South Wind Part 50

Bastions of flame....

The air seemed to have become unusually cool and bracing.

Here, on a bench all by himself, sat Count Caloveglia. As the bishop took a seat beside him they exchanged a few words. The Italian, so affable as a rule, was rather preoccupied and disinclined for talk.

Mr. Heard remembered his first encounter with that old man--the Salt of the South, as Keith had called him. It was at those theatricals in the Munic.i.p.ality. Then too the Count had been remarkably silent, his chin reposing in his hand, absorbed in the spectacle--in the pa.s.sionate grace of the young players. He was absorbed in another spectacle now--the old sun, moving in pa.s.sionless splendour down the sky.

Only a fortnight ago, that first meeting. Less than a fortnight. Twelve days. How much had been crammed into them!

A kind of merry nightmare. Things happened. There was something bright and diabolical in the tone of the place, something kaleidoscopic--a frolicsome perversity. Purifying, at the same time. It swept away the cobwebs. It gave you a measure, a standard, whereby to compute earthly affairs. Another landmark pa.s.sed; another milestone on the road to enlightenment. That period of doubt was over. His values had righted themselves. He had carved out new and sound ones; a workable, up-to-date theory of life. He was in fine trim. His liver--he forgot that he ever had one. Nepenthe had done him good all round. And he knew exactly what he wanted. A return to the Church, for example, was out of the question. His sympathies had outgrown the ideals of that establishment; a wave of pantheistic benevolence had drowned its smug little teachings. The Church of England! What was it still good for? A stepping-stone, possibly towards something more respectable and humane; a warning to all concerned of the folly of idolizing dead men and their delusions. The Church? Ghosts!

His thoughts wandered to England. Often had he sighed, in Africa, for its drowsy verdant opulence--those willow-fringed streamlets and grazing cattle, the smell of hay, the flowery lanes, the rooks cawing among slumberous elms; often had he thought of that village on the hill-top with its grey steeple. Well, he would see them all in a few days. And how would England compare with the tingling realism of Nepenthe? Rather parochial, rather dun; grey-in-grey; subdued light above--crepuscular emotions on earth. Everything fireproof, seaworthy. Kindly thoughts expressed in safe unvarying formulas. A guileless people! Ships tossing at sea; minds firmly anch.o.r.ed to the commonplace. Abundance for the body; diet for the spirit. The monotony of a nation intent upon respecting laws and customs. Horror of the tangent, the extreme, the unconventional. G.o.d save the King.

So much the better. This soulful cult of tradition, this clinging to the obvious and genteel as it were an anchor of safety--it nipped in the bud the monster-making faculty of low horizons and bleak, wintry stretches of earth. Bazhakuloff! Those Russians, it struck him, had been providentially sent to Nepenthe for his delectation and instruction. He was glad to have beheld a type of this nature, inconceivable in England. That grotesque, with three million followers!

It had been a liberal education to look into his vacuous face, into those filmy eyes dripping with saintliness and alcohol. The Little White Cows! Chimaeras, engendered in hyperborean mists.

And still Count Caloveglia said nothing. He gazed at the sun, whose orb now rolled upon the rim of the horizon. Slowly it sank, fusing the water into a golden pool. A hush fell upon nature. Colours fled from earth into the sky. They scattered among the clouds. The enchantment began, overhead.

At last the old man remarked:

"I suppose that is why I am no colourist. That is why I worship the inexorable rigour of form. We of the South, Mr. Heard, are drenched in volatile beauty.... And yet one never wearies of these things! It is what you call a glamour, an interlude of witchcraft. Nature is a-tremble with the miraculous. She beckons us to explore her strange places. She says: Tread here, my friend--and here; tread where you have never trodden before! The sage surrenders his intelligence, and grows young again. He recaptures the spirit of his boyish dreams. He peers into worlds unknown. See! Adventure and discovery are lurking on every side. These painted clouds with their floating banners and citadels, yonder mysterious headlands that creep into the landscape at this hour, those islets emerging, like flakes of bronze, out of the sunset-glow--all the wonder of the ODYSSEY is there!"

He spoke out of politeness and soon fell silent again. His thoughts roamed far away.

They were thoughts commensurate with the grandeur of the scene.

Count Caloveglia was no colourist. He was a sculptor, about to reap the reward of his labours. The cheque would be in his pocket that night.

Three hundred and fifty thousand francs--or nearly. That is what made him not exactly grave, but reserved. Excess of joy, like all other excesses, is not meet to be displayed before men. All excess is unseemly. Nothing overmuch. Measure in everything.

Measure even in the fabrication of h.e.l.lenic masterpieces. He had created one of them (the Demeter did not count); it sufficed for his modest ambitions. The Faun was his first forgery and his last. To retrieve the fortunes of his family he had employed those peculiar talents which G.o.d had given him. He would remain, henceforward, an artist. He shrank from the idea of becoming a wholesale manufacturer of antiques.

