Part 50 (1/2)
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! s.h.i.+ps 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 workmans.h.i.+p. 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 fellows.h.i.+p 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!