CHAPTER XXVIII
THE FORGOTTEN MAN
Barbara pushed open the bamboo gate of the temple garden, then paused.The recluse with whom she had talked yesterday sat a little wayinside, while before him, in an attitude of deepest attention, stoodthe diminutive figure on the huge clogs whose morning acquaintance shehad made from her window. Thorn was looking at him earnestly with hisgreat myopic eye, through a heavy glass mounted with a handle like alorgnette.
"My son," he said. "Why will you persist in eating _ame_, when I havetaught you the classics and the true divinity of the universe? It is toosweet for youthful teeth. One of these days you will be carried to adentist, an esteemed person with horrible tools, prior to the removal ofa small hell, containing several myriads of lost souls, from the leftside of your lower jaw!"
Barbara's foot grated on a pebble and he rose with a startled quickness.The youngster bent double, his face preternaturally grave. Thorn thrustthe glass into his sleeve and smiled.
"I am experimenting on this oriental raw material," he said, "toillustrate certain theories of my own. Ishikichi-_San_, though a slaveto the sweetmeat dealer, is a learned infant. He can write forty Chinesecharacters and recite ten texts of Mencius. He also knows many damnablefacts about figures which they teach in school. He has just propounded aquestion that Confucius was too wise to answer: 'Why is poverty?' Notbeing so wise as the Chinese sage, I attempted its elucidation. Thusendeth our lesson to-day, Ishikichi. _Sayonara_."
He bowed. The child ducked with a jerky suddenness that sent his round,battered hat rolling at Barbara's feet. She picked it up and set it onthe shaven head.
"Oh!" she said humbly. "I beg your pardon, Ishikichi! I put the rimright in your eye!"
"Don't menshum it," he returned solemnly. "I got another." He stalked tothe gate, faced about, bobbed over again and disappeared.
Barbara looked after him smilingly. "Is Ishikichi in straitenedcircumstances? Or is his bent political economy?"
"His father has been ill for a long time," Thorn replied. "He keeps ashop, and in some way the child has heard that they will have to give itup. It troubles him, for he can't imagine existence without it."
"What a pity! I would be so glad to--do you think I could give themsomething?"
He shook his head. "After you have been here a while, you will find thatsimple charity in Japan is not apt to be a welcome thing."
"I am beginning to understand already," she said, as they walked alongthe stepping-stones, "that these gentle-mannered people do not lack thesterner qualities. Yet how they grace them! The iron-hand is here, butit has the velvet glove. Courtesy and kindness seem almost a religionwith them."
"More," he answered. "This is the only country I have seen in the worldwhose people, when I walk the street, do not seem to notice that I amdisfigured!"
She made no pretense of misunderstanding. "Believe me," she said gently,"it is no disfigurement. But I understand. My father lived all his lifein the dread of blindness."
A faint sound came from him. She was aware, without lifting her eyes tohis, that he was staring at her strangely.
"All his life. Then your father is not ... living?"
"He died before I was born."
She glanced at him as she spoke, for his tone had been muffled andindistinct. There was a deep furrow in his forehead which she had notseen before.
"Do you look like him?"
"No, he was dark. I am like my mother."
Thorn was looking away from her, toward the lane, where, beyond thehedge, a man was passing, half-singing, half-chanting to himself in arepressed, sepulchral voice.
"My mother died, too, when I was a little girl," she added, "so I knowreally very little about him."
She had forgotten to look for the Flower-of-Dream. They had come to thelittle lake with its mossy stones and basking, orange carp. Through thegap in the shrubbery the white witchery of Fuji-San glowed in the sunwith far-faint shudderings of lilac fire. She sat down on a sunnyboulder. Thorn stooped over the water, looking into its cool, greendepths, and she saw him pass his hand over his brow in that familiar,half-hesitant gesture of the day before.
"Will you tell me that little?" he asked. "I think I should like tohear."
"I very seldom talk about him," she said, looking dreamily out acrossthe distance, "but not because I don't like to. You see, knowing solittle, I used to dream out the rest, so that he came to seem quitereal. Does that sound very childish and fanciful?"
"Tell me the dreams," he answered. "Mine are always more true thanfacts."
"He was born," she began, "in the Mediterranean--"
She turned her head. The stone on which Thorn's foot rested had crashedinto the water. He staggered slightly in regaining his balance, and hisface had the pale, startled look it wore when he had first seen her fromthe roadside. He drew back, and again his hand went up across his face.
"Yes," he said. "Go on."
"In the Mediterranean--just where, I don't know, but on an island--andhis mother was Romaic. I have never seen Greece, but I like to know thatsome of it is in my blood. His father was American, of a family that hada tradition of Gipsy descent. Perhaps he was born with the 'thumb-print'on the palm that they call the Romany mark. As a child I used to wonderwhat it looked like."
She smiled up at him, but his face was turned away. He had taken hishand from his brow, and slipped it into his loose sleeve, and stoodrigidly erect.
"I often used to try to imagine his mother. I am sure she had a dark andbeautiful face, with large, brown eyes like a wild deer's, that used tobend above his cradle. Perhaps each night she crossed her fingers overhim, and said--"
"_En to onoma tou Patros_," he repeated, "_kai tou Ouiou kai tou AgiouPneumatos!_"
"Yes," she said, surprised. "In the name of the Father, Son and HolyGhost. You know it?"
"It is the old Greek-orthodox fashion," he said in a low voice.
"I should not wonder," she continued, "if she made three little woundson him, as a baby, as I have read Greek mothers do, to place him underthe protection of the Trinity. She must have loved him--her firstboy-baby! And I think the most of what he was came to him from her."
