Part 6

He did not reply, so obsessed was he still with the vision of her loveliness. Throughout the golden afternoon he lay there watching her every little movement, her slightest change of expression; thrilling under the touch of her hands, the sound of her voice; obeying her slightest request; permitting her to serve him as if he were a babe and she his mother.

Gradually the murmuring of the crickets in the grass, the soft chirping of the birds, even the babbling of the brook, the sighing of the gentle breezes seemed to soften their tone to one concerted murmuring lullaby. A veil crept gently over the sky, shutting out the sun and its light.

She put a pillow of pine needles beneath his head, and she covered him over with a downy, silken mantle that smelled of temple incense and was gorgeous beyond words with the golden embroidery of some sacred order.

And presently as he drowsed deliciously under the warm fragrant silk, he felt her stirring at his feet, and her tired little voice came whispering to him as if from very far away:

“Sayonara, Tojin-san! Imadzuka!” (Now we rest).

XIX

ONE does not always count the gilded days of summer in the mountains. It might have been a month, a week, or a few days in which the Tojin-san and the fox-woman wandered over Atago Yama. But the season of Little Heat passed into that of the Great Heat, and they did not know it.

The mountains were cool; there was a green wonder world about them. Soft shadows flickered across the sun-burned paths; intangible breezes fanned them with their scented breaths. They trod a carpeted paradise that was all beauty, all harmony. They felt like the birds which blew over them, or came shyly, timorously at her calling to share her morsel of rice and berries.

Even had he desired to do so, the Tojin could not have found his way back to the city. Seven-eighths of the province is mountain land, and she had led him over paths she alone knew, and indeed had made—narrow, hidden little paths that traced their unending way in and out the densest portion of the wooded mountains.

They passed no humblest lodge, no smallest temple even, though he knew that there were many in the mountains, and the music of their bells reached them at times like the tingling call of a familiar voice very far away.

She knew every secret corner of the mountains. The purest springs, hidden pools and lakelets, caves of unbelievable wonder and beauty, she showed now to the Tojin-san.

Clouds of sacred pigeons followed her as if they knew her. They were of her own Temple Tokiwa, she told him, and were part of her heritage from the ancestors of her mother who had founded the temple. She knew them all—every single bird, so she told him proudly; knew, too, why they were wandering thus far from home. They were seeking her, their guardian, who had been gone for so many, many days.

For the first time she recoiled from him when he suggested that they utilize the birds for food. Up till then they had depended entirely upon the seemingly inexhaustible stores of rice she seemed to have hidden in a hundred different places in the mountains, and upon the fish trapped in the streams, the fruit and wild vegetables which were plentiful enough. She had never dreamed of the pigeons as an addition to their diet, and her expression was quite tragic and piteous.

“They are of the temple,” reverently she said. “The gods love them, and I—I may not eat the forbidden meat.”

“Forbidden meat?”

She looked at him timidly with a new expression in her face. It was as if a flame had crept into her eyes and set its touch upon her lips. She had crossed her hands upon her bosom.

“I, too, am Ni-no ama, like unto my mother,” she softly said. “For both our sin I got mek thad atonement unto Buddha!”

He regarded her in a spell-bound silence. There was something about her words, her actions, withal their simplicity, that held a sacredness. She, against whom the hostile hands of an entire Buddhist community had been raised, a priestess of the Buddha! It was impossible, preposterous! She had been but a child when her parents were killed. What could they have taught her thus early?

She seemed to realize from his silence his doubts, and suddenly she stepped back, raising her hands high above her head, bringing the tips of the fingers together. A moment she stood with her face upraised, her eyes closed.

“For you, oh Tojin-san, I will danze! It is as my mother have tich me the danze for the gods. Haiken suru!” (Adoringly look).

From side to side she swayed, her small, exquisite hands moving in the languorous motions of the dance. Never in even the greatest temples of Kioto or Nikko had he seen a priestess perform as she was doing. He thought of the glittering robes of the hundred nuns chanting their splendid ritual before some gorgeous altar, of their impassive, stony faces, their ebony hair, their narrow, inscrutable eyes. But she, with her unbound hair of gold, her bosom and face of snow!

