It was perhaps not so startling as kneeling on her grave and beholding
her emerge from a temple; nevertheless, the entrance of Stella a
few minutes later was distinctly sensational. Jerome came in just
behind her—a situation complex in the extreme. As was characteristic,
Utterbourne adjusted himself to it without the contraction or flurry of a
single feature, and in one of his sharp, enigmatic silences.
Tsuda, after the first stupefied moment, seemed to wilt and shrink. He
saw that he had been somehow outwitted. He was lost—Tsuda knew that
conclusively. He did not dare look at the Captain, but stood where he
was, shrinking, trembling a little. The game was up—it had been a curious
conspiracy.... All at once he seemed to become a very old man.
Stella barely paused as she entered the room and the wave of almost
tangible amazement broke about her. She crossed the room, her face white
and unmoving, and dropped down beside the cot. She did not lay her hands
upon her husband, but her words embraced him pityingly.
“Ferd—I’ve come back.”
The little spirit lamp was calmly alight, and she gazed at it with eyes
in which there was nothing but misery.
King’s lips moved, though there was no sound of words. A look of ruined
radiance shone in his face. Stella settled in a little heap. Her head
sank on to her arms, and she uttered a soft, desperate cry.
The tragic tableau held the men about her in a state of breathlessness.
“Mrs. King,” murmured Captain Utterbourne; and there was an unmistakable
element of thanksgiving in his voice.
He would have questioned her. But after all, there could not be much to
say. The little spirit lamp beside the cot, and the pipe and dipper and
the covered box seemed telling the story over and over each time a glance
fell upon them.
Tsuda, shrunken and aged, moved almost imperceptibly round to the door.
He waited until the wife of the Kami crumpled into a heap, and then,
with the spell of motionless tenseness broken, he saw his way clear to
slipping out into the night.
However, the gods, for whom he had always evinced so lofty an affection,
were not very kind to Tsuda. It was like a run of ill luck in faro.
Scarcely had he left the house, when a furious beast sprang upon his
shoulders and crushed him to the ground under a storm of blows. The
furious beast had once been a quiet little clerk in Market street. But
much water had run under the bridge, and besides—the clerk had lost his
head completely.
He was magnificent and elemental. He was mad to taste blood, and he
pounded with the merciless hammer of fists which possessed little science
but their full quota of untrained punishing power. One blow thrilled him
profoundly. Tsuda lurched back with a groan and thrust an arm across his
eyes. Then he, too, fought—furious and desperate, like a wounded jaguar,
using his teeth and nails freely, and butting with his bullet-like
Mongolian head. Tsuda had naturally known something of defense in his
younger days, for he had considered it a good thing for a man to know
how to take care of himself, even if he did expect to be a priest. They
clinched and Tsuda neatly tripped his foe and they went down together in
a crashing sprawl.
But somehow, by sheer force of youth and recklessness, probably, Jerome
managed to capture both of Tsuda’s wrists. The man’s muscles strained
and quivered, while his lusty opponent, with swift red passion in his
eye now, bent to the grip, his teeth grinding. The belligerent contact
intoxicated him. It was like his first champagne. It was the finishing
stroke of victorious manhood.
In this position he could have broken Tsuda’s arms, and Tsuda knew it
and cried out warningly. Never since the ancient day in Nemuro, when he
got into a row with miners over a little dancing girl, had Tsuda been so
tempestuously set upon. This time the row was not over a geisha, but the
only white woman on Hagen’s Island.
Jerome felt Captain Utterbourne standing calmly yet a little grimly above
them.
“He can’t get away, Mr. Stewart. Release his arms.”
So Jerome sprang up, bloody and sweaty, and stood panting. The heroic
flash of melodrama was over.
And the Captain said: “We’ll take Tsuda aboard with us tonight for
safe-keeping; in the morning we’ll all feel more rational. Mrs. King
insists upon staying beside her husband, but we can’t leave her without
protection. Sargeant—”
But Jerome broke in: “I’m staying, please. We knew each other once. We
lived just around the corner from each other. I’d rather not go back to
the ship tonight.” It seemed a magnificent moment.
Utterbourne stared at him, and, his lips trembling a little with devious
mirth, he muttered, in almost a tone of quizzical exaltation: “Will
wonders never cease?” After that there fell a pause, and then, under the
stars, like the first welcome note of a returning serenity after much
storm, they heard the Captain gently humming his favourite snatch of
Macdowell.