“A soldier, is he?” said Mrs. Gainsborough, regarding the grave bearded man to whose care they were intrusted. “He looks more like the outside of an ironmonger’s shop. Swords, pistols, guns, spears. It’s to be hoped he won’t get aggravated with us on the way. I should look very funny lying in the road with a pistol through my heart.”
They rode out of Tangier before a single star had paled in the east, and when dawn broke they were in a wide valley fertile and bright with flowers; green hills rose to right and left of them and faded far away into blue mountains.
“I wish you’d tell that Mahomet not to irritate my poor mule by egging it on all the time,” Mrs. Gainsborough said to Don Alfonso, who, realizing by her gestures that she wanted something done to her mount, and supposing by her smile that the elation of adventure had seized her, replied “All right,” and said something in Moorish to Mohammed. He at once caught the mule a terrific whack on the crupper, causing the animal to leap forward and leave Mrs. Gainsborough and the saddle in the path.
“Now there’s a nice game to play!” said Mrs. Gainsborough, indignantly. “‘All right,’ he says, and ‘boomph’! What’s he think I’m made of? Well, of course here we shall have to sit now until some one comes along with a step-ladder. If you’d have let me ride on a camel,” she added, reproachfully, to Sylvia, “this wouldn’t have occurred. I’m not sitting on myself any more; I’m sitting on bumps like eggs. I feel like a hen. It’s all very fine for Mr. Alfonso to go on gabbling, ‘All right,’ but it’s all wrong, and if you’ll have the goodness to tell him so in his own unnatural language I’ll be highly obliged.”
The Moorish soldier sat regarding the scene from his horse with immutable gravity.
“I reckon he’d like nothing better than to get a good jab at me now,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Yes, I dare say I look very inviting sitting here on the ground. Well, it’s to be hoped they’ll have the ‘Forty Thieves’ or ‘Aladdin’ for the next pantomime at Drury Lane. I shall certainly invite Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Beardmore to come with me into the upper boxes so as I can explain what it’s all about. Mrs. Ewings doesn’t like panto, or I’d have taken her too. She likes a good cry when she goes to the theater.”
Mrs. Gainsborough was settling down to spend the rest of the morning in amiable reminiscence and planning, but she was at last persuaded to get up and mount her mule again after the strictest assurances had been given to her of Mohammed’s good behavior for the rest of the journey.
“He’s not to bellow in the poor animal’s ear,” she stipulated.
Sylvia promised.
“And he’s not to go screeching, ‘Arrassy,’ or whatever it is, behind, so as the poor animal thinks it’s a lion galloping after him.”