South Wind Part 23

There was worse to come. For while the sun yet lingered on the horizon news of further portents came thick and fast. A plum tree belonging to a farmer of good standing had unaccountably lost all its leaves. The d.u.c.h.ess arrived in a state of unusual trepidation, declaring that the tortoise-sh.e.l.l of her lorgnette gave forth a crackling sound. She appealed to Don Francesco to explain the meaning of this extraordinary circ.u.mstance; it crackled most distinctly, she declared. Not far from the little bay where only yesterday the streamlet of Saint Elias still trickled into the sea, a fisherman had caught a one-eyed lamprey--a beast, unquestionably, of ill repute. The bibliographer, strolling about with Denis, recollected that his fox-terrier that very morning had been violently sick. He seemed to attach no great importance to the affair; all the same, he said, it was rather queer; dogs are not like that; now, if it had been Keith.... The baby of the princ.i.p.al grocer had tumbled downstairs and thereupon proceeded to swallow eight of its elder brother's marbles which had been carelessly left on the floor--without experiencing, so far as could be ascertained, any appreciable injury. A mysterious disease, known as the scabies, had broken out among the Russian apostles. The yacht of the American millionaire, Mr. van Koppen, arrived that day; there was nothing startling in this since he visited the island year after year at the same season; but why should she collide with a fis.h.i.+ng-boat at the moment of anchoring?

And from the Old Town came news of a portentous fowl which had suddenly a.s.sumed the plumage of the male s.e.x. It was a hen renowned, hitherto, for her temperate and normal habits and, as it happened, known by sight to the local parish priest, who, horrified at the transformation of the feathered monster and mindful of the Papal Bull NE NIMIS NOCEANT n.o.bIS which enjoins upon Christians the duty of destroying all unnatural productions however generated, incontinently ordered it to be put out of the way. But the destruction of this androgyne proved an arduous task. It was reported that the creature fought for its life with the energy of a demon, crowing vigorously the while and laying, in the very act of death, an egg--an egg of spheroidal form, bluish in colour, and apparently hard-boiled--an egg which the Chief Medical Officer of Health had no great difficulty in recognizing as that of a c.o.c.katrice.

In view of these and other sinister occurrences it is not surprising that a sense of insecurity should have fallen upon the more credulous section of the natives. Even sceptical persons thought it rather provoking on the part of Providence, or whoever managed these things, that the disquieting of men's minds should take place during this particular fortnight, the most important of the whole year, midway between the great feasts of Saint Dodeka.n.u.s and Saint Eulalia when the island was crammed with visitors.

And there followed late at night yet another surprise. Mr. Parker had been called away from his duties at the Club in hot haste by the news that his lady was seriously ill. A few days earlier she had been stung on the lip by a mosquito; no further attention was paid to the incident, though the disagreeable south wind provoked a rise in temperature and some discomfort. On this afternoon, however, her face had suddenly begun to a.s.sume strange tints and to swell in wondrous fas.h.i.+on. It was no already enlarged to twice its natural size and altogether--in the words of the physician who had been summoned to her villa--"a thing to see."

It had always been a thing to see. So, at least, said those who were privileged to know. There were tropical strains in her blood-strains from some flowery land in the Caribbean Sea-strains which refused to mingle in harmonious fas.h.i.+on with the white elements in her ancestry.

She was neither lovely nor lovable, and it was regarded as a kindly dispensation of Heaven that some malformation of the lower limbs kept her confined to her boudoir, where no visitors ever called save a few misguided newcomers to the island who were unaware of her idiosyncrasies. These idiosyncrasies, due to the enforced inactivity of her feet, took the form of a grotesque activity of the tongue. Her infirmity preventing her from learning how things really stood, she let her phantasy run riot on the occasional reports which reached the villa; and that phantasy, nourished by lack of physical exercise, indulged in a love of scandal-mongering which bordered, and sometimes trespa.s.sed, on the pathological. She distilled scandal from every pore, and in such liberal quant.i.ties that even the smiling and good-natured Don Francesco once spoke of her as "the serpent in the Paradise." But perhaps he only said that because Madame Parker was not over-fond of him--his rival the PARROCO being her friend and confessor.

Such being the case, the prospect of her possible demise was received with unconcern and even relief by all save a notable number of tradesmen who prayed fervently for her health because the lady, presuming on her connection with the official representative of the friendly state of Nicaragua, had contrived to owe them considerable sums of money. Knowing the Commissioner as they did, these victims feared that they would never be able to collect their due in the event of her death. Hence their prayers for her speedy recovery.