Yes, they were right, they of Fukui! She was an incarnation of the Sun Goddess, tripping like the Spring upon the earth, and inspiring in the hearts and eyes of all who saw her sensations of adoration, and of those who dared not look, of fear—fear and hatred!

She had stolen the face and vestments of the goddess, so they had said; but her soul was that of a fox!

There burst upon him suddenly a realization of the impassable gulf between them, and with the knowledge came an overwhelming sense of revolution, the mad, irresistible passion of the primitive man who knows only his desires.

But a moment later she was at his feet, her pure, trusting face smiling appealingly up at him.

XX

NOW came the Season of White Dew. The days were unbelievably beautiful. The first russet touch of the autumn barely cast its shadow upon the green about them, the yellow tints of leaf and flower mellowed into a dull crimson glory.

But the nights turned chill, and in the early mornings there was the heavy print of the frosted dew upon the ground.

Unconsciously they quickened their lagging footsteps, and turned into shorter paths that would bring them sooner to Sho Kon Sha, the cemetery of “Soul Beckoning Rest,” which was to be the end of their journey. This was her home, so she said—the gardens of the temples of her ancestors. Only a few hill-lengths from the cemetery was the Temple Tokiwa, deserted, almost in ruins, but—her home!

There her parents had lived—and died! Here she had been happy in her solitary childhood, hidden and sheltered by fearful but loving parents. Here her mother had taught her to dance for the gods and entreat them with her prayers; here her father had told her of another God, another heaven. After her parents were gone, the aged temple had been her only sure place of refuge, a sanctuary wherein even the stoutest of hunters dared not penetrate; for the wrathful gods still stared with their dreadful eyes upon the affronted altar, and at the very portals the demons Ni-o, guarding the sacred gates, might no longer be propitiated.

Now confidently, happily, with the pride of a child thither she was leading the Tojin, eager to show him this beautiful shelter she wished to share with him forever. But, ah! how sweet had been the mountain paths this summer, and why need they hasten? The restless, vindictive little city was very far away, and the fox-woman trod upon territory all her own, hers by right of every instinct, and by the very law of the land, did she but know it, which made her proper heir to her ancestors’ property.

Now they were very near to the temple, and soon she would spread forth her arms and say to the Tojin:

“Behold, dear exalted one, here is my honorable home. Condescend to step upon its floor.”

And in her mind she fancied the face of the Tojin would shine with a great light of happiness.

Now he said to her dreamily, as he followed her through a shadowy by-path which crept into a sunlit forest of dripping willow-trees:

“Some day I shall awake. It cannot be true that I am here with you alone in these wild mountains, wandering along in this aimless bliss!”

Because she put back her hand, and he took it perforce in his own, he continued in his low, wooing voice:

“And when I wake, little Tama, I will know the truth of what you once said to me: that our dreams are the most beautiful of all.”

She stopped and turned back to him, with the tall foliage and grass almost burying her in its thickness:

“You god no udder dream more beautiful?” she questioned wistfully.

“No other,” he answered softly. “Have you?”

“No. This is mos’ bes’ dream of all—jost be ’lone wiz you ad those mountains! Thas bes’ dream in all the whole worl’, Tojin-san!”

In the silence that fell between them, and as he still clasped her hands, a momentary shadow flitted across her face, and she stood wide-eyed, as though she saw a vision.

“Alas!” she said in such a mournful tone: “Dreams like unto thad mist. Now here so sweet, so—so beyond our touch. Next hour gone—gone perhaps foraever! Nod even the gods know where they gone!”

He scarcely knew his own voice, so full of a deep encompassing tenderness and yearning was it:

“Our dream is to be different from others,” he said solemnly. “It will never end. Not for a lifetime, little Tama!”

“It surely goin’ last foraever ad this worl’?” she asked with sceptical wistfulness.

“If you wish it,” said he huskily.

