Part 7

A smile, wistful, yet joyous, crept over her lips.

“You din know,” she said, “thad firs’ day in Fukui, thad I too am ad your house to welcome you. Bud me? I am nod wizin thad house. I am out in thad snow. I kinnod speag unto you lig’ those others. I may nod even touch you honorable hand. Bud all same I know you are Tojin—lig’ unto my father! Oh, how glad—how joy I am! Though my feet, my hand, my nose, my honorable ears perish wiz those cold, still I am wait for you. When all those honorable exalted ones gone—then—then I, too, call you name! To-o-jin-san!”

She made a little shivering motion.

“Bud sup-pose I bring you also thad—thad death?”

“There is nothing to fear,” he said steadily, “and if there were, I am strong enough to face any peril with you at my side!”

“Oh, my mind travel bag on thad past! I hear again my father’s voice—my mother’s cry! I am toaching their beloved body. I am tek them in thad black night unto the Sho Kon Sha, and wiz these liddle hands, all alone, I am put them in their—grave! Tojin-san! Ah-h!”

She hid her face against his arm.

“If they should do to you the same!” she said.

“For myself I have no fear,” he said.

“Why nod leave me now?” she urged. “Go bag alone down those mountain. No one speag hard to you who so moch mek respect. Wiz me there is moch trobble, an’ mebbe worse!”

“Without you,” he said, “there is more trouble, and a deep pain—an aching void that could never again be filled. With you here alone, cut off from all the world, holding your little hands in my own, looking into your face, why, even facing death, I am content—happier than I had ever dreamed it possible to be.”

“Thas beautiful word you speag,” she said. “Bud if the gods—”

She folded her hands across her breast and closed her eyes in prayer.

“Temmei itashikata kore maku!” she whispered lowly. (From the decree of heaven there is no escape.)

XXIV

THE rapping on the temple doors was not loud or menacing, but it was insistent, questioning. The Tojin-san drew the fox-woman to the winding staircase which led up the seven stories to the tower above.

Once before Tama had been sent up yonder. Then she had gone willingly, even frantically. Now she made no movement up the stairs. Instead, she turned her back upon them, and faced the Tojin fairly. Upon her face a smile shone luminously as a star. Simply, steadily, she laid her hands in those of the man.

For a moment he held them in his own, his eyes fixed yearningly upon her face, and even while the knocks resounded louder upon the door the clouds cleared from his mind.

Looking into those uplifted, adoring eyes he forgot all else. A sound that was half a sob, half a passionate cry escaped him. He reached out irresistibly and took her into his arms. For the first time his lips hungrily, passionately found her own, and clung in a kiss that over all the years of a lifetime neither he nor she might ever forget. They saw nothing, heard nothing, felt only that close, encompassing embrace that made them one indeed.

Then upon their dream at last broke the lowly calling, almost whispering voice of the one without. They drew apart, though their eyes and hands still clung unconsciously together.

“Sensei. Sensei! Sensei!”

It was the voice of the student, Junzo!

With a low cry, the Tojin was at the doors, wrenching and tearing the great images away with the strength of a veritable giant. At last the doors were reached, and these in turn thrust aside.

There, with their anxious, faithful young faces pale with apprehension in regard to his fate, were his three loyal boys, Junzo, Higo, and Nunuki. They fell literally upon him with tears and shouts of joy. They devoured him with their youthful embraces. Higo clung to one hand, Junzo to the other; and at the back of him Nunuki hovered, seeking to examine the wound upon his neck where the sword of the Daimio’s high officer had pierced. It was healed, so well had the fox-woman cared for it.

Now, step by step, slowly, uncertainly, she crept toward them, white-faced, wild-eyed, every nerve in her thrilling, and reaching out blindly for the arms that had held her, the lips that had clung to her own. But she stopped with her tragic little face clasped on either side with her hands as the joyous voices of the students reached her. They were telling the Tojin of the coming of his friends to Fukui; of the return of the Echizen Prince; of the punishments to be meted out to those who had attacked him; the rewards for those who had defended.

