A little gleam came to Ware's eyes. The threads were in his hands, and this suited his plan. "Thanks," he said; "you're very kind, Commander. I shall see the subject of your rhapsody, then, before the Judge puts on his black cap."
"Ah, but you'll have no chance," laughed the Baroness. "Trust a woman's eye."
"Unless his aëroplane takes a tumble," said the American girl reflectively. "There's always a chance for a tragedy there!"
They rose to depart. "We are actually going to the opera, Mr. Ware," said the Baroness; "the 'Popular Hardman Comic Opera Company,' if you please, 'with Miss Cissy Clifford.' Doesn't that sound like Broadway? It comes over every season from Shanghai, and it's our regular spring dissipation. You'd not be tempted to join us, I suppose?"
He bowed over her hand. "It is my misfortune to have an engagement here."
"Well, then—jusqu'au bal. Good night."
Ware drank his black coffee alone on the terrace. Daunt—a Secretary of Embassy! A rival less experienced than he, full of youth's enthusiasms—a young Romeo, wooing from the garden of officialdom! It had been a handful of days against his own round year; a few meetings, at most, to offset his long and constant plan! And, as a result, the thing he had seen through the car window. He shut his teeth. He would have taken bitter toll of that kiss!
As he lit his cigar, one of the hotel boys came to him. On his arrival Ware had sent him to Phil's bungalow on the Bluff with a note.
"Ware-San not at home," he said.
"Where is he?"
"No Yokohama now. He go Tokyo yesterday. Stay one week."
"Is he at the hotel there?"
"Boy say no hotel. House have got."
"What is the address?"
"Boy no must tell. He say letter send Tokyo Club."
Ware's composure had been fiercely shaken that night and this obstacle in his path pricked him to the point of exasperation. With impatience he threw away his cigar and walked out through the cool, brilliant evening.
But the glittering pageant of the prismatic streets inspired only a rising irritation. When a pedestrian jostled him, the elaborate bow of apology and ceremonial drawing-in of breath met with only a morose stare. He left the Bund and threaded the Honcho-dori—the "Main Street"—striving to curb his mood. Midway of its length was a jeweler's shop-window with a beautiful display of jewel-jade. In it was hung a sign which he read with a wry smile: "English Spoken: American Understood." Ware entered and handed the Japanese clerk his broken cigar-case.
The counter was spread with irregular pieces of the green and pink stone, wrought with all the laborious cunning of the oriental lapidary. At his elbow a clerk was packing a jade bracelet into a tiny box for delivery. He wrapped and addressed it painstakingly with a little brush—
In the street Ware smiled grimly as he entered the address in his note-book. He had always believed in his luck. To-morrow he would find Phil, and gain further enlightenment—incidentally on the matter of jade bracelets! His mouth set in contemptuous lines as he walked back to the hotel.
"And as to the foreigner named Philip Ware, that is all you know?"
"That is all, Ishida-San," Haru answered.
They stood in the cryptomeria shadows of Reinanzaka Hill, from which he had stepped to her side as she came from the Embassy gate. It was dark, for the moon was not yet risen, and the evening was very still. One sleepy semi bubbled in the foliage and in the narrow street at the foot of the hill, with its glimmering shoji, she could hear the fairy tinkle of wind bells in the eaves.
Such an ambush by her lover, unjustified, would have been a dire affront to the girl's rigid Japanese code of decorum. That he had seen Phil greet her at Mukojima the evening before had shamed her pride, and in speaking of it to-night he had seemed at first to lay a rude finger on her maiden dignity. But she had seen in an instant that his errand was inspired by neither anger nor jealousy. He had touched at once her instinct of the momentous.
Her quick, clever brain and finely attuned perception read what lay beneath his questions. The great European expert whom Japan herself employed, and the young foreigner who had pursued her—were they, then, objects of question to that wonderful, many-sided governmental machine which was lifting Japan into the front rank of modern nations? Although she had never shared the disfavor with which her father viewed her lover's duties, she had wondered at his present apparently menial position. To-night she was gaining a quick glimpse beneath the surface. He told her nothing of the details which, though he could not himself have built a tangible indictment from them, had one by one clung together into a sharp suspicion that embraced the two men. But the agitation she felt in his words had sent a quick thrill through her, had tapped that deep racial well of feeling, the Yamato Damashii, which is the Japanese birthright. She felt a sudden passionate wish that she, though a woman, might pour herself into the mighty stream of effort—though she be but a whirling cherry-petal in the great wind of her nation's destiny. He had come to her for any shred of information that might add to his knowledge of the youth who was now Bersonin's satellite. But she had been able to tell him nothing. She had often seen the huge expert—his automobile had clanged past her that morning—but till to-night she had not even known the other's name or where he lived. "That is all, Ishida-San." It hurt her to say these words.
She bowed to his ceremonious farewell, a slim, misty figure that stood listening to his rapid footsteps till they died in the darkness. She walked up the dim slope with lagging pace. The steep road, always deserted at night, had no sound of grating cart or whirring rick'sha, but her paper lantern was unlighted and no song greeted the crow that flapped his grating way above her head. She was thinking deeply.
At the top of the hill, opposite the huge, rivet-studded gate of the Princess' compound, lay the lane on which the Chapel stood. An evening service was in progress and the faint sound of the organ was borne to her. As she turned into the darker shade she was aware of two pedestrians coming toward her,—of a voice which she recognized with a shiver of apprehension. The sentry-box by the great gate stood close at hand. It was empty, and she stepped into it.
Doctor Bersonin and Phil paused at the turning, while the latter lit a cigar from a match which he struck on the sentry-box. Haru's heart was in her throat, but her dark kimono blent with the wood and the flash that showed her both faces blinded his eyes.
"See!" said the doctor. A mile away, from the low-lying darkness of Hibiya Park, a stream of fireworks shot to the zenith, to explode silently in clusters of colored balls. "The first rocket in honor of the Squadron!"
