THE MONASTERY GARDEN

Jane gazed over Nagasaki, the blue water, the green hills, to the blue beyond, and sighed. They were standing near the gate; tea was over, and they were waiting for Campanula, who had gone into the house to make some alteration in her dress before accompanying them "down town."

"Richard," she said, "take us somewhere where we can talk, you and I. I have such a heap of things to ask you and talk about. Twelve years—can it be twelve years since we last saw each other? Did you get my last letter?"

George du Telle was standing near smoking a cigar, and staring at the beautiful view with about the same amount of interest he would have felt had it been a soap advertisement, but she did not lower her voice. She was perfectly frank with the world and her husband.

This frankness carried her far, and enabled her sometimes to skate on ice that would have given under many a woman of half her weight, for it was a genuine frankness, not a thing put on.

She was a person whom women called nice-looking on first acquaintance, and men mentally registered as plain. Tall, pale, with an excellent figure, and gray eyes. A man met her and spoke to her, and found her plain but very jolly, increased the acquaintanceship and found her plainness vanishing, and then, all of a sudden, his foolish soul was caught in a trap.

It was the magic of her lips, perhaps. They formed the true Cupid's bow, full, and seemingly cut by a chisel wielded by a master hand, sensitive and sensuous. Gazing at them one came to understand how in the ancient world tall Troy fell before a kiss.

"Which letter?" asked Leslie, plucking a lilac spray and strewing the ground with the tiny petals.

"The one I wrote six years ago telling you I was married. I sent it care of your father."

"No," said Leslie gloomily. "I have heard from no one for eight years and more. I cut the world, you know—or it cut me rather; but I'll tell you some other time, here's Campanula."

Then they started, Leslie and his companion leading the way.

"Where are you going to take us?" asked Jane, when they had reached the street.

"Through the city to a place I know on a hill," replied Leslie.

He had called four rikshas from the stand, and he gave some directions to the riksha men, and they started.

You cannot imagine the size of Nagasaki till you drive through it in a swift-running riksha, nor the quaintness, nor the terror that causes your heart to fly upwards as your riksha man shaves a baby, not with a razor, but with the off wheel.

Boy babies fighting tops, girls bouncing colored balls, flights of children whose clogs clatter like the dominoes in an Italian restaurant as they pursue each other in some mysterious game—everywhere children, a shifting, colored maze in which the eye gets tangled and lost. Babies, temples, tea-houses, streets upon streets of houses that look as if you could flatten them out with the blows of a shovel, bursts of cherry-blossoms, tripping MousmÈs, stone monsters, awful, yet pathetic with the gray of lichen and the green of moss, a courtyard with a twisted fir tree leaning across it, laughter, and the tune of a chamÈcen running through it all, that is the impression that a riksha ride through Nagasaki in spring would leave on the mind, were not the picture blurred by the European element.

Street after street they passed through, and still the mysterious city kept building up streets before them. Leslie had thought of taking his companions to the O Suwa, but he had changed his mind and given other directions to the riksha men.

They passed up a steep incline, dark with fir trees, and drew up at a great gateway consisting of two joists of wood supporting a vast beam, the whole making a figure something in the fashion of the Greek II.

Beyond the gateway lay an inclined path, bordered by cryptomeria trees, leading to the faÇade of a temple.

"It's a place I sometimes come to," said Leslie, as he helped Jane to descend. "It's quiet, and worth seeing in its way."

Campanula and George du Telle led the way this time, Leslie and his companion leisurely following.

"Come down this path," said Jane, turning to a side alley. "Oh, how pretty! and how mournful too, with those rows of dark trees. Dick, this is not a cemetery you have brought us to?"

"No; it's a Shinto monastery. Few people know it, and it's out of the run of the general sight-seeing bounders."

"Things with kodaks?"

"And without—but see here, Jane."

"Yes?"

"What's your husband?"

"George?"

"Yes, I suppose his name is George. What is he?"

"He's in the wool trade—he's the richest man in the wool trade, they say. He thinks and talks of nothing else but wool. He got off the subject to-day with you for awhile; wasn't he brilliant? But we get on all right together; he has his set, and I have mine."

"What is his set?"

"The very best—I mean the very worst; the poor old Smart Set that every one is always beating as if it were a donkey—which it is," said Jane, taking her seat on the plinth supporting the prancing figure of Ama-ino, fronted across the walk by the equally fantastic figure of Koma-ino, a veritable Lion and Unicorn. "Sit down beside me, Dick, and tell me—"

"Yes?"

"What have you been doing all these years?"

"I—I've been keeping alive—"

"Dick," suddenly broke out Jane, as if she had not been listening, "I have often thought you must have thought me a heartless wretch; but I'm not."

"There is no use in going over the past," he said. "What is done is done, and never can be undone. I can only say that I have never in the past had a friend to stick to me, or a woman to love me, or a father to care for me."

"May it not have been your own fault, Dick? Think for a moment. I don't want to reproach you, but you know how wild you were—you know that was one of the reasons we couldn't get married. Oh, it wasn't 'my heartlessness,' as you told me in your last letter but one. I have heart enough—at least I hope so," said Jane, looking at Koma-ino as if for confirmation, "and I wouldn't have done what I did if you'd been different. Never mind, Dick, cheer up!—buck up! as they used to say in the poor old Smart Set, till the respectable folk took the expression away from them. What've you been doing all these long years, Dick?"

"Oh, I've been in Australia."

"What were you doing there?"