What would that gentleman do without her? For it was his redeeming feature that he felt, or professed to feel, affection for this graceless harridan who was the only person on earth that believed, or professed to believe, in the integrity of his motives. It is to be presumed that they saw through each other perfectly; she, at least, may well have appraised him at his true value. She must have known him for a dishonest fool. Yet this principle of mutual attachment was never relinquished. Wiser than her stepbrother, she knew that a house divided against itself must fall; she therefore approved, forcefully if without conviction, of his every word and deed. Such approval did him good. It created a fict.i.tious self-esteem. And this was really rather unfortunate, since self-esteem, by giving him a sense of importance and consequence in the world, rendered him a good deal more objectionable to his fellow-creatures than he need have been.

Meanwhile she lingered on, and a small group of enquirers were gathered round the physician who was returning late at night from his third visit. The moralists among them saw the finger of G.o.d in the fact that her mouth, out of which had proceeded so much harm to strong men and women, should now be sealed by one of the frailest of His creatures.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders at this kind of talk. He was no moralizer; he was a true Southerner, an aesthete--one of those who could appreciate the subtlest beauty of a skin disease. He waxed discursive on the subject; said that the lady's face reminded him of the rainbow in a certain picture by a local genius; avowed that there were moments when even a doctor's hard life had its compensations, and that this was one of them.

His enthusiasm carried the audience off their feet. It converted the sternest preachers into artists. They forgot to talk about moral lessons. All congratulated the good Aesculapius on his choice of the medical profession as a career and his luck in beholding a spectacle such as this; especially when he added, with glowing eloquence, that it was astonis.h.i.+ng how so small an insect, a mere mosquito, should be able to produce an eruption of this magnitude and in colours, moreover, which would have made t.i.tian or Peter Paul Rubens burst with envy.

CHAPTER XVII

Decidedly, things were happening, as Mr. Heard would have said.

Strange to say that gentleman himself was probably the only person on Nepenthe who still remained in ignorance of all these praeternatural occurrences. In the early morning, after admiring the sea overhung by a cloudless sky and once more thanking the d.u.c.h.ess in his heart for such a delightful residence when he might have been boxed up in some stuffy hotel bedroom, he descended to the beach for his morning bathe. Such was his custom. The swim did him good, it freshened him up.

Then back to breakfast and a busy morning's work, to settle up arrears of correspondence. He wrote to various friends in England; he wrote a long letter--the third since his arrival--to his mother, telling her of all such things as might interest her; a nice gossipy letter, full of information about the entertainments of the foreigners on Nepenthe, about the obliging natives, the Russian colony, the persistent sirocco, his own domestic life, his improved health. Much as he liked the place and people, he said, he expected to be leaving in a week or so. He concluded with two pages describing his last visit to his cousin. She was rather poorly or troubled in mind, he thought; he would see her again ere long.

And that reminded him--he would write to Mrs. Meadows as well. He did so, enquiring after her health, asking whether he could be of any a.s.sistance, and promising to call again shortly. "Rather a formal epistle," he concluded, on reading it through. He was unable to force the note: he could never write or talk otherwise than he felt, and this cousin, after all, was rather remote, self-centred, and difficult of comprehension. "It must go as it is," he decided. "To be quite frank, she's not exactly encouraging either. Asks such queer questions. What on earth did she mean by that conundrum about illegitimacy, I wonder?"

Then luncheon; then a long sleep till tea-time. Everyone slept at this hour during the days of sirocco-heat. What else was there to do? He had already learned to look forward to that calm post-prandial hour of slumber. One owes something to oneself, N'EST CE PAS? as Muhlen had said.

On waking he bethought him of an invitation to tea with Madame Steynlin. He would have listened gladly to her music and her instructive and charitable talk about Nepenthe and its inhabitants. But he was afraid of meeting Russians there. The lady seemed to be specializing in Muscovites just then, and Mr. Heard was not in the Russian mood. He would take what he called "a day off" from social duties.

Slipping his field gla.s.ses into his pocket, he rambled upwards by now familiar paths, past white farmhouses nestling in a riot of greenery; till he reached the barer regions. The vines were more spa.r.s.ely cultivated here, and soon all trace of human handcraft was at an end.

