CHAPTER XLIII

THE SECRET THE RIVER KEPT

Daunt had dined cheerlessly in the deserted dining-room. Afterward, shrinking from the gay piazzas, he had struck off for a long rambling walk. Only the frail moonlight, glimpsing through a cloudy sky, lay over the landscape, when, returning, worn but in no mood for sleep, he found himself at the hill shrine looking down on the white hotel with its long red balconies, brightened here and there by the lighted window of some late-retiring guest.

His few days at Chuzenji had passed in a kind of stifled fever. The report of Barbara's engagement had added its poisoned barb. That morning, however, a careless remark had torn across his mood as sheet-lightning tears the weaving dusk. Tokyo was talking of it--of _him_!--making a jest of that sweet, dead thing in his heart? The thought had stung his pride, and there had grown in him a sharp sense of humiliation at his own cowardice. The afternoon had found him riding down the mountain trail to Nikko. To-morrow he would go back to Tokyo--to the round of gaieties that would now be hateful, and to his work.

He put out his hand to one of the benches in the deep pine-shadow, but drew it back with a sharp breath. A sliver of the warped wood had pierced his knuckle to the bone.

Frowning, he wrapped the bleeding member in his handkerchief and sat down at the bench's other end, bitterly absorbed. The vagrant, intermittent moonlight touched the tumbling water below with creeping silver, and on the horizon, where the cloud-bank frayed away, one white constellation swung low, a cluster of lamps in golden chains. But Daunt's thought had no place for the delicate beauty of the night. His pipe was long since cold, and he knocked out the dead ashes against the bench, and did not relight it. He thought of Tokyo, that to-morrow would stretch so blank and irksome, of the humdrum tedium of the Chancery, in which a few days ago he had worked so blithely. Then all had been interest and beauty. Now the future stretched before him dull and savorless, an arid Desert of Gobi, through whose thirsty waste he must trudge on for ever to a comfortless goal.

How long he sat there with bowed head he could not have told, but at length he rose heavily to his feet As he did so he became aware of a sound below him--a footfall, coming toward him. It crossed a bar of the moonlight.

He shrank, and a tremor ran over him, for it was Barbara.

She had thrown over her a loose cloak, and a bit of soft, clinging lace showed between its dark edges. Her brilliant hair was loosely gathered in a single braid, and in the moonlight it shone like beaten copper against the vivid pallor of her face. He sat stirless, smitten with confusion, conscious that a movement must betray him. A painful embarrassment enveloped him, a fastidious sense of shrinking from her sight of him. He felt a dull wave of resentment that an antic irony of circumstance should have brought them beneath the same roof--to make him seem the moody pursuer, the unwelcome trespasser on her reserve--and that now thrust him into a position which at any hazard he would have shunned. But all thought of himself, all feeling save one vanished, when, with sudden piteous abandon, she threw herself on her knees by the bench and broke into slow sobs, shuddering and tearless.

In that outbreak of emotion, were not alone the pent-up pain and humiliation she had suffered, or the desperate joy of that evening's knowledge. There were in it, too, grief and compunction, dismay and doubt of the future. She was engaged to Austen Ware. Would Daunt ever forgive? Would he want her--now? In the first realization of her error, wound with the knowledge that he was so near her, she had felt only joy; but in the silence of her room, shock on shock had come the incredulous question, the burning revulsion. A while she had lain wide-eyed, but at length, sleepless, she had stolen out to the balmy, fragrant night, craving its peace, longing passionately for its soft shadows and the hovering touch of the mountain's breath on her hair. And in its friendly shadows the gust of feeling had swept her from her feet.

The action took Daunt wholly by surprise. The sound tore his heart like a ruthless talon, and drew a hoarse word from his lips:

"Barbara!" It was little more than a whisper, but she sprang erect with a gasp, her breath labored and terror-stricken.

"I--I beg pardon," he said, with a dry catch in his throat. "Don't be frightened. I will go at once. I should not have stayed. But you came so suddenly, and I did not dream--I--"

"How strange that you should have been here!" She thought he must hear the loud drumming of her pulse.

