from me. What has become of my little mocking-bird? I cannot live
without it."
"You also los' liddle bird?" she queried, softly--"jus' lige unto my
same liddle nightingale?"
"I have lost--I am losing you," he said, suddenly, with a burst of
anguish. "I cannot make you out these last few weeks. What has come over
you? I miss your laughing and your singing. You are always sad now; your
eyes--ah, I cannot bear it." His voice went suddenly anxious. "Tell me,
is it--do you--want--need some more money, Yuki? You know you can have
all you want."
She sprang to her feet fiercely.
"No, no, no, no!" she cried; "naever any more for all my life long,
_dear_ my lord."
"Then why--"
"Ah, _pray_ don' ask why."
"But why--"
"Then listen unto me. I nod any longer thad liddle bit geisha girl you
marrying with. I change grade big moach. Now you see me, I am one
wooman, mebbe like wooman one hundled years ole--wise--sad--I change!"
"Yes," he said. "You are changed. You are my Undine, and I have found
your soul at last!"
* * * * *
One oppressive afternoon, when a nagging, bleating wind out-doors had
prevented their going on their customary ramble through the woods or on
a little trip to the city, Jack had fallen asleep. Long before he had
awakened he had felt her warm, soothing presence near him, but with the
pleasure it afforded him was mingled a premonition of disaster and a
dread of something unhappy about her? He awoke to find her standing by
him, her face white and drawn with a despair he could not comprehend.
"What is it?" He started up fearfully. "Your eyes are tragic! You look
as if you were contemplating something frightful."
She sank down to his feet, and, despite his protests, knelt and clung to
him there, sobbing with passionate abandon.
"Don't! Don't! I can't bear you to do that. What is it, Yuki?"
"Oh, for liddle while, jus' liddle bit while, bear with me," she said.
"Little while! What do you mean?" he demanded.
She tried to regain her composure. Her laughter was piteous.
"I only liddle bit skeered," she said. "I--" she stammered--"I skeered
'bout thad liddle foolish jade bracelet, all smashed and broken."
"Is that all?"
"It is soach a bad omen! The gods trying to separate us, mebbe."
"Separate us?" His suspicions were growing. "How can they do that? It
lies between you and me, such a--such a fate. The gods--ah, you are
talking nonsense."
"The gods see inside," she said.
"Inside what?"
"Our hearts." Her voice was barely above a whisper.
"And what can they find there to distress you?" he asked, almost
fiercely. She was hurting him with her failure to confide in him.
"The bracelet--" she began. "It is broken, an' love, too, mus' die--an'
break!"
From that day her melancholy grew rather than diminished. But she had
roused her husband's suspicions, and her morbidness irritated rather
than appealed to him. He felt that in some way he was being deceived.
The day that he found her wardrobe neatly and carefully folded away in
her queer little packing-case, as though in preparation for a journey,
the full sense of her deceit dawned upon him. Hitherto when she had left
him she had taken none of her belongings with her. He perceived it was
now her intention to desert him utterly. He had served her purpose,
apparently, and she was through with him.
His wrath burst its bounds. He had not known the capabilities of his
angry passion. He tore the silken garments from the box with the fierce
madness of one demented, then he pushed her into the room, and showed
her where they lay scattered.
"The meaning of this?" he demanded, white to the lips with the intensity
of his passion.
She remained mute. She did not even trouble to mock or laugh at him, nor
would she weep. She seemed dazed and bewildered, and he, infuriated
against her, said things which rankled in his conscience for years
afterwards.
"Does a promise mean nothing to you--a promise--an oath itself? Were
you, parrot-like, merely echoing my words when you swore to stay by me
until--" his voice broke--"death?"
Still she made him no denial, and her silence maddened him, and drove
him on with his bitter arraignment.
"What your object has been I fail to see, but you cannot deny that you
have laid yourself out, have used every effort, every art and wile, of
which you are mistress, to make me believe in you. And I--I--like a
blind, deluded fool--ah, Yuki--there is something wrong, some hideous
mistake somewhere. You have some secret, some trouble. Be frank with me.
Can't you see--understand how I--I am suffering?"
She roused herself with an effort, but her words were pitifully
conventional. She apologized for the trouble and noise she had brought
into his house.
