former state of worldly prosperity, he had been inspired to issue that Second Revelation regarding warm-blooded beasts.  He ought to have known about the Grand Dukes, and what a sacrilegious hot-tempered clique they were!  “This comes,” he would say, “of placing the service of God above that of my earthly masters.”  It kept him in exile on this island—­the deadlock in the matter of that Second Revelation.  The expiatory period was not yet over, though Nepenthe, on the whole, would have been glad to see the last of him—­particularly Signor Malipizzo.

Meanwhile, the Little White Cows lived on:  the richer in houses, sleeping fifteen or twenty in one room after the happy style of patriarchal Russia—­the humbler folk in old ruins, sheds, cellars, or even caverns of the rock.  You could do that sort of thing in a climate like Nepenthe, if you were not fastidious in the matter of owls, bats, lizards, toads, earwigs, centipedes, and an occasional scorpion.

CHAPTER XII

No Russians dwelt within the Cave of Mercury.  It was inconveniently remote; it was difficult of approach; moreover, it was haunted.  Dreadful rites had been performed there, in olden times.  The walls had dripped with human gore.  Death-groans of victims slain by the priestly knife resounded in its hollow entrails.  Such had been the legend in the days of those monkish chroniclers in whose credulous pages Monsignor Perrelli, incredulous himself, had discovered a mine of curious information.

Then came the Good Duke Alfred.  His Highness posed as a conservative in some matters; it pleased him to revive memories of the long-buried past.  He cared little about ghosts.  He liked to take things in hand.  After remarking in his brisk epigrammatic fashion that “not everything old is putrid,” he devoted his attention to the Cave of Mercury and caused a flight of convenient stairs to be built, wide enough to admit the passage of two of his fattest Privy Councillors walking abreast, and leading down to this particular grotto through a cleft in the rock.  Nobody knew what happened there under his superintendence.  Mankind being ever prone to believe the worst of every great man, all kinds of stupid and even wicked things were said, though not during his lifetime.  People vowed that he carried on the old traditions, the tortures and human sacrifices, and even improved upon them in his blithe Renaissance manner.  They were ready to supply circumstantial and excruciating details of how, disguised, down to the minutest details of costume, in the semblance of the Evil One, he had sought to prolong his life and invigorate his declining health with the blood of innocent children, artfully done to death after fiendish, lingering agonies.  Father Capocchio, needless to say, has some shocking pages on this subject.