This slight structure of plot gave Hearn the opportunity to paint a marvellous picture. Hundreds of quotations could be given. He is delighted with the rich glory of the tropics, and by his power of word imagery he so reproduces it that with him we too can see and feel it. In this glowing Nature the poisoned beauty of the Orient is forgotten. Take this description:—
The charm of a single summer day on these island shores is something impossible to express, never to be forgotten. Rarely, in the paler zones, do earth and heaven take such luminosity: those will best understand me who have seen the splendour of a West Indian sky. And yet there is a tenderness of tint, a caress of colour, in these Gulf-days which is not of the Antilles,—a spirituality, as of eternal tropical spring. It must have been to even such a sky that Xenophanes lifted up his eyes of old when he vowed the Infinite Blue was God;—it was indeed under such a sky that De Soto named the vastest and grandest of Southern havens Espiritu Santo,—the Bay of the Holy Ghost. There is a something unutterable in this bright Gulf-air that compels awe,—something vital, something holy, something pantheistic and reverentially the mind asks itself if what the eye beholds is not the πνεῦμα indeed, the Infinite Breath, the Divine Ghost, the Great Blue Soul of the Unknown. All, all is blue in the calm,—save the low land under your feet, which you almost forget, since it seems only as a tiny green flake afloat in the liquid eternity of day. Then slowly, caressingly, irresistibly, the witchery of the Infinite grows upon you: out of Time and Space you begin to dream with open eyes,—to drift into delicious oblivion of facts,—to forget the past, the present, the substantial,—to comprehend nothing but the existence of that infinite Blue Ghost as something into which you would wish to melt utterly away for ever.
So it is told that into this perfect peace one August day in 1856, a scarlet sun sank in a green sky, and a moonless night came.
Then the Wind grew weird. It ceased being a breath; it became a Voice moaning across the world hooting,—uttering nightmare sounds,—Whoo!—whoo!—whoo!—and with each stupendous owl-cry the mooing of the waters seemed to deepen, more and more abysmally, through all the hours of darkness.
Morning dawned with great rain: the steamer Star was due that day. No one dared to think of it. "Great God!" some one shrieked,—"She is coming!"
On she came, swaying, rocking, plunging,—with a great whiteness wrapping her about like a cloud, and moving with her moving,—a tempest-whirl of spray;—ghost-white and like a ghost she came, for her smoke-stacks exhaled no visible smoke—the wind devoured it.
And still the storm grew fiercer. On shore the guests at the hotel danced with a feverish reckless gaiety.
Again the Star reeled, and shuddered, and turned, and began to drag away from the great building and its lights,—away from the voluptuous thunder of the grand piano,—even at that moment outpouring the great joy of Weber's melody orchestrated by Berlioz: l'Invitatiòn à la Valse,—with its marvellous musical swing.
—"Waltzing!" cried the captain. "God help them!—God help us all now!... The Wind waltzes to-night, with the Sea for his partner." ...
O the stupendous Valse-Tourbillon! O the mighty Dancer! One-two—three! From north-east to east, from east to south-east, from south-east to south: then from the south he came, whirling the Sea in his arms....
And so the hurricane passed, and the day reveals utter wreck and desolation. "There is plunder for all—birds and men."
At a fishing village on the coast on this same night of the storm Carmen, the good wife of Feliu, dreamed—above the terrors of the tempest which shattered her sleep—once again the dream that kept returning of her little Concha, her first-born who slept far away in the old churchyard at Barcelona. And this night she dreamed that her waxen Virgin came and placed in her arms the little brown child with the Indian face, and the face became that of her dead Conchita.