"You have not answered me!" he cried. "What was your intention? Did you
intend to leave me? You shall answer me that!"
"It was bedder so," she said, and her voice fainted. She could speak no
further.
"Then such was your intention!" He could hardly believe her words.
XI
THE NIGHTINGALE
When Love lives after Trust is dead, then peace is an unknown quantity.
A constraint that was baffling in its intense hopelessness now hedged up
between these two. Yuki grew thin and wistful. Her whole attitude became
one of pitiful attempted conciliation and humility, which with bitter
suspicion her husband took to be confusion and guilt. Had she even
affected somewhat of her old light-heartedness and attempted to win his
forgiveness by her old audacious wiles, her husband would have forgotten
and forgiven everything, glad of an excuse to renew the old close
comradeship with her. But she made no such attempt.
She had acquired a peculiar fear of her husband, and unconsciously
shrank from him, as though dreading to bring down on herself his further
displeasure. She kept away from him as much as she could, though at
times she made spasmodic, frantic efforts to assume her old
light-heartedness, but these efforts were usually followed by passionate
outbursts of tears, when she had drawn the shoji between them, and was
once more alone with her own inward thoughts, whatever they were.
Meanwhile her husband kept the watch of a jailer over her. He was
convinced that she was waiting for a chance to leave him, and this he
was determined to frustrate. She had raised in him a feeling of the
intensest bitterness, which amounted almost to antagonism towards her.
And still beneath all this resentment and bitterness a tenderness and
yearning for her threatened to strangle and overpower all other feeling.
Her apparent fear of him hurt him terribly, and caused him distractedly
at times to question whether he had been as kind to her as he might have
been. Then his mind would inevitably revert to the fact that she was
planning to leave him, and his resentment would burn fiercer than ever.
By a common dread of the subject, both of them avoided alluding to it,
and for this reason it weighed the heavier on their minds. He feared
that any explanation she might attempt to make to him would only be some
excuse put forward to reconcile him, and win his consent to the
impossible situation which he instinctively knew she intended to
consummate. She, on the other hand, watched wildly to turn the subject,
dreading his wrath, which she was conscious was righteous.
To add to the gloom of their strained relations, a season of drizzly wet
weather set in, which confined them to the house, and moreover Yuki was
grieving and pining over the loss of a favorite nightingale that had
made its home in the tall bamboo out in the midnight garden of their
little home. Jack was misanthropic and cynical, restless as it is
possible for a man to be under such galling circumstances, yearning
nevertheless for things to be as they had been between him and his wife.
One night, at dusk, after an exceptionally sad and chilly meal in-doors,
Jack had come out alone, and was trying to soothe his senses with a
fragrant cigar. Instinctively he was waiting for his wife. He missed her
if she was absent from his side but a moment. Suddenly out of the
gloaming soared out one long, thrilling note of sheer ecstasy and bliss,
that quivered and quavered a moment, and then floated away into the
maddest peals of melody, ending in a sob that was excruciating in its
intense humanness. The nightingale had returned!
He sprang to his feet, and, trembling by the veranda rail, stared
outward into the darkness. And then? Yuki came out from the shadows of
their garden, and under the light of the moon, beneath their small
balcony, she looked up into his eyes, and murmured in a voice thrilled
by an inward sob, so timid and meek, so beseeching and prayerful:
"I lige please you, my lord!"
"The nightingale!" he whispered, with hoarse emotion. "Did you hear it?
It has returned!"
"Nay, my lord--tha's jus' me! I jus' a liddle echo!"
She had learned the voice of the nightingale.
[Illustration: THE NIGHTINGALE SONG]
* * * * *
With an exclamation of indescribable tenderness he drew her into his
arms, and for a few moments at least all the misery and pain and
constraint of the last few weeks between them passed away and gave place
to all their pent-up love and loneliness.
As he held her close to him, he was conscious at first only of the fact
that she loved him, that she was clinging to him with somewhat of her
old abandon, and then he felt her hands upon his arms. He could almost
see them shaking and trembling. She was attempting to release herself!
Struggling to be free! All of a sudden he released her, and stood
breathing hard, his arms folded across his breast, waiting for her to do
or say something to him.
