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.