"To-morrow the Admiral has an Imperial audience," said Phil, "and the superior officers are to be decorated."
"So!" said the other in a low, malignant voice. "And I—who have designed Japan's turrets and cheapened her arsenal processes—I may not wear the Cordon and Star of the Rising-Sun!" In the darkness a smile of malice crossed his face. "We shall see if she will hold her head so high—then! Whether war follow or not, it will damn her in the eyes of the nations! She will not recover her prestige in twenty years!"
They passed on down the dark slope, out of sight and hearing of the girl crouched in a corner of the sentry-box. At the foot of the hill, Bersonin said:
"It will take some days longer to finish my work, but the ships will stay for a fortnight. To-morrow night I will mark the triangle on the roof of the bungalow, so that the angle of the tripod will be exact. There must be no bungling. You can go by an earlier train, so we shall not be seen together, and I shall return here in time for the ball."
There was a fire in Haru's bosom as she went on along the thorn-hedges. She had heard every word, and she said the English sentences over and over to herself to fix them in her mind. What they had been talking of was the secret that lay beneath Ishida's questions—for an instant she had almost touched it. A feeling of deep pride rose in her. Japan was not sleeping—it watched! And in the path of the plotting danger stood her lover.
These two men hated Japan! War? They had used the word. Japan did not fear war! Had not that been proven? Her heart swelled. But the thing they were planning was her country's enduring humiliation, "whether war follow or not!" She felt a sudden deep horror. Could such plots be and their God—her God now—not blast them with His thunder? And one of these men had spoken with her, touched her, kissed her! She struck herself repeatedly and hard on the lips.
All at once she shivered. Might it be that in spite of all, such a black design could succeed?
The Chapel was brilliantly lighted and the rose-window threw beautiful tints, like shawls of many-colored gauze, over the shrubbery. She entered and slipped into a seat near the door, burning with her thoughts. The first evening service had brought a curious crowd and the place was nearly filled. She rose for the singing and knelt for the prayer mechanically, her delicate fingers twisting the little white-enamel cross hanging from its thin gold chain on the bosom of her kimono. Painful imaginings were running through her mind. The lesson was being read: it was from the Old Testament, the modern, somewhat colloquial translation.
This-after, Samson a Sorek Valley woman called Delilah did love.
Then the Princes of the Philistines the woman-to up-came, saying:
As for you, by sweet discourse prevail that where his great power is or by what means overcoming, to bind and torture him we may be able ...
It seemed to her suddenly that a great wind filled all the Chapel and that the words sat on it. Slowly her face whitened till it was the hue of death.
She might find out the secret!
And Delilah to Samson said: where your great power is or by what means overcoming to bind and torture you one may be able, this me tell.
She began to tremble in every limb. She, a samurai's daughter? She thought of her father, aged and broken, grieving that he had had no son in the war. She had been but a useless girl-child, left to plant paper prayers at the cross-roads for the brave men who longed to achieve a glorious death. If she did this thing—would it not be for Japan?
And he at last-to his mind completely opened.
The woman's knees-upon Samson did sleep and she called a man who of his head the seven locks cut off ... and the power of him was lost.
If she did, would it avail? She remembered Phil's eyes on her face the day on the sands at Kamakura—their smouldering, reckless glow. She remembered the bamboo lane! In those daredevil kisses her woman's instinct had divined the force of the attraction she exercised over him—had felt it with contempt and a self-humiliation that burned her like an acid. To use that for her purpose? But she was a Christian! From the Christian God's "Thou shalt not" there was no appeal.
She remembered suddenly her last service at the Buddhist temple across the lane, and how the old priest had bade her a gentle farewell, wishing her peace and joy in her new religion, and saying smilingly that all religions were augustly good, since they pointed the same way. She saw the nunnery, with its tall clumps of yellow dahlias and wild hydrangeas; above which hung gauzy robes that waved like gray ghosts escaping from the mold into the sunshine. She saw the cherry-trees touched by the golden summer light, the mossy monuments in the burying-ground, the pigeons fluttering about the lichened pavement.
The audience was singing now—the Japanese version of Jesus, Lover of My Soul:
She could no longer be a Christian!
But the old gods of her people shining from their golden altars—the ancient divinities who looked for ever down above the sound of prayer—they would smile upon her!
For all save one, sleep came early that evening to the house in the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods. In her little room Haru lay as stirless as a sleeping flower. There was no sound save the hushed accents of the outer night that penetrated the wooden amado.
At length she rose, noiselessly slid the paper shoji, and with infinite care, inch by inch, pushed back the shutters. The moon had risen and a flood of moonlight came into the room. Stealthily she opened a wall-closet and selected her best and gayest robe—a holiday kimono of dim green, with lotos flowers, and an obi of cloth-of-gold, with chrysanthemums peeping from the weave. By the round mirror on her low dressing-cabinet, she redressed the coiled ebony butterfly of her hair, and set a red flower in it. She touched her face with the soft rice-powder, and added a tint of carmine to the set paleness of her cheeks. She wrapped in a furoshiki some soberer street clothing, toilet articles, and a mauve kimono woven with silver camelias, set the bundle by the opened amado and noiselessly passed into the next room.
It was the larger living-apartment. The tiny lamp which burned before the golden shrine of Kwan-on on the Buddha-shelf cast a wan glimmer over the spotless alcove, and threw a ghostly light on her finery. Through the thin paper shikiri she could hear her father's deep breathing, and in the room in which he slept a little clock chimed eleven. She opened the door of the shrine and stood looking at the tablet it held—the ihai of her mother. The kaimyo, or soul name, it bore signified "Moon-Dawn-of-the-Mountain-of-Light-Dwelling-in-the-Mansion-of-Luminous-Perfume." She rubbed her palms softly together before it and her lips moved silently. From the golden shadows she seemed suddenly to feel her mother's hand guiding her childish steps to that place of morning worship, to see that loving face, as she remembered it, looking down on her across the rim of years. She bent and passed her hand along the two swords, one long, one short, that rested on their lacquered rack beneath the shelf—it was her farewell to her father.