She did not move. She stood before him, with her head down; and then her
blue eyes lifted, and timidly, appealingly, they beseeched his own. She
started to speak, stammered only a few incoherent words, and then, with
a half-sob, she unsteadily crossed the room and left him alone.
Two days later, upon their household gloom came word from Taro Burton,
announcing that he had arrived in Tokyo. Jack rushed off to meet him,
telling Yuki he expected an old friend, and would bring him home that
evening.
XII
TARO BURTON
It may be that Jack Bigelow first awoke to the fact that for months he
had been literally living in a dream-world when he saw his old
college-chum, Taro Burton--the same dear, old, grave Taro! He rushed up
to him in the old boyish fashion, wringing his hands with unaffected
delight.
The past dream-months rolled for the moment from his memory, and Jack
was once again the happy up-to-date American boy.
Taro had been delayed in America, he now told the other frankly, on
account of the failure of his people to send him passage money until
about a month ago. He had a few hardships to recount and some messages
to deliver from mutual friends, and then he wanted to know all about
Jack. Why had he failed to visit his people as promised? How much of the
country had he seen? Why were his letters so few and far between?
Jack Bigelow laughed shortly. "Burton, old man," he said, "I've been
dead to everything in Japan--in the world, in fact--save one entrancing
subject."
"Yes?" The other was curious. "And that is--?"
"My wife."
"Your wife!" Taro stopped short. They were crossing the main street of
Tokyo on foot.
"Yes," said the other, laughing boyishly, all his resentment against the
girl lost and forgiven for the time being.
"And so you did it, after all?" said the other, with slow, bitter
emphasis. His friend, then, was little different from other foreigners
who marry only to desert.
"Did what?"
"Got a wife."
"Got a wife! Why, man, she came to me. She's a witch, the sun-goddess
herself. She's had me under her spell all these months. She has
hypnotized me."
"And still has you under her spell?"
"I am wider awake to-day," said Jack, soberly.
"And soon," said Taro, "you will be still wider awake, and then--then it
will be time for her to awaken."
"No!" said Jack, sharply, with bitter memory. "She has no heart
whatever. She likes to pretend--that is all."
"How do you mean?"
"Simply that we've both been pretending and acting--I to myself, she to
me; she trying to make me believe it was all real to her, at any rate
these last two months; I trying to delude myself into believing in her,
which was more than my conceit was good for, after all. Just when I was
sure of her, I accidentally discovered that she was preparing to desert
me altogether."
"She apparently has more sense than some of them," said Taro. "Her head
rules her heart."
"Oh, entirely," Jack agreed, quickly, thinking of the money she had
coaxed from him in the past.
"And you," Taro turned on him, "have you come out all right?"
"Perfectly!" the other laughed with forced assurance and airiness that
deceived Taro, who was somewhat credulous by nature. "It wasn't for a
lifetime, you know," he added.
His reply was distasteful to the high moral sense of Taro Burton--more,
it pained him, for it brought to him a sudden and deep disappointment in
his friend. He changed the subject, and tried to talk about his own
people. He was in a great hurry to go home, and would linger but a day
in Tokyo. He had arrived sooner than they expected him. He was hungry
for a sight of his little sister and mother--they were all he had in the
world.
Jack's spirits were dampened for the moment, as he had expected his
friend to remain with him for a few days. However, he got Taro's consent
to accompany him to his home for dinner that evening, in order to meet
the "Sun-goddess."
* * * * *
Taro was ushered with great ceremony into the quaint zashishi, which was
supposed to be entirely Japanese, and was in reality wholly American,
despite the screens and mats and vases. Jack ran up-stairs to prepare
his wife to meet his friend.
The girl was panically dressing in her best clothes. The maid had
brushed her hair till it glistened. Long ago her husband had
peremptorily forbidden her the use of oil for the purpose of darkening
or smoothing it, so it now shone a rich bronze black and curled
entrancingly around her little ears and neck. She needed no color for
her lips or cheeks; this also her husband had forbidden her to use. She
looked like the picture of the sun-goddess in some old fairy print, her
eyes dancing and shining with excitement, her cheeks very red and rosy.
She was irresistible, thought her husband, as he held her at arm's
length. Then, to her great mortification and chagrin, he lifted her
bodily in his arms and carried her downstairs. And thus they entered the
room, the girl blushing and struggling in his arms.
