Anne, free of the tight gown in which she had encased her rebellious
form for the benefit of the fine folk of Bath House, wrapped herself
in a long black mantle, drew down the curving glass globes that
protected the candles from draught and insects, and stepped out upon
her balcony. She even closed the window behind her; and then at last
she felt that she was indeed on Nevis--and alone. Before her rose the
dark cone of the old volcano, its graceful sweep dim against the
background of stars; and the white cloud that ever floated about its
summit like the ghost of dead fires was crawling down the slopes to
the little town at its base. From this small but teeming capital came
fitful sounds of music and of less decorous revelry, and its lights
seemed to flit through the groves of palm and cocoanut trees, gently
moving in the night breeze.
Below the hotel, no man stirred. Anne stood with suspended breath and
half closed eyes. At this end of the island it was as still as death
and almost as dark. There was no moon, and the great crystal stars
barely defined the mountain and the tall slender shafts and high
verdure of the royal palm. Far away she saw a double row of lights
on St. Kitts, the open windows doubtless of Government House in the
capital, Basseterre, where a ball that had taken half the guests of
Bath House was in progress.
In a few moments she became aware of other impressions besides the
silence and the dark. The air was so warm, so caressing, so soft, that
she swayed slightly as if to meet it. The deep delicious perfumes of
tropical blooms, even of tree and shrub, would have been overpowering
had it not been for the lightness of the air and the constant though
gentle wind. Bred upon harsh salt winds, living a life of Spartan
simplicity, where the sprigs of lavender in the linen closet wafted
all she knew of scent to her eager nostrils, this first moment of
tropical pleasure confused itself with the dreams of years, and she
hardly dared open her eyes lest Nevis vanish and she find herself
striding over the moor, her head down, her hands clutching her cape,
while the North Sea thundered in her ears.
She lifted her head suddenly, straining her own throat. A bird poured
forth a flood of melody that seemed to give voice to the perfumes and
the rich beauty of the night, without troubling the silence. She had
read of this "nightingale of a tropic noon" but had not imagined that
a small brown bird, bred below the equator, could rival in power and
dulcet tones the great songster of the North. But it sang as if its
throat had the compass of a Mario's, and in a moment another philomel
pealed forth his desire, then another, and another, until the whole
island seemed to swirl in a musical tide. Anne, with a sudden
unconscious gesture, opened her arms and flung them out, as if to
embrace and hold all the enchantment of a Southern night before it
fled; and for the first time in her life she found that realities
could give the spirit a deep intoxicating draught.
The nightingales trilled into silence. The last sweet note seemed to
drift out over the water, and then Anne heard another sound, the deep
low murmur of the Caribbean Sea. Her mind swung to Byam Warner, to
the extraordinary poem which ten years ago had made his fame and
interpreted this unceasing melancholy of the sea's chant into a dirge
over the buried continent and its fate. With the passionate energy of
youthful genius abandoning itself to the ecstasies of imagination, he
had sung the lament of Atlantis, compelled the blue sepulchre to
recede, and led a prosaic but dazzled world through cities of such
beauty and splendour, such pleasant gardens and opulent wilds as the
rest of Earth had never dreamed of. He peopled it still with an
arrogant and wanton race, masters of the lore and the arts that had
gone with them, awaiting the great day when the enchantment should
lift and the most princely continent Earth has borne should rise once
more to the surface of the sea, lifting these jewelled islands, her
mountain peaks, high among the clouds.
It had been Byam Warner's first epic poem, and although he had won the
critical public with his songs of the Caribbean Sea and of Nevis, the
island of his birth, it was this remarkable achievement, white-hot
from first to last with poetic fire, replete with fascinating pictures
and living tragedy, that gave him as wide a popularity as any novelist
of the day. He had visited London immediately after, and, in spite of
some good folk who thought his poem shockingly immoral, was the lion
of the season, and a favourite at court. But he had soon wearied of
London, and although he had returned several times with increasing
fame, he had always left as abruptly, declaring that he could write
nowhere above the equator; and, notwithstanding revels where he shone
far more brilliantly than when in society, where indeed he was shy and
silent, that he cared for nothing else.
