第17章 VILLA RUBEIN(15)

"Harz!" muttered Sarelli; "Harz means 'tar,' hein? Your family is not an old one?"Harz glared, and said: "My father is a peasant."Sarelli lifted the kummel bottle and emptied it into his glass, with a steady hand.

"You're honest--and we both have devils.I forgot; I brought you in to see a picture!"He threw wide the shutters; the windows were already open, and a rush of air came in.

"Ah!" he said, sniffing, "smells of the earth, nicht wahr, Herr Artist? You should know--it belongs to your father....Come, here's my picture; a Correggio! What do you think of it?""It is a copy."

"You think?"

"I know."

"Then you have given me the lie, Signor," and drawing out his handkerchief SareIIi flicked it in the painter's face.

Harz turned white.

"Duelling is a good custom!" said Sarelli."I shall have the honour to teach you just this one, unless you are afraid.Here are pistols--this room is twenty feet across at least, twenty feet is no bad distance."And pulling out a drawer he took two pistols from a case, and put them on the table.

"The light is good--but perhaps you are afraid.""Give me one!" shouted the infuriated painter; "and go to the devil for a fool""One moment!" Sarelli murmured: "I will load them, they are more useful loaded."Harz leaned out of the window; his head was in a whirl.'What on earth is happening?' he thought.'He's mad--or I am! Confound him!

I'm not going to be killed!' He turned and went towards the table.

Sarelli's head was sunk on his arms, he was asleep.Harz methodically took up the pistols, and put them back into the drawer.

A sound made him turn his head; there stood a tall, strong young woman in a loose gown caught together on her chest.Her grey eyes glanced from the painter to the bottles, from the bottles to the pistol-case.A simple reasoning, which struck Harz as comic.

"It is often like this," she said in the country patois; "der Herr must not be frightened."Lifting the motionless Sarelli as if he were a baby, she laid him on a couch.

"Ah!" she said, sitting down and resting her elbow on the table; "he will not wake!"Harz bowed to her; her patient figure, in spite of its youth and strength, seemed to him pathetic.Taking up his knapsack, he went out.

The smoke of cottages rose straight; wisps of mist were wandering about the valley, and the songs of birds dropping like blessings.

All over the grass the spiders had spun a sea of threads that bent and quivered to the pressure of the air, like fairy tight-ropes.

All that day he tramped.

Blacksmiths, tall stout men with knotted muscles, sleepy eyes, and great fair beards, came out of their forges to stretch and wipe their brows, and stare at him.

Teams of white oxen, waiting to be harnessed, lashed their tails against their flanks, moving their heads slowly from side to side in the heat.Old women at chalet doors blinked and knitted.

The white houses, with gaping caves of storage under the roofs, the red church spire, the clinking of hammers in the forges, the slow stamping of oxen-all spoke of sleepy toil, without ideas or ambition.

Harz knew it all too well; like the earth's odour, it belonged to him, as Sarelli had said.

Towards sunset coming to a copse of larches, he sat down to rest.It was very still, but for the tinkle of cowbells, and, from somewhere in the distance, the sound of dropping logs.

Two barefooted little boys came from the wood, marching earnestly along, and looking at Harz as if he were a monster.Once past him, they began to run.

'At their age,' he thought, 'I should have done the same.' A hundred memories rushed into his mind.

He looked down at the village straggling below--white houses with russet tiles and crowns of smoke, vineyards where the young leaves were beginning to unfold, the red-capped spire, a thread of bubbling stream, an old stone cross.He had been fourteen years struggling up from all this; and now just as he had breathing space, and the time to give himself wholly to his work--this weakness was upon him!

Better, a thousand times, to give her up!

In a house or two lights began to wink; the scent of wood smoke reached him, the distant chimes of bells, the burring of a stream.

IX

Next day his one thought was to get back to work.He arrived at the studio in the afternoon, and, laying in provisions, barricaded the lower door.For three days he did not go out; on the fourth day he went to Villa Rubein....

Schloss Runkelstein--grey, blind, strengthless--still keeps the valley.The windows which once, like eyes, watched men and horses creeping through the snow, braved the splutter of guns and the gleam of torches, are now holes for the birds to nest in.Tangled creepers have spread to the very summits of the walls.In the keep, instead of grim men in armour, there is a wooden board recording the history of the castle and instructing visitors on the subject of refreshments.Only at night, when the cold moon blanches everything, the castle stands like the grim ghost of its old self, high above the river.

After a long morning's sitting the girls had started forth with Harz and Dawney to spend the afternoon at the ruin; Miss Naylor, kept at home by headache, watched them depart with words of caution against sunstroke, stinging nettles, and strange dogs.

Since the painter's return Christian and he had hardly spoken to each other.Below the battlement on which they sat, in a railed gallery with little tables, Dawney and Greta were playing dominoes, two soldiers drinking beer, and at the top of a flight of stairs the Custodian's wife sewing at a garment.Christian said suddenly: "Ithought we were friends."

"Well, Fraulein Christian, aren't we?"

"You went away without a word; friends don't do that."Harz bit his lips.

"I don't think you care," she went on with a sort of desperate haste, "whether you hurt people or not.You have been here all this time without even going to see your father and mother.""Do you think they would want to see me?"Christian looked up.