From Calais I journeyed to Paris, where I stayed until a bill of exchange upon some French merchants, which I had asked Elmscott to procure for me, came to hand, With it was enclosed a letter from my cousin and yet another from Jack Larke.
“This letter,” wrote Elmscott, “was brought to your lodging the day after you left London. L’affaire Marston has caused much astonishment, Your friends almost refused to credit you with the exploit. The family, however, is raised to a clamorous pitch of anger against you; it has influence at Court, and the King has no liking for duels.”
The letter from Larke recounted the homely details of the country-side, and dwelt in particular upon the plan of Sir J. Lowther of Stockbridge to appoint a new carrier between Kendal and Whitehaven, so that the shipment of Kendal cottons to Virginia might be facilitated. The obstacle to the scheme, he declared, was that the road ran over Hard Knott, which in winter and spring is frequently impassable for the snow. I wrote back to him that he should refund to Elmscott with all despatch the amount of the bill of exchange, and relating shortly the causes which kept me abroad, bade him, if he were so minded, join me towards the end of September at Venice. Of my visit to Lukstein I said never a word, the consequence of it was too doubtful. I shrank from setting out my hopes and fears openly upon paper. If I succeeded, I could better explain the matter to him in speech, and take him back with me again to the Castle. If I failed, I should avoid the need of making any explanation whatsoever.
From Paris I travelled into Austria; end so one sunset, in the latter days of August, drove up to the door of “Der Goldener Adler” at Glurns. From this inn I sent Udal forward with a note to Countess Lukstein, announcing my arrival in the neighbourhood, and asking whether she would be willing to receive me. The next day he returned with Otto Krax, and brought me a message of very kindly welcome. Otto, himself, for once, unbent from his grave demeanour, saying that it was long since the Castle had been brightened with a guest, and that for his part he trusted I would be in no great hurry to depart.
I gathered no little comfort from his greeting, you may be sure, and I set off forthwith to the Castle. The valley which, when I last rode through it, showed stark and desolate in its snow drapery, now lay basking in the lusty summer, and seemed to smile upon my visit. The lime-trees were in leaf along the road, wild strawberries, red as the lips of my mistress, peeped from the grasses, on either side cornfields spread up the lower slopes to meet the serried pines, which were broken here and there by a green gap, where the winter snows had driven a track. Behind the ridge of the hills I could see mountains towering up with bastions of ice, which had a look peculiarly rich and soft, like white velvet. The air was fragrant with the scent of flowers, and musical with the voices of innumerable streams. Even Lukstein, which had worn so bare and menacing an aspect in the gray twilight of that November afternoon, now nestled warmly upon its tiny plateau, the red-pointed roofs of its turrets glowing against the green background of firs.
I was received at the Castle by a priest, who informed me that the Countess was indisposed, and wished him to express her regrets that she was unable to welcome me in person. I was much chapfallen and chilled by this vicarious greeting, since on the way from Glurns I had given free play to all sorts of foolish imaginings. The priest, who was a kinsman of the Countess, conducted me very politely to the rooms prepared for me.
“Mr Buckler,” said he, “it is only your face that is strange to me; for I have heard so much of you from your hostess that I made your acquaintance some while ago.” Whereat I recovered something of my spirits.
He led me through the great hall, paved with roughish slabs of stone, and up a wide staircase to a gallery which ran round the four sides of the wall. From that he turned off into a corridor, which ran, as I guessed, through the smaller wing of the building towards the tower. At the extreme end he opened a door and bowed me into a large room lit by two windows opposite to one another. One of these commanded the little ravine which pierced back wards into the hills beside the Castle, and was called the Senner Thai; the other window looked out on to the garden. Moving towards this last, I perceived, on the left hand, the arbour of pinewood and the parapet on which I had lain concealed; the main wing of the Castle stretched out upon the right, and I realised, with an uneasy shiver, that I had been given the bedroom of Count Lukstein. The moment I realised this my eyes went straight to that corner, where I knew the little staircase to be. The door of it stood by the head of the bed, and was almost concealed in the hangings.
“It leads,” said the priest, interpreting my glance “to a little room below; but the room gives only on to the garden, and the door has not been used this many a month.”
