South Wind Part 17

Then came the Good Duke Alfred. His Highness posed as a conservative in some matters; it pleased him to revive memories of the long-buried past. He cared little about ghosts. He liked to take things in hand.

After remarking in his brisk epigrammatic fas.h.i.+on that "not everything old is putrid," he devoted his attention to the Cave of Mercury and caused a flight of convenient stairs to be built, wide enough to admit the pa.s.sage of two of his fattest Privy Councillors walking abreast, and leading down to this particular grotto through a cleft in the rock.

n.o.body knew what happened there under his superintendence. Mankind being ever p.r.o.ne to believe the worst of every great man, all kinds of stupid and even wicked things were said, though not during his lifetime. People vowed that he carried on the old traditions, the tortures and human sacrifices, and even improved upon them in his blithe Renaissance manner. They were ready to supply circ.u.mstantial and excruciating details of how, disguised, down to the minutest details of costume, in the semblance of the Evil One, he had sought to prolong his life and invigorate his declining health with the blood of innocent children, artfully done to death after fiendish, lingering agonies.

Father Capocchio, needless to say, has some shocking pages on this subject.

Mr. Eames, who had made a careful study of Duke Alfred's reign, came to the conclusion that such excesses were incompatible with the character of a ruler whose love of children was one of his most salient traits.

In regard to those other and vaguer accusations, he contended that the Duke was too jovial by nature to have tortured any save those who, in his opinion, thoroughly deserved it. Indeed, he was sceptical about the whole thing. Monsignor Perrelli might have told us the truth, had he cared to do so. But, for reasons which will appear anon, he is remarkably silent on all that concerns the reign of his great contemporary. He says nothing more than this:

"His Highness deigned, during the same year, to restore, and put into its old working order, the decayed heathen rock-chapel vulgarly known as the Cave of Mercury."

To put into ITS OLD WORKING ORDER; that would sound rather suspicious, as though to contain a veiled accusation. We must remember, however, that the historian of Nepenthe bore a grudge against his Prince (of which likewise more anon), a grudge which he was far too prudent to vent openly; so bitter and personal a grudge that he may have felt himself justified in making a covert innuendo of this kind whenever he could safely risk it.

Meanwhile, everything remained as before--shrouded in mystery. Being doubly haunted now, by the Duke's victims and by those earlier ones, the cave fell into greater neglect than ever. Simple folk avoided speaking of the place save in a hushed whisper. It became a proverb among the islanders when speaking of something outrageously improbable: "Don't tell me! Such things only happen in the Cave of Mercury." When someone disappeared from his house or hotel without leaving any trace behind--it happened now and then--or when anything disreputable happened to anyone, they always said "Try the Cave," or simply "Try Mercury."

The path had crumbled away long ago. n.o.body went there, except in broad daylight. It was as safe a place as you could desire, at night-time, for a murder or a love-affair. Such was the Cave of Mercury.

Denis had gone to the spot one morning not long after his arrival. He had climbed down the slippery stairs through that dank couloir or funnel in the rock overhung with drooping maidenhair and ivy and umbrageous carobs. He had rested on the little platform outside the cavern's vineyard far below, and upwards, at the narrow ribbon of sky overhead. Then he had gone within, to examine what was left of the old masonry, the phallic column and other relics of the past. That was ten days ago. Now he meant to follow Keith's advice and go there at midnight. The moon was full.

"This very night I'll go," he thought.

All was not well with Denis. And the worst of it was, he had no clear notion of what was the matter. He was changing. The world was changing too. It had suddenly expanded. He felt that he, also, ought to expand.

There was so much to learn, to see, to know--so much, that it seemed to paralyse his initiative. Could he absorb all this? Would he ever get things in order once more, and recapture his self-possession? Would he ever again be satisfied with himself? It was an invasion of his tranquillity, from within and without. He was restless. Bright ideas never came to him, as of old; or else they were the ideas of other people. A miserable state of affairs! He was becoming an automaton--an echo.

An echo.... How right Keith had been!

"It's rotten," he concluded. "I'm a ludicrous figure, a pathetic idiot."

The novel impressions of Florence had helped in the disintegration.

Nepenthe--it's suns.h.i.+ne, its relentless paganism--had done the rest. It shattered his earlier outlook and gave him nothing in exchange.

