After a time a tropical grove was reached, in whose midst stood the temple. No one, at first, approached very close: there seemed a recognized margin of some sort, beyond which the ground was holy. Of them all, the single figure alone, bearing in his hands a woven tray heaped with the choicest fruits of the place, went on toward the temple itself; the rest squatted upon the ground. Not a word was spoken. It was a strange and awful ceremony.
The moon was just rising, full and yellow; the first soft beams began to steal in through the breeze-stirred palm orchard to illumine the temple with a pale light. But the resinous torches cast up everything in bold, dancing relief. Jerome, on the outskirts, crouching, felt his mind in greater tumult even than before. He seemed to himself almost possessed.
It was a Japanese temple. They had ruined Tsuda’s chances of becoming a priest; but he knew a temple from torii to sessha. It was surrounded by a low wall with a gate. Outside the gate was a tiny spring of fresh water. Jerome could see it: a little pool just troubled in the torchlight.
All about sprang the rich blackness of a tropical growth, the most lush he had ever beheld. The moon was climbing slowly up the sky. He was glad he had come. Life was wonderful and sad. He watched with eyes that tried to record every detail of this unearthly hour.
The figure with the offering uttered a bit of weird chanting; then suddenly the words ceased, and the tray was deposited on a small altar at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the temple itself. That was all. The crude fragment of ritual concluded, these strange beings with bushy hair and prodigious drooping moustaches moved away in silence. Jerome, crouching in his hiding place, watched them pass by, one by one, and disappear. He could see the twinkling lights, like far-off tapers, winding farther and farther. Then silence was supreme.
He remained still in hiding what seemed to him a long, long time. Never had he been in a place so intensely still. When at length he stirred and began moving cautiously toward the temple, his senses were abnormally alert with the painful excitement. But he was ever conscious, too, of that odd feeling of triumph in his heart. Death had seemed to put her back somehow into his hands again. He couldn’t get away from that thought—nor did he want to get away from it. Jerome even began projecting, vaguely and fitfully, a scene with Stella’s father: he would go in very simply and tell him how he had visited her grave alone tonight.
The past was irrevocably behind them; but his heart would not be still.
Suddenly he stopped, thrilling with terror, as a great bird rose up from almost beneath his feet and flew off screaming across the silvered dark. It looked like a great sinister eagle, yet it had the neck of a crane and head plumage of what (though moonlight can create delusion as regards colours) seemed brilliant vermilion. He could hear the bird still screaming at a great distance, crashing on through the tangle of its native wood as though quite blind. After that the silence was still more poignant.
Pulling himself together, Jerome moved on slowly, seeking the grave with the flowers. There were a number of mounds all about, but they looked ancient. Far around to one side, however, he found at last the grave he sought—in the dark stumbled against it, and was really on his knees before he realized this was, in truth, the end of his quest.