Little gossip had come to Warkworth Manor but Anne had read "The Blue
Sepulchre" when she was seventeen, and after that her allowance went
for his books. When a new volume appeared it was an event in her life
comparable only to marriage or birth in the lives of other women. She
abandoned her soul to this young magician of Nevis; her imagination,
almost as powerful as his own, gave her his living presence more
bountifully than had the real man, cursed with mortal disenchantments,
companioned her. So strong was her power of realisation that there
were hours when she believed that her thoughts girdled the globe and
drew his own into her mental heaven. In more practical hours, when
tramping the moor, or sailing her boat, she dismissed this hope of
intelligent response, inferring, somewhat grimly, that the young,
handsome, and popular poet had excited ardour in many a female breast
besides her own. Nevertheless, she permitted herself to return again
and again to the belief that he loved her and dreamed of her; and
certainly one of his most poignant sonnets had been addressed to the
unknown mate whom he had sought in vain.
Nor had he married. She had heard and read references to his
increasing dissipation, caused by an unhappy love affair, but his
work, instead of degenerating with his morals, showed increasing power
and beauty. The fire burned at times with so intense a radiance that
it would seem to have consumed his early voluptuousness while
decimating neither his human nor his spiritual passion. Each new
volume sold many editions. The critics declared that his lyrics were
the finest of his generation, and vowed the time could not be far off
when he would unite the imaginative energy of his first long poems
with the nightingale quality of his later, and produce one of the
greatest poetical dramas in the language. But the man had been cast
into outer darkness. Society had dropped him, and the young Queen
would not permit his name to be mentioned in her presence. That gentle
spirit, the Countess of Blessington, indifferent to the world that
shut its door in her own face, alone received him in what was still
the most brilliant _salon_ in England. But even Anne knew that during
a recent visit to London, when a few faithful and distinguished men,
including Count d'Orsay, Disraeli, Barry Cornwall, Monckton Milnes,
and Crabb Robinson, had given him a banquet at the Travellers' Club,
he had become so disgracefully drunk that when he left England two
days later, announcing his intention never to return, not one of those
long suffering gentlemen had appeared at the dock to bid him farewell.
But Anne heard few of these horrid stories in detail, and her
imagination made no effort to supply the lack. Her attitude was
curiously indifferent. She had never seen his picture. He dwelt with
her in the realm of fancy, a creation of her own; and in spite of the
teeming incidents of that mental life, her common sense had assured
her long since that they would never meet, that with the real Byam
Warner she had naught to do. Her father had been forty-five when he
was taken off by a mis-made gas in his laboratory; she had expected to
be still his silent companion when herself was long past that age--an
age for caps and knitting needles, and memories laid away in jars of
old rose leaves.
It is possible that had Mrs. Nunn not succeeded in letting Warkworth
Manor she would never have uprooted her niece, who, face to face with
the prospect of Nevis, realised that she wished for nothing so little
as to meet Byam Warner, realised that the end of dreams would be the
finish of the best in life. But circumstances were too strong for
Anne, and she found herself in London fitting on excessively smart and
uncomfortable gowns, submitting to have her side locks cut short and
curled according to the latest mode, and even to wear a fillet, which
scraped her hitherto untrammelled brow.
She had little time to think about Byam Warner, but when the memory of
him shortened her breath she hastily assured herself that she was
unlikely to meet an outcast even on an island, that she should not
know him if she did, and that Bath House, whose doors were closed
upon him, was a world in itself. And she should see Nevis, which had
been as much her home as Warkworth Manor, see those other glowing bits
of a vanished paradise. There are certain people born for the tropics,
even though bred within the empire of the midnight sun, even when
accident has given their imagination no such impulse as Anne Percy's
had received from the works of Byam Warner. Mind and body respond the
moment they enter that mysterious belt which divides the moderate
zones, upon whose threshold the spirit of worldliness sinks inert, and
within whose charmed circle the principle of life is king. Those of
the North with the call of the tropics in their blood have never a
moment of strangeness; they are content, at home.
The pauses at the still more southern islands on the way up from
Barbadoes had been brief, but Anne had had glimpses of great fields
of cane, set with the stately homes of planters, the grace of
palm-fringed shores and silver sands; the awful majesty of volcanic
islands, torn and racked by earthquake, eaten by fire, sometimes
rising so abruptly from the sea as to imply a second half split to
its base and hurled to the depths. But although there had been much to
delight and awe, the wine in her cup had not risen to the brim until
she came in sight of Nevis, whose perfection of form and colour, added
to the interest her gifted and unhappy son had inspired, made her seem
to eager romantic eyes the incarnation of all the loveliness of all
the tropics. To-night Anne could forget even Byam Warner, who indeed
had never seemed so far away, and she only went within when the cloud
rolled down Nevis and enveloped her, as if in rebuke of those that
would gaze upon her beauty too long.