“BUD speag to me as before! Touch me wiz those hands—those lips!
Adoringly look upon me! My honorable heart and body are cold. Condescend
to warm them!”
She had followed him down a declivity, unmindful of the students who
pressed with their grave, wondering young faces closely about her.
She could not understand why now no longer she might travel beside him,
his sheltering arm supporting her; why she might not even take his hand,
or rest her wet cheek against his sleeve. In the three days they had
been upon the journey back to Fukui, he had seemed to avoid her, almost
as if he feared her.
Once he tried to explain, stupidly, and with a forced coldness.
Things were very different now. When alone, they were like lost children
and the silent woods and mountains had put strange dreams and fancies
into their heads, so that they had wandered along in a blind, gilded
delirium. Now they had awakened. They must go back to the city, where
they would be like other people, and where, shortly, their ways must
separate. It was for her good. She would understand some day.
She must forget the mountain days, or think of them only as a dream that
had vanished, as she herself had predicted it would, like the mist.
She was very stupid, very stubborn, pathetically dense. She did not wish
their paths to separate—she would not have it so. No, though they tore
her from him by force. She would return to him. Did he not recall the
words he had spoken when he declared the dream would never end unless
she wished it. She did not wish it. She never would. Patiently,
persistently she entreated him, until he was beside himself and felt his
strength of mind weakening, and in desperation turned to his students
for help. He bade them explain to her more clearly than he could do the
new life she was soon to lead—of the change in fortunes that had come to
her.
Manfully, but in the bungling, uncertain language of boys they tried to
obey him. The unfortunate one, as unconsciously they called her, was
soon to see, promised the gentle Junzo. There was to be an honorable
operation upon her eyes. These western wizards of science, said the
Japanese student, had given sight to hundreds in their own land. The
Tojin, himself once a doctor, had diagnosed her trouble as an invisible
cataract of a congenital nature, not uncommon nor difficult of removal.
He had sent for a great and eminent surgeon who was sojourning in the
capital. He had come all the way to Fukui, at the bidding of the Tojin.
He was a miracle-worker, whose fame encircled the globe, said the boy
with a kindling eye.
A hundred friends awaited her in Tokio, so Higo courteously informed
her. They were eager and anxious to receive her—Japanese as well as
foreigners. To them Tama was to be sent; for Fukui had been unkind to
her, and she would be happier away from it. She would understand
by-and-by, they promised her.
She listened patiently, but densely, as if what they told her but half
reached her understanding. That she was to be sent away into some
distant country—very far from the Temple Tokiwa and Atago Yama—an
immeasurable distance away from the Tojin-san—this alone she
comprehended.
Her mother had taught her that the life of a Buddhist nun must be one
long act of expiation for sins and faults committed in some former
state. She tried dazedly to conceive of the terrible crimes of which she
must have once been guilty that now she was to be punished so
dreadfully; and she reached out blindly for the only comfort possible
for her in the world now—the voice, the touch of the Tojin-san, who had
held her in his arms!
They travelled by the public roads of the mountain that she had so
carefully avoided. They passed the nights as guests of the priests of
the mountain temples, who read the letters of the Prince of Echizen,
which the students proudly exhibited, and with courteous and profound
obeisances welcomed the travellers, even regarding the fox-woman with
eyes that were more speculative than resentful. Perhaps they alone of
Echizen had best understood this little creature who had lived among
them, yet beyond their pale, for so long; for though they had not sought
her, neither had they persecuted her, as they could readily have done.
Indeed for years she had practically subsisted upon the food she
surreptitiously obtained from the temples—some of which was
unostentatiously placed as if prepared for her.
The journey back to Fukui was long and tortuous. Summer was gone
completely. The days were cold; wind and rain came about them and drove
them constantly into refuges of one sort and another; but after many
days they came at last to the foot-hills of the mountains, passed
through these into the pine woods, through bamboo groves and camphor
groves, till they came to the Winged Foot River, which brought them to
their destination.
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