“Even we,” said Higo, with boyish pride, “are to have our due reward, for we have honorably been chosen as the body-guard of the Be-koku-jin (American), who has come to Fukui to minister to the unfortunate one, and to take her, if your excellency is willing, to the capital.”

“The unfortunate one?” repeated the Tojin dully. “To whom do you refer?”

The boys stared at him in round-eyed amazement.

The fox-woman of course! Who else? That unfortunate one to whom the whole heart of Fukui had melted like the snows of her native mountains in the Spring. It was the work of the Tojin himself that had accomplished the miracle; for he had pointed out to them all the absurdity, the wrong of the ancient superstition, which had been kept alive chiefly throughout the years by the hatred of those who were ignorant or fanatic.

Now the Prince himself was convinced a wrong had been committed, and Fukui was taking its cue from him. The friend of the Tojin coming at such a time had also had its effect upon the people; and now the remorseful ones were prepared to atone for the past if that were possible. It was the suggestion of the Be-koku-jin, however, that the girl should be taken out of Fukui.

Her history had created a sensation among her father’s race in Tokio, and there they were eager, anxious to receive her among them. But it was for the Tojin alone to say. The change of heart in Fukui was complete. There was nothing further to fear.

“Even I,” said Nunuki with Spartan-like courage, “am prepared to look upon her. We have learned from the tongue of our own Prince and from the Be-koku-jin that many females of your race have her skin and hair and eye-color. Is it not so, honored teacher?”

But the Tojin-san was silent. His face had turned strangely gray; his arms hung limply by his side. He was staring out before him fixedly as though he saw a vision.

XXV

“BUD speag to me as before! Touch me wiz those hands—those lips! Adoringly look upon me! My honorable heart and body are cold. Condescend to warm them!”

She had followed him down a declivity, unmindful of the students who pressed with their grave, wondering young faces closely about her.

She could not understand why now no longer she might travel beside him, his sheltering arm supporting her; why she might not even take his hand, or rest her wet cheek against his sleeve. In the three days they had been upon the journey back to Fukui, he had seemed to avoid her, almost as if he feared her.

Once he tried to explain, stupidly, and with a forced coldness.

Things were very different now. When alone, they were like lost children and the silent woods and mountains had put strange dreams and fancies into their heads, so that they had wandered along in a blind, gilded delirium. Now they had awakened. They must go back to the city, where they would be like other people, and where, shortly, their ways must separate. It was for her good. She would understand some day.

She must forget the mountain days, or think of them only as a dream that had vanished, as she herself had predicted it would, like the mist.

She was very stupid, very stubborn, pathetically dense. She did not wish their paths to separate—she would not have it so. No, though they tore her from him by force. She would return to him. Did he not recall the words he had spoken when he declared the dream would never end unless she wished it. She did not wish it. She never would. Patiently, persistently she entreated him, until he was beside himself and felt his strength of mind weakening, and in desperation turned to his students for help. He bade them explain to her more clearly than he could do the new life she was soon to lead—of the change in fortunes that had come to her.

Manfully, but in the bungling, uncertain language of boys they tried to obey him. The unfortunate one, as unconsciously they called her, was soon to see, promised the gentle Junzo. There was to be an honorable operation upon her eyes. These western wizards of science, said the Japanese student, had given sight to hundreds in their own land. The Tojin, himself once a doctor, had diagnosed her trouble as an invisible cataract of a congenital nature, not uncommon nor difficult of removal. He had sent for a great and eminent surgeon who was sojourning in the capital. He had come all the way to Fukui, at the bidding of the Tojin. He was a miracle-worker, whose fame encircled the globe, said the boy with a kindling eye.

A hundred friends awaited her in Tokio, so Higo courteously informed her. They were eager and anxious to receive her—Japanese as well as foreigners. To them Tama was to be sent; for Fukui had been unkind to her, and she would be happier away from it. She would understand by-and-by, they promised her.