* * * * *

When the sun was dipping down in the west, and but half its red face showed above the shadowy hills of Hakusan, the fox-woman felt the fears seize her in their throttling grip again.

She stood like one under some spell, her back against the trunk of a giant oak, her hair like a veritable aureole above her.

Down in a little ravine, but a few feet from where she stood, the Tojin-san was gathering dried sticks to build their evening fire. She could hear him as he moved from point to point. Sometimes he whistled softly to himself, sometimes hummed vague snatches of song.

Farther away—at a distance beyond her sight, even if she could have seen—she knew, with that intuitive certainty of the blind, that others were passing over their tracks.

Her hand sought her heart, and clung to it, as if to stop its beating. Fear lent sudden wings to her feet, as with a little gasping cry she fled downward to the hollow where the Tojin labored. She was beside him before he had heard or seen her, and now in surprise he looked at her white little face of anguish.

“Tama!”

“You speag right,” she said, and could not smile with her white lips so tremulous, “thas only—beautiful dream. Thad mist gone—away!”

“Dream! No, it’s a beautiful reality. We are here, together, and nothing in the world shall ever tear us apart again.”

“Nothing in the worl’,” she repeated.

Suddenly she covered her eyes, as if the light pained them. From behind her little sheltering hands came her voice, still with that note of pleading terror:

“They come—tear you ’way from me now, Tojin-san! All the way—how many miles I kinnod say—I see them! In my heart I know! Ad my ears I hear! Those feet—ah, cannot you hear them also, kind Tojin-san? Listen!”

She put up her hands, and they stood in a silence, straining for the sound that only she could hear, or believed she did.

He knew she was right. Her instinctive sense was keener than mere sight. Simply, with a tender strength that could not be resisted, he took her little hand in his.

“Come, Tama. We must reach Sho Kon Sha to-night.”

“Yaes,” she murmured, and now there was a note of plaintive weariness in her voice. “I thought she said the gods were good, an’ that perhaps they goin’ forgit us here in those mountains.”

She sighed and moved along step by step beside him.

“Now I know,” she said, “I god new visitor ad my heart!”

“What is it, little Tama?”

“Fear,” she said, “—for you!”

“What blessed nonsense!”

“You are Tojin, like unto my father,” she said, in a voice of anguish, “and oh, all those days my life how I kin forgit what happen unto my father!”

“That was many years ago,” he said. “It is a New Japan we live in to-day, and I have friends—even in Fukui!”

XXI

A NEW impulse drew them now more closely together. Side by side, pressed closely to each other, they travelled swiftly toward Sho Kon Sha. They dared not wait to eat, to sleep, to rest but a moment, and the night found them still moving onward.

They spoke scarcely at all to each other; but she rested like a child in the curve of his arm, her head against his breast. Once she sighed, ever so faintly—a little breath of weariness that escaped her almost unconsciously.

Instantly he stopped, lifted her face in his hands, and, in the dark woods, anxiously examined it.

“You are crying, Tama.”

“No-o,” she said.

“But your face is wet.”

“It is the dew upon my face,” she said.

Again they moved onward. About them towered the giant trees, silhouetted against the starlit skies. Sometimes as the ascent became more steep, they clung to outjutting shrubs and bushes, and once when he fancied her footsteps slightly dragged, he lifted her bodily in his arms and carried her for a space. But she begged to be permitted to walk. There was still a great distance to go. He must not be hampered by her burden. She wished to help—not hinder him.

The night grew more still, and a penetrating chill descended about them. He drew off his coat, to put about her; but she showed him where she had strapped to her back, with the string of her obi, the quilt. He had thought it part of her sash, and was all compunction that he had permitted her to carry even so slight a load. She laughed in her little tremulous way, and challenged him to untie the knot. In the dark his big, clumsy fingers picked at it in vain. Again she laughed, caressingly, with a teasing tenderness, and she drew the little bundle round in front. It fell at her feet in a soft, silken heap.

He was for wrapping it several times around her; but she insisted she would not proceed even the fraction of a step unless he shared the quilt with her. And so, his arm again about her, under the down-padded temple quilt, they moved along in the chilly darkness, defying with the new warmth of their hearts and bodies the cold of the autumn night.

