"Where is he?" he repeated in querulous surprise. "Why here, of course. Where should he be, madam? He will witness my signature."
Would he? Signatures! It was little of signatures I recked at that moment. I was praying to Heaven that my folly might be forgiven me, and that my lightly planned vengeance might not fall on my own head. "Joy does not kill," I was saying to myself, repeating it over and over again, and clinging to it desperately. "Joy does not kill!" But oh! was it true in the face of that white-lipped woman?
"Here!" She did not say more, but gazing at me with great dazed eyes, she raised her hand, and beckoned to me. And I had no choice but to obey--to go nearer to her, out into the light.
"Mrs. Wigram," I said hoa.r.s.ely, my voice sounding to me only as a whisper, "I have news of your late--of your husband. It is good news."
"Good news?" Did she faintly echo my words? or, as her face from which all color had pa.s.sed peered into mine, and searched it in infinite hope and infinite fear, did our two minds speak without need of physical lips? "Good news?"
"Yes," I whispered, "he is alive. The Indians did not--"
"Alfred!" Her cry rang through the room, and with it I caught her in my arms as she fell. Beard and long hair, and scar and sunburn, and strange dress--these which had deceived others--were no disguise to her--my wife. I bore her gently to the couch, and hung over her in a new paroxysm of fear. "A doctor! Quick! A doctor!" I cried to Mrs. Williams, who was already kneeling beside her. "Do not tell me," I added piteously, "that I have killed her."
"No! no! no!" the good woman answered, the tears running down her face. "Joy does not kill!"
An hour later this fear had been lifted from me, and I was walking up and down the library alone with my thankfulness; glad to be alone, yet more glad, more thankful still, when John came in with a beaming face. "You have come to tell me--" I cried eagerly, pleased that the tidings had come by his lips--"to go to her? That she will see me?"
"Her ladyship is sitting up," he replied.
"And Lord Wetherby?" I asked, pausing at the door to put the question. "He left the house at once?"
"Yes, my lord, Mr. Wigram has been gone some time."
Along the Garonne.
We ascend the valley of the Garonne on our way to Pau, which we intended to use as a base of operations against the Pyrenees. Our route, as originally mapped out, lay by sea to Bordeaux, which is three days from Liverpool; and thence by rail to our destination, a journey merely of hours. But at the last moment we determined to postpone our stay at Pau, and instead to wander along the banks of the Garonne for a time, familiarizing ourselves with the ways of the country. Then, when we had rubbed off our insular corners against the Great French Politeness, and perfected our grasp of the language in talk with the Agenois villagers, we proposed to drop gently into Pau, armed at all points, and scarcely distinguishable from Frenchmen.
So we planned: and so it came about that we were free to enjoy ourselves and look about us critically, as the smoky little tender bore us up the wide channel of the Gironde from Pauillac, where our ship bound for South America had contemptuously dropped us, to Bordeaux itself. A little below the city, the Gironde, which is really the estuary of the Garonne and Dordogne, shrinks to the Garonne pure and simple, but under either name it seems equally a waste of turbid clay-laden waters. On our left hand a bright sun--the month was November--shone warmly on a line of low hills, formed of reddish earth, and broken by great marl quarries. Woods climbed about these, and here and there a village or a little town nestled under them. On our right the bank lay low, and was fringed with willows, the country behind it being flattish, planted as it seemed to us with dead thorn-bushes, and dotted sparely with modern castellated houses. Nevertheless it was towards this modest, almost dreary landscape that we gazed; it was of it we all spoke, and to it referred, as we named names famous as Austerlitz or Waterloo, names familiar in our mouths--and our butlers"--as household words. For are not more people versed in claret than in history? And this commonplace landscape, this western bank of the Gironde, a mere peninsula lying between the river and the low Atlantic coast, is called Medoc, and embraces all the best known Bordeaux vineyards in the world. It seems as if a single parish--say St. George"s, Hanover Square, for that is a big one--might hold them all. There, see, is Chateau Lafitte. The vineyards of St. Estephe and St. Julien we have just pa.s.sed. Leoville and Latour are not far off. And now we are pa.s.sing the Chateau of Margaux itself, and gaining experience, are beginning to learn that all those little thorn-bushes stuck about the fallows, as though to protect the ground-game from poachers" nets, are vines--vines of the premier cr! The vintage is over. The grapes, black, sour things, about the size of currants, have all been picked. Where we had looked to see the endless interlacings of greenery, and swelling cl.u.s.ters dropping fatness on a carpet of turf, we find only reddish fallows, and rows of dead gooseberry bushes.
