“No,” said Channing, “for if you had you would not be here. The metaphor is a bad one. I only mean to say that the touch of a stick or a hand may disturb the play of great forces with most surprising results.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE HOUSE BY NIGHT
It was late when Leslie left the hotel. The moon was rising over Nagasaki, and he required no lamp to light him up the hill path leading to the house.
In the veranda he sat down to rest a moment and pull off his boots. The landscape garden, looking very antique in the moonlight, lay before him, the moon lighting its tiny hills and melancholy groves with the same particular care that presently he would bestow on the forests of Scindia and the Himalayas. On one of its verdurous swards lay a mark. It was the mark of Jane du Telle’s footstep imprinted on Campanula’s garden.
He sat for a while in thought, then he unlatched a panel with a sort of gridiron-shaped key, then he searched in his pocket for matches, and found he had none.
Determining to grope his way up and go to bed by moonlight, he closed and fastened the panel, leaving himself in darkness, caught his toe against an hibachi, left as if on purpose for him to tumble over, swore, knocked himself against a screen, which fell crash on Sweetbriar San, the household cat, who had once made part of the Fir-cone, Plum-blossom, Moon, and Snow ministry, and the intelligent animal, conceiving that robbers had entered, rushed wildly round and round in the dark till a panel slid back revealing Pine-breeze with a wan and weary smile on her face, and an andon or night lantern in her hand. She handed Leslie a candle and box of matches, and, still smiling, slid back, closing the panel as she went, like a figure in a trick toy, Sweetbriar San bristling and glowering on her shoulder like a fiend.
The upper part of the House of the Clouds was divided by panels into a passage and three rooms. One for Leslie, one for the Mousmés, and the third for Campanula.