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diff --git a/old/55709-0.txt b/old/55709-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index 3eb9e2a..0000000 --- a/old/55709-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,8091 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Crimson Azaleas, by H. De Vere -(Henry De Vere) Stacpoole - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States -and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no -restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it -under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this -eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the -United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you -are located before using this eBook. - -Title: The Crimson Azaleas - -Author: H. De Vere (Henry De Vere) Stacpoole - -Release Date: October 8, 2017 [eBook #55709] -[Most recently updated: April 22, 2023] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: UTF-8 - -Produced by: Roger Frank, Ernest Schaal, and the Online Distributed -Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images -generously made available by the Google Books Library Project -(https://books.google.com) Revised by Richard Tonsing. - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIMSON AZALEAS *** - - - - -Note: Images of the original pages are available through - the Google Books Library Project. See - https://books.google.com/books?id=nxgNAAAAYAAJ&hl=en - -Transcriber’s note: - - Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). - - Small capitals were replaced with ALL CAPITALS. - - - - -THE CRIMSON AZALEAS - -A Novel - - -by - -H. DE VERE STACPOOLE - -Author of “The Blue Lagoon” - -[Illustration] - -New York -Duffield & Co. -1910 - - - - - CONTENTS - - - PART ONE - - THE TRAGEDY OF THE NIKKO ROAD - - CHAPTER PAGE - - I. THE ROAD TO NIKKO 5 - - II. THE BLIND ONE 11 - - III. THE LOST ONE 20 - - IV. AMIDST THE HILLS 25 - - V. THE TEA HOUSE OF THE TORTOISE 31 - - VI. THE DREAMER AND THE DRAGON 44 - - VII. HOW CAMPANULA BROUGHT FORTUNE TO THE - HOUSE OF THE TORTOISE—AND OTHER - THINGS 54 - - VIII. THE SURPRISING STORY OF MOMOTARO—AKUDOGI - AND SPOTTED DOG 61 - - IX. THE HOUSE OF THE CLOUDS 71 - - X. OF MOUSMÉS AND OTHER THINGS 82 - - - PART TWO - - THE MASSACRE OF THE BLUE-BELLS - - XI. THE DREAM 91 - - XII. THE FOREIGN DEVILS 101 - - XIII. THE MONASTERY GARDEN 107 - - XIV. NAGASAKI BY NIGHT 119 - - XV. M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR 124 - - XVI. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL 135 - - XVII. THE HOUSE BY NIGHT 141 - - XVIII. MOSTLY ABOUT FLOWERS 151 - - XIX. THE STORK AND THE TORTOISE 172 - - XX. THE SONG OF THE MUSHI 183 - - XXI. M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR 194 - - XXII. THE COMPLETE GEOGRAPHER 206 - - XXIII. THE STRUGGLE 213 - - XXIV. GEORGE DU TELLE 223 - - XXV. RETROSPECTION 232 - - - PART THREE - - THE BROKEN LATH - - XXVI. THE BROKEN LATH 241 - - XXVII. THE “EMPRESS OF JAPAN” 247 - - XXVIII. M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR 262 - - XXIX. THE GARDEN-PARTY 268 - - XXX. THE FALSE REPORT 280 - - XXXI. FAREWELL 284 - - XXXII. HER HOUSE IN ORDER 292 - - XXXIII. THE “LA FRANCE” 296 - - XXXIV. AMIDST THE AZALEAS 302 - - XXXV. BON MATSURI 307 - - - - - CHAPTER I - - THE ROAD TO NIKKO - - “Upon the road to Nikko, - Where the pilgrims pray, - Along the road to Nikko - Either side the way, - Thundering great camellia trees - Decked with blossoms gay, - Adorn the road to Nikko, - The mountain road to Nikko, - In the month of May.” - - -The singer stopped singing and began to whistle. Then he broke out into -prose. - -“Damn boots! I’ll be lame in another mile. Why can’t we be content with -sandals like our ‘brithers’ the Japs!” - -“Dinna damn boots, but their makers,” replied his companion, a sandy -Scot of fifty or more, dressed in broadcloth and a bowler, a figure at -once a blot upon the lonely road and a blasphemy against Japan—a blot -whose name was M’Gourley. “I vara well remember when I was in Gleska—” - -“Oh, don’t!” said the poet of the Nikko road, Dick Leslie by name, a -young man, or rather a man still young, very tall, straight, dark, and -good-looking, and a gentleman from the crown of his close-clipped, curly -black head to the soles of the boots that were torturing him. “Don’t -haul up your factory chimneys, your smoke and whisky bottles in this -place of places. I believe if a Scot ever gets into heaven he’ll start -his first conversation with his first angel by making some reference to -Gleska: Look there!” - -“Whaur?” - -“There!” cried Leslie, turning from the direction of Fubasami and the -beginning of the great Nikko valley before them, and pointing backwards -away towards Kureise over an expanse of distant country where the clouds -were drawing soft shadows across the rice fields and the sinuous hills; -over little woods of fir and cryptomeria trees, lakes where the lotus -flowers spread in summer, and the king-fisher flashed like a jewel; over -occasional fields of flowers, flowers that grew by the million and the -million. - -Many of these details were absorbed and dulled by distance, yet still -lent their spirit to the scene, producing a landscape most strange and -quaint. - -Nearly every other country seems flung together by nature, but Japan -seems to have been imagined by some great artist of the ancient -days—imagined and constructed. - -“Look there,” said Leslie, “saw you ever anything better than that in -Clackmannan?” - -“Ay, have I,” replied M’Gourley, contemplating the view before him, -“many’s the time. What sort of country do you call that? Man! I’d as -soon live on a tea-tray if I had ma choice.” - -“Well, you’ve lived in Japan long enough to be used to it. It’s always -the way; put a man in a paradise like this where there are all sorts of -flowers and jolly things around him, and he starts grumbling and -growling and pining after rain, and misery, and cold, and sleet, and -peat smoke—if he’s a Scotchman. How long have you been in Japan, Mac, -did you say?” - -“Near ever since the Samurai took off their swords and turned -policemen.” - -“What kept you in the East so long if you don’t like it?” - -“Trade, like the wind, blaweth where it listeth, and a man must e’en -follow his trade,” said M’Gourley; and they resumed their road. - -They were walking to Nikko together, this strangely assorted pair, -strangely assorted though they were both Scotchmen. They were -approaching the place, not by that splendid avenue of cryptomeria trees -that leads from Utso-no-Miya, but by the wild hill road, which runs from -Kureise, or rather by the higher hill road, for there are two, and they -had taken the loneliest and the longest by mistake (M’Gourley’s fault, -though he swore that he knew the country like the palm of his hand). - -They had come twenty or twenty-five miles of the way by riksha, and were -now hoofing the remainder, their luggage having been sent on to Nikko by -train. - -“And talking of trade,” said M’Gourley, “let’s go back to the matter we -were on a moment ago; there’s money in it, and I know the beesiness. I -ken it fine; never a man knows better the Jap Rubbish trade.” - -“You were talking of starting at Nagasaki.” - -“Ay, Nagasaki’s best.” - -“Well, I’ll plank the money,” said Leslie. “I’ll put up a thousand -against a thousand of yours.” - -M’Gourley stopped and held out a hand sheathed in a mournful-looking -black dogskin glove. - -“Is’t a bargain?” said he. - -“It’s a bargain. Funny that we should have only met the other day in -Tokyo, and that you should have come along to Nikko to show me the -sights. I believe all the time you were bent on trepanning me into this -business.” - -“I was that,” said M’Gourley, with charming frankness; “for your own -good. A man without a beesiness is a man astray, and when you told me in -the hotel in Tokyo you were a boddie with money, and nothing to do with -it, I said: ‘Here’s my chance.’” - -“If I had met you two months ago,” said Leslie bitterly, “I wouldn’t -have been much use, for my father would not have been dead, and I would -not have come into his money. Do you know what I have been?—I have been -a remittance man.” - -“I’ve met vera much worse people than some of _them_,” said Mac, who if -his newly found partner had declared himself a demon out of Hades would -perhaps have made the same glossatory remark—the capital being assured. - -“I’m hanged if I have,” said Leslie bitterly. “Give me a Sydney -Larrikin, a Dago, a Chinee, before your remittance man. I know what I’m -talking about for I have been one—see?” - -“What, may I ask—” began M’Gourley, then he paused. - -“You mean what was the reason of my being flung off by my father? -Youthful indiscretions. Let’s sit down; I want to take my boot off.” - -The road just here took a bend, and became wilder and more lovely, a -stream gushed from the bank on which they took their seats, and before -them lay a little valley, a valley hedged on either side by cypress -trees, and thronged with crimson azaleas. - - - - - CHAPTER II - - THE BLIND ONE - - -Crimson azaleas in wild profusion, here struck with sun, here shadowed -by the cypress trees—a sight to gladden the heart of a poet. Between -the cypress trees, beyond the azaleas, beyond country broken by sunlight -and cloud shadows, lay the sea hills of Tanagura in the dimmest bluest -distance. - -“If I could get that into a gold frame,” said Leslie, as he inhaled the -delicious perfume of the azaleas and bathed his naked foot in the tiny -cascade breaking from the bank on which they sat, “I’d take it to London -and send it to the Academy—and they’d reject it.” - -“Vara likely,” replied Mac. “It is no fit for a peecture. Who ever saw -the like of yon out of Japan? It’s nought but a fakement.” - -“I say,” said Leslie, “talking of fakements—in this business of ours I -hope we’ll steer clear of all that.” - -“In this beesiness of oors,” said Mac, “I thought you distinctly -understood my friend Danjuro will be the nominal head of the firrm—we -are but the sleeping pairtners.” - -Mac’s Scotch bubbled in him when he grew excited, or when he forgot -himself. Ordinarily he talked pretty ordinary English, but when the -stopper was off the Scotch came out, and you could tell by the -pronunciation of the word “money” whether he was mentioning the article -casually or deep in a deal. - -“Well,” said Leslie, “I don’t want my dreams troubled by visions of -Danjuro swindling unfortunate tourists; you say we’re to export things, -but I don’t want to have him roping in people, selling them -five-shilling pagodas at five pounds a-piece.” - -Mac sighed as if with regret at the impossibility of such a delightful -deal as that. - -“It’s rather jolly going into business,” continued Leslie, dreamily -gazing at the azaleas. “Only crime I’ve never committed, except murder -and a few others. Good God! when I started in life I never thought I’d -end my days peddling paper lanterns, and cheating people into buying -penny-a-dozen kakemonos for a shilling a-piece. Don’t talk to me; all -trade is cheating.” - -“You should have known Macbean,” said M’Gourley, who had also taken off -his boots and stockings and was bathing his broad splay feet in the -pretty little torrent. - -“Who was he?” - -“Forty year ago I was his ’prentice. Mummies, and idols, and pagods, and -scarabeuses was the output of the firm, and Icknield Street, Birmingham, -its habitation.” - -“Idols?” - -“Ay, idols. Some the size of your thumb, and some the size of bedposts, -which they were derived from; some with teeth, and some with hair, and -some bald as a bannock. We stocked half West Africa with idols, and the -South Seas absorbed the balance.” - -“Well, you certainly take the cake,” said Leslie. - -“I took three pun ten a week at Macbean’s, and learnt more eelementary -theology than’s taught in the schules of Edinboro’. Macbean said -artistical idols was what the savages wanted, and what they would get as -long as old bedposteses were to be bought at knockdown prices, and sold -for the waurth of elephants’ tusks.” - -“You disgust me,” said Leslie, “upon my word you do.” - -“That’s what Macbean said one day to the boddie I had in mind when I -began telling you of this. The boddie came in grumbling about a mummy—a -vara fine mummy it was, too—that had been sold to him for export. The -mummy had been stuftit with newspapers, but the _sachrum ustum_ used for -coloring the stuffing matter being omitted, the printed matter remained -in eevidence when the American who bought the article in Cairo opened it -to hunt for amulets and scarabeuses. ‘Newspapers!’ said Macbean. ‘And -what more do you expect in a fifty-shullin’ mummy? Did y’ expect it -stuffed wi’ dimonds?’” - -“Well?” said Leslie. - -“That’s all, and that’s the whole of beesiness in a walnut shell; y’ -canna expect a fifty-shullin’ mummy to be stuffed with—” - -“Rubbish! the whole of swindling, you mean. Anyhow, we’ll keep straight, -if you please; a fair profit I don’t mind, but I object to rank -trickery—by the way, what’s the time? my watch has stopped; and how far -is Nikko off?” - -“It’s after two,” said Mac, who had no very definite idea of how far -Nikko might be off, having led his companion by the wrong road and -concealed the fact. “And Nikko is maybe twarree miles, maybe a bit -more—wull we go?” - -For all answer Leslie took some bar-chocolate from his pocket, gave some -to his companion, and proceeded to lunch. - -“I daresay you think it funny,” said he at last, “my chumming up, and in -your heart of hearts—that is, your business heart (excuse me for being -frank)—you must think it strange I should put up my money with a man -whom I don’t know in the least. But, man! the truth of the matter is I’m -weary for a friend. I have money enough and to spare, but—I’m weary for -a friend. - -“I’m the lonest man in the world,” went on Leslie, munching his -chocolate and gazing at the beautiful scene before him; “the lonest man -on God’s earth. What is the matter with me that I should never have -found and kept a friend? If God had ever given me anything to love I’d -have cherished it, but—there is no God that I can see.” - -“Whisht, man,” said Mac. “Dinna talk like that.” - -“I know I was wild,” went on Leslie, “before I left England, but other -men have been as bad. I quarreled with my father, but other men’s -fathers are different from what mine was. He drove me beyond the sea to -be an alien and an outcast. I’ve seen drunken loafers in the bars of -Sydney, where I was stuck as a remittance man three years; they had -friends of a sort—friends who stuck them, but friend or dog never stuck -to me.” - -“No wumman?” asked M’Gourley, spitting out the remains of the chocolate -he was eating, and lighting a vile-looking Hankow cigar. - -“I loved a woman once,” said Leslie, staring before him with eyes that -saw not Japan or the cypress trees or the azaleas. “Her name was Jane -Deering; we were boy and girl together, cousins, and her people lived -quite close to mine. We got engaged, and were to have been married, -and—she threw me over.” - -“For why?” asked Mac. - -“Said she didn’t want to get married.” - -“Well, that was deefinite.” - -“Damned definite. What’s that noise?” - -“Tap, tap, tap.” It was the tapping of a stick upon the ground, and a -man in the dress of a coolie, with a saucer-shaped hat upon his head, -turned the corner of the road, coming in the direction of Nikko. He was -tapping the ground before him with a staff. He was blind. - -“What an awful-looking face!” said Leslie, as the figure approached. -“Look, Mac! Did you ever see the like of that?” - -One sees many extraordinary and sinister faces in the East, but the face -of the on-comer would have been hard to match, even in the stews of -Shanghai. - -The nose seemed to have been smashed flat by a blow. The face was flat -and possessed an awful stolidity, so that at a little distance one could -have sworn that it was carved from stone. It impressed one as the -countenance of a creature long in communion with evil. - -The two Scotchmen held motionless to let this undesirable pass, but he -must have possessed some sixth sense, for instead of passing he stopped -and begun to whine. - -He spoke in a light, flighty, chanting voice, like the voice of a man -either insane or delirious. - -“What’s he say?” asked Leslie. - -“He’s a Chinee, and wants money.” - -“Tell the beast to go.” - -“Says he knows we’re foreigners.” - -“Clever that; why, even I can hear your Scotch sticking out of the -gibberish you’re talking.” - -“Says he wants opium—hasn’t had any the whole day, and if we will give -him opium, or money to buy it, he’ll show us things.” - -“What things?” - -“Lord sakes! the creeture’s daft; says he can make great magic—snakes -out of mud or flowers out of nothing.” - -“Why doesn’t he make some opium if he’s so clever?” - -“Says the woods around here are full of devils.” - -“Tell him to show us a devil, then.” - -Mac translated and the person so well acquainted with devils made -answer. - -“For a piece of gold he will show us one. Why, Leslie, man, don’t you be -a fule.” - -Leslie had taken half a sovereign from his pocket. - -“Give it him and tell him to show us a devil, and if he plays any tricks -I’ll chivy him into Nikko, and give him up to the police.” - -“Don’t be a fule,” said Mac testily. “A’weel!” - -Leslie put the piece of gold into the creature’s hand, who put it to his -ear for a moment, and then hid it in his rags. Then he bent his head -sideways to the road. - -“What’s he doing now?” - -“He’s listening if the road’s clear; he says there’s nothing on it for -two ri on either side, but he hears seven rikshas coming in the -direction of Nikko, but he’ll have time to do what he wants before they -arrive.” - -The Blind One bent down rapidly and traced an almost perfect circle -around himself in the dust of the road; then hurriedly outside this he -traced what an initiate might have taken for the form of the Egg, the -horns of Simara, and another form needless to describe. Then he said -something to Mac. - -“He says, we’re not to speak, or touch the circle or go near it. I have -not paid for this entertainment, and I juist think I’ll take a bit walk -doon the road.” - -“Sit down, you old coward,” said Leslie. “I’m the one that has paid, and -I’m the one the ‘deevil’ will carry off if there is a deevil. Look!” - -The Blind One took from his rags a cane pipe such as blind men use in -Japan, only larger, and began to blow mournful notes out of it. It was -as strange a sound as ever left human lips, now ear-piercing, now low, -low and soothing; his face flushed and swelled; he seemed enraptured, -entranced with his own music, and the searching sound of it caused -things to move disturbedly in the trees around, and a low croaking, as -if from some feathered creature disturbed, to come from the cypress -wood. - -As he played, he turned north, south, east, and west, lingering, at -last, with the reed pipe pointing between the cypress trees, as though -he were calling to the blue hills in the distance. - -As he stood thus, Leslie, who had been looking at the mysterious symbols -around the circle, was seized with an impish impulse, and leaning -forward with his walking-stick, he made in the dust inside the circle, -and just behind the Blind One’s heel, the form of a cross. - -In doing this, the point of the stick touched the Blind One’s heel. - - - - - CHAPTER III - - THE LOST ONE - - -A congreve rocket incautiously touched by a match could not have given a -more surprising result. - -Flinging the pipe from him with a yell, the Blind One sprang clear over -the circle, and stood for an instant panting and blowing at the sun. - -He seemed blowing away things that were trying to enter his mouth; then, -the staff attached by a thong to his wrist flying about wildly, he began -to tear at himself all over his body and fling things away from him, as -though he were attacked by a hundred thousand scorpions; then as if -bitten by some more serious enemy, he seized his staff, and striking -about him wildly, began to run. Hither and thither, hitting right and -left, dashing against trees and seeming utterly regardless of them, -bleeding, torn, and all the time fighting his phantom pursuers he ran -till he vanished round the bend leading towards Nikko. The two Scotchmen -ran to the bend of the road, and there down the road they saw him still -running, and fighting as if for his life; striking above him as if at -things in the air, and around him as if at things leaping at him from -the ground. Suddenly he vanished round a further bend, and was lost to -view. - -“He’s gone gyte!” said Mac as they returned. - -“Well, I’m damned!” said Leslie. - -“I touched his heel, and I suppose he thought it was one of the -devils—mad fool!” - -“’Tis no madness,” said Mac. “If ever I saw a man chased by deevils I’ve -seen one now. ’Twas that mark you made let them loose, or my name’s not -Tod M’Gourley. Did you no ken you were makin’ the sign of the cross in -yon damned circle of his? Hech, man! _Look there!