Part 5

And he told her that never in all his life before had he longed so ardently for any one as he had for her that previous night. That the day had been endless; the noise and show, the brassy merriment and cheer, were abhorrent to him, for she had not been there to rob it of its vulgarity with the charm of her sweet presence. That he had been rude in his efforts to escape it, had bullied the jinrikimen because they had seemed to creep, and that happiness and peace had only come back to him again when he had crossed his own threshold and had taken her in his arms.

Still the wistful distress in her misty eyes was only in part dispelled.

"Last night," she said, "I broke my liddle jade bracelet. It is a bad omen."

"I will buy you a dozen new ones," he said.

"One million dozens cannot mend jus' thad liddle one," she returned, sadly, shaking her head. "It is a bad omen. Mebbe a warning from the gods."

Of what did they warn her? That she could not say, but she had heard that such an accident usually preceded the sorrows of love. Perhaps he would soon pass away from her, and, like the ghost of the fisher-boy Urashima, who had left his fairy bride to return to his people, he too would pass out of her life, back into that from which he had come.

X

A BAD OMEN

It was late in November. The parks were dropping their autumn glories and taking on the browner hues and hints of hoar-frost, black-and-white vestments, the sackcloth and ashes of winter. The recessional of the birds was dying away into silence. Soon the final, long-drawn amen of the north-wind would be breathed out over the deserted woods, where the anthem of praise had rung out to the worshipping air all through the golden days and silver nights of summer.

The still beauty of the autumn evening was piercingly melancholy, and, even with a loving sunset still lingering in the skies, a silken, gentle rain was falling, as though the gods were weeping over the death of the autumn, were weeping hopeless tears--the most tragic of all.

The little house that stood alone on the hill faced to the west, its wet roofs and shingles sparkling and glistening in the rays of the dying sunset that enveloped it.

Yuki opened a shoji (sliding paper door) of her chamber, and looked out wistfully at the city of Tokyo, that in the autumn silence was shining out like a gem, with its many strange lights and colors. She stole softly out on to a small balcony, and stepped down into the tiny garden as the night began to spread its mantle of darkness. A few minutes later her husband called to her:

"Yuki! Yuki!"

He drew her into the room, and closed the shoji behind her.

"You have been crying again!" he said, sharply, and turned her face up to the light.

"It is the rain on my face, my lord," she answered in the smallest voice.

"But you mustn't go out in the rain. You are quite wet, dear."

"Soach a little, gentle rain," she said. "It will not hurt jus' me. I loogin' aeverywhere 'bout for our liddle bit poor nightingale. Gone! Perhaps daed! Aeverything dies--bird, flowers, mebbe--me!"

He put his hand over her mouth with a hurt exclamation.

"Don't!" he only said.

The maid brought in their supper on a tray, but before she could set it down Yuki had impetuously crossed the room and taken it from her hands.

"Go, go, honorable maid," she said. "I will with my own hands attend my lord's honorable appetite."

She knelt at his feet, geisha fashion, holding the tray and waiting for him to eat, but he took it from her gravely, and put it on the small table beside them, and then silently, tenderly, he took her small hands in his own.

"What is troubling you, Yuki? You must tell me. You are hiding something from me. What has become of my little mocking-bird? I cannot live without it."

"You also los' liddle bird?" she queried, softly--"jus' lige unto my same liddle nightingale?"

"I have lost--I am losing you," he said, suddenly, with a burst of anguish. "I cannot make you out these last few weeks. What has come over you? I miss your laughing and your singing. You are always sad now; your eyes--ah, I cannot bear it." His voice went suddenly anxious. "Tell me, is it--do you--want--need some more money, Yuki? You know you can have all you want."

She sprang to her feet fiercely.

"No, no, no, no!" she cried; "naever any more for all my life long, _dear_ my lord."

"Then why--"

"Ah, _pray_ don' ask why."

"But why--"

"Then listen unto me. I nod any longer thad liddle bit geisha girl you marrying with. I change grade big moach. Now you see me, I am one wooman, mebbe like wooman one hundled years ole--wise--sad--I change!"

