South Wind Part 36

It was his favourite corner of the domain--a kind of projecting spur or platform shaded by a few grandiose umbrella pines. Near at hand, on a slightly lower level, rose a group of flame--like cypresses whose shapely outlines stood out against the sea, shining far below like a lake of pearl. The milky sheen of morning, soon to be dispelled by the breeze, still hung about the water and distant continent--it trembled upon the horizon in bands of translucent opal. His eye roved round the undulating garden, full of sunlight and flowers and buzzing insects.

From a verbena hard by came the liquid song of a blackcap. It gave him pleasure; he encouraged the blackcaps, delighting in their music and because they destroyed the spiders whose troublesome webs were apt to come in contact with his spectacles. The gardeners had severest instructions not to approach their nests. It was one of the minor griefs of his life that, being so short-sighted, he could never discover a bird's nest; no, not even as a child. Memories of boyhood began to flit through his mind; they curled upwards in the scented wreaths of his Havana....

The golden oriole's flute-like whistle poured down from some leafy summit in a sudden stream of melody. A hurried note, he thought; expressed without much feeling--from duty rather than inclination; not like the full-throated ease of other orioles in other lands he knew.

And so were the nightingales. They profited by his hospitality for a day or two and then, uttering a perfunctory little tune, some breathless and insincere word of thanks--just like any human visitor--betook themselves elsewhere, northwards.

Northwards!

He glanced into the mazy foliage of the pine tree overhead, out of which a shower of aromatic fragrance was descending to mingle with the harsher perfume of the cypress. How they changed their faces, the conifers--so fervent and friendly at this hour, so forbidding at nighttime! Rifts of blue sky now gleamed through its network of branches; drenched in the sunny rays, the tree seemed to shudder and crackle with warmth. He listened. There was silence among those coralline articulations. Soon it would be broken. Soon the cicada would strike up its note in the labyrinth of needles--annual signal for his own departure from Nepenthe. He always waited for the first cicada.

Northwards!

To his little place in the Highlands, at first. The meager soil and parsimonious culture, the reasonable discourse of the people, their wholesome disputatiousness, acted as a kind of purge or tonic after all this Southern exuberance. Scotland chastened him; its rocks and tawny glinting waters and bleak purple uplands rectified his perspective. He called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves, the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves--those wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant, streaming upwards form the luminous North.

Then, after strolling aimlessly elsewhere, on sea or land, visiting friends--no matter whom or where--he would return to Nepenthe to indulge his genius to the full in the vintage baccha.n.a.ls. He owned a small plantation that lay high up, among the easterly cliffs of the island.

It produced that mountain wine which was held to be the best on Nepenthe. The vines grew upon a natural platform, surrounded by rugged lava crags that overhung the sea.

Hither he was wont to repair with certain of his domestic staff and three or four friends from out of his "inner circle," to superintend the pressing of the grapes. There was a rude structure of masonry on the spot--a vaulted chamber containing winepress and vats and hoes and other implements of the husbandman's time-honoured craft; a few chairs and a table completed the furniture. n.o.body knew exactly what happened up here. People talked of wild and shameless carousals; the rocks were said to resound with ribald laughter while Mr. Keith, oozing paganism at every pore, danced faun-like measures to the sound of rustic flutes.

Certain it was that the party often got riotously tipsy.

So tipsy that sometimes their host was unable to be moved down to his villa. On such days he was put to bed on the floor between two wine barrels, and the chef hastily advised to come up with some food and a portable kitchen range. In earliest morning he would insist upon tottering forth to watch the sun as it rose behind the peaks of the distant mainland, flooding the sea with golden radiance and causing the precipices to glitter like burnished bronze. He loved the sunrise--he saw it so seldom. Then breakfast; a rather simple breakfast by way of a change. It was on one of these occasions that the chef made a mistake which his master was slow to forgive. He prepared for that critical meal a dish of poached eggs, the sight of which threw Mr. Keith into an incomprehensible fit of rage.

"Take those d.a.m.ned things away, quickly!" he commanded. It was the celebrated artist's one and only LACHE.

As a rule, however, he did not sleep on the spot. Peasants, climbing to their work on the hillsides in the twilit hour of dawn, were wont to encounter that staggering procession headed by Mr. Keith who, with spectacles all awry and crooning softly to himself, was carried round the more perilous turnings by a contingent of his devoted retainers.

He found it pleasant to live like this. And now another spring was nearing to its end. For how many more years, he wondered.... That confounded funeral....

