I
Moonlight filled the open space and flooded the temple with a bath of
bluish white.
Jerome knelt beside the grave in the shadow of great palms. In the midst
of this world of silence he suddenly felt a little self-conscious.
Impulse, he feared, had carried him to lengths which it would be rather
difficult to explain. Yet she was the woman he had loved, and men can
never forget these things.
“I must go back, now,” he thought.
Slowly he raised his eyes, and was glad of the stars and the moon. It
required the stars and the moon and the pounding of one’s own heart at
a time like this to keep a man sane. He clung, rather, to the familiar,
static facts in his life—a life now so changed, which had once been
packed with all that was familiar and unchanging.
Stella lay dead at his feet, and on the little altar out there in the
moonlight was the offering placed at the threshold of the gods for
Stella’s soul. He bowed his head a moment, shaken with amazement and
confused regret. When he raised his head, however, and was about to take
his departure, Jerome started. He fancied he had seen something stir in
the moonlight. In another moment he was sure of it.
The paper door of the temple was slowly moving. His finger nails gripped
hard against his palms, and he braced himself by another swift glance at
the unheeding dome of night.
Yes, the door of the temple was opening—slowly, very slowly; first only
a hair’s breadth, then wider and wider, till the aperture was sufficient
to permit a slender, white-clad form to slip through and out into the
soft radiance of the night.
It was a brilliant object-lesson in the science of attention. Quakes
might have riven the earth, and he would have gazed on, through the space
of that first electric moment. Jerome trembled violently, felt the cold
sweat of terror and unbelief on his forehead. His eyes beheld her—yet how
could it be she? His mind seemed suddenly crazed. He had been through too
much in one little hour, he reasoned, and closed his eyes. When he opened
them again she would be gone: there would be only the moonlight on the
silent temple, and he would go back to the _Star of Troy_ and take up his
life once more.
But the white figure was still before him. And then, like a dart of
dazzling inspiration, he knew this was really she, and no creature of
disordered fancy. Yet all the while he knelt on her grave and could not
move or speak.
She looked quickly about and listened. Jerome caught something intimate
and familiar in the tilt of her head. In their old eventless lives she
had tilted her head just that way, sometimes. He was rigid while the girl
very cautiously crept out on to the steps of the temple and descended to
the shrine where the offering had been placed.
Her movements were nervous and stealthy. At the foot of the flight she
paused to look about and listen. Then, in an abrupt, snatching way, she
seized some of the food and ran back up the steps with it, disappearing
into the temple. After a moment she reappeared, and this time moved as
though actuated by a slightly less acute nervousness—even lingered a
moment to gaze up, in a tense lost way, at the beauty of the night sky.
Then she was gone.
It was a time of breathlessness for Jerome, indeed. A time of uncanny,
prickling faintness. He trembled. The emotion seemed almost unbearable.
Yet he knew she was Stella; and the former romantic appreciation
of melancholy triumph was giving way to the chaos foreshadowing
readjustment. It was a time of incredulous certainty. A time when fresh
sensation seemed to overwhelm all the previous sensations of a lifetime.
It was no time for speculation, however; how she came there while he
knelt on her grave—what it all meant—must wait. The only concrete issue
that really mattered was whether she would emerge again. If not, what
should he do? But if she did come out? He could call to her—run and touch
her—last frantic doubts—to see if she were real. Still, the fright of it
for her.... Well, what then?
A suspicion hackneyed and shiny from human usage clutched at his reason
almost comfortingly: “I guess I’ll wake up in a minute!”
She came, carrying a small stone pitcher—came down quickly and crossed
the enclosure to the spring beside the tiny gate, where she stopped.
Jerome’s mind, laying about feverishly for some piece of subterfuge
whereby his presence might be made known without causing her any alarm,
yielded nothing but confusion. There must be some way—he ought to be
enough of an adventurer and man of the world by this time.... Yet after
all he could only stay where he was and call her name—a little more
gently and indeed reverently than quite consorted with his new creed of
woman-hating.
“Stella!”
Hardly more than a murmur, though it seemed to boom and echo, as a voice
will under stress of an unusual silence.
She cried out and fled back to the little flight of steps; but he came
forward, an arm outstretched.
“Don’t be afraid, Stella. I’m Jerome.”
And he stopped, stood still where he had emerged from shadow into the
moonlight.
She could see him distinctly. She was grasping the pitcher of water with
both hands—not that it was the last pitcher in existence, nor that she
was so very much concerned about the water, for there was ever so much
more of it; she clung to the pitcher, rather, the way Jerome had been
clinging to the heavenly bodies. There had to be something perfectly
regular, like pitchers or stars, to keep hold of.
But when she saw it really was Jerome, she sat down very limply on the
top step and did a tremendously natural thing: she began crying—tears
that had burned long, unreleased, when she had thought there were no more
tears left.