It is nearly a month since our night of pleasure at the temple _fête_ of
the thousands of lanterns, and I have been in terrible trouble.
Something has happened to Mousmé, and till that catastrophe—to me it
seemed nothing less—I never realized what she was to me.
It was so sudden.
I had left her in the morning, bright as the sunshine which forced its
way through the bamboo and paper _shoji_, and, filtering thus, fell in
golden, thread-like rays like spun silk upon the floor. The last I saw
of her was a tiny figure upon the balcony as I turned the corner of the
road, blowing kisses to me with one hand, and waving a huge bunch of
crimson lotus in the other, flowers we had just gathered together in the
sun-bathed garden.
And in three or four hours all this was altered, obliterated.
I climbed up from the town leisurely, taking the shady side of the road,
and availing myself to the full of every shadow cast by the trees or by
the queer old villas with their mossy roofs and eccentric architecture.
If I had but known, how my steps would have hastened!
Arrived at the wicket, I cannot see even a flutter of Mousmé’s dress
to-day. She is usually awaiting my return in the shady corner of the
verandah with her _samisen_, or with a pile of books at her side, from
which she has been trying to spell out the words in big print.
I walk up the path, which is flower-bordered, and alive with bees whose
humming sounds are like the deeper notes of an Æolian harp, and across
the garden where dragon-flies flit, iridescent shuttles weaving their
colours, blue, green and yellow, into the sunlit air, darting between
the little ponds in which gold-fish hide from the sunlight beneath the
tranquil floating lotus-leaves.
I enter the house. Everything is strangely still.
There is no one in the room in which we usually sit. The blue-and-white
vases of Arita porcelain are filled with lotus-blooms, dainty, fantastic
in their arrangement, with spiked grasses and sedges. A tiny vase of
bronze stands upon my writing-table. As usual, dear little Mousmé has
placed in it the finest blossoms, and in their rose-hued cups I fancy
some of her kisses may lurk. Her shoes are standing in a patch of
sunlight on the floor. “She cannot have gone out, then,” I say to myself.
“It is evident that she is not down at mother-in-law’s.”
Where is she?
I push back one of the panels to enter the next room. Perhaps she is
there.
The room is so dark that I can scarcely see across it; but in the dimness
I can just discern a something stretched upon the floor.
I step hastily forward.
Yes, it is Mousmé lying there, with her face, upturned, looking a white,
featureless oval in the gloom, her gown elongating her slender figure,
and her huge sleeves of blue flowered silk with orange linings spread out
like the maimed wings of a brilliant, long-bodied moth.
I stoop down.
Is she asleep? No, but she is terribly still. Is it a coquettish ruse on
her part, and will she open her eyes in a minute or two, and burst out
laughing in my face, and then pull it down for a shower of kisses from
her rosebud mouth?
Half expecting this, I wait an instant, and feel as if I were kneeling
beside my own grave. But the fantastic little figure I love so well gives
no sign of movement. My alarm increases. I get up, hastily push back one
of the sliding paper panels, and let in a flood of sunlight from the
garden.
It streams full on Mousmé’s face; it searches out the gold threads in the
embroidery of her gown; it tells me in an instant that there is something
seriously wrong.
There are no bells in this strange little house of mine, so I beat upon
the floor with my heel to summon Oka or his wife.
I wait anxiously, kneeling beside silent little Mousmé. Each second seems
to extend itself into an hour. How long it seems—that minute or two ere
I can hear some one ascending the rickety stairs from the basement. It
is Oka’s wife who enters, her eyes still but half unfastened from an
interrupted siesta.
She comes forward to where I am kneeling beside Mousmé.
Unlike women of her class in England, Oka’s wife is laconic.
“Fever,” she says, on catching sight of Mousmé’s face. “Send for the
doctor very quick!” She is evidently waiting for me to give my assent to
her suggestion, so I nod my head, and she goes away softly across the
room.
A few minutes later I hear one of her numerous progeny go away down the
path at a run, and I know the doctor has been sent for.
Mousmé remains unconscious all the time that we are getting her partially
undressed and on to the mattress.
Am I to lose her?
The bare thought drives the blood away from my heart. I know what
Kotmasu would say, for he still disbelieves, or at least pretends to
disbelieve, in my marriage.
“There are velly plenty more mousmés.”
“Yes, very well,” something inside my mind replies, “but only one Mousmé.”
Whilst we wait the coming of Han Sen, the doctor, I am driven almost
frantic by the noises which one can never shut out of a Japanese
house. The droning hum of the bees at work on the roses outside, the
unceasing chirruping whirr of the cicalas, all the sounds of a garden in
summer-time, are magnified tenfold because I fear that Mousmé will be
disturbed.