Nothing, and yet everything. That vision of Angelina! It filled his inner being with luxurious content; content and uncertainty. It was there, at the back of every dream, of every intimate thought and every little worldly phrase that he uttered. He was like a man who, looking long at the sun, sees its image floating in heaven, on earth--wherever he casts his eye. Angelina! Nothing else was of any account. How would it all end? He drifted along in blissful apprehension of what the next day might bring. She seemed to have become genuinely well-disposed towards him of late, though in rather a mocking, maternal sort of fas.h.i.+on.

The poetic vein had definitely run dry. Impossible to make things rhyme, somehow. Perhaps his pa.s.sion was too strong for technical restraints. He tried his hand at prose:

"Your eyes bewilder me. I would liken you to a shaft of sunlight, a withering flame--a black flame, if such there be--for your grace and ardour is even as a flame. Your step is laughter and song. Your hair is a torrent of starless night. The sun is your lover, you G.o.d. He takes joy in your perfection. Your slender body palpitates with his imprisoned beams. He has moulded your limbs and kissed your smooth skin in the days when you ... nevermore will you whiten those kisses...."

"It won't do," he sadly reflected, laying down the pen. "The adaptation is too palpable. Why does everybody antic.i.p.ate my ideas? The fact is, I have nothing to say. I can only feel. Everything went right, so long as I was in love with myself. Now everything goes wrong."

Then he remembered Keith's pompous exhortation.

"Find yourself! You know the Cave of Mercury! Climb down, one night of full moon--"

"There is something in what he says. This very night I'll go."

It was particularly hard for him that evening. The d.u.c.h.ess was dining with a party at Madame Steynlin's; it was an open secret that the entertainment would end in a moonlight excursion on the water; she would not return till very late. Angelina would be alone, accessible.

It was her duty to guard the house in the absence of its mistress. He might have gone there on some pretext and talked awhile, and looked into her elvish eyes and listened to that Southern voice, rich and clear as a bell. Almost he yielded. He thought of the inept.i.tude of the whole undertaking and, in particular, of those slippery stairs; one might break one's neck there at such an hour of the night. Unless one wore tennis shoes--

Well, he would wear them. He would resist the temptation and approve himself a man. Everybody, even the d.u.c.h.ess, was always telling him to be a man. He would find himself. Keith was right.

The night came.

He descended noiselessly into the cool and dark chasm, resting awhile on a ledge about half-way down, to drink in the spirit of the place.

All was silent. Dim ma.s.ses towered overhead; through rifts in the rocky fabric he caught glimmerings, strange and yet familiar, of the landscape down below. It swam in the milky radiance of a full moon whose light streamed down from some undiscoverable source behind the mountain, suffusing the distant vineyards and trees with a ghostly tinge of green. Like looking into another world, he though; a poet's world. Calmly it lay there, full of splendour. How well one could understand, in such a place, the glamour, the romance, of night!

Romance.... What was left of life without romance? He remembered his talk with Marten; he thought of the scientists crude notions of romance. He pitied the materialism which denied him joys like these.

This moonlit landscape--how full of suggestion! That grotto down below--what tales it could unfold!

The Cave of Mercury....

How had Mercury, the arch-thief, come to be presiding genius here?

Denis knew; his friend Eames had explained everything to him. Mercury had nothing whatever to do with the site. That name had been proved by the bibliographer to be the invention of some pedantic monk who liked to display his learning to a generation avid of antiquities, a generation which insisted on attaching a Roman deity to every cavern.

It was a wilful fabrication, made in the infancy of archaeology when historical criticism was non-existent. And the same with all those stories about human sacrifices and tortures. There was not a word of truth in them. So Mr. Eames had decided, after a systematic investigation of both of the older authorities and of the grotto itself. The legends, too, were simply invented to give a zest to a locality whose original antique name had apparently been lost, though he had not yet abandoned all hope of stumbling across it by one of those lucky accidents which reward the lover of old parchments and t.i.tle-deeds. A pure invention. It was plain the Mr. Eames from what remained of ancient symbols on the spot, that the cave had been consecrated to older and worthier rites--to some mysterious, primeval, fecund Mother of Earth. Her name, like that of her habitation, had lapsed into oblivion.

