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13. terrible sentiment that was born of it, the heart-breaking longing
inspired by her idealized image.
Passion, when it rises to this dimension in the mind of a man, has
beautiful attributes as well as vile, it holds in its hands pictures of
perfect innocence, besides the others.
The devil takes care of that!
He saw Jane not only as she was, but as she had been, fair, and
fresh, and innocent, against the background of the beeches round
Glenbruach, and the sea lochs, and the purple hills.
What he did with his body that day in Arita, or where he
wandered, he could never tell, for his mind was fighting a battle so
fierce that all intelligent perception of outward things was blurred.
At the end of it he found himself in a tea house sitting before
some food which he had apparently ordered, and the battle was
won. So he told himself.
As a matter of fact, he was worn out. Passion was exhausted,
fighting against fate, attempting to escape from the pursuing devils,
beating himself against the trees, he had fallen beneath them, telling
himself that the battle was won, wondering at himself that he ever
could have even dreamed of the ruinous course of action which lust
had urged him to.
But the trees remained steadfast and unharmed, waiting only for
the renewal of the madman’s strength and the inevitable end.
It was dark when he reached the Nagasaki station. He picked a
riksha from a row of them standing outside with hoods up, for it had
been raining slightly, and looking absurdly like a row of tiny,
unhorsed hansom cabs, and told the man to take him to the House
of the Clouds.
14. He came up the hill-path, and as he came the wind, blowing
against him, brought a perfume with it, the perfume of rain-wet
azaleas. During the day and the previous night dozens of blossoms
had broken forth, filling the garden with their fragrance and beauty;
dozens more would be born ere the morrow under the light of the
silvery moon now gliding up over the hill-tops behind a tracery of
flying, fleecy clouds.
As he approached the house, he saw through the open panel
space the silhouettes of Pine-breeze and Cherry-blossom.
They were sitting opposite to each other on their heels upon the
lamplit matting, and seemed at first to be engaged in the game of
kitsune-ken, but almost instantly he perceived that they were playing
at no game, but were engaged in conversation. Alarmed
conversation, to judge by the movements of their hands, now up-
flung, now flung out sideways. Sweetbriar San was promenading the
matting with tail fluffed out, now rubbing against Pine-breeze, now
against Cherry-blossom, attempting apparently to join in the
conversation, and seeming to share in the excitement.
Something had happened of a tragic nature—but what? Two steps
brought him on to the veranda two more into the house with his
boots on, despite the clause in the lease.
The Mousmés gave two little shrieks, wheeled round, and kow-
towed before the August One.
“What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? Is
Campanula San safe?”
Campanula San was quite safe.
Then why all this? What had they been conversing about with so
many exclamations?
Confused replies.
15. “Go,” he said, “and bring me some tea, and ask Lotus-bud to
come hither.”
In a few moments Lotus-bud, wearing a very white face,
appeared, and kow-towed.
He questioned her. At first her answers were vague, and then it all
came out.
Things had happened. Campanula San had gone into the town
that day, and had met he whose head was like the rising sun
(George du Telle in plain prose); and he with the sun-bright head
had walked with her, and had spoken dishonorable words. Oh,
shame!—he had offered her gold.
“God!” said Leslie, staring at the bent figure on the matting before
him.
He remained speechless for a moment, then he took out his
watch and looked at it: it was eleven o’clock.
He turned furiously and strode out of the room: on the veranda
he stopped like a horse suddenly reined in.
Jane’s image had appeared before him, turning him back.
Suppose he were to go to the hotel now and drag George du Telle
out and beat him within an inch of his life, as was his intention a
moment ago?
The idea of Jane in the midst of that scene brought his fury down
from boiling point.
He returned to the room, where Lotus-bud was still on her knees,
with her hands clasped.
Where was Campanula San now?
16. In bed and asleep. She had returned, it seems, greatly troubled at
noon, and had confided her trouble to Lotus-bud, making her
promise to tell no one—Leslie San especially—and Lotus-bud had
promised—with the result we have already seen.
