The early daylight dinner at the hotel had been well nigh a silent ceremonial. That day, with the temple solitary, Barbara had gone down into a deeper Valley of Shadow. Just as her longing to go to him in her trouble had seemed to her overwrought, so now her grief was strangely poignant. When she thought of him her mind was a confusion of tremulous half-thoughts and new emotions. She could not know that the voice she dimly heard was the call of blood—that she was in the grip of that mighty instinct of filiation which strengthens the life-currents of the world. Her grief—mysterious because its springs were haunting and unknown—added its aching pang now to the misery that had encompassed her. She had felt the fierce bounding of the stout little boat, the gusts of windy spray that flew over them, with a tinge of relief, since the buffeting made the inner pain less keen.
As she stood at length, with her task, in the cabin whose door had been so long locked, she remembered the white-robed priests of Kudan Hill, stalking barefooted across the hot coals. Her soul, she thought, must tread a fiery path on which rested no miracle of painlessness, and which had no end. Above her she could hear the irregular footfalls of the bishop on the tilting deck, and the shrill humming of the wind in the ventilators. It seemed to be mocking her. Before the world she was living a painful pretense. Even her uncle believed her to be grieving for the man whose life had gone out that night at Nikko!
When all had been done and the papers sealed in a portmanteau for delivery to the Consul-General, Barbara came into the brilliant saloon. The yacht was pitching heavily and she could stand with difficulty. Steadying herself against the table, she saw the empty wrapper addressed to herself. It bore a Nikko postmark. Who could have sent it here? As she stood holding the paper in her hand, the bishop entered.
"Captain Hart thinks we would better stay aboard to-night, Barbara," he said. "There is a nasty sea and we should be sure of a drenching in the dinghy. We have no change of clothing, you know."
"You will be quite comfortable, Miss Fairfax," the captain's voice spoke deferentially from the doorway. "The guest-rooms are always kept ready."
"Very well," she said, a little wearily. "That will be best, no doubt." She held up the torn wrapper. "What was in this, I wonder?"
The captain confessed his indiscretion with embarrassment, and she absolved him with a smile that covered a sharper pang than she had yet felt that evening. For that thin disk had been on the hillside that Nikko night—perhaps had heard that quarrel, had seen that blow, had watched a man crawling, staggering foot by foot, till he collapsed against the frame that held it! By what strange chance had it been sent to her here?
Her uncle bade her good night presently, being an indifferent sailor, and betook himself to bed. The room that had been prepared for her opened into the saloon. She was too restless to retire, and after a time she climbed up the companion-way to the windy deck.
The vaulted sapphire of the sky had been swept clean of cloud and the stars sparkled whitely. Off at one side, a flock of sinister shadows, she could make out the Squadron of battle-ships, and beyond, in a curving line, the twinkling lights of the Bund. Could it ever again be to her that magical shore she had first seen from a ship's deck, with hills which the cherry-trees made fairy tapestries of green-rose, and mountains creased of purple velvet and veined with gold? The great white phantom lifting above them—would it henceforth be but a bulk of ice and stone, no longer the shrine of the Goddess-of-Radiant-Flower-Bloom? The sky—would it ever again seem the same violet arch that had bent over a Tokyo garden of musk flowers and moonlight? Would the world never seem beautiful to her again?
All about her the foam-stippled water glowed with points of phosphorescence, as though a thousand ghostly lanterns were afloat. It made her think of the festival of the Bon, of which Thorn had told her, when the Shoryo-buné—the boats of the departed spirits—in lambent flotillas, go glimpsing down to the sea. How unbelievable that she should never see him again! She felt a sudden envy of the placid millions encircling her to whose faith no life was ever lost, whose loved ones were ever coming back in the perennial cherry-blooms, the maple-leaves, the whispering pines.