He cracked his whip loudly as they rolled along, and every now and then gave a long shrill whistle.
Mrs. Ashe was sure that these were signals to his band, who were lurking somewhere on the olive-hung hillsides.
She thought she detected him once or twice making signs to certain questionable-looking characters as they passed; and she fancied that the people they met gazed at them with an air of commiseration, as upon victims who were being carried to execution.
Her fears affected Katy; so, though they talked and laughed, and made jokes to amuse Amy, who must not be scared or led to suppose that anything was amiss, and to the outward view seemed a very merry party, they were privately quaking in their shoes all the way, and enjoying a deal of highly superfluous misery.
And after all they reached Sorrento in perfect safety; and the driver, who looked so dangerous, turned out to be a respectable young man enough, with a wife and family to support, who considered a plateful of macaroni and a glass of sour red wine as the height of luxury, and was grateful for a small gratuity of thirty cents or so, which would enable him to purchase these dainties.
Mrs. Ashe had a very bad headache next day, to pay for her fright; but she and Katy agreed that they had been very foolish, and resolved to pay no more attention to unaccredited rumors or allow them to spoil their enjoyment, which was a sensible resolution to make.
Their hotel was perched directly over the sea.
From the balcony of their sitting-room they looked down a sheer cliff some sixty feet high, into the water; their bedrooms opened on a garden of roses, with an orange grove beyond.
Not far from them was the great gorge which cuts the little town of Sorrento almost in two, and whose seaward end makes the harbor of the place.
Katy was never tired of peering down into this strange and beautiful cleft, whose sides, two hundred feet in depth, are hung with vines and trailing growths of all sorts, and seem all a-tremble with the fairy fronds of maiden-hair ferns growing out of every chink and crevice.
She and Amy took walks along the coast toward Massa, to look off at the lovely island shapes in the bay, and admire the great clumps of cactus and Spanish bayonet which grew by the roadside; and they always came back loaded with orange-flowers, which could be picked as freely as apple-blossoms from New England orchards in the spring.
The oranges themselves at that time of the year were very sour, but they answered as well for a romantic date, "From an orange grove," as if they had been the sweetest in the world.
They made two different excursions to Pompeii, which is within easy distance of Sorrento.
They scrambled on donkeys over the hills, and had glimpses of the far-away Calabrian shore, of the natural arch, and the temples of P?stum shining in the sun many miles distant.
On Katy's birthday, which fell toward the end of January, Mrs. Ashe let her have her choice of a treat; and she elected to go to the Island of Capri, which none of them had seen.
It turned out a perfect day, with sea and wind exactly right for the sail, and to allow of getting into the famous "Blue Grotto," which can only be entered under particular conditions of tide and weather.
And they climbed the great cliff-rise at the island's end, and saw the ruins of the villa built by the wicked emperor Tiberius, and the awful place known as his "Leap," down which, it is said, he made his victims throw themselves; and they lunched at a hotel which bore his name, and just at sunset pushed off again for the row home over the charmed sea.
This return voyage was almost the pleasantest thing of all the day.
The water was smooth, the moon at its full. It was larger and more brilliant than American moons are, and seemed to possess an actual warmth and color.
The boatmen timed their oar-strokes to the cadence of Neapolitan barcaroles and folk-songs, full of rhythmic movement, which seemed caught from the pulsing tides.
And when at last the bow grated on the sands of the Sorrento landing-place, Katy drew a long, regretful breath, and declared that this was her best birthday-gift of all, better than Amy's flowers, or the pretty tortoise-shell locket that Mrs. Ashe had given her, better even than the letter from home, which, timed by happy accident, had arrived by the morning's post to make a bright opening for the day.
All pleasant things must come to an ending.
"Katy," said Mrs. Ashe, one afternoon in early February,
"I heard some ladies talking just now in the salon, and they said that Rome is filling up very fast.
The Carnival begins in less than two weeks, and everybody wants to be there then. If we don't make haste, we shall not be able to get any rooms."
"Oh dear!" said Katy, "it is very trying not to be able to be in two places at once.
I want to see Rome dreadfully, and yet I cannot bear to leave Sorrento.
We have been very happy here, haven't we?"
So they took up their wandering staves again, and departed for Rome, like the Apostle, "not knowing what should befall them there."
CHAPTER IX.
A ROMAN HOLIDAY.
"Oh dear!" said Mrs. Ashe, as she folded her letters and laid them aside,
"I wish those Pages would go away from Nice, or else that the frigates were not there."
"Why! what's the matter?" asked Katy, looking up from the many-leaved journal from Clover over which she was poring.
"Nothing is the matter except that those everlasting people haven't gone to Spain yet, as they said they would, and Ned seems to keep on seeing them," replied Mrs. Ashe, petulantly.
"But, dear Polly, what difference does it make?
And they never did promise you to go on any particular time, did they?"
"N-o, they didn't; but I wish they would, all the same.
Not that Ned is such a goose as really to care anything for that foolish Lilly!"
Then she gave a little laugh at her own inconsistency, and added, "But I oughtn't to abuse her when she is your cousin."
"Don't mention it," said Katy, cheerfully.
"But, really, I don't see why poor Lilly need worry you so, Polly dear."
The room in which this conversation took place was on the very topmost floor of the Hotel del Hondo in Rome.
It was large and many-windowed; and though there was a little bed in one corner half hidden behind a calico screen, with a bureau and washing-stand, and a sort of stout mahogany hat-tree on which Katy's dresses and jackets were hanging, the remaining space, with a sofa and easy-chairs grouped round a fire, and a round table furnished with books and a lamp, was ample enough to make a good substitute for the private sitting-room which Mrs. Ashe had not been able to procure on account of the near approach of the Carnival and the consequent crowding of strangers to Rome.
In fact, she was assured that under the circumstances she was lucky in finding rooms as good as these; and she made the most of the assurance as a consolation for the somewhat unsatisfactory food and service of the hotel, and the four long flights of stairs which must be passed every time they needed to reach the dining-room or the street door.
The party had been in Rome only four days, but already they had seen a host of interesting things.
They had stood in the strange sunken space with its marble floor and broken columns, which is all that is left of the great Roman Forum.
They had visited the Coliseum, at that period still overhung with ivy garlands and trailing greeneries, and not, as now, scraped clean and bare and "tidied" out of much of its picturesqueness.
They had seen the Baths of Caracalla and the Temple of Janus and St. Peter's and the Vatican marbles, and had driven out on the Campagna and to the Pamphili-Doria Villa to gather purple and red anemones, and to the English cemetery to see the grave of Keats.
They had also peeped into certain shops, and attended a reception at the American Minister's,—in short, like most unwarned travellers, they had done about twice as much as prudence and experience would have permitted, had those worthies been consulted.