"Yes," he said. "You are changed. You are my Undine, and I have found your soul at last!"

* * * * *

One oppressive afternoon, when a nagging, bleating wind out-doors had prevented their going on their customary ramble through the woods or on a little trip to the city, Jack had fallen asleep. Long before he had awakened he had felt her warm, soothing presence near him, but with the pleasure it afforded him was mingled a premonition of disaster and a dread of something unhappy about her? He awoke to find her standing by him, her face white and drawn with a despair he could not comprehend.

"What is it?" He started up fearfully. "Your eyes are tragic! You look as if you were contemplating something frightful."

She sank down to his feet, and, despite his protests, knelt and clung to him there, sobbing with passionate abandon.

"Don't! Don't! I can't bear you to do that. What is it, Yuki?"

"Oh, for liddle while, jus' liddle bit while, bear with me," she said.

"Little while! What do you mean?" he demanded.

She tried to regain her composure. Her laughter was piteous.

"I only liddle bit skeered," she said. "I--" she stammered--"I skeered 'bout thad liddle foolish jade bracelet, all smashed and broken."

"Is that all?"

"It is soach a bad omen! The gods trying to separate us, mebbe."

"Separate us?" His suspicions were growing. "How can they do that? It lies between you and me, such a--such a fate. The gods--ah, you are talking nonsense."

"The gods see inside," she said.

"Inside what?"

"Our hearts." Her voice was barely above a whisper.

"And what can they find there to distress you?" he asked, almost fiercely. She was hurting him with her failure to confide in him.

"The bracelet--" she began. "It is broken, an' love, too, mus' die--an' break!"

From that day her melancholy grew rather than diminished. But she had roused her husband's suspicions, and her morbidness irritated rather than appealed to him. He felt that in some way he was being deceived. The day that he found her wardrobe neatly and carefully folded away in her queer little packing-case, as though in preparation for a journey, the full sense of her deceit dawned upon him. Hitherto when she had left him she had taken none of her belongings with her. He perceived it was now her intention to desert him utterly. He had served her purpose, apparently, and she was through with him.

His wrath burst its bounds. He had not known the capabilities of his angry passion. He tore the silken garments from the box with the fierce madness of one demented, then he pushed her into the room, and showed her where they lay scattered.

"The meaning of this?" he demanded, white to the lips with the intensity of his passion.

She remained mute. She did not even trouble to mock or laugh at him, nor would she weep. She seemed dazed and bewildered, and he, infuriated against her, said things which rankled in his conscience for years afterwards.

"Does a promise mean nothing to you--a promise--an oath itself? Were you, parrot-like, merely echoing my words when you swore to stay by me until--" his voice broke--"death?"

Still she made him no denial, and her silence maddened him, and drove him on with his bitter arraignment.

"What your object has been I fail to see, but you cannot deny that you have laid yourself out, have used every effort, every art and wile, of which you are mistress, to make me believe in you. And I--I--like a blind, deluded fool--ah, Yuki--there is something wrong, some hideous mistake somewhere. You have some secret, some trouble. Be frank with me. Can't you see--understand how I--I am suffering?"

She roused herself with an effort, but her words were pitifully conventional. She apologized for the trouble and noise she had brought into his house.

"You have not answered me!" he cried. "What was your intention? Did you intend to leave me? You shall answer me that!"

"It was bedder so," she said, and her voice fainted. She could speak no further.

"Then such was your intention!" He could hardly believe her words.

XI

THE NIGHTINGALE

When Love lives after Trust is dead, then peace is an unknown quantity. A constraint that was baffling in its intense hopelessness now hedged up between these two. Yuki grew thin and wistful. Her whole attitude became one of pitiful attempted conciliation and humility, which with bitter suspicion her husband took to be confusion and guilt. Had she even affected somewhat of her old light-heartedness and attempted to win his forgiveness by her old audacious wiles, her husband would have forgotten and forgiven everything, glad of an excuse to renew the old close comradeship with her. But she made no such attempt.

