The Dragon Painter Part 10

A sullen look crept into the boy's face. Again he turned questioning eyes upon his wife. From the troubled silence her sweet voice reached like a caress: "Dear father, the autumn days, though golden, have held unusual heat."

"Heat! What are cold and heat to a true artist? Did he not paint in August? I am old, yet I have been painting!"

Again fell the silence.

"I said that I had been painting," repeated the old man, angrily.

Ume-ko recovered herself with a start. "I am--er--we are truly overjoyed to hear it. Shall you deign to honor us with a sight of your ill.u.s.trious work?"

"No, I shall not deign!" snapped the old man. "It is his work that you now are concerned with." Here he pointed to the scowling Tatsu. "Why have you not influenced him as you should? He must paint! It is what you married him for."

Ume-ko caught her breath. A flush of embarra.s.sment dyed her face, and she threw a half-frightened look towards Tatsu. Answering her father's unrelenting frown, she murmured, timidly, "To-morrow, if the G.o.ds will, my dear husband shall paint."

Tatsu's steady gaze drew her. "Your eyes, Ume-ko. Is it true that for this--to make me paint--you consented to become my wife?"

Ume tried in vain to resist the look he gave her. Close at her other hand, she knew, her father hung upon her face and listened, trembling, for her words. To him, art was all. But to her and Tatsu, who had found each other,--ah! She tried to speak but words refused to form themselves. She tried to turn a docile face toward old Kano; but the deepening glory of her husband's look drew her as light draws a flower.

Sullenness and anger fell from him like a cloth. His countenance gave out the fire of an inward pa.s.sion; his eyes--deep, strange, strong, magnetic--mastered and compelled her.

"No, no, beloved," she whispered. "I cannot say,--you alone know the soul of me."

A fierce triumph flared into his look. He leaned nearer, with a smile that was almost cruel in its consciousness of power. Under it her eyes drooped, her head fell forward in a sudden faintness, her whole lithe body huddled into one gracious, yielding outline. Even while Kano gasped, doubting his eyes and his hearing, Tatsu sprang to his feet, went to his wife, caught her up rudely by one arm, and crushed her against his side, while he blazed defiant scorn upon Kano. "Come Dragon Wife," he said, in a voice that echoed through the s.p.a.ce; "come back to our little home. No stupid old ones there, no prattle about painting. Only you and I and love."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'Come, Dragon Wife,' he said, 'come back to our little home.'"]

Now in j.a.pan nothing is more indelicate, more unpardonable, or more insulting to the listener than any reference to the personal love between man and wife. At Tatsu's terrible speech, Ume-ko, unconscious of further cause of offense, hid her face against his sleeve, and clung to him, that her trembling might not cast her to the floor. Kano, at first, was unable to speak. He grew slowly the hue of death. His brief words, when at last they came, were in convulsive spasms of sound. "Go to your rooms,--both. Are you mad, indeed,--this immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right,--a Tengu, a barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise to slay you both!"

The utterance choked him, and died away in a gasping silence. He clutched at his lean chest. Ume would have sped to him, but Tatsu held her fast. His young face flamed with an answering rage. "Do you use that tone to me--old man--to me, and this, my wife," he was beginning, but Ume put frantic hands upon his lips.

"Master, beloved!" she sobbed. "You shall not speak thus to our father,--you do not understand. For love of me, then, be patient.

Even the crows on the hilltops revere their parents. Come there, to the hills, with me, now, now--oh, my soul's beloved--before you speak again. Wait there, in the inner room, while I kneel a moment before our father. Oh, Tatsu, if you love me----"

The agony of her face and voice swept from Tatsu's mind all other feeling. He stood in the doorway, silent, as she threw herself before old Kano, praying to him as to an offended G.o.d: "Father, father, do not hold hatred against us! Tatsu has been without kindred,--he knows not yet the sacred duties of filial love. We will go from your presence now until your just anger against us shall have cooled. With the night we shall return and plead for mercy and forgiveness. No, no, do not speak again, just yet. We are going, now, now. Oh, my dear father, the agony and the shame of it! Sayonara, until the twilight." She hurried back to Tatsu, seized his clenched hand with her small, icy fingers, and almost dragged him from the room.

