Meanwhile she lingered on, and a small group of enquirers were gathered round the physician who was returning late at night from his third visit. The moralists among them saw the finger of God in the fact that her mouth, out of which had proceeded so much harm to strong men and women, should now be sealed by one of the frailest of His creatures. The doctor shrugged his shoulders at this kind of talk. He was no moralizer; he was a true Southerner, an aesthete—one of those who could appreciate the subtlest beauty of a skin disease. He waxed discursive on the subject; said that the lady's face reminded him of the rainbow in a certain picture by a local genius; avowed that there were moments when even a doctor's hard life had its compensations, and that this was one of them.
His enthusiasm carried the audience off their feet. It converted the sternest preachers into artists. They forgot to talk about moral lessons. All congratulated the good Aesculapius on his choice of the medical profession as a career and his luck in beholding a spectacle such as this; especially when he added, with glowing eloquence, that it was astonishing how so small an insect, a mere mosquito, should be able to produce an eruption of this magnitude and in colours, moreover, which would have made Titian or Peter Paul Rubens burst with envy.
CHAPTER XVII
Decidedly, things were happening, as Mr. Heard would have said.
Strange to say that gentleman himself was probably the only person on Nepenthe who still remained in ignorance of all these praeternatural occurrences. In the early morning, after admiring the sea overhung by a cloudless sky and once more thanking the Duchess in his heart for such a delightful residence when he might have been boxed up in some stuffy hotel bedroom, he descended to the beach for his morning bathe. Such was his custom. The swim did him good, it freshened him up.
Then back to breakfast and a busy morning's work, to settle up arrears of correspondence. He wrote to various friends in England; he wrote a long letter—the third since his arrival—to his mother, telling her of all such things as might interest her; a nice gossipy letter, full of information about the entertainments of the foreigners on Nepenthe, about the obliging natives, the Russian colony, the persistent sirocco, his own domestic life, his improved health. Much as he liked the place and people, he said, he expected to be leaving in a week or so. He concluded with two pages describing his last visit to his cousin. She was rather poorly or troubled in mind, he thought; he would see her again ere long.
And that reminded him—he would write to Mrs. Meadows as well. He did so, enquiring after her health, asking whether he could be of any assistance, and promising to call again shortly. "Rather a formal epistle," he concluded, on reading it through. He was unable to force the note: he could never write or talk otherwise than he felt, and this cousin, after all, was rather remote, self-centred, and difficult of comprehension. "It must go as it is," he decided. "To be quite frank, she's not exactly encouraging either. Asks such queer questions. What on earth did she mean by that conundrum about illegitimacy, I wonder?"
Then luncheon; then a long sleep till tea-time. Everyone slept at this hour during the days of sirocco-heat. What else was there to do? He had already learned to look forward to that calm post-prandial hour of slumber. One owes something to oneself, N'EST CE PAS? as Muhlen had said.
On waking he bethought him of an invitation to tea with Madame Steynlin. He would have listened gladly to her music and her instructive and charitable talk about Nepenthe and its inhabitants. But he was afraid of meeting Russians there. The lady seemed to be specializing in Muscovites just then, and Mr. Heard was not in the Russian mood. He would take what he called "a day off" from social duties.
Slipping his field glasses into his pocket, he rambled upwards by now familiar paths, past white farmhouses nestling in a riot of greenery; till he reached the barer regions. The vines were more sparsely cultivated here, and soon all trace of human handcraft was at an end. He found himself on a little plateau of volcanic cinders and lava-blocks. The spare grasses and flowers that grew between fuliginous masses of stone were already losing their bright enamel under the withering heat; a peculiar odour, acrid but stimulating to the nostrils, rose from the parched ground. Here he rested awhile. He scanned the landscape through his glasses—a wine-coloured sea at his feet, flecked with sailing boats innumerable; confronting him from the volcano whose playful antics were even then attracting the attention of a crowded Piazza. And his eye roved along the serrated contours of the mainland, its undulating shore-line, its distant peaks throbbing in the sunset glow; they rested upon many villages, coral-tinted specks of light, so far away they seemed to belong to another world. It was a pleasure to breathe on these aerial heights, surrounded by sky and sea; to survey the world as a bird might survey it. Like floating in air….