For a moment he thought of waking Campanula, but he dismissed
the thought. The thing had occurred and was irremediable, the
question now remained, what was he to do about George du Telle.
He went up to bed. In times past he could have obtained his
remedy.
Where lay his remedy now? The law could do nothing; there
remained only physical force.
A wheezy pug dog protected by a woman’s skirts, that is what
George du Telle was. Leslie knew that if once he could catch the
brute by the scruff of the neck, the only struggle would be with
himself as to the limits of chastisement to be inflicted.
If he could only get him away from Jane up a back street
anywhere, just for five minutes! The thing was to be done. With the
help of the astute M’Gourley he felt it was to be done, and would be
done on the morrow.
He got up and went to a rack on the wall where he kept his
sticks, and took down a whangee cane half an inch thick, a most
efficient instrument for the chastisement of a brute. He made it sing
through the air, then he put it on the rack again and returned to
bed, and slept soundly, far more soundly than he had slept the night
before.
17. CHAPTER XXIV
GEORGE DU TELLE
He was awakened by voices. Sunlight was streaming into the
room, the sparrows were bickering round the trees, and from below
came the voice of Pine-breeze crying, “Irashi, condescend to enter!”
Then Jane’s voice: “I don’t understand what you say. Stop
rubbing the matting with your nose. I want your master.” Then an
octave higher, “Richard!”
“Hullo!” cried Leslie, leaning on his elbow, and scarcely able to
credit his ears.
“Oh, you are there! Come down at once, I must speak to you.
Quick!”
“What on earth has happened?”
“All sorts of things.”
“I’ll be down in two minutes, but for goodness sake tell me what
is the matter.”
“Can I speak without any one understanding?”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“Well, then, George has bolted.”
“George has what?”
“Gone away.”
18. “Where has he gone to?”
“Oh! come down and I’ll tell you everything. Dick! Dick! is that a
bath I hear you dragging over the floor? Dick, if you dare to have
the impudence to keep me waiting whilst you take a bath, I’ll—I’ll
come up and pull you out of it. Do come on!”
“Directly!”
“Well, don’t be long,” grumbled Jane; and she apparently took her
seat on the cushions upon the matting, for he could hear her
grumbling about the absence of chairs.
This was a new development of affairs. George bolted! It was just
what one might have expected of the man, to insult a girl and then
fly from the wrath to come.
It was rather a relief, too, viewed by the light of morning. No man
likes the task of thrashing a dog that has misbehaved: the thing has
to be done, but it is unpleasant, and if the creature runs away and
hides, so much the better. And the thrashing of a fat, wheezy pug
without teeth or means of defense was what the punishment of
George du Telle would amount to.
He dressed rapidly and came down to the room where Jane was
sitting on a cushion, trying to read the Japan Mail.
“Oh, there you are! Come and sit down. No, not beside me; right
opposite, if you please.”
“Tell me all about it.”
“Oh, there’s not much to tell. I was in bed nearly all yesterday
with a headache, and George went off for a walk in the afternoon;
said he was going to call on you. I told him you had gone to
Nagoya.”
“Arita.”
19. “It’s all the same—then he went out, I don’t know where, and
that is the last I’ve seen of him. At nine yesterday evening they
brought me a note saying he had gone to Osaka, and to follow with
our luggage.”
Leslie whistled.
“What are you whistling about?”
“Osaka! Why, that’s over three hundred miles away!”
“Where is it?”
“On the Inland Sea.”
“Where’s that?”
“Oh, it runs from here up to—well, practically to Osaka. At least, it
doesn’t exactly reach from here, you have to go through the Straits
of Tsu-shima.”
“Well, I don’t care what Straits you have to go through; he’s gone
to Osaka on important business the note said. Now, what business
can have taken him there. What do they do at Osaka?”
“Make all sorts of things, from machinery to tea-pots, and so on.”
