There was a light truly of heaven in his eluding Asiatic eyes. He led her
to a little temple in a grove of palm and giant fern; pointed out its
mystic excellencies; talked a great deal about Shintō which she couldn’t
grasp.
“It’s like a little doll’s house!” she cried. “And so perfect! I’m sure
it must have taken you a long, long time to build.” There were low mounds
all about, for it was here, also, that the dead were buried.
Tsuda seemed too vividly moved by the ecstasy, which shone out of his
eyes, to hear her little burst of amazed enthusiasm. “Some day he tell
us the White Kami will come. We wait, long time. A very long time, it
seem. One day”—Tsuda crept closer—“the White Kami!” He lifted his arms
in weird triumph. “The White Kami at last is come to live among his
children!”
Stella seemed to grasp in a flash the significance of this. She thrust
her hand, in a startled gesture, against one cheek; found it burning.
Tsuda’s face, as he watched her so eagerly for news of the emotions in
her heart, suddenly clouded with shrewdness. “They do not tell you?” he
murmured, close; she could feel his breath.
“I’ve heard nothing about this, Tsuda. You mean my husband—?”
“Sss.” His eyes, so young in a face so lined and ancient, never relaxed
their eager searching look. “Tsuda tell you all things,” he said softly
and very humbly.
“The White Kami ...” she faltered, groping, her mind in great
confusion. For a moment it was almost as though his words brought to
her the discovery that she had married a being of another species than
herself.... The sensation, though fleeting, was vivid and even terrible.
And half consciously she remembered how she had sat waiting in the
drawing room at Berkeley, and had felt, beyond the incommunicative
conventionality, of the place, a subtle sense of something ominous....
Tsuda’s hands, lean and brown, moved restlessly. “The Captain tell us,”
he murmured, “we may look for the White Kami. But he do not tell us you
come too, Wife-of-the-Kami!”
When she looked at him his head was lowered; and as though swayed by a
religious impulse too powerful to be denied, the Japanese slowly sank
down onto one knee before her and reverently brought the hem of her dress
to his lips.