Part 14 (1/2)
”But, look what love has done to him! Death is only another name for paradise compared with the agony sunken deep into this young face!”
She placed him gently, at full length, upon the padded floor. She chafed the flaccid wrists, the temples, the veins about his ears, and then, leaning over, blew on the heavy lids. ”Ume-ko, my wife, my wife,” he whispered, and tried to smile.
A wave of pity swept from the old dame's mind the last barrier of mistrust. ”Yes, Master, here is Ume's nurse,” she said in soothing tones. ”Not Ume-ko,--she has gone away from us,--but the poor old nurse who loves her. I will serve you for her sake. Here, put your head upon this pillow,--she has often used it,--and now lie still until old Mata brings you rice and tea.” She bustled off, her hands clattering busily among the cups and trays. As she worked, thankful, through her great agitation, for the familiar offices, she fought down, one by one, those great, distending sobs that push so hard a way upward through wrinkled throats.
Tatsu was still a little dazed. His eyes followed her about the room with a plaintive regard, as if not entirely sure that she was real.
”Did you say that you were--Ume's--nurse,” he asked.
”Yes. Don't you remember me, Master Tatsu? I am Mata, the old servant, and your Ume's nurse. I--I--was not always kind to you, I fear. I opposed your marriage, fearing for her some such sorrow as that which came. But it is past. The G.o.ds allowed it. I will now, for her sake, love and serve you,--my true master you shall be from this day, because I can see that your heart is gnawed forever by that black moth, grief, as mine is. Old Kano does not grieve,--he is a man of stone, of mud!” she cried. ”But I must not speak of his sins, yet; here is the good tea, Master, and the rice.” She fed him like a child, allowing, at first, but a single sip of tea, a grain or two of rice.
He, in his weakness, was gentle and obedient, like a good child, eating all she bade him, and refraining when she told him that he had enough.
It was a new Tatsu that sorrow had given to the Kano home.
But more wonderful than the transformation in him was, in Mata's thought, the complete reversal of her own emotions. Even in the midst of service she stopped to wonder how, so soon, it could be sweet to serve him,--to minister thus to the man she had called the evil genius of the house. In some mysterious way it seemed that through him the dead young wife was being served. In the smile he bent upon her, the old nurse fancied that she caught a tenderness as of Ume's smile.
Perhaps, indeed, the homeless soul, denied its usual shelter in the shrine, made sanctuary of the husband's earthly frame. Perhaps, too, Kano had hoped for this, and so refused the ihai. However these high things might be, Mata knew she had gained strange comfort in the very fact of Tatsu's presence, in the companions.h.i.+p of his suffering.
When, being nourished, Tatsu insisted on sitting upright, and had recalled the scene about him, his first question was of Ume's shrine, where the ihai had been set, and what the kaimyo. This loosened Mata's tongue, and, with a sensation of deep relief, she began to empty her heart of its pent-up acrimony. Tatsu listened now, attentively; not as would have been his way three months before with gesticulations and frequent interruptions, but gravely, with consideration, as one intent to learn the whole before forming an opinion. Even at the end he would say nothing but the words, ”Strange, strange; there must be a reason that you have not guessed.”
”But we will get the ihai, will we not, Master? Together, when you are strong, we will climb the long road to the temple?” she questioned tremulously.
”Indeed we shall,” said Tatsu, with his heartrending smile; ”for at best, the thoughts of Kano Indara cannot be our thoughts. He let her die.”
At this the other burst into such a pa.s.sion of tears that she could not speak, but rocked, sobbing, to and fro, on the mats beside him. He wondered, with a feeling not far from envy, at this open demonstration of distress.
”I cannot weep at all,” he said. Then, a little later, when she had become more calm, ”Are your tears for me or for Ume-ko?”
”For both, for both,” was the sobbing answer. ”For her, that she had to die,--for you, that you must live.”
”Both are things to weep for,” said the boy, and stared out straight before him, as one seeing a long road.
Kano, returning later and finding the two together, marking as he did, at once, with the quick eye of love, how health already cast faint premonitions of a flush upon the boy's thin face, had much ado to keep from crying aloud his joy and grat.i.tude. By strong effort only did he succeed in making his greeting calm. He used stilted, old-fas.h.i.+oned phrases of ceremony to one recently recovered from dangerous illness, and bowed as to a mere acquaintance. Tatsu, returning the bows and phrases, escaped in a few moments to his room, and emerged no more that day. Kano sighed a little, for the young face had been cold and stern.
No love was to be looked for,--not yet, not yet.
