. I harked back to the broken conversation which had first made us friends, and to his chance sketch of Helen Blantock and her type. In that connection, I ventured to bring up the subject of his sister.
"What you said about her disillusionment interested me very much," I told him. "You see, I"ve just come through an experience something like it myself, do you mind talking about her?"
"Not in this place--and this mood--and to you," he answered. "But first--what disillusioned you?"
"Disappointment in someone I cared for,--and believed in."
"It was the same with--my sister."
"Poor Princess."
"Yes, poor Princess. Was it--a man friend who disappointed you?"
"A woman. The old story. As a matter of fact, she threw me over because another fellow had a lot more money than I."
"Horrid creature."
"Oh, just an ordinary, conventional, well brought up girl. Now you see I have as much right to a grudge against women, as your sister the Princess has against men."
"But I don"t believe the girl _could_ have been as cruel to you, as this man I"m thinking of was to--her. They"d known each other for years, since childhood. He used to call her his "little sweetheart"
when she was ten and he was fifteen. How was she to dream that even when he was a boy, he didn"t really like her better than other little girls, that already he was making calculations about her money? She thought he was different from the others, that _he_ cared for herself.
They were engaged, the bridesmaids asked, the trousseau ready, the invitations out for the wedding, and then--one night she overheard a conversation between him and a cousin of his, who was to be one of her bridesmaids. Only a few words--but they told everything. It was the other girl he loved, and had always loved. But he was poor, and so--well, you can guess the rest. My sister broke off her engagement the next day, though the man went on his knees to her, and vowed he had been mad. Then she left home at once, and soon she was taken very ill."
"She loved that worthless scoundrel so much?"
"I don"t know. I don"t think she knows. It was the destruction of an ideal which was terrible. She had clung to it. She had said to herself: "Many men may be false, and mercenary, and unscrupulous, but this one is true." Suddenly, he had ceased to exist for her. She stood alone in the world--in the dark."
"Except for you."
"Except for me, and a few friends,--one girl especially, who was heavenly to her. But the dearest girl friend can"t make up for the loss of trust in a lover."
"That"s true. By Jove, I thought I had been roughly used, but it"s nothing to this. I feel as if I knew your sister, somehow. I wonder, since you and she are such pals, that you can bear to leave her."
"She wanted to be alone. She said she didn"t feel at home in life any more, and it made her restless to be with anyone who knew her trouble, anyone who pitied her. I was ill too,--from sympathy, I suppose, and--she thought a tramp like this would do me good. So it has. Being close to nature, especially among mountains, as I"ve been for weeks now, makes one"s troubles and even one"s sister"s troubles seem small."
"You are young to feel that."
"My soul isn"t as young as my body. Maybe that"s why nature is so much to me. I am more alive when I"m away from big towns. Sunrises and sunsets are more important than the rising and falling of money markets. They--and the wind in the trees. What things they say to you!
You can"t explain; you can only feel. And when you _have_ felt, when you have heard colour, and seen sounds, you are never quite the same, quite as sad, again,--I mean if you _have_ been sad."
"I"ve said all that--precisely that--to myself lately," I exclaimed, forgetting that I was a man talking to a child. The strange little person whom I had apostrophised as "Brat" seemed not only an equal, but a superior. I found myself intensely interested in him, and all that concerned him. "Odd, that you, too, should have thought that thing about colour and sound! This evening-blue, for instance. Do you hear the music of it?"
"Yes. I"m not sure it isn"t that which has made me answer your questions. But now let"s talk of something else--or better still, let"s not talk at all, for a while."
We were silent, and I wondered if the Boy"s thoughts ran with mine, or if he had closed and locked the secret door in his brain, and listened dreamily to the sweet evening voices of this Valley of Musical Bells.
Suddenly, into the many sounds of the silence, broke a loud and jarring note; the trampling of men"s feet and horses" hoofs; loud laughter and the jingling of accoutrements. We looked over the bal.u.s.trade to see a battalion of soldiers marching at ease, on their way back from some mountain manoeuvres, and as we gazed down, they stared up, a young fellow shouting to the Boy that he had better join them.
"It"s like life calling one back," said the strange child. "I suppose one must always go on, somewhere else. And we--we must go on, though it is sweet here."
"It was what I was thinking of just now," I answered. "Are we to part company?"
The Boy laughed--an odd little laugh. "Why, that depends," said he abruptly, "on where you are going. I"ve planned to walk back over the St. Bernard to Martigny, and so by way of the Tete Noire to Chamounix.
That name--Chamounix--has always been to my ears, as Stevenson says, "like the horns of elf-land, or crimson lake." I want to come face to face with Mont Blanc, of which I"ve only seen a far-off mirage, long ago when I was a little chap, at Geneva. What are your plans?"