Part 3

Chapter 34,291 wordsPublic domain

However, there seemed, happily, no way of escape from an outcasting and the consequences they had fixed upon, and this grew upon them more and more as they went homeward, so that as they were yet quite happy in it they came into the vicinity of Yone's home. Now, by that time all the details had been arranged: Yone was to go to Arisuga's mother, where a complete confession would be made. Then, on the morrow, the consent of the parents would be asked, which, whether it were or were not obtained, would be the signal for the wedding preparations. For in the one case Yone would be the daughter of her parents, whose consent would have been obtained, in the other of his whose consent was sure.

Then they looked up to find themselves almost in the midst of a great fire which their absorption had kept them from noticing. And it was at once but too plain that Yone's home was in that part of the district already burned clear. Of course there were parents and brothers to think of at once, and in thought of their safety Yone forgot the opportunity for her outcasting and the hastening of her happiness. When she remembered, it was too late.

She had been pounced upon by her father, and borne in joy to the rendezvous where all the brothers and sisters, as well as the parents of Yone, were now in prosaic safety and little perturbation. Shijiro Arisuga had, upon the appearance of the father, ignominiously disappeared--which, indeed, was the best thing which could have happened for Yone, so far as her safety from scandal was concerned, and the worst so far as her wish for an immediate marriage was concerned. There was, now, not the least hope of an outcasting. No one had even seen Shijiro, it appeared, nor knew of their going away or coming back together.

"How did you escape, my pleasant daughter?" cried the happy father, embracing her.

"I do not know," said Yone, with some truth, looking furtively about for Arisuga.

"And fully dressed?" asked the father again.

With a sigh of disgust, Yone answered again that she did not know.

"It was an interposition of the gods."

"Yes," sighed Yone, in her heart, "I suppose it was an interposition of the infernal gods."

For Shijiro was undoubtedly gone, not at once to return.

"The smell of fire has not even passed upon your garments," pursued the delighted parent.

"It is very strange," sighed the daughter.

"The gods love you!" declared her father.

"I suppose so," answered Yone, indifferently, thinking of quite another escape and another love.

It happened that the next day the _Kowshing_ was sunk and the Guards started for Ping-Yang.

PING-YANG

VII

PING-YANG

Arisuga sang for the Guards, and made rhymes and laughter, and they liked him tremendously, as big men are inclined to like little ones, until they reached Ping-Yang, when they liked him still more for something better. You will remember how the first assault of the Japanese was met by the Chinese, who had yet to be taught defeat. The big Satsuma color-bearer was killed, and the flag fell in the polluting Chinese dust. It was little Arisuga who raised it--to such a shout as cost the Chinese the hundred or so men they could spare at that time. And he stayed out there, with the flag, where the Chinese were, when the rest retired, and taunted the enemy with polite epithets, kept his pistol going, and finally came through without a scratch!

Thus, the smallest member of the Guards had demonstrated to the greatest, the thing which helped to win their other victories: that though their enemy was not lacking in courage, as they had thought, yet he could neither manoeuvre nor shoot.

Afterward, there was a contest for the picturesque office of color-bearer. Some of them wanted Okuma. And Arisuga was willing, of course. He knew how impossible it was to him at his size. But Colonel Zanzi said the colors belonged to Arisuga.

"Men get what they win in the army--nothing more, and not less. Here, no honor goes by favor! A man passes for a man until he is proven otherwise, no matter who or what he is, or whether he be five feet or six. In the army there are neither eta nor samurai, only sons of the emperor."

After the peace of Shimenoseki there was dull barrack life for little Arisuga, far from Yone, until he led the allies in their assault upon the gate of the Hidden City. You will remember that the Japanese were conceded the advance. After the first repulse they disentangled Arisuga from a heap of Chinese with the colors still upright in his hands. The wound was in his forehead. The great death had been near.

Now it happened that the next day a man with a Japanese name was brought before Colonel Zanzi and desired to know why it was that wounded Japanese soldiers were taken to the houses of the Chinese when there were Japanese houses near where they would be not only welcome but--Well, he had a pretty daughter, and the Chinese annoyed her by their attentions. A Japanese soldier in the house, a flag in the yard, and a pink ticket at the door would be not only glory but protection.