There was a rustle at his back. The southerly breeze had struck Nepenthe on its morning ripple over the Tyrrhenian, setting things astir; it searched a pa.s.sage through those mighty canes which sprouted in a dank hollow where the rains of winter commingled their waters. The leaves grew vocal with a sound like the splash of a rivulet. Often had he listened joyfully to that melody which compensated, to some small degree, for the lack of the old Duke's twenty-four fountains. Legendary music! Now it made him sad. What was its burden? MIDAS HAD a.s.sES' EARS.

Midas, the fabled king, whose touch turned everything to gold. And gold, and jewels--of what avail were these against the spectre?

The gardeners, moving with bare feet among the sinuous paths, were quick to perceive that a cloud had fallen upon his spirit. They divined his moods with the tactfulness of natural sympathy. On some horticultural pretext one of them drew near and craftily engaged his thoughts and conversation. At last he said something that made him smile. One or two more appeared upon the scene, as if by accident. It was evident that the master needed cheering up. They began to tell him the fairy-tales he loved; tales of robbers and witches and pirates--grand old tales that never wearied him. To arouse his interest they joked among themselves, as though unaware of his existence. One of them, and then another, sang some wild song of love and war which he had picked up while wandering with his flocks among the craggy hills of yonder mainland. He was laughing now; outdoing their songs and stories.

It kept him young--to unbend, to play the fool in company such as theirs and relax the fibres stiffened by conventionality; it refreshed him to exchange the ephemeral for the eternal, the tomfoolery of social life for Theocritus and his deathless creatures. How fair it was, this smiling earth! How blithely the young voices went aloft!

They failed to drown those other strains, vagrant wraiths that now floated upwards over fields and houses on the tepid wings of the sirocco--fragmentary s.n.a.t.c.hes, torn from the brazen measure of the munic.i.p.al band as it marched with the funeral procession. He cursed the sounds from the bottom of his heart. They reminded him of that infamous apparition, of all he most ardently desired to forget. His laughter died down. Wanly he looked at his mirthful pagans, the embodiment of joys. Yes; these were his distractions, his playmates, his elixir of life, his antidote against the only disease, the only sin, crime, vice which he recognized on earth--a vice none the less, because it happened to be the inevitable--the vice of old age. And all the time that pallid swarm came crowding on: messengers from the inexorable spectre. He felt them creeping about with ghostly tread, blighting the radiance of his life, tainting the very air he breathed. Hateful intruders! They wailed among his lilies. The garden was full of their horrid footsteps.

In their presence Mr. Keith began to experience an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of chill--as though something evil had stepped between himself and the brave light of the sun. It was a fleeting feeling which he would have diagnosed, in other people, as perilously akin to a moral stomach-ache.

CHAPTER XXIX

Only one other person on Nepenthe found cause to complain of the munic.i.p.al music. It was Mr. Heard. Altogether, he was not greatly edified by this, the first funeral of its kind he had ever witnessed. A rowdy-dowdy business, he called it. The music was too lively and blatant for so solemn an occasion; the gorgeous vestments of the clergy, the loud chattering among the mourners, the violent gestures that accompanied Torquemada's well-meant and carefully prepared oration (Don Francesco, a born speaker, would have done it better, but the defunct was no friend or even client of his)--all these things savoured slightly of irreverence. Everyone was talking and laughing as they marched along. It was more like a polonaise than a funeral. In his African period the sight of such a burial would have affected him unpleasantly. But Mr. Heard was changing, widening out.

"These people live gaily," he said to himself. "Why not? A funeral is supposed to be nothing but a friendly leave-taking. Why not be cheerful about it? We are all going to see each other again, sometime, somewhere. I suppose...."

The problem gave him no trouble whatever.

He found himself walking side by side with Mr. Eames who ventured to remark, in a seemly whisper, that he attended the funeral not so much out of respect for the lamented lady--every cloud, he fancied, had a silver lining--as because he hoped to gather, from among so representative a concourse of natives and foreigners, the "popular impression" of yesterday's eruption, with a view to utilizing it in this appendix on RECENT VOLCANIC PHENOMENA OF NEPENTHE.

"Really?" replied the bishop. "A chapter on Volcanic Phenomena? It is sure to be interesting."

Mr. Eames warmed to his subject.

It might be made interesting, he agreed, but for his own ignorance of geology. As it was the business gave him a vast deal of trouble.

Monsignor Perrelli had dealt with geological matters in a fashion far too summary for present-day requirements. The old scholar was not to blame, of course, seeing that geology was quite a modern science; but he might at least have been a little more painstaking in his record of those showers of ashes and lapilli which were known to have covered the island from time to time. His account of them was lamentably defective.

