“Have they come back?” he said.
“No,” said Gipsy. “Don’t you think they ought to be here soon?”
Cherry glanced at his watch.
“Nine o’clock? Yes, I suppose they will be here directly, for the guides told us eight. People never get off mountains as soon as they expect they will. I’ll come down. I have finished my letter.”
Some time longer passed without any sign of an arrival, and the landlord of the inn, and some of the muleteers, began to say that either the Ingleses must have changed their route, or that something must have detained them till it was too dark to get down the mountains, so that they must be waiting till daylight to descend. Cheriton did not take alarm quickly; he knew that a very trifling change of path or weather would make this possible, and he was the first to say that they had better go to bed, and expect to see the wanderers in the morning; and Mr Stanforth, very anxious to avoid frightening him, chimed in with a cheerful augury to the same effect. But when Cheriton had left them, he said, anxiously,—
“I don’t like it; I am sure Alvar would not delay if he could help it—he would not cause so much anxiety.”
“But some very trifling matter might have detained them till after dark,” said Miss Weston.
“Oh, yes; I trust it may be so.”
Gipsy said nothing; but before her mind’s eye there rose a vision of more than one little wayside cross which she had been shown on their ride to Ronda, with the inscription, “Here died Don Luis or Don Pedro,” and the date.
These were erected, she was told, where travellers had been killed by saltiadores or brigands; but there were very few of such breakers of the law in Andalusia now. Still, their party had thought it right to carry arms. What if they had been driven to use them?—what if—? Even to herself Gipsy could not finish the sentence; but she lay awake all night listening for an arrival, till her ears ached and burnt with the strain; till she heard in the night-time, that had hitherto seemed to her so silent, sounds innumerable; till she felt as if she could have heard their footsteps on the mountain side. And all the time the worst of it was that she heard nothing. And for fear that Miss Weston would guess at her terror, for speaking of it seemed to remove it from the vague regions of her imagination and give it new force, and also for fear of missing a sound, she lay as still as a mouse, till, spite of an occasional doze, the night seemed endless, and the most welcome thing in the world was the long-delayed winter dawn.