Kano sat as she had left him, motionless, now, as the white jade vase within the tokonoma. His anger, crimson, blinding at the first possession, had heated by now into a slow, white rage. All at once he began to tremble. He struck himself violently upon one knee, crying aloud, "So thus love influences him! Ara! My Dragon Painter! Other methods may be tried. Such words and looks before me, me,--Kano Indara! And Ume's eyes set upon him as in blinding wors.h.i.+p. Could I have seen aright? He caught my child up like a common street wench, a thing of sale and barter. And she,--she did not scorn, but trembled and clung to him. Is the whole world on its head? I will teach them, I will teach them."

"Have my young mistress and her august spouse already taken leave?"

asked Mata at a crack of the door.

"Either they or some demon changelings," answered the old man, rocking to and fro upon the mats.

The old servant had, of course, heard everything. Feigning now, for her own purposes, a soothing air of ignorance, she glided into the room, lifted the tiny tea-pot, shook it from side to side, and then c.o.c.ked her bright eyes upon her master. "The tea-pot. It is honorably empty. Shall I fill it?"

"Yes, yes; replenish it at once. I need hot tea. Shameless, incredible; he has, indeed, the manners of a wild boar."

"Ma-a-a!" exclaimed the old woman. "Now of whom can my master be speaking?"

"You know very well of whom I am speaking, goblin! Do you not always listen at the shoji? Go, fill the pot!"

Mata glided from the room with the quickness of light and in an instant had returned. Replacing the smoking vessel and maintaining a face of decorous interest, she asked, hypocritically, "And was my poor Miss Ume mortified?"

"Mortified?" echoed the artist with an angry laugh; "she admired him!

She clung to him as a creature tamed by enchantment. My daughter!

Never did I expect to look upon so gross a sight! Why, Mata----"

"Yes, dear master," purred the old dame encouragingly as she seated herself on the floor near the tea-pot. "One moment, while I brew you a cup of fresh, sweet tea. It is good to quiet the honorable nerves. I can scarcely believe what you tell me of our Ume-ko, so modest a young lady, so well brought up!"

"I tell you what these old eyes saw," repeated Kano. Once more he described the harrowing sight, adding more details. Mata, well used to his outbursts of anger, though indeed she had seldom seen him in his present condition of indignant excitement, drew him on by degrees. She well knew that an anger put into lucid words soon begins to cool. Some of her remarks were in the nature of small, kindly goads.

"Remember, master, the poor creatures are married but a week to-day."

"Had I dreamed of such low conduct, they should never have been married at all!"

"Of course he is n't worthy of her," sighed the other, one eye on Kano's face.

"Nonsense! He is more than worthy of any woman upon earth if he could but learn to conduct himself like a human being."

"That would take a long schooling."

"He is the greatest artist since Sesshu!" cried the old man, vehemently.

Mata bowed over to the tea-pot. "You recognize artists, master; I recognize fools."

"Do you call my son a fool?"

"If that wild man is still to be considered your son, then have I called your son a fool," answered Mata, imperturbably.

The new flush left the old man's face as quickly as it had come.

"Mata, Mata," he groaned, too spent now for further vehemence, "you are an old cat,--an old she-cat. You cannot dream what it is to be an artist! What one will endure for art; what one will sacrifice, and joy in the giving! Why, woman, if with one's shed blood, with the barter of one's soul, a single supreme vision could be realized, no true artist would hesitate. Yes, if even wife, child, and kindred were to be joined in a common destruction for art's sake, the artist must not hesitate. At the thought of one's parents, the ancestors of one's house, it might be admissible to pause, but at nothing else, nothing else, whatever! Life is a mere bubble on the stream of art, fame is a bubble--riches, happiness, Death itself! Would that I could tear these old limbs into a bleeding frenzy as I paint, if by doing so one little line may swerve the nearer to perfection! Often have I thought of this and prayed for the opportunity, but such madness does not benefit.

