The two men opened their umbrellas for them and handed them to them. From this they received a faint encouragement, because they could not believe that if these men were wicked they would pause to open umbrellas. The man with the lantern then made signs to them to follow him, talking loud and quickly, and Beppo, they noticed, remained behind. Ought they to pay him? Not, they thought, if they were going to be robbed and perhaps murdered. Surely on such an occasion one did not pay. Besides, he had not after all brought them to San Salvatore. Where they had got to was evidently somewhere else. Also, he did not show the least wish to be paid; he let them go away into the night with no clamour at all. This, they could not help thinking, was a bad sign. He asked for nothing because presently he was to get so much.
They came to some steps. The road ended abruptly in a church and some descending steps. The man held the lantern low for them to see the steps.
"San Salvatore?" said Mrs. Wilkins once again, very faintly, before committing herself to the steps. It was useless to mention it now, of course, but she could not go down steps in complete silence. No mediaeval castle, she was sure, was ever built at the bottom of steps.
Again, however, came the echoing shout--"Si, si--San Salvatore."
They descended gingerly, holding up their skirts just as if they would be wanting them another time and had not in all probability finished with skirts for ever.
The steps ended in a steeply sloping path with flat stone slabs down the middle. They slipped a good deal on these wet slabs, and the man with the lantern, talking loud and quickly, held them up. His way of holding them up was polite.
"Perhaps," said Mrs. Wilkins in a low voice to Mrs. Arbuthnot, "It is all right after all."
"We're in God's hands," said Mrs. Arbuthnot again; and again Mrs. Wilkins was afraid.
They reached the bottom of the sloping path, and the light of the lantern flickered over an open space with houses round three sides. The sea was the fourth side, lazily washing backwards and forwards on pebbles.
"San Salvatore," said the man pointing with his lantern to a black mass curved round the water like an arm flung about it.
They strained their eyes. They saw the black mass, and on the top of it a light.
"San Salvatore?" they both repeated incredulously, for where were the suit-cases, and why had they been forced to get out of the fly?