AS a mother seeks a lost child, so the Tojin-san frantically scoured
every nook and corner of the Shiro Matsuhaira for the fox-woman.
In the interval in which he had faced that threatening, blood-hungry
mob, she had gone! He was torn with sick forebodings of the fate that
might have befallen her. That she had gone of her own free will, he
could not believe—no, not after the promise she had made him!
And so, with his wound untended, his brain swimming in vertigo, he
staggered from room to room, until the morning dawned dim and gray, and
the sun crept over the horizon with its bright, hard eye.
Wild and haggard-eyed, shaking as though he were afflicted with ague, he
came finally back to his own chamber. Here his students awaited him,
eager to show him their good-will, to congratulate him and gossip over
the certain punishment that would overtake those who had molested him.
But he heard no word that they spoke, and presently they seemed to
realize that something was wrong with the great Tojin, and they drew
apart, whispering, and regarding him with awed glances.
The maid, Obun, snivelling and shaking with fear, crept into the vast,
deserted kitchen and fell to putting it in order. In another wing of the
house the voice of the lately craven Genji Negato was heard, and out
along the road, loaded down with their belongings, trailed the little
caravan of menials, creeping humbly back to their old employment.
Oh, these were dark, impoverished days for Fukui! Who could refuse
remunerative employment such as this? The honorably enlightened students
of the university had vanquished the disgruntled, fighting ones;
Samourai Matsuyama, their leader, was desperately sick, shorn of his
power, and deserted even by his friends.
And the fox-woman was gone! No one knew how or when she had gone. They
told, in whispers, of her ghostly vanishing, and some said the
bottom-less lake of Matsuhaira, with its white, chilly lotus, held a
secret all its own. But “The Lotus tells no tales,” as the proverb has
it, and how should they know, and why should they care whether the
fiendish gagama, who had haunted their master for so long, floated
beneath the smiling water-flowers or not?
They gathered together, these gabbling, faithless servants, and
discussed ways and means to propitiate the Tojin-san. Following the lead
of Genji Negato, finally, they took their courage into their hands and
came to his apartment. Barely had they entered the room, however, ere
they fled again.
One look only at the distorted face was enough. Like a pack of startled
sheep they turned tail and fled from his presence, leaving him once more
alone, pacing and repacing, with staggering, irregular steps, the floor,
crunching his great hands together as if in some mortal agony.
What weakness was this that robbed him of his manhood! What anguish that
pierced to his very marrow? Was this what the son of the Daimio’s high
officer had endured when he had followed the fox-woman out into the
mountains? Persistently, dazedly he thought of Gihei Matsuyama, and he
asked himself repeatedly why—why? Suddenly it was clear—he knew why. He
had killed the Daimio’s high officer! With his own mighty hands he had
killed the father of Gihei Matsuyama!
A Chinese doctor, brought by the students Junzo and Higo, examined him
at a safe distance, and he said the foreign sensei was afflicted with a
malady of the brain.
Outside in the summer gardens, serious-eyed, grave-faced boys looked at
each other with startled glances, and in the city people were telling in
the streets of the dreadful punishments certain to be meted out to those
who had molested the guest of their absent Prince; for word had, at
last, come from Tokio that he had started on his way back to Fukui.
The day with its sun and fragrance passed away unseen to the great,
blank-minded Tojin. But when the night came, with a whispering breeze
about the ancient Matsuhaira, he raised a listening head.
As on that first night in Fukui, plainly, distinctly he heard the
fluttering, human knocking upon his shoji. Holding his breath, treading
on tiptoe, he found his way to the doors, drew them apart and looked out
into the dusky woods beyond. How his ears tingled now, straining for
that old caressing call:
“T-o-o—jin-san! Too-jin-san!”
Gently, softly, wooingly, he answered the fox-woman, breathing her name
into the still air about him:
“Tama! Tama!”
And, as on that other night, again he dropped down into the garden. Over
the green-clipped lawn he went, across the wing of the moat, into the
bamboo grove, and on and on into the beckoning, luring woods of Atago
Yama.
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