_” - -“Where?” - -“My God!” said M’Gourley, “look you there, _there_! There’s a bairn -amongst the azaleas!” - -“So there is!” said Leslie. “By Jove, a little Jap girl come out of the -wood.” - -“Dom it, man,” roared M’Gourley, “she wasn’t there twarree seconds ago. -She’s come out of no wood; she’s been _fetched_.” - -“Well, of all the superstitious idiots!” said Leslie, gazing from the -perspiring M’Gourley to the figure of the quaint and pretty little -Japanese girl who was busy amidst the azaleas plucking the blossoms. -“Why, it wouldn’t take her more than ‘twarree seconds’ to come out of -the wood. Anyhow, I’ll go and see if she’s real.” - -“Man! man! hauld back!” cried the agonized M’Gourley as his partner -plunged amidst the bushes. “Ye’ll be had; she’s a bogle. Lord’s sake! -Lord’s sake! Well, gang your own gate, I’m off to Nikko.” - -Yet he waited. - -The bogle was plucking blossoms as hard as she could and in the profuse -manner of childhood. She and the azaleas made a sight for sore eyes. - -She might have been seven or eight, dressed in a blue kimono with a -scarlet obi, hair black as ebony shavings, tightly drawn off the -forehead and held up with a tortoiseshell comb—the “germ of a woman.” - -Her back was turned to Leslie, and as he got within arm’s length of the -quaint and delicious little figure he did just what you or I might have -done—bent down, seized her up, and kissed her. - -The bogle dropped her flowers and gave a shriek, a most distinctly human -shriek. - -“He’s kessed her!” cried M’Gourley, addressing the azaleas, the cypress -trees, and all Japan. - -Then he stood in agony, held to the spot by the sight of Leslie and the -bogle making friends. - -It didn’t seem to take long, for presently he returned through the -azaleas triumphant, carrying her in his arms. - -“Here’s your bogle,” said he, placing her on the dusty road where, with -all the gravity of the Japanese child, she made a deep obeisance to -M’Gourley. That gentleman returned the compliment with a short, sharp -nod. - -“I’m awa’ to Nikko,” said he in the hard, irritable voice of a person -who is desirous of avoiding an undesirable acquaintance, gazing at -Leslie and steadily ignoring the lady in blue who was now holding on to -Leslie’s right leg, contemplating M’Gourley, and sucking the tip of a -taper and tiny forefinger all at the same time. “I’m awa’ to Nikko. ’Tis -no place for a mon like me. Never was I used to the company of fules—” - -“Don’t be an ass! Speak to her; you have the tongue, and I haven’t.” - -“I winna.” - -“Well, of all the old women I ever met,” said Leslie, addressing a -“thundering great camellia tree” that stood opposite, “this partner of -mine takes the bun!—don’t he, Popsums?” bending down and looking into -the small face, the left cheek of which was now resting against his -knee. - -Popsums, in reply to the smile and interrogative tone in the question -she did not understand, smiled gravely back and murmured something that -sounded like “Hei.” - -M’Gourley snorted, and Leslie broke out laughing; he had little of the -Japanese, but he knew that “Hei” meant “Yes.” - - - - - CHAPTER IV - - AMIDST THE HILLS - - -Just then a ripple of laughter came down the breeze, and round the -corner of the road, heading for Nikko, came at full trot seven rikshas -streaming out like a scarf of color; a dream of color—for each riksha -contained a lady most beautiful to behold under the splendor of her -umbrella. - -They were a party of girls returning to Nikko after some sylvan freak, -and they drew up as if by common assent to admire the azaleas. - -Leslie, removing his hat and lifting his treasure trove, held her up for -exhibition. - -The girls laughed and spoke to her; had they been English girls she -would have been promptly handed round and kissed; and she, with becoming -gravity, replied gracefully in a few half-lisped words. - -Then, leaving behind them on the air a cloud of dust, a perfume of -camellia oil, and a long drawn “Sayonara,” the bevy of beauties passed -in a gorgeous flight of mixed colors round the bend of the road and were -gone. - -“Ye mind he said seven rikshas were coming,” cried Mac. - -“Bother!” answered Leslie. “He’d come the same direction and passed -them. Do you think they’d have laughed and spoken to her if there was -anything wrong and they’re Japs, and ought to know. Come! buck up, man! -You’re not afraid to do what a girl has done?” - -“A’weel!” said M’Gourley, half ashamed of himself; and dour as any -Procurator Fiscal, he set to the examination of the being who was now on -the ground again, her hand clasped in that of Leslie. - -This was the result of the examination. Deponent lived with her father. -Where? She did not know.—Just beyond there somewhere. What was the -house like she lived in? It had a plum-tree growing before it. What did -her father do? He hammered things with a hammer. Had she any brothers -and sisters? No; but—sudden thought—she had a sugar-candy dragon, and -she had lost it. (Here deponent wept slightly and with reserve.) - -Pause in the interrogations whilst a snub nose was wiped with Leslie’s -pocket handkerchief. - -And a kite, but that was at home. She had gone that day with a little -boy—a neighbor—to hunt for the saccharine dragon, and they had lost -themselves, then they had lost each other, then _she_ had lost herself. -How was that possible? Well, she had gone to sleep. Where? In the wood. - -Here the examinate went off into a tale about an impossible tom-cat with -wings, which she had once seen on an umbrella, and beheld once again in -the wood, but was suppressed by the court and asked to keep to facts. - -Whilst asleep in the wood she was awakened, so she declared, by a sound -like the passage of a flight of storks, and, coming out of the wood, -fearful of meeting a dragon, she began to pick the pretty flowers; then -she was seized by the honorable gentleman, whose height was greater than -a poplar tree. - -How old was she? Eight times the cherry blossom had blown since her -humble self had come into the world. - -Then she volunteered the entirely unsolicited statement that it was -likely her little boy companion had been lost in the snow. But that was -impossible—well, it was a field of lilies then—and he had been most -possibly devoured by a dragon. - -What did she propose about going home? Did she know the way, and could -she go alone? - -Here she declared herself utterly at a loss. Her home was somewhere near -by, but where, she could not exactly say. - -“Well, well!” said M’Gourley, when he had finished his examination. “It -seems to me that bogle or no bogle you’ve saddled yoursel’ wi’ a lost -child. Whaur’s your common sense now?” - -“Just where it always was.—Question is—what are we to do? Can _you_ -suggest anything?” - -“Na, na! it’s not for me to say,” said the other, with that vile sense -of satisfaction a brither Scot feels when a brither Scot has made a -cubby of himself. Then, remembering the bond of partnership, “If I were -the party responsible, I’d just pop her back where I fund her first, and -rin.” - -“Well, you _are_ a beast! Why, you benighted old mummy-stuffer, I -believe you’ve got a scarab in your bosom instead of a heart! I’ll take -her along to Nikko, and get the police to hunt out her home. Stay, we -haven’t asked her what’s her name.” - -M’Gourley asked the question, and the Lost One declared her name to be -“Bell-flower.” - -“Bell-flower!” said Leslie, who had a smattering of botany, “that’s a -campanula. We’ll call her—‘Campanula.’” - -She also made declaration that she was quite satisfied to go with the -honorable gentleman, whose height exceeded the tallest of trees. Leslie -lifted her up and seated her upon his shoulder, and, as they started, he -turned and looked back at the loveliness of the perfumed azalea -valley—a sight that was yet to haunt him in the time to come. - -“It’s my opeenion,” said M’Gourley, as they took the road, “that there -was something forming in yon wood, something dom bad, and you flung it -out of the forming eelement, and she was just suckid in.” - -“What d’you mean?” - -“The wraith of some dead bairn was wanderin’ aboot, and the forming -eelement seized it.” - -“What forming element? Rubbish! That chap was a lunatic; well, when he -felt me touch him it set his lunacy off, that’s all. Why, I once went to -a big asylum in Scotland, and I saw a man cutting just the same capers, -fighting devils. He’s an opium taker, and the opium is out of his brain, -that’s all. Drink does the same thing—Hi! By Jove, look up there! He’s -at it still.” - -Away up in the wild mountain gorge they saw a figure. It was the Blind -One still pursued, still running, and apparently fighting for his life. -If his actions were not the outcome of insanity they gave food to the -mind for the most terrible suppositions. - -Streaming with blood from his mad dashes against the trees, he seemed -surrounded on all sides, hemmed in, fighting furiously like a man -surrounded by wolves. If a tree chanced to be near, an opening seemed to -be made for him by his tormentors towards it, and he would rush at it -and dash himself against it, falling back bleeding but fighting still, -screaming and all the time being steadily shepherded further and further -into the loneliness of the hills. - -“Sirs! Sirs!” cried Mac, throwing up his hands as the horrible spectacle -vanished round a distant bend of the gorge. “This is no sight for a -Christian mon!” - -“It’s pretty rotten,” said Leslie who looked rather pale and sick. -“Fetch out that flask of yours, Mac. Thanks. Poor devil! would there be -any use following him?” - -“Not for twanty thousand pounds would I follow him,” said Mac, gurgling -at the flask. “He’s in ither hands than ours.” - -And, indeed, not for a very great sum would Leslie have gone up that -desolate gorge to see the finish of the tragedy. - -“Let’s go on,” said Leslie, “and don’t let’s speak of it again. I want -to forget it—ugh!” - - - - - CHAPTER V - - THE TEA HOUSE OF THE TORTOISE - - -It was at the next turn that Nikko broke upon them, a long way off, -lying in its valley amidst the high hills, hills fledged with greenery -to their summit. - -There are sights that strike the eye and the heart at the same time, and -the sight of Nikko where the Shoguns sleep, Nikko the beautiful in the -silent valley, amidst the silent hills, is one of these. - -The delicate colors, the exquisite tracery of the temple roofs, the -crystal clearness of the air through which the eye can pick out detail -after detail, the atmosphere of tranquillity of the mountains, and the -green cryptomeria trees, make up a picture, leaving little for the heart -to desire, or the imagination to conceive. - -“Why,” cried Leslie, turning to his companion (Campanula was seated -aloft in solitary state upon his shoulder clutching his hair tight, -whilst he held in one big hand her two little sandal-shod, tabi-clad -feet), “if that’s Nikko, it’s ten miles off if it’s a foot. What’ve you -got to say for yourself, hey?” - -“A’weel,” said M’Gourley, glowering at Nikko, “if you want my candid -opeenion, we’ve juist gone astray; the country I know well, but these -dom roads lead one like a Jack o’Lanthorn. It’s my opeenion that a -Japanese road—” - -“I don’t want your opinion on Japanese roads, I want your concise -opinion about yourself—ain’t you a fool?” - -“Ay, ay,” said M’Gourley, as if considering the matter, “a fule I may -be, but it’s my candit opeenion that I’m not the only fule in Japan.” - -“Well,” said Leslie, “fool or no fool, we’ll have to tramp it, and -you’ll have to take your turn to carry the kid, so—_Marchons_!” - -Campanula, so far from being frightened at her awful elevation from the -earth, seemed to enjoy the situation, and to find food for a sort of -muse of her own, for she began to hum as Leslie took the road with his -long stride, and to sing in a lisping sort of way. - -“What’s she singing?” demanded her bearer of the sweating Scot at his -side. - -“Lord knows! ’tis an eldritch chune, and I dinna like to listen to the -words. Man, Leslie, but your legs are longer than mine, and I canna keep -the pace.” - -“Well, I’ll go slower if you’ll listen, and tell me what she’s singing.” - -“She’s singing,” gasped M’Gourley, “s’ far as I can make out, some -diddering noensense aboot a sugar-candy dragon that a man like a poplar -tree is goin’ to hunt, he and a man like a corbie.” - -“That’s you.” - -“More like some bogle from the wood that’s maybe after us now. I am not -a supersteetious man—na, na! ye may laugh or not—but would y’ like to -know what in my humble opeenion you are cartin’ on your shoulders?” - -“Yes?” - -“Some bairn that has been lost and dead these years, and has been -whustled up by that blind deevil with the pipe. What did she mean by -that reeference to the snaw—answer me that!” - -“When I can get into the mind of a Japanese child, and see the world as -it sees it, I’ll answer you; you know what children’s minds are, how -they mix and imagine things.” - -“What did she mean by that reeference to the snaw?” grimly went on -M’Gourley. “Mix or no mix, what did she mean by the other bairn being -lost in the snaw?” - -“Well,” said Leslie, “I don’t care a button whether she’s a bogle or -not. If she is, she’s the prettiest bogle that was ever bogled, and -about the heaviest, I should think. Here, you take a turn with her, I’m -about done.” - -They took it turn about, M’Gourley vastly loth, to carry the Lost One; -and the Lost One stopped them to gather flowers for her by the wayside, -to give her drinks from rivulets, to help her admire and wonder at -herons and other marvels of the way, so that it was after six of the -clock when two of the most dusty and perspiring Scotchmen in the Eastern -Hemisphere entered the happy village of Nikko from the mountain side, -Campanula this time on Leslie’s shoulder, grave, triumphant, and holding -a huge lily in her hand. - -Nikko and its surroundings just now was ablaze with scarlet japonica. -The lamps of the camellias were lit, the soaring wistaria vines had -broken into clusters of pale lilac blossoms, the iris beautified the -field, and the wild cherry the thicket. It was as if spring had called -from the tomb of Iyeyasu and her faithful had come to pray. - -There are two hotels at Nikko known to the globe-trotter, “Kanayas” and -the “New Nikko,” but M’Gourley knew a better place than these. - -As they passed down the long inclined street a baby with a shaved head, -a baby that was half a baby and half an obi, tied behind in a stiff and -preposterous bow, spied Campanula being borne aloft, dropped his -immediate business—the attempt to fly a kite shaped like a moth—and -followed the newcomers with a shout. - -The shout, as if by magic, brought half a dozen children from nowhere in -particular; girl children with dolls on their backs, older girl children -with babies on their backs, boys battledore in hand, and all with clogs -on their feet, clogs that went clipper-clapper, waking up the echoes and -calling forth more children, so that when they had got half-way down the -mile-long street from the upper village Campanula had a “following,” the -like of which had never been seen, perhaps, since the pied piper passed -through Hamelin. - -A colored, laughing, murmuring, rippling throng following with every eye -fixed on the Lost One borne sky-high on the shoulder of the tall -stranger; a throng, the half of which could have walked under a -dinner-table without much inconvenience; some empty-handed, some still -grasping their implements of play, all agog, yet of decent and orderly -behavior. A throng, in fact, of ladies and gentlemen in the making. - -Backward over the summit of Leslie gazed Campanula upon this crowd, -whilst the stall-keepers and the stray riksha men, the pilgrims and the -paupers, the priest and the policeman, stood by the way to watch the -procession pass. - -“I say,” called Leslie to his companion, who was limping behind dead -beat, yet in an agony at the “splurge” they were making, “this is gay, -isn’t it?” - -“Dod rot the child!” cried M’Gourley, nearly tumbling over a fat baby -with a tufted head, who was running in front of him and trying to look -up in his face. - -“I dinna ken whoat ye mean by gay. I have no immeediate particular use -for the waurd. Never before have I been held up to public reedicule. I’m -a decent livin’ man, ye ken, an’ I ha’na any use for such gayeties. I -leave them to ithers who care for makin’ assinine eediots of -theirselves; but, thank the Laird, we’re nearly there noo.” - -They turned a corner and entered a gate that led to a garden. - -At the gate M’Gourley turned and addressed the camp followers, telling -them with forced politeness that there was nothing more to be seen; that -the show was over, in fact, and asking them honorably to excuse him the -pleasure of being followed any more. - -The crowd murmured, and dissolved, the earth seemed to take it up like -blotting-paper, and M’Gourley, turning his back upon its remnants, led -the way through the garden, past a tiny lake in the midst of which stood -an island, inhabited by a huge frog, and so, by a path, to the front of -a long, low, white-washed house. - -This was the Tea House of the Tortoise, a place well known to M’Gourley, -as (to use his own abominable expression) being “cheap and clean.” - -A panel of the front was drawn back, revealing cream-white matting and -lamp light. - -M’Gourley sat down with a sigh on the side of the veranda, and began to -pull off his elastic side boots. Leslie sat down also, with Campanula in -his lap; he could not put her down for she had literally tumbled into -sleep. - -“Pull off my boots, Mac,” said he. “I can’t let go of this blessed -child.” - -“Na!” said Mac mysteriously, and somewhat viciously, as he knelt down -and unlaced his partner’s boots, “ye cannot let her go, ye cannot let -her go; forby, she wullna let _you_ go.” - -“You think she’s going to stick to me?” - -“Imphim,” replied Mac. - -Imphim is not Japanese, it is the double Scotch grunt, which has -twenty-two separate meanings, mostly unpleasant. Shut your mouth tight -and try to say “Hum, hum,” and you will achieve “Imphim,” but never do -it again, please. - -Leslie was about to answer, when a sound behind made him turn, and -there, like a pinned-down butterfly, was a Mousmé on the mat, crying, -“Irashi, condescend to enter.” - -M’Gourley—a most unengaging figure in his stocking feet—rose and -addressed the Mousmé. - -He told her things in language unknown to Leslie; things about the -sleeping Campanula evidently, for he pump-handled with his arm in the -direction where Leslie, bootless now, sat holding her. - -The Mousmé on her knees, a camellia blossom in her hair and her eyes -fixed upon M’Gourley, seemed fascinated. Then she called out and.... - -“Hai tadaima,” came a soft voice from somewhere in the back premises, -and a second Mousmé appeared, made obeisance, and listened whilst the -tale, whatever it was, was laid before her. - -Deep astonishment, exclamations of wonder, a call: - -“Hai tadaima!” and an old lady appeared, and made obeisance, and -listened whilst the thrice-told tale was told her by the two Mousmés and -M’Gourley all together. - -Meanwhile Leslie, feeling ridiculously like a nursemaid, sat holding the -Lost One, whose soul was wandering in the vain land of dreams. - -“What are you stuffing those creatures up with?” he suddenly broke out. -“Blessed if you oughtn’t to be dressed in a kimono and a petticoat; -you’re the biggest old woman of the lot. Ask one of them to take the -kid, or I’ll go off to the hotel with her.” - -“One minit,” said Mac. “They’re conseedrin’ the matter.” - -Scarce had he spoken when the old lady called out, and entered on the -scene, an old gentleman, the proprietor of the tea house, a black cat, -and two more Mousmés. - -“Oh, _do_ call a few more!” said Leslie. “And call in a couple of -musicians and make the comic opera complete.” - -“There are no more to call,” replied Mac. “They are conseedrin’ the -matter. The Japanese are a very supersteetious people, and these are -good friends of mine, and I would not spring a pairson upon them with -dootful anticeedents. You see, Leslie, man, the presence of the bairn -must be explained. She is not a bale of goods we can dump in a corner. -Bide a wee; I will talk them over yut.” - -The Areopagus was considering the question as to whether Campanula, if -admitted to the Tea House of the Tortoise, would bring ruin and -destruction or a blessing on the premises, when Hedgehog San, the black -cat, settled the matter by coming up to Leslie and rubbing against his -leg. - -Then the Hon. Hedgehog—may his ashes rest in peace!