He found himself on a little plateau of volcanic cinders and lava-blocks. The spare gra.s.ses and flowers that grew between fuliginous ma.s.ses of stone were already losing their bright enamel under the withering heat; a peculiar odour, acrid but stimulating to the nostrils, rose from the parched ground. Here he rested awhile. He scanned the landscape through his gla.s.ses--a wine-coloured sea at his feet, flecked with sailing boats innumerable; confronting him from the volcano whose playful antics were even then attracting the attention of a crowded Piazza. And his eye roved along the serrated contours of the mainland, its undulating sh.o.r.e-line, its distant peaks throbbing in the sunset glow; they rested upon many villages, coral-tinted specks of light, so far away they seemed to belong to another world. It was a pleasure to breathe on these aerial heights, surrounded by sky and sea; to survey the world as a bird might survey it. Like floating in air....

He sat and smoked and pondered. He tried to get himself into perspective. "I must straighten myself out," he thought. a.s.suredly it was a restful place, this Nepenthe, abounding in kindly people; his affection for it grew with every day. Rest without; but where was that old rest within, that sense of plain tasks plainly to be performed, of tangible duty? Whither had it gone? Alien influences were at work upon him. Something new had insinuated itself into his blood, some demon of doubt and disquiet which threatened his old-established conceptions.

Whence came it? The effect of changed environment--new friends, new food, new habits? The unaccustomed leisure which gave him, for the first time, a chance of thinking about non-professional matters? The south wind acting on his still weakened health? All these together? Or had he reached an epoch in his development, the termination of one of those definite life--periods when all men worthy of the name pa.s.s through some cleansing process of spiritual desquamation, and slip their outworn weeds of thought and feeling?

Whatever it was he seemed to be no longer his own master, as in former days. Fate had caused his feet to stray towards something new--something alarming. He was poised, as it were, on the brink of a gulf. Or rather, it was as if that old mind of his, like a boat sailing hitherto briskly before the wind, had suddenly encountered a bank of calm, of utter and ominous calm; it was a thing spell-bound; a toy of circ.u.mstances beyond human control. The canvas hung in the stagnant air. From which quarter would the quickening breeze arrive? Whither would it bring him?

And his glance fell upon a slender coquettish vessel, a new-comer, lying in the sunny harbour under the cliff. He knew it from hearsay. It was the FLUTTERBY, van Koppen's yacht. He recollected all he had ever heard about the millionaire; he tried to conjure up some idea of his features and habits from gossip overheard at odd moments.

This man, he concluded, must be intelligent beyond ordinary standards.

It would be worth while making his acquaintance. America is notoriously the land of youthful precocity. But it is not every American who, as a stripling of fourteen summers, puzzling in callow boyish perplexity upon the thousand ills that afflict mankind and burning with desire for their betterment, makes a discovery in Malthusian methods destined to convulse the trade and the social life of a continent. Not everybody is like young Koppen--he attached a van to his name on reaching his seventy-fifth million--who, possessed at that time of barely three dollars in the world and not even the shadow of a moustache, had both the wit to realize the hygienic importance of a certain type of goods and the pertinacity to insist on cheapening their price, in the interest of public health, to such an extent that--to quote from subsequent advertis.e.m.e.nts--they should be "within reach of the humblest home." It is not everybody--no, not every American--who, after revolutionizing the technique of manufacture and shattering the Paris monopoly, dares boldly to advertise the improved article across the length and breadth of the land, and to thrust his commodity upon a reluctant market in the teeth of popular prejudice and commercial rivalry. Van Koppen had done all this. And it was noted that he had done it without ever for a moment losing sight of his dual aim--mercantile and philanthropic; for if he was a humanitarian by natural disposition, he became what he called "a tradesman by force of circ.u.mstance"--and not a bad tradesman, either. He had done all this and more. Unlike most self-made men who remain yoked like oxen to their sordid affairs (in harness, they aptly call it) he had been shrewd enough to retire from business in the heyday of his age, on a relatively modest competence of fifteen million dollars a year. He was spending his time at present in the gratification of personal whims, and leaving the remaining millions to be picked up by whoever cared to take the trouble. Manifestly an unusual type of millionaire--this man who had lived down half a century of obloquy and was now hailed, in well-informed circles, as the saviour of his country.

Nor was this all. Van Koppen was described as a brisk, genial, talkative old fellow, rather fat, with a clear complexion, sound teeth, shrubby grey beard, a tw.a.n.g barely sufficient to authenticate his transatlantic descent, and the digestion of a boa-constrictor. He was tremendously fond of b.u.t.tered tea-cakes--so the d.u.c.h.ess said; a man who, in the words of Madame Steynlin, "really appreciated good music" and who, as the PARROCO never ceased to declare, could be relied on to give a handsome contribution towards the funds for supporting the poor and repairing a decrepit parish organ. (The parish poor were never in such dire distress, the parish organ never so hopelessly deranged, as during that annual week when the FLUTTERBY rode at anchor.)