But never mind, even though this be but the first of many disillusions, and though the "sunny south" become hourly a more humorous catchword. To-day the sun is warm, the breeze is soft, the custom-house officers are civil. We air--but with the caution due to convalescents, or those of tender years--our shaky, tottering French, and get English answers. So we stride across the broad quays of Bordeaux, our hearts before us, our luggage behind, and ourselves in the best of spirits and tempers.
Bordeaux, as we saw it, was a cheerful, busy city, full of wide streets and open s.p.a.ces and handsome buildings; a bright clean, airy, city with little smoke, an immense water frontage, and one very fine bridge: a pleasant etherealized Liverpool, in fact. The white blouses and blue trousers of the workmen, the soldiers" uniforms, the bare heads of some women and the gay "kerchiefs, worn chignon-wise, of others, gave picturesqueness to the crowds circling about the kiosques, and reminded us, from time to time, that we were in a southern city. Not unnecessarily; for the thermometer fell on the day after our arrival to fifty degrees; and rain fell too, and we were quick to discover the true cause of French vivacity. The French have no fires at home. Consequently, when it is cold--and it often is very cold, even as far South as Bordeaux--their only resource is to go out, and jump about in such faint sunshine as they can find, and so make believe to be warm. Every one in Bordeaux seemed to be doing this that day.
We saw a number of churches, but I have jumbled them together in my mind, and dare not distinguish between the beauties of St. Seurin and St. Croix, St. Michel or the Cathedral. Only I attended a service on Sunday morning, and, having heard that no Frenchmen now went to church, noted with interest that of a large congregation one in every four was a man. But then Bordeaux is perhaps the most orthodox city in France, and primitive ideas, good and bad, still prevail in this southwestern province, peopled by descendants of the Huguenots and Albigenses, by devout Basques and simple Navarrese. And two things also in Bordeaux I remember--the semi-circular remains of a Roman amphitheatre, which no one visiting Bordeaux should omit to see; and, secondly, a lofty, detached spire of singular lightness and grace. It is called the Peyberland, and was built by Pierre Berland, who must have been an English subject.
His name strikes the vein of thought which was uppermost in my mind at Bordeaux. I found it impossible to forget that it had been for three centuries a half English city, and the capital of a half English province, ruled by an English king; or that up the wide Gironde, between the marly banks, Edward the Black Prince must many a time have sailed in state. Sir John Chandos and Sir Walter Manny, and many another English worthy, knew these streets as well as they knew Eastcheap or Aldgate. John of Gaunt and Talbot of Shrewsbury dwelt here, as much at home and at their ease as in York or Leicester. It is impossible not to wonder at those old Englishmen; not to think of them with pride, as we remember how firmly, the roving blood of Dane and Norman young in their veins, they grasped this prize; how long they clung to it, how boldly they flaunted the French lilies in the eyes of France; how cheerfully they crowded year by year to cross the bay in open boats! And then what cosmopolitans they were, with their manors in Devon and Aquitane, their houses in London and Bordeaux; with perhaps a snug little box at Calais, and a farm or two in Maine. How trippingly French and Provencal, and the rougher English, pa.s.sed over their tongues. They founded no empire--on the contrary they lost one. But they were the immediate ancestors of Elizabeth"s sea-dogs, for all that. In holding Guienne through those three centuries their strength was wasted. When they lost it (1451), they turned upon one another, and the Wars of the Roses took up half a century. After that they needed half-a-century"s holiday to recruit themselves; and then out flashed the Vikings" spirit again--this time to better purpose--and under Drake and Grenville and Hawkins, they, the men of Poitiers and Sluys, made the greater England.
Even in Bordeaux they have left some traces of their work. They built this cathedral which stands here, in the third city of France. Their leopards are not yet effaced from the walls of yonder castle. Their dogs--les dogues des Anglais, our waiter dubbed them, on seeing us fondle them--play about the streets, and sniff with a special friendliness at English calves. Indeed, I never saw such a place for bull-dogs--chiefly brindled ones--as Bordeaux. We drank a toast after dinner the evening before we left. It was, Les dogues des Anglais!