—jumped on Leslie’s -knee and rubbed himself against Campanula. - -That clinched the business. - -The old lady herself advanced, and, taking the Lost One from the Weary -One, carried her bodily into the house, whilst Leslie, yawning and -stretching himself, followed. - -Inside, in the bare, clean room, the little Mousmé with the camellia in -her hair addressed herself to Leslie in a soft and beseeching voice. - -“What does she want?” he asked of Mac. - -“She wants to know if you require anything.” - -“A bath—that’s what I want more than anything—don’t you?” - -“I am not given to promeescuous bathing,” said M’Gourley, “being greatly -subject to the siatickee; but a bath you wull have, and I’ll e’en sit -here and smoke a pipe whilst you bathe yourself.” - -“I want also a sugar-candy dragon for the bairn,” said Leslie. “Ask ’em -to send out and get one. I suppose you can get such things?” - -M’Gourley gave the message to the maid, and she departed. - -The travelers’ luggage—a frightful-looking old mid-Victorian carpet bag -belonging to M’Gourley, and a Gladstone of Leslie’s—had already arrived -at the tea house, having been sent on by rail _via_ Utsu-no-Miya, and -the two sat down on small square cushions, placed on the cream-colored -matting, to smoke a pipe, whilst dinner and the bath were preparing. - -“The police will be here the morn about that bairn,” said Mac in his -cheerful way, “and we’ll have to acoont for her.” - -“Of course we will.” - -“Ay, ay,” said Mac, “but have you ever acoonted for a thing to the -Japanese police?” - -“Well, considering I’ve only been in Japan ten days, I haven’t had much -time, you see, to fall foul of the police.” - -“I found a scairf pin once,” said this comforter of Job, “on the Bund at -Nagasaki. Twa-and-sax-pence it was worth, or maybe three shullin’, and I -took it to the police office and began to acoont for it.” - -He stopped and sighed and sucked his pipe. - -“Well?” - -“Well, I’m acoontin’ for it still, and that’s three months ago; letters -and papers, and papers and letters enough to drive a man daft! Well, I’m -thinkin’ if a twa-and-saxpenny scairf pin can cause such a wully waugh, -what’s a live bairn going to do? Now, I’m thinking—” - -“May I give you a piece of advice, Mac?” - -“I am always open to judeecious advice,” answered the unsuspecting Mac. - -“Well, don’t think too much or you’ll hurt yourself.” - -M’Gourley grunted, and at that moment the Mousmé with the camellia in -her hair entered with the announcement that the bath was ready in the -room above, and Leslie departed. - -“When you have shown the honorable gentleman the bath, come down; I wish -to speak to you,” said M’Gourley to the lady of the camellia. She obeyed -the request and M’Gourley held her in light conversation, till he knew -by the sounds above that his partner was in the tub. Then he released -the handmaiden, and she departed upstairs. - -He listened, and presently he heard Leslie’s voice. - -“Go away, please. Good heavens I say, I _wish_ you’d go away! No, I -don’t want soap. I say, Mac! Hi, McGourley!—leave my back -alone—_M’Gourley_!” - -But M’Gourley, like an Indian Sachem, smoked on and answered not. - -He was having his revenge for the Nikko road. - - - - - CHAPTER VI - - THE DREAMER AND THE DRAGON - - -They had finished dinner; a dinner which began with tea and bean flour -cakes, passed on to fish served on little mats of grass, went on to soup -served in lacquered bowls, proceeded to prawns; halted, hesitated, and -went back to soup, scratched its head, so to speak, and then, as if with -an after-thought, served up a quail, apologized for the substantiality -of the quail by presenting a salted plum on a little plate, and then -harked shamelessly back to soup, ending deliriously with a shower of -little dishes containing everything inconceivable, and a big bowl of -rice. - -This is an impressionist picture of a Japanese dinner. I have eaten -many, but I have never carried away more than an impression, and whether -kuchi-tori comes before hachiz-a-kana, I cannot say, or where the -seaweed or salted fish come in—but come in they do, they and other -things stranger than themselves. - -A _chamécen_ was thrumming somewhere in the house as they dined, sitting -on the soft white matting, and waited upon by two Mousmés crouched on -the matting like little panthers preparing to spring. - -A slid back panel of the front wall made a doorway through which they -could see the moon wandering over Nikko, casting her cool white light -upon the blazing japonica flowers, the glory of the camellias, the roofs -of the temples, and the sad dark beauty of the cryptomeria trees. - -Nikko by day is fair, but by night, when the moon is overhead, when the -air is full of the sounds of wandering waters, and the wind is heavy -with the perfume of the wild azaleas, Nikko is a dream. - -When the tea and bean cakes had been served, the moon was in the act of -washing weakly a house gable across the garden, and a pale lilac-colored -flower of the wistaria, which projected above the extemporized doorway; -but by the time the quail had made its appearance, the garden was solid -in moonlight, the pond was a mirror, and the frog self-marooned on the -little island, was as distinct as if seen by daylight. - -“I must learn Japanese,” said Leslie, taking a cigarette-case from his -pocket and lighting a cigarette at the tobacco-mono that stood at his -elbow. “My lines are cast in Japan, that’s clear, but a man without the -language is a helpless baby.” - -“Ay, ay,” said M’Gourley. “You can easily get instruction in the -Japanese: take a wumman to live with you.” - -“I haven’t looked at a woman for ten years, and I don’t want to look at -one again.” Then suddenly bursting out: “Why, you old scamp, talking -like that—you told me you were a member of the Free Kirk.” - -“The Wee Kirk,” corrected Mac, leisurely lighting his pipe with an ember -from the hibachi. - -“Well, Free Kirk or Wee Kirk, you ought to be jolly well ashamed of -yourself; and were you a member of the Wee Kirk when you were -constructing idols in Birmingham with old What’s-his-name?” - -“Na, na; those were my godless days. I got my releegion late in life, -and a vara good releegion it is; a waurkable releegion, one that does -not heat in the bearings, but runs smooth.” - -“And what is this wonderful religion, if I may ask?” - -“It is noet so much wonderful as waurkable, and it may be compreezed in -the sentence: ‘Do unto ithers as ithers would do unto you.’” - -“O good Lord! and you call that a religion! Why, you precious old -humbug, that means you can rob, and plunder, and murder, and cheat—that -is to say, you can act like a beast towards people who would act so to -you.” - -“Just so.” - -“Well, there’s one thing I like about you, you’re frank, to say the -least of it.” - -This remark seemed greatly to incense Mac, who, perhaps, misunderstood -the meaning of the word frank. - -“When y’ve been in the waurld as long as I have, surrounded on ivry side -by scoondrels and robbers, y’ll maybee be as fraunk as mysel’. -Fraunk.—wid ye give me a defineetion of the waurd—fraunk! I wid have -ye to understand I’m an hoenest mon with hoenest men, but _I’m a -scoondrel wi’ scoondrels_. Fraunk!” And so he went on, his Scotch accent -deepening as deepened his excitement, till at last he broke down into -Gaelic, and thundered his remarks at the hibachi, slapping his thigh as -he did so, and wakening the echoes of the house, which was resonant as a -fiddle. So that by the time he had got to the end of his exordium, -Leslie saw a panel waver back an inch, and the lady of the camellia -peeping in to see what the Learned One was shouting about. - -“Keep your hair on,” said Leslie, when Mac, with a final “Fraunk!” -delivered in English, began to refill and light his pipe. “I didn’t mean -to insult you; I only meant to say I like your open-heartedness.” - -“Ay, I was ever that to those I had a liking for.” - -“I meant more precisely your open-mindedness—but no matter, let’s talk -of something else. I wonder where they’ve put the kid, and oh, by Jove! -I wonder if they’ve got that dragon. Sing out and ask, like a good -chap.” - -Mac clapped his hands, and “Hai tadaima!” came as a response. - -It was worth the trouble of clapping one’s hands to hear that sweet -reply. - -A moment later, a panel slid back and the camellia lady appeared. - -Campanula San was asleep, and at that very moment Wild-cherry-bud was in -search of the Hon. Dragon, with orders to leave no confectioner’s stall -unvisited till she had secured him. - -This with immovable gravity and deep, sweet earnestness of tone. - -“Well,” said Leslie when she had withdrawn, “of all the people I have -struck yet, give me the Japanese.” - -“Wait till you’ve had beesiness transactions with them,” said Mac -darkly. “I am no so unfreenly to the Japs in or’nary life, but in -beesiness the Jap’s a wrugglin’ sairpent—all but one—Danjuro—the man -we’re going to join in partnership; he’s as straight as a Chinee.” - -“He must be damn crooked then!” - -“Cruik’d enough to make his way in Japan, but straight enough to a -freend; but you’re a poet, man, Leslie, and no beesiness man. I kent y’ -for a poet when you sang that bit song on the road—the song aboot the -camellia trees.” - -Leslie laughed. - -“That rubbish! It’s not mine; I read it in the Sydney _Bulletin_. Funny -enough, too, it was the first thing that made me think of coming to -Japan! Poetry! Good God! Put a man through the remittance mill in Sydney -and see all the poetry that will be left in him! Put a butterfly through -a sausage machine and then see how beautifully it will fly! Yes, I was -once a poet; years and years ago I was a poet—a poet who never wrote -anything, but a poet for all that. I could see the beauty of the world; -and then they blinded me. Who? I don’t know—the world. Maybe it was -myself, maybe not. Maybe it was my father, maybe not. I only state the -fact that something in me is dead—the something that took joy in life -and found beauty in innocence—or was dead till I came to Japan. Oh, -M’Gourley, man, the years I’ve spent in Sydney under a cloud, mixing -with bar loafers, cursing my father and myself; the years I’ve spent in -Sydney have broken my soul in me!” - -“Why did ye not waurk?” - -“Work! I had just enough money to keep me from starvation and decently -dressed. I might have got a clerkship; for what good? To make another -hundred a year. To spend on what? Can you not understand, man, that my -mainspring was gone, that I was put out of the world I knew, tied by the -leg to Sydney, bound to appear every quarter-day at the double-damned -lawyer’s office, or starve? Two things only kept me alive—tobacco and -books—saved me from myself and from drink.” - -“What sort of a mon was your faither?” - -“A hard, dour, just man—a man who could make no allowance for folly.” - -“Ay, ay! Had y’ any brithers and sisters?” - -“Never a one, and my mother died when I was two; and he used to leather -me. Well, you can fancy my joy when old Bloomfield, the lawyer, sent for -me one day and said: ‘I’ve bad news for you, Mr. Leslie.’ ‘What’s that?’ -said I. ‘Your father is dead. He died intestate, and you have inherited -his property. I am advised it amounts to over twenty-one thousand -pounds.’” - -“Twenty-one thousand?” said Mac in admiration. - -“Yes; and I said to Bloomfield: ‘You must be either a fool or a -hypocrite, for that’s the best news I ever heard in my life, and you -know it.’ Then some instinct took me over here to Japan. I was thinking -of going to England, but I found all at once I had a horror of England -and the English, so I came to Japan; and glad I am I came. Can you fancy -what these people here are to me after the population of Sydney—those -raucous, horse-racing, drink-swilling beasts? Then I fell in with you at -Tokyo, and took a fancy to your old Scotch mug—and here we are.” - -At this moment a little figure crossed the garden, bearing a lantern on -the end of a stick. It was Wild-cherry-bud; and presently she appeared -with the much-sought-for dragon wrapped in rice paper. - -It was a wonderful creation with a twisted tail, rather stumpy wings, -but with a mouth that made up for all defects; nothing so ferocious had -ever perhaps before been done in sugar candy. - -When the thing had been inspected and approved, Wild-cherry-bud led the -way to where Campanula slept, for Leslie wished his present to be placed -beside her, so that she might find it when she awoke. - -The Lost One, looking very much lost indeed on a huge futon (a quilt -thicker than a muffin), and covered by a blue mosquito-net with red -bound edges, was so profoundly asleep that the clicking of the net being -pulled aside and the light of the night lantern borne by Wild-cherry-bud -did not disturb her. She was sleeping on her back, the top futon only -drawn to her waist, and her little perfectly shaped white hands were -crossed pathetically on her breast. - -Leslie knelt down, and lifting one little hand placed the long-sought -monster beneath it. The hand clasped the dragon, the long-sought dragon, -and across the sleeper’s face passed what seemed the ghost of a smile. - -“A’weel!” thought Mac as he looked on, “had he a bairn he’d make a -better faither to it than his own faither made to him.” - -Then the mosquito-net was drawn and they departed, leaving Campanula to -the possession of her dreams. - -Up in their room Leslie steadily refused to undress till the waiting -Mousmé had “cleared out.” He had already refused to allow her to rub his -back when he was in his tub and now this— - -The Tea House of the Tortoise people, good old-fashioned, Japanese inn -people, unused to foreign follies, could not make it out. - -The Areopagus convened itself again, and held council by the light of an -andon, or night lantern. - -“What could it mean?” There was simply no meaning in it. Such a thing -had never happened before, and the general conclusion was that Leslie -had “gone gyte.” - -Then the Areopagus went to bed all together under the same mosquito-net, -and silence reigned with the moon over the Tea House of the Tortoise. -The moon wandering over Nikko touching temple and tea-house pointed a -pallid finger between the window chinks of the room where the Lost One -lay asleep, as if to show her to the night. Clasping the candy dragon -whose ferocious eyes shone carbuncle-like in the placid moonlight she -made a strange picture, veiled by the blue gauze of the mosquito-net. - - - - - CHAPTER VII - - HOW CAMPANULA BROUGHT FORTUNE TO THE - HOUSE OF THE TORTOISE—AND OTHER - THINGS - - -The sun rose up and struck Nikko; struck the sacred red lacquered bridge -that crosses the foaming river, and the common bridge that you and I may -use, the potter’s shop, and the golden shrine of Iyeyasu. - -Then temple after temple broke up from shadow as the sun reached for -them and found them, and the hills took on a momentary splendor, an -ethereal loveliness, evanescent as youth and never to be recaptured by -the day. - -In the garden of the Tea House of the Tortoise a bomb-shell full of -bickering sparrows seemed suddenly to burst above the pond, the sun -looked over the wall upon the dwarf maples in their blue porcelain -flowerpots, a panel of the white house front slid back and a Mousmé -appeared, her head tied up in a blue cotton duster; appeared another -Mousmé, dragging a futon to air in the morning brightness, and yet -another who came out and yawned at the sun, showing him the full extent -of her pink gullet, and every one of her thirty-two white teeth. - -Then Hedgehog San, a cat honored and beloved, came forth with tail -erect, and a grasshopper hanging by the veranda in a tiny cage creaked -forth a thin hymn of praise. - -Thus started the day at the Tea House of the Tortoise. - -When Leslie and M’Gourley came downstairs—a stair like a ship’s -companion-way but without any balustrade—they found Campanula having -her obi tied by Fir-branch (she who had yawned at the sun), and Leslie -was informed through his partner that the dragon had been found and that -he had grown; this statement, with some confidential information -concerning a thunder-cat of which she had dreamed, Mac translated from -the original with a serious face. - -Up to this he had treated the Lost One as an adult, and as a most -undesirable adult, with whom he wished to have nothing to do. But -Campanula, fresh and spruce in the light of morning, chattering over her -shoulder to you about thunder-cats, whilst Fir-branch tied her obi in a -huge bow, was a person whose charm was not to be denied, and Mac began -to thaw. - -“What’s a thunder-cat?” asked Leslie. - -“Lord only knows! some contraption in the shape of an animal that makes -thunder. The Japs are full of supersteetions about animals. Wull we out -before breakfast?” - -Leslie the night before had declared his intention of sending for the -police next morning before the police sent for him, and had given a -message to the landlord accordingly. But he might have saved his breath. - -Nikko was agog. Whether the tale had leaked through the chinks of the -Tea House of the Tortoise, whether Wild-cherry-bud had distributed it -during her peregrinations in search of the dragon, no one will ever -know; the fact remains that the story of Campanula had gone abroad with -additions—all sorts of weird and wonderful additions. Half Nikko had -seen her