It was Cardinali that Carolina strained her eyes to discern, and at last she beheld it—a weather-beaten little town perched high on a crag of rock. Then she breathed content and awaited patiently the time for landing. Within an hour after her well-shod feet had pressed the soil she was snugly installed, trunk and handtraps, in a veteran victoria drawn by a raw recruit of a horse, whose youthful antics kept the driver busy. With her luggage safely at her side and the landing accomplished without mishap, she settled back on the cushion and gave herself up to ease and self-adoration. How much wiser and abler she was than those excitable, nervous women whom she had left on the quay, still fuming over their baggage and the customs examination! Complacently she judged herself a very superior person, and never before had she felt on better terms with herself. The raw recruit trotted decorously enough past the monument of the Man that made an Egg stand on End, and clattered under the marble arch, whereon St. George, champion of Genoa, was trampling a dragon. Presently the city lay at her back, and she began to breathe the good air of home in the white dust of the highway, the pungent scent of the sage, the sweetness of the honeysuckle and oleander.
They began the ascent of the winding causeway up which Armando had toiled so sadly with his despised Juno and the Peacock. Long stretches of wall bordered the route, which was rough in places and steep, and not at all to the taste of the youngster in the traces. He grew cross and nervous, and shied at such innocent things as a tuft of cowslips on the roadside or an umbel of clematis on the wall.
“What kind of horse have you there?” asked Carolina, picking up a valise that had been jolted from the seat several times.
“What kind of a horse?” repeated the cocchiere, as though unable to credit his ears. “Ah, signora, there is none better in all Genoa; only he is a little green and has had the staggers once. Verily a fine beast.”
At the bight of a turning a Franciscan monk came in view suddenly from behind a thicket of myrtle. He wore the brown robe, scanty cape and hood on the shoulders, the girdle of knotted cord, the wooden sandals of his order. The recruit struck up a dance, and would have caracoled to the upsetting of the victoria, had not the monk run forward and caught his head.
“I regret that I frightened your horse, signora,” said the friar; “but I think he will go safely now.”
To the mind of Aunt Carolina, both the danger and its allayance had sprung from an eminently proper source. To be put in peril by a holy man was a distinction second only to being rescued by one. In thanking her deliverer she made known with pride that she too had been a limb of the Church.
“For eight years, father, was I perpetua of the rectory in Mulberry.”
The monk crossed himself and trudged on.
They were not far now from the last squirm of the highway that serpentined to Cardinali. The angle by the myrtle thicket doubled, they entered upon a road that for half a mile was an almost level shelf on the mountain side. On one hand yawned a precipice that grew deeper as the road wore upward, and all that stood between an ungovernable horse and his driver’s eternity was a low stone wall built along the margin. Carolina would have descended from the vehicle and walked the rest of the way but for the persuasive driver, who promised her upon his honour that all would go well now they had reached a stretch of road that was not steep. He could assure the signora that his horse was kind and gentle at heart, but coming of a lordly stock he loved not the menial task of hauling heavy loads uphill. A person of education like the signora would understand that. Peril? Not a spark of it now that the going was smooth and easy. See! he was behaving better already.