Bordeaux, being like London too high on the river to get the sea-breeze, has its Brighton at Arcachon. To reach the latter from the city, a railway pa.s.ses some thirty miles westward across a tract of light, sandy soil, thinly clothed with woods. As you glide through these, now in sunshine, now in shade, you catch a glimpse here and there of clearings and wooden shanties, and groups of peasants leaning on axes. Then, scarcely descending, you find yourself on the seash.o.r.e, with the Bay of Biscay before you. Nearer, a basin of deepest blue, almost cut off from the outer sea by a reef of the dunes, forms a glorified harbor. Along this basin runs a broad beach, backed by a row of magnificent hotels with s.p.a.cious terraces; and behind these lie two or three streets of rather paltry shops and restaurants. Having seen all this--the plage, the hotels, the terraces, the streets--you fancy you have seen Arcachon, and are inclined to be disappointed. But this is not Arcachon proper, which lies at the back of all this, and at the back even of that fairy-like Casino that rises on the abrupt slope of the sand-dunes behind us, and seemed the rear of all things. For on the land-side of the Casino is a forest of pines and larches, wild, far stretching, and apparently illimitable: a forest that is perpetually running up one sand-hill and down another, as if it were trying to get a view of the sea, and were not easily satisfied. And amid the vivid greens and dull blues of the foliage, glitter here and there and everywhere the daintiest of Swiss chalets or Indian bungalows, bright boxes of wood and stucco, colored and painted, and fretted and carved so delicately that one would infer that rain never fell here; or else that these were not intended for out-of-door wear. Mere toys they seem, set in smooth lawns. Flowers glow about them, and the scent of the pines is everywhere, and everywhere are shady aisles of trees hung with white mosses, and leading into the gloom of the forest. Nature and luxury have come together here; the result is that soft, languid, southern beauty, Mademoiselle Arcachon--of the Theatre des Folies Bordelaises. Yet is her const.i.tution tolerably strong--thanks to the Atlantic breezes, though the sun was bright on the day we visited her, the wind was cold and the thermometer scarcely above forty degrees. This in early November.
The next evening saw us enter a very different place in a different way. For leaving Bordeaux we reached La Reole on foot and at dusk, welcomed only by the fantastic rays of a few swinging oil lamps. La Reole is the antipodes to Arcachon. It is a small, ancient town, which, small as it is, has a great place in Froissart and Davila, and still frowns bravely down upon the rich plain of the Garonne. It stands on a steep, cloven hill that rises sheer from the wide, yellow, rush-bordered river about forty miles above Bordeaux. On the crest above the Garonne stands a castle once English, and in size and position not unlike that at Chepstow. Beside it are a church, a modern chateau, and a place of modern houses. Upon the second crest, and in the cleft between the two, are huddled together the steep alleys and crazy tottering houses, all corners and gables, of the old town. A stream on which are several mills pours through the ravine, being overhung by tall, delapidated houses of three stories, with as many sets of wooden balconies and outside stairs. One might almost step across the water from one balcony to another, so much do the houses bulge. We took infinite delight in the old-world quaintness of this scene, in the air of decay that hung about all things, in the crumbling coats of arms, the wavy, tiled roofs, the sinking houses, the swinging lanterns; above all in the gray walls of the castle, brightened here and there by the pure discs of a rose bush, or the green of ivy.
Froissart has a very pretty story--and a strange story too--to tell of La Reole. He says that Sir Walter Manny being with the English besieging it, "was reminded of his father;" that he had heard in his infancy that he had been buried there, or in that neighborhood. (Is there not a pleasant smack about that "was reminded of," and that dubious "he had heard in his infancy"?) The elder Manny, the chronicler explains, had unluckily wounded to death in a tournament at Cambray a Gascon knight; and by way of penance had agreed to go on a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James of Compostella, at Santiago in Spain. On his return he pa.s.sed near La Reole, and hearing that the brother of the King of France was besieging it, stayed to visit him; and going home one night from the royal hotel to his lodgings, was waylaid and murdered. The Gascon"s kinsmen were strongly suspected of the foul deed; but they were powerful, "and none took the part of the Lord of Manny." So he was buried in a small chapel outside La Reole; and was almost forgotten when his son, being in the neighborhood, raked up the old story, and offered a reward of a hundred crowns to any one who could show him the grave. This an old man volunteered to do, and took Sir Walter to a tomb which was further identified by a Latin inscription. Thereupon, the son, as pious as brave--a subject of Queen Philippa of Hainault, I fear, and not a trueborn Englishman, though he died in London, was buried in the Charter House, and left his lands "on either side of the sea" to the Earl of Pembroke--had the remains conveyed to Valenciennes in Hainault, and buried there.
