Bishop Randolph was a bachelor, past middle age, ruddy and with eyes softened by habitual good-humor. He was the son of a rector of a rich Virginian parish, which on his father's death had sent the son a unanimous call. He had answered, "No; my place is in Japan," without consciousness of sacrifice. For him, in the truest sense, the present voyage was a homeward one.
"Japan gets into the blood," he said musingly. "I often think of the old lady who committed suicide at Nikko. She left a letter which said: 'By favor of the gods, I am too dishonorably old to hope to revisit this jewel-glorious spot, so I prefer augustly to remain here for ever!' I have had something of the same feeling, sometimes. I remember yet the first time I saw the coast. That was twenty-five years ago. We watched it together—your father and I—just as we two are doing now."
She looked at him with sudden eagerness, for of his own accord he had never before spoken to her of her dead father. The latter had always seemed a very real personage, but how little she knew about him! The aunt who had brought her up—her mother's sister—had never talked of him, and her uncle she had seen but twice since she had been old enough to wonder. But, little by little, gleaning a fact here and there, she had constructed a slender history of him. It told of mingled blood, a birthplace on a Mediterranean island and a gipsy childhood. There was a thin sheaf of yellowed manuscript in her possession that had been left among her mother's scanty papers, a fragment of an old diary of his. Many leaves had been ruthlessly cut from it, but in the pages that were left she had found bits of flotsam: broken memory-pictures of his own mother which had strangely touched her, of a bitter youth in England and America overshadowed by the haunting fear of blindness, of quests to West-Indian cities, told in phrases that dripped liquid gold and sunshine. The voyage to Japan had been made on the same vessel that carried her uncle, and they two had thus become comrades. The latter had been an enthusiastic young missionary, one of a few chosen spirits sent to defend a far field-casement thrown forward by the batteries of Christendom. His sister had come out to visit him and a few months later had married his friend.
Such was the story, as Barbara knew it, of her father and mother—a love chapter which had soon closed with a far-away grave by the Inland Sea. Her fancy had made of her father a pathetic figure. As a child, she had dreamed of some day placing a monument to his memory in the Japanese capital. She possessed only one picture of him, a tiny profile photograph which she wore always in a locket engraved with her name. It showed a dark face, clean-shaven, finely chiseled and passionate, with the large, full eye of the dreamer. She had liked to think it looked like the paintings of St. John. Perhaps this thought had caused the projected monument to take the form of a Christian chapel. From a nebulous idea, the plan had become a bundle of blue-prints, which she had sent to her uncle, with the request that he purchase for her a suitable site and begin the building. He had done this before his visit to America and now the Chapel was completed, save in one particular—the memorial window of rich, stained-glass stowed at that moment in the ship's hold. The bishop had not seen it. From some feeling which she had not tried to analyze, Barbara had said nothing to him of the Chapel's especial significance. Now, however, at his unexpected reference, the feeling frayed, and she told him all of her plan.
He gazed at her a moment in a startled fashion, then looked away, his hand shading his eyes. When she finished there was a long pause which made her wonder. She touched his arm.
"You were very fond of father, weren't you?"
"Yes," he said, in a tone oddly restrained.
"And was my mother with you when he fell in love with her?"
"Yes," and after a pause: "I married them."
"Then they went to Nagasaki," she said softly, "and there—he died. You weren't there then?"