CHAPTER XVI.
THE STORM KING.
While two of the Motor Maids slept in the sacred wood on the mountain two others rested in one of the bedrooms of the villa straining their ears for sounds of the returning search party. It was only eight o'clock, but Miss Campbell, worn out with excitement and fatigue, had already dropped off to sleep in the next room.
Nancy was quietly and softly weeping, her face buried in her pillow, and Elinor lay staring into the darkness. Mr. Campbell had assured them that the girls could not be lost for long, and that the only mishap that could possibly come to them in that holy place was sleeping under the pine trees; but he could not conceal the anxiety he really felt, the anxiety of a father for his only daughter, the being he loved best in all the world.
Nancy had felt the anxiety, too, and remorse had entered into her soul; not because she had met Yoritomo in the garden and exchanged notes with him in a romantic manner, the notes having been hidden under a stone near the old shrine, for she was beginning dimly to realize that such things were only silly and common. Her remorse was caused by something else more remote in her consciousness but looming bigger all the time. The cruel letter she had written to Billie in anger and then torn into pieces and thrown into a brass vase in Mme. Fontaine's drawing-room! Why had she been so angry? She could not understand it now. She only knew that the longer she poured her troubles into Mme. Fontaine's ears the more sympathetic the widow became until Nancy was worked into a perfect rage. As for the widow, she had said very little indeed, only a few words now and then, vague, suggestive remarks, but they had set Nancy thinking; had stirred her up so violently, indeed, that she had written that foolish letter. There had been no waste basket by the desk and Nancy, after a wretched sleepless night, had torn up the letter and dropped it in the nearest vase. Why had she not torn it into smaller bits? Why had she not burned it in a charcoal brazier? Why had she ever written it at all? Why—why—? A dozen whys flashed through her troubled mind. She would never rest again until she knew the letter had been entirely destroyed, reduced to ashes. Out of this long train of unhappy thought a resolution came to Nancy to write to Mme. Fontame and ask her to find the letter and burn it up. This she accordingly did a few days after the visit to Nikko, and of what came of it more will be told later.
In the meantime, while Nancy, goaded by a troubled conscience was weeping abundantly into her pillow, Billie and little Mary Price lay sleeping peacefully in the great cathedral forest.
Precisely at the moment that Nancy's disturbed fancies had taken the form of a resolution Billie and Mary opened their eyes on a world of velvety blackness. Straight overhead through the lacework of intertwined boughs gleamed an occasional tiny star, like the light shining through a pin prick in a black curtain. Scarcely two hours had passed since they had slipped into the unknown, and now sitting up and rubbing their eyes, they wondered where in the world they were. Hearing Mary stirring beside her in the dark, Billie put out a hand and grasped Mary's groping to meet it. The two friends sat silently for a few minutes. At last Billie said softly:
"What are we going to do, Mary, dear?"
"I am thinking of what they are going to do," answered Mary. "How frightened they will be about us, Billie! As for me, I can't help feeling happy out in this dark peaceful place. I should like to lie here all night and watch the dawn come through the trees."
All of which was extremely poetic, but Billie had become suddenly prosaic at the thought of her father, wild with anxiety she was certain, searching the terraced mountainside for them at the risk of falling off a precipice or tumbling into the river. Besides, at that moment, she felt a puff of hot wind in her face, and immediately was conscious that she was very thirsty and that the palms of her hands were dry and burning.
"Don't you think it's very hot, Mary?" she whispered. "I feel as if I had been baked brown in an oven."
"The wind has changed," answered Mary. "It was cool and sweet when we dropped off, and now it's like a wind that's blown over a desert."
Through the forest came a murmur like thousands of voices gathering in strength and volume all the time. The gigantic pillars of the cathedral began swaying and tossing their arched boughs and the whole mountain seemed to resound with strange sounds, cries and calls, grindings and poundings. The pin prick stars disappeared and the place was as black as the pit.
The two girls rose quickly and clasped hands again.
"I think we'd better go straight down," said Billie. "We're obliged to strike a path somewhere and perhaps we may find a temple or a tomb or a pagoda or something. Anything to get away from that awful thing that's coming, whatever it is."
Fortunately the act of descending gave them a sense of direction. Many times they fell, skinning their shins and their foreheads against trees, but they picked themselves up again, entirely unconscious of bruises, and ran on as fast as they could go with the hot devastating wind behind them. Suddenly the whole mountainside was illuminated by a flash of lightning, like a jagged stream of fire stretching from heaven to earth. A deafening roar of thunder followed. Then all the forest seemed to be perfectly quiet. Such a stillness settled over the place that the girls stopped and held their breath.
"Look," whispered Billie, pointing to a strange looking light coming rapidly nearer, wobbling and undulating like the light on the bow of a ship in a rough ocean. Then came another terrifying flash of lightning, and thunder that seemed to rock the whole world. The two girls rushed toward the friendly light with one accord, and collided with the bearer with such force that three persons were precipitated with unintentionally devotional attitudes at the foot of a shrine of Buddha.
"By Jove, but this is luck," called a familiar voice.