And so the story ends. But is it not a quaint and pretty story, and does it not smack of the times when the knight errant was one day tourneying at Cambray, and the next kneeling at Santiago, and on the third was waylaid at La Reole? And does it not plaintively suggest how, after long days of waiting, the news, still dim and uncertain, came through to the quiet castle in Hainault, news so dim, so uncertain, that the good son, when chance brought him to the scene of his father"s death, could but faintly remember that it had happened there or thereabouts?
We seemed to be for a few days in a world of dying things. If La Reole was old and decadent, and showed few signs of former strength, the next place to which we came was still farther gone in decay. Port St. Marie is a straggling town lying low in a bend of the river. Most of its houses--they are large, with heavy doorways--are built in frameworks of wood after the style of our black and white houses, and have the s.p.a.ces between the beams filled with bricks; long, thin bricks of close texture and the old Roman shape, set sometimes on end, sometimes lengthwise, more often aslant; any way so that they may fill the interstices. A large number of these houses are of three stories; and each upper story projecting two or three feet beyond the one below it, the buildings seem really nodding to their fall. Many were empty, with unglazed windows, and flapping shutters, and sinking corners; and yet the stout timbers, seasoned perhaps when Simon de Montfort was governor of Guienne and had his court in Bordeaux, held together, and bound up the crumbling clay. Above one door ran the legend "Le Couronne dut devoir," a sufficiently chivalrous motto. Above others were battered stone shields. On all was the stamp of a.s.sured ruin. Neglect and poverty were written large everywhere. Time had touched the place with no caressing hand, such as Makes old bareness picturesque, And tufts with gra.s.s a feudal tower, but with mean and sordid fingers; and the result was pitifully dreary. It made our hearts ache. The very people we saw in the streets looked pallid and hopeless, like people going down the hill. Such a town, so desolate, so moribund, does not exist, thank heaven, in our more populous England. Yet in our way we enjoyed it. We gloated with something of the zest of ghouls over its decay, until having cloyed our souls with sadness, we got hurriedly away into the sunshine and the fields, where the patient, fawn-colored oxen were dragging the plough, and the countryman stood leaning on his goad to see us pa.s.s between the rows of poplars. No doubt he thought us mad to be toiling out of St. Marie with our faces set countrywards, when no great distance off lay the railway, which would take us in a few hours to Bordeaux, to the delights of cafe and boulevard. "Oh! but they are droll, these English!"
Any one leaving St. Marie must remark a singular, conical hill which rises abruptly from the plain before him. It is topped by a wooden steeple, while the dark outlines of walls and towers form a crown about its summit, and a row of cypresses rising solemnly above the lower buildings impart something of mystery to the place. It seemed to me like nothing so much as Mont St. Michel. In vain we ransacked our guide books. We could find no word of this fortress town which looked down on road and river; only in our map we discovered that its name was Clermont Dessus. Nothing daunted, however, we discovered a field path, and, climbing the hill, pa.s.sed through a ruined gateway into the silence of the place. On three sides the walls were yet fairly perfect, and within them stood some fifty houses, many in ruins, more empty, a few inhabited. The floor of one was on a level with the roof of another, and the only means of access was by steep, tortuous alleys. The church had been partially restored, but was old and still bore marks of violent usage. The graveyard on a terrace displayed twenty-four cypresses, and an ancient stone cross. Above all this rose the ruins of a castle, smaller than that at La Reole and with traces of more recent occupation. Woodwork and iron still remained adhering to the walls. What, we wondered, had been its history. A few women and children were the only human creatures it held, and we could gather nothing from them save that it belonged, or had belonged, to the "Seigneur." For our climb, however, we felt amply rewarded by the view over the valley of the Garonne, and so ran quickly down the hill and stepped out stubbornly for Agen, which we reached after twice losing our way through a too ardent desire to cling to a pleasant green path by the river.
It was dark when, footsore and tired, we gained the princ.i.p.al street; and we failed to discover our hotel. "Would you direct us to the Hotel de St. Jean?" I asked a decent-looking man who was pa.s.sing.
"How, monsieur?" he replied, after so long a pause that I feared he did not understand me; "the Hotel de St. Jean no longer exists. It has been closed a year and more."
