"It was to you," he said unsteadily. "I didn't know your name. But I never forgot the song. I remembered it that night in the garden, when I first heard you playing!"
CHAPTER XXX
THE ISLAND OF ENCHANTMENT
They walked together around the curving road, leaving Haru with the tea-basket. "Patsy would have come," Barbara had said, "but she is in the clutches of her dressmaker." And Daunt had answered, "I have a distinct regard for that Chinaman!"
His black mood had vanished, and the leering imps had flown. In the brightness of her physical presence, how baseless and foolish seemed his sullen imaginings! What man who owned a steam yacht, knowing her, would not wish to name it the Barbara? Walking beside her, so near that he could feel the touch of her light skirt against his ankles, it seemed impossible that he should ever again be other than light-hearted. She was no acquaintance of hours, after all. He had known her for seven years. He was in wild spirits.
The sky was duller now. Its marvelous haze of blue and gold had turned pallid, and the sun glared with a pale, yellowish effrontery. A strange sighing was in the air, so faint, however, that it seemed only the stirring of innumerable leaves, the resinous rasping of pine-needles and the lisping fall of the flaming petals from the century-old camelia trees, that stained the ground with hot, bleeding red. Far below in the shallow pools, nut-brown, bare-legged girls were gathering seaweed in hand-nets, kimono tucked beneath their belts and scarlet petticoats falling to their knees, like a flock of brilliant flamingos. At a turn in the road stood a stone image of Jizo, with a red paper bib about its neck. Before it lay three small rice-cakes; somewhere in the neighborhood was a little sick child, three years old. At its base were heaps of tiny stones, piled by mothers whose little children had died.
They stopped at a tea-house open on all sides, and, sitting cross-legged on its tatamé, drank tea from earthenware pots that held only a small cupful, while they listened to a street minstrel beating on a tom-tom, and singing a mysterious song that seemed about to choke him. They fed a crisp rice-cake to a baby sagging from an urchin's shoulder. A doll was strapped to the baby's back. They peered into a Buddhist temple where a monotonous chant came from behind a blue-figured curtain. They went, laughing like two children, down the zigzag stone steps, past innumerable uomitei—crimson-benched "resting-houses," where grave Japanese pedestrians sat eating stewed eels and chipping hard-boiled eggs—to the rocky edge of the tide, which now rolled in with a measured, sullen booming. He pointed to a gloomy fissure which ran into the mountain, at a little distance.
"O Maiden, journeying to Holy Ben-ten," he said, "behold her shrine!"
"How disillusioning!"