CHAPTER XLV

THE BISHOP ANSWERS A SUMMONS

The Chapel was but sparsely filled. From where she sat, Barbara, through the open door, could see the willows along the disconsolate roadway whipping in the fleering dashes of wind. A woman trudged by, bare-legged, her _kimono_ tucked knee-high, the inevitable, swaddled baby on her back. The hot, fibrous song of the _semi_ had died to a thin humming, like bees in an old orchard. Across the bishop's voice she heard the plaintive call of a huckster, swinging by in slow dogtrot with panier-pole on shoulder, and the chirr of a singing-frog under the hedge.

The service was in the vernacular, and though she tried to follow it in her _Romaji_ prayer-book--whose words were printed in Roman letters instead of the Japanese ideograph--the lines were meaningless, and she could not fasten her mind on them.

She had reached a point in these few tragical days where her mind, overwrought with its own pain, had acquired a kind of benumbing lassitude that was not apathy and yet was far removed from spontaneous feeling. Daunt's presence that dreadful night on the hillside--his confusion--his bleeding hand--his round-about return to the hotel--all this, at the sight of the Damascene crop in the bushes, had flashed to her mind in damnable sequence. And yet something deep and unfathomed within her had driven her to the obliteration of that mute evidence. Austen Ware had slipped and fallen--such was the universal verdict. The truth was sealed for ever in the urn now bound over-seas to its last resting-place. She alone, she thought, knew the secret of that Nikko tragedy.

With the next daylight the storm had broken and the ensuing gloomy weather had formed a dismal setting for gloomier scenes, through which she had moved dully and mechanically. When all was over, to Patricia's sorrow, she had not returned to the Embassy, but had gone immediately to her uncle's. The pity offered her--though not openly expressed, since her engagement had not been formally announced--hurt her like physical blows, and the quiet of the Ts'kiji rectory was some solace. To-night, an unwelcome task lay before her. She was to visit the yacht--now, by a satiric freak of chance, legally her own!--to seal the private papers of the man whose deed of gift might not now be recalled.

As she sat listening to the meaningless reading and the sighing of the wind above the Chapel roof, Barbara's eyes on the stained-glass figure in the rose-window were full of a wistful loneliness. If her father were only alive--if he could be near her now! Unconsciously her gaze strayed across the hedges, to the gray roof of the old temple where lived the eccentric solitary to whom her thought insistently recurred. In her trouble she longed to go to him, with a longing the greater because it seemed fantastic and illogical. She recalled suddenly the quaint six-year-old of the huge clogs and patched _kimono_--Ishikichi, troubled over the giving up of the family establishment, puzzling his baby brain over the hard things of life.

She was startled by a sound outside--the single, shrill, high scream of a horse in some stable near at hand. It cut through a pause in the service, sharp, curdling, like a cry of mortal fear. A baby, near Barbara, awoke and began to cry and the mother soothed it with whispered murmurings.

Suddenly there arose a strange rattling, a groaning of timbers. The bishop ceased reading. People were rising to their feet. The building was shifting, swaying, with a sickening upward vibration, as though it were being trotted on some Brobdingnagian knee. Barbara felt a qualm like the first touch of _mal de mer_. "_Ji-shin! Ji-shin!_" rose the cry, and there was a rush for the open air. In another moment she found herself out of doors with the frightened crowd.

It was her first experience of earthquake, and the terror had gripped her bodily. The wet trees were waving to and fro like gigantic fans, and a dull moan like an echo in a subterranean cavern seemed to issue from the very ground. A section of tiling slid from the Chapel roof with a crash. "Rather severe that, for Tokyo," said the bishop at her elbow, where he stood calmly, watch in hand. "Almost two minutes and vertical movement."

"Two minutes!" she gasped. She had thought it twenty.

The nauseating swing had ceased, but in an instant, with a vicious wrench, it began again. "The secondary oscillations," he said. "It will all be over in a ..."

As he spoke, the air swelled with a horrible, crunching, grinding roar, like the complaint of a million riven timbers. Across the lane a sinister dust-cloud sprang into the air like a monstrous hand with spread fingers. "It is one of the temples!" said the bishop, and hurried with the rest, Barbara following him.

The paved yard was filling with a throng. Agitated priests and acolytes ran hither and thither and slate-colored nuns, with shaven heads and pale, frightened faces, peered through the bamboo-lattices of the nunnery. The newer temple faced the open space as usual, but across the hedged garden no ornate roof now thrust up its Tartar gables. Instead was a huddle of wreckage, upon which lay the huge roof, crumpled and shattered, like the fragments of a gigantic mushroom. From the tangle projected beam ends, coiled about with painted monsters, and here and there in the cluttered _débris_ lay great images of unfamiliar deities. Over all hung a fine yellow dust, choking and penetrating.

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."