Northwards!

To his little place in the Highlands, at first.  The meager soil and parsimonious culture, the reasonable discourse of the people, their wholesome disputatiousness, acted as a kind of purge or tonic after all this Southern exuberance.  Scotland chastened him; its rocks and tawny glinting waters and bleak purple uplands rectified his perspective.  He called to mind the sensuous melancholy of the birches, the foxgloves, the hedgerows smothered in dog-roses; he remembered the nights, full of fairy-like suggestion and odours of earth and budding leaves—­those wonderful nights with their silvery radiance, calm and benignant, streaming upwards form the luminous North.

Then, after strolling aimlessly elsewhere, on sea or land, visiting friends—­no matter whom or where—­he would return to Nepenthe to indulge his genius to the full in the vintage bacchanals.  He owned a small plantation that lay high up, among the easterly cliffs of the island.  It produced that mountain wine which was held to be the best on Nepenthe.  The vines grew upon a natural platform, surrounded by rugged lava crags that overhung the sea.

Hither he was wont to repair with certain of his domestic staff and three or four friends from out of his “inner circle,” to superintend the pressing of the grapes.  There was a rude structure of masonry on the spot—­a vaulted chamber containing winepress and vats and hoes and other implements of the husbandman’s time-honoured craft; a few chairs and a table completed the furniture.  Nobody knew exactly what happened up here.  People talked of wild and shameless carousals; the rocks were said to resound with ribald laughter while Mr. Keith, oozing paganism at every pore, danced faun-like measures to the sound of rustic flutes.  Certain it was that the party often got riotously tipsy.

So tipsy that sometimes their host was unable to be moved down to his villa.  On such days he was put to bed on the floor between two wine barrels, and the chef hastily advised to come up with some food and a portable kitchen range.  In earliest morning he would insist upon tottering forth to watch the sun as it rose behind the peaks of the distant mainland, flooding the sea with golden radiance and causing the precipices to glitter like burnished bronze.  He loved the sunrise—­he saw it so seldom.  Then breakfast; a rather simple breakfast by way of a change.  It was on one of these occasions that the chef made a mistake which his master was slow to forgive.  He prepared for that critical meal a dish of poached eggs, the sight of which threw Mr. Keith into an incomprehensible fit of rage.

“Take those damned things away, quickly!” he commanded.  It was the celebrated artist’s one and only LACHE.

As a rule, however, he did not sleep on the spot.  Peasants, climbing to their work on the hillsides in the twilit hour of dawn, were wont to encounter that staggering procession headed by Mr. Keith who, with spectacles all awry and crooning softly to himself, was carried round the more perilous turnings by a contingent of his devoted retainers.