Part 10 (1/2)

A sullen look crept into the boy's face. Again he turned questioning eyes upon his wife. From the troubled silence her sweet voice reached like a caress: ”Dear father, the autumn days, though golden, have held unusual heat.”

”Heat! What are cold and heat to a true artist? Did he not paint in August? I am old, yet I have been painting!”

Again fell the silence.

”I said that I had been painting,” repeated the old man, angrily.

Ume-ko recovered herself with a start. ”I am--er--we are truly overjoyed to hear it. Shall you deign to honor us with a sight of your ill.u.s.trious work?”

”No, I shall not deign!” snapped the old man. ”It is his work that you now are concerned with.” Here he pointed to the scowling Tatsu. ”Why have you not influenced him as you should? He must paint! It is what you married him for.”

Ume-ko caught her breath. A flush of embarra.s.sment dyed her face, and she threw a half-frightened look towards Tatsu. Answering her father's unrelenting frown, she murmured, timidly, ”To-morrow, if the G.o.ds will, my dear husband shall paint.”

Tatsu's steady gaze drew her. ”Your eyes, Ume-ko. Is it true that for this--to make me paint--you consented to become my wife?”

Ume tried in vain to resist the look he gave her. Close at her other hand, she knew, her father hung upon her face and listened, trembling, for her words. To him, art was all. But to her and Tatsu, who had found each other,--ah! She tried to speak but words refused to form themselves. She tried to turn a docile face toward old Kano; but the deepening glory of her husband's look drew her as light draws a flower.

Sullenness and anger fell from him like a cloth. His countenance gave out the fire of an inward pa.s.sion; his eyes--deep, strange, strong, magnetic--mastered and compelled her.

”No, no, beloved,” she whispered. ”I cannot say,--you alone know the soul of me.”

A fierce triumph flared into his look. He leaned nearer, with a smile that was almost cruel in its consciousness of power. Under it her eyes drooped, her head fell forward in a sudden faintness, her whole lithe body huddled into one gracious, yielding outline. Even while Kano gasped, doubting his eyes and his hearing, Tatsu sprang to his feet, went to his wife, caught her up rudely by one arm, and crushed her against his side, while he blazed defiant scorn upon Kano. ”Come Dragon Wife,” he said, in a voice that echoed through the s.p.a.ce; ”come back to our little home. No stupid old ones there, no prattle about painting. Only you and I and love.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: ”'Come, Dragon Wife,' he said, 'come back to our little home.'”]

Now in j.a.pan nothing is more indelicate, more unpardonable, or more insulting to the listener than any reference to the personal love between man and wife. At Tatsu's terrible speech, Ume-ko, unconscious of further cause of offense, hid her face against his sleeve, and clung to him, that her trembling might not cast her to the floor. Kano, at first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of sound. ”Go to your rooms,--both. Are you mad, indeed,--this immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,--a Tengu, a barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise to slay you both!”

The utterance choked him, and died away in a gasping silence. He clutched at his lean chest. Ume would have sped to him, but Tatsu held her fast. His young face flamed with an answering rage. ”Do you use that tone to me--old man--to me, and this, my wife,” he was beginning, but Ume put frantic hands upon his lips.

”Master, beloved!” she sobbed. ”You shall not speak thus to our father,--you do not understand. For love of me, then, be patient.

Even the crows on the hilltops revere their parents. Come there, to the hills, with me, now, now--oh, my soul's beloved--before you speak again. Wait there, in the inner room, while I kneel a moment before our father. Oh, Tatsu, if you love me----”

The agony of her face and voice swept from Tatsu's mind all other feeling. He stood in the doorway, silent, as she threw herself before old Kano, praying to him as to an offended G.o.d: ”Father, father, do not hold hatred against us! Tatsu has been without kindred,--he knows not yet the sacred duties of filial love. We will go from your presence now until your just anger against us shall have cooled. With the night we shall return and plead for mercy and forgiveness. No, no, do not speak again, just yet. We are going, now, now. Oh, my dear father, the agony and the shame of it! Sayonara, until the twilight.” She hurried back to Tatsu, seized his clenched hand with her small, icy fingers, and almost dragged him from the room.

Kano sat as she had left him, motionless, now, as the white jade vase within the tokonoma. His anger, crimson, blinding at the first possession, had heated by now into a slow, white rage. All at once he began to tremble. He struck himself violently upon one knee, crying aloud, ”So thus love influences him! Ara! My Dragon Painter! Other methods may be tried. Such words and looks before me, me,--Kano Indara! And Ume's eyes set upon him as in blinding wors.h.i.+p. Could I have seen aright? He caught my child up like a common street wench, a thing of sale and barter. And she,--she did not scorn, but trembled and clung to him. Is the whole world on its head? I will teach them, I will teach them.”

”Have my young mistress and her august spouse already taken leave?”

asked Mata at a crack of the door.

”Either they or some demon changelings,” answered the old man, rocking to and fro upon the mats.

The old servant had, of course, heard everything. Feigning now, for her own purposes, a soothing air of ignorance, she glided into the room, lifted the tiny tea-pot, shook it from side to side, and then c.o.c.ked her bright eyes upon her master. ”The tea-pot. It is honorably empty. Shall I fill it?”

”Yes, yes; replenish it at once. I need hot tea. Shameless, incredible; he has, indeed, the manners of a wild boar.”

”Ma-a-a!” exclaimed the old woman. ”Now of whom can my master be speaking?”

”You know very well of whom I am speaking, goblin! Do you not always listen at the shoji? Go, fill the pot!”

Mata glided from the room with the quickness of light and in an instant had returned. Replacing the smoking vessel and maintaining a face of decorous interest, she asked, hypocritically, ”And was my poor Miss Ume mortified?”