borne aloft on the shoulders of Leslie, the other half had -heard extraordinary statements concerning her origin; the result was -that the whole of Nikko ached inwardly with a great ache of curiosity. - -By seven o’clock fifteen Mousmés or maybe twenty, had arrived singly and -in couples, not to ask questions, but to borrow things, or to offer the -loan of things, or to ask after the health of old mother Ranunculus, the -landlady of the “Tortoise.” Incidentally they learned about Campanula. - -A juggler had made her on the Nikko road. Out of what, for goodness’ -sake? Out of a wild azalea bush! - -No! - -Yes, assuredly, the Learned One had said so. - -And what had become of the juggler? He had vanished in a clap of -thunder—turned into a dragon. - -Surprising! - -And they went off to spread the news. - -At half-past eight, or thereabouts, a little man in white, the chief of -the Nikko police, arrived. He had come officially, but he also was -aching to get to the truth of this marvelous tale. - -Now the Japanese police is the most perfect police force in the world in -every respect. They are recruited from the Samurai or fighting-class, -and they are gentlemen to a man. - -The chief of the Nikko police made profound apologies for disturbing the -peace of the strangers, then he heard the story told by M’Gourley. - -He agreed that it was strange, but opined that the Lost One might simply -be a lost child. Where exactly was she found? In a valley of crimson -azaleas on the road from Kureise. Ah, yes! there was such a valley well -known, for the azaleas were crimson, and differed from the wild scarlet -azaleas so common hereabouts. There were also villages around there, and -tea houses; it might possibly be that she belonged to one of these. As -to the mad man they had seen running away, no one else had seen him. - -Then Campanula was brought in and questioned, the whole of the -“Tortoise” people squatting round in a ring, even down to Hedgehog San, -who sat with judicial gravity, and seemed to be taking mental notes. - -She told her little tale about the house with the plum tree in front of -it, and the kite, and the sugar-candy dragon which she had lost and -found again. How the said dragon had grown very much, and seemed -different, but tasted all right. Here she hastened to explain that she -had not eaten him, only touched him with her tongue. - -She could not possibly say what men called her father. He hammered -things. What sort of things? She did not know, but they went pong, pong, -pong, when he struck them. - -“Tinsmith,” murmured M’Gourley. - -She was sure of one thing, that her father’s house was quite close to -the wood and the azalea valley. - -How old was she? - -Seven times had the cherry blossoms blown since her humble self— - -“Hauld there,” said M’Gourley. Then in Japanese he explained that -yesterday she had declared that eight times the cherry blossoms had -blown since her humble self, etc. - -Ah, yes! but how was she to know? a lump of mud like her! - -In conclusion, she took back her statement about the snow. She must have -dreamt that in the wood. - -Then the court began to consult, the “lump of mud” sitting in their -midst pensive and rather sad, a scarlet flower in her black hair, and -the bow of her obi looking very stiff and huge. - -“Look here,” said Leslie at last. “Tell him I’ll look after her, and pay -all expenses till she’s found. Tell him to have the place searched, all -that wood and country, and I’ll pay for it; and if they can’t find her -people I’ll adopt her. I will, begad!” - -Mac translated. - -At first the chief of police seemed to think that the “lump of mud” -should be hauled off to the police office—impounded, in short; then -M’Gourley intervened. M’Gourley was a power in Japan just then, for the -astute Scot had made himself very useful to the government in past -years, and the chief of police, when he heard what Mac had to say, -agreed to leave matters where they were whilst the country was being -searched, and the chief of police at Tokyo communicated with. - -Then he took his departure, and here began the prosperity of the Tea -House of the Tortoise. - -Three elderly gentlemen in kimonos were the first to arrive; after them -a youth in a bowler hat, and with the face of an uninspired idiot. These -sat round and sipped saki and smoked little pipes, and talked to -Wild-cherry-bud and Fir-branch, and listened to the grasshopper singing -in his cage, whilst more guests arrived, and still more. So that -Fir-branch, Wild-cherry-bud, & Co., were full of business, so full -indeed that mother Ranunculus, driven to her wits’ end, sent out for -hired help. - -At eleven, when M’Gourley and his companion went out to inspect the -golden Shrines, the Tea House of the Tortoise was humming like a -bee-hive. - -“It’s a funny business,” said Leslie, as they turned the corner into the -street. - -“I’m thinkin’,” said Mac, “that you’ll no find it so funny a beesiness -in the end.” - - - - - CHAPTER VIII - - THE SURPRISING STORY OF MOMOTARO—AKUDOGI - AND SPOTTED DOG - - -“I don’t care a button,” said Leslie, on the third morning of their stay -in Nikko. “Danjuro may go be hanged. I’m not going to leave here till -I’ve settled about the kid.” - -“Ay, ay!” said Mac. “The man who will to Cupar maun to Cupar. I would -only imprees upon you this, that time is going and time is money.” - -“I know; but it won’t take more than a few days now. They say they’ve -hunted the whole country round there, and can’t find trace of her -people.” - -“Na, and never will. If she has onny real people they won’t fash -themselves aboot her; girls in Japan are as plentiful as blaeberries in -Lorne—you’re sadlit with her.” - -“Well, I want her, that’s the truth. I’ve taken a fancy to her; she’s -not the sort of thing one picks every day—she and her thunder-cats and -dragons.” - -“I won’t say she is not an attractif wee boddie,” said Mac, “but think -of the future, mon, when she’s graun up.” - -“Bother the future! I’m rich enough to see after her. D’y know, Mac—” - -“Weel?” - -“I wonder did she come out of those azaleas?” - -Mac gave a grunt. - -Curiously enough, his point of view had changed, and he was now -convinced, or pretended to be convinced, that the treasure trove was a -solid body and no bogle. - -“Because,” went on Leslie, “it may be fact or fancy, but when I picked -her up she seemed slipping away into thin air till I kissed her, and -then she became solid.” - -“Imphim,” said Mac, using a variation of the sound that was simply -stuffed with meanings all uncomplimentary to Leslie’s intelligence. - -“They used to tell me when I was a kid that babies came out of parsley -beds. Well, I’m half inclined to believe the tale has come true at last, -and she came out of those azalea bushes. Of course,” said Leslie -suddenly, and as if apologizing to his own common sense, “I don’t really -believe it, but I like to fancy it; it’s so much nicer than thinking she -came into the world the other way.” - -The prosperity of the Tea House of the Tortoise still continued, people -coming from far and near to get a glimpse of the foundling. - -Every day Mac and Leslie would take her out for a walk, and she clopped -beside them in her little clogs delightfully grave, and seemingly -unmindful of the polite following of children that always tailed after -them without appearing quite to do so. Children bouncing colored balls, -playing hop scotch or what not, yet always with an eye on the child that -had come out of the azaleas. - -Shopping with Campanula Leslie found to be a new pleasure; a present, no -matter what, was received with such deep thankfulness, such quaint -expressions of gratitude. - -He ordered Mother Ranunculus—requested her, rather—to get a complete -new outfit for his charge, everything that money could buy, from tabi to -hairpins, from kimonos to clogs. As for toys, she simply wallowed in -them: bouncing balls and battledores fell round her as if from the sky, -not to mention a doll as big as a baby of three, which she instantly -became a mother to, carting it about on her back tucked under her -kimono. - -The one thing that disturbed Leslie was her seeming indifference to her -own strange position. Beyond the bald statement that she had a father, -she never referred to that enigmatical gentleman, nor did she grieve, -outwardly at least, about her separation from him. - -By the end of the week the two Scotchmen and their charge began to be -welded into a corporate body—a little quaint family party. It was -strange the influence of this child upon these two men whom fate had -drawn together from the corners of the earth. Leslie, with newly -acquired interest in life, had grown five years younger in mind, and as -for Mac, he had grown ten degrees more human. His withered fatherly -instincts were awakened—at least they opened one eye—and it was pretty -to see him with his gnarled, horny hands and intent, weather-beaten face -making chickens for the Lost One out of orange pips. - -They would go out, all three, and wander about Nikko and its temples, -and they would sit on grassy banks in the gardens of Dai Nichi Do, just -as a father and an uncle and niece might sit on seats in Kensington -Gardens, and then Leslie and his partner would discuss the future and -trade, whilst Campanula played with her doll or bounced a ball. - -Here one day, whilst the sun shone on the little lake and the pink and -copper maples, the tiny islands and bridges and pagodas, Campanula, -weary of play, told, in a sing-song voice and broken manner, the story -of Momotaro, otherwise called Peachboy, and his wonderful deeds. She -told it standing before them, and striking attitudes suitable to the -phases of the tale. - -One day, it appears, an old woman found a huge peach, and she was just -going to cut it in two with a knife when the peach broke open, and out -tumbled a baby. This very surprising thing happened a long time ago, but -exactly when Campanula could not possibly say. - -Then Peachboy grew up, and every day he grew fatter and stronger, till -at last he grew so big that he determined to fight Akudogi, the king of -the Ogres, who lived on an island—somewhere. And he started out, said -Campanula, with a sword and a bag full of millet dumplings, each with a -salted plum in the center, to fight the Ogres. - -Here she took from her sleeve a paper of sweets, and gravely presented -it to her companions, who each took one. She took one herself, consumed -it, and resumed the narrative. - -On the way he met a spotted dog, a monkey, and a crow, and to each he -gave a dumpling, and they followed him to the attack on Akudogi, the -king of the Ogres. - -The narrator’s voice became deeper in tone, and she spread out her -fingers as if in fear. - -The crow flew first to the castle of Akudogi and held him in talk, -whilst Peachboy, spotted dog, and the monkey, got over the castle wall. - -Campanula was now standing before her auditors in a most dramatic -attitude, her hands uplifted, the fallen back sleeves of her kimono -showing her arms, and her brown eyes full of fear. She did not seem to -see either Leslie or M’Gourley. Her eyes were fixed on the frightful -Akudogi, and Peachboy, the spotted dog and the monkey, who were about to -attack him. - -The crow, when he saw that his companions had gained an entrance to the -castle, flew away with a laugh, and Akudogi turned and beheld Peachboy -and his brave companions. He gnashed his teeth, pulled out his sword, -and oh! - -Frightened to death with her own imaginations, she rushed with a little -shriek into Mac’s arms for protection. - -“Hauld yourself taegether; I winna let them catch ye! I winna let them -catch ye!” cried Mac, as he clasped the perfumed bundle that had flung -itself into his arms. - -“What’s all that she was telling?” asked Leslie, who felt rather jealous -that Mac should have been chosen as the harbor of refuge. - -“Only a daft tale about ogres an’ spotted dogs. She’s clean crackit on -all sorts of queer beasties. Only last night she told me a tale aboot a -rat that played the fiddle an’ a tortoise that came to listen, and she -told what the tortoise speired an’ what the rat made answer, till you -could have sworn you heard the rat and the tortoise claverin’ -taegither.” - -“Well, hand her over here,” said Leslie; “she’s not yours.” And he took -Campanula from Mac and placed her on his knee. “She’s mine. I paid ten -shillings to that chap with the reed-pipe to whistle her up.” - -“I’ll tell you what,” said Mac. - -“Well?” - -“I’ll gi’ you ten shullin’ for a half share, and pay half the expeenses -of her upbringing.” - -“No, she’s mine; you can play with her as much as you like, but I’m -going to keep her. She’s the jolliest thing I ever struck, and I’m going -to stick to her. I saw that policeman Johnnie this morning, and he’s -quite given up hope of finding her people. They’ve hunted everywhere. I -offered him a fiver to cover the business, but he would not touch the -money. He says the chief of police at Tokyo knows you.” - -“Weel does he know me, seven year and more.” - -“And he says there’s no objection to our taking her along to Nagasaki if -you give your bond that she will be looked after, so I was thinking of -starting to-morrow.” - -“Wull you take her with us?” - -“I was thinking of leaving her with the ‘Tortoise’ people till I settle -about a place to live in at Nagasaki, and then coming back to fetch her. -She’ll be all right with them, I suppose?” - -“Ay, she’ll be right enough,” said Mac, and they left the gardens of Dai -Nichi Do, and headed for the hostelry. - -That night the Areopagus convened itself again, and M’Gourley explained -matters. It was necessary that he and his honorable friend should go to -Nagasaki, and they proposed that the Lost One should be left behind at -the Tea House of the Tortoise, to be kept till called for, warehoused, -in short, and, of course, paid for accordingly. Was Madame Ranunculus -willing? - -Most willing. - -A sum of money would be placed in the landlord’s hands as guarantee. - -Oh, that was perfectly unnecessary! - -Still, the Hon. Leslie wished it. - -Accordingly, a sum equivalent almost to the value of the Tea House of -the Tortoise, was placed in the landlord’s hands, who placed it in -numerous folds of rice paper, and handed it to his wife, who engulfed it -in her kimono. - -These matters having been satisfactorily settled, Campanula was led off -to bed and dinner was served. - -Next morning at eight o’clock two rikshas arrived to take the travelers -to the station. The whole of the “Tortoise” folk, Hedgehog San included, -came to the front of the house. The cry, “Sayonara—come again quickly,” -followed them as they swept round the pond and out at the gate, a cry -made up of the landlord’s croaking basso, the sweet voices of the -Mousmés, and Campanula’s childish treble. - -“She seemed sorrier to part with old Mac than me,” thought Leslie as -they span along. “Ugh!” He turned his head in disgust from an English -tourist in tweeds, who was engaged in kodaking a temple. - -In the train, with a pipe in his mouth and M’Gourley opposite to him, he -felt as if he had just stepped out of a dream; a dream of sun and -splendor, a dream in which figured camellia trees twenty feet high, and -the form of the Lost One standing amidst the glory of crimson azaleas. - -But another picture obtruded itself upon this pleasant dream. - -Away in the mountains not far from Lake Chuzenji, a green thing had been -discovered, a thing that had once been a man. Mac had been to view it at -the request of the police, but he could not identify it as the body of -the Blind One of the Nikko Road. It was green from the chlorophyll of -the cryptomerias. In the quaint language of the Japanese police, it was -the body of a man whom “the trees had beaten to death.” - - - - - CHAPTER IX - - THE HOUSE OF THE CLOUDS - - -Danjuro, the curio dealer of Jinrikisha Street, Nagasaki (no relation of -Danjuro the actor), was a gentleman of uncertain age, with a face which -seemed the relic of a thousand years of debauchery. - -It was probably only opium, but the awful weary look with which he -swindled you, when you were once in the trap he called his shop, would -have given Dante points for the construction of a new circle in his -_Inferno_. - -He had spent years in China, had Danjuro, hence, perhaps, the expression -on his face; also the fact that he did his calculations not by aid of -the so-ro-ba, or calculating machine used by the Japanese tradesmen. He -did his calculations in his head, and with that far-away look so filled -with the poetry of the horrible, he would calculate the difference -between the price he had paid for the okimono he was selling you and -your offer for it, contrasting them with your own personality, and from -these three factors calculating to a nicety how much money he could -swindle out of you. - -He had a hand in the selling of the Great Tung Jade to the Empress of -China, or rather to her ambassador the Mandarin Li, the shadiest -transaction that ever emerged from darkness; and could you place end to -end the globe trotters swindled and chiseled and fleeced by him, they -would reach in a noxious line from London to Newcastle, and maybe -further. He had long, polished finger nails that shone like plate glass, -and when you entered his establishment he advanced, bowed, and hissed at -you by way of welcome. - -He was a rogue, yet he was straight in his way. To be a perfect rogue, -at least to succeed in the art, you must be straight in some ways. The -bandit who betrays his brethren never goes far without a dagger sticking -in his back. - -M’Gourley had “discovered” Danjuro years ago. M’Gourley had twice come -to financial smash, once because of an earthquake, and again in the -upheaval caused by the breaking of the Barings. Danjuro had helped him -twice, and he had helped Danjuro many times; helped him with his Western -craft, Scotch cuteness, and knowledge of Europeans. - -In every city of the East, in every city of the world, you will find a -fixed Scot always prospering; M’Gourley was a floating Scot. Navigating -Japan from end to end, now at Tokyo, now at Kioto, now at Nagasaki, -crossing to Corea and pottering about there, meeting brither Scotchmen -and helping them in trade speculations, selling, or assisting in the -sale, of everything sellable from coals to kakemonos, went M’Gourley, a -busy man, but somehow a rather unfortunate one. - -Suddenly Japan rose and smashed China, Russia stepped in and robbed her -of the pieces, and Japan sat down, drew her kimono round her, and began -to think about Russia. - -M’Gourley just then (it was some two years before he met Leslie) was on -the Lao-Tung peninsula, a black wandering dot, innocuous to governments, -one would imagine, as a beetle. - -Suddenly M’Gourley returned to Japan, and the day after his return a -sheaf of documents addressed by a gentleman named Lessar to a gentleman -named Mouravieff was in the hands of the Japanese Council of Elders. - -I don’t say anything about the transaction at all; it is not for me to -take away the characters of my characters. I only know this, that if the -Russian Government had caught Mac just then, they, laboring under, -perhaps, a fantastically wrong impression, would have done something -decidedly unpleasant to him. - -At all events, Mac bought a new suit of reach-me-down clothes at a -native shop in the Honcho Dori at Yokohama, and got so drunk that three -Mousmés had put him to bed, whilst a fourth fanned him, and a fifth -played soothing tunes on a moon-fiddle to exorcise the demon; and a -piece of priceless gold lacquer presented to Mac by a high official was -sold by him to an American week later for