THE BROKEN LATH

A heat wave from the Pacific had stolen over Nagasaki, and the windless night was filled with stars and lights.

Stars in the sky, and stars in the harbor, long wavy reflections of light from the ships in the anchorage, and ten thousand lanterns spangling the mysterious city.

A spangle of colored lamps that spread away to the base of the O Suwa hill which they stormed, covering it with a thousand sparkles like phosphoric sea-spray, and cresting its summit with a burning zone, bright as the snow crest of Fuji.

It was a gala night, and the O Suwa, that galaxy of temples, had called the true believers in love and beauty to worship in the name of religion.

From the great double temple, which is the crowning glory of the hill, Leslie and his companions looked down upon shrine after shrine, broad flights of steps stained with the soft amber and pink of lantern light, and the colored crowd ever shifting, and murmurous as the sea.

The shadow spaces and the vagueness of night made great distances in this dim but splendid picture, till the moon, rising over the hill-top, chased the shadows away, paled the lamps, and drew the distances together.

Touched by her light the crowd below became sonorous as a musical glass touched by the finger; the murmur of voices, the ripple of laughter, the sigh of moving silk and the flutter of a thousand fans intensified, rose blended and mixed, and dwelt in the air a nimbus of sound. The native city beyond grew more distinct, yet more unreal in the moonlight, which strengthened the black shadows of the wooded cliffs and converted the harbor into a trembling mirror.

"We shall never see anything again so beautiful as that," said Jane, "so mysterious, so strange."

He did not reply. A small hand had stolen into his; it was Campanula's. She, too, was gazing at the scene around and below them, filled with who knows what thoughts.

They were not alone here on the utmost heights; women, gayly dressed, were passing into the temple behind them to pray and clap their hands before their gods. Women surrounded them, laughing, chattering, dispelling quaint perfumes on the air from large incessantly-waving fans. From the tea houses behind the temple came the thready music of chamÈcens and sounds of unseen festivity; and from the great park beyond, through the hot night, the perfume of azaleas and the odor of the dew-wet cryptomeria trees.

"Come," said Jane, "let us go and take the picture with us before it gets dulled. I will never forget this night—there is something in the air of this place I have never felt before. No, thanks, I don't want to see the tea houses, I am quite content with this; let us go down right through it, and home."

They descended the broad flights of steps through the murmuring, laughing, and perfumed crowd. There was something in the air indeed, something as intoxicating as wine, yet far more subtle, subtle as a poison or a love philter.

They found rikshas to take them back, and the whole party returned to the hotel, where they left Jane.

"To-morrow at noon," she said to Leslie, as she turned to enter.

"Yes, or even a little later; the train doesn't start till after one."

"Good-night!" She waved her hand in the lamplit portico and vanished.

They had no need of lanterns to show the way up the hill-path to the House of the Clouds; the path was a tangle of moonlight and lilac-bough shadows, a tremulous carpet upon which above them they perceived a creeping and colored thing.

It was Cherry-blossom. She, too, had been at the festival at the O Suwa, and was now returning, wearied out and walking like a somnambulist, a lantern painted with butterflies held before her nodding at the end of a bamboo cane.

In the house, when he had fastened the shoji and taken his night lantern from Pine-breeze, he turned to where Campanula was standing, a vague figure in the dimly-lit room. Yielding to a sudden impulse he picked her up from the ground, just as he might have picked up a child, and kissed her—kissed her just as he had kissed her when she was a child that day, years ago, in the valley by the Nikko road.

That night sleep was impossible. The lights of the O Suwa burned before him, the perfume of the azaleas and cryptomerias pursued him, lighting always and leading him always to the same image—Jane.

He lay considering what the future would be when Jane was gone; the rainy season would soon be upon them, and then the autumn and the winter and the spring again after that, and the years to come.

Whilst thus torturing his soul his mind was steadfastly making a resolve. A resolve that, come what might, Jane must not go out of his life. That to-morrow he must act in such a way as to make her for ever his own.

Come what might!

There was no time left for thought, scarcely enough for action.

He had quite ceased to battle with himself, to say this is right or this is wrong. Time had cut all these arguments short with the command: "Act now, now, in the next twenty-four hours! for after that your chance is gone."

Then he began to sketch out the plan that had been vaguely forming in his brain all the evening—a plan that the villainous conduct of George du Telle made possible and practicable, and, to Leslie's mind, almost plausible.

As he lay thus, a faint sigh came through the lattice of the window. The wind had risen, and was moving the cherry branches and the azaleas.

Then came another sound—the sound of a stick tapping on the garden path, as if some blind person were cautiously feeling their way round the house.

Up along the garden path, pausing now, now advancing, now dying away, now returning, somebody was promenading in front of the house, keeping watch and ward like a sentry, somebody whose feet made no sound, somebody blind.

A feeling of sick terror came over him—terror not to be borne.

He pulled the mosquito-net aside, and rose, shivering and trembling, feeling that he must look out at all hazards—even at the worst.

He pulled the slats aside and looked out. Nobody. The moonlight lay on the azaleas and the garden path, but of the prowler there was no sign.

Then he saw the cause of the sound. A lath broken from the house wall was hanging with tip touching the path, and tapping upon it as the wind shook it.

He returned to bed, and tried to snatch a few hours' sleep, but the sound of the blind man tapping his way continued all night long—now faint, now loud, and insistent as the wind rose and fell.