She had left no message. She could tell no one. If she succeeded, she would have done her part. If she failed—there was only a blank darkness in that thought. But she had no agitation now—only a dull ache.
In her own room she took a book from a drawer and slipped it into her sleeve, caught up the furoshiki, stepped noiselessly to the outer porch and carefully closed the amado behind her.
She walked swiftly back to the empty Chapel. The great glass window that had seemed so beautiful with the light behind it, was now dark and opaque and dead. Only the cross above the roof in the moonlight looked as white as snow. She drew the book from her sleeve. It was her Bible, with her name on the fly-leaf. She unhooked the gold chain about her neck and slipped off the little enamel cross. She put this between the leaves of the Bible and laid it on the doorstep.
A half-hour later she stood before a wistaria-roofed gate in Kasumiga-tani Cho—the "Street-of-the-Misty-Valley"—near Aoyama parade-ground. The glass lantern above it threw a dim light on a gravel path twisting through low shrubbery. Down the street she could hear a dozen students chanting the marching song of Hirosé Chusa, the young war hero:
Haru opened the gate. Cherry-petals were sifting down like rosy snowflakes over the scarlet trembling of nanten bushes. A little way inside was a graceful house entrance half-shaded by a trailing vine. The amado were not closed, the shoji were brilliantly lighted.
With a little sob she unfastened the golden obi, rewound and tied it with the knot in front.
The room where Phil sat was softly bright with andon, through whose thin paper sides the candle-light filtered tranquilly.
It had been furnished in a plain, half-foreign fashion; a book-rack and a French mahogany desk sat in a corner, an ormolu clock ticked on its top, and beside it was a lounge piled with volumes from the shelves. On a bracket sat three small carvings in dark wood, replicas of the famous monkeys of the great Jingoro the Left-Handed, preserved in Iyeyasu temple at Nikko. With their paws one covered his eyes, another his ears, the third his mouth, representing the "I see not—I hear not—I tell not" of the ancient wisdom.
The place, however, to which these had given a suggestion of quaint and extraordinary art, was now touched with a certain tawdriness. It would have affected a Japanese almost to nausea. The severity of beauty of its etched and paneled walls, the plain elegance of its satinwood fittings, were cheapened with a veneer of vulgarity. A row of picture postcards in colors was pinned on the wall—the sort the tourist buys for ten sen on the Ginza, too highly tinted and with much meretricious gilding—and a photograph hung in a silver-gilt frame of interlocked dragons. It showed a girl in abbreviated skirts and exaggerated posture; on the mount was printed: "Miss Cissy Clifford in Gay Paree." The air was full of the sickly-sweetish smell of Turkish cigarettes. The desk was a confusion of pipes, ivory nets'ke, cigarette-boxes and what not, and a man's cloth cap and a gauntlet were tossed in a corner, beside an open gold-lacquer box heaped with gloves.
Phil, however, felt no qualm. The room fitted him as a scabbard fits its sword. He had discarded his heavier outer clothing and donned a loose, wide-sleeved robe of cool silk, tied with a crimson cord.
"Give me the whisky-and-soda," he said to the grizzled servant, in the vernacular, "and I shan't want you again to-night."
The bottle the Japanese left at his elbow was becoming Phil's constant comforter. Alone with his thoughts, he fled to it as the hashish eater to his drug, because it banished his dread and bolstered the courage that he longed for. To-night, as he sat with the intoxication creeping like dull fire in his blood, he was thinking of Haru, with her soft smooth skin, her perfect neck, her lithe, graceful limbs, her eyes that held caught laughter like moss in amber.
His thought broke off. He had heard a sound outside. It seemed to be a light tapping on the grill of the outer door. Could it be Bersonin? Had anything gone wrong? He went hastily into the anteroom and opened the grill.
For an instant he stared unbelievingly at the figure standing there, the gay kimono, the rouged cheeks, the sparkling eyes. He took a step forward.
"Haru! Is it really you, little girl?" he cried.
She laughed—a high, clear, flute-like note. "Such an astonish!" she said. "You not know my mus' come ... after ... after those kiss? Can I not to come in, Phil-lip?"
With a laugh that echoed her own—but one of ringing triumph—he caught her hand, drew her into the lighted room and closed the shoji. His look flamed over her.
"I couldn't believe my eyes!" he cried. "I don't half believe them yet! Why, your hands are as cold as ice. We'll have a drink, eh!"
He went into an outer room, came back with a bottle of champagne and knocked off its neck against the mantel.
"Yes, yes!" she said. "My mus' drink—so to be gay, Phil-lip!" She drank the bubbling liquor at a draft. "What are the use of to be good? Né?"
"You're right, little girl! The pious people are the dull ones!" He came to her unsteadily—he had noticed the reversed obi. "So you'll train with me, eh? Well, we'll show them a trick or two! How would you like to have plenty of money, Haru—as much as you can count on a soroban? Would you think a lot more of me if I got it for you?"
"You so—much clever!" she laughed. "No all same Japan man. He ve-ree stupid! My think you mos' bes' clever man in these whole worl', to goin' find so much money—né?"
With a savage elation he drew her close in his arms. The great spiral of her headdress drooped under his caresses, and the blue-black hair fell all about the white face.
