iacomo's Ladies' Orchestra had been established there for some time.

The business which had called him out from his seclusion in his lost
corner of the Eastern seas was with the Tesmans, and it had something
to do with money. He transacted it quickly, and then found himself with
nothing to do while he awaited Davidson, who was to take him back to his
solitude; for back to his solitude Heyst meant to go. He whom we used
to refer to as the Enchanted Heyst was suffering from thorough
disenchantment. Not with the islands, however. The Archipelago has a
lasting fascination. It is not easy to shake off the spell of island
life. Heyst was disenchanted with life as a whole. His scornful
temperament, beguiled into action, suffered from failure in a subtle way
unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human
enterprise. It was like the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of
shame before his own betrayed nature; and in addition, he also suffered
from plain, downright remorse. He deemed himself guilty of Morrison's
death. A rather absurd feeling, since no one could possibly have
foreseen the horrors of the cold, wet summer lying in wait for poor
Morrison at home.

It was not in Heyst's character to turn morose; but his mental state was
not compatible with a sociable mood. He spent his evenings sitting
apart on the veranda of Schomberg's hotel. The lamentations of string
instruments issued from the building in the hotel compound, the
approaches to which were decorated with Japanese paper lanterns strung
up between the trunks of several big trees. Scraps of tunes more or
less plaintive reached his ears. They pursued him even into his bedroom,
which opened into an upstairs veranda. The fragmentary and rasping
character of these sounds made their intrusion inexpressibly tedious in
the long run. Like most dreamers, to whom it is given sometimes to hear
the music of the spheres, Heyst, the wanderer of the Archipelago, had
a taste for silence which he had been able to gratify for years. The
islands are very quiet. One sees them lying about, clothed in their dark
garments of leaves, in a great hush of silver and azure, where the sea
without murmurs meets the sky in a ring of magic stillness. A sort of
smiling somnolence broods over them; the very voices of their people are
soft and subdued, as if afraid to break some protecting spell.

Perhaps this was the very spell which had enchanted Heyst in the early
day