She had acquired a peculiar fear of her husband, and unconsciously shrank from him, as though dreading to bring down on herself his further displeasure. She kept away from him as much as she could, though at times she made spasmodic, frantic efforts to assume her old light-heartedness, but these efforts were usually followed by passionate outbursts of tears, when she had drawn the shoji between them, and was once more alone with her own inward thoughts, whatever they were.

Meanwhile her husband kept the watch of a jailer over her. He was convinced that she was waiting for a chance to leave him, and this he was determined to frustrate. She had raised in him a feeling of the intensest bitterness, which amounted almost to antagonism towards her. And still beneath all this resentment and bitterness a tenderness and yearning for her threatened to strangle and overpower all other feeling. Her apparent fear of him hurt him terribly, and caused him distractedly at times to question whether he had been as kind to her as he might have been. Then his mind would inevitably revert to the fact that she was planning to leave him, and his resentment would burn fiercer than ever.

By a common dread of the subject, both of them avoided alluding to it, and for this reason it weighed the heavier on their minds. He feared that any explanation she might attempt to make to him would only be some excuse put forward to reconcile him, and win his consent to the impossible situation which he instinctively knew she intended to consummate. She, on the other hand, watched wildly to turn the subject, dreading his wrath, which she was conscious was righteous.

To add to the gloom of their strained relations, a season of drizzly wet weather set in, which confined them to the house, and moreover Yuki was grieving and pining over the loss of a favorite nightingale that had made its home in the tall bamboo out in the midnight garden of their little home. Jack was misanthropic and cynical, restless as it is possible for a man to be under such galling circumstances, yearning nevertheless for things to be as they had been between him and his wife.

One night, at dusk, after an exceptionally sad and chilly meal in-doors, Jack had come out alone, and was trying to soothe his senses with a fragrant cigar. Instinctively he was waiting for his wife. He missed her if she was absent from his side but a moment. Suddenly out of the gloaming soared out one long, thrilling note of sheer ecstasy and bliss, that quivered and quavered a moment, and then floated away into the maddest peals of melody, ending in a sob that was excruciating in its intense humanness. The nightingale had returned!

He sprang to his feet, and, trembling by the veranda rail, stared outward into the darkness. And then? Yuki came out from the shadows of their garden, and under the light of the moon, beneath their small balcony, she looked up into his eyes, and murmured in a voice thrilled by an inward sob, so timid and meek, so beseeching and prayerful:

"I lige please you, my lord!"

"The nightingale!" he whispered, with hoarse emotion. "Did you hear it? It has returned!"

"Nay, my lord--tha's jus' me! I jus' a liddle echo!"

She had learned the voice of the nightingale.

* * * * *

With an exclamation of indescribable tenderness he drew her into his arms, and for a few moments at least all the misery and pain and constraint of the last few weeks between them passed away and gave place to all their pent-up love and loneliness.

As he held her close to him, he was conscious at first only of the fact that she loved him, that she was clinging to him with somewhat of her old abandon, and then he felt her hands upon his arms. He could almost see them shaking and trembling. She was attempting to release herself! Struggling to be free! All of a sudden he released her, and stood breathing hard, his arms folded across his breast, waiting for her to do or say something to him.

She did not move. She stood before him, with her head down; and then her blue eyes lifted, and timidly, appealingly, they beseeched his own. She started to speak, stammered only a few incoherent words, and then, with a half-sob, she unsteadily crossed the room and left him alone.

Two days later, upon their household gloom came word from Taro Burton, announcing that he had arrived in Tokyo. Jack rushed off to meet him, telling Yuki he expected an old friend, and would bring him home that evening.

XII

TARO BURTON

It may be that Jack Bigelow first awoke to the fact that for months he had been literally living in a dream-world when he saw his old college-chum, Taro Burton--the same dear, old, grave Taro! He rushed up to him in the old boyish fashion, wringing his hands with unaffected delight.

