"Nine o'clock? Then draw the blinds."

"I've drawn them." She stepped to the window and tapped on the gla.s.s panes by way of confirmation. "All dark outside," she added. "Ashes are falling from heaven. The volcano is very, very angry."

"Ashes? The volcano? I must dress at once. Light two more candles. No, three! We can't have three candles burning. Don Francesco may be here at any moment."

The d.u.c.h.ess often laughingly described herself as "only a weak woman."

A certain number of persons concurred in that opinion. Just then she was the most self-possessed inhabitant of Nepenthe. The disturbance of nature left her undisturbed. Her intellect was naturally incurious as to the habits of volcanoes; her soul, moreover, in good hands, her conscience in excellent working order, as befitted a potential convert to Catholicism. She could rely on a spiritual adviser who had instilled into her mind a lofty sense of obedience and resignation. Don Francesco would never desert her. He would arrive in due course, explaining why G.o.d had allowed the volcano to behave in this unseemly fashion, and br.i.m.m.i.n.g over with words of consolation for his daughter-to-be. G.o.d, if so disposed, could work a miracle and drive away the plague, even as he had sent it. Ashes or no ashes, all was for the best. Calmly she waited.

Out of doors, meanwhile, the shower went on without ceasing. It had begun shortly after midnight; the ground was covered to the depth of two inches. Nepenthe lay veiled in Cimmerian gloom, darker than starless midnight--a darkness that could be felt; a blanket, as it were, hot and breathless, weighing upon the landscape. All was silent. No footfall could be heard in the streets; the powdery ashes, softer than snow, absorbed every sound. And still they fell. Those few scared natives whom necessity forced to go abroad crept about in fear of their lives. They thought the end of the world had come. Terror-stricken, they carried knives and revolvers in their pockets; they pa.s.sed each other distrustfully in the streets holding, in one hand, a lighted torch or lantern, and in the other a handkerchief pressed to the face for fear of suffocation. In one or two of the shop windows could be discerned a light glimmering feebly as through the thickest fog. All the ordinary sights and sounds of morning--the vehicles plying for hire, the cracking of whips, the cries of the fish and fruit vendors--all were gone. The deathly stillness was broken only by a clangour of the town clock, tolling the hours into a darkened world.

Half a dozen adventurous spirits had gathered together at the Club.

They called themselves adventurous. As a matter of fact they were scared out of their wits and had gone there merely with a view to leaning on each other for mutual support and courage. There was no whisky drinking that morning, no cards, no scandal-mongering. They sat round a table under an acetylene lamp, anxiously listening to a young professor from Christiania who claimed to be versed in the higher mathematics and was then occupied in calculating, by means of the binomial theorem, how long it would take for the whole town of Nepenthe to be submerged under ashes up to the roofs--presuming all the buildings to be of equal height. He was a new-comer to the place and, for that reason, rather a cheerful pessimist. He thought it quite possible that before the second floors of the houses had been reached--granted, of course, that none was higher or lower than the other--the wind might change and carry the ashes elsewhere. His demonstration had a depressing effect on the hearts of those who had lived longer on the island. They rose from the table and sadly shook their heads, prepared for the worst. They knew their sirocco.

As morning wore on other stragglers entered the premises, m.u.f.fled up to the ears; they scattered ashes from their cloaks and hastily closed the door behind them. More lamps were lighted. The news was not inspiring.

It was dark as ever outside; you could not see your hand before your face; the shower had acc.u.mulated to an alarming extent. Some roofs had fallen in under the weight of ashes; telegraphic communication with the mainland was interrupted owing, it was supposed, to the snapping of the cable in some submarine convulsion; a man had stumbled in the market-place over the dead body of a woman--choked, no doubt; two of the judge's Russian prisoners, unaccustomed to volcanic phenomena, had gone stark staring mad and disembowelled one another with a carving knife.

Mr. Muhlen, who presently turned up in anything but his usual sprightly humour, was furnished with a full and corrected version of this last affair, to the effect that there were not two, but fourteen, of these victims; that prior to their frenzied act they had partaken of bread and salt and sung the national anthem; that the instrument chosen was not a carving knife but a rusty chisel. None of his listeners seemed to be greatly moved by what, under ordinary circ.u.mstances, would have been a valuable contribution to the entertainment. They were waiting for the appearance of their president, the Commissioner, the life and soul of the place, who would be able to give them an official apology for this scandalous outbreak of nature. The Commissioner, for once in his life, failed to perform his duty.