We looked at each other in silent disgust; and he looked at us. We were fairly tired out. "Would you have the kindness, then, to tell us which is the best hotel?" I said with resignation.
"I will conduct you to the Hotel de St.----," he answered, quickly. "It is an hotel of the first cla.s.s."
But when I saw the Hotel de St. ----, we knew him for a swindler. It was a miserable place, and we would have none of it. We courteously said that we did not like it. He insisted. We broke away from him, and in a few minutes came upon the Hotel de St. Jean, its doors open to welcome us, and the light pouring ruddily from its windows. The story is trivial: I tell it because it was my ill-luck more than once to fall into the hands of this kind of tout, and be deceived by the tale that the house to which I had been advised to go was shut. On one occasion, at Guelmah, in Algeria, I was lured while inquiring for the Hotel d"Orient into the Hotel Auriol, a miserable place. In the morning I looked out of my window, and to my astonishment saw the name of the hotel in which I believed myself to be staring me in the face, painted up in large letters over the door of a house on the farther side of the square. I rubbed my eyes and wondered, and it was not until I stood in the open, and read the name of one and the other, that I recognized with a hearty laugh how I had been taken in.
From Agen, on a fine, sunny morning, we went by rail to Moissac. Here, attached to the church, is the most delightful cloister in the world, a cloister rich in arches and capitals of delicate tracery poised on slender shafts, and half hidden by luxuriant creepers, through which the light falls soft and green-tinged, as in some sea-grotto. It is a place for rest and reflection, perfectly adapted to a hot climate; whereas, he who has only seen the dull, dank portico enclosing danker grave-stones, the play-ground of cats--which in England we call a cloister--does not know what the thing is. This church boasted also a quaint doorway enriched with the more or less coa.r.s.e designs in which the monks of yore took pleasure: a doorway reputed to be one of the most curious in France.
From Moissac we went on foot to Castel Sarrasin, sometimes by the Tarn, but for the most part by the side of the great ca.n.a.l; and always, whether by the latter or the river, moving in a soft symphony of various greens, green streams, green poplars--and oh! such vistas of them!--green willows, green banks--all mingled together and fading into one another, and harmoniously blending as the evening fell with the pale pea-green of the eastern sky. It was a peaceful and silent walk through a world of restful hues.
From Castel Sarrasin, once no doubt a stronghold of the Moors, to Montauban we went by train. Montauban, on the Tarn, is a busy place, but a picturesque one also. Standing on a rough, steep hill, the town is seamed and cleft by strange, deep valleys with precipitous sides. Crazy houses with roofs of tiles, so time-stained that they have the precise appearance of strips of bark, fill these ravines and lean against their walls. Gardens cling to the ledges of the rocks. Shrubs and flowers clothe the crannies. Wooden balconies hang everywhere--and clothes-lines. We were there on market-day, and watched with amus.e.m.e.nt the teams of oxen--all fawn-colored--coming in for sale, or dragging into town the lumbering carts (much like timber-wagons, with boxes about the middle) in which Madame sat with her produce about her. Monsieur walked before the oxen, his goad on his shoulder, and a white nightcap on his head. Oxen push, they do not pull. They shove inwards against one another, the near legs of the near ox and the off legs of the off ox being protruded at a considerable angle to get a good purchase. Very frequently only the feet so used are shod. The driver always goes before them, and as they follow with lowered heads, they are perfect images of patient resignation.
An old farmer, stout and jolly-looking, presently met us loitering on the bridge, and after a long period of staring, spoke to us. "Are you Germans?" he asked.
"No," I replied with courteous determination, "we are English." He still eyed us with some suspicion, and after a pause fell to questioning us about our country. Had we bread, and what kind of bread? had we any railways?
"Yes," I answered proudly to this last, "we have trains that travel at the rate of a hundred kilometres an hour!" A trifling exaggeration it may be, but human and pardonable.
He gravely nodded his head, however, as if he believed it, and meant to pose his wife and neighbors with it when he reached home. "You have grapes and wine?" he continued.
"We grow grapes under gla.s.s," I explained, "in gla.s.s houses. In the open air it is generally too cold for them."
"What!" he exclaimed, his jovial face clouding over as it occurred to him that I was not in earnest. "Will you kindly say that again?"
I did as he wished. But when I had made the matter as clear as I could, he answered stoutly, "No! It is impossible! Either I do not understand you, or you do not understand me!" And he went on his way in a pa.s.sion. He could believe in the Irish Mail; but the cultivation of vines under gla.s.s was a thing outside his ideas of the world"s economy.
