South Wind Part 30

"Complains of headache."

"Headache? That is very unlike Mrs. Meadows. I always look upon her as a bundle of steel springs. Perhaps something is wrong with the baby."

"Maybe," replied the bishop. "She seems to dote on it."

Then that last visit to his cousin suddenly recurred to him; he remembered her conversation--he thought of the lonely woman up thee.

Strange! Somehow or other, she had been at the back of his mind all the time. He decided to call again in a day or two.

Keith said:

"I should not like to come between her and the child. That woman is a tiger--mother.... Heard, there has been something in your mind all day long. What is it?"

"I believe there has. I'll try to explain. You know those j.a.panese flowers--" he began, and then broke off.

"I am glad you are becoming terrestrial at last. Nothing like Mother Earth! You cannot think how much money I wasted on j.a.panese plants, especially bulbs, before I convinced myself that they cannot be grown on this soil."

"Those paper flowers, I mean, which we used to put in our finger-bowls at country dinner tables. They look like shrivelled specks of cardboard. But in the water they begin to grow larger and to unfold themselves into unexpected patterns of flowers of all colours. That is how I feel--expanding, and taking on other tints. New problems, new influences, are at work upon me. It is as if I needed altogether fresh standards. Sometimes I feel almost ashamed--"

"Ashamed? My dear Heard, this will never do. You must take a blue pill when we get home."

"Can it be the south wind?"

"Everybody blames the poor sirocco. I imagine you have long been maturing for this change, unbeknown to yourself. And what does it mean?

Only that you are growing up. n.o.body need be ashamed of growing up....

Here we are, at last! We will land at the little beach yonder, near the end of that gulley. You can go ash.o.r.e and have a look at the old thermal establishment. It used to be a gay place with a theatre and ballrooms and banqueting rooms. n.o.body dare enter it nowadays. Haunted!

Perhaps you will see the ghost. As for me, I mean to take a swim. I always feel as if I needed a bath after talking about religion. You don't mind my saying so, do you?"

Mr. Heard, climbing upwards from the beach, felt as though he did not mind what anyone said about anything.

With the Devil's Rock the most imposing tract of Nepenthean cliff--scenery came to an abrupt end. That mighty escarpment was its furthest outpost. Thereafter the land fell seawards no longer precipitously, but in wavy earthen slopes intersected by ravines which the downward-rushing torrents of winter had washed out of the loose soil. It was at the termination of one of these dry stream-beds that Mr. Heard set foot on sh.o.r.e. Panting under the relentless heat he wound his way along a path once carefully tended and engineered, but now crumbling to decay.

Before him, on a treeless brown eminence, silhouetted against the blue sky, stood the ruin. It was a fanciful woe-begone structure, utterly desolate. The plaster, gnawed away by winds laden with searching sea-moisture, had fallen to earth, exposing the underlying masonry of cheap construction whose rusty colour was the same as that of the ground from which it had arisen, and into which it now seemed ready and eager to descend. Everything useful or portable, everything that spoke of man's occupation, everything that suggested life and comfort--the porcelain tiles, woodwork, window-panes, roofings, mosaic or marble floors, leaden pipes--all this had been carried away long ago. It stood there stark, dismantled, de-humanized, in the midday heat. Here was nothing to charm the eye or conjure up visions of past glory; nothing elegant or romantic; nothing savouring of grim warlike purposes. It was a modern ruin; a pile of rubbish; a shameless, frivolous skeleton.

Those hastily built walls and staring windows wore an air of faded futility, almost of indecency--as though the mouldering bones of some long-forgotten lady of pleasure had crept out of their tomb to give themselves an airing in the sunshine.

Mr. Heard, after glancing at what remained of a pretentious facade, stepped within.

Deep shade was here, in those of the chambers whose roofs remained intact; shade, and a steamy heat, and the noxious odour of some mineral product--the healing waters. He strayed in the twilight through halls and corridors, past ample saloons and rows of cells which had apparently served for convenience of disrobing. Everywhere that noisome smell accompanied his footsteps; the place was reeking with it. And all was in decay. Gaudy paper hung in tatters from the ceilings; the dust lay thick, undisturbed for generations. Unclean things littered in musty corners. Through gaping skylights a sunny beam would penetrate; it played about the mildewy stucco part.i.tions encrusted, in patches, with a poisonous lichen of bright green. Wandering about this dank and mournful pile of wreckage, he could understand why simple folks should dread to enter so ghoul-haunted a spot.

Gladly he issued, by way of an obscure pa.s.sage, into what had once been a trim garden. No trace of flowers or shrubs remained; the walks, the ornamental stone seats and artificial terraces, were merging into brown earth. Here, in the centre of this ruined pleasaunce, the health-giving fountain had lately flowed, bubbling up in a couch-shaped basin of cement. It was now dry. But a damp warmth still clung to its rim, whereon the mineral had left a comely deposit of opaline texture.

Lowering his hand he felt an intermittent stream of hot air rising out of the ground, feeble as the breath of a dying man. Still some mysterious gusts of life down there, he concluded, in the dark earth.

How curious that volcanic connection with the mainland, of which Count Caloveglia had spoken!