He went over to it as he spoke, and tried the handle. The door was locked, but the key remained in the lock. It creaked and grated when he turned it, as though it had rusted in the keyhole. Together we went down the little winding stairway and into the chamber at the bottom. What wonder that I hesitated on the last step with a failing heart, and needed the invitation of the priest to nerve me to cross the threshold! Not a single thing had been moved since I stood there last. But for the clouds of dust, which rose at each movement that we made, I could have believed this day was the morrow of our deadly encounter. The table still lay overturned upon the floor, the rugs and skins were heaped and disordered by the trampling of our feet, the curtain hung half-torn from the vallance, where I had cowered in it with clutching hands as the Countess passed through the window on to the snow. Nothing had been touched. Yes, one thing; for as I glanced about the room, I saw my pistol dangling from a nail upon the hood of the fireplace.
“The room, you think, Mr Buckler, does little credit to our housekeeping?” said the priest. “But ’tis unswept and uncleansed of a set purpose. As you see it now, so it was on the fifteenth, night of last November, and the Countess our mistress wills that so it shall remain.”
“There is some story.” I replied, with such indifference as I could assume, “some story connected with the room?”
“Ay, a story of midnight crime—of crime that struck at the roots of the Lukstein race, that breaks the line of a family which has ruled here for centuries, and must in a few years make its very name to perish off the earth. Count Lukstein was the last of his race, and in this room was he slain upon his bridal night.”
Sombre as were the words, the priest’s voice seemed to have something of exultation in its tone, and unwarily I remarked on it.
“God works out His purposes by ways we cannot understand,” he explained, with a humility that struck me as exaggerated and insincere. “Unless Countess Lukstein marries again, the Castle and its demesne will pass into the holy keeping of the Church.”
He looked steadily at me while he spoke, and I wondered whether he meant his utterance to convey a menace and warning.
“What if the Countess married a true son of the Church?” I hastened to answer. “Would he not second and further her intention?”
“I think, Mr Buckler, that you have more faith in mankind than knowledge of the world. But ’twas of the room that we were speaking. Until that crime is brought to light, the room may neither be swept nor cleansed.”
“You hope, then, to discover—” I began.
“Nay, nay!” said he. “’Tis not with us that the discovery rests. Look you, sin is not a dead thing like these tables, to which each day adds a covering of dust; it is rather a plant that each day throws out fibres towards the sun, bury it deep as you will in the earth. Surely, surely it will make itself known—this very afternoon, maybe, or maybe in years to come; maybe not until the Day of Wrath. God chooses His own time.”
Very solemnly he crossed himself, and led the way back to the bedroom above.
This conversation increased my anxiety to unburden myself to Ilga. For it was no crime that I had committed, but an act of common justice. But although the house hold, apart from the servants and retainers, who made indeed a veritable army, consisted only of the Countess, Mademoiselle Durette, and Father Spaur, as the priest was named, I found it impossible to hit upon an occasion.
In the first place, the Countess herself was, without doubt, ailing and indisposed. She would come down late in the morning with heavy eyes and a weariful face, as though she slept but little. ’Twas no better, moreover, when she joined us, for she treated me; though ever with courtesy as befitted a hostess, still with a certain distance; and at times, when she thought I was interested in some talk and had no eyes for her, I would catch a troubled look upon her face, wherein anger and sorrow seemed equally mixed. Nor, indeed, could I ever come upon her alone, and such hints as I put forward to bring such a consummation about were purposely misunderstood. In truth, the priest stood between us. I set the changed manner of Countess Lukstein entirely to his account, believing that he was studiously poisoning her mind against me, and maybe persuading her that I did but pursue her wealth like any vulgar adventurer. I suggested as much to Mademoiselle Durette, who showed me great kindness in this nadir of my fortunes.
“I know not what to make of it,” she replied, “for Ilga has shut me from her confidence of late. But there is something of this kind afoot, I fear, for Father Spaur is continually with her, and ’twas ever his fashion to ascribe a secret and underhand motive for all one’s doings.”
The Father, indeed, was perpetually with either Ilga or myself. If he chanced not to be closeted with the Countess, he would dance indefatigable attendance upon me, devising excursions into the mountains or in pursuit of the chamois, which abounded in great numbers among the higher forests of the ravine.
On these latter occasions he would depute Otto Krax, who was, as I soon learned, the chief huntsman of the Castle, to take his place with me, pleading his own age with needless effusion as an excuse for his absence. In the company of Otto, then, I gained much knowledge of the locality, and in particular of the great ice-clad mountain which blocked the head of the ravine. For the chase led us many a time high up the slopes above the trees to where the ice lay in great tongues all cracked and ridged across like waves frozen at the crest; and at times, growing yet more adventurous with the heat of our pursuit, we would ascend still higher, making long circuits and detours about the cliffs and gullies to get to windward of our quarry; so that I saw this mountain from many points of view, and gained a knowledge of its character and formation which was afterwards to stand me in good stead.
