Part 13 (1/2)
You trick me as you would a child,” he moaned.
The priest knelt slowly by the bed. ”In the name of Shaka,--whom I wors.h.i.+p,--these words of mine are true. Here, in this room, at this moment, your Ume-ko is waiting.”
”But I want her too,” whispered the piteous lips. ”Not only her aerial spirit! I want her smile,--her little hands to touch me, the golden echo of her laughter,--I want my wife, I say! Oh, you G.o.ds, demons, preta of a thousand h.e.l.ls!” he shrieked, springing to a sitting posture in his bed, and beating the air about him with distracted hands.
”These are the memories that whir down and close about me in a cloud of stinging wasps!I cannot endure! In the name of Shaka, whom you wors.h.i.+p, strike me dead with the staff you hold,--then will I bless you and believe!” In a transport of madness, he leaned out, clutching at the staff, clawing down the stiff robes from the abbot's throat, snarling, praying, menacing with a vehemence so terrible, that the little acolyte, flinging down the still-burning koro, screamed aloud for help.
It was many hours before the nurses and physicians could quiet this last paroxysm. Exhaustion and a relapse followed. The long, dull waiting on hope began anew. After this no visitor but Kano was allowed. He entered the sick chamber only at certain hours, placing himself near the head of the bed where Tatsu need not see him. He never spoke except in answer to questions addressed him directly by his son, and these came infrequently enough. With this second slow return to vitality, Tatsu's most definite emotion seemed to be hatred of his adopted father. He writhed at the sound of that timid, approaching step, and dreaded the first note of the deprecating voice.
Kano was fully aware of this aversion. He realized that, perhaps, it would be better for Tatsu if he did not come at all; yet in this one issue the selfishness of love prevailed. Age and despair were to be kept at bay. He had no weapons but the hours of comparative peace he spent at Tatsu's bedside. Full twenty years seemed added to the old man's burden of life. His back was stooped far over; his feet shuffled along the wooden corridors with the sound of the steps of one too heavily burdened. He never walked now without the aid of his friendly bamboo cane. The threat of Tatsu's self-destruction echoed always in his ears. Away from the actual presence of his idol it gnawed him like a famished wolf, and his mind tormented itself with fantastic and dreadful possibilities. Once Tatsu had hidden under his foreign pillow the china bowl in which broth was served. Kano whispered his discovery to the nurse, and when she wondered, explained to her with s.h.i.+vering earnestness that it was undoubtedly the boy's intention to break it against the iron bedstead the first moment he was left alone, and with a shard sever one of his veins. Tatsu grinned like a trapped badger when it was wrested from him, and said that he would find a way in spite of them all. After this not even a medicine bottle was left in the room, and the watch over the invalid was strengthened.
”But,” as old Kano remonstrated, ”even though we prevent him for a few weeks more, how will it be when he can stand and walk,--when he is stronger than I?” To these questions came no answer. The second convalescence, so eagerly prayed for, became now a source of increasing dread. Something must be done,--some way to turn his morbid thoughts away from self-destruction. The old man climbed often, now, to the temple on the hill.
The hospital room, in an upper story, was small, with matted floors, and a single square window to the east. The narrow white iron bed was set close to this window, so that the invalid might gaze out freely.
Tatsu did not ask that it be changed though, indeed, each recurrent dawn brought martyrdom to him. The sound of sparrows at the eaves, the smell of dew, the look of the morning mist as it spread great wings above the city, hovering for an instant before its flight, the glow of the first pink light upon his coverlid, each was an iron of memory searing a soul already faint with pain. The attendant often marvelled why, at this hour, Tatsu buried his face from sight, and, emerging into clearer day, bore the look of one who had met death in a narrow pa.s.s.
At noon, when the window showed a square of turquoise blue, he grew to watch with some faint pulse of interest the changing hues of light, and the clouds that s.h.i.+fted lazily aside, or heaped themselves up into rounded battlements of snow. Quite close to the window a single cherry branch, sweeping downward, cut s.p.a.ce with a thick, diagonal line.
Silvery lichens frilled the upper surface of the bark, and at the tip of each leafless twig, brown buds--small armored magazines of beauty--hinted already of the spring's rebirth. Life was all about him, and he hated life. Why should cherry blooms and sparrows dare to come again,--why should that old man near him wheeze and palpitate with life, why--why--should he, Tatsu, be held from his one friend, Death, when she, the essence of all life and beauty,--she who should have been immortal,--drifted alone, helpless, a broken white sea-flower, on some black, awful tide?