From the place at Montauban, an open s.p.a.ce pleasantly laid out on the brow of the hill, it is said that the Pyrenees can be seen on a fine day. We had a fine day, but we saw no sign of the mountains--our land at Beulah--though we looked long and lingeringly.
Attracted by a name which seemed familiar to us, and had a ring about it as of feudal and knightly times, we made a diversion from here to Cahors on the Lot, an old city standing in a fertile basin, among bare, brown hills. We were disappointed in the first appearance of the town. The river still runs round three sides of it, but the ramparts have been turned into gardens where they have not been levelled; only one tower of the castle survives; and though there are some picturesque houses, the town is for the most part modern, and devoted to Gambetta who was born in it. The cathedral, surmounted by one heavy tower, backed by three domes in a row, is imposing in its bulky ugliness. Its floor is much lower than the marketplace without: so that on entering through the west door you find a flight of steps before you, and the congregation at your feet immersed in candlelit gloom. These steps at the Sunday morning service were crowded by kneeling hucksters and market-women with their baskets, who had quietly entered as a matter of course from the market, which was in full swing without, and were devoutly telling their beads, or listening to a sermon preached by a bishop--a Count-Bishop, too, whose pastoral ring was still a prominent feature in the scene, so skilfully did he wave and display it. At Cahors we were much pleased with one of the bridges, from which rise three Flemish-looking towers. They form as many gateways, and from every point of view are singularly picturesque. This bridge may have stood there in its present state when Henry of Navarre did at Cahors his most famous deed. A strong garrison was at the time holding the city for the Catholic party, but Henry, smarting under the loss of La Reole, which had been betrayed by its governor, determined to seize Cahors. Accordingly he came to it with fourteen hundred men, and leaving one half of this force outside to cover his night attack, blew in a gate with a petard and entered with the rest, being himself the seventh to pa.s.s in. A furious battle in the streets ensued, but when day broke, the Huguenots had mastered a small part of the city only, and reinforcements for the enemy arriving, Henry"s followers begged him to retire. "No!" he answered, fighting on with his back to a shop, "I will not retire! My only retreat from this town shall be the retreat of my soul from my body!" He kept his word. Street by street and house by house, he reduced the town, neither side asking or giving quarter. But it was not until the fifth night after his entrance that he completely mastered the place, a feat which is generally allowed to stand highest among his warlike exploits.
At Cahors it was that we first came under the influence of his name; but thereafter it grew and grew, a bigger factor in the past, a more prominent object in our thoughts in the present, the farther south we travelled; until at Pau, his birthplace and capital, the son of Jeanne d"Albret, the Bearnais, the Navarrese, the Protector of the Religion, Henri Quatre, Henry the Great, seemed to fill all past history, and dwarf all other figures. We have in English story no royal personage, no prominent life even, at once so picturesque, so rich in surprises, so lovable, and so blameworthy. Hot-blooded and cool-headed, daring to rashness, astute to meanness, a professor and a profligate, merciful, affectionate, yet letting nothing intervene between him and his aims--who that is man shall judge him? Surely the wine which Henry"s father raised to his new-born lips, the cold water which was dashed in his hour-old face, the national song his mother sang at his birth, did really reproduce themselves in his life.
Leaving Cahors in the evening, we slept at a small village called Lelbenque, and were on foot before eight next day, and on our way across the hills to Caylus. The country through which we pa.s.sed in the fresh morning air, a range of bleak lime-stone heights spa.r.s.ely covered with oak trees, seemed thinly peopled, and little tilled. Here and there in the wooded depths of a valley, we came upon a sparkling brook and a few comfortable farm-houses nestling among fruit trees, and protected by abrupt limestone walls from the cold winds which swept across the uplands. The distance to Caylus was sixteen miles. There were no inns, and as we had breakfasted rather meagrely on coffee and bread, we were driven to beg something at one of the farm-houses. There were only women at home, and these were with reason astonished to see foreign tramps in that out-of-the-way district. They seemed even a little afraid of us, but we got what we wanted notwithstanding the growling of the dogs; and our offer of payment was declined with suspicious abruptness. I fancy that they suspected us of wanting change.
