The Dragon Painter Part 7

"She listens at the crack. Consult her now," said Kano.

The old dame threw aside the shoji like an armor, and walked in. "Yes, ask me what I think! Ask the old servant who has nursed Miss Ume from her birth, managed the house, scrubbed, haggled, washed, and broken her old bones for you! This is my advice,--freely given,--make of the youth her jinrikisha man, but not her husband!"

"Impertinent old witch!" cried Kano. "You are asked for nothing but the earliest possible date for the marriage!"

"Do you give yourself so tamely to a dangerous wild creature from the hills?" Mata demanded of the girl.

"Yes, yes, she'll marry him," said Kano, before her words could come.

"The date,--the earliest possible hour! Will two weeks be too soon?"

"Two weeks!" shrieked the old dame, and staggered backward. "Is it of the scavenger's daughter that you speak?"

"Four weeks, then,--a month. It cannot be more. I tell you, woman, for a longer time than this I cannot keep the youth at bay. Is a month decent in convention's eyes?"

Mata began to sob loudly in her upraised sleeve.

"I see that it is at least permissible," said Kano, grimly. "What a weak set of social idiots we are, after all. Tatsu is right to scorn us! Well, well, a month from this date, deep in the golden heart of autumn, will the wedding be."

"If the day be propitious and the stars in harmony," supplemented Mata.

"She shall not be married in the teeth of evil fortune, if I have to murder the Dragon Painter with my fish-knife!"

"Oh, go; have the stars arranged to suit you. Here's money for it!"

He fumbled in his belt for a purse of coin, threw it to the mats, and, over the old dame's stooping back, motioned Ume-ko permission to withdraw. The girl went swiftly, thankful for the release.

"A good child,--a daughter to thank the G.o.ds for," chuckled Kano, as she left.

Mata looked sharply about, then leaned to her master's ear. "You are blind; you are an earth-rat, Kano Indara. This is not the usual submission of a silly girl. Ume is thinking things we know nothing of.

Did you not see that her face was as a bean-curd in its whiteness? She kept so still, only because she was shaking in all directions at once.

There, look at her now! She is fleeing to the garden with the uncertain step of one drunk with deep foreboding!"

"Bah! you are an old raven croaking in a fog! Go back to your pots. I can manage my own child!"

"You have never yet managed her or yourself either," was the spoiled old servant's parting shaft.

Kano sat watching the slender, errant figure in the garden. Yes, she had taken it calmly,--more calmly than he could have hoped. How beautiful was the poise, even at this distance, of the delicate throat, and the head, with its wide crown of inky hair! Each motion of the slow-strolling form in its clinging robes was a separate loveliness.

Kano drew a long sigh. He could not blind himself to Tatsu's savagery.

This was not the sort of husband that Ume had a right to expect from her father's choice,--a youth not only penniless, and without family name, but in himself unusual, strange, with look, voice, gesture, coloring each a clear contrast to the men that Ume-ko had seen. He could not bear the thought of her unhappiness, and yet, at any sacrifice, Tatsu must be kept an inmate of their home.

The girl had stopped beside the sunlit pond, leaning far over. She did not seem to note the cl.u.s.tering carp at all, but rather dwell upon her own image, twisted and shot through with the gold of their darting bodies. Now, with dragging feet she went to the moon-viewing hill, remaining in the shadow of it, and pausing for long thought. Her eyes were on the cliff, now raised to the camphor tree. Suddenly she s.h.i.+vered and hid her face. What was the tumult of that ignorant young breast?

The old man rose and went to an inner room where hung the Butsudan, the shrine. He stood gazing upon the ihai of his wife. His lips moved, but the breath so lightly issued that the flame on the altar did not stir. "She, our one child, has come now to the borders of that woman-land where I cannot go with her," he was saying. "Thou art the soul to guide, and give her happiness, thou, the dear one of my life,--the dead young mother who has never really died!" He folded his hands now, and bowed his head. The small flame leaned to him. "Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amid a Butsu," murmured the old man.

Out by the hill, a b.u.t.terfly, snow white, rested a moment on the young girl's hair. She was again looking at the cliff, and did not notice it.

V

Ando Uchida, from his green seclusion among the bamboo groves of Meguro, sent, from time to time, a scout into the city. First an ordinary hotel kotsukai or man-servant was employed. This experiment proved costly as well as futile. The kotsukai demanded large payment; and then the creature's questions to Mata were of a nature so crude and undiplomatic that they aroused instant suspicion, causing, indeed, the threat of a dipper of scalding water.

The next messenger was an insect peddler, Katsuo Takanaka by name. It was the part of this youth to search daily among the bamboo stems and hillside gra.s.ses of Meguro for the musical suzu-mus.h.i.+, the hataori, and the kirigirisu. These he incarcerated in fairy cages of plaited straw, threaded the cages into great hornets' nests that dangled from the two ends of his creaking shoulder-pole, and started toward the city in a perfect storm of insect music. The noise moved with him like a cloud.

