“A woman’s idea!” thought Phil. “I can understand it, in this country where they sell daggers in clusters as they sell bananas with us.”
The attention of both was drawn away by a change of scene. They had left the city behind them and were already in the open country. Peasants were driving their mules or pushing carts, with children perched upon bundles of straw and packs of rags. They were coming to augment the tumult of those who had taken to the city for refuge.
“It seems to me we are going the wrong way,” said Ethel, laughing; “every one is turning his back to us.”
“Why, we’ve just started,” said Phil. “We must go on now to the end.”
“Of course,” Ethel said, in delight; “and it’s so exciting! I’d go through fire and flames to see something really new. Come, here are our horses waiting for us!”
“What luck!” cried Suzanne, “we are going to see a sorceress—b-r-r-r-r! it sends a shiver down one’s back to think of it!”
This childish outburst put everybody in good humor. Will and Phil mounted their horses. Ethel, Helia, and Suzanne seated themselves on the benches or the luggage in the conveyance; and the escort started off.
They went straight into the mountains. Except the guides and two soldiers in the picturesque costumes of the klephts,—white gaiters and short jacket, like that of a bull-fighter, with a fustanelle shirt,—no one accompanied the tourists. The tutor had gone back to Adalbert. There was no danger as far as the convent of Semavat Evi, or “House of Heaven,” and there a larger escort was awaiting them and would accompany them to the frontier. Ethel asked herself in what condition she would reach the place, so shockingly rough was the road. Suzanne, seated on a valise which she named her strapontin (an aisle-seat in a theater), was having immense fun.
“It’s just like a scene in the Chatelet Theater,” she said, pointing to the landscape where the huge castle overlooked the old city huddled together at its feet, with the yacht anchored out in the blue sea. She shook with laughter as the wheel passed over a projecting rock and all but overthrew the conveyance.
Ethel and Helia looked at the two soldiers marching ahead. The flapping of their fustanelle skirts, when they leaped over the gutters, gave them the air of two ballet-dancers. The contrast between their brigand heads and the collection of weapons at their belts, and their long, white, agile legs was so comic that Ethel and Helia did not perceive they were going along beside a precipice. The cultivated land was passed, and they could see only tufts of thorny shrubs. Suzanne alone gave a note of gaiety to the bleak landscape. Ethel let her talk on, without listening, and soon Suzanne was silent, conquered like the others by the melancholy sight.