She Buildeth Her House Part 19

"Yes, Saint Pierre is glowing like a brazier," he said. "I was ash.o.r.e last night for awhile. The people blame the mountain. Old Pelee has been acting up--showering the town with ash every little while lately. It's the taint of sulphur that spoils the air."

She turned apprehensively toward the volcano. _La Montague Pelee_, over the red-tiled roofs of Saint Pierre, looked huge like an Emperor of the Romans. Paled in the intense morning light, he wore a delicate ruching of white cloud about his crown. They stepped ash.o.r.e on the Sugar Landing where Paula found a carriage to take her to the _Hotel des Palms_, a rare old plantation-house on the _Morne d'Orange_, recently converted for public use.

The ponies were ascending the rise in _Rue Victor Hugo_, at the southern end of the city, when Paula discovered the little Catholic church she had imaged for so many weeks, _Notre Dame des Lourdes_, niched away in the crowded streets with a Quebec-like quaintness, and all the holier from its close a.s.sociation with the lowly shops. From these walls had risen the spiritual house of Father Fontanel--her far bright beacon....

The _porteuses_, said to be the lithest, hardiest women of the occident, wore a pitiable look of fatigue, as they came down from the hill-trails, steadying the baskets upon their heads. The pressure of the heat, and the dispiriting atmosphere revealed their effects in the distended eyelids and colorless, twisted lips of the burden-bearers.

The ponies at length gained the eminence of the _Morne d'Orange_, and ahead she saw the broad, white plantation-house--_Hotel des Palms_. To the right was the dazzling, turquoise sea where the _Fruitlands_ lay large among the s.h.i.+pping, and near her a private sea-going yacht, nearly as long and angelically white. The broad verandas of the hotel were alluring with palms; the walls and portcullises were cooled with embroidering vines. Gardens flamed with poinsettias and roses, and a shaded grove of mango and India trees at the end of the lawn, was edged with moon flowerets and oleanders. Back of the plantation-house waved the sloping seas of cane; in front, the Caribbean. On the south rose the peaks of Carbet; on the north, the Monster.

Paula had hardly left the veranda of magnificent vistas two hours later, when the friendly captain of the _Fruitlands_ approached with an elderly American, of distinguished appearance, whom he presented--Mr. Peter Stock, of Pittsburg.

"Since you are to leave us here, Miss Wyndam," the captain added, "I thought you would be glad to know Mr. Stock, who makes an annual cruise around these Islands--and knows them better than any American I've encountered yet. Yonder is his yacht--that clipper-built beauty just a bit in from the liner."

"I've already been admiring the yacht," Paula said, "and wondering her name. There's something Venetian about her dazzling whiteness in the soft, deep blue."

"I get it exactly, Miss Wyndam--that 'mirage of marble' in the Italian sky.... My craft is the _Saragossa_." His eyelids were tightened against the light, and the voice was sharp and brisk. His face, tropically tanned, contrasted effectively with the close-cropped hair and mustache, l.u.s.trous-white as his s.h.i.+p.... Paula having found the captain's courtesy and good sense invariable during the voyage, gladly accepted his friend, who proved most interesting on the matter of Pelee.

"I've stayed here in Saint Pierre longer now than usual," he told her, pointing toward the mountain, "to study the old man yonder. Pelee, you know, is identified with Martinique, much the same as the memory of Josephine; yet the people of the city can't seem to take his present disorder seriously. This is cataclysmic country. h.e.l.l--I use the word to signify a geological stratum--is very close to the surface down here.

All these lovely islands are merely ash-piles hurled up by the great subterranean fires. The point is, Lost Atlantis is apt to stir any time under the Caribbean--and rub out our very pretty panorama."

"You regard this as an entertainment worth waiting for?" Paula asked.

The vaguest sort of a smile pa.s.sed over his eyes and touched his lips.

"Pelee and I are very old friends. I spoke of the volcanic origin of these islands in the way of suggesting that any seismic activity in the archipelago--Pelee's present internal complaint, for instance,--should be taken significantly. Saint Pierre would have been white this morning--except for the heavy rain before dawn."

"You mean volcanic ash?"

"Exactly."

"That explains the white sc.u.m I saw in the gutters, driving through the city.... But it isn't altogether a novelty, is it, for the mountain to behave this way?"

"From time to time in the past ten days, Miss Wyndam, Pelee has had a session of grumbling."

"I mean as a usual thing----"

He turned to her abruptly and inquired, "Didn't you know that there hasn't been a sound from Pelee for twenty years before the month of April now ending?"

This gave intimacy to the disorder. Mr. Stock was called away just now, but after dinner that night he joined Paula again on the great veranda.

"Ever been in Pittsburg?" he asked.

"No."

"I've only to shut my eyes in this second-hand air--to think I'm back among the steel mills of the lower Monongahela."

"The moon looks like beaten egg," Paula said with a slight s.h.i.+ver. "They must be suffering down in the city. You're the expert on Pelee, Mr.

Stock, please tell me more about him."

He had been regarding the new moon, low and to the left of the Carbet peaks. It had none of the sharpness of outline peculiar to the tropics, but was blurred and of an orange hue, instead of silvery. "It's the ash-fog in the air which has the effect of a fine wire screen," he explained. "We'll have a white world to-morrow, if it doesn't rain."

They turned to the north where a low rumbling was heard. It was like distant thunder, but the horizon beyond Pelee was unscathed by lightning.

"Are you really worried, Mr. Stock?"

"Why, it's as I said. The fact that Pelee is acting out of the ordinary is quite enough to make any one skeptical regarding his intentions."