In the midst of such dreary imaginings, old Kano, late in the last month of the year, crept in upon his son. He was an hour earlier than his custom. Also there was something unusual,--a new energy, perhaps a new fear, noticeable in face and voice. But Tatsu, still bleeding with his visions of the dawn, saw nothing of this. The premature visit irritated him. ”Go, go,” he cried, turning his face sharply away.
”This is a full hour early. Am I to have no moments to myself?”
”My son, my son,” pleaded the old man, ”I have come a little before time, because I have brought--”
”Do not call me son,” interrupted the petulant boy. ”It is wretchedness to look upon you. She would be here now, but for you.
You killed her! You drove her to it!”
”No, Tatsu, you wrong me! As I have a.s.sured you, and as her own words say,--she made the sacrifice from her own heart. It was that her presence obscured your genius, my son. She was unselfish and n.o.ble beyond all other women. She--went--for your sake--”
”For my sake!” jeered the other. ”You mean, for the sake of the things you want me to paint! Well, I tell you again, I will neither live _nor_ paint! Yes, that touches you. Human agony is nothing to your heart of jade. You would catch these tears I shed to mix a new pigment! You do not regret her. You would think the price cheap, if only I will paint. I hate all pictures! I curse the things I have done! Would that, indeed, I had the tongue of a dragon, that I might lick them from the silk!”
”Tatsu, my poor son, be less violent. I urge nothing! The G.o.ds must do with you as they will, but here is something--a letter--” Fumbling, with shaking fingers, in his long, black sleeve, he drew out a filmy, white rectangle. The look of it, so like to one pinned to a certain pillow in the dawn, sent a new thrill of misery through the boy.
”A letter! Who would write me a letter,--unless souls in the Meido-land can write! Back, back,--do not touch me, or ere I kill myself I will find strength to slay you first. I will drag you with me to the underworld, as I journey in searching for my wife, and fling your craven soul to devils, as one would fling offal to a dog! Speak not to me of painting, nor of her!”
At the sight of extra attendants hurrying in, Tatsu waved them to leave him, threw himself back, stark, upon the pillow, and closed his eyes so tightly that the wrinkles radiated in black lines from the corners. He panted heavily, as from a long race. His forehead twitched and throbbed with purple veins.
Flung down cruelly from the exhilaration which a moment before had been his, old Kano seated himself on a chair directly in sight of Tatsu's bed. The nurses stole away, leaving the two men together. Each remained motionless, except for hurried breathing, and the pulsing of distended veins. A crow, perched on the cherry branch outside the window, tilted a cold, inquisitive eye into the room.
Tatsu was the first to move. The reaction of excitement was creeping upon him, drawing the sting from pain. He turned toward his visitor and began to study, with an impersonal curiosity, the aspect of the pathetic figure. Kano was sitting, utterly relaxed, at the edge of the cane-bottomed foreign chair His head hung forward, and his lids were closed. For the first time Tatsu noted how scanty and how white his hair had grown; how thin and wrinkled the fine old face. Something akin to compa.s.sion rose warm and human in the looker's throat. He had opened his lips to speak kindly (it would have been the first gentle word since Ume's loss) when the sight of his name, in handwriting, on the letter, froze the very air about him, and held him for an instant a prisoner of fear. The envelope dangled loosely from Kano's fingers.
On it was traced, in Ume-ko's beautiful, unmistakable hand, ”For my beloved husband, Kano Tatsu.”
”The letter, the letter,” he cried hoa.r.s.ely, pointing downward. ”It is mine,--give it!”
Kano raised his head. The reaction of excitement was on him too, and it had brought for him a patient hopelessness. It did not seem to matter a great deal just now what Tatsu did or thought. He would never paint. That alone was enough blackness to fill a h.e.l.l of everlasting night.
”Give it to me,” insisted the boy, leaning far out over the bed. ”Did you bring it only to torture me? Quick, quick,--it is mine!”
”I brought it to give, and you repulsed me. I had found it but this morning, in your painting room, pinned to a silken frame on which you had begun her picture! She must have put it there before--before--”
”If you have a shred of pity or of love for me, give it and go,” gasped the boy.