For a few days Tatsu did nothing but lie on the mats; or wander, aimlessly, over the house and garden. He came whenever Mata summoned him to meals, and ate them with old Kano, observing all outer semblances of respect. But it seemed an automaton who sat there, eating, drinking, and then, at the last, bowing over to the exact fraction of an inch, each time, and moving away to its own rooms. The old artist, mindful of certain professional warnings from the hospital physicians, never spoke in Tatsu's presence of paintings, or of anything connected with art. Within a few days it seemed to him that Tatsu had begun to watch him keenly, as if expecting, every instant, the broaching of that subject which he knew was always uppermost in the other's mind. But the old man, for the first time in his whole life, had begun to use tact. He never followed Tatsu to his rooms, never intruded into those long conversations now held, many times a day, between Mata and her young master; never even commented to Mata upon her change of att.i.tude. About five days after his first appearance in the kitchen, Tatsu and the old servant left the house together, giving Kano no hint of their destination. He watched them with a curious expression on his face. He knew that they were to climb together to the temple, and that it was a pilgrimage from which he was contemptuously debarred. They returned, some hours later, and were busied all the afternoon with the placing and decorations of an exquisite ”butsu-dan,” or Buddhist shelf, on which the ihai of the dead are placed. At the abbot's advice (and yet against all precedent) this was put, not beside the butsu-dan, where Kano's young wife had for so many years been honored, but in Tatsu's own bed-chamber, thus making of it a ”mita-yama,” or spirit room.
Kano, visiting it, unperceived, next day, noted with the same curious, half-quizzical, half-pathetic look that no Buddhist kaimyo or after-name had been given to his daughter. It was the earth-name, Kano Ume-ko, which the old abbot had written upon the lacquered tablet of wood. Added to it, as a sort of t.i.tle, was the phrase, ”To her who loves much.” ”That is true enough,” thought old Kano, and touched his eyes an instant with his sleeve.
During the following week Tatsu, of himself, drew out his painting materials and tried to work. An instant later he had hurled the things from him with a cry, had slammed together the walls of his chamber, and lay in silence and darkness for many hours. At the time of the night-meal he came forth. Kano, to whom sorrow was teaching many things, made no comment upon his exclusion; and even old Mata refrained from searching his face with her keen eyes.
The next day he made the second attempt. His fusuma were opened, and Mata could see how his face blanched to yellow wax, how the lips writhed until they were caught back by strong, cruel teeth, and how the thin hands wavered. Notwithstanding this inward torture, he persisted.
At first the lines of his brush were feeble. His work looked like that of a child.
Through subsequent days of discouragement and brave effort his power of painting grew with a slow but normal splendor of achievement. His fame began to spread. The ”New Kano” and ”The Dragon Painter of Kiu s.h.i.+u”
the people of the city called him. Not only his work but his romantic, miserable story drew sympathy to him, and bade fair to make of him a popular idol. Older artists wished to paint his portrait.
Print-makers hung about his house striving to catch at least a glimpse of him, which being elaborated, might serve as his likeness in the weekly supplement of some up-to-date newspaper. Sentimental maidens wrote poems to him, tied them with long, s.h.i.+ning filaments of hair, and suspended them to the gate, or upon the bamboo hedges of the Kano home.
But against all these petty, personal annoyances Tatsu had the double guard of Kano and old Mata San. The pride of the latter in this ”Son of our house” was unbounded. One would have thought that she discovered him, had rescued him from death and that it was now through her sole influence his reputation as an artist grew. n.o.ble patrons came to the little cottage bearing rolls of white silk, upon which they entreated humbly, ”That the ill.u.s.trious and honorable young painter, Kano Tatsu, would some day, when he might not be augustly inconvenienced by so doing, trace a leaf or a cloud,--anything, in fact, that fancy could suggest, so that it was the work of his own inimitable hand. For the condescension they trusted that he would allow them to give a present of money,--as large a sum as he was willing to name.”
”A second Sesshu! A second Sesshu!” old Kano would murmur to himself, in subdued ecstacy. ”So did they load his s.h.i.+p with silk, four centuries ago!”
Of most of these commissions, Tatsu never heard. Kano did not wish the boy's work to be blown wide over the great city as it had been blown along the mountain slopes of Kiu s.h.i.+u. Nor did he wish the thought of gain or of personal ambition to creep into Tatsu's heart. Now he spent most of the day-lit hours secluded in his little study, painting those scenes and motives suggested by the keynote of his mood. Of late he had begun to read, with deep interest, the various essays on art, gathered in Kano's small, choice library. He would sometimes talk with his father about art, and let the eager old man demonstrate to him the different brush-strokes of different masters. The widely diversified schools of painting as they had flourished throughout the centuries of his country's social and religious life aroused in him an impersonal curiosity. He began to try experiments, realizing, perhaps, that to a genius strong and sane as his even fantastic ventures in technique were little more than bright images flecking, for an instant, the immutable surface of a mirror.
All methods were essayed,--the liquid, flowing line of the Chinese cla.s.sics, Tosa's nervous, shattered lightning-strokes of painted motion, the soft, gray reveries of the great Kano school of three centuries before, when, to the contemplative mind all forms of nature, whether of the outer universe or in the soul of man, were but reflecting mirrors of a single faith; the heaped-up gold and malachite of Korin's decoration, sweet realistic studies of the s.h.i.+jo school, even down to the horrors of ”abura-ye,” oil-painting, as it is practised in the Yeddo of to-day, each had for him its special interest and its inspiration. He leaned above the treasure-chests of time, choosing from one and then another, as a wise old jewel-setter chooses gems. Because ambition, art, existence had come to be, for him, gray webs spun thin across the emptiness of his days, because all hope of earthly joy was gone, he had now the power to trace, with almost superhuman mimicry and skill, the shadow-pictures of his shadow-world.