In half an hour they were off. Lord Abbotsworthy’s head-keeper, a shrewd greyhound of an Albanian, who knew the forests as a man knows his house, had said that it would be possible to make a way along the bridle-path by the river, thus avoiding the delay and danger of falling or fallen trees, and the groom took the order with the bland imperturbability of an English servant. They had each a horse, or rather a sturdy mountain cob, animals more surefooted than a cat, wise, strong, and steady. They left the Legation by the stable-gate, so as to avoid the possibility of being seen by anyone from the houses in the square, and in a moment the white tumult of the driven snow had swallowed them up.
The confusion of the elements was incredible; the snow, driven almost horizontally by the wind, was more like a solid sheet than an infinity of flakes. Beneath the shelter of houses, they made their way quickly out of the town, though not without danger, for the tiles on the windward side of the roofs, where the snow could not lie, were starting up like disturbed game, and would be shot with a rattle half-way across the street, burying themselves with a silent plunge in the snow, and once half a chimney fell not three yards in front of Blanche.
It was not till they left the last houses behind that they realized the full uproar of the heavens, and in ten minutes, for all that could be seen, they might have been at Amandos or Mavromáti. They could discern nothing, except a few yards of white ground on each side; they passed lumps and hummocks of snow to the right hand and the left, which might have been houses, or buried flocks of sheep, or hedgerows. But Yanni, with the aid of a compass and a long pole, which from time to time he thrust forward beyond his pony to guard against slipping into a drift, led them cannily on. In an hour or so they could tell he was on the right track, for the ground began rapidly to decline, and on their left they passed from time to time a fallen tree, or a group of wind-tormented pines, which must be the outliers of the forest. Soon the screaming of the wind was overscored by a hoarser note, and in ten minutes more they came down to the river, yellow and swollen beyond recognition, a furlong breadth of maddened foam, peopled with trees, house-beams, débris of huts and now and then some dead animal—sheep, pig, or goat—all twisting and whirling down with a ghastly sort of gaiety in a veritable dance of death.
A steep bank of snow led to the river-side, on which lay the bridle-path they must now find and follow, and Yanni dismounted to probe about for it. Once he slipped up to the neck in a drift, and when Blanche and the groom dragged him out, he shook his head in grave self-reproof.
‘I doubt my mother bore a fool,’ he said.
But before long they found it, and once found, it was easily possible to follow the path, for it lay notably level on that hillside of snow.
About four of the afternoon, when the faint glimmer of day was turning into a more palpable darkness, a change, at first hardly perceptible, began to come over the tumult of the weather. The wind blew only in sudden squalls and sonorous gusts, with intervals of quiet; the falling snow grew thinner and finer, and though they were rapidly descending, the cold grew more exquisite and piercing. The ponies’ feet, instead of plunging noiselessly into the fallen stuff, made each step through a crisp upper crust of frozen snow. By five the sky was clear and the wind dead, and an innumerable host of large and frosty stars began to glimmer like half-lit lamps in a vault of velvet. As the intenser darkness of night came on they burned ever more luminously, and every foot of the country, lying white polished and shining, caught and reflected their brightness. Eastwards the sky was gray with the approach of moonrise, and even before the full circle topped the hills to the east, it was as if day but now succeeded to night rather than night to day.
Before seven they had joined the main-road from Mavromáti below and beyond the intervening forest. The air was of an exceeding clearness, and crisp with frost, and not five miles away twinkled the lights of the port, and the various fingers of the lighthouse. Behind them, a black blot in the moonlight, rose the forest, shoulder over shoulder; to their right brawled the swollen stream, but all was as still and as frozen as an Arctic day.
Not till then, when, morally speaking, their journey was over, did Lady Blanche realize how acute her anxiety had been.
‘Oh, William!’ she exclaimed to the groom, with a sudden, half-hysterical laugh, ‘we shall soon be there.’