Soon he found himself beside the shattered framework of a small pavilion, built in a grotesque Chinese style and looking woefully out of place in this cla.s.sic landscape, with the blue Tyrrhenian at its foot. And here he rested. He surveyed the traces of the old path leading down from the higher lands in serpentine meanderings; that path--once, doubtless, bordered by shady trees--whereby all those worldly invalids had once descended. He pictured the lively caravan afoot, on mule-back, in sedan chairs, seeking health and pleasure at this site, now so void of life. Lower down, almost within a stone's throw, lay the beach. The sailors, father and son, had drawn the boat up to the sh.o.r.e and were sitting huddled up on its shady side, with some food between them on a coloured handkerchief. That Brobdingnagian luncheon-basket had also been disembarked. Keith was swimming, together with his two genii; he looked like a rosy Silenus. They seemed to be enjoying themselves vastly, to judge by the outbursts of laughter. Mr. Heard thought of going to join the fun, but gave up the idea; there was something astir that clogged his energies.

He knew them--these Southern noons. If no ghost resided in the melancholy ruin hard by, there might well be some imponderable hostile essence afloat in the still air of midday. Anything, he felt, could happen at this unearthly hour. The wildest follies might be committed at the bidding of this unseen Presence.

He tried to recollect what Keith had told him concerning Muhlen, that corrupt personality. Retlow ... where had he heard that name before?

In vain he flogged his memory. There was an alien power in this brightness; a power as of a vampire that drained away his faculties, his vitality; a spirit of evil, exhaling from the sunny calm. It made a mock, a mirage, of the landscape which danced before his eyes; it distorted the realities of nature, the works of man....

Presently he observed that Keith and his companions were clothed and occupied in dragging things out of the preposterous food-receptacle.

They called up to him. The spell was released.

He descended.

"Nice bathe?" he enquired.

"Rather! And now these fellows will make a pa.s.sable omelette, to begin with. I don't fancy cold luncheons, do you? They seem to lie dead on one's stomach."

"Are those sailors not coming with us?"

"No. They are well paid for their work. No doubt they would like to be in my service too. But I never employ islanders, except for casual jobs; it saves me all kinds of local trouble and family intrigues. Nor yet older people. They are so apt to think; and once a servant begins to think he ceases to be of use. I believe in the outsider, for all purposes of human intercourse. If you want a thing done, go to the outsider, the intelligent amateur. And when you marry, Heard, be sure to select a wife from another cla.s.s, another province, another country--another planet, if possible. Otherwise you will repent it. Not that I see any objection, on principle, to incest; it strikes me as the most natural proceeding in the world--"

"Dear me!"

"And yet--that inexplicable prejudice. It is probably artificial and of modern origin. I suspect the priestly caste. Royal families kept up the custom and do so still, like that of Siam. Odd, how anachronisms linger longest at the two poles of society. What do you say," he went on, "to climbing a little up that gorge, into the shade? I cannot digest properly with the sun staring at me. And tell me, as we go along, your impressions of the ruin ... I perceive drawbacks to incest; grave practical drawbacks--sterility, inbreeding. Yes, there is obviously something to be said for exogamy. AUDI ALTERAM PARTEM as Eames might say, though G.o.d knows why he thinks it sounds better in Latin. Seen the ghost?"

The bishop remembered a certain answer given him by Madame Steynlin, to whom he had once spoken of the "tonic" effects of Keith's conversation.

"A tonic?" she had said. "Very likely! But not a tonic for men and women. A tonic for horses."

After luncheon they improvised a shelter in order to repose awhile. It was the right thing to do on Nepenthe at that hour of the day, and Mr.

Keith tried to conform to custom even under unusual circ.u.mstances such as these. Protected by the boat's scarlet awning from the rays of the sun, they slumbered through the flaming hours.

CHAPTER XXIII

The d.u.c.h.ess was a good sleeper, as befitted a person of regular habits and pure life.

It was her custom to retire for the night at about eleven o'clock.

Angelina, who reposed in an adjoining room, would enter softly at nine in the morning, draw up the blinds, and deposit a cup of tea at the bedside of her mistress. Up to that moment, she would slumber like a child. Rarely did she suffer from insomnia or nightmare. On this particular night, however, her rest was troubled by a strange and disquieting dream.

She was a little girl once more, at her parental home out West. All the old memories were around her. It was winter time. She was alone, out of doors. Snow, the familiar snow, was falling from a sombre sky; already it lay deep on the boundless plains. It fell without ceasing. The sky grew darker. Hours seemed to pa.s.s, and still the flakes descended. It was not cold snow. It was warm snow--warm and rather suffocating. Very suffocating. It began to choke her. Suddenly she found she could breathe no more. She gave a wild cry of despair--

Her maid was standing beside the bed, a lighted candle in her hand.

Otherwise the room was in pitch darkness. Angelina looked like a Tanagra statuette. Draped in nothing but a clinging nightgown that reached two inches below the knee and accentuated the charm of her figure, with the candle-light throwing playful gleams upon her neck and cheeks, Angelina was an apparition to gladden the heart of man.

The heart of the d.u.c.h.ess was not gladdened by any means.

"What is the meaning of this, girl?" she enquired sternly, in what she took to be the language of the country. "And in the middle of the night!"

"It's nine o'clock, Madam."