five thousand dollars gold -coin—gold coin being much more useful than gold lacquer to a man in -Mac’s way of life. - -Thus it came about that Mac was a persona grata with the Japanese -Government, and had many little privileges not enjoyed by ordinary -Europeans. - -Danjuro’s shop was situated in Jinriksha Street, a street like a picture -slashed out of the “Arabian Nights,” a picture that a child had made -additions to with a lead pencil and half spoiled. - -A bowler hat in Jinriksha Street, for instance, is a thing very much out -of place, yet you see many of them, mostly potted down on the back of -Japanese heads, and making the wearers both frightful and -ridiculous-looking. - -Here passes a Mousmé under an umbrella, a figure fashioned seemingly -from a rainbow, a figure to bless the eye and make the heart feel glad. -Here stumps along a thing that once was a Mousmé, a thing in European -dress—alas! - -Here you turn from a shop sign in the vernacular, and across the way, -over the booth where cakes reposing on myrtle branches are sold, “Englis -here is spoke,” blasts your sight. - -Jinrikisha Street, and for Jinrikisha Street read nearly every other -street in sea-board Japan, is a picture, as I have said, spoiled as if -by a meddlesome English child. - -Danjuro’s shop was all open in front so that you could come right in -past the bronze stork on the tortoise, past the leaping dragon made of -jointed steel, a dragon hard as adamant yet flexible as india-rubber. -Then you met Danjuro, and he sank towards the floor and hissed at you by -way of welcome. The chief treasures were in the cellar below, but here -was quite enough to feast the eye of a not too wise amateur, and make -the purse jump in his pocket. - -Danjuro had the art of shop-dressing at his finger-ends. Things always -looked better in his establishment than they did when fetched home. - -People would cry: “Is _that_ the Owari vase I bought? Why, _what has -happened to it_?” - -It would be the same vase, but divorced from its surroundings. - -You cannot imagine the effect of a dwarf plum tree in a green tile pot -upon a dragon of steel until you see them in juxtaposition, nor the -strange difference certain backgrounds make in an Owari vase till you -try them. Danjuro was well up in these subtleties, and this knowledge, -combined with his own personality, lent an added value to his -wares—twenty per cent. at least. - -Here in the shop of Danjuro, in a semi-twilight, glimmer demons and -beasts in porcelain and bronze. The frightful face of Akudogi shouts at -you from the wall, the lotus expands over pools in the silent land of -lacquer, and the hundred guinea ivory Mousmé, ten inches high, trips -beneath her ivory umbrella, ever on the way to some fanciful pageant -that had once existed in her creator’s dreams. - -Here is a Jap baby, about as big and as round as a tangerine orange, -feeding ducks. Here a little box a size larger than a walnut. Open it; -inside are seated a man and boy playing some game with dice. The man is -holding the dice cup up preparing to cast; in it are the dice, every -cube separate and real, and each marked with the proper pips. - -In the shop of Danjuro you are gazing, not upon bronzes and lacquers, -but upon the mind of Japan, partly made visible. There is here evidence -of patience and labor sufficient to conquer the world, beauty enough to -charm the world, and ferocity enough to terrify it. - -There is nothing so strange on earth as this art that reveals in -glimpses the exquisite and the awful, where the lily blossoms and the -dragon tramples it under foot. - -That baby feeding the ducks, could anything be more laughable or -lovable? But do not open the drawers of the cabinet he is standing on: -they are filled with ivory obscenities carved with just as loving care. - -No, the kakemonos and bronzes that adorn the drawing-rooms of Bayswater -and Bedford Park do not disclose the whole of Japanese art. If you don’t -believe me, then go to Japan and become a friend of Danjuro the -curio-dealer, who lives in Jinrikisha Street, in the quaint city of -Nagasaki. - -“There’s no use talking,” said Leslie, the second day after his arrival -at Nagasaki. “I don’t want to live in the European quarter. I want that -white house up on the hill there you said was empty, and I want to buy -it.” - -“Weel,” said Mac—they were standing in Danjuro’s shop consulting—“I’m -thinking you want more than it’s likely y’ll get. You cannot buy the -house—rent it, maybe. Stay till I ask Dan.” - -Dan and he had a consultation, the upshot of which was that the -curio-dealer, after a cynical declaration to the effect that anything -could be obtained for money, offered his services as an intermediary. - -A friend of his, a brother dealer, a Mr. Initogo, or some such name, -owned the house up there on the heights; he would probably let it. It -was named the House of the Clouds, warranted rainproof and free from -ghosts. - -Mr. Initogo was fetched from across the way—a gentleman in horn -spectacles, who looked as wise as Confucius but was a little bit deaf. -After some five minutes’ polite bawling on the part of Mac and Danjuro, -Mr. Initogo came to understand the matter, and at once declared with a -thousand protestations of regret that the thing was impossible. - -Why? - -Well, he could not allege any specific reason. The House of the Clouds -was empty, but he had not considered the matter of letting it. The -proposition came as an honorable shock to him. - -Then Mac and Danjuro tackled Mr. Initogo, tea was brought forth, and -after half an hour’s wavering Mr. Initogo began to give in. - -He sent for his son, and piloted by the son, the two Scotchmen went off -to inspect the House of the Clouds. - -They passed up a by-street and then up a steep path, till they came to a -gate shadowed by lilac trees. The gate led to a tiny demesne, a long, -white, two-storied house, before which lay a grass plot, at the far end -of the house some cherry trees, and a space that might be used as a -garden. - -From the veranda of the House of the Clouds one could look down on -Nagasaki and the harbor that pierces the land like a crooked sword. The -hum of Jinrikisha Street came up, mixed with the eternal song of the -cicalas. - -Across the harbor, where the junks and sampans contrasted strangely with -the foreign shipping, hills rose up, green near the water, brown further -off; over the hills a few white fleecy clouds passed on the light wind. -It was the sky of an English summer. - -“I like this,” said Leslie, turning from the view. “Now let’s look at -the house.” - -It was furnished with primrose-colored matting, nothing else, and it was -about as substantial as a bandbox. There were two stories connected by a -flight of steps without a balustrade, and you could make as many rooms -as you liked with sliding panels. - -“I’ll take it,” said Leslie, and they returned to the shop of Danjuro. -Mr. Initogo was fetched, and after more wriggling and haggling and -tea-drinking and the smoking of tiny pipes, he consented to let the -place—the authorities willing. - -Mac undertook to make everything right in that respect, though it would -cost him a good deal of trouble, as the government have a holy horror of -foreigners spreading beyond the allotted quarters; and then a Chinese -comprador was obtained, and received orders from Leslie to furnish the -place with the necessary futons (he determined to live in the native -way), pots, tins, kettles, Mousmés, and a decent cook; also screens and -mosquito-nets, plum trees in pots, and everything else that might be -necessary for comfort and adornment. - -Three days later the comprador appeared at the Nagasaki hotel, where -Leslie was staying, and declared that everything was in order—even to -the last tea-cup. He had hired servants, made a most advantageous -bargain: he had hired a whole family. - -“But, bless my soul! I don’t want a family,” said Leslie. “I only want a -cook and a couple of girls.” - -Just so. This family consisted of a cook—her name was Fir-cone—and -three daughters. They would all come together or not at all; he had got -them at a bargain. The names of the daughters were: Moon, Plum-blossom, -and Snow. Sixteen shillings a month a-piece was the wages they were -promised. There was also a cat belonging to this family— - -“Oh, well, I’ll take them,” said Leslie, “and if they don’t suit I can -get others.” - -That afternoon, preceded by the comprador and followed by two coolies -carrying his luggage he went up to take formal possession, and was -received by his new servants all on their knees—the three Mousmés in -front and mother Fir-cone in the background. - -Next day he started on the long journey to Nikko to fetch Campanula. -When he returned with his charge the first person to meet him on the -quay was Mac. Mac in a stove pipe hat he had bought cheap and which did -not fit him but of which he seemed proud. Campanula instantly recognized -Mac with a smile and an attempt to kow-tow before him, which Leslie -frustrated, on account of the dirty state of the quay. It was a pretty -little incident, and went to the old fellow’s heart. - - - - - CHAPTER X - - OF MOUSMÉS AND OTHER THINGS - - -Plum-blossom was a Mousmé with a broad face, ever lit by a half smile. -Moon was a girl with a serious expression, but gorgeous of dress as any -girl of Kioto. Snow looked shrunk—not withered, you understand, fresh -as a daisy, in fact; but something had happened in her development: she -was preternaturally small, and looked like a Mousmé seen through a -diminishing glass. - -The three Mousmés and old mother Fir-cone took almost entire possession -of Campanula San when she arrived, and Campanula San seemed quite -content. - -Mixed with her charming childishness there was a philosophical calm that -would have done honour to a sage of the Stoic school. Riding on -Leslie’s shoulder through Nikko, under examination at the Tea House of -the Tortoise, playing with Plum-blossom in the veranda of the House of -the Clouds, she was just the same. Life was a pageant at which she was -an humble spectator, whose duty was to be amiable and submissive, and -accept things just as they came. - -She did not say this, but she acted it, or rather expressed it in her -actions and ways. - -Down on the Bund an office had been rented by M’Gourley. He slept there -and lived there, ascending occasionally at night to the House of the -Clouds to smoke a pipe with his partner and talk business, and give -advice on things Japanese, advice often needful enough to the -uninitiated Leslie. - -House-keeping in Japan is full of surprises. One day, for instance, -Leslie met a figure coming from the back part of the premises—a figure -like a rag-doll that had spent its life in a coal-scuttle. Interrogated, -the figure turned out to be the mother of Moon, and by profession—well, -her profession was helping to coal the Canadian Pacific boats. - -“But,” said Leslie, “it is impossible, for Moon already has a mother -whose name is Fir-cone.” - -He was just going to send for the police when the whole truth came out -on the veranda, in the form of Moon herself. - -She explained in indifferent English, kneeling as she spoke with the -backs of her little hands held upwards to her face, that the comprador -had lied; that there was no particular connection between her and her -fellow-servants; that the comprador had made a bunch of them just as he -might make a bunch of weeds, picking one up here and the other there, -and pretending they were all the one family. Why had he done this thing? -Who could say? For some dark reason of his own. She said also that her -mother was not always as dirty as that, but was going home now to wash. -Would Leslie San like to see her washed so that Moon’s words might be -proved to him true? Leslie San would not. - -M’Gourley was had up, and managed to arrange matters without the -disruption of the household, which seemed imminent. - -M’Gourley mixed a good deal in the affairs of the House of the Clouds. -Six months had not passed before the member of the Wee Kirk declared -that Campanula should be sent to the missionary day school near the -Bund, and brought up a Christian. - -Leslie at first demurred. The state of Campanula’s mind, as revealed by -her in conversations mostly translated by Mac, but often conducted -limpingly by Leslie himself (he was beginning to pick up the native), -did not argue a good foundation for a structure like the Christian -religion. - -Her mind, as far as he could get at it, was the mind of a sensitive and -cultured lady who was slightly mad—mad on the subject of demons and -strange beasts. - -Tortoises who talked, storks whose language was the acme of politeness, -and toads of polished speech, seemed as real to her as ordinary folk. - -Whether the tin-smith, her supposed father, had filled her head with -these things, no one can say, but the fact remained that she was a -perfect Uncle Remus as far as animal-tale construction was concerned, -and had a Mrs. Radcliffe touch in the weird, so that it was a not -uncommon thing for her to be marched off to bed, the triumvirate of -Mousmés—Moon, Plum-blossom, and Snow—acting as a body-guard to protect -her from her own extraordinary fancies. - -Then the self-abasement, the absolute self-abasement with which she -would kow-tow with both tiny hands backs upward before your august self, -and next minute she would be spinning a top on the veranda, or playing -just like an ordinary child with Kiku San, a dot about her own size, and -only daughter of Mr. Initogo, the landlord. - -She had a whole host of baldheaded Pagan friends, male and female, and -Leslie, taking a siesta of an afternoon, would hear their clogs rattling -on the veranda, or their naked feet pattering in the kitchen, and half -fancy himself the proprietor of a kindergarten. - -Quaint kites were often to be seen flying above the House of the Clouds, -kites shaped like hawks and butterflies, and M’Gourley down in the -street below would sometimes glance up and see these evidences of -Campanula’s existence, and nod his head and say, “A’weel!” and hurry on -to Danjuro’s to meet him about some perhaps questionable transaction, -revolving in his mind the while the question of Campanula’s conversion -to Christianity. - -He was a strange mixture. He would spend a whole morning in trade. That -is to say, he would get to the office on the Bund early, do his -correspondence and what not with regard to the export of cheap curios, -go to the hotel and have a cocktail, and fish round for victims; find -some well-to-do stranger and lead him into Danjuro’s shop, deliver him -up as a dripping roast into Danjuro’s hands, receive his commission, and -go off and have tiffin. Then as likely as not he would go up to the -House of the Clouds and fetch Campanula out for a walk, and buy her -toys, or sweets, or flowers. - -And once a week or so he would tackle Leslie about the Christianity -business, till Leslie at last gave in. - -Campanula went to the missionary day school, the prettiest school child -in the world under her scarlet umbrella pictured with flying storks. - -Leslie went away sometimes for weeks, leaving her in charge of the -Mousmés and leaving Mac with instructions to keep an eye on her welfare. - -For the first eight months or so of this new life he was amused and -interested, the beauty of the country, the quaintness of the people, the -new conditions of life, kept him from thinking much about the past or -troubling about the future. - -Then came reaction. A craving came on him to see England once again, a -veritable home-sickness that was not to be denied. - -He made a journey to London. He only spent a fortnight there; every one -he had known in the past was either gone or dead. He belonged to no -club. It was a miserable fortnight, and every day of it Japan called him -back. - -When he returned, he told himself that he had done with the West for -ever. Just as men sometimes tell themselves they have done for ever with -sin, folly, or love. - - - - - PART TWO - - THE MASSACRE OF THE BLUE-BELLS - - - - - CHAPTER XI - - THE DREAM - - -The “Jap Rubbish trade” was prospering mildly. - -During the first two years it seemed likely to languish and die, but in -the third year it woke up, got on its legs, and, to use M’Gourley’s -phrase, “began to pick a bit.” In the fourth year it was bringing Leslie -in some two hundred a year, a fair amount considering the capital -originally invested in it. - -Not that he wanted the money, he kept his interest in the thing just for -something to do—a toy business to play with when he was otherwise -disengaged. - -As for Mac, he was getting rich, not out of the Rubbish trade, but in a -manner we will hint at later on. - -The House of the Clouds remained unaltered, save for a tiny landscape -garden not much bigger than a dining-table which Leslie had laid out for -Campanula. It lay beyond the garden walk in front of the veranda, and it -had mountains and rivers and savannas of moss, and old oak trees, -fierce-looking, but not much bigger than your thumb, and twisted fir -trees that reflected themselves gloomily in lakes the size of -hand-mirrors, and a Shinto temple about the size of a Buszard’s Dundee -cake; there were also bridges across the rivers. - -The thing had been laid out as a New Year’s gift for Campanula, and it -had cost Leslie about the price of a Steinway Grand. - -Azalea bushes grew right up to it, azaleas bordered the house, and there -was a wilderness of azaleas in the open space near the cherry trees. - -Crimson azaleas, imported all the way from the azalea valley at Nikko in -the very first year of Leslie’s residence in Nagasaki. It was a pretty -thought, and it had cost a good penny, and caused much grumbling from -Mac, and great admiration in Mr. Initogo, who had turned out the most -delightful of landlords, a good hand at whist, and most adaptable about -repairs. He was a modern Japanese agnostic when he was well, was Mr. -Initogo, and a Shinto when he was ill or in trouble; but he was an -all-round good landlord at all times. - -One bright afternoon Leslie was seated beneath the cherry trees in a -deck chair, his hat tilted back, and the pipe he had just been smoking -lying on the ground at his feet. He was asleep. Lately he had been -suffering from a touch of fever and chills caught on a duck-shooting -expedition down the coast; he had been taking opium for it, and now as -he sat beneath the cherry trees the opium was troubling his dreams. - -Just before dropping off, his eye had fallen on a single azalea blossom -that had burst into flame, as if spring had just touched off with her -torch the fire of crimson flowers that soon would blaze round the house. - -Then he fell asleep, and Opium plucked the crimson blossom, and followed -him with it into the land of dreams. - -He was in a Hongwanji temple, and there were people there, Europeans -seemingly, dressed in European clothes; but though in a specious -disguise, they were soon perceived to be not the people of this earth. -They had strange and distorted faces, and forms that surely never were -made in God’s image. One man, who suddenly hid himself behind a screen -of lacquer, Leslie could have sworn was made of stone. - -Then in great tribulation of spirit he was escaping from the company of -these people, passing down a corridor where soft matting took the foot; -but something was following him with a hissing sound, a sound such as -Danjuro made by way of welcome when you entered his shop. Of a sudden -the opium spirit touched the corridor wall with the flower he had been -patiently carrying, the Hongwanji temple vanished, and Leslie found -himself on the Nikko road. - -The