“Well, he can’t have gone to buy machinery or tea-pots—what
can it mean? He was so good, too, yesterday; brought me up some
antipyrine, and wanted to fetch a doctor, and plumped up my
pillows, and then went out and off to Osaka without a word, and
how did he get there? He says follow by next boat to-morrow. I was
going to ask the hotel people, but I didn’t like to. I just told them I
knew he was going, and I was going to follow him to-morrow.”
“There’s no railway to Osaka,” said Leslie, “for this bit of Japan is
an island. He must have gone by a Holt liner; one started last
evening. The Canadian Pacific boats don’t stop at Osaka, they go
20. right on to Yokohama. I suppose he means for you to follow by the
Messagerie boat that leaves to-morrow evening.”
“I’ll give him tea-pots,” said Jane gloomily, “when I catch him!
The idea of his leaving me like that! In a strange country, too. I
wonder what is the meaning of it all!”
“Perhaps he went away—because of a girl.”
“You mean he’s run away with some girl!” flashed Jane. “Why
don’t you say so if you mean it?”
“Because I don’t mean it. I said ‘because of a girl,’ not ‘with a
girl.’”
“Dick, you know something!”
“Yes, I do.”
Jane turned pale, and he hated to see her like that, but he had
suddenly made up his mind to tell her all.
“He met Campanula yesterday afternoon, and, not to put too fine
a point upon it, insulted her.”
“Oh, Dick!” said Jane, turning, if possible, paler than before. She
stared at him in a frightened way, then she recovered herself. “There
must be some mistake; she must have misunderstood him. He
couldn’t have done such a thing; however foolish he may be, he’s a
gentleman.”
“Yes, a gentleman in England, but not a gentleman in Japan. He—
God damn it!” blazed out Leslie suddenly, bringing his fist down with
a bang on the matting—“he offered her money.”
“I must go to him at once,” said Jane, making as if to rise, “and
ask him if this thing is true.”
21. “Sit down for a while; you can’t possibly get to Osaka to-day. Oh,
it’s true enough. I was in a boiling rage last night when I came home
and heard it all. I was going down to the hotel with a stick to have it
out, and then I thought of you, and the disgrace and uproar there
would be, so I just bit on the bullet and went to bed. Honestly, I was
going to have got him somewhere by himself to-day, and have it out
with him, but it seems he prefers insulting women to facing men.
Forgive me, Jane, for all this; I feel bitter about it, but I hate to have
to say these things to you.”
“It was good of you to think of me last night,” said Jane in a
broken voice, gazing at the matting as she spoke, then looking up
full in his face, “very good of you.”
“Oh, I suppose it’s really nothing, after all,” he said. “Those
confounded fools that write books about Japan have got it into
English people’s heads that every ‘Jap-girl,’ as they call them, is a
what’s-its-name at heart. Let’s say no more on the matter, the affair
is closed. Have some breakfast?”
“No, thanks; I’m too much troubled and worried,” said Jane,
sighing and folding her hands in her lap.
“Oh, don’t trouble about it. I told you because—well, I thought
you ought to know.”
“Richard,” said she, looking up, “if you meet George again—”
“Don’t be a bit alarmed. I will do nothing to him except to cut
him. He has run away; that closes the affair entirely. A man can only
be really angry with a man.”
“Richard,” said she, now half tearfully, “I’m going to say
something I want to say. Men don’t understand women. I’m fond of
George. Men are always talking about love, and so are novels. I
never loved George that way. I don’t think I ever loved any one
really in that way, but I have an affection for George; I suppose that
22. is the best name to give it. I know he’s ugly, I know he’s a lot of
things he ought not to be, yet I feel he belongs to me.
“It’s the sort of feeling one has for an—for an animal. I’m just
telling you what I feel. An animal may be terribly ugly, yet one may
love it. George has been very good to me, and he has grown into my
life; that is the only way I can express it.
“Do you know, Dick, when you have your face very close to
another person’s face you cannot tell what they are like. Well, it’s
just the same with marriage. After people have been married some
time they don’t see each other as they saw each other before; they
have lost their identity—each is part of the other. And, Dick, I know
George has been wicked, but ought we not to remember, the day
before yesterday—”
“Yes,” he said; “the day before yesterday I kissed you.”