She listened patiently, but densely, as if what they told her but half reached her understanding. That she was to be sent away into some distant country—very far from the Temple Tokiwa and Atago Yama—an immeasurable distance away from the Tojin-san—this alone she comprehended.

Her mother had taught her that the life of a Buddhist nun must be one long act of expiation for sins and faults committed in some former state. She tried dazedly to conceive of the terrible crimes of which she must have once been guilty that now she was to be punished so dreadfully; and she reached out blindly for the only comfort possible for her in the world now—the voice, the touch of the Tojin-san, who had held her in his arms!

They travelled by the public roads of the mountain that she had so carefully avoided. They passed the nights as guests of the priests of the mountain temples, who read the letters of the Prince of Echizen, which the students proudly exhibited, and with courteous and profound obeisances welcomed the travellers, even regarding the fox-woman with eyes that were more speculative than resentful. Perhaps they alone of Echizen had best understood this little creature who had lived among them, yet beyond their pale, for so long; for though they had not sought her, neither had they persecuted her, as they could readily have done. Indeed for years she had practically subsisted upon the food she surreptitiously obtained from the temples—some of which was unostentatiously placed as if prepared for her.

The journey back to Fukui was long and tortuous. Summer was gone completely. The days were cold; wind and rain came about them and drove them constantly into refuges of one sort and another; but after many days they came at last to the foot-hills of the mountains, passed through these into the pine woods, through bamboo groves and camphor groves, till they came to the Winged Foot River, which brought them to their destination.

XXVI

THE last courteous and obsequious emissary of the Prince of Echizen had bowed himself out of the apartment of the Tojin-san, having sonorously delivered the speeches of regret of their master.

The room was piled with the rich gifts sent by the now soon departing Prince, who was to take office directly under his imperial master. Now he was sojourning in Echizen merely for the purpose of setting his affairs in order, and to do what lay in his power to set his former vassals in the new path they were to follow. Because he was the soul of chivalry and of justice, he was righting the wrong and slight paid to the foreigner he had himself invited to his province.

The Tojin was inexpressibly weary. One deputation after another of the citizens of Fukui had been arriving all day. They had commenced coming before daybreak, for the earlier a Japanese makes a call the greater he expresses his respect.

Delegations from the college presented petitions asking him to continue in Fukui, despite the change of government, and promising to make his stay there as happy and prosperous as lay within their power. He listened to them all a bit grimly, making no effort to emulate their politeness. Through the new interpreter who had entered his service, he merely signified that he would take the matter under consideration. It could not be decided at once.

At last he found himself alone with the Be-koku-jin, as they called his American friend, who was in fact what the Japanese youth had said, an eminent surgeon, with whom the Tojin had once been associated.

He was a small, but very dignified and important individual, whose most noticeable features were his bright eyes, which twinkled incongruously beneath a pair of fierce and uncompromising eyebrows. In his well-fitting English clothes he was as out of place in the Tojin’s great chamber as was the awkward furniture the deluded Genji Negato had chosen for his master.

Now he wandered about the room examining this and that article, and fingering the gifts brought by the Japanese with anticipatory fingers. His eyes, however, turned constantly toward his friend, who, now that they were for the first time alone together, had nothing to say.

The American surgeon was blessed with more than an ordinary intelligence, and he had learned a great deal from the students. A man seemingly absolutely wrapped up in his work, he had for years secretly cherished what he had become to believe was positively a vice. He was in fact as sentimental as a girl. When supposedly he was deeply engrossed in the study of some scientific work, locked in his study with stern orders without that on no account was he to be disturbed, he was in fact reading some love-story—or some romance of adventure usually enjoyed by very youthful persons.

Now he felt himself, as it were, part of a moving captivating drama cut out of life itself. No written page had ever absorbed him quite like this love-story of the fox-woman and his friend the Tojin-san.