valley of azaleas lay before him and the mournful cypress trees, the -country where the moving clouds cast their shadows, and the far blue -hills beyond. - -There was something moving amidst the azaleas. He knew it was a child, -but, by some curious and subtle freak of the opium fiend, the child was -hidden from him, all but vague glimpses; were it to make itself half -visible for a second a phantom azalea bush would come before it, but he -could see a tiny white hand busy plucking the crimson blossoms. - -Then from somewhere far away through the dream came the mournful toot, -toot, of a blind man’s reed-pipe. At first it seemed beyond the bend of -the road, and then it seemed amidst the azaleas, and then in the wood of -cypress trees. It grew more insistent and piercing, and changed subtly -into the sound he had once heard on the Nikko road when, sitting with -M’Gourley, he had listened to the tune of the blind juggler with the -pipe. - -As he listened, shuddering, he saw something which he at once knew to be -the reason of the music and the soul of the opium drama that was -unfolding before him. - -A tiny black dot was visible in the sky away over the distant hills. It -expanded and grew, dilated as if in response to the enchanted music. And -then he saw that it was a bird; a vast bird, larger than an eagle, a -ferocious and awful bird, a tragic apparition called up from the lands -of night. It poised above the valley, seeming to float and be upborne, -not on air, but on the music welling from the wood. - -He knew that if he could get to the half-seen child amidst the azaleas -he could save it from its fate. But he could make no movement nor utter -a sound, but stood paralyzed, watching the tiny white hand plucking the -crimson flowers and the Horror above preparing to strike. - -The music had now turned to a drone, a sound like the spinning sound of -a vast top. The thing in the air circled and span. He knew it was -preparing to fall like a thunderbolt. - -Then he awoke. - -He saw the garden, the cherry trees, the house. Opium land had vanished, -but the music remained, ringing in his ears; or was it real? - -He sprang to his feet and staggered along the path leading to the gate -looking wildly round him and listening. As he came, the sound died off; -died and turned to the sound of ordinary life, the hum from the city -below, the sound of the wind in the lilac trees, the tune of ceaseless -cicalas. - -“My God! what a dream!” he muttered as he grasped the gate and stared -down the lilac-shadowed path. Then he returned slowly to the seat -beneath the cherry trees, and lit a cigarette. - -Opium had played a trick upon him like this before. He had taken it -first months ago for fever; since then he had taken it occasionally for -the slightest ache. He reacted well to it sensually speaking, and found -it at once soothing and stimulating. Once before it had pushed him into -dreamland, but a dreamland without plot or plan, and unstained by a -horror such as he had just witnessed. - -He was seated half drowsing, when suddenly some influence made him look -up and he saw before him a lovely thing. It was Campanula. She had just -come out of the house by way of the veranda, and was approaching him. -Campanula, far removed from the child he had carried on his shoulder -into Nikko five years ago. - -The child had turned into a girl with that rapidity of transformation -characteristic of the women of Japan. She was taller than the ordinary -Mousmé of fourteen or fifteen; her face, even to Western eyes, was -beautiful with a sad and mysterious beauty of its own, and her every -movement was graceful as the movement of a bluebell when touched by the -wind. - -She had ceased to attend the mission school after nearly four years’ -instruction, during which she had grasped the art of speaking and almost -of thinking in English, and was now Leslie’s housekeeper, his adopted -daughter, and absolute ruler of the small domain known as the House of -the Clouds—as far, that is to say, as the household affairs went. - -She still retained her childishness of mind, and for all the Christian -endeavor of the missionaries, she still retained much of her pristine -belief in “things”—things with wings as well as hoofs, things that -lived in woods, birds that talked, and beasts that made answer. - -Though she could speak English, she never spoke in long sentences, or -told a connected tale in that language, always falling back on the -vernacular when her imagination was roused, or a long and connected -statement had to be made. - -She was approaching Leslie now with a porcelain bowl figured with storks -in her hand, and a smile upon her face. There was little mat on the -ground near his chair, and on this she sat down—kneeling fashion—with -the bowl before her. - -“See!” said she, producing some things like small gun wads from the -sleeve of her kimono, “I bought these to-day to give you pleasure. Oh, -so beautiful! Watch!” - -She cast one of the ugly discs upon the surface of the water. It lay -there for a moment unchanged, and then, as if by magic, began to expand -as it sucked up the fluid, and break up, growing bigger and broader till -at last on the surface of the water floated three pink-tinted -lotus-flowers, a most delicate and perfect resemblance of the real -things. - -She folded her hands and looked up at him with a happy smile. - -“Where did you get them?” asked Leslie. - -“M’Gourley San told me of them, he wished to buy them for me—but I -bought them for you.” - -She removed the lotus-flowers and cast another disc on the water. - -Leslie watched her. During the last few months Campanula’s attitude to -him had changed. From a happy, humble, and somewhat heedless thing—a -creature that regarded him with affection—an affection of about the -same strength as she exhibited for M’Gourley, Sweetbriar San, the cat, -and her children schoolmates; she had become a follower of his alone, -always striving to please him, forestalling his wants, always happy in -his presence, and drooping—unknown to him—when he was away. - -The second wad under the influence of the water broke up and began to -form the branch of a cherry tree covered with blossom. - -“Arashiyama,” murmured she, folding her small hands and speaking -dreamily, as if communing with herself. Then she sat watching the branch -of the cherry tree expanding over the surface of the water. - -From the house came a somewhat discordant voice singing a song about a -bee and a lilac bough. - -It was Pine-breeze singing at her work. Moon, Plum-blossom, and Snow, -with their fictitious mother Fir-cone, had vanished from the House of -the Clouds two years and more, giving place to Pine-breeze, a miracle of -daintiness and prettiness, and two other Mousmés, one “rather old,” the -cook, Lotus-bud by name, and the other named Cherry-blossom, as pretty -as Pine-breeze. - -“Listen!” said Campanula, suddenly looking up from the bowl and its -contents. “There is some one at the gate.” - -Leslie half turned. - -A man and woman had passed through the gateway shadowed by lilac, a -short, stout man dressed in tweed and a tall woman in blue serge. - -Leslie could see them only indistinctly from where he sat, and they, not -looking in his direction, failed to see him at all. - -They were coming up to the veranda when the woman turned to the little -picture garden, laughed, and pointed it out to her companion. Then she -left the path, stepped gingerly right into the middle of the landscape -garden country, and tried to pluck up an oak tree, a gnarled and -ancient-looking oak tree eight inches high. - -“Who?” asked Campanula, turning from the sight of this outrage with -uplifted forefinger. - -“They are Foreign Devils,” said Leslie using the Chinese idiom. He was -very pale, leaning forward in chair. “Look, Campanula! I verily believe -she is trying to tear up your mountains to see how they grow. That’s -what they call in England ‘cheek,’ Campanula.” - - - - - CHAPTER XII - - THE FOREIGN DEVILS - - -The female Foreign Devil having failed to uproot the oak, which clung to -its native soil with a tenacity highly Japanese, returned to the garden -path. And then came the voice of Pine-breeze kow-towing to the -strangers, bidding them welcome, and imploring them to make the -honorable entrance. - -They passed from view into the house, and Leslie rose from his chair. - -“Wait here awhile, Campanula,” he said, “and then follow me in. I think -I know them, but I will go and see.” - -“Yes,” said Campanula. - -He walked to the house and kicked his garden shoes off in the veranda, -noting the fact that the Foreign Devils had committed the unspeakable -outrage of entering with their shoes on. - -“_Richard!_” cried the tall woman, advancing to him with outstretched -hand as he entered the room where they were. “Why, you’ve grown!” She -spoke as though they had parted yesterday, but her voice had an -hysterical quaver, then she presented her cheek to him for a cousinly -kiss. - -“This is Richard Leslie,” said the woman, turning to the little stout -man in tweed. “We grew up together; that’s why I’m so tall, I suppose. -Dick—my husband George. Gracious, Dick, where are your chairs and -things? Have you nothing to sit down on?” - -“Only the floor,” said Leslie, fetching some square cushions and placing -them on the matting. “See, this is how it’s done,” and he sat down on -one of the cushions, whilst his companions followed suit. - -Jane du Telle, once Jane Deering, was, despite her vivacity and -carelessness of manner, evidently in a state of high nervous tension. - -Leslie, notwithstanding the years that had passed since their last -meeting, saw in her mentally little change. She was the same Jane who -had once hacked his shins, when they were boy and girl together, up in -Scotland, and then flung herself on his neck in a burst of repentance -and tears. Emotional, good-hearted, selfish—giving herself away one -moment, but always saved the next by a latent discretion that was to her -flighty nature as a gyroscope. The same Jane with whom he had fished for -salmon and played at tennis in the past, seated before him now on a -floor in Japan, chattering of everything and nothing just in the old -familiar way. - -“And that’s the fellow she has married!” thought he, as he glanced -across at George du Telle, a podgy, red-headed little man, a -globe-trotting Briton of the most blatant description. - -“How did you know I was here?” asked he, after Jane had somewhat talked -her hysterical feelings off. - -“Mr. Channing told us last night at the hotel. He’s a friend of yours. -He told us he knew an Englishman named Richard Leslie living in the -native fashion, and I asked him if he was good-looking and tall and -dark, and he said, ‘Yes.’ He said you lived at the House of the -Clouds—sounds like an address in a dream, doesn’t it?—so we took -rikshas and came.” - -She put her hand to her back, where the “floor stitch” had seized her. -The floor may be a convenient enough resting-place for a Mousmé who -sinks down upon it quite naturally in the likeness of a compressed and -joyously colored Z, but for an English woman of five feet eight or more, -dressed in a tailor-made gown, and laced in a _corset parfait_ it is at -first rather difficult. - -“I would have got chairs,” said Leslie, “if I had known you were coming; -but of all the people of the world, you were the last I expected to see. -Where did you come from? I mean, how did you strike Nagasaki?” - -“We came from Colombo.” - -“Beastly hole,” put in her husband, who was stroking Sweetbriar San, the -cat of the establishment, who had just come in to inspect the strangers. -“We stayed at the Beach Hotel two nights, and d’you know what they -charged us? Just think.” - -“Don’t think,” said Jane, who had wriggled into a more comfortable -attitude. “Give me that cat, George; and I wish you would try to repress -your hotel bills. Dick, I was so sorry to hear the news about your -father.” - -“What news?” - -“About his death.” - -“Well, you were sorrier than I was.” - -“Oh, Dick! but don’t let us talk about it, it’s all so sad. And have you -been living here in Japan ever since?” - -“Ever since.” - -“Just like this on the floor?” - -“Just like this on the floor.” - -“You must find it rather flat, I should think,” said the carroty-headed -George. - -“Richard,” said Jane suddenly, ignoring her husband, “you’re not married -to a Japanese—or anything—are you?” - -“No.” - -“Do you live here alone?” - -“Well, I have three servant girls, and a daughter, if you call that -‘alone.’” - -“A daughter!” said Jane. - -“Yes; and she’s Japanese, too.” - -“Japanese!” - -“Yes; I adopted her.” - -George du Telle snorted, and fortunately at that moment a panel slid -back, and Pine-breeze appeared with the tea, followed by Lotus-bud with -an hibachi and Cherry-blossom with a heap of tiny plates. - -“Are these your—I mean is one of these your—” - -“Daughter? No. Turn round, and you will see her,” - -Jane was seated with her back to the drawn-back panel that made a -doorway on to the veranda. She turned, and there in the sunlit space -stood Campanula in her blue kimono, broad scarlet obi, and with a -scarlet flower in her hair. Behind her, as a background, lay the picture -garden, antique hills, spun-glass torrents, and tiny, twisted fir trees, -that looked, oh, so old, and tired of the world, and tormented by the -wind. - -Campanula went right down on her knees upon the matting, and murmured -the usual Japanese welcome. - -Now this was a practice that Leslie disliked. He had tried to break her -of it, and in the attempt he had come across a strange fact. - -Campanula in her heart of hearts was a real child of Old Japan. She -might have been a sister to the seven-and-forty Ronins in the time -before Osaka was defiled by factory chimneys, and the monastery of -Kotoku-in by the presence of Cook’s tourists. - -She tried honestly to be modern, as it was the wish of Leslie, but in -times of emotion, back her intellect would go to Old Japan, and she -would act as her ancestors had acted in who knows what lotus-strewn and -blossom-scented ages. - -“What does she say?” asked Jane, as George du Telle rose to his feet. -“Tell me, and ask her to excuse me for not getting up, for when I get -up, I’ll have to be _pulled_ up.” - -“She is bidding you welcome and at the same time apologizing for the -fact of her own miserable existence.” - -“I accept the apology,” said Jane, as Campanula, her devotions over, -sank down before the tea-service, and prepared to act as hostess. -“Freely and frankly, Dick, I must congratulate you on your taste—she is -lovely.” - -Campanula looked up with a faint, apologetic smile. - -“I speak English,” she said. - - - - - CHAPTER XIII - - THE MONASTERY GARDEN - - -Jane gazed over Nagasaki, the blue water, the green hills, to the blue -beyond, and sighed. They were standing near the gate; tea was over, and -they were waiting for Campanula, who had gone into the house to make -some alteration in her dress before accompanying them “down town.” - -“Richard,” she said, “take us somewhere where we can talk, you and I. I -have such a heap of things to ask you and talk about. Twelve years—can -it be twelve years since we last saw each other? Did you get my last -letter?” - -George du Telle was standing near smoking a cigar, and staring at the -beautiful view with about the same amount of interest he would have felt -had it been a soap advertisement, but she did not lower her voice. She -was perfectly frank with the world and her husband. - -This frankness carried her far, and enabled her sometimes to skate on -ice that would have given under many a woman of half her weight, for it -was a genuine frankness, not a thing put on. - -She was a person whom women called nice-looking on first acquaintance, -and men mentally registered as plain. Tall, pale, with an excellent -figure, and gray eyes. A man met her and spoke to her, and found her -plain but very jolly, increased the acquaintanceship and found her -plainness vanishing, and then, all of a sudden, his foolish soul was -caught in a trap. - -It was the magic of her lips, perhaps. They formed the true Cupid’s bow, -full, and seemingly cut by a chisel wielded by a master hand, sensitive -and sensuous. Gazing at them one came to understand how in the ancient -world tall Troy fell before a kiss. - -“Which letter?” asked Leslie, plucking a lilac spray and strewing the -ground with the tiny petals. - -“The one I wrote six years ago telling you I was married. I sent it care -of your father.” - -“No,” said Leslie gloomily. “I have heard from no one for eight years -and more. I cut the world, you know—or it cut me rather; but I’ll tell -you some other time, here’s Campanula.” - -Then they started, Leslie and his companion leading the way. - -“Where are you going to take us?” asked Jane, when they had reached the -street. - -“Through the city to a place I know on a hill,” replied Leslie. - -He had called four rikshas from the stand, and he gave some directions -to the riksha men, and they started. - -You cannot imagine the size of Nagasaki till you drive through it in a -swift-running riksha, nor the quaintness, nor the terror that causes -your heart to fly upwards as your riksha man shaves a baby, not with a -razor, but with the off wheel. - -Boy babies fighting tops, girls bouncing colored balls, flights of -children whose clogs clatter like the dominoes in an Italian restaurant -as they pursue each other in some mysterious game—everywhere children, -a shifting, colored maze in which the eye gets tangled and lost. Babies, -temples, tea-houses, streets upon streets of houses that look as if you -could flatten them out with the blows of a shovel, bursts of -cherry-blossoms, tripping Mousmés, stone monsters, awful, yet pathetic -with the gray of lichen and the green of moss, a courtyard with a -twisted fir tree leaning across it, laughter, and the tune of a -_chamécen_ running through it all, that is the impression that a riksha -ride through Nagasaki in spring would leave on the mind, were not the -picture blurred by the European element. - -Street after street they passed through, and still the mysterious city -kept building up streets before them. Leslie had thought of taking his -companions to the O Suwa, but he had changed his mind and given other -directions to the riksha men. - -They passed up a steep incline, dark with fir trees, and drew up at a -great gateway consisting of two joists of wood supporting a vast beam, -the whole making a figure something in the fashion of the Greek II. - -Beyond the gateway lay an inclined path, bordered by cryptomeria trees, -leading to the façade of a temple. - -“It’s a place I sometimes come to,” said Leslie, as he helped Jane to -descend. “It’s quiet, and worth seeing in its way.” - -Campanula and George du Telle led the way this time, Leslie and his -companion leisurely following. - -“Come down this path,” said Jane, turning to a side alley. “Oh, how -pretty! and how mournful too, with those rows of dark trees. Dick, this -is not a cemetery you have brought us to?” - -“No; it’s a Shinto monastery. Few people know it, and it’s out of the -run of the general sight-seeing bounders.” - -“Things with kodaks?” - -“And without—but see here, Jane.” - -“Yes?” - -“What’s your husband?” - -“George?” - -“Yes, I suppose his name is George. What is he?” - -“He’s in the wool trade—he’s the richest man in the wool trade, they -say. He thinks and talks of nothing else but wool. He got off the -subject to-day with you for awhile; wasn’t he brilliant? But we get on -all right together; he has his set, and I have mine.” - -“What is his set?” - -“The very best—I mean the very worst; the poor old Smart Set that every -one is always beating as if it were a donkey—which it is,” said Jane, -taking her seat on the plinth supporting the prancing figure of Ama-ino, -fronted across the walk by the equally fantastic figure of Koma-ino, a -veritable Lion and Unicorn. “Sit down beside me, Dick, and tell me—” - -“Yes?” - -“What have you been doing all these years?” - -“I—I’ve been keeping alive—” - -“Dick,” suddenly broke out Jane, as if she had not been listening, “I -have often thought you must have thought me a heartless wretch; but I’m -not.” - -“There is no use in going over the past,” he said. “What is done is -done, and never can be undone. I can only say that I have never in the -past had a friend to stick to me, or a woman to love me, or a father to -care for me.” - -“May it not have been your own fault, Dick? Think for a moment. I don’t -want to reproach you, but you know how wild you were—you know that was -one of the reasons we couldn’t get married. Oh, it wasn’t ‘my -heartlessness,’ as you told me in your last letter but one. I have heart -enough—at least I hope so,” said Jane, looking at Koma-ino as if for -confirmation, “and I wouldn’t have done what I did if you’d been -different. Never mind, Dick, cheer up!