The true Mr. Eames revealed and reasserted himself.  He shrank from the idea.  He closed up like a flower in the chill of night-fall.  He was not going to put himself under obligations to anybody.  He would keep his sense of personal independence, even if it entailed the sacrifice of a life’s ambition.  Owe no man anything!  The words rang in his ears.  They were his father’s words.  Owe no man anything!  They were that gentleman’s definition of a gentleman—­a definition which was cordially approved by every other gentleman who, like Mr. Eames junior, happened to hold analogous views.

Gentlemen being rather scarce nowadays, we cannot but feel grateful to the Crotalophoboi for devouring Saint Dodekanus and paving the way, via the antiquities of Monsignor Perrelli, for the refined personality of Mr. Eames—­even if such was not their original intention.

CHAPTER IV

Next morning, at precisely 4 a.m., there was an earthquake.

Foreigners unaccustomed to Nepenthean conditions rushed in their pyjamas out of doors, to escape the falling wreckage.  An American lady, staying at Mr. Muhlen’s high-class hotel, jumped from her bed-room on the third floor into the courtyard below, and narrowly escaped bruising her ankle.

It was a false alarm.  The sudden clanging of every bell on the place, the explosion of twelve hundred mortars and the simultaneous booming of an enormous cannon—­that far-famed gun whose wayward tricks had cost the lives of hundreds of its loaders in the days of the Good Duke—­might have passed for an earthquake of the first magnitude, so far as noise and concussion were concerned.  The island rocked to its foundations.  It was the signal for the festival of the patron saint to begin.

Nobody could have slept through that din.  Mr. Heard, dog-tired as he was, woke up and opened his eyes.

“Things are happening here,” he said—­a remark which he found himself repeating on several later occasions.

He looked round the room.  It was not an hotel bed-room.  Then he began to remember things, drowsily.  He remembered the pleasant surprise of the previous evening—­how the Duchess had called to mind a small villa, vacated earlier than she had expected by a lady friend for whom she had taken it.  It was furnished, spotlessly clean, with a woman, a capable cook, in attendance.  She had insisted on his living there.

“So much nicer than a dreadful room in an hotel!  You’ll show the bishop all over it, won’t you, Denis?”

Walking together, he and Denis, they had been overtaken by another recent visitor to Nepenthe.  It was Mr. Edgar Marten.  Mr. Marten was a hirsute and impecunious young Hebrew of low tastes, with a passion for mineralogy.  He had profited by some University grant to make certain studies at Nepenthe which was renowned for its variegated rocks.  There was something striking about him, thought Mr. Heard.  He said little of consequence, but Denis listened enthusiastically to his abstruse remarks about fractures and so forth, and watched with eagerness as he poked his stick into the rough walls to dislodge some stone that seemed to be of interest.