About mid-day we pa.s.sed over the last ridge of the uplands, and saw below us a narrow fertile valley squeezed in between mountain-walls. Halfway through this gorge and in the middle of it, a hill or rock rose abruptly almost to the height of a thousand feet. On this, lording it over the road, stood Caylus, its houses and gardens descending terrace by terrace from the castle-nucleus on the crest almost to the road. Very old was the church, about the porch of which are carved green animals in the act of nibbling one another"s tails under the superintendence of St. Michael. We took it for St. Michael. Old, too, seemed the great stone house opposite, known as the Maison du Loup, and bearing uncouth masks and figures of wolves in high relief on its front. Older still we judged the market-place to be, which built of wood rests on stone pillars; and the heavy Arcade or "Row" which stands in the same tiny square with it, and the beetle-browed wynds that lead to it--all old, gray, heavy, time-stained, but still solid. In the market hall we noticed three ancient corn-measures; hollows scooped out in stones that formed part of the fabric of the hall, with to each a horizontal outlet or spout at the side, through which the grain when measured might escape into bag or basket. Even while we were examining these we remarked women sitting outside the doors about us, removing the grain from stalks of maize, and plaiting various articles with the straw.
The weather-beaten castle belongs to Madame St. Cyr, but was occupied when we visited it by Mr. Wilton, an Englishman, who was not at home. His housekeeper, however, kindly allowed us to go over the building, and we found the view from the leads of the keep--used, I suspect, as a smoking-room--very charming. Caylus, to sum up, is difficult of access and is not even named in "Murray," but I can highly recommend it as a quaint example of a mediaeval town, such as cannot now be found in England without much searching.
From it we pa.s.sed by means of a top-heavy, jingling country coach to St. Anthonin, and so by rail to Albi on the Tarn, Albi of the Albigenses, the unhappy sect whose fate confutes the saying that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church. About Albi, from which place they took their name, they grew and flourished in the latter half of the twelfth century. But seventy years later, notwithstanding the attempt which their feudal lord, Raymond of Toulouse, made to protect them, they were virtually extinct. Save that they dissented from the Romish Church, their very doctrines are now unknown or to be found only in the writings of their enemies, and their story and fortunes are too often confounded with those of the Waldenses. Simon de Montfort, the father of our Simon de Montfort, took a conspicuous part in the cruel deeds which attended their suppression. At the fall of Beziers, heretic and churchman were put to the sword together. "Slay all--G.o.d will know His own," said the gentle Abbot Arnold. And in a sense wisely: for it is only the man of half measures who fails as a persecutor. To be perfectly ruthless, perfectly thorough in the work, is to be successful also. At any rate at Albi, which, like Cahors, stands among hills, there are no traces of the Albigenses left; not even such a story as rings about the name of Beziers with fire. Rather the great cathedral proclaims Rome"s victory. Built externally of bricks, it is a huge blind oblong with an apsidal end. A swelling base and rounded b.u.t.tresses add to its heavy appearance. Yet it is very lofty. The monstrous red tower hung about with giddy balconies rises nearly to the height of three hundred feet, while the church itself, the lower part of which has no openings or windows, seems half that height. In a word, the whole is as much a fortress as a cathedral. Lofty flights of steps lead to a raised porch, formed by three arches decorated with carvings lately and successfully restored. Entering the church through this we find the interior a striking sight. In shape it is a vast hall surrounded by chapels in two stories, and with a choir screened off at one end. The interior still remains in the state to which our Puritans objected, the state probably characterized more churches than we now imagine. It is covered from ceiling to floor with frescoes and paintings and scrollwork, some gaudy, some subdued, some good, some bad. The very statues are painted and gilded, and although here and there the effect is garish and unpleasing, I do not agree that the appearance of the whole, as the vast ma.s.s of color presents itself to the eyes, broken by the exquisite carvings of the stone screen or a bevy of tinted marbles, is absolutely unharmonious. I found it more pleasing than I expected. And then what would have been the effect of these plain walls in their naked monotony?
The paintings are mainly of the date of Francis I., say about 1520. Two frescoes of h.e.l.l and the Pa.s.sions, done by Italian artists, cover the west end--cover acres of it as it seems; and in a chapel, among other anachronisms is a notable picture of Christ, in which He is figured in a hat and feather and the dress of a courtier of the time in the midst of Roman soldiers who are kicking Him along. A great store of information as to the dresses and customs of the early part of the sixteenth century is laid up here, to be ransacked by any one who will take the trouble to closely inspect this huge interior. The groups painted upon the walls, groups of people fighting, tourneying, feasting, dancing, dying--ay, and doing many things scarcely adapted to church decoration--are to be counted by thousands; as are the gold stars that stud the bright blue ceiling. There is something suggestive in the portrayal of these things in this place; they seem to tell of a faith which, with all its scandals, abuses, and laxity, was bound up intimately with the life of the people, with their joys as well as their griefs; and so smacked of One who did not consider the price of sparrows as beneath knowledge.