"There is something grand in this old animistic conception," Eames had said. "Later on, under the Romans, the place seems to have been dedicated to Priapic rites. That is rather a depreciation, isn't it? It brings us down from fruitfulness to mere lasciviousness. But where are you going to draw the line? Everything tends to lose its hallowed meaning; it becomes degraded, b.e.s.t.i.a.lized. Still, the roots of the idea are sound. In giving sensual attributes to a garden G.o.d the ancients had in mind the recklessness, the spendthrift abundance, of all nature--not excluding our own. They tried to explain how it came about that the sanest man is liable, under the stress of desire, to acts of which he vainly repents at leisure. I don't suppose they meant to justify those acts. If they had, they would have given a less equivocal position to Priapus in their celestial hierarchy. Priapus, you know, was not wholly divine. I think they only wanted to make it quite clear that we cannot drive out nature with a fork. I wish we could," he added.

And then he sighed. The poor fellow was thinking at that moment, of balloons.

Denis remembered this conversation. Earth-wors.h.i.+p: the cult of those generative forces which weld together in one mighty instinct the highest and lowliest of terrestrial creatures.... The unalienable right of man and beast to enact that which shall confound death, and replenish the land with youth, and joy, and teeming life. The right which priestly castes of every age have striven to repress, which triumphs over every obstacle and sanctifies, by its fruits, the wildest impulses of man. The right to love!

Musing thus, he began to understand why men of old, who looked things squarely in the face, should have deified this friendly, all-compelling pa.s.sion. He reverenced the fierce necessity which drives the living world to its fairest and sole enduring effort. Be fruitful and multiply. He recognized for the firs ttime that he was not a lonely figure on earth, but absorbed into a solemn and eternal movement; bound close to the throbbing heart of the Universe. There was grandeur, there was repose, in being able to regard himself as an integral part of nature, destined to create and leave his mark. He felt that he was growing into harmony with permanent things--finding himself. He realized now what Keith had meant.

It cost him quite an effort to tear himself away from that ledge. He began to descend once more.

Near the entrance of the Cave he paused abruptly. It seemed as if a sound had issued from the interior of the rock. He listened. It came again--a human sound, unquestionably, and within a few yards of his face. A whisper. There was something going on--Earth-wors.h.i.+p....

Suddenly a succession of words broke upon the stillness--breathless words, spoken in a language which not everybody could have translated.

He recognized the voice. It said:

"EGO TE AMARE TANTUM! NON VOLERE? NON PIACERE? NON CAPIRE? O Lord, can't you understand?"

It was Mr. Marten's voice. Mr. Marten was being romantic. No answer came to his fervent pleadings. Perhaps they were not coherent enough.

He began again, TREMOLO AGITATO, CON MOLTO SENTIMENTO:

"O EGO TE AMARE TANTUM! NEMO SAPIT NIHIL. d.u.c.h.eSSA IN BARCA AQUATICA c.u.m MAGNA COMPANIA. REDIBIT TARDISSIMO. NIENTE TIMOR. AMARE MULTISSIMO!

EGO MORIRE FINE TE. MORIRE. MORITURUS. CAPITO? NON CAPIRE? Oh, CAPIRE be blowed!"

There was a short pause. The language seems to have been understood this time. For, amid a ripple of laughter, a rich Southern voice was heard to say with a sigh of mock resignation:

"SIA FATTA LA VOLONTA DI DIO!"

Then silence....

Denis turned. He walked up the steps as in a dream, neither slowly nor fast. No one was ever more unhappy, though he scarcely felt as yet the depths of his own humiliation. It was more like a stab--a numbing a.s.sa.s.sin-like stab. He could hear the beatings of his heart.

He reached the upper level of the town, he knew not how.

All lay quiet as he found his way among the familiar buildings. It was after midnight; most of the lamps had been extinguished. The streets were deserted. He heard, in the distance, the song of a drunken wayfarer reeling homewards from a tavern or from the Club.

In one of the little roadways that converge upon the market-place something was astir. It was a dim phantom of willowy outline, swaying capriciously to and fro, like a black feather tossed by the wind. Miss Wilberforce! She fluttered down a doorstep and began crooning a vulgar song about "Billy had a letter for to go on board a s.h.i.+p." Denis moved to the other side of the narrow path, hoping to escape un.o.bserved. The light was too strong.

"My young friend," she cried in quite a hoa.r.s.e and altered tone of voice, "we should know each other! We've had the pleasure haven't we?

Been down to the sea, have you? And what are the wild waves saying?"