THE SECRET THE RIVER KEPT
Daunt had dined cheerlessly in the deserted dining-room. Afterward,
shrinking from the gay piazzas, he had struck off for a long rambling
walk. Only the frail moonlight, glimpsing through a cloudy sky, lay over
the landscape, when, returning, worn but in no mood for sleep, he found
himself at the hill shrine looking down on the white hotel with its long
red balconies, brightened here and there by the lighted window of some
late-retiring guest.
His few days at Chuzenji had passed in a kind of stifled fever. The
report of Barbara's engagement had added its poisoned barb. That
morning, however, a careless remark had torn across his mood as
sheet-lightning tears the weaving dusk. Tokyo was talking of it--of
_him_!--making a jest of that sweet, dead thing in his heart? The
thought had stung his pride, and there had grown in him a sharp sense of
humiliation at his own cowardice. The afternoon had found him riding
down the mountain trail to Nikko. To-morrow he would go back to
Tokyo--to the round of gaieties that would now be hateful, and to his
work.
He put out his hand to one of the benches in the deep pine-shadow, but
drew it back with a sharp breath. A sliver of the warped wood had
pierced his knuckle to the bone.
Frowning, he wrapped the bleeding member in his handkerchief and sat
down at the bench's other end, bitterly absorbed. The vagrant,
intermittent moonlight touched the tumbling water below with creeping
silver, and on the horizon, where the cloud-bank frayed away, one white
constellation swung low, a cluster of lamps in golden chains. But
Daunt's thought had no place for the delicate beauty of the night. His
pipe was long since cold, and he knocked out the dead ashes against the
bench, and did not relight it. He thought of Tokyo, that to-morrow would
stretch so blank and irksome, of the humdrum tedium of the Chancery, in
which a few days ago he had worked so blithely. Then all had been
interest and beauty. Now the future stretched before him dull and
savorless, an arid Desert of Gobi, through whose thirsty waste he must
trudge on for ever to a comfortless goal.
How long he sat there with bowed head he could not have told, but at
length he rose heavily to his feet As he did so he became aware of a
sound below him--a footfall, coming toward him. It crossed a bar of the
moonlight.
He shrank, and a tremor ran over him, for it was Barbara.
She had thrown over her a loose cloak, and a bit of soft, clinging lace
showed between its dark edges. Her brilliant hair was loosely gathered
in a single braid, and in the moonlight it shone like beaten copper
against the vivid pallor of her face. He sat stirless, smitten with
confusion, conscious that a movement must betray him. A painful
embarrassment enveloped him, a fastidious sense of shrinking from her
sight of him. He felt a dull wave of resentment that an antic irony of
circumstance should have brought them beneath the same roof--to make him
seem the moody pursuer, the unwelcome trespasser on her reserve--and
that now thrust him into a position which at any hazard he would have
shunned. But all thought of himself, all feeling save one vanished,
when, with sudden piteous abandon, she threw herself on her knees by the
bench and broke into slow sobs, shuddering and tearless.
In that outbreak of emotion, were not alone the pent-up pain and
humiliation she had suffered, or the desperate joy of that evening's
knowledge. There were in it, too, grief and compunction, dismay and
doubt of the future. She was engaged to Austen Ware. Would Daunt ever
forgive? Would he want her--now? In the first realization of her error,
wound with the knowledge that he was so near her, she had felt only joy;
but in the silence of her room, shock on shock had come the incredulous
question, the burning revulsion. A while she had lain wide-eyed, but at
length, sleepless, she had stolen out to the balmy, fragrant night,
craving its peace, longing passionately for its soft shadows and the
hovering touch of the mountain's breath on her hair. And in its friendly
shadows the gust of feeling had swept her from her feet.
The action took Daunt wholly by surprise. The sound tore his heart like
a ruthless talon, and drew a hoarse word from his lips:
"Barbara!" It was little more than a whisper, but she sprang erect with
a gasp, her breath labored and terror-stricken.
"I--I beg pardon," he said, with a dry catch in his throat. "Don't be
frightened. I will go at once. I should not have stayed. But you came so
suddenly, and I did not dream--I--"
"How strange that you should have been here!" She thought he must hear
the loud drumming of her pulse.