Riding with Patricia in the big victoria next day, its red-striped runner diving ahead, Barbara forgot her vague wonder at Haru's disappearance, as she felt the enchanted mystery of Tokyo creep further into her heart. They threaded the softly dreaming silence of the willow-bordered moat that clasps the Imperial grounds with a girdle of cloudy emerald, where the "Dragon Pines" of the great Shogun Iyemits fling their craggy masses of olive-green down over the leaning walls to kiss the mirroring water—past many-roofed, Tartar-like watch-towers, cream-white on the blue, and through little parks with forests of thin straight-boled trees and placid lotos ponds seething with the dagger-blue flashings of dragon-flies, all woven together into a tapestry, lovely, remote, fantastic—like the projection of some dream-legend whose people lived a fairy story in a picture-book world.
On this oriental background continually appeared quaint touches of the foreign and bizarre: a huge American straw hat, much befrilled and befeathered, on the head of a baby strapped to its mother's back, or a hideous boa of chenille like bunched caterpillars marring the delicate native neckwear of an exquisite kimono.
On the slope of a hill they came on a motley crowd, which included a sprinkling of foreigners, gathered before the entrance of a temple yard, where a rough, improvised amphitheater had been erected. Patricia called to the driver, and he pulled up.
"Fire-walk," said the betto. "Ontaké temple."
From their elevated seat they could see white-robed and barefooted priests waving long-handled fans and wands topped with shaggy paper tassels over an area of red-hot cinders. Presently some of them strode calmly across the smoking mass.
"They call that the 'Miracle of Kudan Hill,'" said Patricia. "They are making incantations to the god of water to come and drive out the god of fire. It's a Shinto rite."
A laugh rose from the spectators. The High Priest was inviting the foreigners to attempt the ordeal.
"Look!" said Patricia. "There is the man who got the free lecture out of your uncle on the train—the man with the white waistcoat and the red beard. And there's 'Martha,' too. I do believe she's going to try it!"
She was. Undeterred by the misgivings of the rest, the lady of the painted muslin calmly divested herself of shoes and stockings and marched across and back again. "There!" she said triumphantly. "I said I would, and I did! It may be a miracle, but my feet are simply frying!"
The carriage rolled on across a section of busy trade. From a side street came the brassy blare of a phonograph.
"What a baffling combination it is!" said Barbara. "Last night some of those people were at Mukojima, listening to dead little drums and squealing fifes, and to-night here is Damrosch and the Intermezzo."
"The other day when I passed," said Patricia, "it was Waltz Me Around Again, Willie, and forty children were prancing to it. Martha's husband is 'in' phonographs, by the way. She told me all about it at the Review. He's making a set of Japanese records—geisha songs and native orchestra pieces and even street-noises—to copyright at home."
Presently the horses stopped before a great gate of unpainted cedar, roofed with black and white tiles and bossed with nails of hammered copper. Above it two pine-trees writhed like a Doré print. "One of the Empress' ladies-in-waiting lives here," Patricia said. "I'll walk home and on the way I can leave some 'call-tickets'—Tucker's name for visiting-cards. Give my love to the bishop."
She looked wistfully after Barbara as the latter bowled away toward Ts'kiji and her uncle's. Under her flyaway spirits Patricia had the warmest little heart in the world, loyal to its last beat to those she liked. Daunt was decidedly in this category. Like the rest, she had been weaving a cheerful little romance for these two friends. Since the evening at the Cherry-Moon, however, when the newly arrived yacht had been talked of, she had had misgivings. Yesterday, too, Barbara, while confiding nothing, had told her of Austen Ware's coming. Patricia walked up the driveway slowly and with a puzzled frown.
But the girl driving on under cherry-stained sky and cherry-scented winds, knew, that one hour, no problems. She was full of the flame and pulse of youth, of a new nascent tenderness and a warm sense of loving all the world. She asked herself if she could really be the poised, self-contained girl who a few weeks ago sailed for the Orient. Some magic alchemy had transmuted all her elements. New emotions dominated her, and through the beauty before her gaze went flashing more beautiful thoughts that linked with the future.
In her pocket was a letter. It had been brought to her that morning when she woke and she had read it over and over, kneeling in the drift of pillows, her red-gold hair draping her white shoulders, thrilling, murmuring little inarticulate answers to its phrases, looking up now and then to peer through the bamboo sudaré to the white and green cottage across the lawn. He would not see her to-day—until evening. Then he would ask her....
As the carriage bore her on, she whispered again and again one of the sentences he had written: "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be! My Lady of the Many-Colored Fires!"
Mr. Y. Nakajima, the almond-eyed guide of gold-filled teeth, came to the end of his elaborate conversation. He turned from the old servant, leaning on his pruning knife, and spoke to the man who stood waiting outside the wistaria-gate in the Street-of-the-Misty-Valley.
"He say Mr. Philip Ware stay here," he announced, "but house is ownerships of his friend, Mr. Daunt, of America Embassy. He regret sadly that no one are not at home."
Ware reflected. Daunt's house? He lived in the Embassy compound—so they had said at dinner last night. Why should he maintain this native house in another quarter of Tokyo? There came to his mind that hackneyed phrase "the custom of the country," the foreigner's specious justification of the modern "Madame Butterfly." In this interminable city, with its labyrinthine mazes, who could tell what this or that gray roof might shelter? Was this a nook enisled, for pretty Japanese romances "under the rose"? He had loaned it to Phil—they were friends.
Ware struck his stick hard against the hedge. He scarcely knew what thought had entered his mind, so nebulous was it, so indefinable. If he had thought to use this discovery, he knew no way; if it was Daunt's covert, here was Phil in possession.
"Ask him if he has any idea where he is."
The guide translated. The servant was ignobly unacquainted, as yet, with the danna-San's illustrious habits. He arrogantly presumed to suggest that he might augustly be in any one of a hundred esteemed spots.
Ware thought a moment, frowningly. "Tell him I am Ware-San's brother," he said then, "and that I have just arrived in Tokyo. I shall wait in the house till he comes."