It was Nicholas Grimm, who calmly picked up himself and then his oil-paper lantern attached to the end of a slender wand; next he helped the girls to their feet.
"Take an arm, each one of you. There's no time to lose. The thing that's coming, whatever it is, will get here in a minute now."
Running like mad, on the very wings of the wind, the three young people followed the windings of the path and presently came up short on a small temple, the tomb of some holy personage. Into this they rushed without ceremony just as the storm burst with all its fury, and crouching in a corner just out of reach of the rain, they listened to the howls and shrieks of the wind.
"It's just like some live thing," remarked Mary after a while. "I feel as if some terrible demon lived up in a cave in the mountain, and when he is angry he comes down and lashes the earth and shakes the mountain."
Mary's poetic notion of storms in that region was not so far removed from the Japanese legends.
"You struck the nail on the head that time, Miss Price," said Nicholas. "There is an extinct volcano over here in the northeast and in its side is a huge cavern. People around here used to believe that all these frightful storms issued from the cavern. Every spring and every fall there was a perfectly corking one that tore up the whole place, and they called the mountain 'Ni-Ko San,' or Two-Storm Mountain. Then an old party who was a saint, I believe, and very wise, placed a curse on the storm demon and named the place 'Nikko San,' Mountain of the Sun's Brightness."
"The demon seems to have returned," remarked Billie.
"Oh, he did. That was the point. The magic curse had to be repeated every year, and the saint gave the receipt to a priest and it was handed down from one generation to another in the priest's family for nearly nine hundred years, but the demon still pursued, as you have probably observed."
They were all silent for a while. Mary was making a picture in her mind of the aged priest in his white robes standing like a midget on the side of the vast mountain exorcising the storm king. That personage, she imagined, was a gigantic figure formed principally of black clouds with a terrifying human countenance. Every breath was a whirlwind or a hailstorm and when he struck the side of the mountain with his staff the lightning flashed—
Here Mary's thoughts were interrupted by just such a flash uncomfortably near.
Billie leaped to her feet.
"Oh, Nicholas," she cried, "do you think Papa could still be looking for me? Suppose he should be out now in all this frightful wind! I hadn't thought of it until this moment."
"He'll be all right, Miss Billie," answered Nicholas soothingly. "Don't you worry."
"Don't you tell me not to worry," cried Billie, almost angrily. "Do you think Papa would look after himself if he thought I was lost on the mountain? Oh, heavens, why did we count those old broken statues?"
Nicholas laughed.
"Excuse me," he said, choking back his amusement at sight of Billie's reproachful eyes which even the dim lantern light could not hide. "What are you going to do?" he added, as Billie seized the lantern from his hand.
"I'm going to wave this at the door and yell with all my strength until I haven't any voice left. If Papa is anywhere near he may see it and come straight here."
Nicholas, who, having also had much training in camps and outdoor life, had not felt the least uneasiness about Mr. Campbell's safety, now quietly took the lantern from Billie and began waving it to and fro at the door, while they both shouted again and again. But their voices were lost in the roar of the tempest. Billie stifled a sob.
"Papa!" she whispered to herself. "Dearest, dearest Papa!"
While she spoke a flash of lightning lit up the side of the mountain, and in that momentary illumination Billie saw her father toiling up the path against the wind and rain.
"Papa, Papa!" she shrieked, seizing the lantern and waving it wildly back and forth.
"Halloo!" yelled Nicholas, and then there came an answering shout, a really human cry this time, and after several breathless moments of waiting Mr. Campbell staggered into the temple.
Nicholas and Mary turned their faces away at sight of his emotion when he found his daughter in his arms. He actually buried his face on her shoulder and wept like a child.
"I was beginning to think I was never going to see you again, sweetheart," he said brokenly.
It gave Mary a lonesome, remote feeling. She drew away from the others into a corner of the temple and rested her chin on her hands.
"I wonder how it would feel to have some one big and strong and—and handsome to love and protect one like that," she thought contemplatively.
Just then a figure staggered into the circle of light cast by the lantern. It was Mr. Buxton.
"Good evening," he said. "Delightful weather, isn't it? Suppose we shed a little light on Carlton's path," he added calmly, holding the light to the door. Reggie was close behind his friend, however, and with feelings of enormous relief, the little company proceeded to sit down on the floor and relate their experiences.
"It all really happened," remarked Mary, after Billie had confessed the cause of all the trouble, "because we tried to count the four hundred statues of Buddha and never got the same answer twice, and he naturally didn't like it, and I suppose he put us to sleep and summoned the Storm King—"
"No, child," interrupted Mr. Buxton, "I am sorry to disabuse your romantic young mind, but it really happened because the pressure of the coming storm had a stupefying effect. Buddha was a very high-minded gentleman. He would never have taken offence over such a trivial matter."
"Don't contradict her, Buxton," said Mr. Campbell. "You have no imagination to comprehend the supernatural, anyhow."
"It would be supernatural for two women to count alike," answered the incorrigible bachelor, who would have the last word.
Gradually the storm spent its fury, and by midnight they were able to return to the little villa. Except for a few scratches and bruises, the only important result of the Storm King's visit was Nancy's determination to write a letter to Mme. Fontaine.