CHAPTER V

VISITING THE SORCERESS

The conveyance and escort for Ethel, with Suzanne and Helia, were awaiting them at the other side of the city. There were also horses for Will and Phil. Sœurette was to remain behind, to keep company with the little Monseigneur. Grandma returned to the yacht, quite out of sympathy with living in old castles which have plenty of stairways but no elevators.

Ethel had already seen the city; yet she had an ever new pleasure in these comings and goings. Her inquisitiveness was satisfied to the full. She was making studies of a population as ignorant as it was unknown, anchored to its old-time customs, and closed in by its mountains, like monks within their cloisters. Yet beneath all this torpor one could feel unconquerable pride and love of vengeance and of glory.

These motionless shopkeepers would sell you a pair of slippers or a whole outfit of pistols and daggers for the belt. All these warlike accoutrements were amusements to Ethel; she found them even on the porter who peacefully brought her packages from the hall of the throne to the carriage.

As soon as they had come down from the castle, after turning back a last time to salute the duke, whom etiquette bound to the ramparts, along with Caracal, the party entering the town seemed passing through a haunt of brigands. Pieces of basket-work hung before the shops. Suspended on nails in the shade were the bridles of horses, shining with brass, and red leather saddles, and swords. Savage eyes looked out to see them go by.

The season for heavy siestas had passed. All the day long the crowd thronged the street. Shepherds, clad in hairy goatskins and shod with leather sandals, mingled with soldiers, at whose side was slung long Albanian rifles. They talked politics as they drank their coffee.

Others displayed the cylindric turban, the knit silken girdle, and the dagger-sheath of brass. Women with knit boots, and dressed in scarlet embroidered with arabesques, sang to the accompaniment of the guzla—that lyre with its single string made of twisted hair. They droned out a psalmody of mountaineers, recalling the ancient glories of their country.

Adalbert’s tutor, who accompanied the party, translated and explained the songs.

The blood sprang to the cheeks of the impetuous queen; Then every soldier satisfied his vengeance; None like Morgana!

Swift and daring she struck this one and pierced that one! Ah, she poured out to her enemies a bitter drink! Thus they all perished!

Everywhere the impassioned looks and voices of the crowd made them feel that war was near. All these peasants, coming from different regions, were stirred by a common desire—to see the return of the heroic days when Morgana and Rhodaïs and the great ancestresses had led the people to victory.

Every one in the street drew aside as the party passed. The rumor had run that a queen was to visit the duke—a young maiden from unknown lands beyond the sea, where the sun sets. Which one was it? Ethel or Helia? Perhaps both? The people were in admiration at their noble air. Women grown prematurely old in the harsh labor of the fields were in ecstasy at their beauty. To them the two young girls seemed of a higher race, like that of the saints and heroines in the stained-glass windows of their churches; they followed them with their eyes, and took up again their chants in honor of Morgana.

Morgana was the universal inspiration; she was everywhere. In the back of gloomy shops icons were to be seen—St. Morgana, with the Virgin, dimly lighted by a burning float. There was something touching in the faith which this people had in their national legends.

Ethel appreciated the silence of the crowd on the jetty that evening when the duke quitted the yacht. No; his people did not recognize themselves in him. They still had a certain respect for him, for the sake of his glorious ancestors; but the people were prepared to abandon him, and to take shelter in their dreams.

One would have said that the power of the state was no longer in the ducal castle, but far away by the spurs of the Kutsch-kom Mountain, where lived the sorceress, the primitive oracle of her race. They paid no attention to their effeminate master, and listened only to this ancestral voice, that foretold national happiness.

“Phil,” said Ethel, “you know the proverb, ‘When you are in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ It’s a useless recommendation, for we can’t help doing it. But even if we don’t act like this people, we are rather Morganian in our thoughts, are we not? And it is the women who interest me chiefly,” Ethel continued. “It is their heroines whose remembrance fills the people with a hope beyond realization. And yet—what if it should be realized? We can never be certain.”

Phil was silent,—Helia was at his side.

“You look a little tired,” Ethel said to her.

Phil took Helia’s arm; and they walked together, talking little, making indifferent remarks to each other, each alone with his own innermost thoughts. They were leaving the weavers’ street for that of the armorers.

“There is enough here to cut the throats of a nation!” Phil could not help observing.

They were between the lines of shops. The sun’s rays fell straight down, striking flashes from the niello work of the rifles, from the ivory of the Albanese pistols, and from the clusters of daggers hanging from their hooks. They were of every form and size: the Malay creese, curved zigzag like a lightning-flash; Venetian stilettos, as pointed as a bee’s sting; and others pierced with holes, for their amalgam of arsenic and grease, looking like blotches. Besides the slender, elegant blade to be worn at the garter, there were horn-handled knives, real bandits’ weapons, made to stick into the back.

Phil thought of the landscape he had painted for Ethel when he had come from the circus, and of the man who had sought for a knife in his pocket, threatening Helia from a distance.

