A CHAPTER OF HORRORS
It is wonderful how well it passes time to have a secret understanding with anybody; that is, if you're a girl, and the other person a man. Mr. Barrymore and Maida seemed hardly to have gone before they were back again; which pleased me very much. In attendance was a man with a mule—a grinning man; a ragged and reluctant mule; which was still more reluctant when it found out what it was expected to do. However, after a fine display of diplomacy on our Chauffeulier's part, and force on that of the mule's owner, the animal was finally hitched to the automobile with strong rope.
Mr. Barrymore had to sit in the driver's seat to steer, while the man led the mule, but we others decided to walk. Mamma's heels are not quite as high as her pride (when she's feeling pretty well), so she preferred to march on the road rather than endure the ignominy of being dragged into even the smallest of villages behind the meanest of beasts.
A train for Cuneo was due at Limone, it seemed, in an hour, and we could walk there in about half that time, Mr. Barrymore thought. He had made arrangements with the capo di stazione, as he called him, to have a truck in readiness. The automobile would be put on it, and the truck would be hitched to the train.
Maida and I were delighted with everything; and when Mamma grumbled a little, and said this sort of thing wasn't what she'd expected, we argued so powerfully that it was much more fun getting what you did not expect, than what you did, that we brought her round to our point of view, and set her laughing with the rest of us.
"After all, what does it matter, as long as we're all young together?" said she, at last; and then I knew that the poor dear was happy.
Sir Ralph considered Limone an ordinary Italian village, but it seemed fascinating to us. The fruit stalls, under overhanging balconies, looked as if piled with splendid jewels; rubies, amethysts and pearls, globes of gold, and silver, and coral, as big as those that Aladdin found in the wonderful cave. Dark girls with starry eyes and clouds of hair stood gossipping in old, carved doorways, or peered curiously down at us from oddly shaped windows; and they were so handsome that we liked them even when they doubled up with laughter at our procession, and called their lovers and brothers to laugh too.
Men and women ran out from dark recesses where they sold things, and from two-foot-wide alleys which the sun could never have even seen, staring at us, and saying "molta bella" as Maida passed. She really was very effective against the rich-coloured background—like a beautiful white bird that had strayed into the narrow village streets, with sunshine on its wings. But she didn't seem to realize that she was being looked at in a different way from the rest of us. "I suppose we're as great curiosities to them, as they are to us," she said, lingering to gaze at the gorgeous fruit, or some quaint Catholic emblems for sale in dingy windows, until Sir Ralph had to hurry her along lest we should miss the train.
We were in plenty of time, though; and at the railroad depôt (according to me), or the railway station (according to Sir Ralph and our Chauffeulier), the automobile had been got onto the truck before the train was signalled. Our tickets had been bought by Mr. Barrymore, who would pay for them all, as he said it was "his funeral," and we stood in a row on the platform, waiting, when the train boomed in.
As it slowed down, car after car passing us, Mamma gave a little scream and pointed. "Look, there's another automobile on a truck!" said she. "My goodness, if it isn't exactly like the Prince's!"