It formed, as it were, a penumbra of fine shrilling, and could be heard for many streets in advance. This itinerant merchant was commissioned to haunt the Kano gate until impatience or curiosity should fling it wide for him. Then, after having coaxed old Mata into making a purchase, he was to engage her in conversation, and extract all the domestic information he could. Unfortunately for the acquisition of paltry news, it was Ume-ko, not Mata, who came out to purchase. The seller, watching those slim, white fingers as they fluttered among his cages, the delicate ear bent to mark some special chime, forgot the words of Ando Uchida, otherwise, Mr. S. Yetan, of Chikuzen, forgot everything, indeed, but the beauty of the girlish face near him.

He left the house in a dream more dense than the mult.i.tudinous clamor of his burden. "Alas!" thought Katsuo, as he stumbled along, unheeding the beckoning hands of mothers, or the arresting cries of children in many gateways, "Had I been born a samurai of old, and she an humble maiden!

Even as an Eta, an outcast, would I have loved and sought her. Now in this life I am doomed to catch insects and to sell them. Perhaps in my coming rebirth, if I am honest and do not tell to the ignorant that a common mimi is a silver-voiced hataorimus.h.i.+,--perhaps----"

Ando's third envoy was chosen with more thoughtful care. This time it was none other than a young priest from the temple of Fudo-Bosatsu in Meguro. He was an acolyte sent forth with bowl and staff to beg for aid in certain temple repairs. Ando promised a generous donation in return for information concerning the Kano family. Being a.s.sured that the motive for this curiosity was benevolent rather than mischievous, the priest consented to make the attempt. He reached the Kano gate at noon, within a few days after Tatsu's arrival. Mata opened to his call. Being herself a Protestant, opposed to the ancient orders and their methods, she gave him but a chilly welcome. Her interest was aroused, however, in spite of herself, by the fact that he neither chanted his refrain of supplication nor extended the round wooden bowl.

"I shall not entreat alms of money in this place," he said, as if in answer to her look of surprise, "I am weary, and ask but to rest for a while in the pleasant shade of your roof."

Without waiting for Mata's rejoinder, Ume-ko, who had heard the words of the priest, now came swiftly to the veranda. "Our home is honored, holy youth, by your coming," she said to him. "Enter now, I pray, into the main guest-room, where I and my father may serve you."

The priest refused this homage (much to Mata's inward satisfaction), saying that he desired only the stone ledge of the kitchen entrance and a cup of cold water.

After his first swift upward look he dared not raise his eyes again. The sweetness of her young voice thrilled and troubled him. But for his promise to Uchida he would have fled at once, as from temptation.

Ume-ko, seeing his embarra.s.sment, withdrew, but not until she had made an imperious gesture to old Mata, commanding her to serve him with rice and tea.

After a short struggle with himself the priest decided to accept the offer of food. Old Mata, he knew, was to be his source of information.

The old dame served him in conscious silence. Her lips were compressed to wrinkled metal. The visitor, more accustomed to old women than to young, smiled at the rigid countenance, knowing that a loquacity requiring so obvious a latch is the more easily freed. He planned his first question with some care.

"Is this not the home of an artist, Kano by name?"

Mata tossed her gray hair. "Of the only Kano," she replied, and shut her lips with a snap.

"The only Kano, the only Kano," mused the acolyte over his tea.

"So I said, young sir. Is it that your hearing is honorably non-existent?"

"Then I presume he is without a son," said the priest as if to himself, and stirred the surmise into his rice with the two long wooden chopsticks Mata had provided.

The old dame's muscles worked, but she kept silence.

Ume-ko, now in her little chamber across the narrow pa.s.sage, with a bit of bright-colored sewing on her knees, could hear each word of the dialogue. Mata's shrill voice and the priest's deep tones each carried well. The girl smiled to herself, realizing as she did the conflict between love of gossip and disapproval of s.h.i.+ngon priests that now made a paltry battlefield of the old dame's mind. The former was almost sure to win. The priest must have thought this, too, for he finished his rice in maddening tranquillity, and then stirred slightly as if to go. Mata's speech flowed forth in a torrent.

"My poor master has no son indeed, no true son of his house; but lately,--within this very week----" She caught herself back as with a rein, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the empty tea-pot, hurried to the kitchen and returned partly self-conquered, if not content. She told herself that she must not gossip about the master's affairs with a beggarly priest.

Determination hardened the wrinkles of her face.

If the priest perceived these new signs of taciturnity, he ignored them.

"Your master being verily the great artist that you say, it is a thing doubly to be regretted that he is without an heir," persisted the visitor, with kind, boyish eyes upon old Mata's face. The old woman blinked nervously and began to examine her fingernails. "Alas!" sighed he, "I fear it is because this Mr. Kano is no true believer, that he has not prayed or made offerings to the G.o.ds."

Mata had a momentary convulsion upon the kitchen floor, and was still.

The priest kept gravity upon his mouth, but needed lowered lids to hide the twinkles in his eyes. "True religion is the greatest boon," he droned sententiously. "Would that your poor master had reached enlightenment!"

Ume-ko in her room forgot her sewing, and leaned a delicate ear closer to the shoji.