"I see," laughed the colonel. "Will a wounded one do?"

The visitor thought he would--if he were the young man who had been carried to the house of Han-Hai next door to him, the day before.

"Very good," smiled the colonel. "I observe that we are not only glorifying the emperor, but assisting a countryman to humble his Chinese neighbor. Very good!"

"It is not that," said the Japanese in China. "My daughter has seen him."

"Oh-h! Oh-h! He will have good care!"

Without another word the smiling commanding officer wrote the order for his transfer.

And the next day Orojii Zasshi was the proudest Japanese in China. For the imperial sun-flag waved over his roof; the pink ticket, to indicate that a soldier was quartered there, was tacked to his door-post; and within, in the most sumptuous room the house afforded, lay Shijiro Arisuga, color-bearer.

DREAM-OF-A-STAR

VIII

DREAM-OF-A-STAR

When Arisuga saw the face of "Hoshi-no-Yume," some days later--and this "Dream-of-a-Star," as he at once called her, was well enough worth seeing--he said first:--

"It is not like what I thought it, angel."

Referring, of course, to the great red death, which he thought he had suffered--and what had necessarily followed.

"No," answered Hoshiko, comfortingly, remembering what the surgeon had said, that when he came out of his delirium he would probably be a bit queer.

"I suppose, after all, that the earth-heavens are much like the earth."

"Yes," from Miss Star-Dream.

"I don't think you understand me, since you answer only yes and no?"

"I understand your _words_ perfectly. I am Japanese!" answered the lips of Hoshiko, while they slowly smiled. "But your thought--"

"How lucky! For, I suppose here all peoples are mixed."

"Yes. There are all sorts: Russians, Germans, Americans, Frenchmen--"

She was thinking of the allies.

"It looks like Japan."

This was the interior which he was seeing.

"But you think it is China?"

"Yes! Out there it is precisely like the place where we fought."

"Yes," said puzzled Hoshiko.

"I suppose the gods surround us in the heavens with the things which have pleased us most on earth."

Something made him look at the girl who flitted near, and the same thing made him connect her with this state of celestial bliss.

But he sighed and turned from her. In the heavens, of course, she was incorporeal, and, while patent to the eyes, would fail like the air itself to the touch.

He looked through the window, then, at the Forbidden City.

"But there is no fighting here now," ventured the girl.

"Naturally," agreed the soldier.

"The Forbidden City is taken."

"I am glad to hear it. How long have you been here?"

"About thirteen years."

"You couldn't have been more than three or four when you died! I don't understand."

But, now, Hoshiko at last did. And she laughed.

"Excuse my levity," she said. "I am not dead, and you are not. I am not an angel, and this is not a heaven!"

"Oh!" said Arisuga; and then, "All right," as if it were a thing to be endured. He ended by also laughing. "But you must excuse the mistake. It seems a good deal like a heaven, and you more like an angel."

Still, as he looked about, and at the girl, he was not sure. That is what they were likely to tell a sick man.

"Might I touch you?" he asked.

"Oh, yes!" cried the girl, with a pleasure which challenged his attention. She put herself within his reach.

"It is _not_ a heaven," he agreed, when he had passed his hand along an exquisite arm.

"I am honorably glad that you are not dead," breathed the girl, bravely. "Are not you?"

And every little atom of her showed that she was glad and begged that he might be. Though the mists were still in the brain of Shijiro Arisuga, he could not help knowing both of these things: her innocence had uncovered them so completely. For a moment he studied her. Then he answered a tardy yes to her question.

"For such as you it is good to live--yes--and--" The soldier stopped to sigh. "Good for others to live near you for the little while."

"For a little while, lord?"

She thought it the mere hyperbole of their race.

"Oh, you shall be old, old, old, and beautiful, with long white hair and perhaps a beard, and all the earth shall worship your piety--"

Arisuga laughed and caught a hand to stop her.

"Lord," she went on, "most vast lord, I will make you. Yes! I have thus far made it to be. When they brought you they said you would die. So said my father and mother. But I--"

She turned and summoned her maid with fierce irrelevance.

"Isonna, come here!"

The maid hastened from the next room, where, it is almost certain, she had lain with her ear to the fusuma, and then Hoshiko's mysterious purpose appeared.