Three hundred and fifty thousand francs. If sufficed. Thinking of those figures, he began to smile with contentment. He smiled--but no more. And as he continued to muse upon the transaction his look melted, imperceptibly, into one of reverential awe; there was a solemnity about that sum, an amplitude, a perfection of outline that reminded him, in a way, of the proportions of some wonderful old Doric temple. The labour of a lifetime would not have enabled him to collect so much had he tried to sell bronzes of his own workmanship. A bust or statue by Count Caloveglia--it would command a certain small price, no doubt; but what was the reputation, the market value, of the most eminent modern artist as compared with that nameless but consummate craftsman of Locri?

The Count saw things in their true perspective. His mental att.i.tude towards Sir Herbert Street and his American employer was not tinged with the faintest cloud of disrespect; for van Koppen, indeed, he cherished a liking which bordered on affection. He detected in the astute American what n.o.body else could detect--an element of childlike freshness and simplicity. As far apart, in externals, as two distant trees whose leaves are fluttering on either side of some tangled forest, he yet felt that their roots were interwoven below ground, drawing common life and nourishment and sympathies from that old teeming soil of human aspirations. Nor was he vainglorious of his achievement. His superiority over the art-expert he took as a gift of the G.o.ds. Vanityi was abhorrent to his nature. He was not proud but glad--glad to have been able to reconquer his legitimate social position; glad, above all things, to have forged a link with the past--a key to admit him into the fellowship of Lysippus and those others whose august shades, he opined, were even them smiling upon him. The Locri Faun was his handiwork. He was "ent.i.tled to dine well," as he had told Denis. That was what he now purposed to do. One master-stroke had repaired his fortunes. It sufficed. Nothing overmuch. Count Caloveglia knew the story of Polycrates, the too-fortunate man. He knew what lies in wait for the presumptuous mortal whoo oversteps the boundary of what is fair and good. Nemesis!

Three hundred and fifty thousand francs. There would be an ample dowry for Matilda. And, as regards himself, he could return to his pa.s.sion of youth; he could afford to become a sculptor again and even, if so disposed, a collector--though not exactly after the style of his excellent friend Cornelius van Koppen.

"That was a suggestive encounter, was it not, between the Deputy and our local judge?"

He spoke, as before, out of civility.

"Very suggestive," a.s.sented Mr. Heard. "Two blackguards, I call them."

The bishop was particularly glad to learn, as everybody on the island had learnt, the minutest details of this sordid legal affair. It seemed likewise to have been providentially arranged, in order to afford him an insight into the administration of local law, and some notion of what would have been in store for his cousin had she applied for relief from Muhlen's persecutions to Signor Malipizzo, his intimate friend.

There would have been no justice for her--not from that quarter. He would probably have forbidden the child to be moved out of his jurisdiction, pending the progress of a trial which might never end.

Nor could the English Court, with its obsolete provisions on this head, have regarded Muhlen otherwise than as her legal husband--the child of her later union as illegitimate. b.a.s.t.a.r.dy: a taint for life! How well she had done to put herself beyond a rancorous letter of the law; to protect her child and family according to the immutable instincts of mankind!

The Nepenthe magistrate had shown what he was capable of, in his b.e.s.t.i.a.l dealings with a half-witted lad and those harmless Russian lunatics--the first one saved through the intervention of a cut-throat politician, and the second ... well, he did not exactly know how the Muscovites had been able to regain their freedom but, remembering what Keith had told him about Miss Wilberforce, her periodical imprisonments and his periodical bribes, he shrewdly suspected some underhand practices on the part of that gentleman at the instigation, very possibly, of the charming Madame Steynlin. Signor Malipizzo's cruel travesty of justice--how unfavourably it compared with his cousin's altogether satisfactory, straightforward and businesslike handling of Muhlen's little affair!

Doubtless she suffered intensely. He called to mind her looks, her voice, during that first interview at the villa Mon Repos; he thought it likely that, but for her child and husband, she would have taken her own life in order to escape from this villain. And doubtless she had weighed the matter in her own mind. Sensible people do not take steps of this gravity without reflecting on the possible consequences. She must have tried her hardest to talk Muhlen over, before coming to the conclusion that thee was nothing to be done with the fellow. She knew him; she knew her own mind. She knew better than anyone else what was in store for her if Muhlen got the upper hand. Her home broken up; her child a b.a.s.t.a.r.d; herself and Meadows--social outcasts; all their three lives ruined. Mrs. Meadows, plainly, did not relish such a prospect.

She did not see why her existence should be wrecked because a scoundrel happened to be supported by a disreputable paragraph of the Code.