“It was a moment of weakness on my part,” continued Jane. “We
are all very weak and wicked, but I have always been faithful to my
husband—I should say, to myself. It is strange to talk like this.”
“The whole affair is closed,” he said. “Let us wipe the slate clean
and begin again.”
Sitting opposite to her here in the morning light he was a very
different person from the man wandering about Arita yesterday,
pursued by her image.
The course of a great passion like his is not a high level line. If a
man were to live through such a phase of existence at Italian opera
heights he would be mad or dead in a very few days.
Its course is most like the temperature chart of a typhoid fever
case: tremendous ups and downs, fever point now, a few hours later
almost normal.
He clapped his hands, and Pine-breeze appeared.
23. “Breakfast,” he said. “You’ll stay to breakfast,” turning to Jane.
“And there is something I forgot day before yesterday. You have
come to see Japan—well, look here—”
He went to a big lacquer cabinet where he kept his papers, and
returned with a large, square, cream-colored card covered with
Chinese ideographs.
“What is it?” said Jane, turning it over.
“An invitation to a garden-party. A man named Kamamura is
giving it to-morrow at O-Mura.”
“A Japanese garden-party!” said Jane, with interest in her voice.
“Yes, very Japanese. He told me to bring any of my friends.”
“But to-morrow,” said Jane—“I am going away to-morrow.”
The words went through him like a pang.
“Never mind,” he said. “Your boat does not start till evening; you
will have plenty of time to get back.”
“I’d love to go,” she said; “but—are you sure it’s all right for me to
go without an invitation?”
“Perfectly, or I would not bring you.”
Pine-breeze entered with a tray.
“Where,” enquired Leslie, “is Campanula San?” Campanula San
had not risen yet; she had a headache.
24. CHAPTER XXV
RETROSPECTION
“I’ll go up and see her,” said Jane, when they had finished
breakfast. “May I?”
“Yes, if you like; Pine-breeze will show you the way—but, Jane,
say nothing to her of what occurred yesterday; she thinks nobody
knows except one of the servants here.”
“I’ll say nothing,” replied Jane; “but I’ve got some antikamnia
tabloids in my pocket, fortunately, and I’ll just make her take one.”
“All right,” said Leslie; “but for goodness sake don’t poison her.”
This was another point on which Jane had not altered. As a girl
she had been possessed by a passion for drugs, and would swallow
anything in the way of medicine she came across or was given. She
had always been doctoring rabbits and other unfortunate animals,
and had once nearly poisoned herself by taking half a bottle of pain-
killer for a dose. And now here she was, nearly fifteen years after, in
Japan, going upstairs to doctor Campanula, with just the same
manner and seriousness of face with which long ago, medicine bottle
in hand, she would give the order: “Prize its mouth open, Dick; don’t
hurt it. Steady now, I’m going to pour.”
Quarter of an hour later she came down triumphant.
“She took it like a lamb. She’s the dearest child! Now I’m off. I
have a hundred things to do. Will you walk down with me as far as
the hotel?”
25. He accompanied her to the hotel, and neither of them spoke
much on the way.
“I won’t ask you in,” said Jane, when they reached the door,
“because it wouldn’t be proper. Now let me see. To-morrow is the
garden-party; we might do something to-day, you and Campanula
and I—might not we?”
“We could run over to Mogi,” he said. “We can get rikshas, have
luncheon there, and come back to tea at my place; and to-night
there’s an affair on at the O Suwa temple, we might go there. Shall I
call for you at twelve or so?”
“Yes,” said Jane, “if you’ll bring a chaperon. You see, now George
is away I must be awfully ‘propindicular,’ like that person in Uncle
Remus—the Terrapin—wasn’t it?”
“I’ll bring Campanula—or one of the Mousmés, at a pinch.”