The natives termed it the “Wildthurm,” and approached it ever with the greatest reluctance and with much commending of their souls to God. For the spirits of the lost, they said, circled in agony about its summit, and might be heard at noonday no less often than at night, piercing the air with a wail of lamentation. It may be even as they held; but I was spared the manifestation of their presence when I invaded their abode, and found no denizens of that solitary region more terrible than the eagles which built their nests upon the topmost cliffs. Towards the ravine the “Wildthurm” towered in a stupendous wall of rock of thousands of feet, but so sheer that even the chamois, however encompassed, never sought escape that way. From the apex of this wall a ridge of ice ran backwards in a narrow line and sloped outwards on either side, so that it looked like nothing so much as a gipsy’s tent of white canvas.
When we sought diversion upon lower ground, hawking or riding in the valley, Father Spaur himself would bear me company. In fact, I never seemed to journey a mile from the Castle without either Otto or the priest to keep me in surveillance.
Father Spaur, though past his climateric, was of a tall, massive build, and, I judged, of great muscular strength. His hair was perfectly white, and threw into relief his broad, tanned face, which wore as a rule an uninterested bovine expression, as of one whom neither trouble nor thought had ever touched. One afternoon, however, as we were riding up the hillside towards the Castle, I chanced to make mention of the persecution of the Protestants in France, whereof I had been a witness during my stay at Paris, and ventured, though a Catholic, to criticise the French King’s action in abrogating the edict of Nantes.
“Cruelty, Mr Buckler!” he exclaimed, reining in his horse, with his eyes aglare, and his fleshy face of a sudden shining with animation. ’Twas as though some one had lit a lamp behind a curtain. “Cruelty! ’Tis the idlest name that was ever invented. Look you: a general throws a thousand troops upon certain death. Is not that cruelty? Yet if he faltered he would fail in his duty. If the men shrank, they in theirs. Cruelty is the law of life. Nay, more, for with that word the wicked stigmatise the law of God. Never a spring comes upon these hills but it buries numbers of our villagers beneath its slipping snowdrifts. You have seen the crosses on the slopes yourself. They perish, and through no foolhardiness of their own. Is not that what you term cruelty? Take a wider view. Is there not cruelty in the very making of man? We are born with minds curious after knowledge, and yet we only gain knowledge by much suffering and labour—an infinitesimal drop after years of thirst. Take it yet higher. The holy Church teaches us that God upon His throne is happy; yet He condemns the guilty to torment. With a smile, we must believe He condemns the guilty. Judge that by our poor weak understanding: is it not cruelty? What you term cruelty is a law of God—difficult, unintelligible, but a law of God, and therefore good.”
’Twas a strange discourse, delivered with a ringing voice of exaltation, and thereafter my thoughts did more justice to the subtlety of his intellect.
Meanwhile the days slipped on and brought me no nearer to the fulfilment of my purpose. The time had come, moreover, when I must set off into Italy if I was to meet Larke at Venice as I had most faithfully promised. I resolved, then, to put an end to a visit which I saw brought no happiness to my mistress, and wasted me with impatience and despondency. I was minded to go down into Italy, and taking Jack with me to set sail for the Indies, and ease my heart, if so I might, with viewing of the many wonders of those parts. So choosing an occasion when we were all dining together in the great parlour on the first floor of the Castle, I thanked the Countess for the hospitality which she had shown me, and fixed my departure for the next day. For a while there was silence, Ilga rising suddenly from the table and walking over to the wide-open windows, where she stood with her back turned and looked out across the waving valley of the Adige.
“It seems that we have been guilty of some discourtesy, Mr Buckler, since you leave us so abruptly,” said Father Spaur with a great perturbation.
Upon that point I hastened to set him right; for indeed I had been so hedged in by attention and ceremony that I should have been well content with a little neglect.
“Then,” he continued, with an easy laugh, “we shall make bold to keep you. If we bring guests so far to visit us, we cannot speed them away so soon. Doubtless the Castle is dull to you who come fresh from London and Paris—”
“Nay,” said I with some impatience, for I thought it unfair that he should attribute such motives to me. “Madame will bear me out that I have little liking for town pleasures.” I turned towards her, but she made no sign or movement, and appeared not to have heard me, “I am pledged to meet a friend at Venice, and, as it is, I have overstayed my time.”
