Part 31 (1/2)
”Nine o'clock? Then draw the blinds.”
”I've drawn them.” She stepped to the window and tapped on the gla.s.s panes by way of confirmation. ”All dark outside,” she added. ”Ashes are falling from heaven. The volcano is very, very angry.”
”Ashes? The volcano? I must dress at once. Light two more candles. No, three! We can't have three candles burning. Don Francesco may be here at any moment.”
The d.u.c.h.ess often laughingly described herself as ”only a weak woman.”
A certain number of persons concurred in that opinion. Just then she was the most self-possessed inhabitant of Nepenthe. The disturbance of nature left her undisturbed. Her intellect was naturally incurious as to the habits of volcanoes; her soul, moreover, in good hands, her conscience in excellent working order, as befitted a potential convert to Catholicism. She could rely on a spiritual adviser who had instilled into her mind a lofty sense of obedience and resignation. Don Francesco would never desert her. He would arrive in due course, explaining why G.o.d had allowed the volcano to behave in this unseemly fas.h.i.+on, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with words of consolation for his daughter-to-be. G.o.d, if so disposed, could work a miracle and drive away the plague, even as he had sent it. Ashes or no ashes, all was for the best. Calmly she waited.
Out of doors, meanwhile, the shower went on without ceasing. It had begun shortly after midnight; the ground was covered to the depth of two inches. Nepenthe lay veiled in Cimmerian gloom, darker than starless midnight--a darkness that could be felt; a blanket, as it were, hot and breathless, weighing upon the landscape. All was silent. No footfall could be heard in the streets; the powdery ashes, softer than snow, absorbed every sound. And still they fell. Those few scared natives whom necessity forced to go abroad crept about in fear of their lives. They thought the end of the world had come. Terror-stricken, they carried knives and revolvers in their pockets; they pa.s.sed each other distrustfully in the streets holding, in one hand, a lighted torch or lantern, and in the other a handkerchief pressed to the face for fear of suffocation. In one or two of the shop windows could be discerned a light glimmering feebly as through the thickest fog. All the ordinary sights and sounds of morning--the vehicles plying for hire, the cracking of whips, the cries of the fish and fruit vendors--all were gone. The deathly stillness was broken only by a clangour of the town clock, tolling the hours into a darkened world.
Half a dozen adventurous spirits had gathered together at the Club.
They called themselves adventurous. As a matter of fact they were scared out of their wits and had gone there merely with a view to leaning on each other for mutual support and courage. There was no whisky drinking that morning, no cards, no scandal-mongering. They sat round a table under an acetylene lamp, anxiously listening to a young professor from Christiania who claimed to be versed in the higher mathematics and was then occupied in calculating, by means of the binomial theorem, how long it would take for the whole town of Nepenthe to be submerged under ashes up to the roofs--presuming all the buildings to be of equal height. He was a new-comer to the place and, for that reason, rather a cheerful pessimist. He thought it quite possible that before the second floors of the houses had been reached--granted, of course, that none was higher or lower than the other--the wind might change and carry the ashes elsewhere. His demonstration had a depressing effect on the hearts of those who had lived longer on the island. They rose from the table and sadly shook their heads, prepared for the worst. They knew their sirocco.
As morning wore on other stragglers entered the premises, m.u.f.fled up to the ears; they scattered ashes from their cloaks and hastily closed the door behind them. More lamps were lighted. The news was not inspiring.
It was dark as ever outside; you could not see your hand before your face; the shower had acc.u.mulated to an alarming extent. Some roofs had fallen in under the weight of ashes; telegraphic communication with the mainland was interrupted owing, it was supposed, to the snapping of the cable in some submarine convulsion; a man had stumbled in the market-place over the dead body of a woman--choked, no doubt; two of the judge's Russian prisoners, unaccustomed to volcanic phenomena, had gone stark staring mad and disembowelled one another with a carving knife.
Mr. Muhlen, who presently turned up in anything but his usual sprightly humour, was furnished with a full and corrected version of this last affair, to the effect that there were not two, but fourteen, of these victims; that prior to their frenzied act they had partaken of bread and salt and sung the national anthem; that the instrument chosen was not a carving knife but a rusty chisel. None of his listeners seemed to be greatly moved by what, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, would have been a valuable contribution to the entertainment. They were waiting for the appearance of their president, the Commissioner, the life and soul of the place, who would be able to give them an official apology for this scandalous outbreak of nature. The Commissioner, for once in his life, failed to perform his duty.
That unfortunate man was sitting at home, in the remote villa known as the ”Residency,” profoundly troubled in mind. He leaned over his study table, which was lighted by a lamp; his eyes peered dejectedly, through the windows beyond, into the gloom. Before him lay the skeleton draft of his annual report to the Nicaraguan Minister of Finance, a gentleman who developed a pa.s.sionate craving, once a year, to be informed of the condition of Nepenthe in regard to matters such as s.h.i.+pping and trade returns, zymotic diseases, and the methods locally employed for combating beri-beri.
The elaboration of this report had hitherto given Mr. Freddy Parker no trouble whatever. It was an understood thing between himself and his protector, Senor Pomponio de Vergara y Puyarola, that his labours need not be otherwise than purely formal. To every one of the intelligent queries on the part of a paternal government it had been his custom, therefore, to append the magic word NIL. Banking system--NIL. Meat export--NIL. Cotton industry--NIL. Agriculture--NIL. Ca.n.a.l traffic--NIL.