That very moment, as if some mysterious sympathy had been set up between Helia and himself, he felt the young girl’s arm tremble in his own. Helia pressed against him in a movement of unreasoned fear.

“What is the matter, Helia?” he asked. “Does the sight of so many weapons make you nervous?”

“No, it is not that,” said Helia, looking at the market-place thronged with people.

“What are you looking at?” Phil insisted. “Has any one frightened you? Do me the honor to fear nothing when on my arm, Helia!”

“Oh! I am afraid of nothing,” answered Helia. “Forgive me! it was surprise. I thought I saw some one, recognized some one; but no, I must be crazy—”

“You have seen some one? Whom?”

Helia was on the point of answering, “Socrate!” but she did not pronounce the name. Already he had been spoken of too much between her and Phil. Besides, she no longer could see the man. Yet she would have sworn that but now, there, behind that group, she had beheld the flat face of Socrate looking at her stealthily. It must have been an illusion. Was she now going to meet Socrate everywhere? Already, on board the yacht, one evening when she was looking from the deck into the boiler-room, she thought she had seen him in the red rays of the fires with his eyes lifted toward her, shining from a face black with coal-dust. Surely, it must have been because, when they left Marseilles, Suzanne burst into laughter, saying: “See the stokers they are taking on! There is one who looks like Socrate!”

“Do you wish me to find out?” Phil asked.

“No; remain here, Phil—here, at my side. It was just an idea I had—but do not leave me,” she added, pressing against him once more.

“A woman’s idea!” thought Phil. “I can understand it, in this country where they sell daggers in clusters as they sell bananas with us.”

The attention of both was drawn away by a change of scene. They had left the city behind them and were already in the open country. Peasants were driving their mules or pushing carts, with children perched upon bundles of straw and packs of rags. They were coming to augment the tumult of those who had taken to the city for refuge.

“It seems to me we are going the wrong way,” said Ethel, laughing; “every one is turning his back to us.”

“Why, we’ve just started,” said Phil. “We must go on now to the end.”

“Of course,” Ethel said, in delight; “and it’s so exciting! I’d go through fire and flames to see something really new. Come, here are our horses waiting for us!”

“What luck!” cried Suzanne, “we are going to see a sorceress—b-r-r-r-r! it sends a shiver down one’s back to think of it!”

This childish outburst put everybody in good humor. Will and Phil mounted their horses. Ethel, Helia, and Suzanne seated themselves on the benches or the luggage in the conveyance; and the escort started off.

They went straight into the mountains. Except the guides and two soldiers in the picturesque costumes of the klephts,—white gaiters and short jacket, like that of a bull-fighter, with a fustanelle shirt,—no one accompanied the tourists. The tutor had gone back to Adalbert. There was no danger as far as the convent of Semavat Evi, or “House of Heaven,” and there a larger escort was awaiting them and would accompany them to the frontier. Ethel asked herself in what condition she would reach the place, so shockingly rough was the road. Suzanne, seated on a valise which she named her _strapontin_ (an aisle-seat in a theater), was having immense fun.

“It’s just like a scene in the Chatelet Theater,” she said, pointing to the landscape where the huge castle overlooked the old city huddled together at its feet, with the yacht anchored out in the blue sea. She shook with laughter as the wheel passed over a projecting rock and all but overthrew the conveyance.

Ethel and Helia looked at the two soldiers marching ahead. The flapping of their fustanelle skirts, when they leaped over the gutters, gave them the air of two ballet-dancers. The contrast between their brigand heads and the collection of weapons at their belts, and their long, white, agile legs was so comic that Ethel and Helia did not perceive they were going along beside a precipice. The cultivated land was passed, and they could see only tufts of thorny shrubs. Suzanne alone gave a note of gaiety to the bleak landscape. Ethel let her talk on, without listening, and soon Suzanne was silent, conquered like the others by the melancholy sight.

The horizon broadened around them, rising up on either side. Below, the plains stretched out far as the eye could reach. The road was like a thread lying along the ground. By this road, at their feet, they would come back from the excursion. Ethel looked with interest at this pathway of so many invasions. The rude mountaineers of Albania had followed it to the sea, and more than once invaders had filled it with the flashing of their swords. Who could know whether Morgania was not to pass again through such a period of disaster? There was now no living wall to stay the waves.

The wagon went up and up in endless turnings. Suddenly, as they crossed a plateau where ragged grass was growing, a chant arose, monotonous and solemn, and repeated by the echoes. On every side they seemed to hear lamentations and groans issuing forth from the earth or falling from the clouds.

“Where are we?” asked Ethel, stirred from her reverie. “I see no one.”

“It is the shepherds over there,” said Helia.

