"Nevertheless," answered Marc'antonio with some sarcasm, "she appears to have neglected to confide to you what she feared."
Stephanu spread out his hands. "The Prince, and the reverend
Father—who can tell what passes in their minds?"
"Not you, at any rate! Very well, then—the Princess was apprehensive. . . . Yet now, when the mischief (whatever it is) should either be done or on the point of doing, she will have none of our help. Clearly she knows more, yet will have none of our help. That is altogether puzzling to me. . . . And she sends us north. . . . Very well again; we will go north, but not far!"
He glanced back at me over his shoulder. I read his meaning—that he wished to plan his campaign privately with Stephanu—and, reining in my pony, I fell back out of earshot.
The pass towards which we were climbing stood perhaps three thousand feet above the shore and the high road we had left; and the track, when it reached the steeper slopes, ran in long zigzagging terraces at the angles of which our ponies had sometimes to scramble up stairways cut in the living rock. As the sun sank a light mist gradually spread over the coast below us, the distant islands grew dim, and we rode suspended, as it were, over a bottomless vale and a sea without horizon. Slowly, out of these ghostly wastes, the moon lifted herself in full circle, and her rays, crossing the cope of heaven, lit up a tall grey crag on the ridge above us, and the stem of a white-withered bush hanging from it—an isolated mass which (my companions told me) marked the summit of the ascent.
"The path leads round the base of it," said Stephanu. "We shall reach it in another twenty minutes."
"But will it not be guarded?" I asked.
He hunched his shoulders. "The Prince is no general. A hundred times our enemies might have destroyed us; but they prefer to leave us alone. It is more humiliating."
Marc'antonio rode forward deep in thought, his chin sunk upon his breast. At the summit, under the shadow of the great rock, he reined up, and slewing himself about in his saddle addressed Stephanu again.
"As I remember, there is a track below which branches off to the right, towards Nonza. It will take us wide of Olmeta and we can strike down into the lowland somewhere between the two. The Princess commands us to make for the north; so we shall be obeying her, and at the same time we can bivouac close enough to take stock at sunrise and, maybe, learn some news of the camp—yet not so close that our horses can be heard, if by chance one should whinny."