Clive drew a long breath.
“This explains Ida’s letter,” he exclaimed. And at the moment he could not have said whether the thought brought him the most of joy or of pain.
Sefton made no reply. He was standing at the half-open casement, his head thrown back, his arms folded on his breast, his eyes, with a strange, unseeing look in them, fixed upon the distant landscape.
The inn stood on rocks a little above the small cluster of houses dignified by the title of village. Below these the valley lay in depths of purple gloom; straight in front towered the ridges of La Sila, crag over crag, spire over spire, till they lost themselves in the clouds.
The moon had set, and above these fantastic crags and spires faintly showed the beautiful white light which precedes the dawn.
On this Sefton’s unseeing eyes seemed fixed.
A remark which he presently made seemed to show that he was following a curious train of thought.
“I dare say, after all,” he said, in a vague, dreamy tone, “a man never gets anyone to love him better than his mother does. Now if anything were to happen to me, no one would grieve for me like my poor old mother!”
Assuredly Captain Culvers’s late associates at No. 15, Rue Vervien, would have found some difficulty in identifying this absent, gloomy man, with their débonnaire if somewhat haughty companion of two or three days back.
Clive was puzzled. What did this new mood taking possession of the man mean? The entrance of the guides—the brothers Capelli—at this moment prevented further talk.
They presented a somewhat ferocious appearance with their guns and tall, brigand hats. Their faces, however, were prepossessing, their manner respectful. The elder brother, Ditta, was a man of about forty years of age, Andrea some six or eight years younger.
Sefton interrogated them as to their knowledge of the mountain passes, and whether it would be possible to arrive at Alta Lauria before nightfall.
They shrugged their shoulders. If they set off at once it would be possible; but where there were mules to find! And then they shrugged their shoulders again. Clive, standing near the open window, had his attention for a moment diverted from these men by a voice which reached his ear coming up out of the darkness in the courtyard below.
“Have those Englishmen gone on yet,” it said, “or do they stay here for sunrise?”
The landlord’s voice replied telling the story of the search for mules, and that most probably the travellers would be delayed for an hour or so.
Then followed an animated colloquy—sympathy on one side, complaint on the other respecting the hard fate of innkeepers who had to keep their houses open all day and all night to meet the uncertain hours of the trains.
Clive, leaning slightly forward, saw a man emerge from the courtyard, and turn his steps towards the road that wound upward to the mountains. He could just make out in the semidarkness that his figure was young and slight, and that he carried a gun.
Knowing the fondness for gossip which exists in Italian villages, he laid no stress upon the circumstance.
Later on, however, it was to be recalled to his memory.
XXIII
The delay in procuring the mules retarded their journey by three or four hours, and in spite of their urgency, and the offer of double and treble pay alike to landlord and muleteers, Clive and Sefton did not get away from the inn till close upon eight o’clock that morning.
By noon, however, thanks to the good pace of the animals when found, they succeeded in reaching the pasture tablelands of La Sila, which in the summer is the scene of a vast migration of shepherds and their flocks from the plains below.
The hour of Ave Maria found these plains with their meandering streams and shadowy beech forests some three thousand feet below them, and entirely hidden from their view by the intervening perpendicular rocks.
A white pebbly fiumara, or dry torrent course, then became their road. It wound away steadily upward for some three or four miles; the rocks on either side of it closing in, near and nearer the higher they went, until at length little more than a broad ribbon of blue sky seemed left to them overhead.
Landscape there was none. Where the sharp perpendicular rocks on either side split, as it were, and the eye wandered there for a glimpse of surrounding scenery, or, as in the case of Clive and Sefton, in hopes of catching a distant view of Alta Lauria, it was met only by other sharp perpendicular rocks, or perhaps by some ravine choked with earthquake-riven blocks of granite; or some yawning chasm showing black now in the fading daylight.
And everywhere silence, solitude—intense, profound. It seemed a place for shades and ghosts to wander in, rather than men endowed with senses that loved light and colour, glow and variety in beauty.
“They’re taking us all right, I suppose; this path seems endless,” said Clive, addressing Sefton in English.
Sefton made no reply. He had descended from his mule, which he was leading over a rough part of the road. His head was bent, he seemed lost in thought.
So Clive addressed an equivalent question in Italian to Ditta.
“How much more of this? How many kilos?” he asked.
The man shrugged his shoulders, and answered that another two hours would bring them in sight of Alta Lauria.
After all, hours measured their road better than kilos. Their day’s march, so far, could have been accomplished in less than half the time along an English country road.
It would have been useless to deny, young and muscular though they were, that the fatigue of their day’s mountaineering following on the heels of their rapid travelling from Paris was beginning to tell