At any rate we were pleased with these things. The interior of Albi Cathedral may not be in the best taste. It may be meretricious, it may be gilt rather than of gold. But it is curious; it is almost unique; it is a museum in itself; and to an Englishman accustomed to the cold if correct lines of a Gothic church, its warmth and color afford a not unwelcome change.
At Auch we arrived at night, and found it to be an old-fashioned archiepiscopal city on the summit and southern slope of a precipitous hill. Here we came upon the first traces--a Spanish pedler, a Navarrese bonnet--of that strange borderland between Spain and Western France in which three languages and a dozen patois, French, Spanish, Basque, the Langue d"Oc, the Langue d"Or, and Gascon and Provencal and the tongue of Andorra, and I know not what others, are fighting for the mastery: where two great nations now peaceably march, dividing between them the wild country where the kingdom of Navarre once sat enthroned on hills with the free Basque communities about her. It is a country rich in memories of independence, of strife; of brigandage, of romance; of the free life of the hunter; a land of snow-clad peaks and deep valleys, and rolling, wooded hills full of creatures elsewhere extinct, bears, and izards, and, shall I add, Basques. Here are Roncesvalles and the Bida.s.soa, Fontarabia and Orthez, San Sebastian and the Isle of Peac.o.c.ks. Moor and Paladin, Scot and Spaniard, Charlemagne and Wellington, have all pa.s.sed this way and left deep foot-prints.
And Auch stands on the verge of this strange country; an old city, but full of energy and with no trace of decay. From the river, flights of wide steps with s.p.a.cious landings, gay with flowers and fountains, climb the southern face of the hill, which the best road-maker would find impracticable. At the head of these steps and commanding extensive prospects stands the cathedral, a beacon to all the country between it and the skirts of the mountains. The building is fine, but its pride lies in the wood carvings of the unrivalled choir. My guide, an ex-soldier, also pointed out with pride some cymbals presented to the cathedral by the first Napoleon: trophies, so he told me, of the Egyptian campaign.
We wandered out in the afternoon to the brow of a ridge of hills lying on the far side of the river, and throwing ourselves down upon some heather and bracken--it was a warm and sunny but not very clear day--began to cast speculative glances towards Spain. But while we thought that we were looking southwards our eyes were really turned too much to the east. And presently we discovered this in a strange way. For glancing by chance towards the skyline on our right, we saw, first, a brown autumnal landscape of woods and hills, and beyond this a long, gray cloud, the horizon, as we thought; and above that--ah! what was it we saw above that? A line of silvery peaks, gleaming in a gray, sheeny atmosphere of their own, so pure, so soft, so far above this world of ours, that as the words "The Pyrenees!" broke the first moments of astonished silence, we felt that for once the thing long looked for had pa.s.sed our expectations! Our hearts fastened upon the distance. The pleasant landscape spread out before us lost its charms. It was homely, it was flat, it was commonplace, it was of the earth earthy, beside the serene beauty of the snowy crests and untrodden wastes that shone and sparkled in that far distance, and anon grew cold and dim as the veil of cloud was drawn before them even while we watched.
When they were gone, we felt that nothing save the mountains would now satisfy us. We had a craving for them, such as I have sometimes felt for the sea. A sudden conviction that we were wasting our time in a world of small things, while the wonders of the hills lay close at hand, overwhelmed us. We hurried homewards, talking of peaks, and glaciers, and pa.s.ses, of Cauteret and Gavarnie, Mont Perdu and the Pic du Midi; and packed in the same state of pleasant excitement. The next morning saw us pa.s.sing through the same country, rich in autumn tints, in leafy bottoms, and rippling streams, which we had seen stretched out before us. And the evening saw us stand on the famous Place Royale, hard by the castle where Henry of Navarre was born, feasting our eyes on the cold, bright tints of the great mountains, seen sharp and clear above the Jurance hills, and listening to the rushing waters of the Gave. Our Garonne pilgrimage was over.