South Wind

The bishop was feeling rather sea-sick. Confoundedly sea-sick, in fact.

This annoyed him. For he disapproved of sickness in every shape or form. His own state of body was far from satisfactory at that moment; Africa—he was Bishop of Bampopo in the Equatorial Regions—had played the devil with his lower gastric department and made him almost an invalid; a circumstance of which he was nowise proud, seeing that ill-health led to inefficiency in all walks of life. There was nothing he despised more than inefficiency. Well or ill, he always insisted on getting through his tasks in a businesslike fashion. That was the way to live, he used to say. Get through with it. Be perfect of your kind, whatever that kind may be. Hence his sneaking fondness for the natives—they were such fine, healthy animals.

Next morning, at precisely 4 a.m., there was an earthquake.

Foreigners unaccustomed to Nepenthean conditions rushed in their pyjamas out of doors, to escape the falling wreckage. An American lady, staying at Mr. Muhlen's high-class hotel, jumped from her bed-room on the third floor into the courtyard below, and narrowly escaped bruising her ankle.

It was a false alarm. The sudden clanging of every bell on the place, the explosion of twelve hundred mortars and the simultaneous booming of an enormous cannon—that far-famed gun whose wayward tricks had cost the lives of hundreds of its loaders in the days of the Good Duke—might have passed for an earthquake of the first magnitude, so far as noise and concussion were concerned. The island rocked to its foundations. It was the signal for the festival of the patron saint to begin.

Nobody could have slept through that din. Mr. Heard, dog-tired as he was, woke up and opened his eyes.

"Things are happening here," he said—a remark which he found himself repeating on several later occasions.

He looked round the room. It was not an hotel bed-room. Then he began to remember things, drowsily.

One of those few modern houses was the Villa Mon Repos. There was a curious history attached to the place. It had been built about a century ago at the orders of an eccentric French lady, a lyric poetess, who professed to be tired of life. She had heard that somewhere on Nepenthe was a towering precipice, unique of its kind and convenient for suicidal purposes. She thought she would like to live near that precipice—it might come in handy. There was nothing of the right sort in Paris, she declared; only five-storey hotels and suchlike; the notion of casting herself down from one of those artificial eminences did not appeal to her high-strung temperament; she craved to die like Sappho, her ideal. An architect was despatched, the ground purchased, the house built and furnished. That done, she settled up her affairs in France and established herself at Mon Repos. On the evening of her arrival she climbed the little height at the back of her domain and looked southward, down a sheer wall of rock eight or nine hundred feet high, over the wrinkled ocean. It made her feel queer. Further familiarity with the precipice did not breed contempt; her visits to the site became rarer and rarer. She died, at a patriarchal age, in her bed, after writing a scholarly pamphlet to prove that the tale of Sappho's leap over her famous silvery crag was a myth, the "purest sensationalism," a fable of the grammarians "hopelessly irreconcilable with what we know of that great woman's character."

"I've been analysing myself lately. I find I have too much romance in my composition, as it is."

"What do you call romance?"

Denis thought awhile. Then he said:

"When a man invests ordinary people or objects or occurrences with an extraordinary interest. When he reads attributes into them which they don't possess, or exaggerates those which they do possess. When he looks at a person and can't help thinking that there is nobody on earth quite like her."

"Too celestial for me, on the whole. But I'm glad you said that last part. Glad for your sake, I mean. It shows that you've perhaps got something better than a soul, after all."

"What is that?"

"A body. Look here, Phipps. I also have my romantic moments, though you wouldn't believe it. I can be as romantic as ever you please. But not when I'm alone."

"I should like to see you in that condition. And talking Latin, no doubt?" he added with a laugh.

"I daresay you would," replied the scientist. "Given the circumstances under which I become romantic, you'll find it a little difficult. But there's no knowing. Funny things happen sometimes!"

The duchess was a good sleeper, as befitted a person of regular habits and pure life.

It was her custom to retire for the night at about eleven o'clock. Angelina, who reposed in an adjoining room, would enter softly at nine in the morning, draw up the blinds, and deposit a cup of tea at the bedside of her mistress. Up to that moment, she would slumber like a child. Rarely did she suffer from insomnia or nightmare. On this particular night, however, her rest was troubled by a strange and disquieting dream.

She was a little girl once more, at her parental home out West. All the old memories were around her. It was winter time. She was alone, out of doors. Snow, the familiar snow, was falling from a sombre sky; already it lay deep on the boundless plains. It fell without ceasing. The sky grew darker. Hours seemed to pass, and still the flakes descended. It was not cold snow. It was warm snow—warm and rather suffocating. Very suffocating. It began to choke her. Suddenly she found she could breathe no more. She gave a wild cry of despair—

Her maid was standing beside the bed, a lighted candle in her hand. Otherwise the room was in pitch darkness. Angelina looked like a Tanagra statuette. Draped in nothing but a clinging nightgown that reached two inches below the knee and accentuated the charm of her figure, with the candle-light throwing playful gleams upon her neck and cheeks, Angelina was an apparition to gladden the heart of man.