—buck up! as they used to say in -the poor old Smart Set, till the respectable folk took the expression -away from them. What’ve you been doing all these long years, Dick?” - -“Oh, I’ve been in Australia.” - -“What were you doing there?” - -“Curse Australia!” suddenly broke out Leslie, digging his heel in the -ground. “Don’t speak to me about it; let’s talk of something else.” - -“Well, what are you doing here? I mean, what have you been doing all -these years—playing the guitar, or what?” - -“I’m a shopman.” - -“I beg your pardon?” - -“I and a man named M’Gourley are in business.” - -“Two Scotchmen?” sneered Jane. - -“Two Scotchmen.” - -“And what are you selling—paper umbrellas?” - -“Yes; and hats and kakemonos, and every other sort of a mono that the -European trade will swallow. We export them.” - -“Then you’re a merchant, _not_ a shopman,” said Jane in a half-angry, -half-relieved voice. “I _wish_ you would not give me these sort of -horrible shocks. I thought at first you were serving in some place -behind the counter—” - -“Oh, I don’t want to make money in business much; I do it more for -interest and to have an object in life. I’m well off; my father’s money -all came to me—he died well off.” - -“And wasn’t it queer?” said Jane. “George is awfully rich, you know; -well, directly I was married, old Aunt Keziah died, and every penny of -her money came to me. Fifty thousand. No, forty-eight thousand, four -hundred and eighty-two pounds, ten and sixpence. It seemed so sweet, the -little sixpence following at the end. I sent for it, and had a hole -drilled through it, and I always wear it on this bangle—look!” - -He looked; there were many things hanging on the bangle. He touched a -tiny gold pig swinging by a ring. - -“Good heavens!” - -“_You_ gave me that,” said Jane, “and I’ve never parted with it.” - -“What’s this?” said he, fingering a cabalistic-looking blue stone. - -“That’s an inkh, I think; I’m not sure of the name. It’s lucky, or -supposed to be.” - -“Who gave it to you?” - -“A boy at Cairo last winter.” - -“How old was he?” - -“Oh, about twenty.” - -“And this?” said Leslie, picking out another charm in the form of a -heart. - -“Look here,” said Jane, pulling her wrist away, “I don’t want to waste -time like this, I want you to tell me more about yourself; I want you to -tell me about that child Campanula. _Why_ did you adopt her?” - -“I found her on the road going to Nikko.” - -“Where’s that?” - -“It’s away up in Shimotsuke, beyond Tokyo. I and M’Gourley were on the -tramp. We were sitting by the roadside resting, when a blind man came -along. He was half mad, and talked wild. Said he was a juggler, and -offered to fetch devils out of a wood near by, if we gave him gold.” - -“Why didn’t you try him?” said Jane in an interested voice. - -“I did try him,” said Leslie; “gave him some money. He made a circle in -the dust, with signs round the rim of it, told us not to touch it or -come near it, got into the middle of it, and fetched out a reed-pipe. -Then he began to play a tune that would make you shiver to hear, and -things croaked in the wood.” - -“Go on,” said Jane shivering pleasantly. - -“I took my walking-stick and made a mark in the dust just near his foot. -I touched his heel by accident, and—whew!” - -“Yes?” - -“He went off like a rocket; bounded out of the circle, rushed this way -and that, knocking against trees and striking right and left with his -stick, as if dogs were about him. He got round the bend of the road and -vanished. We were pretty much astonished, but that wasn’t the end of it. -In front of us was a valley of the most beautiful crimson azaleas.” - -“Wait a moment, Dick; you’re a very bad story-teller. You should always -stage your characters: you should have described the azaleas first and -the scenery. Well, go on.” - -“Bother the azaleas!” said Dick. They were fast getting into the old -boy-and-girl way of talking to each other, a somewhat dangerous language -at thirty. “It doesn’t matter whether they come in first or last. Where -was I? Oh yes. Mac suddenly said: ‘Look there!’ I looked, and there sure -enough was a child amidst the azaleas. She hadn’t been there a few -seconds before, and Mac would have it that she had been ‘fetched’; it -was a pretty wild country and no houses around, and there she was, just -as if she had stepped out of a house, plucking away at the azalea -blossoms for all she was worth, a tiny dot in a blue kimono and scarlet -obi. I stole up behind her.” - -“I’d have caught her up and kissed her.” - -“Just what I did, in fact; and it may have been fancy, but she seemed -slipping through my fingers like—grease till I kissed her, and she -became solid.” - -“There’s one thing, Dick, you’ll never make a poet. Well, go on; it’s -awfully interesting.” - -“We carried her off to Nikko. No parents could be found to own her, so I -adopted her.” - -“What became of the juggler?” - -“That was a funny thing. As we turned the bend of the road we saw him -away up in a gorge of the hills. He was still running for all he was -worth, beating about him with his stick as if hitting off devils, and -dashing himself against trees in a quite regardless manner.” - -“How awful!” - -“Well, frankly, it was, and it had a sequel, for his dead body was found -miles away some days after, and the Japanese police said the trees had -beaten him to death, which they practically had.” - -“But, Dick, what was the meaning of it?” - -“Who knows! When I touched him on the heel perhaps he may have thought -it was a devil seizing him, and his imagination did the rest. Mac -thinks, or, at least, he once thought—” - -“Yes?” - -“That there was something developing in the wood, something bad; that -Campanula’s ghost was wandering in the wood; that when I made the mark I -did inside the circle, the bad thing was flung out of the developing -medium and Campanula’s ghost sucked into it, and so she became -materialized.” - -“And the bad thing went for the juggler man?” - -“It and perhaps others.” - -“I never heard anything half so horrible, if it’s true.” - -“It’s true enough. I was forgetting it almost, but I had a horrid dream -to-day that brought it all back. I was sitting in the garden smoking and -I dropped off to sleep; and I heard the sound of that beast’s pipe, and -I saw the place on the Nikko road, and there was a child amongst the -flowers. Then a frightful bird came along and was going to attack the -child, and I awoke—it was just before you came.” - -“Dick, what was the mark you made on the road?” - -“The sign of the cross,” said Leslie. - -Jane was silent for a moment then— - - - - - CHAPTER XIV - - NAGASAKI BY NIGHT - - -“I wish you wouldn’t tell me stories like that,” she suddenly broke out. -“I’ll be dreaming about it all to-night.” She shuddered, and gazed at -Koma-ino. “Japan seems a horribly creepy sort of place; I think I’ll -make George come away to-morrow.” - -“One side of it,” said Leslie, “is simply crawling; you have no idea, -and I who have lived here five years have only a glimmering of the mind -of the people. Do you know what I think?” - -“Yes?” - -“I think that in the sleeves of their kimonos—I mean their frock coats, -for they’ve put off their kimonos for a while for business -purposes—they are simply laughing at us.” - -“At whom?” - -“At the English—at Europe.” - -“Like their impudence!” - -“Perhaps it’s impudence, perhaps not, anyhow—I distrust them—” - -“Dick,” said his companion, “look! It’s getting dusk: let’s go and look -for George and your ‘adoptive daughter.’ Mercy! What’s that!” - -A deep hum filled the air; it seemed to come at first from the statue of -Koma-ino—a soul-disturbing hum that deepened and swelled and then -leapt, leapt into a deafening roar that rushed over Nagasaki, to die on -the distant sea. - -Jane clung to her companion like a child, hugged him as a child might -hug a nurse; her straw hat was pushed sideways, and he found his face -buried in the masses of her perfumed hair. His arm had slipped round her -waist, her arm was over his shoulder, and her fingers pressing his neck; -for a moment he felt as if he were absorbing her being—drinking her. - -Then the sound died away. - -“_What_ was it?” gasped she, pushing away from him and gazing at him -with a white, drawn face. “Why, you seem half dazed; you were more -frightened than I. Dick, what was it?” - -“I’m all right,” said Leslie, in the voice of a man waking from the -effect of an opiate. “I wasn’t frightened. It was only the big gong of -the monastery; I’ve heard it lots of times.” - -“Then why couldn’t you have told me?” cried Jane, flying from fright to -fury. “Think what it must have looked like, you hugging me like that.” -She sprang to her feet. “You bring me here and tell me ghost stories, -and frighten me to death with gongs and things, and then—I believe -you’re half a Japanese already, you’ve grown so horrid.” - -“There wasn’t any one to see,” said Leslie, rising to his feet. “And -talking about hugging—” - -“I don’t want to talk about hugging—talk about hugging! Do you fancy -yourself on Hampstead Heath? Come, let us find George. I want something -common-place after all this.” - -They found George and Campanula—the most strangely matched pair in the -world—waiting for them at the gates. - -“You’ll come and dine with us at the hotel, won’t you?” asked Jane as -they got into the rikshas. - -“I’ll come right enough,” said Leslie. “Wait, please.” - -He went to Campanula’s riksha and asked her, but she prayed to be -honorably excused—she had a headache. - -She passed her hand across her forehead as if in confirmation of her -words. Leslie tucked the riksha blanket round her knees, and explained -to the Du Telles, and they started. - -The quaint city they had come through had changed to a quainter city -still. Night had blotted out the traces of Europe on Nagasaki—at least, -in the purely native streets. All sorts of strange little trades that -sleep in the daytime had awakened with the dusk. Things queer in the -daytime were now mysterious, and things common, quaint. The fish shop, -with its huge paper lantern, besides the fish and the sea-weed on its -slabs, disposed of dreams which it flung away gratis to the passing -traveler in the running riksha, and the booth of the sandal merchant, -with the tiny potted rose tree in front of the wares, became at once an -apology and atonement for all the commonplace villainy condensed in the -word “shop.” - -Mousmés passed, now half Mousmés, half glowworms, each bearing a -colored lantern on the end of a little stick; and then the shadows -half lit by lamp-light, where a cherry tree was attempting to peep -into the street: the light of lamps glimmering through paper shutters, -the light of lanterns swinging in the wind—red, blue, white, and -yellow, some pictured with chrysanthemums; the stork that stands so -boldly forth in Japanese pictures but is nearly gone from Japan, -cherry-blossoms, and fish that seem swimming vigorously in a bowl of -water lambent and green; and then the sounds, ten _chamécens_ for one -in the day. The riksha whisks by a booth, whence comes the squalling of -cats—seemingly. It is the gaku, Japanese poetry set to music and flung -into the lamp-lit street to make things stranger, and heighten, if -possible, the charm. At the corner of the by-street leading to the -House of the Clouds they met Pine-breeze simply laden with all sorts of -weird and wonderful paper boxes, and lighting herself on her way with a -lantern pictured with a cuttle-fish and carried on the end of a short -bamboo rod. She had been marketing. It was a fortunate meeting, for she -could escort Campanula home. - - - - - CHAPTER XV - - M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR - - -Following Pine-breeze, who went before her like a fantastically colored -glowworm, Campanula ascended to the house. - -As she stepped onto the veranda she heard the voice of M’Gourley San -addressing Lotus-bed, and asking when she thought Leslie San would be -back. Mac’s elastic-side boots were in the veranda, and his gamp was -propped against the wall. - -He was sitting on the floor smoking a pipe and reading the _Japan Mail_ -through a pair of spectacles when Campanula entered. - -Mac often came up of nights like this. He was a vivid Radical, and -Leslie was a hide-bound Conservative, so they had a splendid time -together when they got on politics; or they would play chess, or Mr. -Initogo would drop in and they would have a rubber of dummy whist. - -But what Mac really came for, though he scarcely knew it himself, was -Campanula. - -Campanula was a lot to Mac; much more than one can express in prose, and -M’Gourley is scarcely the figure to make a ballad of. Yet the poem was -there round about him, unsung, unuttered, unguessed by any one, least of -all by himself. - -When he had made chickens out of orange-pips for her at Nikko, she just -as cunningly had made him her slave. - -She had taken this dull, hard-grained, and shady old business man into a -byway, of life, and made him spin tops and fly kites. She had made him -admire flowers and listen to fairy tales, and all as naturally and as -peacefully as though these things had been matters of everyday -occurrence with him the whole long length of his arid life. - -“_Einst, O wunder!_”—that ballad might have been inspired by Mac—had -the writer ever met him in business or seen him in the flesh. - -“Hech!” said Mac. “There you are; and where have you been trapsing to -this hour of the evening?” - -Campanula explained that Leslie had met friends, and that he had gone to -dine with them at the hotel. - -“Wonder who they can be?” soliloquized Mac, as Campanula clapped her -little hands together for Pine-breeze to bring refreshments. “Some -people he has picked up at the hotel, maybe.” - -They sat opposite to each other on the matting, this strangely assorted -pair. A panel in the front was open, for the night was warm, and the -lamplight fell on the veranda and the garden path beyond. - -And they ate salted plums and crystallized prawns, soup with seaweed in -it, and rice with fish sauce, whilst the perfume of the cherry blossoms -stole in from the night outside, and the twang of a _chamécen_ came from -somewhere in the mysterious depths of the house. - -It was Lotus-bud relieving her soul with music, mournful as the sound of -the wind blowing over the wet fields of millet in the rainy weather. - -The things having been removed, Campanula brought forth a chess-board, -which she laid on the matting before Mac. - -He had taught her chess, and had found her an apt pupil, a veritable -Zukertort, a female Nogi, who attacked his positions with her ivory -army, stormed his fortifications, and put him to rout when she chose. - -Yet he often won. She would make amazing blunders just in time to save -him from defeat, and Mac would chuckle and say— - -“There you are, there you are—thrown a pawn away that might have given -you back your queen in two more moves. Never mind, you’re getting on; -I’ll noat say ye aren’t im—” long pause—“proving. Check—and how’s -that for mate?” - -Then Campanula would throw her hands up in assumed horror at her own -stupidity, and Mac would chuckle over his own supposed cleverness, and -all would be harmony and peace. - -To-night, however, Campanula’s mind was somewhat astray, and the -chess-player who lived in her brain took advantage of the fact, and beat -Mac thoroughly in the course of a dozen moves. - -“I’m getting auld,” said Mac testily. “Here, put the things away. Na, -na, I’ll play no more the night.” - -He lit his pipe at the tobacco-mono and moodily smoked it. He could not -bear being beaten at chess, and now he looked as if he would be sour for -the whole evening. - -She reached for a long-necked _chamécen_ that lay near her on the -matting, and tuned it, striking a few somber notes. - -“Ay, sing us something,” said Mac, and as the night wind sighed and the -cherry blossoms filled the room with their faint, faint fragrance, -Campanula, her eyes fixed across illimitable distance, sang in a voice -like the ripple of a mountain brook, a song telling of the Miakodori, -and the sunlit slopes of Maruyama, where the great old Gion cherry tree -blooms at the foot of Yaamis lane. And then an old love-song strayed in -from the night and was caught by the strings of the _chamécen_ and made -articulate by her voice. - -It told the fate of a maiden named Pine-bough, who lived by the sea at -Hamada where the foam and the sand are as snow. - -She loved a noble, this maiden named Pine-bough—you can guess the rest. -Mac listened, soothed; it was the case of David and Saul over again—a -very inferior sort of Saul, it is true. - -“Now,” said the Charmed One as the rafters absorbed the last echoes of -the fate of Pine-bough, “tell us a story.” - -Campanula, with the _chamécen_ lying across her lap, knitted her brows -in thought. She was evidently pursuing strange beasts across the fields -of Fancy, and undetermined as to which she would mark down and serve up -to her guest. Then she solved the matter by suddenly clearing her brow -and telling a tale without any beasts in it at all. - -“There is a garden,” declared Campanula, “where every one may enter; the -Mikado himself goes there, and the riksha man, the Mousmé and the -Mousko, Bo Chan, and Kiku San. Even Campanula herself, lowly as she is, -may enter there. And there the Mousko pulls the beard of the Emperor -unafraid, and the riksha man forgets his riksha and drinks tea at the -tea houses, where no money is paid and no money is asked for.” - -“What’s this garden you’re telling me of?” demanded Mac, his business -instincts and common sense in arms at the latter statement. - -“It is the garden of sleep,” answered Campanula cunningly. She had been -waiting for the question and now she paused, gently plucking a string of -the _chamécen_, filling the air with a faint throbbing sound as if to -summon around her the tale-bearers of the night. - -“Here in the garden of sleep,” pursued the dreamy voice, as the -vibrations died away, “every tree bears a lighted lantern swinging in -the wind and painting the grass beneath with its color—red lanterns -painted with storks, and blue lanterns pictured with the blossoms of the -cherry; lanterns on which dragons fly pursuing each other, and lanterns -disported upon by my lord the Bat. - -“A wanderer in the garden has but to pluck a lantern from a tree, and -his dreams will at once turn in a happy direction, and by the light of -the lantern he will see before him