Teak trade--NIL. Emery mines--NIL. Fisheries--NIL.
He could trust Senor de Vergara to arrange matters, in the event of any complaint arising as to the unwarranted ambiguity or succinctness of the Nepenthean Report.
Bad news had just reached him; very bad news indeed. His friend and protector had been stabbed to death, after the approved fas.h.i.+on of Nicaraguan politicians, by a couple of a.s.sa.s.sins in the pay of that minister's rival, a bankrupt tradesman who, desirous of bettering his fortunes, conceived that he would make as good a Finance Minister as anyone else and had, in fact, already usurped that post. Worse news could hardly be imagined. The prognosis was most unfavourable. For Mr.
Parer shrewdly argued that a rival of the late Don Pomponio would look askance at those whom His Excellency had exalted--at himself, for instance. And what then? However conscientiously he might henceforward edit the report, he realized that his position was no longer secure; he was liable to be recalled at any moment--to cede his place to some candidate of the opposing faction. Those d.a.m.ned republics! Or the post, being a purely honorary one created expressly for himself by the obliging and now defunct Don Pomponio, might be permanently abolished.
It was not a pleasant prospect. Mr. Freddy Parker was rather too old to start knocking about the world again. He was losing what he called his ”nerve.” What was to be done?
He tugged at his beard and puffed furious clouds of smoke out of his briar pipe. He thought of another grief--another source of anxiety. The quarterly remissions forwarded to him by certain obscure but respectable relatives in England, under the condition that he should never again set foot in that land of honest men, had not arrived. It was two weeks overdue. What had happened? Had they decided to cancel it? They had threatened to do so ere now. And if so, how was he going to live? It was a facer, that was. The equivalent of fifteen pounds sterling was urgently necessary at that very moment. Fifteen pounds.
Who would lend him fifteen pounds? Keith? Not likely. Keith was a miser--a Scotchman, ten to one. Koppen? He had once already tried to touch him for a loan, with discouraging results. A most unsympathetic millionaire. Almost offensive, the older bounder had been. Perhaps somebody had let on about that bit of CREPE DE CHINE preserved at the Residency, and its uses as a sociological doc.u.ment. How things got about on Nepenthe! Where the h.e.l.l, then, was money to come from?
Both these troubles, great in themselves, faded into insignificance before a new and overwhelming sorrow.
In a room directly overhead lay the dead body of his lady. She had breathed her last on the previous midday, and it is more than likely that the noise of the cannon-shots, reverberating through her chamber, had accelerated her end; not the noise as such, for she was naturally a rowdy woman and never felt comfortable save in an atmosphere of domestic explosions and quarrels with servants, but the noise in its social significance, the noise as demonstrating to her exhausted consciousness that there was something wrong, something at the same time of considerable importance--something she might never live to comment on--happening in the market-place. In other words, it is highly probable that her death had been hastened by the moral rather than the physical shock of the noise; by disappointment; by the bitter reflection that she would never survive to learn what this new scandal, evidently an interesting one, was about.
The doctor, for reasons which he deemed sufficient, had recommended a speedy interment; it was fixed for that morning. The fall of ashes had put the ceremony out of the question. There she lay. And in the room below sat her bereaved stepbrother, distractedly gazing out of the window upon the darkness of Erebus.
It harmonized with the darkness of his mourning trousers, newly creased but not newly purchased; and of his soul. He saw his worldly existence menaced--tottering to its fall. All these catastrophes, so crus.h.i.+ng, so unexpected, filled him with a kind of primeval terror. Mr. Parker was neither a devout believer nor the reverse. He was a fool and liable, as such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion. An attack of indigestion, the failure of some pecuniary speculation, the demise of a beloved stepsister--these various happenings, so dissimilar to one another, had yet this feature in common, that they put the fear of G.o.d into the otherwise empty brain of Mr. Parker.
He had been in many tight corners, but never in so tight a corner as this. Hardly ever. He thought of the lady lying dead upstairs and all she had done towards establis.h.i.+ng and consolidating their social position; how she had economized for him, yes, and lied for him--better, far better, than he could ever hope to lie. For she possessed that most priceless of all gifts: she believed her own lies. She looked people straight in the face and spoke from her heart; a falsehood, before it left her lips, had grown into a flaming truth. She was a florid, improvident liar. There was no cla.s.sical parsimony about her misstatements. They were copious baroque, and encrusted with pleasing and unexpected tricks of ornamentation. That tropical redundancy for which her person was renowned reflected itself likewise in her temperament--in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, there could be no doubt as to her sincerity, her ingenuousness. Ah, she was a woman in a thousand! Often had Mr. Parker sat at her feet, a respectful disciple, listening spellbound and striving to acquire that secret--a secret which was, after all, not so much art as nature. He could never hope to rival her technique.
That was because he could not look you in the face; because he disbelieved not only his own lies, but those of other people--and not only their lies, but their truths; because he distrusted everything and everybody, and was duly distrusted in his turn. n.o.body believed a word he said, and some rude persons went so far as to tell him exactly what they thought of him. They called him a liar in public and in private.
Such experiences are trying to one's nerve; they end in giving you a s.h.i.+fty look. People who knew him well never took his word for granted, and the more casual acquaintance would say that even if his facts were correct now and then he could not help being a fraud all the same.
And now she was gone, this lady who had saved him from countless small annoyances, who had given him self-esteem and a kind of social backbone. He stared into the darkness. Where was money to come from--those miserable fifteen pounds, for example? What would happen?