Thus all night long they travelled, their feet moving mechanically, but never unwillingly, pausing not at all to look backward over the paths they had followed, but pressing steadily onward toward their goal. And the first pale streak of dawn found them climbing up the last height, within the very sight of Sho Kon Sha.

XXII

AS the laggard sun crept stealthily out of the east, a vision of extraordinary loveliness burst upon them. There, within but the length of a single hill and field from them, the ragged peaks of the old Temple Tokiwa raised a lordly head above the sun-flecked pines.

Stripped of its wealth, but not its beauty, showing the ravages of fire and assault upon its burnished walls, deserted, falling to the decay of neglected age, it was more compellingly majestic than any of the famous structures the Tojin-san had seen.

The approach was over terraces made of countless stone steps, many of them now loose and entirely overgrown with grass and weeds.

The pagoda was of seven stories, its crimson eaves still fringed with shattered wind-bells.

A swarm of pigeons flew about its eaves and roof, and came to meet them in a voluble, almost intelligent cloud. She ran to meet them, holding out her arms and calling and chirping to them. Dipping into her long sleeves, she brought up handfuls of the rice she had not forgotten to bring with her, and threw it generously among them. They pecked at her hand, seeking scoldingly for the food, and sprang upon her shoulders, her head, her hands. Presently, chidingly, she drove them off, shaking her sleeves at them and waving them back.

Now she drew the Tojin into the temple, pushing back its rusty doors with a careful hand.

He was struck with the empty majesty of the interior. It had been stripped of all its treasures, save the great stone images, which still sat inscrutably upon their thrones.

The altar was devoid of vestments; no twinkling lights or swinging censers burned their incense for the delectation of the gods; yet the penetrating odor of sandalwood and the dim fragrance of umegaku and the pine seemed to cling about the very air.

By the great main altar, the hideous old god Bunzura glared at them from beneath his sleepy eyelids, resting fatuously upon his haunches. Before him was the bar where once thousands of slips of paper containing written prayers, were tied. Now it was entirely stripped and glittered up in the face of the god in a mocking irony.

Tama moved softly by the image, pausing only to put her hand upon its knee, caressing it gently, as if with a conciliating, loving pat. It was evident she did not stand in awe of the gods. She had been born among them; knew them as part of her own silent family, exiled like herself upon the mountains.

She even put her cheek against the head of a peculiarly sinister-looking image, who was attended by three smaller gods. The Tojin-san recognized the group. They were in every Buddhist temple. Ema, the Lord of Hell, with his assistant torturers, one of which wielded a sword, one a pen, and one a priest’s staff.

Now she made her first prostration, bowing lowly, and slipping devoutly to her knees. She was in a little alcove wherein no image whatever was to be seen.

As he stood wondering why she should choose this empty corner for her prayers, he perceived upon the wall a curious print or scroll. It was a faded paper chromo, apparently many years old, the picture upon it almost obliterated, the ends of the paper showing charred marks where it must have once started to burn.

A curious sensation stirred within the Tojin, such a feeling as one might only know when in a land of gods one sees for the first time an emblem or a token of one’s own true God; for the tattered, shabby scroll upon the wall was a picture of the Christ!

She seemed to sense his emotion and excitement, and, still kneeling, raised a pair of smiling eyes:

“It is my father’s God,” she said. “To him, mos’ of all; I speag me my petitions.”

“Why to him?” he asked, deeply moved.

“Because,” she answered simply, “he, too, lig’ me, knew trobble. Thas why I speag to him my heart—account I _know_ he—listen!”

XXIII

THE Tojin-san took what measures he could for their future protection. An exploration throughout the seven-storied pagoda brought to light some old weapons—a rifle and a sword, once evidently her father’s. They were out of date, and in bad condition, but better than nothing, he decided.

