"Are you? Well, take that!"
A glass tumbler, which Mr. Richards dodged in quite a professional manner, came hurtling through the air and missed the bishop's forehead by about four inches.
That crowd was past his aid. He turned to go. As he did so, a curious idea flitted through his brain. This Mr. Richards—was he, perhaps, the burglar? He was; but Mr. Heard dashed aside the horrible suspicion, mindful of the mistake he had made about Angelina's character and how careful one must be in judging of other people. The voice, meanwhile, pursued him down the stairs.
"No, gentlemen! I've no use for an honest man. He always lets you down.
Fortunately, he is rather rare—"
Mr. Heard slept badly that night, for the first time since his arrival on Nepenthe. It was unbearably hot. And that visit to Mrs. Meadows had also troubled him a little.
The Old Town looked different on this occasion. A sullen death-like stillness, a menacing stagnation, hung about those pink houses. Not a leaf was astir under the burning sirocco sky. Even old Caterina, when he saw her, seemed to be afflicted, somehow.
"SOFFRE, LA SIGNORA," she said. The lady was suffering.
The bishop would not have recognized his cousin after all those years; not if he had met her in the street at least. She greeted him affectionately and they talked for a long time of family matters. It was true, then. Her husband's leave had been again postponed. Perhaps she would travel back to England with him, and there await the arrival of Meadows. She would let him know definitely in a day or two.
He watched her carefully while she conversed, trying to reconstruct, out of that woman's face, the childish features he dimly remembered. They were effaced. He could see what Keith had meant when he described her as "tailor-made." There was something clear-cut about her, something not exactly harsh, but savouring of decision. She was plainly a personality—not an ordinary type. The lines of her face told their story. They had been hammered into a kind of hard efficiency. But over that exterior of tranquil self-possession was super-imposed something else—certain marks of recent trouble. Her eyes looked almost as if she had been weeping. She made a tremendous show of cheeriness, however, calling him Tommy as in olden days.
Just a little headache. This sirocco. It was bad enough when it blew in the ordinary fashion. But quite intolerable when it hung breathlessly about the air like this. Mr. Eames—he once called it PLUMBEUS AUSTER. That meant leaden, didn't it? Everybody had headaches, more or less.