"But I--Isonna and me--this is Isonna, my ugly maid--Isonna and me prayed for you--wept for you; you were so beautiful and bloody. And Benten--see, I have Benten always near! Benten loves the tears of sympathy, and to her we prayed, so--"

"I owe you and Isonna my life," laughed the soldier.

"No, Benten," whispered the girl, now answering his laugh with a smile. "And she will grant other prayers of ours--Isonna and me--will she not, Isonna, you little beast? Why do you not speak?"

Isonna corroborated her mistress by a deep prostration.

"And so we have asked for long life for you, very long, until the pebbles grow to boulders and the moss grows to your shoulders--"

Arisuga laughed, in frank joy of her.

"And suppose, you who are so powerful with the goddess of beauty--for which I do not blame the goddess--suppose I have sworn to die the great death, to release my father's soul from the Meido so that he can be born again, and for the glory of the emperor?"

"Oh!" gasped the girl.

The soldier went on.

"--what will the other gods think of me, saving Benten, if I stop here and forget to die because a woman has hands, a voice, and eyes?"

"No, no!" cried Isonna, in sudden strange anguish.

Then she prostrated herself in abjection.

Arisuga rose on his elbow to look at her.

"What have I said to cause such sorrow?" he wondered. "Let me see. It was about your hands and voice and eyes."

"Yes!" cried mistress and maid together.

But it was the maid who went on:--

"And you must not, mighty lord. You must not find any beauty in my mistress's eyes and hands and voice. None anywhere. It is evil for both you and her!"

"Who said I found any beauty there?" smiled Arisuga, languidly.

"There is a secret, lord--" the maid went on in a frenzy.

But Star-Dream, suddenly grasping the place of her heart with both hands, cried out to the maid, as if she were desperately wounded:--

"Go, go, go, little foul beast! What do you do here? Who called you? Go!"

The maid disappeared like a spirit. Star-Dream found herself upon her feet, still gasping with ecstasy and terror together. Then she at last turned slowly toward the bed and smiled a sick mechanical smile.

"Lord, you said," she prompted. "Say on. Do not listen--do not observe the ugly Isonna. She has a trouble of the head."

Hoshiko drooped her own in some sort of gentle guilt.

"Ah, but I displeased you also," said Arisuga.

"Lord--I--no. I have a distemper. In it I am harsh to Isonna. That is what she is for. That is why my father keeps her. That she may bear my distemper. Presently I will go and put my arms about her, so, and all will be well!"

She illustrated with her own person.

"So?" asked the soldier, laughing; "certainly all will be well!" and she came with another laugh and knelt at his bed. She touched him. She chattered on helplessly.

"Truly, all will be well. She loves me, wicked as I am to her, and with a touch I can win her!"

"Yes!" he agreed. "Or any one, I should fancy!"

Thus, at least, she had cunningly won him from his wonder at the scene he had just witnessed, if she had not won all else she had hoped for.

"May I ask a question?" said the girl.

"A hundred," said Shijiro.

"Lord, you said--you called me--"

"Yes," laughed Arisuga. "The eyes, the hands, the lips--"

"I am not beautiful--"

"I did not say so."

"My hands are not--"

She held them out that he might see that they were not. The soldier examined them and then said:--

"No, the maid was right. I find no beauty there."

"And my eyes--they are only beast's eyes--"

"Let me see," begged the soldier.

She came closer, and seriously opened them upon him. It was very hard for Shijiro looking into them to nod his assent that they were beast's eyes.

"Then the question is," said the girl, with innocent mirth, "why, if I am not beautiful, if nothing about me is, why did you do so?"

"Do what?" demanded the soldier, with a pretence of savagery.

"Look so into my eyes, touch so my hands, listen so to my miserable voice?"

"I supposed that I was in a heaven, and that you were an--attendant," said Arisuga.

"But after you knew that you were not in a heaven?"

The soldier gave up with a laugh.

"I see that we shall be very good friends," he said. They laughed together.

"Lord," she said, "I do not know whether you speak true!"

"I," said the soldier, "have the impression that I have lied to you about you."

"Shaka!" breathed the girl, between laughter and fear.

"Did you wish it--what I did--said?"

