“A fine type,” Keith whispered into the bishop’s ear.  “You will like him.  I call him the Salt of the South.  If you are interested in the old Greek life of these regions—­well, he gives you an idea of those people.  He is the epitome of the Ionian spirit.  I’ll take you up to see him one of these days.”

The performance consisted of a series of twelve scenes without words, representing the twelve chief episodes in the life of the Patron Saint, as portrayed in a certain marble frieze in the church.  The actors were a handful of the more attractive and intelligent children of the place.  They had been trained under the watchful eye of a priest who confessed to some notions of stage-craft and delighted in juvenile theatricals.  It was a thrillingly realistic performance; the costumes—­designed, long ago, by the Good Duke himself—­varied with every tableau.  Vociferous expressions of approval accompanied the performance.  The Saint’s encounter in the grove of Alephane with the golden-haired lady was a masterpiece of histrionic art; so was his solemn preaching among the black natives.  Tears flowed freely at his violent death—­a scene which was only marred by the erratic movements of his venerable beard; that mill-stone, too, of papier MACHE, played lovely pranks upon a pea-green ocean.  Best of all was the cannibalistic feast of the Crotalophoboi ending with a tempestuous, demoniacal war-dance.  Their blackened limbs emerging from the scantiest of vesture, the actors surpassed themselves.  Such an uproar of applause accompanied the orgy that it had to be repeated.

Every year it had to be repeated, this particular tableau.  It was by far the most popular, to the intense regret of the parroco, the parish priest, a rigid disciplinarian, an alien to Nepenthe, a frost-bitten soul from the Central Provinces of the mainland.  He used to complain that times were changed; that what was good in the days of the Duke might not be good for the present generation; that a scene such as this was no incentive to true religion; that the Holy Mother of God could hardly be edified by the performance, seeing that the players were almost nude, and that certain of the gestures verged on indelicacy and even immodesty.  Every year he complained in like fashion:  Ah, what would the Madonna say, if she saw it?

And every year the entire body of the local clergy, with Don Francesco as their eloquent spokesman, opposed his views.

The play was tradition, they avowed.  Tradition must be upheld.  And what more?  It savoured of heresy to suggest that the Mother of God was blind to anything that happened on earth.  Doubtless She saw this particular scene; doubtless She approved; doubtless She smiled, like everyone else.  She loved her people in true motherly fashion.  She was not born in the Central Provinces.  She was fond of children, whether they wore clothes or not.  The players enjoyed themselves.  So did the audience.