Thorn moved his position suddenly, and Barbara saw his shoulders rise ina deep-taken breath.
"Love of right and hatred of wrong," he said, "admiration for thebeautiful and the true, faith in man and woman, sensitiveness toartistic things--ah, it is most often the mother who makes men what theyare. Not our strength or power of calculation, but her heart and powerto love! In the twilight of every home one sees the mother-souls glowinglike fireflies. I never had a picture of my mother. I would rather haveher portrait than a fortune!"
His voice was charged with feeling. She felt a strange flutter of theheart, a painful and yearning sympathy such as she had never feltbefore.
"I wonder what he saw from that Greek cradle," she resumed. "I couldnever fancy the room so well. I suppose it had pictures. Do you thinkso?"
He nodded. "And maybe--on one wall--a Greek _ikon_, protected by asilver case ... I've seen such ... that left exposed only theolive-brown faces and hands and feet of the figures. Perhaps ... when hewas very little ... he used to think the brown Virgin represented hismother and the large-eyed child himself."
"Ah," she cried, and a deeper light came in her eyes. "You have been inGreece! You have seen what he saw!" But he made no reply, and after amoment she went on:
"He had never known what terror was till one day an accident, receivedin play, brought him the fear of blindness. It must have stayed with himall his life after that, wherever he went--for he lived in othercountries. I have a few leaves of an old diary of his ... here and thereI feel it in the lines."
She, too, fell silent. "And then--?" he said.
"There my dreams end. You see how little I know of him. I don't know whyhe came to Japan. But he met my mother here and here they were married.I should always love Japan, if only for that
."
"He--died here?"
"In Nagasaki. My mother went back to America, and there I was born."
She was looking out across the wide space where the roofs sank out ofsight--to the foliaged slope of Aoyama. Suddenly a thrill, a curiouslycomplex motion, ran over her. Above those far tree-tops, sailing inslow, sweeping, concentric circles, she saw a great machine, like agigantic vulture. She knew instantly what it was, and there flashedbefore her the memory of a day at Fort Logan when a brave younglieutenant had crashed to death before her eyes in a shatteredaeroplane.
If Daunt were to fall ... what would it mean to her! In that instant thegarden about her, Thorn, the blue sky above, faded, and she stareddismayed into a gulf in whose shadows lurked the disastrous, theterrifying, the irreparable. "I love him! I love him!"--it seemed topeal like a temple-bell through her brain. Even to herself she couldnever deny it again!
She became aware of music near at hand. It brought her back to thepresent, for it was the sound of the organ in the new Chapel across theway.
Looking up, she was struck by the expression on Thorn's face. He seemed,listening, to be held captive by some dire recollection. It brought toher mind that bitter cry:
"I can not but remember such things were, That were most precious to me!"
She rose with a sudden swelling of the throat.
"I must go now," she said. "The Chapel is to be dedicated this morning.The organ is playing for the service now."
She led the way along the stepping-stones to the bamboo gate. As theyapproached, through the interstices of the farther hedge she could seethe figure of the Ambassador, with Mrs. Dandridge, among the _kimono_entering the chapel door. In the temple across the yard the baton hadbegun its tapping and the dulled, monotonous tom-tom mingled weirdlywith the soaring harmonies of the organ.
With her hand on the paling she spoke again:
"One thing I didn't tell you. It was I who built the Chapel. It is inthe memory of my father. See, there is the memorial window. They wereputting it in place when I came a little while ago."
She was not looking at Thorn, or she would have seen his face overspreadwith a whiteness like that of death. He stood as if frozen to marble.The morning sun on the Chapel's eastern side, striking through its opencasements, lighted the iridescent rose-window with a tender radiance,gilding the dull yellow aureole about the head of the Master and givinglife and glow to the face beside Him--dark, beardless, and passionatelytender--at which Thorn was staring, with what seemed almost an agony ofinquiry.
"St. John," she said softly, "'the disciple whom Jesus loved.'" She drewfrom the bosom of her dress the locket she always wore and opened it."The face was painted from this--the only picture I have of my father."
His hand twitched as he took it. He looked at it long and earnestly--atthe name carved on its lid. "Barbara--Barbara Fairfax!" he said. Shethought his lips shook under the gray mustache.
"You--are a Buddhist, are you not?" she asked. "And Buddhists believethe spirits of the dead are always about us. Do you think--perhaps--hesees the Chapel?"
He put her locket into her hands hastily. "God!" he said, as if tohimself. "He will see it through a hundred existences!"
Her eyes were moist and shining. "I am glad you think that," she said.
In the Chapel the bishop's gaze kindled as it went out over the kneelingpeople.
"_We beseech Thee, that in this place now set apart to Thy service, Thy holy name may be worshiped in truth and purity through all generations._"
The voice rang valiant and clear in the summer hush. It crossed thestill lane and entered a window where, in a temple loft, a man sat stilland gray and quiet, his hands clenched in his _kimono_ sleeves:
"_We humbly dedicate it to Thee, in the memory of one for the saving of whose soul Thou wert lifted upon the Cross._"
The man in the loft threw himself on his face with a terrible cry.
"My child!" he cried in a breaking voice. "My little, little child, whomthey have robbed me of--whom I have never known in all these wearyyears! You have grown away from me--I shall never have you now! Never... never!"
Behind him the unfinished image of Kwan-on the All-Pitying, tossed thesunlight about the room in golden-lettered flashes, and beneath hisclosed and burning lids these seemed to blend and weave--to form bossedletters which had stared at him from the rim of the rose-window:
THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME.