THE he death of the mother of Wistaria had taken place the day after the
girl’s birth. Her father had left his young Eta wife to go to the
village to purchase medicines and food. She was in the care of her
grandmother, who was old and weak, and powerless to protect her.
The Mori samurai, all of them in a state of savage intoxication, had
come to the house demanding and calling for Shimadzu. They had been
drinking heavily all day, and swore they would have their final cup with
their former comrade.
When Madame Mume assured them of his absence, they insisted upon
entering the house, and, pushing past the old woman, straightway took
possession of the place. One of their number suggested that in the
absence of Shimadzu they must be entertained by his Eta wife, whereupon
the others, taking up the cry, boisterously began to shout for the
hostess of the house.
Meanwhile the young wife, very weak and ill from her recent confinement,
listened with feverish excitement to the loud voices and the bedlam of
noises now rattling through the little cottage. Fearful for the safety
of her lord, in a moment of delirium she arose from her sick bed to go
to them, staggering through the dividing rooms until she came to the
ribald debauchees.
As she pushed aside the sliding doors and stood in the opening, her
white bed-robes about her, she seemed like an apparition. A sudden
silence fell upon the revellers. It was broken by a samurai whose sake
cup dropped from his nerveless hand to the floor, where it shattered
into fragments.
The next instant there was a general movement towards the figure between
the shoji. That simultaneous, half-savage advance seemed to snap the
last vital cord in the woman. When they reached her she no longer swayed
between the shoji. They bent over her in various attitudes of horror,
where she lay prone at their feet, a white, crushed thing whose delicate
life had been brutally snuffed out forever.
With a loud cry of fear and dismay they rushed from the chamber, out
from the house into the open air, where their befogged brains still
seemed to behold a vision of an avenging, pursuing spirit.
Hearing the wailing cries of the old grandmother while he was yet afar
off from the house, Shimadzu began to run at his utmost speed, a
premonition of disaster forcing itself upon him. Up the hillocks he
sped. A moment of fearful, striving effort and he was beside the old
woman. Something froze in Shimadzu, paralyzing his faculties. Power of
speech and movement was gone.
The old woman caught his arm, shook it, and gazed with her fading
eyesight into his staring eyes.
“Master, master!” she cried.
He only stared at the figure upon the floor. The old woman rushed from
the house, shrieking and calling aloud for help. Neighbors came rushing
up from the little village below and began to fill the house. They tried
to arouse the stricken samurai, but he heeded them not. But when they
attempted to move the young wife, a strange guttural sound of savage
protest escaped his lips, so that they dared not touch her.
Then the neighbors mingled their cries with those of the old woman, and
the house of death was rendered hideous with their ceaseless moaning and
the muffled beating of Shinto drums.
All night long the samurai crouched in that paralyzed attitude by the
side of his wife. But in the morning strong and stout armed men from the
village, disregarding his cries of protest, lifted the body of the wife
upon the death-couch, drew the lids over the staring eyes, closed the
frothed mouth, where the teeth shone out like small white fangs, and
folded the frozen white hands across her breast. Then the samurai came
back to life—vivid, horrible, insane life.
Some kindly woman brought in the little Wistaria and held her towards
him with a pitying exclamation, knowing that this little life could not
but comfort the bereft man. He seized the child wildly in his arms. Then
holding his one-day-old babe over the dead body of his wife, he swore a
fearful oath of vengeance.
From that day the samurai had but one purpose in life, but one hope and
ambition: to encompass the ruin and death of those he deemed the
murderers of his wife. It happened that he came of a powerful family,
who, in all his troubles, had offered him their sympathy and would
gladly have received him back among them in spite of his marriage to an
Eta girl. They were in high favor at court, and now they carried his
case to the Shogun himself. The exiled samurai was forthwith ordered to
appear before the Shogun, who had been deeply impressed and touched by
his sorrows, and who had cause for prejudice against his former lord.
The Shogun offered to force his lord to restore to the samurai his
estates and rank, but Shimadzu fiercely refused to accept these favors,
wildly declaring that he would rather be buried alive than enter the
service of such a lord. The Shogun, still anxious to please his family,
begged him to make some request which it would be in his power to grant,
whether for service under another lord, or at court in attendance upon
his own person.
“I have but one request to make, my lord,” responded the samurai.
“That is?—”
“To be made the public executioner.”
All these things the Lady Wistaria now learned for the first time. She
was as one struck down by a sudden shock of grief. In one little hour
she had fallen from a great height, and had learned of things that had
caused her to quiver with anguish and shame. She could not at once share
the thought of the father whose wrongs haunted him, demanding vengeance
and justice. She thought, instead, of other things. She was the daughter
of the public executioner, the hangman!—an Eta girl—an outcast! The
odium of it all crushed her. In that hour of agony her imagination
conjured up the noble, highborn face of her lover, torturing her soul
with its infinite distance from her. She knew now that he was as far
beyond her reach as the sun.
“Shrink not, my daughter,” came her father’s voice harshly upon her
thoughts; “your father’s hands are not stained in the blood of any of
his fellow-men save those who were his by divine right. To underlings I
gave the punishment of the public criminal, but to myself I kept the
sacred task of seeking, tracking, ruining, and killing with my own hands
the destroyers of my house.”
“Then,” said Wistaria, in a strangely pleading voice, “you have avenged
my mother. All is done, all is finished. Oh, my father, let us forget
all this past, and go away where we may not be known and pass our days
in peace until the end.”
“Nay, all is not done,” replied the father. “You forget that while I
have had the holy joy of executing the six murderers of my wife, their
prince still lives.”
“Ah!”
“Once I served under him, honored him above all men; now I desire
nothing else on earth but to bow his head in the dust. He is a great
prince, beyond my reach, but I have sought and found a better means of
striking at him. For this purpose, my daughter, I need your aid.”
“You mean—” she began.
“This Prince of Mori is the man. Now you understand. His heart, his
whole life, is wrapped up in his son. But yesterday, my daughter, I
caught that son in the trap which I set through you. To-morrow he pays
the penalty of the sins of his father.”
Wistaria tottered to her feet. Then she fell on her knees and crept upon
them to her father.
“Father, dear, my father, I beg, I implore you to show mercy.”
“For whom do you ask mercy, my lady?” asked the father.
“For the innocent—this young Prince of Mori.”
“You—you ask mercy for this prince!—you, the daughter of a murdered
woman!” In an instant she was sitting up stiff and rigid.
“My lord,” she said, “I am, indeed, too insignificant and unworthy to be
thy daughter, but for one small moment I did forget our wrongs and fain
would have spared my soul the sacrifice of innocent blood.”
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[Illustration: Decoration]