NOW came the Season of White Dew. The days were unbelievably beautiful.
The first russet touch of the autumn barely cast its shadow upon the
green about them, the yellow tints of leaf and flower mellowed into a
dull crimson glory.
But the nights turned chill, and in the early mornings there was the
heavy print of the frosted dew upon the ground.
Unconsciously they quickened their lagging footsteps, and turned into
shorter paths that would bring them sooner to Sho Kon Sha, the cemetery
of “Soul Beckoning Rest,” which was to be the end of their journey. This
was her home, so she said—the gardens of the temples of her ancestors.
Only a few hill-lengths from the cemetery was the Temple Tokiwa,
deserted, almost in ruins, but—her home!
There her parents had lived—and died! Here she had been happy in her
solitary childhood, hidden and sheltered by fearful but loving parents.
Here her mother had taught her to dance for the gods and entreat them
with her prayers; here her father had told her of another God, another
heaven. After her parents were gone, the aged temple had been her only
sure place of refuge, a sanctuary wherein even the stoutest of hunters
dared not penetrate; for the wrathful gods still stared with their
dreadful eyes upon the affronted altar, and at the very portals the
demons Ni-o, guarding the sacred gates, might no longer be propitiated.
Now confidently, happily, with the pride of a child thither she was
leading the Tojin, eager to show him this beautiful shelter she wished
to share with him forever. But, ah! how sweet had been the mountain
paths this summer, and why need they hasten? The restless, vindictive
little city was very far away, and the fox-woman trod upon territory all
her own, hers by right of every instinct, and by the very law of the
land, did she but know it, which made her proper heir to her ancestors’
property.
Now they were very near to the temple, and soon she would spread forth
her arms and say to the Tojin:
“Behold, dear exalted one, here is my honorable home. Condescend to step
upon its floor.”
And in her mind she fancied the face of the Tojin would shine with a
great light of happiness.
Now he said to her dreamily, as he followed her through a shadowy
by-path which crept into a sunlit forest of dripping willow-trees:
“Some day I shall awake. It cannot be true that I am here with you alone
in these wild mountains, wandering along in this aimless bliss!”
Because she put back her hand, and he took it perforce in his own, he
continued in his low, wooing voice:
“And when I wake, little Tama, I will know the truth of what you once
said to me: that our dreams are the most beautiful of all.”
She stopped and turned back to him, with the tall foliage and grass
almost burying her in its thickness:
“You god no udder dream more beautiful?” she questioned wistfully.
“No other,” he answered softly. “Have you?”
“No. This is mos’ bes’ dream of all—jost be ’lone wiz you ad those
mountains! Thas bes’ dream in all the whole worl’, Tojin-san!”
In the silence that fell between them, and as he still clasped her
hands, a momentary shadow flitted across her face, and she stood
wide-eyed, as though she saw a vision.
“Alas!” she said in such a mournful tone: “Dreams like unto thad mist.
Now here so sweet, so—so beyond our touch. Next hour gone—gone perhaps
foraever! Nod even the gods know where they gone!”
He scarcely knew his own voice, so full of a deep encompassing
tenderness and yearning was it:
“Our dream is to be different from others,” he said solemnly. “It will
never end. Not for a lifetime, little Tama!”
“It surely goin’ last foraever ad this worl’?” she asked with sceptical
wistfulness.
“If you wish it,” said he huskily.
* * * * *
When the sun was dipping down in the west, and but half its red face
showed above the shadowy hills of Hakusan, the fox-woman felt the fears
seize her in their throttling grip again.
She stood like one under some spell, her back against the trunk of a
giant oak, her hair like a veritable aureole above her.
Down in a little ravine, but a few feet from where she stood, the
Tojin-san was gathering dried sticks to build their evening fire. She
could hear him as he moved from point to point. Sometimes he whistled
softly to himself, sometimes hummed vague snatches of song.
Farther away—at a distance beyond her sight, even if she could have
seen—she knew, with that intuitive certainty of the blind, that others
were passing over their tracks.
Her hand sought her heart, and clung to it, as if to stop its beating.
Fear lent sudden wings to her feet, as with a little gasping cry she
fled downward to the hollow where the Tojin labored. She was beside him
before he had heard or seen her, and now in surprise he looked at her
white little face of anguish.
“Tama!”
“You speag right,” she said, and could not smile with her white lips so
tremulous, “thas only—beautiful dream. Thad mist gone—away!”
“Dream! No, it’s a beautiful reality. We are here, together, and nothing
in the world shall ever tear us apart again.”
“Nothing in the worl’,” she repeated.
Suddenly she covered her eyes, as if the light pained them. From behind
her little sheltering hands came her voice, still with that note of
pleading terror:
“They come—tear you ’way from me now, Tojin-san! All the way—how many
miles I kinnod say—I see them! In my heart I know! Ad my ears I hear!
Those feet—ah, cannot you hear them also, kind Tojin-san? Listen!”
She put up her hands, and they stood in a silence, straining for the
sound that only she could hear, or believed she did.
He knew she was right. Her instinctive sense was keener than mere sight.
Simply, with a tender strength that could not be resisted, he took her
little hand in his.
“Come, Tama. We must reach Sho Kon Sha to-night.”
“Yaes,” she murmured, and now there was a note of plaintive weariness in
her voice. “I thought she said the gods were good, an’ that perhaps they
goin’ forgit us here in those mountains.”
She sighed and moved along step by step beside him.
“Now I know,” she said, “I god new visitor ad my heart!”
“What is it, little Tama?”
“Fear,” she said, “—for you!”
“What blessed nonsense!”
“You are Tojin, like unto my father,” she said, in a voice of anguish,
“and oh, all those days my life how I kin forgit what happen unto my
father!”
“That was many years ago,” he said. “It is a New Japan we live in
to-day, and I have friends—even in Fukui!”
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