There was something appallingly tragic in that little listening, waiting figure crouching there in the hall against the Tojin’s door! The Be-koku-jin knew very well indeed what it was this forlorn little creature of the mountains wanted; he knew, too, why it was that the Tojin believed he could not give it to her.

He had come to Fukui chiefly because he had been unable to resist the lure of the story of the fox-woman as the Tojin-san had written it to him. Now here he had stumbled upon a more entrancing story still.

He looked at his friend with his bright, clear eyes, and it occurred to him that there was something wonderfully attractive about the man’s face, grim and stony as was its expression, marked and marred as were the features. The mouth was that of the revolutionist, grim, unyielding, almost bitter; but the eyes were those of the poet, full of vague dreams and tenderness. The Be-koku-jin, assuming his most professional and uninterested manner, drew up a chair before his friend, and settled his plump little body comfortably into its depths.

“What are your plans?” he asked abruptly.

The other did not look up.

“That depends on you,” he said quietly.

“Your refusal or acceptance of the position here depends on me?”

“Absolutely.”

“What do you mean?”

The Tojin-san leaned forward in his chair. His eyes were no longer dull, there was a flame behind them.

“If you are successful—I remain here, in Fukui.”

“Ah. Er—you mean as regards the operation?”

“Yes.”

The Be-koku-jin regarded the tips of his fingers, which he had brought precisely together, reflectively. He purposely avoided the other’s almost pleading glance. He cleared his throat gruffly, and frowned as he crossed and recrossed his legs.

“Why stay in any event?” he demanded shortly, and put up his hand before the other could answer. “Your attitude is sentimental moonshine. You have nothing to fear—even if the operation is successful. I don’t agree with—er—what you have upon your mind.”

“That is because you do not understand,” said the Tojin wearily. “She is indeed what these people have imagined her—a creature almost of another world. She has lived only in her exquisite imagination, and because she is so beautiful and good and pure, to her all things too are fair. I was the first to treat her humanly. She has made me something in her mind’s eye that it is preposterous even to think of. To her I—_I_—think of it!—am a thing of beauty—a flawless, perfect god!”

He glared in a fierce sort of anguish at his friend, then stood up suddenly and began pacing the floor in long irregular strides, to bring up suddenly again before the other.

“I do not wish her to see me—at all! It will not be necessary. I ask you to take her for me to Tokio. There my sister will meet you, and take her with her to America.” He smiled for the first time. “At least I can do that for her. I claimed the right to care for her, and refused even the smallest help from Echizen and others. I have means—other than my work; and what I have will be hers. I want no one else to do for her,” he added jealously. “I can give her everything she needs or may want.”

The Be-koku-jin was still studying his finger-tips, and there was a curious expression upon his face. Suddenly he looked up directly at the Tojin-san.

“Why have the operation?”

The Tojin-san had turned very pale, but his voice was steady and strong.

“I have been through all that, my friend—have wrestled, tortured my very soul threshing it out. That’s the solution of a coward. I am a man!”

Said the other:

“I decline to perform the operation.”

The Tojin-san stared at him as if he could not believe his ears. Then he brought his hand so heavily down upon the other’s shoulder that the smaller man jumped under the touch.

“You prefer to leave it to my bungling hands? Is that what you came to Fukui to tell me?”

“As I said,” said the other, wincing still under the Tojin’s hand, “in any event you exaggerate the effect upon her. Just as you say—you are a man!”

He stood up abruptly.

“You will do it?” demanded the Tojin hoarsely.

“Yes,” said the other, blinking angrily, “I suppose I must.”

He glared for a moment at his friend and then for the first time permitted himself to show some emotion in his voice and expression:

“We’ll fight it out between us. Sight or no sight, I know you will be the same to her!”

“It is not alone my physical deformity,” said the Tojin, steadily, “but the fact that I am old enough to be her father. I have no longer the splendid courage of youth to take her in spite of my misfortune. ‘Old Grind,’ that was what they called me, even in America!”

