In their presence Mr. Keith began to experience an uncomfortable sensation, a kind of chill—­as though something evil had stepped between himself and the brave light of the sun.  It was a fleeting feeling which he would have diagnosed, in other people, as perilously akin to a moral stomach-ache.

CHAPTER XXIX

Only one other person on Nepenthe found cause to complain of the municipal music.  It was Mr. Heard.  Altogether, he was not greatly edified by this, the first funeral of its kind he had ever witnessed.  A rowdy-dowdy business, he called it.  The music was too lively and blatant for so solemn an occasion; the gorgeous vestments of the clergy, the loud chattering among the mourners, the violent gestures that accompanied Torquemada’s well-meant and carefully prepared oration (Don Francesco, a born speaker, would have done it better, but the defunct was no friend or even client of his)—­all these things savoured slightly of irreverence.  Everyone was talking and laughing as they marched along.  It was more like a polonaise than a funeral.  In his African period the sight of such a burial would have affected him unpleasantly.  But Mr. Heard was changing, widening out.

“These people live gaily,” he said to himself.  “Why not?  A funeral is supposed to be nothing but a friendly leave-taking.  Why not be cheerful about it?  We are all going to see each other again, sometime, somewhere.  I suppose. . . .”

The problem gave him no trouble whatever.

He found himself walking side by side with Mr. Eames who ventured to remark, in a seemly whisper, that he attended the funeral not so much out of respect for the lamented lady—­every cloud, he fancied, had a silver lining—­as because he hoped to gather, from among so representative a concourse of natives and foreigners, the “popular impression” of yesterday’s eruption, with a view to utilizing it in this appendix on recent volcanic phenomena of nepenthe.

“Really?” replied the bishop.  “A chapter on Volcanic Phenomena?  It is sure to be interesting.”

Mr. Eames warmed to his subject.

It might be made interesting, he agreed, but for his own ignorance of geology.  As it was the business gave him a vast deal of trouble.  Monsignor Perrelli had dealt with geological matters in a fashion far too summary for present-day requirements.  The old scholar was not to blame, of course, seeing that geology was quite a modern science; but he might at least have been a little more painstaking in his record of those showers of ashes and lapilli which were known to have covered the island from time to time.  His account of them was lamentably defective.  It was literally bristling with—­with—­with lacunae, which had to be filled up by means of laborious references to contemporary chronicles.  Altogether one of the most unsatisfactory sections of an otherwise admirable work. . . .