Taro Burton was standing tall and erect, his back to the light. He was
very grave, in spite of his friend's mirth, and, as Jack set the girl on
the floor, he took a step forward to meet her, bowing ceremoniously in
Japanese fashion.
Yuki stood up, straightened her crumpled gown, and hung her head a
moment.
"Yuki, this is my friend, Mr. Burton."
She raised her head with a quick, terrified start, and then
instantaneously hers and Taro's eyes met, and each recoiled and shrank
backward, their eyes matching each other in the intense startled look of
horror.
The man's face had taken on the color of death, and he was standing,
immovable and silent, almost as if he were an image of stone. The girl
sank to the floor in a confused heap, shivering and sobbing.
Jack turned from her to Taro, and then back again to the crouching girl.
She was creeping on her knees towards Taro, but the man, having found
the power of movement, went backward away from her, aged all in a
moment.
He tried to turn his sick eyes from her, but they clung, fascinated as
is the needle by the pole.
And then Jack's voice, hoarse with a fear he could not understand, broke
in:
"Burton, what is the matter?"
Suddenly the girl sprang to her feet and rushed to Taro, sobbing and
entreating in Japanese, but the terrible figure of the man remained
immovable. Jack pulled her forcibly from him.
"Burton, dear old friend, what is it?"
The other pushed his hands from him with almost a blow.
"She is my sister! Oh, my God!"
Jack Bigelow felt for an instant as if the life within him had been
stopped. Then he grasped at a chair and sank down dazed.
As though to break up the terrible silence, the girl commenced to laugh,
but her laughter was terrible, almost unearthly. The man in the chair
covered his face with his hands; the other made a movement towards her
as if he would strike her. But she did not retreat: nay, she leaned
towards him. And her laughter, loud and discordant, sank low, and then
faded in a tremulous sob.
She put out her little speaking, beseeching hands, and "Sayonara!" she
whispered softly. Then there was stillness in the room, though the
echoes seemed to repeat "Sayonara," "Sayonara," and again "Sayonara,"
and that means not merely "Farewell," but the heart's resignation: "If
it must be."
Jack and Taro were alone together, neither breaking by a word the tragic
sadness of that terrible silence. It was the coming into the room of the
maid that recalled them to life. Twilight was settling. She brought the
lighted andon and set it in the darkening room.
Jack got up slowly. The stupor and horror of it all were not gone from
him, but he crossed to the other man, and looked into his dull, ashen
face.
"My God! Burton, forgive me," he said, brokenly; "I am a gentleman. I
will fix it all right. She is my wife, and all the world to me. We can
remarry if you wish, and I swear to protect her with all the love and
homage I would give to any woman who became my wife."
"Yes, you must do that," said the other, with weak half-comprehension.
"But where is she?"
"Where is she?" Jack repeated, dazedly. They had forgotten her
departure. A dread of her possible loss possessed and stupefied Jack,
and Taro was half delirious.
"We must look for her at once," said Jack.
They called to her, and all over the house and through the grounds they
searched for her, their lanterns scanning the dark shadows under the
trees in the little garden; but only the autumn winds, sighing in the
pine-trees, echoed her singing minor notes, and mocked and numbed their
senses.
"She must have gone home," said the husband.
"We must go there at once," said the brother.
"It will be all right, Burton, dear old friend. Trust me; you know me
well enough for that."
Taro paused, and turned on him burning eyes, in which friendliness had
been replaced by a look that spoke of stern and awful judgment.
"Otherwise," he began, but paused; he went on in a cold hard voice, "I
was going to say, I will kill you."
XIII
IN WHICH TWO MEN LEARN OF A
SISTER'S SACRIFICE
Jack Bigelow's usually sunny face was bleached to the ashiness of fear
and despair. He was so nervous that he could not keep still a moment at
a time, but would get up and pace the length of the car, only to return
and look with eyes that attested the heartache within at the other man,
silent and grim. Taro seemed the calmer, but well the younger man knew
that beneath that subdued exterior slumbered a fire that needed but a
breath to be turned into avenging fury.
At last they reached their destination. The little town once again! But
this night Jack was not alone. There was no star or moon overhead to
lighten their pathway; a dull, drizzly, sleety rain was falling. In
silence they left the car; in silence plodded through the mud of the
road and the damp grass of the field beyond. The little garden gate
creaked on its hinges as they went through. They saw the dim outlines of
the old palace before them, with its wide balconies and sloping roofs.
