“What does it matter? Look at the night!”
Julie regarded it, and capitulated. They strolled up the road that led to the upper part of the village. Street lights were sparse and dim in Guindulman. The avenue was almost closed overhead by the prodigal foliage of mango trees, and blackened with the soft, thick darkness of the tropics; yet to-night it was meteorically lighted by myriads of fire-flies shimmering in the branches.
Julie threw up her head in wonder at the transfiguration. Everything had become unreal. The avenue was like a road in fairy-land. The convento, white as driven snow in the moonlight, rose from its high tier of steps above them, like an ancient temple.
To the left was the Major’s ogre-like retreat. Mike, routed from his roost in the trees by this intolerable illumination, was snarling and lashing through the branches like an imp of darkness.
This little gargoyle had been deliberately installed in this tree commanding the entrance to his office by the Major, and Hell itself could not have been more ferociously guarded by Cerberus. Men could come and men could go; but to the whole female race Mike stuck out his whiskered jaw in challenge. He might be swinging by his tail, ever so happy and carefree, in the branches, but let a daughter of Eve, however secretly, steal up to the portal of the omnipotent Major, and he was down upon her with a thud, wildly rending her garments.
“Wild little beast!” Julie disapprovingly declared, moving out of range of his chain. The monkey, like some monster of elf-land, thrust his grotesque little head out of a nimbus of fire-flies. He scratched them out of his eyes, and securing them cunningly in his wicked little paws, bolted them with rapt relish.
“Horrible!” Julie cried. “And they were lighting up the world!”
“He’s rather handy to have round, though,” Calmiden hardily declared. “You see I am Quartermaster, and people want to bother one with such a multitude of senseless things.”
They mounted the terraced steps, which in a sheer drop fell from the walls of the convento. “Look!” Julie pointed high above them. On the aerial gallery of the convento, a black cassock loomed stark against the night, a solitary brooding figure staring at the stars. Once it bent intently to regard the two young persons.
“Poor fellow!” Calmiden exclaimed.