As she had shown him a small exit in the rear, of which the outside of the pagoda gave no inkling, he decided to barricade the main entrance. This he did, after a gigantic effort, by piling several of the images before it until they effectually blocked the entrance. As their faces were turned outward he surmised their weird effect upon the marauders when, after forcing the doors, they should find themselves fronted with so formidable a guard as these.

No one, so she said, had stepped across the threshold since that frightful day when, in their fanatical hatred, the danka had murdered her parents.

She had always been kept hidden in one of the upper stories of the pagoda, and at this time no one had seen her save her parents.

On that day she had fled to the very roof in her first impulse of mortal terror; but even from there, with her ears covered by her hands, she had heard the cries of her father and her mother, and the wild, brutal, triumphant shouting of those who had killed them.

A strange sense of quiet came suddenly upon her. She crept stealthily, but fearlessly, back down the seven stories of the pagoda, and opened the great doors that gave ingress to the temple. There for the first time the people of Fukui saw her, standing like a flame upon the altar of the great Shaka, whither she had leaped from the door in a single bound.

Her hair was more glittering than the altar itself; her eyes, her skin were of a color no man in Fukui had ever seen before. She seemed to their dazzled eyes a vengeful spirit, whom the Lord Buddha had uplifted. They stood as if petrified, staring at her as she swayed before them on the very lap of the god. Then, with a concerted cry of superstitious fear and horror, they slunk from the temple, leaving her alone—with her dead!

As the Tojin looked about the great chamber, he felt himself almost unconsciously rehearsing that grim scene of the past. He knew why her hand had been set against the whole world, why she had terrified and defied her tormentors. Even now, as she repeated the tale to him her face was white and fixed.

“Now you know,” she said, “why I am call the fox-woman! Perhaps thas true ’bout me. Mebbe I am gagama!”

“You are not,” he said, “even in spite of them.”

She was silent, staring out before her in some abstracted trance. Suddenly she sighed:

“I nod lig’ udder people! Thas bedder nod come near unto me. I mek the trobble, and sometimes—the death for those who seek me! Down in Fukui perhaps already they have tol’ you of thad—Gihei Matsuyama?”

“They told me,” he said, “but I do not believe them.”

“Thas true,” she said, and there was a plaintive note of weariness in her voice. “He cum lig’ unto a storm that fall down from those sky wiz no warning. When I am come from my door, he there to await me. He speag my name sof’—kind—lig’ you, Tojin-san! No one aever speag unto me lig’ thad before. No! They bud cry to me those name and curse and throw the stone upon me! Bud he! he speag lig’ you augustness.

“Ad firs’ my heart stan’ still—it ’fraid. I thing of my father—my mother, and I am ’fraid he come kill me also. Then again he speag my name sof’ and kind, an’ I say ad my heart: ‘Thas god come veesit me!’ An’ so—an’ so—for him I mek the sacred danze. But when I am through, I know I mek meestake—thas nod god ad all! Thas jost man from Fukui!

“Then my heart laugh wizin me, and my feet carry me quick across those mountain. I loog nod bag, though I hear his voice, for I am thad ’fraid agin. I know nod why, Tojin-san.”

Her voice faltered. She went a timid step nearer to him, touched his hand questioningly with her own.

“The blind see wiz one thousand inner eye, bud, ah, alas! they see nod also for another. How could I know thad the foolish one would nod loog upon his steps?”

She shuddered and covered her face with her little shaking hands.

“How many days I waiting ad thad pool—jos’ waiting, Tojin-san, wiz the hope that mebbe some day he goin’ come bag out those water.”

“You must never think of it again,” he said. “You were entirely blameless.”

“Sometime I thing,” she went on wistfully, “thad mebbe those Fukui people right, an me?—I am truly a fox-woman. For see what trobble, what—death I mek for those who see me. Even for you, kind Tojin-san, alas! I mus’ bring you those pain!”

“No—that is not so,” he said.

“I know nod when or how firs’ I have hear of your comin’. They talk of nothing else at Fukui, an’ I am always listen, though they see me nod. Something tell me, when you come all those worl’ goin’ change for me! Thas’ why I wait, wait, all thad winter for your comin’.”