Muhlen was a troublesome insect. He must be brushed aside. Ridiculous to call such a thing a tragedy!

He thought of the insignificance of a human life. Thousands of decent upright folks swept away at a blow.... Who cared? One dirty blackmailer more or less: what on earth did it matter to anybody?

An enigma? His cousin was not an enigma at all. Keith had called her a tiger mother. That was correct. Not every parent could do what she had done. Not every parent could do what she had done. Not every parent was placed under the necessity. Not every parent had the grit. If all of them fought for their offspring after this fashion, the race would be stronger and better. Thinking thus, he not only understood. He approved. Mrs. Meadows had saved her family. She was perfect of her kind.

Suddenly he remembered that other parent on the pa.s.senger boat when he came to Nepenthe--that ugly peasant-woman dressed in black, with the scar across her cheek--how she had tried to console her suffering child.

What had Muhlen said? "Throw it into the water! It's often the only way of ridding oneself of a nuisance." Into the water. His own words. That was where he, the nuisance, had gone. It was unpleasant, maybe, to hurtle through eight hundred feet of air. But men who specialize in making themselves objectionable after Muhlen's peculiar fashion deserve all they can get. Sensible women do not put up with such nonsense, if they can help it.

One owes something to one's self, N'EST-CE PAS?

Decidedly so.

Everything was as clear as daylight. And he found he had bothered himself long enough about Muhlen; there were so many other interesting things on earth. A contemptible little episode! He decided to relegate it into the category of unimportant events. He was glad that the whole affair had remained in the background, so to speak, of his Nepenthean experiences. It seemed appropriate. Odd, all the same, that the most respectable woman on the island should be a murderess.

"Dear me!" he mused. "How very queer. It never struck me in the light before. Shows how careful one must be.... And a relation of mine into the bargain. H'm. Some people, if they knew, would call it a compromising situation. Well, I begin to think it rather creditable than otherwise to our family. We want more women of this kind on earth.

All mothers ought to be tiger mothers...."

"Don't you notice, Count, that there is an unwonted sparkle in the air this evening? Something cleansing, clarifying?"

"To be sure I do," replied the other. "And I can tell you the cause of it. Sirocco is over for the present. The wind has shifted to the north.

It brightens all nature. It makes one see things in their true perspective, doesn't it?"

"That is exactly what I feel," said Mr. Heard.

CHAPTER XL

The symposium, that evening, might have degenerated into something like an orgy but for the masterful intervention of Denis who was not going to let Keith make a fool of himself. It took place in the most famous of all the caves of Nepenthe-Luisella's grotto-cavern dedicated, by common usage, to the worship of Venus and Bacchus.

There were two or three living rooms on the surface of the ground.

Walking through the first of these you clambered down some slippery stairs into what was once a breathless subterranean vault hewn out of the soft and dry pumiceous rock and used, as was customary, for storing barrels and other paraphernalia. In the course of time, as more barrels acc.u.mulated, the grotto was excavated further and further into the entrails of the island. There seemed no reason why it should ever cease growing when suddenly, one day, the perspiring workmen were struck in the face by a cool blast of wind laden with marine moisture. They knew what this meant. They had encountered one of those mysterious and dangerous fissures that lead down to unknown depths, opening upon the world of sunshine often at the water's edge, four hundred feet below.

It was deemed prudent to suspend excavations. These rents in the interior of the earth had a knack of enlarging themselves, without a word of warning, from cracks of a few inches to black gulfs several hundred feet across. The cavern ceased to grow. As a matter of fact, it turned out to be just large enough.

That current of air ventilating the grotto made the fortune of these orphan girls--Luisella and her three sisters. The barrels and other lumber once removed, the recess became a breezy night-tavern, its natural vaulting being first whitewashed and then adorned, by master-hand, with thrilling pictures of crimson fish afloat upon caerulean waves, and piles of bossy pumpkins, and birds of Paradise with streaming golden feathers, and goats at pasture among blue lilies, and horses prancing over emerald mountains, and trees laden with flowers and fruits such as no mortal had ever seen or tasted. It was an ideal place for a carousal.

They could cook, those girls. Their savoury stews and vegetable soups and FRITTURAS of every description were known far and wide. It was universally agreed that n.o.body could make a more appetizing mayonnaise sauce for cold fish and lobsters. No mayonnaise was quite like theirs; no, not quite. Its flavour lingered on the palate; it haunted your memory in distant lands, like the after-glow of some happy love-affair.

Nice girls, too; well-mannered; not very difficult to caress, and never jealous of each other. "It's all in the family," they used to declare.

"Am I right, then, or am I wrong?" asked Mr. Keith, whose pomposity was melting away under successive bottles of his own wine, specially imported to grace the table.