“Stuff!” grunted the other. “‘Old Bones’ was the affectionate term applied to me. At this rate you’ll put us in our dotage. A man under forty is in his best youth. I never felt younger in my life!” he snorted indignantly.

“But she is only a child,” said the Tojin softly, “—a child in years—and in heart!”

“If you could see her,” said the other, with intense earnestness, “as I have had occasion to since last night, you would say differently. Child! why, man, she is a suffering, neglected, forsaken little woman! Open your door to her. Don’t let her think it as stony as your heart!”

XXVII

“TAMA!” He opened the sliding doors at last. She did not stand, even when he spoke to her, but with a mute, wordless sob moved a pace nearer to him on her knees, and put her head submissively at his feet.

He stooped above her, his face working, his hands trembling. Gently he lifted her to her feet, only to release her instantly.

“Stand there,” he said, “while I speak to you. You must do whatever the Be-koku-jin wishes of you. He tells me you have resisted his attempts to help you. If I tell you it is my wish, my very dear wish, you will go with him, will you not?”

She had put out her hands in the old blind way, and would have found him had he not stepped back soundlessly as she approached him. She sighed in her distress, sighed and sobbed, like a tortured child. As he looked at her he felt his resolve far from weakening, becoming even more fixed. He would not have her this way, blind in mind and in sight. She must know the truth.

“The Be-koku-jin will help you, Tama. Soon you are going to see, and then things will appear very differently to you. What you believe now to be beautiful may prove to be otherwise. For example,” he continued steadily, “you believe me other than I am in fact. My face is horrible. It may even frighten you, as it did another woman once!”

A hush fell between them. Her eyes, very wide and dark, were fixed upon his face, almost as though they were endowed with sight.

“Though all keep dark foraever ad my eyes, still I would know your face—ad—my heart!” she said.

“If you could really see—” he murmured hoarsely, almost imploringly.

“Tojin-san!” she said, “though all the worl’ come before my eyes, I would know you only! I would follow you—yaes to thad worl’s end—if you bud would permit me.”

He made a motion toward her, and with that smile still upon her face she went blindly to meet him; but as quickly he had drawn back again, and a moment later turned desperately toward the doors. She heard him slide them open, felt the cold draught of air enter; then they closed again, and she heard only the sound of his steps as he passed along the paths.

She stood unmoving, listening until even the faintest sound of him was gone. Then suddenly she ran forward, feeling her way with her hands till she came to his chair. Upon her knees she sank, sighing, sobbing, and buried her face upon her arms in the lap of the chair. Here the Be-koku-jin found her, sleeping her first sleep in many, many days, exhausted, but with a strange look of peace upon her face at last!

XXVIII

THE whole of the city of Fukui had turned forth into its streets. Jostling, pushing, shoving each other aside they elbowed their way to the front. Children were raised to the shoulders of parents, boys climbed upon roofs and poles and trees to see the spectacle.

The runners could hardly make a passageway through the throngs; but there was no disorder, nor the slightest trace of antagonism, as the norimono passed slowly down the streets. A respectful silence—a silence that had in it an element of torturing remorse more than curiosity—fell upon the throng.

The bamboo hangings had been drawn back from the norimon, for it was the desire of the Tojin that all of Fukui might see the fox-woman themselves, see and judge what manner of creature was this they had outcast and persecuted through all her short life.

Beside the Be-koku-jin, who had performed the miracle upon her eyes, she sat, her face white as snow, her wide, dazzled eyes gazing bewilderedly about her, as if she were but half conscious of what she saw, but half comprehended its meaning. They had confined most of her golden hair in some shimmering gray veil that floated about her like a cloud, but little moist curls clung about her brow and blew from beneath the veil in tender, kissing tendrils about her cheeks.

At her feet, with her fascinated, infatuated eyes pinned upon her face, crouched the maid Obun, who was pledged to her service by the Tojin-san.