The old man bowed profoundly at the statement of the relationship. He spoke at some length to the guide. The latter looked at Ware questioningly but hesitated.
"Well?" asked the other tartly.
"He think better please you wait to the hotel."
Ware struck open the gate with a flare of irritation. "You can go now," he said to the guide, and disdaining the servant, strode along the gravel path to the house entrance.
The old man looked after him with an enigmatic Japanese smile. It was not his fault if the foreigners (the kappa devour them!) ate dead beasts and were all quite mad! He tucked up his kimono, stacked his gardening-tools neatly under the hedge, and betook himself across the street for a smoke and a game of Go with the neighbor's betto.
Under the trailing vine Ware slid back the shoji and entered the house.
As he stood looking at the interior his lip curled. He hated the cheapness and vulgarity to which Phil turned with instinctive liking, and he had long ago come thoroughly to despise his younger brother and to relish the whip-hand which the law, with its guardianship, gave him. The place fitted Phil, from the cigarette odor to the loud photograph in the dragon-frame and the partly open wall-closet with its significant array of bottles. It expressed his idea of "a good time!"
He slid open a shikiri. It showed a room, evidently unused, littered with tools, a dusty table with models of curious wing-like propellers, a small electric dynamo and a steel-lathe. He opened another, and stood looking at the room it disclosed with a faint smile. It was scrupulously clean and orderly, and, in contrast to the outer apartment, had an atmosphere of delicate refinement. On the wall hung a tiny gilt image of Kwan-on and below it on an improvised shelf an incense rod was burning with a clean, pungent odor. At one side was suspended a mosquito-bar of dark green gauze, and across a low stool was laid a kimono, with silver camelias on a mauve ground. He picked this up and looked at it curiously, half conscious of a faint perfume that clung to it.
He shut his teeth. The camelia had always been Barbara's favorite flower!
Meanwhile the girl thus incongruously in his thought had felt a gray shadow across her sunshine. She found her uncle greatly perplexed and troubled. Haru's Bible, found on the Chapel doorstep, had been brought to him that morning. He had sent at once to the Street-of-Prayer-to-the-Gods and the messenger had returned with news of her disappearance. The fact that she had taken clothing with her showed that the flight was a deliberate one.
It pained him to think what the return of the book and the little cross might mean. In his long residence in Japan the bishop had grown accustomed to strange dénouements, to flashing revelations of subtle deeps in oriental character. But save for one instance of many years ago—which the sight of Barbara must always recall to him—he had never been more saddened than by to-day's disclosure. What he told her had left Barbara with an uneasy apprehension. She drove away pondering. The anxious speculation blurred the glamour of the afternoon.
The homeward course took her through Aoyama, by unfrequented streets of pleasant, suburban-like gardens and small houses with roofs of fluted tile as softly gray as silk. Here and there a bean-curd peddler droned his cry of "To-o-fu! To-o-fu-u!" and under a spreading kiri tree a blind beggar squatted, playing a flute through his nostrils, while his wife, also blind and with a beady-eyed baby strapped to her back, twanged a samisen beside him. In the road groups of little girls were playing games with much clapping of hands and shouting in shrill voices.
In one of the cross-streets a dozen coolies strode, carrying flaming white banners painted in red idiographs. The last bore a huge papier-maché bottle—an advertisement of a popular brand of beer. A brass band of four pieces, discoursing hideously tuneless sounds, led them, and between band and banners stalked a grotesquely clad figure on stilts ten feet tall, the shafts pantalooned so that his legs seemed to have been drawn out like India-rubber. The spidery pedestrian was followed by a score of staring children of all ages and sizes.
Suddenly Barbara rose to her feet in the carriage. She had seen a girl emerge from a small temple and turn into a side street.
"Fast! Drive fast, Taka," she called quickly. "The street to the left!" He obeyed, but a soba-ya had halted his shining copper cart of steaming buckwheat, and momentarily delayed them.
The hastening figure was farther away when they rounded the turning. Barbara clasped her hands together. "It was Haru! It was Haru! I am sure!" she whispered.
The girl slipped through a gateway hung with wistaria. As Barbara sprang to the ground she was hurrying through the garden.
"Haru!" But the flying figure did not seem to hear the call.
Barbara ran quickly after her along the gravel path.
In the house, Austen Ware, standing with the kimono in his hand, had heard the rumble of carriage wheels. He had left the outer shoji open, and through the aperture he saw the slim form hastening toward the doorway. An exclamation broke from his lips. Behind her, just entering the gate, was Barbara!
For a breath he stared. A cool, thriving suspicion—one bred of his anger and humiliation, that shamed his manhood—ran through him. Barbara, there? Was it another rendezvous, then? The fierce, self-dishonoring doubt merged into the mad jealousy that already burned him like a brand.
He dropped the kimono, drew back the shikiri of the unused apartment, and stepped inside.
Swiftly and noiselessly the light partition slipped into place behind him.
Through the thin paper pane, parted by his moistened finger, Ware's hot, hollow eyes saw the Japanese girl come into the room. She had not waited to shut the shoji behind her. She drew quick sobbing breaths and her eyes had the desperate look of a hunted animal. She ran into the sleeping apartment and closed its shikiri.
Barbara had halted at the doorway. As she stood looking in, her eyes fell on the mauve kimono with its silver camelias. It was the robe Haru had worn the first evening she came to her. If she had doubted, all doubt was now gone. An instant she hesitated, then, with sudden resolution, knocked on the grill and stepped across the threshold.
The man who watched could not solve the puzzle, but in that instant the sick suspicion he had harbored became a cold and lifeless thing in his breast. A sense of shame rushed through him as he saw her gaze wander about the interior with its veneer of the foreign: to the disordered desk—the lounge and its litter of books—the photograph on the wall—the open panel with its champagne bottles. In her glance distaste had grown to a quick question. The coarse suggestions of the place were welling over her. Whose house was this? Had Haru seen her and was she hiding from her?
