Through her tears she saw the savages below her in the valley. She saw
the chief of the Ainu and heard his wailing supplication. Mysterious
forces....
As she gazed at the cluster of native huts, suddenly her mind whirled
with amazement. The mat at the door of one of the huts was lifted and her
husband came out. He looked about him a moment a little uncertainly, and
then strode off, disappearing into the jungle.
Stella could feel her heart beating. She turned to Tsuda to see if he had
shared her observation. It was apparent, from his involved look, that he,
too, had seen the White Kami come out of the hut.
Her mind, so edged with suffering, leapt instantly to a suspicion which,
even after all that she had endured, was potent enough to fill her with
an immense revulsion. At first she thought she would say nothing at all,
but presently she asked: “Tsuda, whose hut is that my husband just left?”
Tsuda looked humble and reluctant. “The way of the gods....” he
murmuringly began.
But she interrupted him in a dry, rather sharp voice. “Let’s never mind
about all that, Tsuda. Just tell me whose house it is.”
Tsuda at first was silent. He made a little awkward motion of appeal
toward her with his bony brown hands. But he saw that he must not evade
(clever Tsuda) so in a moment he told her the truth in a reticent
mutter—perhaps just too reticent to be convincing. The truth he had
brought her up here to, if possible, behold.
“It is the house of the great chief’s Small Wife.”
“Yes,” murmured Stella. A plain dull monosyllable. There was nothing
more to be said. Still, after a little, she asked, in a voice almost
completely strained free of any emotion: “Does he go there often, Tsuda?”
And Tsuda answered in the affirmative—that is to say, he answered after
his own devious fashion, slowly inclining his head, but quickly raising
it to fix his restless bright eyes upon her face: “It is written—gn—we
must trust the gods in all things, Wife-of-the-Kami.”
She said she would go back to her rock. And she sat there all through the
day. Sometimes fancy played pranks with her vision, and she thought the
horizon was broken by a tiny point like the far off bow or funnel of a
ship. But she was always mistaken. The sun dropped into the sea, and the
dark came. When it was too dark to watch any longer she returned to the
house.
For a week Stella went every day to watch for the _Star of Troy_. But the
ocean rested vacant. On the eighth day she did not go to the rock at all.