Through all these busy days Umè-ko moved as one but little interested.
Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the
conventional nonenity of maidenhood that Japanese etiquette demanded.
It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal
readiness to any other husband of their choosing.
Mata knew her idol and nursling better. Hints of character and of
deep-sea passion had risen now and again to the surface of the girl's
placid life. There were currents underneath that the father did not
suspect. Once, during her childhood, a pet bird had been injured in a
fit of anger by old Kano. Umè-ko, with her ashen face under perfect
control, had killed the suffering creature and carried it, wrapped in
white paper, to her own room. The father, ashamed now, and filled with
genuine remorse, had stormed up and down the garden paths, reviling
himself for an impatient ogre, and promising more restraint in future.
Mata, silent for once, had crept to her child-mistress' close-shut
walls, heard the last sobbing words of a Buddhist prayer for the dead,
and burst through the shoji in scant time to catch back the stroke of a
dagger from the girl's slim, upraised throat. Her terrified screams
summoned Kano and the neighbors as well. A priest hurried down from
the temple on the hill. In time the culprit was reduced to a condition
of tearful penitence, and gave her promise never again to attempt so
cowardly and wicked a thing as self-destruction, unless it were for
some noble and impersonal end.
The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of
her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo
which Kano carved, in his finest manner, upon a wooden grave post. In
time, the artist forgot the episode. Mata never forgot. Often in the
long hours she thought of it now as she watched the girl's face bent
always so silently above the bridal sewing. No impatience or regret
were visible in her. Yet, thought Mata, surely no maiden in her senses
could really wish to become the wife of an ill-mannered, untamed
mountain sprite! Could Death be the secret of this pale tranquillity?
Was Umè-ko to cheat them all, at the last, by self-destruction?
In such wise did the old servant fret and ponder, but no assurance
came. A true insight into art might have opened many doors to her.
Yet, through a life devoted to the externals of it, Mata had been
tolerant of beauty, rather than at one with it. The impractical view
of life which art seemed to demand of its devotees was enough to arouse
suspicion, if not her actual dislike. Uchida was a hero because he had
been bold enough to shake himself free from lethargic influences, and
achieve a shining and substantial success.
But even had the key of art been thrust into the old dame's groping
hand, and even had her master guided her, there was an inner chamber of
Umè's heart which they could not have found. Umè herself had not known
of it until that first instant when, now three weeks ago, a strange
young face, hung about with shadows, had peered into her father's gate.
With the first sound of his voice, she had entered in, had knelt before
a shrine whereon, wrapped in fire, a Secret lay. Ever since she had
needed to guard that shrine, not, indeed, for fear that the light would
falter, but rather that it might not leap up, and lay waste her being.
As one guards a flame, so Umè-ko, with silence and prayer and
self-enforced tranquillity, guarded the sacred spark from winds of
passion. Each day at dawn, and again at twilight of each day, it
flamed high and was hard to conquer, for with dawn a letter was
hers--held in the night-wet branches of her dragon-plum, and each night
when Mata and her father thought her sleeping, an answer was written,
and committed to the keeping of the tree.
When Tatsu did not paint, or rest from sheer exhaustion, he was
writing. Umè, bending above his words, shivering at times, or weeping,
marvelled that the tissue had not charred beneath the thoughts burned
into it. Tatsu's phrases were like his paintings, unusual, vital,
almost demoniac in force, shot through and through at times with the
bolt of an almost unbearable beauty. Her own words answered his, as
the tree-tops answer storm, with music. Verse alone could ease the
girl of her ecstacy, and each recorded and triumphed in the demolition
of yet another day. "Another stone, beloved, thrust down from the
dungeon wall that severs us!"