Suddenly she saw the man's cap and gauntlet in the corner. Her cheeks rushed into flame. She seemed to see Haru's innocent face smiling at her over the throbbing samisen and through its tones to hear again the echo of a ribald laugh before the gilded cages of the Yoshiwara. Something in her cried out against the inference. All at once she took an abrupt step forward. She was looking at the round glass lantern just outside the doorway, painted with three characters:
ドント
She chilled as if ether had been poured in her veins. The name they stood for had been her first lesson in Japanese—which Haru had taught her! She snatched up one of the volumes from the chair. It was Lillienthal's Conquest of the Air. She opened it to the title page.
Ware, watching, saw with surprise that she was trembling violently. She had grown pale to the lips. The book slipped from her fingers and crashed on to the tatamé. It lay there, open as she had held it, and he saw what was written across the white leaf. It was Daunt's name.
His thought leaped as if at the flick of a lash. Daunt's book! What was she thinking? The piteous pallor that swept her face like an icy wave answered him. Why she was there—her interest in this Japanese girl who fled from her—he could not guess. But it was clear that she had not known the house was Daunt's, and that with the knowledge, she was face to face with what must seem a damning complicity. Perhaps some hint of this retreat had come to her—he knew how gossip feathered its shafts!—some covert allusion, some laughing oui-dire, to which her coming had now given such verity. Phil was the deus ex machina of the situation. His Japanese amour she was now laying at Daunt's door! All this flashed through his mind in an instant. He watched her intently.
Over Barbara was sweeping a hideous chaos of mocking voices, bits of recollection barbed with agony. The little house near Aoyama parade-ground—the carriage had passed the great empty plaza a few moments ago—that he had kept from "sentiment"! The house she had asked him to show her, when he had evaded the request. And Haru! A feeling of physical anguish like that of death came to her; a dull pain was in her temples and the floor seemed to be rising up with her toward the ceiling. Daunt? He whose lips had lain on hers, whose letter was in her bosom—it burned her flesh now like a live coal! "There has never been another woman to me, Barbara. There never will be!" The words seemed to launch themselves from the air, stinging like fiery javelins.
Behind the shikiri, a weird, malevolent clamor was shouting through Ware's brain. He stood alone with his temptation. What had he to do with Daunt, or with her belief in him? She had accepted his own advances, beckoned him half around the world—for what? To discard him for this man whom she had known but a handful of days! Chance had arranged this mise en scène. Was he to tell her the truth—and lose her? The key to the situation was in his hand. He had only to keep silence!
At that moment he felt crumble down in some crude gulf within the fabric of his self-esteem—the high-built structure of years. Something colder, formless and malignant, came to sit on its riven foundations. A savage elation grew in him.
Suddenly a shikiri was flung aside. Haru stood there, her face deathly pale, her hands wrenching and tearing at her sleeves. She laughed, a high, gasping, unnatural treble.
"So-o-o, Ojo-San! You come make visiting—né? The shrill voice rang through the silent room. "My new house now, an' mos' bes' master. No more Christian! My bad—oh, ve-ree bad Japan girl!" With another peal of laughter she pointed to the knot of her obi. It was tied in front.
Barbara ran down the garden path as if pursued. She stepped into the carriage blindly. The Fox-Woman! Votary of the Fox-God, at whose candle-lighted shrine she had refused tribute!
This, then, was the end. It came to her like the striking of a great bell. To-morrow the streets would lie as vivid in the sunlight, the buglers would march as blithely, the bent pines would wave, the lotos-pads in the moat glisten, the gorgeous geisha flash by: she alone would know that the sun had died in the blue heaven!
"Home, Taka," she said, and leaned back and closed her eyes.
Behind her Haru's laughter had broken suddenly. She rushed into the little sleeping-room and threw herself on the tatamé before the tiny image of Kwan-on, in a wild burst of sobbing.
Ware opened the shikiri softly, and with noiseless step, passed out of the house.
The spacious residence of the Minister of Marine that night was a maze of light. All social Tokyo would be at the ball in honor of the Admiral and officers of the visiting Squadron.
It was late when Daunt turned his steps thither through the fragrant evening. The deciphering of a voluminous telegram had kept him at the Chancery till eleven.
All that day he had worked with a delicious exhilaration rioting in his pulses. He had not seen Barbara, but her face had seemed always before him—quiveringly passionate as he had seen it in Ben-ten's cave, hazed with daring softness as it had turned to his on the steps of the railway carriage. There had been moments when some aroma of the spring air made him catch his breath, mindful of the crisp, sweet scent of her hair or the maddening fragrance of her lips. He thought of "Big" Murray and his letter, at which he had bridled—how long ago? He understood now what the complacent old pirate had been talking about! He would have an epistle to write him to-morrow in return! To-night he was to see her! In fancy he could feel her slim hand on his sleeve as they danced—could see himself sitting with her in some dusky alcove sweet with plum-blossoms—could hear her say ...
A hoarse warning from a betto and he sprang aside for a carriage that dashed past through the gateway. He shook himself with a laugh and walked on through the shrubbery. By day it was a place of mossy shadows, of shrubberied red-lacquer bridges and glimmering cascades; now its polished dwarf-pines and twisted cypresses gleamed with red paper lanterns that hung like goblin fruit and quivered, monster misshapen gold-fish, in the miniature lake. Along the drives stood policemen, wearing white trousers and gloves. Each held a paper lantern painted with the Minister's mon or family crest. Farther on carriages became thicker, till the approach was a crawling stream of gleaming black enamel, sweating horses, crackling whips, and shouting bettos. Daunt picked his way among these to where a wide swath of electric light beneath the porte-cochère struck into high relief a strip of scarlet carpet.