That unfortunate man was sitting at home, in the remote villa known as the "Residency," profoundly troubled in mind. He leaned over his study table, which was lighted by a lamp; his eyes peered dejectedly, through the windows beyond, into the gloom. Before him lay the skeleton draft of his annual report to the Nicaraguan Minister of Finance, a gentleman who developed a pa.s.sionate craving, once a year, to be informed of the condition of Nepenthe in regard to matters such as shipping and trade returns, zymotic diseases, and the methods locally employed for combating beri-beri.

The elaboration of this report had hitherto given Mr. Freddy Parker no trouble whatever. It was an understood thing between himself and his protector, Senor Pomponio de Vergara y Puyarola, that his labours need not be otherwise than purely formal. To every one of the intelligent queries on the part of a paternal government it had been his custom, therefore, to append the magic word NIL. Banking system--NIL. Meat export--NIL. Cotton industry--NIL. Agriculture--NIL. Ca.n.a.l traffic--NIL.

Teak trade--NIL. Emery mines--NIL. Fisheries--NIL.

He could trust Senor de Vergara to arrange matters, in the event of any complaint arising as to the unwarranted ambiguity or succinctness of the Nepenthean Report.

Bad news had just reached him; very bad news indeed. His friend and protector had been stabbed to death, after the approved fashion of Nicaraguan politicians, by a couple of a.s.sa.s.sins in the pay of that minister's rival, a bankrupt tradesman who, desirous of bettering his fortunes, conceived that he would make as good a Finance Minister as anyone else and had, in fact, already usurped that post. Worse news could hardly be imagined. The prognosis was most unfavourable. For Mr.

Parer shrewdly argued that a rival of the late Don Pomponio would look askance at those whom His Excellency had exalted--at himself, for instance. And what then? However conscientiously he might henceforward edit the report, he realized that his position was no longer secure; he was liable to be recalled at any moment--to cede his place to some candidate of the opposing faction. Those d.a.m.ned republics! Or the post, being a purely honorary one created expressly for himself by the obliging and now defunct Don Pomponio, might be permanently abolished.

It was not a pleasant prospect. Mr. Freddy Parker was rather too old to start knocking about the world again. He was losing what he called his "nerve." What was to be done?

He tugged at his beard and puffed furious clouds of smoke out of his briar pipe. He thought of another grief--another source of anxiety. The quarterly remissions forwarded to him by certain obscure but respectable relatives in England, under the condition that he should never again set foot in that land of honest men, had not arrived. It was two weeks overdue. What had happened? Had they decided to cancel it? They had threatened to do so ere now. And if so, how was he going to live? It was a facer, that was. The equivalent of fifteen pounds sterling was urgently necessary at that very moment. Fifteen pounds.

Who would lend him fifteen pounds? Keith? Not likely. Keith was a miser--a Scotchman, ten to one. Koppen? He had once already tried to touch him for a loan, with discouraging results. A most unsympathetic millionaire. Almost offensive, the older bounder had been. Perhaps somebody had let on about that bit of CREPE DE CHINE preserved at the Residency, and its uses as a sociological doc.u.ment. How things got about on Nepenthe! Where the h.e.l.l, then, was money to come from?

Both these troubles, great in themselves, faded into insignificance before a new and overwhelming sorrow.

In a room directly overhead lay the dead body of his lady. She had breathed her last on the previous midday, and it is more than likely that the noise of the cannon-shots, reverberating through her chamber, had accelerated her end; not the noise as such, for she was naturally a rowdy woman and never felt comfortable save in an atmosphere of domestic explosions and quarrels with servants, but the noise in its social significance, the noise as demonstrating to her exhausted consciousness that there was something wrong, something at the same time of considerable importance--something she might never live to comment on--happening in the market-place. In other words, it is highly probable that her death had been hastened by the moral rather than the physical shock of the noise; by disappointment; by the bitter reflection that she would never survive to learn what this new scandal, evidently an interesting one, was about.

The doctor, for reasons which he deemed sufficient, had recommended a speedy interment; it was fixed for that morning. The fall of ashes had put the ceremony out of the question. There she lay. And in the room below sat her bereaved stepbrother, distractedly gazing out of the window upon the darkness of Erebus.

It harmonized with the darkness of his mourning trousers, newly creased but not newly purchased; and of his soul. He saw his worldly existence menaced--tottering to its fall. All these catastrophes, so crushing, so unexpected, filled him with a kind of primeval terror. Mr. Parker was neither a devout believer nor the reverse. He was a fool and liable, as such, under the stress of bodily or mental disturbance, to spasmodic fits of abject fright which he mistook for religion. An attack of indigestion, the failure of some pecuniary speculation, the demise of a beloved stepsister--these various happenings, so dissimilar to one another, had yet this feature in common, that they put the fear of G.o.d into the otherwise empty brain of Mr. Parker.