In fact there was no doubt about it: van Koppen had the gifts of making himself beloved. But n.o.body's company was more markedly to his taste than that of Count Caloveglia. The two old men spent hours together in Caloveglia's shady courtyard, eating candied fruits, sipping home-made liqueurs of peaches or mountain-herbs and talking--ever talking. Between them there existed some strong and strange bond of friends.h.i.+p or interest. Speculation was rife as to its origin, its meaning, its end.

What was all the talk about?

Andrea, the devoted retainer, however artfully approached on the subject, was ambiguous to a distressing degree. It was understood, none the less, that Count Caloveglia was perhaps of use to the other in the acc.u.mulation of cla.s.sical relics which--the Italian Government forbidding the export of antique works of art--were smuggled at night-time on board the FLUTTERBY to be incorporated in a magnificent museum somewhere out West, a museum which was destined to be presented by van Koppen as a gift to the great American people. Again, it might be inferred that these two elderly gentlemen, choice representatives of two conflicting civilizations, widely experienced and profoundly versed, each in his own way, in the knowledge of mankind, took a sincere and childlike pleasure in one another's society, going over past times and anxious, to the very end of life, to add something fresh to their store of learning.

Both these explanations were sufficiently plausible to be straightway dismissed by the majority as inadequate to account for the phenomenon.

They inclined, rather, to adopt an alternative and alluring theory propounded by the Commissioner's lady. This theory laid it down that the American was bargaining for the Count's daughter, a pretty girl whom the old ruffian had shut up in a convent somewhere in antic.i.p.ation of the day when a purchaser, rich enough to content his inordinate l.u.s.t for gold, should present himself. Van Koppen was that purchaser. They had now been haggling, she said, for two or three years; a DENOUEMENT might be expected at any moment. If the Count's avarice could be appeased the unhappy child might expect to find herself, with as little delay as possible, an inmate of the floating harem on board the FLUTTERBY.

No visitor was safe from her lively tongue, and alas, certain little details, insignificant in themselves, gave ground for the ungenerous hypothesis that van Koppen, like all the rest of them, had a cloven hoof. There was the usual "dark side" to this otherwise charming and profitable stranger, the usual mystery, the usual fly in the ointment.

In the first place it was a singular fact, much commented on, that n.o.body had ever been invited on board the yacht. That alone was suspicious. IF YOU WANT TO GET ANYTHING OUT OF OLD KOPPEN--so ran a local saying--DON'T PROPOSE A VISIT TO THE FLUTTERBY. More curious still was the circ.u.mstance that n.o.body, save the owner and certain bearded venerables of the crew, had ever been known to land on the island. How about the other pa.s.sengers? Who were they? The millionaire never so much as mentioned their existence. It was surmised, accordingly, that he voyaged over the seas with a bevy of light-hearted nymphs; a disreputable mode of conduct for a man of his advanced years, and all the more aggravating to other people since, like a crafty and jealous old sultan, he screened them from public view. Impropriety could be overlooked--it could pa.s.s, where a millionaire was concerned, under the heading of unconventionality; but such glaring selfishness might end in being fatal to his reputation.

Confirmatory evidence of this scandalous state of affairs was obtained, one sunny morning, in the most unexpected fas.h.i.+on. A fisherman named Luigi, paddling about the stern of the FLUTTERBY where, in consequence of the kitchen refuse thrown overboard, marine beasts of every shape and kind were wont to congregate, cast down his spear at what looked like a splendid caerulean flat-fish of uncommon size and brilliance.

The creature s.h.i.+vered and collapsed at that contact in the most unnatural, unfishlike manner; and Luigi drew up, to his amazement, a fragment of a lady's dress--to wit, a short length of sky-blue CREPE DE CHINE. Bitterly disappointed, he nevertheless took the matter with the characteristic Southern philosophy. "This will do for my little Annarella," he decided. And doubtless the child, arrayed in these celestial tints, would have been the envy of all her girl companions at the next festival of the patron saint b for the fact that Mr. Freddy Parker was strolling on the beach at the very moment of the man's return to land. By a rare piece of good luck, as he himself phrased it, his eye fell upon the dripping fabric; by a stroke of intuition not rare but unique, he divined its worth as a sociological doc.u.ment.