The interior was dressed with that marvelous attention to minutiæ and artistic ensemble that is characteristically Japanese. The great hall was brilliant opera bouffe: a mingling crowd of gold-braided uniforms crossed by colored cordons and flashing with decorations, white necks and shoulders rising from dainty French gowns, gleaming lights, Japanese men in European costume, languorous black eyes under shining Japanese head-dresses, and silken kimono woven in tints as soft as dreams. In the large central room opposite was hung a painting of the Emperor. Japanese who passed it did so reverently. They did not turn their backs. Some of the older ones bowed low before it and withdrew backward. Through a doorway came glimpses of couples on a polished floor swaying to music that swelled and ebbed unceasingly, and down a long vista a pink dazzle of cherry-blooms under a cloth roof. Over all was the exotic perfume of flowers.
Daunt had seen many such affairs where the blending of colors and sounds, the scintillant shifting of forms, had been but a maze. To-night's, however, was wound in a glory. All these decorative people, this scented echo of laughter and music, existed only to form a kaleidoscopic setting for the one woman. He went to search for her with his handsome head erect, his shoulders square and a color in his face.
He passed through several rooms, revealing one oriental picture after another. In one a series of glass-cases reproduced a daimyo's procession in Old Japan: hundreds of dolls, six inches high, fashioned in elaborate detail—coolies with banners; chest-bearers; caparisoned horses; bullock-carts with huge, black lacquer wheels; samurai, visored and clad in armor, with glittering swords and lances. In another were cabinets spread with pieces of priceless gold-lacquer that had cost a lifetime of loving labor. A third the host denominated his "ghost-room," since it was lined with quaint pottery unearthed in ancient Korean tombs. These rooms were filled with the social world of the capital, a gay glimmer of urbanity set off against masses of all the blossoms of spring. In the last room the host stood with the visiting Admiral and several Ambassadors. He was a perfect type of the modern Japanese of affairs, a diplomatist as well as a seasoned Admiral. He had been at Annapolis in '75 and his wife was a graduate of Wellesley. He was one of the strongest of the powerful coterie which was shaping the destinies of new Japan. Daunt greeted him and paused to chat a while with his own chief and Mrs. Dandridge. Her gown was gray and silver, with soft old lace that accentuated the youthful contour of her face, and framed the graciousness and charm that made her marked in however charming and gracious an assembly. Barbara was not there.
He entered a veranda where people sat at little tables eating ices frozen in the shape of Fuji, under fairy lamps whose tiny bamboo and paper shades were delicately painted with sworls of water and swimming carp. From one group the Baroness Stroloff waved a hand to him, but Barbara was not there. Beyond, through a canopied doorway, hung the cherry-blooms. He paused on the threshold. It was a portion of the garden walled in with white cloth, and roofed with blue and gold. The space thus inclosed was set with cherry-trees from whose every gray twig depended the great pink pendants. It was floored with soft carpeting, in the center a fountain tinkled coolly, and the roof was dotted with incandescents. In this retreat the violins of the ball-room wove dreamily with the talk and laughter, tenuous and ghost-like, soft as the music of memory. She was not there. Daunt turned back, threaded the hall and entered the ball-room.
There, through the shifting crowd, over flashing uniforms and diamonded tiaras, he saw her. Beside her stood a little countess, one of the noted court beauties, lotos-pale, bamboo-slender, in a kimono of Danjiro blue, with woven lilies. In the clear radiance, Barbara stood almost surrounded. Her white satin gown shimmered in the light, which caught like globes of fire in the gold passion-flowers with which it was embroidered. A new sense of her beauty poured over him. She had always seemed lovely, but now her loveliness was touched with something removed and spiritual. In the blaze of light she looked as delicately pale as a moon-dahlia, but a spot of color was on either cheek and her eyes were very bright. Daunt stood still, feasting his gaze.
The Baroness Stroloff paused beside him, chatting with the Cabinet Minister and the representative of the Associated Press. They watched the forms flit past in the swinging rhythm of the deux-temps, kimono weaving with black coats and uniforms, varnished pumps gliding with milk-white tabi and velvet pattens. "Pretty tinted creatures," she said. "How do they ever keep on those little thonged sandals?"
"Ah, their toes were born to them," the journalist answered.
The statesman shrugged his shoulders. "Waltzing in kimono with men is very, very modern for our Japanese ladies," he said. "I myself never saw it until two years ago—when the American Fleet was here. That established it as a fashion. Some of us older ones may frown, but—shikata-ga-nai! 'Way out there is none,' as we say in our language. It's a part of the process of Westernization!"
Daunt started when Patricia's fan tapped his arm.
"You're frightfully late," she said, as her partner, the German Chargé, bowed himself away. "Father will give you a wigging if you don't look out."
"I saw him a few moments ago," he answered. "He didn't seem very fierce."
"Was he still looking at those spooky curios? I can't see what anybody wants such things for! I always feel like saying what Mark Twain's man said when they showed him the mummy: 'If you've got any nice fresh corpse, trot him out.'"
Daunt's smile was a mechanism. She knew that he had ceased to listen. As she looked at his side-face with her clear, kind eyes, a shadow came to her own. Her loyal heart was troubled. After her drive that afternoon, Barbara had kept her room on the plea of rest for the evening; she had not come down to dinner and had appeared only at the moment of starting. At the first glance, then, Patricia had noticed the change. The Barbara she had always known, of flashing impulses and girlish graces, was gone; the Barbara of the evening had seemed suddenly older, of even rarer beauty, perhaps, but with something of detachment, of unfamiliarity. Riding beside her to the ball, Patricia had felt, under the eager, brilliant gaiety, this chilly sense of estrangement, and it had puzzled her. Later she had come to connect it with the man of whose coming Barbara had told her, the man with handsome, bearded face who had seemed, since his greeting in the moment of their entrance, to take unobtrusive yet assured possession of such of her moments as were not given to the great. Withal, he had lent this an air of the natural and habitual which, nicely poised and completely conventional as it was, seemed to convey a subtle atmosphere of proprietorship. So now, as she saw Daunt's gaze, Patricia was a little sad. There had fallen a silence between them which he broke with a sudden exclamation.
