第72章 XXXV.(2)

"Well, sir," Stoller returned, "maybe I'll have the chance to show you.

They got my instructions over there to send everything to me."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe gave little heed to the landscape as landscape.

They agreed that the human interest was the great thing on a landscape, after all; but they ignored the peasants in the fields and meadows, who were no more to them than the driver on the box, or the people in the two-spanner behind. They were talking of the hero and heroine of a novel they had both read, and he was saying, "I suppose you think he was justly punished."

"Punished?" she repeated. "Why, they got married, after all!"

"Yes, but you could see that they were not going to be happy."

"Then it seems to me that she was punished; too."

"Well, yes; you might say that. The author couldn't help that."

Miss Triscoe was silent a moment before she said:

"I always thought the author was rather hard on the hero. The girl was very exacting."

"Why," said Burnamy, "I supposed that women hated anything like deception in men too much to tolerate it at all. Of course, in this case, he didn't deceive her; he let her deceive herself; but wasn't that worse?"

"Yes, that was worse. She could have forgiven him for deceiving her."

"Oh!"

"He might have had to do that. She wouldn't have minded his fibbing outright, so much, for then it wouldn't have seemed to come from his nature. But if he just let her believe what wasn't true, and didn't say a word to prevent her, of course it was worse. It showed something weak, something cowardly in him."

Burnamy gave a little cynical laugh. "I suppose it did. But don't you think it's rather rough, expecting us to have all the kinds of courage?"

"Yes, it is," she assented. "That is why I say she was too exacting.

But a man oughn't to defend him."

Burnamy's laugh had more pleasure in it, now. "Another woman might?"

"No. She might excuse him."

He turned to look back at the two-spanner; it was rather far behind, and he spoke to their driver bidding him go slowly till it caught up with them. By the time it did so, they were so close to it that they could distinguish the lines of its wandering and broken walls. Ever since they had climbed from the wooded depths of the hills above Carlsbad to the open plateau, it had shown itself in greater and greater detail. The detached mound of rock on which it stood rose like an island in the midst of the plain, and commanded the highways in every direction.

"I believe," Burnamy broke out, with a bitterness apparently relevant to the ruin alone, "that if you hadn't required any quarterings of nobility from him, Stoller would have made a good sort of robber baron. He's a robber baron by nature, now, and he wouldn't have any scruple in levying tribute on us here in our one-spanner, if his castle was in good repair and his crossbowmen were not on a strike. But they would be on a strike, probably, and then he would lock them out, and employ none but non-union crossbowmen."

If Miss Triscoe understood that he arraigned the morality as well as the civility of his employer, she did not take him more seriously than he meant, apparently, for she smiled as she said, "I don't see how you can have anything to do with him, if you feel so about him."

"Oh," Burnamy replied in kind, "he buys my poverty and not my will. And perhaps if I thought better of myself, I should respect him more."

"Have you been doing something very wicked?"

"What should you have to say to me, if I had?" he bantered.

"Oh, I should have nothing at all to say to you," she mocked back.

They turned a corner of the highway, and drove rattling through a village street up a long slope to the rounded hill which it crowned. A church at its base looked out upon an irregular square.

A gaunt figure of a man, with a staring mask, which seemed to hide a darkling mind within, came out of the church, and locked it behind him.

He proved to be the sacristan, and the keeper of all the village's claims upon the visitors' interest; he mastered, after a moment, their wishes in respect to the castle, and showed the path that led to it; at the top, he said, they would find a custodian of the ruins who would admit them.