Stella now was tearless and calm. Her look brought a quick emotion to Jerome’s throat; and, as he entered the room, an elusive tenderness seemed to come also upon the enigmatic Captain.
“My God,” they thought they heard him say again, very softly.
There was something fugitively poetic and sublimating about it—a devious spiritual touch, as though the Captain perhaps saw, even more poignantly than Jerome, that she was a woman at length. Stella fancied there a gleam of shy sympathy, with a hitherto impregnable barrier for a fleeting instant broken down.
They buried Mr. King, just at the hour of a radiant tropical sunset, in a scented bower near the house; and they remained a little while in silence gazing at the plot of vexed earth beneath which lay all that remained of that being who had played so curious a part in the affairs of the universe.
Meantime the Ainu, uncognizant of their irreparable loss, had assembled in the house of the great chief, Cha-cha-kamui, who was present in all his grandeur, wearing the robe of red and white cloth, and on his gigantic head the crown of shavings and gilt. Outside, children played about in a noisy unimaginative way, and the women of the tribe sat on the ground working their distaffs dully. Cha-cha-kamui’s Small Wife passed among them, a little distant and haughty—for it was known that in former days the White Kami had looked with favour upon her.
Later on Tsuda would stage some sort of learned pagan ritual celebrating the return of the White Kami to the Brotherhood of the Blessed. But such processes require time—as they do in the mystic Shinshū mountains—and for the present it sufficed that there was plenty of saké.
When revelry was at its height, Tsuda, who had drunk nothing and seemed very sad and cast down, slipped out of the house of the chief and away to the edge of the sea.
The Star of Troy was hoisting her anchor. Every sound was vividly audible in the hush of early evening.
He sat down in a despondent heap on the dock and leaned wearily up against the tilted derrick. In a little while there would be only a drifting plume of smoke along the horizon.