Swiftly the heap of wedding garments grew. There were delicate
kimonos, as thin and gray as mist, with sunset-colored inner robes of
silk; gowns of linen and cotton for indoor wear; bath and sleeping
robes with great designs of flowers, birds, or landscapes; silken
bed-quilts and bright floor cushions; great sashes crusted like bark
with patternings of gold; dainty toilet accessories of hairpins,
girdles, collarettes, shopping-bags, purses, jewel-cases,--and new
sandals of various sorts, each with velvet thongs of some delicate hue.
The sewing was, of course, done at home. Mata would have trusted this
sacred rite to no domination but her own. She worked incessantly,
planning, cutting, scolding,--hurrying off to the shopping district for
some forgotten item, conferring with Ando Uchida about the details of
Tatsu's outfit, then returning, flushed with success and importance, to
new home triumphs.
Umè sewed steadily all day. Her painting materials had been put meekly
aside, and, as a further precaution at old Mata's hands, hidden under
the kitchen flooring. Toward the last it was found necessary to employ
an assistant, a seamstress, known of old to Mata. Her companionship,
as well as her sewing, proved a boon. Seated upon the springy matting,
with waves of shimmering silk tumultuous about them, the old dames
chatted incessantly of other brides and other wedding outfits they had
known. Marvellous were their tales of married life, some of them
designed to cheer, others to warn the silent little third figure, that
of the bride-to-be. As a matter of fact, Umè never listened. The
noise and buzz of incessant conversation affected her pleasantly, but
remotely, as the chatter of distant sparrows. The girl had too much
within herself to think of.
"May Kwannon have mercy upon my young mistress," sighed the nurse, one
day, as Umè left the room.
"Does she require mercy? I thought--she appears to me
honorably--er--undisturbed," ventured the seamstress, with one swift
upward look of interest.
"Yes, she appears,--many of us appear,--but can she be happy? That is
what I wish to know. The creature she is being forced to marry is more
like a mountain-lion than a man!"
"Ma-a-a! Is he dangerous? Will he bite her?" questioned the other,
hopefully.
"Amida alone knows what he will do with her," croaked Mata, in a
sepulchral voice.
The subject was one not to be readily relinquished. "The facts being
honorably as you relate," began the hired seamstress, her needle held
carefully against the light for threading, "how is it that the august
father of the illustrious young lady permits such a marriage?"
Mata's eyes gleamed sharp and bright as the needle. "Because he is as
mad as the wild man, and all for pictures! They would strip their own
skins off if that made better parchment. Miss Umè has been influenced
by them, and now is to be sacrificed. Alas! the evil day!" and Mata
wiped away some genuine tears on the hem of a night-robe she had
finished.
"O kinodoku Sama, my spirit is poisoned by your grief," murmured the
other, sympathetically. "Yet, in your place, I should find great
comfort in the outfit of your mistress. Never, even in the sewing
halls of princes, could more beautiful silks be gathered." She looked
about slowly, with the air of a professional who sees something really
worthy of regard.
Mata's face cleared. "Since the gods allow it, I should not complain,"
she admitted. "Indeed, Mr. Uchida and I are doing well by the young
couple in the matter of silks and house furnishings. And--whisper this
not--no one but he and I dream from what source these splendid fabrics
come!"
Mata had thrust a poisoned arrow of curiosity into her listener, and
knew it. Some day, perhaps the very day before the wedding, she might
reveal it. For the present, as she said, no one but herself and Uchida
knew.
More than once during sewing hours, Umè-ko herself had wondered how her
father was able to give her silks of such beauty and variety. With the
unthrift of the true artist, Kano was always poor. The old man would
have been as surprised and far angrier than his daughter, had he known
that Tatsu's pictures, stolen craftily by the confederates, Uchida and
Mata, and sold in Yokohama for about a tenth of their true value, were
the source of this sudden affluence. Tatsu remained ignorant, also.
But, provided they took no image of Umè's face, he would not have cared
at all. New garments, new mats, dainty household furnishings, were
showered upon him, too; but they might have been autumn leaves, for all
the interest he showed.
