South Wind eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 503 pages of information about South Wind.

South Wind eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 503 pages of information about South Wind.

And from the Old Town came news of a portentous fowl which had suddenly assumed the plumage of the male sex.  It was a hen renowned, hitherto, for her temperate and normal habits and, as it happened, known by sight to the local parish priest, who, horrified at the transformation of the feathered monster and mindful of the Papal Bull NE NIMIS NOCEANT Nobis which enjoins upon Christians the duty of destroying all unnatural productions however generated, incontinently ordered it to be put out of the way.  But the destruction of this androgyne proved an arduous task.  It was reported that the creature fought for its life with the energy of a demon, crowing vigorously the while and laying, in the very act of death, an egg—­an egg of spheroidal form, bluish in colour, and apparently hard-boiled—­an egg which the Chief Medical Officer of Health had no great difficulty in recognizing as that of a cockatrice.

In view of these and other sinister occurrences it is not surprising that a sense of insecurity should have fallen upon the more credulous section of the natives.  Even sceptical persons thought it rather provoking on the part of Providence, or whoever managed these things, that the disquieting of men’s minds should take place during this particular fortnight, the most important of the whole year, midway between the great feasts of Saint Dodekanus and Saint Eulalia when the island was crammed with visitors.

And there followed late at night yet another surprise.  Mr. Parker had been called away from his duties at the Club in hot haste by the news that his lady was seriously ill.  A few days earlier she had been stung on the lip by a mosquito; no further attention was paid to the incident, though the disagreeable south wind provoked a rise in temperature and some discomfort.  On this afternoon, however, her face had suddenly begun to assume strange tints and to swell in wondrous fashion.  It was no already enlarged to twice its natural size and altogether—­in the words of the physician who had been summoned to her villa—­“a thing to see.”

It had always been a thing to see.  So, at least, said those who were privileged to know.  There were tropical strains in her blood-strains from some flowery land in the Caribbean Sea-strains which refused to mingle in harmonious fashion with the white elements in her ancestry.  She was neither lovely nor lovable, and it was regarded as a kindly dispensation of Heaven that some malformation of the lower limbs kept her confined to her boudoir, where no visitors ever called save a few misguided newcomers to the island who were unaware of her idiosyncrasies.  These idiosyncrasies, due to the enforced inactivity of her feet, took the form of a grotesque activity of the tongue.  Her infirmity preventing her from learning how things really stood, she let her phantasy run riot on the occasional reports which reached the villa; and that phantasy, nourished by lack of physical exercise, indulged in a love of scandal-mongering which bordered, and sometimes trespassed, on the pathological.  She distilled scandal from every pore, and in such liberal quantities that even the smiling and good-natured Don Francesco once spoke of her as “the serpent in the Paradise.”  But perhaps he only said that because Madame Parker was not over-fond of him—­his rival the parroco being her friend and confessor.

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South Wind from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.