He had been in many tight corners, but never in so tight a corner as this. Hardly ever. He thought of the lady lying dead upstairs and all she had done towards establishing and consolidating their social position; how she had economized for him, yes, and lied for him--better, far better, than he could ever hope to lie. For she possessed that most priceless of all gifts: she believed her own lies. She looked people straight in the face and spoke from her heart; a falsehood, before it left her lips, had grown into a flaming truth. She was a florid, improvident liar. There was no cla.s.sical parsimony about her misstatements. They were copious baroque, and encrusted with pleasing and unexpected tricks of ornamentation. That tropical redundancy for which her person was renowned reflected itself likewise in her temperament--in nothing more than the exuberance of her untruths which were poured out in so torrential a flood, with such burning conviction at the opulence of detail that persons who knew her well used to stand aghast (Catholics had been known to cross themselves) at the fertility of her constructive imagination, while the most hardened sceptics protested that, even if her facts were wrong, there could be no doubt as to her sincerity, her ingenuousness. Ah, she was a woman in a thousand! Often had Mr. Parker sat at her feet, a respectful disciple, listening spellbound and striving to acquire that secret--a secret which was, after all, not so much art as nature. He could never hope to rival her technique.

That was because he could not look you in the face; because he disbelieved not only his own lies, but those of other people--and not only their lies, but their truths; because he distrusted everything and everybody, and was duly distrusted in his turn. n.o.body believed a word he said, and some rude persons went so far as to tell him exactly what they thought of him. They called him a liar in public and in private.

Such experiences are trying to one's nerve; they end in giving you a shifty look. People who knew him well never took his word for granted, and the more casual acquaintance would say that even if his facts were correct now and then he could not help being a fraud all the same.

And now she was gone, this lady who had saved him from countless small annoyances, who had given him self-esteem and a kind of social backbone. He stared into the darkness. Where was money to come from--those miserable fifteen pounds, for example? What would happen?

He almost decided upon praying, only he could not think of appropriate words in which to appeal for this loan; it might seem to the Deity a contemptuously small sum, not worth bothering the angels about. On the other hand he dared not apply for more than he actually needed--not to that quarter, at least--for fear of being found out. He was always being found out, even by his earthly creditors. Besides, there lingered at the back of his mind all the time certain doubts as to the efficacy of applying to G.o.d for money or anything else. The whole thing might be a farce. He remembered, with pain and grief, that he had already on several occasions tried the prayer-system, like most other systems. And alas, the results had invariably been NIL....

A visit from His Reverence the parroco was announced.

This heroic priest, accompanied by two acolytes bearing torches, had braved the downpour of ashes. He never shirked his duty. It was his duty that morning to confer with Mr. Parker anent the delayed funeral and other painfully material matters. For the deceased lady had not deserted the creed of her fathers; she was an ardent Catholic--so ardent that she professed great pain at her stepbrother's alien leanings and had taken considerable trouble to convert him to her own way of thinking. She used to say, in her flowery language, that his contumacious att.i.tude towards the true Faith gnawed at her vitals--meaning, presumably, that it annoyed her. Often she pointed out how many social and other advantages they would gain--living in a Catholic country--if he, too, could bring himself to enter the field of believers. In vain! The Commissioner had a knack of being ultra-protestant on such occasions.

Not that he greatly cared to what Church he belonged. But if n.o.body made it worth his while--why, he remained an Englishman. He knew perfectly well that the parroco, his lady's confessor, was anxious to do something in the proselytizing line which might lower the prestige of Don Francesco. And he was clever enough to realize that, by embracing Catholicism at Torquemada's hands, he, the Official Representative of Nicaragua, would be putting a feather in the priest's cap. He was not going to put a feather in anybody's cap--not for nothing. It was not good enough. Some strong leader of nations had once remarked, "Every man his price." Mr. Parker liked that phrase; he was deeply convinced of its veracity. He also had his price, and once, in a moment of extreme financial embarra.s.sment, he had delighted his stepsister by announcing that he was prepared to consider the question of conversion. He then named his price. It was a condition not to be expressed by such terms as a gratified church might have been able to concede--by some elevation to a higher sphere of influence or other worldly favour; it was a figure baldly commercial, expressible, that is, in pounds, shillings and pence.

"You've got some cheek, Freddy," was all she could bring herself to say.

"My dear Lola, he can take it or leave it," the Commissioner had replied, sulkily.

His Reverence never found himself in the odious dilemma of either taking it or leaving it, for the lady was wise enough not to divulge so ign.o.ble a proposition.