To gain his Dragon Maid,--to know that in this life she was irrevocably
his,--that was Tatsu's one conscious thought.
The wedding day came at last. Umè-ko had written no letter on the eve
of it, but all night long she felt that he was near her, leaning on the
breast of the plum tree, scaling the steeps above her, wandering, a
restless ghost of joy, about the moon-silvered cemetery, speaking
perhaps, as equal, to his primeval gods. So close, already were these
two, that even in absence, each felt always something of the other's
mood. It was a sleepless night to the girl, also. She cowered close
about the Secret, until its fierce light scorched her. She pressed
down her lids with strong, white fingers, but the glory streamed
through. So, tortured by intolerable bliss, she suffered, until the
dawn came in.
Quite early in the day the bride's trousseau and gifts were sent to
Tatsu's home. They made a train that filled the neighbors' eyes with
wonder and Mata's swelling heart with pride. There were lacquered
chests and cases of drawers, all filled with clothing. Each great
square package was covered with a decorated cloth, and swung from a
gilded staff borne on the shoulders of two stout coolies. There were
boxes of cakes, fruit, and eggs; and jinrikishas piled with a medley of
gifts. Even Kano was impressed. Uchida rubbed his two fat hands
together and laughed at everything. Umè-ko, watching the moving
shadows pass under her father's gate-roof, closed her eyes quickly and
caught her breath. The next gift from the Kano home was to be herself.
By this time autumn was upon the year. A few early chrysanthemums
opened small golden suns in the garden. Dodan bushes and maples hinted
at a crimson splendor soon to follow. The icho trees stood like
pyramids of gold; and suzuki grass upon the hillsides brushed a
cloudless blue sky with silken fingers. In the garden, autumn insects
sang. Umè-ko's kirigirisu which, some weeks before, she had released
from its cage, had, as if in gratitude made a home among the lichens of
the big plum tree. Umè believed that she always knew its voice from
among the rest, no matter how full the chorus of silver chiming.
She had gone back to her room, and sat now, in the centre of it,
staring toward the garden. Noon had crept upon it, devouring all
shadow. Her eyes saw little but the golden blur. A fusuma opened
softly, and two women, Mata and the attendant seamstress, came mincing
and smirking toward her, each with an armful of white silk. Umè rose
like an automaton. They began her toilet, talking the while in low
voices. They robed her in white with a thin lining-edge of crimson,
and threw over her shining hair a veil of tissue. Some one outside
called that the bride's kuruma was at the gate. Old Kano entered the
room, smiling. His steps creaked and rustled with new silk. Umè
turned for one fleeting glimpse of her plum tree. It seemed to stir
and wave green leaves toward her. With head down-bent, the girl
followed her father through the house.
Mata helped them into the two new, shining jinrikishas, a dragon-crest
blazoned on the one for Umè's use. She scolded the kuruma men in her
shrill voice, giving a dozen instructions in one sentence, and
pretending anger at their answering jests. On the doorstep stood the
little seamstress ready to cast a handful of dried peas. When Kano and
Umè-ko were off, Mata scrambled excitedly into her own vehicle. Her
human steed, turning round for an impudent and good-natured stare,
drawled out an unprintable remark. The seamstress shrieked "sayonara"
and pelted space with the peas. Afterward she ran on foot down the
slope of the hill and joined the smiling crowd of lookers-on. Soon it
was over. The peddler picked up his pack, and the children their toys.
Gates opened or slid aside in panels to receive their owners. The
jangling of small gate-bells made the hillside merry for an instant,
then busy silence again took possession.
No one at all was left in the Kano home. The little cottage of Umè's
birth, of her short, happy life and dawning fame, drew itself together
in the unusual silence. Sunshine fell thick upon the garden, and
warmed even the lazy gold-fish in their pigmy lake. In the plum-tree
branch that touched Umè-ko's abandoned chamber, the cricket chirped
softly to himself. He knew the Secret!