The past dream-months rolled for the moment from his memory, and Jack was once again the happy up-to-date American boy.

Taro had been delayed in America, he now told the other frankly, on account of the failure of his people to send him passage money until about a month ago. He had a few hardships to recount and some messages to deliver from mutual friends, and then he wanted to know all about Jack. Why had he failed to visit his people as promised? How much of the country had he seen? Why were his letters so few and far between?

Jack Bigelow laughed shortly. "Burton, old man," he said, "I've been dead to everything in Japan--in the world, in fact--save one entrancing subject."

"Yes?" The other was curious. "And that is--?"

"My wife."

"Your wife!" Taro stopped short. They were crossing the main street of Tokyo on foot.

"Yes," said the other, laughing boyishly, all his resentment against the girl lost and forgiven for the time being.

"And so you did it, after all?" said the other, with slow, bitter emphasis. His friend, then, was little different from other foreigners who marry only to desert.

"Did what?"

"Got a wife."

"Got a wife! Why, man, she came to me. She's a witch, the sun-goddess herself. She's had me under her spell all these months. She has hypnotized me."

"And still has you under her spell?"

"I am wider awake to-day," said Jack, soberly.

"And soon," said Taro, "you will be still wider awake, and then--then it will be time for her to awaken."

"No!" said Jack, sharply, with bitter memory. "She has no heart whatever. She likes to pretend--that is all."

"How do you mean?"

"Simply that we've both been pretending and acting--I to myself, she to me; she trying to make me believe it was all real to her, at any rate these last two months; I trying to delude myself into believing in her, which was more than my conceit was good for, after all. Just when I was sure of her, I accidentally discovered that she was preparing to desert me altogether."

"She apparently has more sense than some of them," said Taro. "Her head rules her heart."

"Oh, entirely," Jack agreed, quickly, thinking of the money she had coaxed from him in the past.

"And you," Taro turned on him, "have you come out all right?"

"Perfectly!" the other laughed with forced assurance and airiness that deceived Taro, who was somewhat credulous by nature. "It wasn't for a lifetime, you know," he added.

His reply was distasteful to the high moral sense of Taro Burton--more, it pained him, for it brought to him a sudden and deep disappointment in his friend. He changed the subject, and tried to talk about his own people. He was in a great hurry to go home, and would linger but a day in Tokyo. He had arrived sooner than they expected him. He was hungry for a sight of his little sister and mother--they were all he had in the world.

Jack's spirits were dampened for the moment, as he had expected his friend to remain with him for a few days. However, he got Taro's consent to accompany him to his home for dinner that evening, in order to meet the "Sun-goddess."

* * * * *

Taro was ushered with great ceremony into the quaint zashishi, which was supposed to be entirely Japanese, and was in reality wholly American, despite the screens and mats and vases. Jack ran up-stairs to prepare his wife to meet his friend.

The girl was panically dressing in her best clothes. The maid had brushed her hair till it glistened. Long ago her husband had peremptorily forbidden her the use of oil for the purpose of darkening or smoothing it, so it now shone a rich bronze black and curled entrancingly around her little ears and neck. She needed no color for her lips or cheeks; this also her husband had forbidden her to use. She looked like the picture of the sun-goddess in some old fairy print, her eyes dancing and shining with excitement, her cheeks very red and rosy. She was irresistible, thought her husband, as he held her at arm's length. Then, to her great mortification and chagrin, he lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her downstairs. And thus they entered the room, the girl blushing and struggling in his arms.

Taro Burton was standing tall and erect, his back to the light. He was very grave, in spite of his friend's mirth, and, as Jack set the girl on the floor, he took a step forward to meet her, bowing ceremoniously in Japanese fashion.

Yuki stood up, straightened her crumpled gown, and hung her head a moment.

"Yuki, this is my friend, Mr. Burton."

She raised her head with a quick, terrified start, and then instantaneously hers and Taro's eyes met, and each recoiled and shrank backward, their eyes matching each other in the intense startled look of horror.