“Campanula chaperoning me!” said Jane with a laugh. “Well, I
don’t care. It’s only for the sake of Mrs. Grundy.”
“There is no Japanese Mrs. Grundy.”
“No, but there is an English one.”
They parted, and Jane entered the hotel.
She went to her bedroom, got her writing-case out of a
portmanteau, and began to write. She was writing a letter to
George.
The first began:
“Your abominable conduct has been discovered. You have
heaped shame on me, you have heaped shame on yourself—”
26. When she got as far as this she found that it was too
melodramatic, somehow, and the “heaped shames” did not ring true,
so she tore it up and began again:
“My cousin, Richard Leslie, sent for me this morning in great
distress. How you could have acted as you did towards that
sweet child surpasses me. Fortunately for yourself you have run
away—”
She tore this up too, flew into a temper with herself, and then
wrote as follows:
“George,—I’ve heard everything. Dick is furious, but he’s not
going to do anything, so just stay at Osaka till I come, and don’t
go bolting off anywhere else. And don’t drink too much port, for
if you get another attack of gout I won’t nurse you.—Jane.
“P.S.—You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
She sealed this classical epistle and addressed it. Then she
remembered that she might just as well have left it unwritten, for
there was no communication to be had with Osaka till the morrow;
and if she posted it, it would go by the same boat as herself. So she
tore it up.
Then she sat down on the side of her bed and bit a corner of her
handkerchief.
She was thinking.
To-morrow she would never see Dick again, most probably, after
that.
She had never loved Dick, that is to say in the good old Family
Herald way. Their boy and girl relationship had been anything but
sentimental.
Recalling the past she could conjure up no tender pictures.
27. She could see herself clinging to a rod bent like a bow, and
shouting to Dick: “Now then, chucklehead, gaff him!”
She could see herself tramping after him like a squaw after a
chief on rabbiting expeditions—dozens of pictures like this, but none
of them sentimental. She had never thought of marriage till the day
she received a letter from Dick, asking her to marry him; to which
she replied by writing half a dozen letters refusing him, which letters
she tore up one after the other, and then wrote a seventh accepting
him, which she posted.
Now one of the worst evils in an accepted proposal of marriage is
this. That directly they hear of it, the girl’s relations, male and
female, take their implements—nets, ferrets, and so on—and go off
rabbiting in your past.
Dick had not much of a past as far as size goes, but it was well
stocked with game for hunters such as these.
So well stocked that old Mr. Deering, a retired London wine
merchant who had taken a country seat in Scotland, near
Glenbruach, put his foot down and forbade Jane to have anything
more to do with her cousin: an order which would have driven her
straight into his arms, had not the unfortunate Dick, hearing of the
inquisition that had been made, come North inflamed with rage and
whisky.
Men drank harder even in the ‘eighties than they do now, and
Scotland was never the home of abstinence; yet the scene Dick
Leslie created in Callander went beyond the bounds of even Scottish
convention, and utterly destroyed any chance of his marriage with
Jane du Telle.
Remembering his description of the affair which he gave to
M’Gourley on the Nikko road, you will agree with me that he was not
a man who viewed his own acts—well, as others viewed them.
28. In this, however, he was by no means singular.
Jane, sitting on her bed and biting the corner of her handkerchief,
was at the same time looking back over the past. She was a person
with an infinite capacity for affection, with no capacity at all for a
Grand Passion. Her life was made up of a bundle of petty interests,
and her history was the history of a pure and somewhat
commonplace soul.
She had loved Dick as a brother in the past, and now that he had
come into her life again after all those years (even after that terrible
scene long ago), bringing with him so much from the happy days
that were for ever gone, her heart went out to him as it had never
gone to human being before.
And to-morrow she must say good-bye to him, and never,
perhaps, see him again.
They must part; there was no other thing to be done. She was
her own mistress, with plenty of money at her command; she could
have flown in the face of society, and made Dick forever her own.
Such a course did not even occur to her, for she was a creature
bound by the laws of convention, almost as rigidly as you or I by the
laws of gravity.
