During the preceding sombre conversation he had caught at words as they fell, almost without heeding them at the time. Now they hung together in his mind and formed a vivid picture. The grave was near the temple ... you could tell it by the fresh flowers. And the string of lights ... they were taking up an offering ... an offering to heathen gods for the soul of Stella. It was ghastly. It all but passed belief.
Keeping his distance, and walking as softly as possible, Jerome made off after the procession of twinkling lights. Overhead the heavy tropical stars were shining brightly. There would be a moon presently; the east was aglow; but in the jungle it was very dark. The way was long, and the strange men with the lights went ever on ahead.
After a time a tropical grove was reached, in whose midst stood the temple. No one, at first, approached very close: there seemed a recognized margin of some sort, beyond which the ground was holy. Of them all, the single figure alone, bearing in his hands a woven tray heaped with the choicest fruits of the place, went on toward the temple itself; the rest squatted upon the ground. Not a word was spoken. It was a strange and awful ceremony.
The moon was just rising, full and yellow; the first soft beams began to steal in through the breeze-stirred palm orchard to illumine the temple with a pale light. But the resinous torches cast up everything in bold, dancing relief. Jerome, on the outskirts, crouching, felt his mind in greater tumult even than before. He seemed to himself almost possessed.
It was a Japanese temple. They had ruined Tsuda’s chances of becoming a priest; but he knew a temple from _torii_ to _sessha_. It was surrounded by a low wall with a gate. Outside the gate was a tiny spring of fresh water. Jerome could see it: a little pool just troubled in the torchlight.
All about sprang the rich blackness of a tropical growth, the most lush he had ever beheld. The moon was climbing slowly up the sky. He was glad he had come. Life was wonderful and sad. He watched with eyes that tried to record every detail of this unearthly hour.
The figure with the offering uttered a bit of weird chanting; then suddenly the words ceased, and the tray was deposited on a small altar at the foot of a flight of steps leading up to the temple itself. That was all. The crude fragment of ritual concluded, these strange beings with bushy hair and prodigious drooping moustaches moved away in silence. Jerome, crouching in his hiding place, watched them pass by, one by one, and disappear. He could see the twinkling lights, like far-off tapers, winding farther and farther. Then silence was supreme.