Clementina

In fact, just about the time when the Prince's horses were being

unharnessed from his carriage on the heights of Mount Brenner, the hired

carriage stopped before a little inn under the town wall of Innspruck

hard by the bridge. And half an hour later, when the Prince was sitting

down to his supper before a blazing fire and thanking his stars that on

so gusty and wild a night he had a stout roof above his head, a man and

a woman came out from the little tavern under the town wall and

disappeared into the darkness. They had the streets to themselves, for

that night the city was a whirlpool of the winds. Each separate chasm in

the encircling hills was a mouth to discharge a separate blast. The

winds swept down into the hollow and charged in a riotous combat about

the squares and lanes; at each corner was an ambuscade, and everywhere

they clashed with artilleries of hail and sleet.

The man and woman staggered hand in hand and floundered in the deep

snow. They were soaked to the skin, frozen by the cold, and whipped by

the stinging hail. Though they bent their heads and bodies, though they

clung hand in hand, though they struggled with all their strength,

there were times when they could not advance a foot and must needs wait

for a lull in the shelter of a porch. At such times the man would

perhaps quote a line of Virgil about the cave of the winds, and the

woman curse like a grenadier. They, however, were not the only people

who were distressed by the storm.

Outside the villa in which the Princess was imprisoned stood the two

sentinels, one beneath the window, the other before the door. There were

icicles upon their beards; they were so shrouded in white they had the

look of snow men built by schoolboys. Their coats of frieze could not

keep out the searching sleet, nor their caps protect their ears from the

intolerable cold. Their hands were so numbed they could not feel the

muskets they held.

The sentinel before the door suffered the most, for whereas his

companion beneath the window had nothing but the house wall before his

eyes, he, on his part, could see on the other side of the alley of trees

the red blinds of "The White Chamois," that inn which the Chevalier de

St. George had mentioned to Charles Wogan. The red blinds shone very

cheery and comfortable upon that stormy night. The sentinel envied the

men gathered in the warmth and light behind them, and cursed his own

miserable lot as heartily as the woman in the porch did hers. The red

blinds made it unendurable. He left his post and joined his companion.