Out of very light-heartedness she would do things and say things
that would have been dangerous symptoms in a woman of a sterner
mold; and men had often pursued her, led on by this laughing spirit
that vanished behind a veil, which, being lifted, disclosed an
adamant door.
Her great danger lay in her compassionate emotions, and all the
womanly nature that lay behind them. Her great danger lay in
Richard Leslie, for he was the only being that had ever aroused them
to their full strength.
29. All at once she cast herself upon the bed, and after the fashion of
her childhood, buried her face in a pillow, and sobbed, and “grat.”
When she had occupied herself thus for some ten minutes, she
rose and looked at herself in the glass, and wondered at her own
distorted image, and how she could possibly be such a fool. But she
felt better; the pain of parting with Dick was not quite so bad, and
she felt kindlier towards George.
If his conduct had taken place in England, I doubt if her anger
would have been so soon assuaged. But they were in Japan—and
the Japs, you know!—
PART THREE
THE BROKEN LATH
30. CHAPTER XXVI
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
31. 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 chamécens 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.
32. “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.
33. 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.
34. 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.
35. CHAPTER XXVII
THE “EMPRESS OF JAPAN”
If Mr. Kamamura had sent a special messenger to Paradise to pick
from the aviary there a blue-winged and bright-eyed day for his
garden-party, he would not have obtained a better one than that
which came by chance.
A haze hid its coming. Just after sunrise, looking from Leslie’s
garden one could scarcely see Nagasaki down below—a toy town,
seen through faint blue gauze, it seemed. The wind came in puffs,
hot from the Pacific, shaking the cherry branches.
The great double cherry-blossoms were falling. The close, even
moss under the trees was white, like ground after a mild snowstorm.
There was something in the atmosphere which loosened the
petals this morning. At each puff of wind a fresh shower fell, sifting
through the air to scatter softly on the ground. It was a ghostly sight
in the gray and silent dawn; the trees seemed despoiling
themselves, casting their blossoms from them in sorrow or fear.
In the veranda stood the crimson garden umbrella, all damp with
dew, and four pairs of clogs in a row. The house was deathly still;
and one might have likened it to a tomb, had it not possessed so
much the appearance of a bandbox, looped and latticed.
Presently a faint sound might have been heard. A panel slid back,
and a figure appeared, holding in its hand a lighted paper lantern.
It was Campanula, clad in blue, her feet peeping from beneath
her skirt like two white mice.
36. She put out the lantern, and hung it on a hook. Then she put on
a pair of clogs, and clicked down the steps. She went down the
path, through the little gate, and vanished from sight; and as her
footsteps died away, silence returned to the house and the garden.
Then in a few minutes a glorious transformation scene took place.
The haze turned to a golden mist; it became sundered by rivers of
clear air, and from it leaped the sun, like Helios from the sea.
Instantly the silence of the orchard became broken by the
bickering of birds; a cock crowed somewhere in the back premises,
and he was answered by the cock that lived half-way down the hill
at the cooper’s shop—who was answered, a minute later, by all the
roosters in Nagasaki.
The mist vanished entirely now, the sun began steadily to mount
into the vault of perfect blue; his slanting rays shot through the
cherry orchard, striking here the bole of a tree glistening with great
tears of fragrant gum, and there on the ground besnowed with
blossom, even the fierce old hills of the landscape garden lost
something of their ruggedness in the warm and mellow light.
Then the house began to awaken. Pine-breeze appeared on the
veranda, and after Pine-breeze the other Mousmés all busy, or
appearing so, dragging out futon to air for a moment in the morning
brightness, and lacquer screens to be dusted.
“Summer has come in the night,” said Lotus-bud, pointing out the
fallen cherry-blossoms.
“Yes,” chimed in Pine-breeze, “but spring has gone.”
“I dreamt last night of frost.” This from Cherry-blossom, who was
busily engaged watching the others at work.
Frost is a bad dream in Japan, and the Mousmés conferred in
murmurs as to what it might mean.
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