But now, while the good priest uttered a few parting plat.i.tudes of condolence, the other was revolving in his mind how negotiations--direct negotiations, this time--could be opened up. He needed fifteen pounds; well, one might be able to do a little juggling with the Club money for that part of the business. It was necessary, above all, to devise some means whereby the Nicaraguan Government might be induced to keep him at his old post. Here was Torquemada. How could the fellow be turned to account?

"The Nuncio!" he suddenly thought. A Catholic republic like Nicaragua was sure to have a Papal Nuncio whatever that might be; and if he became a convert to the official faith of that country, the Nuncio would be delighted and might whisper in the ear of the President a few words commending his act and requesting that so good a servant of the Church should not be despoiled of his post. And if the President, himself a Catholic, could be brought to share this view, then he, Freddy Parker, could snap his fingers at the machinations of Senor Vergara's successor.

He decided to show some signs of devotion to what he had been accustomed to call the grossest of superst.i.tions; to reveal symptoms of latent Roman proclivities. Grief seemed to have sharpened his wits, for an inspiration came to him. After the sordid and melancholy details of the funeral had been discussed yet again--it was to take place as soon as ever the state of the sky would allow of it--Mr. Parker, pointing to the blackened world outside, made an oracular remark.

"Something must be done," he said.

His companion agreed, very heartily. But soon he drew a deep sigh. How could a volcanic eruption be stopped? In other words, what must be done?

"Let me suggest something, parroco. Why not organize a procession at once, a penitential procession? Such things take place during eruptions on the mainland. Why not here?"

It was the most tactful and diplomatic proposal that the Commissioner had ever made. A thundering good tip, in fact. How proud his Lola would have been, had she heard him make it! A flash of inspiration--and he was actually following it up. The effect was instantaneous. At the sound of the word "procession" the other's thin lips relaxed, and into his ferrety eyes there came a gentler look. He was pleased, infinitely pleased. The Protestant Commissioner betraying only too plainly the heart of a Catholic--that augured well. But difficulties, apparently insurmountable, presented themselves.

"That thought, Signor Parker, coming from you, gives me pleasure beyond words. But I question whether a procession can be formed. Even the priests, most of them, would not care to attend. As to the populace--who is going to risk his life in the midst of this calamity? We might all be choked to death. Not that I would hesitate to play my becoming part!"

"You know your people--how inquisitive they are. If you toll the church bells a certain number are sure to gather in the market-place in order to learn, even at risk of their lives, what is happening. When they see a torchlight procession being formed, you will obtain a sufficient quant.i.ty, I feel sure, to carry the Holy Image of the Saint; and some to spare. Also, I see no reason why the priests should be present in full strength. Toll the bells, parroco! You will get your men."

His Reverence was thinking hard. At last he said:

"Your project appeals to me. It does credit to your heart. It would do credit to our island. I will try to arrange it. But if--"

"You mean, don't you, if the ashes continue to fall, notwithstanding our expiatory demonstration? Let me see. There was that disgraceful tumult in the town yesterday. Saint Dodeka.n.u.s is perhaps too deeply vexed against his people to concede them a grace under such circ.u.mstances. I imagine him to be very displeased with us just now.

That being the case, the fall of ashes might well be permitted to continue for our castigation, despite the penitential act. What do you think?"

n.o.body knows what the parroco thought. It was not his habit to think aloud, much less to express opinions on ticklish arguments such as these. But he could corroborate the fact with a clear conscience.

"It was indeed enough to anger a saint in Heaven! Seven more of the wounded have succ.u.mbed to their injuries; three of them little children. Ah, these deeds of violence and bloodshed, for which Nepenthe was ever infamous! When will the peace of G.o.d descend upon our island?"

Mr. Parker had no idea when that might happen. He was not particularly keen about the peace of G.o.d--he was keen about keeping his job. None the less, he managed to move his head up and down, in a decidedly becoming fashion.

"And now," concluded the parroco, "with your kind permission, I will take my leave, to confer with the clergy if I can discover any of them, as to what can be done towards forming a procession. I confess that the more I think upon your idea, Signor Parker, the more I like it. If only we can find a sufficient number to partic.i.p.ate!"

"Have no fear of that. Only toll the bells. You will get your men. This eruption is enough to make anybody religious. I mean--you know what I mean, parroco."

The acolytes having rekindled their torches His Reverence, a happier man, stepped boldly out of doors and was swallowed up in the murk.

This is a succinct and faithful account of the genesis of that procession which was to become famous in Nepenthean annals. However much, in later years, certain envious folks claim to be the originators of the project it was, from first to last, the Commissioner's idea.