He discussed familiarly certain of the man-eaters among the mountains of the world--Krakatoa, Bandaisan, Cotopaxi, Vesuvius, aetna, calling them chronic old ruffians, whom Time doesn't tame.

"A thousand years is nothing to them," he added. "They wait, still as crocodiles, until seers have built their temples in the high rifts and cities have formed on their flanks. They have tasted blood, you see, and the madness comes back. Twenty years is only a siesta. Pelee is a suspect."

"I think I should prefer to hear you tell the treachery of volcanoes outside of the fire-zone," she declared. "It's like listening to ghost stories in a haunted house."

Pelee rumbled again, and Paula's fingers involuntarily started toward his sleeve. The heavy wooden shutters of the great house rattled in the windless night; the ground upon which they stood seemed to wince at the Monster's pain. She was conscious of the fragrance of roses and magnolia blooms above the acrid taint of the air. Some strange freak of the atmosphere exerted a pressure upon the flowers, forcing a sudden expulsion of perfume. The young moon was a formless blotch now in the fouled sky. A sigh like the whimpering of many sick children was audible from the servants' cabins behind the hotel.... Later, from her own room, she saw the double chain of lights out in the harbor--the _Saragossa_ pulling at her moorings among the lesser craft, like a bright empress in the midst of dusky maid-servants; and in the north was Vulcan struggling to contain the fury of his fluids. She was a little afraid of Pelee.

Very early abroad, Paula set out on her first pilgrimage to _Notre Dame des Lourdes_. Rain had not fallen in the night, and she regarded a white world, as Stock had promised, and the source of the phenomenon with the pastelle tints of early morning upon his huge eastern slope. She had slept little and with her face turned to the north. A cortege had pa.s.sed before her in dream--all the destroyers of history, each with a vivid individuality, like the types of faces of all nations--the story of each and the desolation it had made among men and the works of men.

Most of them had given warning. Pelee was warning now. His warning was written upon the veins of every leaf, painted upon the curve of every blade of gra.s.s, sheeted evenly-white upon the red tiles of every roof.

Gray dust blown by steam from the bursting quarries of the mountain clogged the gutters of the city and the throats of men. It was a moving, white cloud in the river, a chalky shading that marked the highest reach of the harbor tide. It settled in the hair of the children, and complicated the toil of bees in the nectar-cups. With league-long cerements, and with a voice that caused to tremble his dwarfed companions, the hills and _mornes_, great Pelee had proclaimed his warning in the night.

EIGHTEENTH CHAPTER

PAULA IS INVOLVED IN THE RENDING FORTUNES OF SAINT PIERRE AND _THE PANTHER_ CALLS WITH NEW YORK MAIL

Father Fontanel was out in the parish somewhere. One of the washer-women told her this, at the door of the church. There were many sick in the city from the great heat and the burned air--many little children sick.

Father Fontanel always sought the sick in body; those who were sick in soul, sought him.... So the woman of the river-banks, in her simple way, augmented the story of the priest's love for his people. Paula rested for a few moments in the dim transept. Natives moved in and out for a breath of coolness, some pausing to kneel upon the worn tiles of the nave. Later she walked among the lower streets of the suffering city, her heart filled with pity for the throngs housed on the low breathless water-front. Except when the wind was straight from the volcano, the hotel on the _Morne d'Orange_ was made livable by the cool Trades.

The clock in the _Hopital l'Militaire_ struck the hour of nine. Paula had just hired a carriage at the Sugar Landing, when her eye was attracted by a small crowd gathering near the water's edge. The black ca.s.sock of a priest in the midst drew her hurrying forward. A young man, she thought at first, from the frail shoulders and the slender waist....

A negress had fallen from the heat. Her burdens lay together upon the sh.o.r.e--a tray of cakes from her head, and a naked babe from her arms....

A glimpse at the priest's profile, and she needed not to be told that this was the holy man of Saint Pierre.

Happiness lived in the face above the deep pity of the moment. It was an attraction of light, like the brow of Mary in Murillo's _Immaculate Conception_; or like that instant ethereal radiance which s.h.i.+nes from the face of a little child pa.s.sing away without pain. The years had put an exquisite n.o.bility upon the plain countenance, and the inner life had added the gleam of adoration--"the rapture-light of holy vigils kept."

Paula rubbed her eyes, afraid lest it were not true; afraid for a moment that it was her own meditations that had wrought this miracle in clay.

Lingering, she ceased to doubt the soul's transfiguration.... Father Fontanel beckoned a huge negro from a lighter laden with mola.s.ses-casks--a man of strength, bare to the waist.

"Take the little mother to my house," he said.

A young woman standing by was given charge of the child.... "Lift her gently, Strong Man. The woman will show you the way to the door." Then raising his voice to the crowd, the priest added, "You who are well--tell others that it is yet cool in the church. Carry the ailing ones there, and the little children. Father Pelee will soon be silent again.... Does any one happen to know who owns the beautiful s.h.i.+p in the harbor?"

His French sentences seemed lifted above a pervasive hush upon the sh.o.r.e. The native faces wore a curious look of adulation; and Paula marvelled in that they seemed unconscious of this. She was not a Catholic; yet she uttered his name with a thrilling rapture, and with a meaning she had never known before:

"Father Fontanel----"

He turned, instantly divining her inspiration.

"Mr. Stock, who owns the s.h.i.+p yonder, is staying at the _Hotel des Palms_," she said quickly. "I have a carriage here. I was thinking that the sick woman and her child might be taken to your house in that.