Half-way up the garden was the family pond, freshened by a hidden
spring, and the little winding brook which wound hither and thither
showed how it emptied into the bay beyond. There was even a tiny boat
moored on a toy-like island in the centre of the pond.
For the first time Taro Burton paused, and looked with dreadful eyes at
its dull surface, which even the darkness of the night and the miserable
rain could not obliterate entirely. What were the memories that crowded
back on him, suffocating him? Here it was that he and Yuki had grown up
together. The little boat was the same, the island as small and neat,
the house seemed as ever; nothing had changed. Yes, there was Yuki! A
deep groan slipped from his lips.
There was a difference of seven years in their ages, but a stronger bond
of sympathy and comradeship had existed between these two than is usual
between brother and sister. Their nationality had to a large extent
isolated them from other children, for the Japanese children had laughed
at their hair and eyes, and called them "Kirishitans" (Christians).
Until he was seven years of age, Taro had manfully, though bitterly,
fought his battles alone. He had been a queer, brooding little lad, of
passionate and violent temper, and, apparently, scorning any overtures
of friendship from any one outside his own household.
When the little sister had come, the boy had gone suddenly wild with
joy, and had proceeded to bestow upon her the same worshipful love his
mother gave exclusively to him, for Snowflake had been born when their
English father lay at the gates of death, her tiny soul fluttering into
life just as that of her father drifted outward into eternity, so that
to Omatsu, the mother, who was passionately absorbed in her grief, her
arrival had been a source of irritation. But Taro had carried her to the
family temple, and had, himself, named her "Snowflake" (Yuki), for she
had come at a time when all the land was covered with whiteness. There
had been a frost and even a snowfall, which is rare in that part of the
country. Moreover, she resembled a snowflake, so soft and white and
pure.
How was it possible for him, after all these years, to come, as he now
had come, once more to this place of which she had always been a part,
and with which she had always been lovingly associated in his mind, and
not be filled with emotions that rent his heart. She had been his
inspiration and all the world to him.
He remembered how they would drift around in their tiny boat, and she,
little autocrat, would perch before him, her eyes dancing and shining,
while he told her the story of the fisher-boy Urashima and his bride,
the daughter of the dragon king. And when he would finish, for the
hundredth time, perhaps, she would say, "See, Taro-sama, I am the
princess, and you the fisher-boy. We are sailing, sailing, sailing on
the sea 'where Summer never dies,'" and he, to please her fancy, drifted
on and on with her, around and around the little pond, until the sun
began to sink in the west and the little mother would call them
in-doors.
Now the monotonous drip, drip, drip of the rain-drops as they plashed
from the weeping willow-trees that surrounded the tiny lake, fell upon
its dull surface with mournful sound. Taro groaned again.
When he had knocked loudly a man came shuffling round from the rear of
the house, and, in reply to his inquiry for Madam Omatsu, informed him
gruffly that she had retired.
It did not matter; he must awaken her, Taro, who had found voice, told
him with such insistence that the servant fled ignominiously to obey
him. They waited for some time, out in the melancholy night. There was
no sound from within the house. Taro hammered on the door once more.
Then a faint light appeared from a window close by the door, and the
man's head showed again. He begged their honorable patience. He would
open in a fraction of a second. He was very humble and servile now, and,
as he admitted them, backed before them, bowing and bobbing at every
step, for his mistress's entire household had been taught to treat
foreigners with the greatest deference and respect.
"Go to your mistress," said Taro, briefly, "and tell her that her son
desires to see her at once."
There was immediately a fluttering at the other side of the shoji. Taro
saw an eye withdraw from a hole. There were a few minutes of silence,
and then the shoji parted and a woman entered the room. Her mother-love
must have prompted her to rush into the arms of her son, for she had not
seen him in five years, but, whatever her emotions, she skilfully
concealed them, for the paltry reason that her son was accompanied by a
stranger, an honorable foreign friend; and it behooved her to affect the
finest manners. Consequently she prostrated herself gracefully, bowing
and bowing, until Taro strode rapidly over to her and lifted her to her
feet.