"No wonder!" he said.
"No wonder what?"
"That she is a success."
"Success! I should think so. She's danced with three Ambassadors and Prince Hojo sat out two numbers with her. Just look at the men around her now!"
The music had drifted into a waltz and the group about Barbara was dissolving. A dark face was bending near. Its owner put his arm about her and they glided into the throng. Ware, like all heavy men, danced perfectly and the pair seemed to skim the mirroring floor as easily as swallows, her red-bronze hair, caught under a web of seed-pearls, glowing like a net of fire-flies. Heads turned back over white shoulders and on the edges of the room people whispered as they passed. Floating lightly as sea-foam, the shimmering gown drew near, passing so close that Daunt could have touched it. The lovely white face, over her partner's shoulder, met Daunt's. For a fraction of a second Barbara's eyes looked into his—then swept by as if he had been empty air. It was as if a clenched hand had struck him across the face.
He whitened. Patricia felt a sudden sting in her eyelids. She slipped her hand through his arm, and saying something about the heat (it was deliciously cool), drew him down the corridor. She chatted on airily, fighting a desire to cry. But when they came to the entrance of the cherry-blooms, he had not spoken a word.
"I see mother still in the spook room," she said. "I must go back to her—no, please don't come with me! Thank you so much for bringing me so far."
She left him with a nod and a bright smile that he did not see. He was in a painful quicksand of bewilderment. The cherry-garden was almost empty and the fountain tinkled in a perfumed quiet. He sat down on a bench in its farthest corner. What did it mean? Why, it had been like the cut direct! From her?—impossible! She had not seen him! He had been mistaken! He would go to her—now! He sprang up.
A page came into the garden. He was a part of the Minister's establishment; Daunt had often seen him in that house. He carried a tray with a letter on it.
"For you, sir," he said.
Puzzled, Daunt took it and the boy withdrew. It bore no address. He tore it open. It contained some folded sheets of paper. A tense whiteness sprang to his face as he unfolded them. It was his letter—the only love-letter he had ever written—torn across.
Now he knew! It had been true—what he had imagined of the yacht! The cherry-trees seemed to writhe about him, bizarre one-legged dancers waving pink draperies, and a tide of resentment and grief rose in his breast as hot as lava. Had she been only playing with him, then? When she had lain panting in his arms in Ben-ten's cave—when her lips had quivered to his kisses—had it all been acting? Was this what she really was, his "Lady of the Many-Colored Fires?" He, poor fool! had deemed it real, when it had been only a week's amusement. He had almost guessed the truth that night at the tea-house, and how cleverly she had fooled him! His jarring laugh rang out across the tinkle of the fountain. Then, Austen Ware's telegram! It was he who had danced with her to-night, no doubt—Phil's brother. For her the little play was over. The curtain had to be rung down, and this was how she did it.
Dim thoughts like these went flitting through the gap of his racked senses. He dropped on the bench and bowed his head between his hands. It had been real enough to him. Painted on his closed eyelids he seemed to see, with a chill, numb certainty, his future unrolling like a gray panorama, incoherent and unwhole, its colors lack-luster, its purpose denied, its meaning missed. Pain lifted its snake-head from the shadows and hissed in his ear, like the jubilant serpent that coiled its bright length by the gate of Eden when the flaming sword drove forth the first man to the desert of despair.
Daunt did not know that Patricia, pausing in the corridor, had seen the letter delivered and opened. She went back to her mother with a slow step.
"You look worn, dear," said Mrs. Dandridge, as they entered the ball-room. "Are you tired?"
"Yes," she said. "I think I won't dance any more, mother."
The host had entered before them and now stood at the end of the room with the Admiral of the Squadron and the Ambassador of the latter's nation. Suddenly a young man pushed hastily through the press. He handed his chief a telegram. The Ambassador scanned it, changed color, and held it out to the Admiral with shaking hand. The Secretary who had brought it said something to the Foreign Minister, who turned instantly to give a quick order to a servant. The orchestra stopped with a crash.
There was a dead hush over the brilliant room-full, broken only by the movement of the Squadron's officers as they came hurriedly forward beside their Admiral. All looked at the white-haired diplomatist who stood, his eyes full of tears, the pink telegram in his hand.
He addressed the grave group of naval men. "Gentlemen," he said, in a low voice, "I have the great grief to announce the sudden death to-day of His Majesty, the King."
He bowed to his host, and, followed by the Admiral and his officers, left the house. The Ambassadors and Ministers of the other powers, in order of their precedence, each with his glittering staff and their ladies about him, followed. The gaiety was over; it had ceased at the far-away echo of a nation's bells, tolling half a world away.
The great house was almost emptied of its guests when the solitary figure that had sat in the cherry-garden passed out along the deserted corridors. Daunt went utterly oblivious that its bright pageantry had departed. A feverish color was in his cheek and his eyes were dulled with a painful apathy.
Count Voynich was lighting a cigarette in the cloak room as he entered. "Sic transit!" he said. "This calls a quick halt on the plans of the Squadron's entertainment, doesn't it!"
There was no answer. Daunt was fumbling, from habit, for the lettered disk of wood in his pocket.
"If the King could have lived a few weeks longer," said Voynich, "we'd have heard no more talk of trouble with Japan. He was a great peacemaker. The new regent may be less circumspect. What do you think?"
No reply. He spoke again sharply.
"I say, Miss Fairfax seems to be making a tremendous walkover, eh?"
There was only silence. Daunt did not hear him. Voynich looked at his face, whistled softly under his breath, and went quietly away.