Ethel perceived, in the midst of a lean flock, beside a fire whose smoke mounted straight upward, a group of shepherds singing. It was one of the _prismés_ which they sing from one mountain to the other. Ethel was greatly impressed by these spontaneous chants of the desert. In them, hoarse cries alternated with sharp, high cadences and a quickening measure. An impression of grandeur was left behind by this singing in the solitude. Ethel thought with pity of the old untuned piano in the castle, and of the sound of the banjo, thin as the humming of flies among the massive pillars of the throne-room. The castle itself,—what was it compared with these huge natural towers overlooking the road, with their giant steps made of rocks that had slid down?—or to these ravines, like somber courtyards,—to these measureless caverns opening like vaults, in the depths of which the schist rock shone like stained-glass windows? And still they mounted up, turning around these strongholds of a country made for liberty. They were approaching the grotto of the sorceress.

A joyful burst of laughter drew Ethel from her reverie. Behind her, seated astride a package, Suzanne was in an ecstasy of delight.

“The ballet!—oh, Miss Rowrer, the ballet is beginning—look at the _danseuses_!”

Suzanne was choking, stuffing her handkerchief into her mouth not to let herself be heard.

The two soldiers, won by the music’s enthusiasm, were leaping in time with sharp cries, now squatting to earth and now brandishing their rifles, swaying right and left, and twirling their legs while their fustanella skirts stood out straight. Like monkeys drunk with cocoa-milk, they gave inarticulate cries—“Yoo! yoo!”

“Encore!” cried Suzanne.

“My kodak!” said Ethel.

“I’m sitting on it!” said Suzanne; “I can hear it crack!”

All their gaiety had come back. Ethel felt the need of shaking off the mysterious influence that had been depressing her since they set out.

“Really, I’m too simple,” she said; “I shall wind up by believing in their sorceress. Poor old woman, who will sell us four-leaved clover against thunder, coral horns against the evil eye, fetishes and prayer-mills and garlic _pommade_.”

“How happy Poufaille would be here!” thought Suzanne.

“What a journey!” Ethel continued. “What roads! I am all shaken up! At least they ought to build a narrow-gage railroad in such a country!” she said to Will, who had come up with her.

“It wouldn’t pay,” said Will. “But if I owned these mountains I’d take the ore out of them.”

“Mademoiselle would be very good if she would ask for me a toad’s-hair chaplet,” Suzanne said, in a low tone.

“Ask? From whom? From my brother?”

“No! From the old sorceress!”

“But toads haven’t hair, Suzanne!”

“It was M. Caracal told me.”

“Oh, if you’re going to believe all that he says—”

“Poor old woman!” observed Will, “living in such a hole, stuck to her rock like an oyster in its shell!”

“That doesn’t prevent her consulting the stars and occupying herself with Jupiter, and knowing a hundred and ten ways of foretelling the future.”

“A hundred and ten ways—that’s a great deal,” replied Will. “Which is the best of them all?”

“Let’s count on our fingers,” said Ethel. “I’ll begin. Aëromancy, by the air; aleuromancy, by flour; telomancy, by arrows—”

“—Dactylomancy, by the fingers; chiromancy, by the hand; podomancy, by the feet!” continued Phil.

“Hydromancy, by water,” Ethel began again. “Rhabdomancy, by sticks—”

“That’s for Poufaille,” thought Suzanne. “_Vive la rhabdomancie!_”

Just then the horses stopped, and the driver turned to the tourists, saying a few words in a low tone of voice and pointing with his finger to a recess in the rock. They had reached their journey’s end. All was silent. Ethel, Helia, and Suzanne descended from the vehicle, and Will and Phil leaped from their horses.

The spot was a wild one. Before them the whole country lay outstretched. Behind them mountains were heaped together. The wind blew, tossing the horses’ manes; and the great passing clouds seemed to issue forth from the mountain.

The visitors took a few steps forward and saw a black hole. It was the cavern. A rough statue of Morgana, virgin and martyr, was carved in the living rock. There were heaps of votive offerings around it—little figures of children and birds, veils and women’s girdles, daggers and flowers and fruits, and the red cake which betrothed ones break before marriage. A peasant woman at her prayers, prostrate on the rock at the saint’s feet, was praying with the energy of despair, and calling for vengeance.

The visitors kept on advancing, half regretting that they had come. What were they to say to the sorceress? Ethel, greatly moved, took Phil’s arm. It seemed to her that her own lot was to be decided. She felt her heart beating as they advanced to the grotto. Helia was at her side. Will was behind with Suzanne. They came to the opening and leaned forward, but saw nothing.

Little by little their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. They could distinguish, uncertainly, in the depths, eyes that shone—and then a figure, huddled together on a bed of rushes, looking at them, motionless, with her finger to her mouth, like a statue of silence! The eyes, fixed in turn on each of them, suddenly rested upon Helia with a strange glow.

“Oh, how she looks at me!” Helia said, seizing Ethel’s arm. “Oh, _mon Dieu_, if she only will not speak! Let us go away; I entreat you, let us go away! I am afraid!”

They started back, and felt relieved when they were out of sight of the sinister eyes.

“Let us go,” said Ethel.

At the feet of St. Morgana, the suppliant one was now praying as in an ecstasy.