Part 30 (1/2)
”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-rus.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne.
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.