“Oh! you have a friend awaiting you,” said the priest slowly. “You are very prudent, Mr Buckler.”
The Countess turned swiftly about her eyes wide open and staring like one dismayed.
“Prudent?” I exclaimed in perplexity.
“I mean,” said the priest, flushing a dark red and dropping his voice, “I mean that if one fixes so precise a limit to one’s visit, one guards against any inclination to prolong it.” He spoke with a meaning glance in the direction of the Countess who had turned away again. “The heart says ‘stay’, prudence ‘go’. Is it not the case?” he whispered, and he smiled with an awkward effort at archness, which, upon his heavy face, was little short of grotesque.
Now his words and manner perplexed me greatly, for at the moment of my coming to Lukstein, he had seemed most plainly to warn me against encouraging any passion for Ilga, and his conduct since in disparting us had assured me that I had rightly guessed his intention. Yet here was he urging me to extend my stay, and sneering at my prudence for not giving free play to that passion.
“Besides,” he continued, raising his voice again, “if you go to-morrow you will miss the best entertainment that our poor domain provides. We are to have a great hunt, wherein some of our neighbours will join us, and Otto informs us that you have great partiality for the sport, and extraordinary skill and nimbleness upon mountains. In a week, moreover, the headsman of our village is to marry. ’Tis a great event in Lukstein, and indeed, to a stranger well worth witnessing, for there are many quaint and curious customs to be observed which are not met with elsewhere.”
He added many other inducements, so that at last I felt some shame at persisting in my refusal But, alter all, the Countess was my hostess, and she had said never a word, but had turned back again to the window as though she would not meddle in the matter. At last, however, she broke in upon the priest, keeping, however, her face still set towards the landscape.
“Could you not send forward your servant, Mr Buckler, to meet your friend, and remain with us this week? As Father Spaur says, the marriage will be well worth seeing, and since you are so pressed, you may leave here that very night.”
There was, however, no heartiness in her invitation; the words dropped reluctantly from her lips, as if compelled by mere politeness towards her guest.
“The most suitable plan!” cried the priest, starting up. “Send your man to Venice, and yourself follow afterwards.”
I explained that Udal was little accustomed to travelling in strange countries, and had no knowledge of either the German or Italian tongues; and to put a close to the discussion, I rose from my seat and walked away to the end of the apartment, where I busied myself over some weapons that hung upon the wall. In a minute or so I heard the door close softly, and facing about, I saw that the priest and Mlle. Durette, who had taken no part in any of this talk, had departed out of the room. The Countess came towards me.
“I sent them away,” she said, with a wan smile, and a voice subdued to great gentleness. “I have no thought to—to part with you so soon. Stay out this week. You—you told me that you had something which you wished to say.”
“Madame,” said I, snatching eagerly at her hand, “you also told me that you had guessed it.”
“Not now; not now.” She slipped her hand from my grasp with an imploring cry, and held it outspread before my face to check my words. “Not now. I could not bear it. Oh, I would that I had more strength to resist, or more weakness to succumb.”
Never had I heard such pain in a human voice: never have I seen features so wrung with suffering. The sight of her cut me to the heart.
“Listen,” she went on, controlling herself after a moment, though her voice still trembled with agitation, and now and again ran upwards into an odd laugh, the like of which I had never hearkened t before or since. ’Twas the most pitiful sound that ever jarred on a man’s ears. “On the night of the marriage the villagers will come to the Castle to dance in the Great Hall. That night you shall speak to me, and a carriage shall be ready to take you away afterwards, if you will. Until that night be ‘prudent’.”
She gave me no time to answer her, but ran to the door, and so out of the room. I could hear her footsteps falling uncertainly along the gallery, as though she stumbled while she ran, and a great anger against the priest flamed up in my breast. ‘Strength to resist or weakness to succumb.’ Doubtless the words would have bewildered me, like the oracles of old Greece, but for what I suspicioned in the priest. Now, however, in the blindness of my thoughts, I construed them as the confirmation of my belief that he was practising all his arts upon Ilga to secure Lukstein for the Church. ’Twas Father Spaur, I imagined, whom she had neither the strength to resist nor the weakness to yield to, and I fancied that I was set upon a second contest for the winning of her, though this time with a more subtle and noteworthy antagonist.
And yet for all my fears, for all Ilga’s trouble, with such selfish pertinacity do a lover’s reflections seek to enhearten his love, I could not but feel a throb of joy for that she had so plainly shown to me what the struggle cost her.