The man's face had taken on the color of death, and he was standing, immovable and silent, almost as if he were an image of stone. The girl sank to the floor in a confused heap, shivering and sobbing.

Jack turned from her to Taro, and then back again to the crouching girl. She was creeping on her knees towards Taro, but the man, having found the power of movement, went backward away from her, aged all in a moment.

He tried to turn his sick eyes from her, but they clung, fascinated as is the needle by the pole.

And then Jack's voice, hoarse with a fear he could not understand, broke in:

"Burton, what is the matter?"

Suddenly the girl sprang to her feet and rushed to Taro, sobbing and entreating in Japanese, but the terrible figure of the man remained immovable. Jack pulled her forcibly from him.

"Burton, dear old friend, what is it?"

The other pushed his hands from him with almost a blow.

"She is my sister! Oh, my God!"

Jack Bigelow felt for an instant as if the life within him had been stopped. Then he grasped at a chair and sank down dazed.

As though to break up the terrible silence, the girl commenced to laugh, but her laughter was terrible, almost unearthly. The man in the chair covered his face with his hands; the other made a movement towards her as if he would strike her. But she did not retreat: nay, she leaned towards him. And her laughter, loud and discordant, sank low, and then faded in a tremulous sob.

She put out her little speaking, beseeching hands, and "Sayonara!" she whispered softly. Then there was stillness in the room, though the echoes seemed to repeat "Sayonara," "Sayonara," and again "Sayonara," and that means not merely "Farewell," but the heart's resignation: "If it must be."

Jack and Taro were alone together, neither breaking by a word the tragic sadness of that terrible silence. It was the coming into the room of the maid that recalled them to life. Twilight was settling. She brought the lighted andon and set it in the darkening room.

Jack got up slowly. The stupor and horror of it all were not gone from him, but he crossed to the other man, and looked into his dull, ashen face.

"My God! Burton, forgive me," he said, brokenly; "I am a gentleman. I will fix it all right. She is my wife, and all the world to me. We can remarry if you wish, and I swear to protect her with all the love and homage I would give to any woman who became my wife."

"Yes, you must do that," said the other, with weak half-comprehension. "But where is she?"

"Where is she?" Jack repeated, dazedly. They had forgotten her departure. A dread of her possible loss possessed and stupefied Jack, and Taro was half delirious.

"We must look for her at once," said Jack.

They called to her, and all over the house and through the grounds they searched for her, their lanterns scanning the dark shadows under the trees in the little garden; but only the autumn winds, sighing in the pine-trees, echoed her singing minor notes, and mocked and numbed their senses.

"She must have gone home," said the husband.

"We must go there at once," said the brother.

"It will be all right, Burton, dear old friend. Trust me; you know me well enough for that."

Taro paused, and turned on him burning eyes, in which friendliness had been replaced by a look that spoke of stern and awful judgment. "Otherwise," he began, but paused; he went on in a cold hard voice, "I was going to say, I will kill you."

XIII

IN WHICH TWO MEN LEARN OF A SISTER'S SACRIFICE

Jack Bigelow's usually sunny face was bleached to the ashiness of fear and despair. He was so nervous that he could not keep still a moment at a time, but would get up and pace the length of the car, only to return and look with eyes that attested the heartache within at the other man, silent and grim. Taro seemed the calmer, but well the younger man knew that beneath that subdued exterior slumbered a fire that needed but a breath to be turned into avenging fury.

At last they reached their destination. The little town once again! But this night Jack was not alone. There was no star or moon overhead to lighten their pathway; a dull, drizzly, sleety rain was falling. In silence they left the car; in silence plodded through the mud of the road and the damp grass of the field beyond. The little garden gate creaked on its hinges as they went through. They saw the dim outlines of the old palace before them, with its wide balconies and sloping roofs. Half-way up the garden was the family pond, freshened by a hidden spring, and the little winding brook which wound hither and thither showed how it emptied into the bay beyond. There was even a tiny boat moored on a toy-like island in the centre of the pond.