"Curse Australia!" suddenly broke out Leslie, digging his heel in the ground. "Don't speak to me about it; let's talk of something else."

"Well, what are you doing here? I mean, what have you been doing all these years—playing the guitar, or what?"

"I'm a shopman."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I and a man named M'Gourley are in business."

"Two Scotchmen?" sneered Jane.

"Two Scotchmen."

"And what are you selling—paper umbrellas?"

"Yes; and hats and kakemonos, and every other sort of a mono that the European trade will swallow. We export them."

"Then you're a merchant, not a shopman," said Jane in a half-angry, half-relieved voice. "I wish you would not give me these sort of horrible shocks. I thought at first you were serving in some place behind the counter—"

"Oh, I don't want to make money in business much; I do it more for interest and to have an object in life. I'm well off; my father's money all came to me—he died well off."

"And wasn't it queer?" said Jane. "George is awfully rich, you know; well, directly I was married, old Aunt Keziah died, and every penny of her money came to me. Fifty thousand. No, forty-eight thousand, four hundred and eighty-two pounds, ten and sixpence. It seemed so sweet, the little sixpence following at the end. I sent for it, and had a hole drilled through it, and I always wear it on this bangle—look!"

He looked; there were many things hanging on the bangle. He touched a tiny gold pig swinging by a ring.

"Good heavens!"

"You gave me that," said Jane, "and I've never parted with it."

"What's this?" said he, fingering a cabalistic-looking blue stone.

"That's an inkh, I think; I'm not sure of the name. It's lucky, or supposed to be."

"Who gave it to you?"

"A boy at Cairo last winter."

"How old was he?"

"Oh, about twenty."

"And this?" said Leslie, picking out another charm in the form of a heart.

"Look here," said Jane, pulling her wrist away, "I don't want to waste time like this, I want you to tell me more about yourself; I want you to tell me about that child Campanula. Why did you adopt her?"

"I found her on the road going to Nikko."

"Where's that?"

"It's away up in Shimotsuke, beyond Tokyo. I and M'Gourley were on the tramp. We were sitting by the roadside resting, when a blind man came along. He was half mad, and talked wild. Said he was a juggler, and offered to fetch devils out of a wood near by, if we gave him gold."

"Why didn't you try him?" said Jane in an interested voice.

"I did try him," said Leslie; "gave him some money. He made a circle in the dust, with signs round the rim of it, told us not to touch it or come near it, got into the middle of it, and fetched out a reed-pipe. Then he began to play a tune that would make you shiver to hear, and things croaked in the wood."

"Go on," said Jane shivering pleasantly.

"I took my walking-stick and made a mark in the dust just near his foot. I touched his heel by accident, and—whew!"

"Yes?"

"He went off like a rocket; bounded out of the circle, rushed this way and that, knocking against trees and striking right and left with his stick, as if dogs were about him. He got round the bend of the road and vanished. We were pretty much astonished, but that wasn't the end of it. In front of us was a valley of the most beautiful crimson azaleas."

"Wait a moment, Dick; you're a very bad story-teller. You should always stage your characters: you should have described the azaleas first and the scenery. Well, go on."

"Bother the azaleas!" said Dick. They were fast getting into the old boy-and-girl way of talking to each other, a somewhat dangerous language at thirty. "It doesn't matter whether they come in first or last. Where was I? Oh yes. Mac suddenly said: 'Look there!' I looked, and there sure enough was a child amidst the azaleas. She hadn't been there a few seconds before, and Mac would have it that she had been 'fetched'; it was a pretty wild country and no houses around, and there she was, just as if she had stepped out of a house, plucking away at the azalea blossoms for all she was worth, a tiny dot in a blue kimono and scarlet obi. I stole up behind her."

"I'd have caught her up and kissed her."

"Just what I did, in fact; and it may have been fancy, but she seemed slipping through my fingers like—grease till I kissed her, and she became solid."

"There's one thing, Dick, you'll never make a poet. Well, go on; it's awfully interesting."

"We carried her off to Nikko. No parents could be found to own her, so I adopted her."

"What became of the juggler?"

"That was a funny thing. As we turned the bend of the road we saw him away up in a gorge of the hills. He was still running for all he was worth, beating about him with his stick as if hitting off devils, and dashing himself against trees in a quite regardless manner."

"How awful!"

"Well, frankly, it was, and it had a sequel, for his dead body was found miles away some days after, and the Japanese police said the trees had beaten him to death, which they practically had."

"But, Dick, what was the meaning of it?"

"Who knows! When I touched him on the heel perhaps he may have thought it was a devil seizing him, and his imagination did the rest. Mac thinks, or, at least, he once thought—"

"Yes?"

"That there was something developing in the wood, something bad; that Campanula's ghost was wandering in the wood; that when I made the mark I did inside the circle, the bad thing was flung out of the developing medium and Campanula's ghost sucked into it, and so she became materialized."

"And the bad thing went for the juggler man?"

"It and perhaps others."

"I never heard anything half so horrible, if it's true."

"It's true enough. I was forgetting it almost, but I had a horrid dream to-day that brought it all back. I was sitting in the garden smoking and I dropped off to sleep; and I heard the sound of that beast's pipe, and I saw the place on the Nikko road, and there was a child amongst the flowers. Then a frightful bird came along and was going to attack the child, and I awoke—it was just before you came."

"Dick, what was the mark you made on the road?"

"The sign of the cross," said Leslie.

Jane was silent for a moment then—