"Lord," confessed the girl, "I wish to be as beautiful as the sun-goddess, so that you must--do--say--!"

She crept closer. It was as if she caressed the soldier.

ISONNA

On another day Hoshiko asked:--

"Lord, must it be soon--now--that you die?"

"Now," he said, with a pretence of severity.

"Is the day fixed?"

"Yes. Am I to wait here because your eyes are not exactly a beast's, while my father languishes in the Meido?"

"Yea, lord, if you are hap--happy. For the spirits of our augustnesses, no matter where they are, even in the suffering of the hells, are not sad while they make us happy."

"In what book did you learn that?" demanded the soldier.

"In the Bushido," lied the girl, seriously.

"Then I have not read the commandments of the Bushido with sufficient care. I must do it all over. I am glad that there is such a doctrine. One may keep to a holy purpose, but need not hasten it. And to-day I like to linger from the red death; I like it well!"

"Yes, lord, that is a filial duty. To die for--for--the repose of your father's soul. But there is no need of--haste?"

"No," said the disgraceful young soldier, "there is no need of haste."

She laughed and touched his face--where he caught and held her hand.

"Perhaps, many many years?"

"Perhaps," said Arisuga.

"Until you are mi--married?"

"Perhaps until I am married."

"Beautiful!" cried the girl.

"And who would you have me marry?"

"Isonna!" laughed Hoshiko, "if you were not so great, lord. Oh, she is most sweet to men! Often I have wondered that men do not marry her! Isonna!"

Again the girl plunged from the next room.

"Isonna," said her mistress, "ugly little beast, you are to marry the lord soldier when he is a trifle better."

Isonna forgot her manners in the violence of another amazement. Arisuga shouted with happy laughter.

"Vast lord," wailed the maid, as if she believed it all, "there is the same reason in me as in my mistress, that--"

"Sh!"

Hoshiko put her two hands violently upon the garrulous mouth of the servant.

"You little beast! Is not once enough? I dislike to kill you. But I suppose I must!"

When all was well again she turned to Arisuga:--

"Then you will need a servant--and I am very industrious, am I not, Isonna?"

Isonna said nothing. This seemed safest.

"Is she industrious, Isonna?" asked the mystified young soldier. "We will have no servants who are not industrious!"

"No," said the frightened maid to him, and "Yes" to her when she had looked, first, the way of her mistress, then the way of the soldier.

"Do I not curl the futons, dress my hair, fill my father's pipe, clean the sand out of his sandals, mend his bed-netting, tie his girdle, cook his rice?"

Isonna said yes.

"I am convinced," laughed the soldier. "When I marry Isonna you shall serve us."

"Go," said the girl to the maid, "and be ready when the lord commander wishes."

And when she was gone the young soldier and the girl laughed again together.

"Almost," said the girl, "she lost me my place in your household."

And one could not be certain from her words that she was not serious.

The soldier had again the impression that she had barely prevented some momentous disclosure. It gave his gayety pause and his coquetry caution.

"Then I am not in a heaven," said he, "and--_you_ are not a heavenly person?"

The girl dropped to her knees beside him and asked:--

"I wish I might make this a heaven to you, and that I might seem--truly--like--a heavenly--person!"

"I never knew one on earth who seemed more like one! Be content."

"Alas! that is only because you have been ill and I have been kind to you?"

"You are very pleasant--very pleasant!" said Arisuga, setting the current of desire away from the peril of her. "What have you been doing with me all the while I have been here?"

Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his retreat from sentiment, the wounded soldier possessed himself of one of Hoshiko's hands--quite by an unconscious act of fellowship. But one was not enough; he took the other. As he did it, he remembered and smiled because his hands and his will were at such variance.

The Lady Hoshi did not stay him. Indeed, she had always liked the stories of those bandits in the mountains, who took pretty girls and were never heard of again.

But she had to get away just then, much to her regret, because, out of her innocent honesty, she was not prepared to answer the question he had asked her--What had she been doing with him during the period of his delirious unconsciousness? And he repeated it!

Now to call one a pleasant person is about as far as a Japanese lover ordinarily goes. But Hoshiko was disappointed with it. What had gone before promised more.

In her disappointment, her humor became as testy as it was possible for her humor to become, which was, after all, not very testy. And so it remained for the day.