She uncloses her eyes once when the doctor’s steps are heard coming up
the garden-path. But she says nothing, and only takes my large brown hand
in her small one.
I have not much faith in the doctor. His phials are so finikin and
toy-like, and I have heard something, too, about their drugs, and my
memory of their fantastic and extraordinary nature does not tend to
reassure me.
He is a little, oldish man with gimlet eyes in a face full of wrinkles,
which seem to serve no other purpose than to disguise his emotions if
he has any. He treads softly across the matting floor, with Oka’s wife
hovering, anxious-faced, in the rear.
“Madame the most honourable lady has been unwell some time?” he inquires
in a high-pitched key, with an insinuating inflection on the first word,
which many people annoy me with when referring to Mousmé.
“No.”
“No!” and his eyebrows depart upward from overhanging his narrow, beady
black eyes.
“Her illness dates but from an hour or two ago.”
“Ah, then she will get better, most honourable English Mister,” is the
reply. And then, whilst I am explaining matters, the doctor’s yellow
fingers, with their wrinkled, dried-parchment skin, are busy compounding
something which smells abominably, and in the efficacy of which I feel I
have no faith, notwithstanding his reiterated assurance that “the most
honourable madame” will speedily recover.
When he has finished mixing the medicine in the little jar-like cup
Oka’s wife has brought him, he examines his patient very carefully with
a pair of spectacles thrust up on his forehead, holding Mousmé’s hand
and counting the pulse-beats, lifting her eyelids and staring into her
unseeing eyes, talking all the while in the high-pitched, squeaky tone
which reminds me of the old man who sits at the corner of Nisson Street
and writes the illiterate mousmés’ love-letters, putting in all sorts of
dreadful things in response to the usual, “You know what to say,” of his
unimaginative clients.
When Dr. Han Sen has finished the examination, and has listened with a
stethoscope of native manufacture to the beating of Mousmé’s heart, to
the bird-like fluttering of which I am so used in the wakeful stillness
of the night, he rises to go.
Shall he come to see the most honourable lady to-morrow?
A vague idea formulates itself as I look into his unintelligent, vacuous
face.
“No, I will send if I want your services,” I hastily explain.
“No?” There is a look of almost professional regret on the wizened face.
Do I know my most honourable madame is ill, very ill?
“Yes! I know. I will send if I require the most honourable Dr. Han Sen.”
Then he goes out down the path, no doubt mystified at my eccentric
conduct.
What a fool I was not to have thought of this before!
As soon as Dr. Han Sen has had time to get clear of the garden, I hasten
off down into Nagasaki, leaving Mousmé, who is evidently sleeping now, in
charge of Oka’s wife.
I am going to get the European doctor of the mail-boat to come and see
her.
“Why did not I think of this before?” I ask myself as I hasten over the
roughly paved roadway down the hillside towards the harbour. Ah! why,
indeed, not?
Mousmé was very ill, and at one time I watched beside her day and night,
fearing every hour, nay, almost every moment, lest the frail thread of
life should be snapped, and the sun of my happiness go down with that of
her life.
My friend M’Phail, the cheery doctor of the mail-boat, was most untiring
in his attendance; and at last I think professional interest in the case
was replaced by a deep and friendly one. Oka’s wife, who has seen so many
cases of fever, and so many lives allowed to slip through the native
practitioners’ fingers, is unceasing in her praises of the ship’s doctor,
whose skill and resourcefulness seem to her simple mind nothing short of
miraculous. Indeed, she almost forgets to give the family god, before
whose impassive figure a light has been kept burning night and day during
her mistress’s illness, any credit for Mousmé’s wonderful recovery.
However, when she remembers it, she in penitence places additional
offerings of fruit and flowers on the little shelf on which the image
stands, and when I go down to give some order to Oka, I see her
prostrated, in the comparative gloom of their basement bed-chamber,
pouring out her supplications, whilst the scent of burnt incense pervades
the house more than ever.
When she hears me she comes out, half fearing lest I should treat her
orisons with ridicule.
“Him hear,” she says, pointing and nodding in the direction where
the idol sits solemnly, in a halo of yellow light from the little
earthen-ware lamp. “Missus”—she has mastered the word, and uses it with
infinite care—“velly much better.”
“Yes,” I reply.
And who knows, Oka’s wife, perhaps your prayers offered in good faith
have reached ears that are not deaf, and have brought an answer from “the
God of the English sir,” I say to myself.
[Illustration: CHAPTER NINE]