What was under those ruins? Barbara shivered. She was quite unconscious of the mud and the pelting rain. The bishop drew her under the temple porch, and they stood together watching the men now working with mattocks, saws and with loose beams for levers, prying up a corner of the fallen roof. It seemed an hour they had stood there, when a priest, bareheaded, his robes caked with mud, came from the clustering crowd. The bishop questioned him in Japanese. Barbara guessed from his face what the priest had answered! She waited quiveringly.
Through the bishop's mind swift thoughts were passing. He knew by hearsay of the recluse—knew that he was not an Oriental. He had often seen the placard on the little gate: "Maker of Buddhas." He had never passed it without a pang. It seemed a satirical derision of the holiest ideal of the West—a type and sign of reversion, a sardonic mockery of the Creed of Christ. He was a priest holding the torch of the true light to this alien people, and here, a dark shadow across its brightness, had stood this derisive denial. Yet now, perhaps, this man stood on the threshold of the hereafter—and he was a man of his own race!
He turned to Barbara. "Wait here for me," he said. "I am going in. I will come back to you as soon as I can."
CHAPTER XLVI
THE GOLDEN CRUCIFIX
The bishop went quickly through the crowd to a gap under the great gables, where the beams had been sawed through and the rubbish shoveled to one side, making a difficult way into the interior. The enormous span of the roof had sunk sidewise, splitting its supporting beams and bending the walls outward, but its great ridge had remained intact and it now stretched, a squat, ungainly lean-to, over what had been the altar. The space was strewn with brasses, fragments of fretted and carven doors, and splintered beneath a mass of tiling lay a great image of Kwan-on. The daylight came dimly in through the chinks in the ruin. The air was warm and close and had a smell of pulverized plaster, of stale incense and rotting wood. A group of priests stood on the altar platform beside a huddle of wadded mats and brocaded draperies, on which a man was lying, his open eyes upturned to the painted monsters on the twisted tangle of rafters.
The bishop hesitated, then came close.
The man's head turned toward him—for an instant he seemed to shrink into the cushions; then in his eyes, dark with the last shadow, came a swift yearning. He spoke to the priests and they drew back.
"Arthur," he said, "don't you know me?"