Promising the man a reasonable sum of money (the Commissioner happened to have no loose change in his pocket just then) he carried the incrimination morsel in triumph to the Residency, where it was displayed by his lady, to all and sundry, in corroboration of her theory.

"That settles it," she used to say. "Unless indeed he dresses up his cabin-boy as a girl, and in that case...."

Mr. Heard, reposing on the rough pumiceous ground with his eye fixed upon the naughty FLUTTERBY whose virginal whiteness, with declining day, had a.s.sumed a tell-tale crimson blush, pieced together these and sundry other little bits of information. They made him more than usually thoughtful; they chimed in with his momentary mood of self-a.n.a.lysis.

One thing was dead certain. To circ.u.mnavigate the globe in the arms of a dozen chorus-girls was not his ideal. He was not built on those lines. He purposed, G.o.d Willing, to spend the evening of his days in another and more respectable manner. A vision arose before his imagination--a vision of a peaceful homestead among the green lanes of England, where he would lead a life of study and of kindly, unostentatious acts, with family and friends; old friends of College days, and London days, and African days; new friends from among the rising generation--straightforward and decent-minded youngsters, whom he would take to his heart like a father.

Why could not van Koppen see the beauty of such dreamings?

And yet, he argued, if the man does seclude them in this fas.h.i.+on--supposing they really exist--who can blame him? No woman is safe on Nepenthe with persons like Muhlen about. From chance meetings in the street, from stray conversations overheard, he had been led to take an unreasoning dislike to this foreigner, whose att.i.tude towards the gentle s.e.x struck him as that of a cur. Muhlen, if the yacht were his, would flaunt these ladies about the streets. The American, in keeping them secluded on board, betrayed a sense of shame, almost of delicacy; a sense of his obligations towards society which, so far as it went, was rather a laudable trait of character than otherwise.

And then--the difference between himself and the millionaire in life, training, antecedents! A career such as van Koppen's called for qualities different, often actually antagonistic, to his own. You could not possibly expect to find in a successful American merchant those features which go to form a successful English ecclesiastic. Certain human attributes were mutually exclusive--avarice and generosity, for instance; others no doubt mysteriously but inextricably intertwined. A man was an individual; he could not be divided or taken to pieces; he could not be expected to possess virtues incompatible with the rest of his mental equipment, however desirable such virtues might be. Who knows? Van Koppen's doubtful acts might be an unavoidable expression of his personality, an integral part of that nature under whose ferocious stimulus he had climbed to his present enviable position. And Mr. Heard was both shocked and amused to reflect that but for the co-operation of certain coa.r.s.e organic impulses to which these Nepenthe legends testified, the millionaire might never have been able to acquire the proud t.i.tle of "Saviour of his Country."

"That's queer," he mused. "It never struck me before. Shows how careful one must be. Dear me! Perhaps the ladies have inevitable organic impulses of a corresponding kind. Decidedly queer. H'm. Ha. Now I wonder.... And perhaps, if the truth were known, these young persons are having quite a good time of it--"

He paused abruptly in his reflections. He had caught himself in the act; in the very act of condoning vice. Mr. Thomas Heard was seriously concerned.

Something was wrong, he concluded. He would never have argued on similar lines a short time ago. This downright sympathy with sinners, what did it portend? Did it betray a lapse from his old-established principles, a waning of his respect for traditional morality? Was he becoming a sinner himself?

Thomas--the doubting apostle. He wondered whether there was anything in a name.

Then he called to mind how he had approved--yes, almost approved--of Don Francesco's deplorable act of familiarity towards the little serving maid. An absurdly small matter, but symptomatic. Things like that had happened in Africa lately. He remembered various instances where he had intervened on behalf of the natives, despite the murmured protests of the missionaries. They were such laughing, good-natured animals--so fine and healthy! What was it, this excessive love of erring humanity, and whither trending? Mr. Heard began to vex his soul to stray about in a maze of doubts. It was so miserably complex, this old, old problem of right and wrong; so unreasonably many-sided. Anon, he pulled himself together with characteristic bluntness.

"The whole question," he concluded, "is plain as a pikestaff. Am I becoming more of a Christian, or less?"

As though to learn an answer to his riddle he gazed fro he eyrie over the wide horizon, upon leagues of sea rising upward to blend their essence, under the magic touch of evening, with the purple dome overhead.