It was literally bristling with--with--with lacunae, which had to be filled up by means of laborious references to contemporary chronicles.

Altogether one of the most unsatisfactory sections of an otherwise admirable work....

"I wish I could help you," said Mr. Heard.

"I wish you could. I wish anyone could. There was that young Jew, Marten, who understood more about these things than most people. A coa.r.s.e little fellow, but quite a specialist. He promised to supply me with an up-to-date statement, accompanied by a map of the geological structure of the island. I said to myself: Just what I wanted! Well, this confounded statement has never reached my hands. Now I fear he has left the place. Gone away altogether. Didn't have the decency to say good-bye or leave his address. Too bad. Who knows when the next mineralogist will turn up? These fellows are not as common as blackbirds. Meanwhile I have to rely on my own efforts. It's wonderful, by the way, how much a person can pick up of odds and ends of information when forced, by a hobby of this kind, to delve into recondite departments of knowledge which he would otherwise not have dreamt of exploring. One grows quite encyclopaedic! Minerals, medicine, strategy, heraldry, navigation, palaeography, statistics, politics, botany--what did I know or care about all these things before I stumbled on old Perrelli? Have you ever tried to annotate a cla.s.sic, Mr. Heard?

I a.s.sure you it opens up new vistas, new realms of delight. It gives one a genuine zest in life. Enthralling!"

And thereupon the bibliographer fell silent, all at once. He had succ.u.mbed, yet again, to his besetting sin: talking too enthusiastically to outsiders of what was nearest his heart. Why on earth should a globe-trotting bishop be bothered about the mineralogy of Nepenthe? It was absurd: tactless of him.

He tried to atone for the blunder by some mundane trivialities.

"What are you doing afterwards?"

"Going up to see Mrs. Meadows."

"Are you? Do remember me very kindly! Or perhaps--no. Better not. Fact is, she cut me dead two days ago. At least, it looked uncommonly like it. I confess I was rather upset, because I'm not conscious of having done anything to annoy her. Indeed, I've always felt a kind of weakness for Mrs. Meadows; there is something so fine and womanly about her.

Will you try to find out what it's all about? Thanks. Perhaps she may not have noticed me. She was walking very fast. And I must say she was not looking herself at all. Not at all. White and scared. Looked as if she had seen a ghost."

The bishop was troubled by these words.

"Is that so?" he asked. "You alarm me. I think I'll be off this minute.

She is my cousin, you know; and I've been rather concerned about her lately. Yes; I won't wait for the end of this funeral; I'll be off!

Perhaps we shall meet this evening. Then I can tell you her news. As to deliberately cutting you--don't you believe that for a minute."

"I shall be down here about seven o'clock...."

"People like her," thought Mr. Heard, as he fell out of the procession.

He would make a point of having a good long chat, and perhaps stay to luncheon.

He dreaded the coming heat of midday. It was quite warm enough already, as he climbed slowly upward by the short cuts that intersected the driving road, availing himself of every little patch of shade that fell from trees or cottages athwart the pathway.

The country seemed deserted, the funeral ceremony having attracted all the natives from far and near. Yet one figure was moving rapidly up the road in front of him. Muhlen! Even at this distance he was recognizable; he looked, as usual, overdressed. What was he doing there, at this hour? Mr. Heard remembered seeing him go up, once before, at the same time of the day.

He called to mind what he had heard from Keith in the boat. He was quite prepared to believe that this man lived on blackmail and women; that was precisely what he looked like. A villainous personality, masquerading under an a.s.sumed name. The sight of the fellow annoyed him. What business had he to transact up there? Retlow! Once more he began to puzzle where he had heard that name. It conjured up, dimly, some unpleasant connotation. Where? Long ago; so much was clear. For a brief moment he felt on the verge of remembering. Then his mind became blank as before; the revelation had slipped away, past recall.

He was glad to enter the shady garden of the villa Mon Repos. Old Caterina sat, sphinx-like, on the stones at the house entrance. There was some knitting-work on her lap, with brown wool and curiously shaped needles; one foot rested on the base of the cradle, which she rocked from time to time. At his approach she rose up, stark and hieratic, without a trace of a friendly smile on her countenance. Was the lady indoors? No, she was out. Out! Where? There was a definite but enigmatical movement of her withered brown arm; it appeared to embrace the universe. And when would she be back? No reply whatever. Only a slight upward movement of the eyes, as much as to say: G.o.d knows!