He laughed--a hard, colorless little laugh. "Yes," he answered, "it
seems so."
A mist blinded her eyes, for his tone carried to her, even more sharply
than had the look she had seen from the balcony, a sense of the pain he
had undergone. In what words could she tell him?
"You have been suffering," she said in a low voice. "I see that. And it
was my fault."
He gathered himself together with an effort of will, to still the tingle
that flashed along his nerves. "It was quite sane and right, no doubt,"
he said. "When I have learned to be honest enough with myself, I shall
see it so. My mistake was in ever dreaming that I was worth one of your
thoughts or a single second's memory."
She turned her head abruptly. "Do you hear some one talking? I thought I
heard it as I came up the path--like some one muttering to himself."
He listened, but there was no sound.
"I must have imagined it," she said. There was a moment's pause, and
presently she went on:
"You have been thinking hard things of me. It is natural that you
should. And yet I--whatever you think--whatever you do--that day in the
cave, I was not--was not--"
"You were nothing you should not have been," he replied rapidly. Her
voice had sent a tremor over him--he felt it with a new wave of the
morning's contempt. "I understand. There is nothing for you to justify,
nothing to regret."
She shook her head. "_We have left undone those things which we ought to
have done_," she quoted in a low voice, "_and have done those things
which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us_. We all
recite that every Sunday. I have something now to confess to you. Won't
you stand there in the light? I--I want to see your face."
He stepped slowly into a bar of moonlight.
"Why," she said, "you have hurt your hand!" She made a quick step toward
him, her eyes on the stained bandage.
"It is nothing," he said hastily. "I struck it a little while ago.
What--"
He turned, suddenly alert. A sharp whistle had sounded below them, and
bright points here and there pricked the gloom. "They have turned on the
tree-lights," he said. There was a sound of voices on the path. Some one
ran across the foot-bridge.
"Something has happened," she said. "What can it be?"
He made no reply. There had flashed to him a quick realization of the
position in which, unwittingly, they had placed themselves. She must not
be seen at such an hour, in that lonely spot with him! He knew the
canons of the world he lived in! With a hushed word he drew her back
into the shadow.
The voices were speaking in Japanese, and now he heard them clearly.
"Some one is injured," he told her. "He fell down the hillside, they
think." A hurried step crossed the bridge, and a voice, sharp and
peremptory, asked a question in nervous English. Daunt chilled at the
answer, turning to her, every unselfish instinct alive to spare her.
But she had heard a name. "It is Mr. Ware who is hurt!"
He grasped her wrist. "Wait!" he said hurriedly. "I beg you to go by the
upper path to the side door." But she caught away her arm and ran
quickly down the path.
Daunt sprang up the hill, skirted the building, gained its upper
corridor, now simmering with excitement, and crossed the bridge. Near
its farther end a small group stood about a figure, prostrate beside the
phonograph whose cylinder gleamed in the lantern-light. By it Barbara
was kneeling.
But something came between her gaze and the pallid face--something which
she saw with the distinctness of a black paper silhouette on a white
ground: a glimmering object, unnoted by the rest, which had lain
half-concealed by a bush--something that one day, a thousand years ago,
had glittered against Daunt's brown hair as he saluted her from his
horse! It was a riding-crop, whose Damascene handle bore the device of a
fox's head.
* * * * *
Two hours later the corridors were silent and the bishop and Daunt sat
together in the darkened office, saying few words, both thinking of a
man lying straight and alone--and of a girl in an upper room whose
promise he had taken with him out of the world. Daunt was to leave for
Tokyo on the early morning train. Half the night through he sat there
listening to the moan of the rising weather.
But a little while before the sky whitened to a rainy dawn, a gray
wraith glided along the upper piazza of the hotel. It crossed the
foot-bridge to the hillside.
Barbara groped and found the crop. Across the night she seemed to see an
endless procession of stolid, sulphur-colored figures, linked with thin,
rattling chains, filing into the humid, black mouth of a mine.
Shuddering, she swung the stick with all her strength, and threw it from
her down the steep, into the water that roared and tumbled far below.