He laughed--a hard, colorless little laugh. "Yes," he answered, "it seems so."

A mist blinded her eyes, for his tone carried to her, even more sharply than had the look she had seen from the balcony, a sense of the pain he had undergone. In what words could she tell him?

"You have been suffering," she said in a low voice. "I see that. And it was my fault."

He gathered himself together with an effort of will, to still the tingle that flashed along his nerves. "It was quite sane and right, no doubt," he said. "When I have learned to be honest enough with myself, I shall see it so. My mistake was in ever dreaming that I was worth one of your thoughts or a single second's memory."

She turned her head abruptly. "Do you hear some one talking? I thought I heard it as I came up the path--like some one muttering to himself."

He listened, but there was no sound.

"I must have imagined it," she said. There was a moment's pause, and presently she went on:

"You have been thinking hard things of me. It is natural that you should. And yet I--whatever you think--whatever you do--that day in the cave, I was not--was not--"

"You were nothing you should not have been," he replied rapidly. Her voice had sent a tremor over him--he felt it with a new wave of the morning's contempt. "I understand. There is nothing for you to justify, nothing to regret."

She shook her head. "_We have left undone those things which we ought to have done_," she quoted in a low voice, "_and have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us_. We all recite that every Sunday. I have something now to confess to you. Won't you stand there in the light? I--I want to see your face."

He stepped slowly into a bar of moonlight.

"Why," she said, "you have hurt your hand!" She made a quick step toward him, her eyes on the stained bandage.

"It is nothing," he said hastily. "I struck it a little while ago. What--"

He turned, suddenly alert. A sharp whistle had sounded below them, and bright points here and there pricked the gloom. "They have turned on the tree-lights," he said. There was a sound of voices on the path. Some one ran across the foot-bridge.

"Something has happened," she said. "What can it be?"

He made no reply. There had flashed to him a quick realization of the position in which, unwittingly, they had placed themselves. She must not be seen at such an hour, in that lonely spot with him! He knew the canons of the world he lived in! With a hushed word he drew her back into the shadow.

The voices were speaking in Japanese, and now he heard them clearly. "Some one is injured," he told her. "He fell down the hillside, they think." A hurried step crossed the bridge, and a voice, sharp and peremptory, asked a question in nervous English. Daunt chilled at the answer, turning to her, every unselfish instinct alive to spare her.

But she had heard a name. "It is Mr. Ware who is hurt!"

He grasped her wrist. "Wait!" he said hurriedly. "I beg you to go by the upper path to the side door." But she caught away her arm and ran quickly down the path.

Daunt sprang up the hill, skirted the building, gained its upper corridor, now simmering with excitement, and crossed the bridge. Near its farther end a small group stood about a figure, prostrate beside the phonograph whose cylinder gleamed in the lantern-light. By it Barbara was kneeling.

But something came between her gaze and the pallid face--something which she saw with the distinctness of a black paper silhouette on a white ground: a glimmering object, unnoted by the rest, which had lain half-concealed by a bush--something that one day, a thousand years ago, had glittered against Daunt's brown hair as he saluted her from his horse! It was a riding-crop, whose Damascene handle bore the device of a fox's head.

* * * * *

Two hours later the corridors were silent and the bishop and Daunt sat together in the darkened office, saying few words, both thinking of a man lying straight and alone--and of a girl in an upper room whose promise he had taken with him out of the world. Daunt was to leave for Tokyo on the early morning train. Half the night through he sat there listening to the moan of the rising weather.

But a little while before the sky whitened to a rainy dawn, a gray wraith glided along the upper piazza of the hotel. It crossed the foot-bridge to the hillside.

Barbara groped and found the crop. Across the night she seemed to see an endless procession of stolid, sulphur-colored figures, linked with thin, rattling chains, filing into the humid, black mouth of a mine. Shuddering, she swung the stick with all her strength, and threw it from her down the steep, into the water that roared and tumbled far below.