Cartaret’s heart had place only for the last words that Vitoria had said to him. He would not look at her again, and he cared little what might happen to himself, so long as he could draw this irate brother after him and away from the endangered women. Vitoria had said that she hated him: well, he would do what he could to save her, and then leave Alava forever. He passed through the door....
“He is my guest,” he heard Don Ricardo saying. “An Eskurola remembers the laws of hospitality.”
Cartaret went on to the court-yard. There his host followed him.
“Will you come to my offices?” he asked.
He walked across to the north wing of the castle and into a large room that looked upon the terrace. The ceiling was a mass of blackened rafters; the walls, wainscoted in oak, were hung with ancient arms and armor, with the antlers of deer and the stuffed heads of tusked boar, and with some rags of long-faded tapestry. There was a yawning fire-place at one end, between high bookshelves filled with leather-bound folios, and, near one of the windows, stood an open Seventeenth Century desk massed with dusty papers.
Eskurola waved his guest to a stiff-backed chair. Cartaret, seeing that Don Ricardo intended to remain standing, merely stood beside it.
“Sir,” began the Basque, “you have said that you are a stranger to our country and its ways. It is my duty to enlighten you in regard to some details.”
He towered nearly half a foot above Cartaret. The nostrils of his beaked nose quivered above his bristling beard, but he kept his voice rigorously to the conversational pitch.
Cartaret, however, was in no mood to hear any more exposition of Vascongada manners and customs. He had had enough of them.
“There’s no need of that,” he said. “If I’ve done anything I shouldn’t have done, I’m sorry. But I want you to understand that I’m to blame: I’m to blame—and nobody else.”