Only the torn anguish of a soul may sometimes help. And with old souls, like old trees, they do not bleed, but are snapped to earth, and lie there rotting. He, Tatsu, the son of my adoption, could with one strong sweep of his arm make the G.o.ds stare, and he spends his hours fondling the perishable object of a woman, while I, who would give all, all,--give my own child that he loves,--I remain impotent! Alas! So topsy-turvy a world are we born in!"

He bowed his head in a misery so abject that Mata forbore to jibe. She tried to speak again, to comfort him, but he motioned her away, and sat, scarcely moving in his place, until the night brought Tatsu and his young wife home again.

VIII

Thus under, as it were, a double ban of displeasure, did the new generation of Kano, Tatsu and Ume-ko, begin life in the little cottage beneath the hill. They were given Ume's chamber near which the plum tree grew, an adjoining room having been previously fitted up for Tatsu's painting. As in the other cottage, inviting rectangles of silk, already stretched and sized, stood in blank rows against the walls. Even the fusuma were of new paper, offering, it would seem, to any inspired young artist, a surface of alluring possibilities.

Paints, brushes, and vessels without number made an array to tempt, if only the tempting were not so obvious.

Ume-ko, watching closely the expression of her husband's face as he was first led into this room, drew old Kano aside, and urged that more tact and delicacy be used in leading Tatsu back to a desire for creative work. She herself, she hinted with deprecating sweetness, might do much if only allowed to follow her own loving instincts. But Kano had lost confidence in his daughter and bluntly told her so. Tatsu had been adopted and married in order to make him paint, and paint he should! Also it was Ume-ko's duty to influence him in whatever way and method her father thought best. Let her succeed,--that was her sole responsibility. So bl.u.s.tered Kano to himself and Mata, and not even the malicious twinkle of the old servant's eye pointed the way to wisdom.

Naturally Ume-ko did not succeed. Tatsu merely laughed at her flagrant efforts at duplicity. He felt no need of painting, no desire to paint.

He had won the Dragon Maiden. Life could give him no more! There was no anger or resentment in his feeling toward Kano, or even the old scourge Mata. No, he was too happy! To lie dreaming on the fragrant, matted floor near Ume, where he could listen to her soft breathing and at times pull her closer by a silken sleeve,--this was enough for Tatsu. Nothing had power to arouse in him a sense of duty, of obligation to himself, or to his adopted father. He would not argue about it, and could scarcely be said to listen. He lived and moved and breathed in love as in a fourth dimension. To the old man's frequent remonstrances he would turn a gentle, deprecating face. He had promised Ume-ko never again to speak rudely to their father. Besides, why should he? The outer world was all so beautiful and sad and unimportant. A sunset cloud, or a bird swinging from a hagi spray could bring sharp, swift tears to his eyes. Beauty could move him, but not old Kano's genuine sufferings. Yet, the old man, bleating from the arid rocks of age, was doubtless a pathetic spectacle, and must be listened to kindly.

Finding the boy thus obdurate, Kano turned the full force of his discontent on Ume-ko. She endured in silence the incessant railing.

Each new device urged by the distracted Kano she carried out with scrupulous care, though even with the performance of it she knew hopelessness to be involved. For hours she remained away from home, hidden in a neighbor's house or in the temple on the hill, it being Kano's thought that perhaps, in this temporary loss of his idol, Tatsu might seek solace in the paint room. But Tatsu, raging against the conditions which made such tyranny possible, stormed, on such occasions, through the little house, and up and down the garden, pelting the terrified gold-fish in their caves, stripping leaves and tips from Kano's favorite pine-shrubs, or standing, long intervals of time, on the crest of the moon-viewing hillock, from which he could command vistas of the street below.