THE TASK OF JIZO

"Why didn't he take me?" she demanded savagely of Isonna the maid that night as she was putting her mistress to bed in the adjoining room. "And quickly! Like that! I would!" She clapped her hands--and then said: "Sh! Do you think he heard that?"

The maid reassured her.

"But _why_ is a man satisfied with a hand--even two--when by a strong arm he might have--" she stopped to sigh and to look into the round mirror which the maid was holding up to her--"all!"

"All of what?" asked the astonished maid.

"Me! This."

"Oh!" said the maid.

"If a man calls a girl an angel when he thinks he is in heaven, he has no business to call her only--" she stopped and sniffed disdainfully at the word--"_pleasant_ when he finds he is not."

"What would you, then, have him to call you on earth?" questioned the puzzled maid.

"Angel still."

"Permit him a little time, mistress."

"Time! Time! What do you call time, you ignorant one? It was fifteen minutes! Yes! We had been talking fifteen minutes when he said I was a _pleasant_ person! After saying I was an angel!"

"Oh!" said Isonna--which Hoshiko took for reproof.

"I have known him two weeks!"

"Yes," agreed the maid.

"And if you speak--if you suggest again, that which twice nearly escaped your lips, I will kill you. One night you will lie down, and, into your horrid, tattling mouth, I will pour, as you sleep, a something which will prevent you from ever rising. I have it always ready for you."

"But, your father?" whined Isonna.

"I, not my father, am speaking now!"

"I will be silent," agreed the maid.

"What is the use to take the trouble to tell him? Soon he will go and forget both us and that--what is the use?"

"I will be silent," said the maid, again. "I do not wish to die."

"And then--O Jizo, punish him!" She broke off and addressed another of her goddesses. "And then he had the unparalleled audacity to ask me what I had been doing with him all the while he has been here! After he had said angel repeatedly! O Jizo, punish him!"

"Well, well," comforted the maid, "why did you not inform him? Surely that was not difficult!"

"Oh! it was not, eh? Well, you blind little beast, do you _know_ what I _have_ been doing?"

"You have recovered him from his illness with the utmost tenderness and beauty," said the maid.

"Oh, you little fool!" cried her mistress, first striking her, then embracing her; "I have been falling in love with him. It happened that day they carried him into the house of Han-Hai, where live three daughters, all unmarried. You saw it; you were present! Do you not remember how beautiful and bloody he was? His eyes were closed, the sun shone in his face, and that was pale with here and here the windings of a bandage, like an aureole. Oh, how we both wept! He was so young; and we thought that we could heal him with great care! We wept. My father did the one thing which would stop our tears--brought, him here!"

"Yes--yes!" agreed Isonna.

"Now! Shall I tell him?"

"Oh, no, Lady Hoshi, no! That is a dreadful thing to do," sighed the maid.

"It is not dreadful. It is beautiful."

"But, dear, dear mistress, you must not love a man. That is what your father pays me to prevent!"

"Well, you haven't prevented it. And I shall tell my father, and he, also, will kill you and get me some one who is more useful. That is two killings for you!"

"But I did not know, mistress! Perhaps I do not know love."

"You do not, Isonna. For it has been right under your nose these two weeks. After all, I will not tell my father. For he might give me a maid who would not be as pretty as you," and she hugged Isonna, who was not pretty at all. "And in exchange for my mercy you must not be odious, but recognize that it is too late. Is it a bargain?"

Well, any bargain the lovely Hoshi might propose to the plain Isonna would meet with her approval, though it should mean her death the next instant, and so this one was approved.

ANGEL OF THE EARTH-HEAVEN

Now, the next day, Arisuga, laughing, greeted her with that very word--"angel"! Perhaps he did hear a bit of their talk. For the walls between them were very thin. This was the way of it: He clapped his hands so early in the morning that he was amazed at the despatch with which she arrived. But we are not. For we know that she was waiting just outside of his screens to be called. She meant to dissemble and pretend that she was at a distance. But you can fancy how instantly she forgot that when he called:--

"Angel! Angel of my earth-heaven!" Though there are no angels in the Japanese heavens.

You have seen that, in her presence, he had forgotten his caution! Observe, now, that he did likewise in her absence! What end but one could there be to such recklessness!