the object of his desire, be it what -it may.” - -“I’ll remember that,” said Mac grimly, “next time I find myself there.” - -“One has no memory there,” said Campanula, “and few people know of the -secret of that place, else every one would be happy in their dreams. - -“One night entered the garden Taro San, a child no higher than one’s -knee. He was the son of a tea-house keeper, and he had plucked a -glowworm from a bush, by which feeble light he was lighting himself -through the darkness of the garden. - -“All at once he found himself beneath a tree, from the lowest branch of -which swung a huge lantern of wistaria-blue. - -“It was the lantern of Spring, and the painted butterflies upon it, by -some magic, moved their wings in flight, yet remained always in the same -place, and the painted cherry-blossoms upon it waved in some magic wind, -yet never faded or lost a petal, and the bird upon it pursuing the -dragon fly was always gaining upon the dragon fly, yet the dragon fly, -oh mystery! always outstripped the bird.” - -Campanula paused in thought, and a faintly plucked string of the -_chamécen_ filled the air with the hum of the dragon fly’s wings as it -flew by reed and iris, by mere and pond, by the unblown lotus and the -blue of the river in the country of eternal spring. - -“O Taro San,” continued the story-teller, “gazing up and beholding this -fair thing, strove to reach it, and failing, he began to weep. - -“Now, there was passing by at that moment the Daimiyo of his province, -and the great lord walked with his gaze fixed upon the ground overcome -as he was by the reverie of sleep; but hearing the sound of Taro San -weeping, he paused and asked the child what ailed him, and hearing the -trouble, he lifted him upon his shoulder; and Taro San grasped the -lantern and waved it in the air and laughed, for its light showed him a -pleasant path beset with roses and leading to a sea, blue as the sea of -Harima, and in the path stood a little girl plucking the amber and -crimson flowers. - -“Taro cried out to the Daimiyo to take him to the little girl, but the -Daimiyo did not heed, for to him the lantern had shown Osaka Castle -stormed by knights in armor, and the spears of the Samurai all bent -towards its walls under a roof of flying arrows. Towards this sight he -ran, and Taro dropping the lantern, it went out, and the Daimiyo awoke -in his palace and Taro awoke in the tea house upon the futon, where he -slept beside his father. - -“Another night stood Taro beneath the lantern which hung beyond his -reach, but a beggar man who chanced to pass lifting him upon his -shoulder, the child seized the lantern and waved it in the air, and -instantly before him appeared the flower-set path and the form of the -Mousmé, more beautiful now and attired in a kimono of palest amber -embroidered with silver bats. - -“But the beggar man saw nothing but a purse of silver lying before him -on the ground, and, stooping to pick it up, Taro fell from his shoulder, -the lantern went out, and the beggar man awoke by the roadside where he -had fallen asleep, and Taro on the futon beside his father. - -“Many times did Taro stand beneath the lantern of spring and many people -raised him towards it, but never one of them saw what Taro saw, all -their dreams being of things other than flowers and the time of spring. - -“One night,” resumed Campanula after a pause, “Taro entered the garden, -and beneath the lantern there stood a child, and the child implored him -to lift him upon his shoulder, and being there the child seized the -lantern and laughed aloud with pleasure at the vision of the roses, and -the Mousmé, and the sea. But Taro saw nothing of this. He only saw a tea -house where customers were waiting to be served, for Taro,” said -Campanula, “Had now grown up, and was a man.” - -She finished her little tale with three mournful notes drawn from the -bass string of the _chamécen_. - -“Humph!” said Mac. - -He tapped the ashes out of his pipe into the little receptacle of the -tobacco-mono, refilled it, and lit it with a glowing ember. - -Whilst he was thus engaged, Campanula rose and went to the open panel -space leading on to the veranda. He heard her addressing some one in her -low, sweet voice, then there was a pause, then she spoke again as if in -answer to some remark, then she returned. - -“Blind man,” said Campanula, putting the _chamécen_ away. - -“I heard nobody,” said Mac, looking up as he finished lighting his pipe. -“What did you say? Blind man? Was it he you were speaking to?” - -“Yes; he said he had come from a great way, and he looked oh, so ugly -and tired! He has gone to the back entrance, and they will give him -food.” - -“It’s these blessed paper houses,” said Mac. - -“They either swallow a sound or magnify it, so’s you can’t hear yourself -speak if a man sneezes in the next room.” - -He smoked for a while, and then rose to go. - -“There!” said Campanula, as she too rose. “He’s gone away again down the -path towards the gate.” - -“I’ll just follow him,” said Mac, “and see what he’s like.” - -He bade Campanula good night and departed. - -The gate was closed, and there was no one on the garden path; no one on -the hill path either, he found as he descended it slowly, peering -through the gloom before him. - -“It’s dom queer!” muttered Mac to himself as he reached the street. “I’d -have staked my life she was talking to herself.” - -He felt vaguely uneasy, and thought of returning. Then he decided not. -The path looked gloomy and mysterious viewed from down below, and its -descent without meeting any one had already given him a slight attack of -the “creeps.” - - - - - CHAPTER XVI - - THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIL - - -Dinner was served in the Du Telles’ private room. Channing dined with -them—the man who had informed Jane of Leslie’s whereabouts—a young, -clean shaven man, member of the Shanghai Jockey Club and practically -head of the great silk firm of Channing, Matheson & Co. - -At dessert Jane asked Leslie’s permission to tell of Campanula’s -finding. Leslie at first demurred. No one knew anything about it except -the far-away folk in Nikko and the secretive Japanese police. It seemed -scarcely fair to Campanula to give the tale away, but at last he -consented, for George du Telle had eaten and drunk himself into a state -of torpor. He was staring at a pineapple before him with a flushed face, -from which protruded a great cigar, and as for Channing he was off to -Shanghai next day. So Jane told the story, and Channing listened. - -“Well, what do you think?” said Jane when she had finished her tale. - -“I never think about these matters,” said Channing, “I simply accept -them. My dear lady, were you to live a long time in the East you would -come to believe in things that Western people would rank as nursery -tales. The Tokyo fire-walkers can walk barefoot over a bed of live -charcoal as thick as a mattress. I have seen them. How do they do it? I -don’t know. - -“It is very curious how the Western people, Christians, and so forth, -treat the unknown. They look upon it as the unknowable. The Easterns -don’t. I had a missionary man in at my office the other day over at -Shanghai subscription hunting. I gave him what he wanted, and then, -without scarcely saying ‘Thank you,’ he asked me did I believe in God. I -asked him did he believe in the devil. He said ‘Yes.’ I asked him did he -believe in devils, and he said ‘No.’ I asked him did he believe in the -Bible. He said ‘Yes.’ Then I recalled to his mind the story of the -Gadarene swine, and his reply was that times are changed since then. -Then I suppose, I said, all the devils are dead? He walked away in a -huff—with my check in his pocket, though. - -“Now the juggler man”—turning to Leslie—“may have been chivied to -death by devils just as the Gadarene swine were chased into the sea—who -knows? - -“Of course it may have been that his madness, if he were mad, took an -acute turn, who knows? But I have lived a good time in the East, and I -am very well assured of this, that there are men here hand in glove with -evil. I have seen things done in China, and for money too, that could -not possibly have been done by trickery, and could not, I think, have -been done by permission of the powers of Good. I’m not what you call a -Christian, and what’s more, I think the Christian religion has done a -great deal of harm—not to speak of other what you call ‘religions’—Am -I wearying you, Mrs. du Telle?” - -“Not in the least; please go on.” - -“In this way. It has robbed us of our terror of evil. It paints a vague -devil that no man really believes in. Now take that much-read book, ‘The -Sorrows of Satan,’ where the Devil sits down and plays the piano and -sings a song.” - -“I thought it was a guitar he played,” said Jane. - -“Well, a guitar; it’s all the same. People read that with a grave face. -He’s quite a good sort and so forth.” Channing paused for a moment and -gazed reflectively at the wine in his glass, took a sip and went on: -“Don’t you think the thousands of people who read that stuff, and admire -it, must have lost all sense of the horrible thing that evil is? The -sense that evil is a reality, a thing to fill us with the wildest horror -if one could only appreciate it, a very real thing, and a very -determined thing, and a thing all black; yet we get people playing in -fancy with, and even laughing about, this horror. And writers painting -the cuttle-fish center of it as a semi-sentimental idiot capable of -assuming evening clothes and talking twaddle, or criticizing plays as he -does in Satan Montgomery’s poem. We don’t play with a thing we loathe -even in fancy. But we—I mean Christians—play with the idea of the -devil as if it were a poodle dog. The truth is that Christians don’t -fear the Power of Evil, they fear the Power of Good. They praise him, -propitiate and worship him in a most fulsome manner, and say they love -him. I tell you this for a fact that no man can love good who does not -abhor evil, and you can’t abhor a thing that you play with.” - -“Do you abhor evil, Mr. Channing?” asked Jane. - -“Honestly, I do. Any one with eyes and the capacity for thought who -lives in China _must_.” - -“Then you must love good?” - -“One does not ‘love’ the sun, one worships it, so to speak—but this is -all very strange my talking like this; my business in life is mainly -silk and racehorses.” - -“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, who was swaying slightly in his -chair, the gone-out cigar still stuck in the side of his mouth, his face -bulged and red, and his eye a fixity. “’Scuse me.” - -“One moment, George—Well, I think, Mr. Channing, there are worse -Christians in the world than you are.” - -“Perhaps there are worse men, but I don’t claim to be a Christian. Only -a man who recognizes fearfully the existence of evil as well as good.” - -“’Scuse me,” said George du Telle, speaking loudly now as if he were -calling a servant or railway porter. “I’m not going to have this sort of -thing at my table. _I’m_ a Christian, brought up a Christian, die one. -’M not going to—” - -“George!” said his wife in a mild voice, but a voice very steady and -full of command. - -The Christian, who had raised himself in his chair, subsided. - -Jane rose from the table. - -“Shall we go into the drawing-room and have some music?” she said. “You -sing, Dick—or used to.” - -As they passed to the drawing-room she said to Channing: “Did I tell you -the mark my cousin Dick made—you know what I mean—was the Christian -emblem?” - -“My dear lady,” said Channing, “I especially dread hurting another -person’s religious feelings, and I, what am I? Just a man who thinks his -own thoughts, but—” - -“Well?” - -“Well, if there were anything in it at all, may it not be that the cause -of the disturbance was the fact that he touched him?” - -“How is that?” - -“You have never touched the wire in connection with a running dynamo?” - -“No.” - -“No,” said Channing, “for if you had you would not be here. The metaphor -is a bad one. I only mean to say that the touch of a stick or a hand may -disturb the play of great forces with most surprising results.” - - - - - CHAPTER XVII - - THE HOUSE BY NIGHT - - -It was late when Leslie left the hotel. The moon was rising over -Nagasaki, and he required no lamp to light him up the hill path leading -to the house. - -In the veranda he sat down to rest a moment and pull off his boots. The -landscape garden, looking very antique in the moonlight, lay before him, -the moon lighting its tiny hills and melancholy groves with the same -particular care that presently he would bestow on the forests of Scindia -and the Himalayas. On one of its verdurous swards lay a mark. It was the -mark of Jane du Telle’s footstep imprinted on Campanula’s garden. - -He sat for a while in thought, then he unlatched a panel with a sort of -gridiron-shaped key, then he searched in his pocket for matches, and -found he had none. - -Determining to grope his way up and go to bed by moonlight, he closed -and fastened the panel, leaving himself in darkness, caught his toe -against an hibachi, left as if on purpose for him to tumble over, swore, -knocked himself against a screen, which fell crash on Sweetbriar San, -the household cat, who had once made part of the Fir-cone, Plum-blossom, -Moon, and Snow ministry, and the intelligent animal, conceiving that -robbers had entered, rushed wildly round and round in the dark till a -panel slid back revealing Pine-breeze with a wan and weary smile on her -face, and an andon or night lantern in her hand. She handed Leslie a -candle and box of matches, and, still smiling, slid back, closing the -panel as she went, like a figure in a trick toy, Sweetbriar San -bristling and glowering on her shoulder like a fiend. - -The upper part of the House of the Clouds was divided by panels into a -passage and three rooms. One for Leslie, one for the Mousmés, and the -third for Campanula. - -Pine-breeze, with her arm full of towels, or what not, would often come -into Leslie’s bedroom through the wall. He might be in his bath, he -might be—anything, it was all the same to Pine-Breeze, she was thinking -of her duties, not of him. - -One night, long ago, he had awakened in the arms of Mother Fir-cone, who -was jibbering with fright. There was a mosquito-net between them, for -she had rushed through the wall, and literally flung herself upon him, -tearing the mosquito-net from its attachments. I do not wonder at her -fright. Also San was in eruption, and a fearful earthquake was roaring -and billowing under Nagasaki. - -Several times had the Mousmés rushed into his room all clinging -together, and crying “Dorobo!” (Robbers). Robbers had tried to burgle -the house twice, in fact. He had shot one the second time, and they -never came again. Yet he always slept with a Smith and Wesson -convenient, for a Japanese robber is a business man, without a heart, -but with a desire for plunder keen as the edge of a sword. - -Leslie’s bedroom was a very bare apartment, furnished mostly with a -nothing. A futon and pile of pillows—he had tried the makura or -Japanese pillow, but given it up in disgust—under a mosquito-net, a -wash-stand, a stick-rack, and some pegs to hang clothes on, constituted -the remainder of the furniture. The window was a wide open space crossed -by lattice slats, through which the moon was now shining, her light -partly intercepted by the dance of a cherry bough waving in the wind. - -Leslie undressed and got into bed. Seen through the blue gauze of a -mosquito-net, the room had a character all its own. - -The House of the Clouds by night was not the place for a person -afflicted with insomnia. There were so many noises only waiting to tell -strange tales to the strained ear. Tales of mystery and exaggeration. -Lying awake you would hear some one leaning close against the attenuated -house wall; it was the wind. And now, a scratching sound as of a panther -trying to commit a burglary; it was the wind; and now a whisper like the -whisper of a lover to his mistress—or maybe of a robber to his mate; it -was the wind. - -Then the owl sitting on the roof, staring with saucer eyes at the moon, -would give one low, whistling cry, and his mate beyond somewhere, would -make cautious answer. - -Then “tap, tap, tap.” It would be the wind—making the skeleton finger -of a dead Samurai out of a loose lattice. - -Then a thunder of cats and a yell on the veranda roof, and the drowsy -one, just off to goblin land with the dead Samurai, would be brought up -all standing, and half rise for a boot, or a boot-jack, or anything -hurlable, and sink back with a sigh, remembering that he was in Japan. - -The wind played upon the House of the Clouds just as a maestro plays on -a fiddle, but with a more distressing result. Sometimes of an autumn or -winter night you might have sworn the place was surrounded by a company -of old Japanese ghosts escaped from the clutches of Emma O[1] and -requestful of succor and safety. - - [1] The Guardian of the Buddhistic hells. - -Leslie could not sleep. This eruption of his past into the present -disturbed him deeply. - -He had been getting acclimatized, losing little by little that horrible -sense of exile and home-sickness that had driven him once across half -the world to London, and now it was all coming back. - -And she was married to that little beast, and, worst of all, she seemed -content. - -For eight years he had looked upon her as a thing dead to him, and now -she had returned with sevenfold power, for she brought the past with -her. The golden past, golden despite that dour father, Colonel Leslie of -Glenbruach, that just man unacquainted with folly. She brought the river -in spate and the leaping salmon, the heather-scented wind from the -purple hills, Glenbruach in the midst of a world of snow, the ripple of -the mountain burn and the faint reek of peat. - -Worse than all these, she brought herself. She was the same spiritually -and mentally as the slim girl of long ago—a slip of a girl straight as -a wand and as full of laughter and movement and brightness as a mountain -brook. - -But materially she had vastly altered. She was now a woman, divinely -formed, a creature appealing to every sensual fiber in a man’s nature. - -And George du Telle owned all this! - -Leslie, I daresay you have perceived, was a man who did not take what -one may call a dry-light view of things, past or present, when they had -relation to himself; as a matter of fact, he saw the shortcomings of -others tremendously clearly. The shortcomings of his father, of -Bloomfield the lawyer, of the Sydney bar loafers, of Danjuro the curio -dealer, and of poor old sinful, grubbing M’Gourley—too clearly, in -fact. - -His own shortcomings he acknowledged by word of mouth. He knew they were -there, just as a merchant knows a bale of damaged and unsaleable goods -is in his cellar, but he did not go down and rake them out and examine -them carefully. - -No one ever had cared for him, he said, but he never asked himself if he -ever had permitted any one to care for him. With this outlook on life, a -semi-poetical nature, and passions that slept long and deeply only to -awake rejuvenated and with the strength of demons, he might before this -have gone entirely to the devil, only for a lodger he had. - -An old Scotch ancestor lived with him. This “pairson,” who had -once worn a long upper lip and had been a writer to the signet, a -just, hard, God-fearing, and straight man, had a chamber in a -convolution of Leslie’s brain, where he sat—he, or his attenuated -personality—twiddling his thumbs like a night watchman and waiting for -alarms. - -It was this gentleman who had saved his descendant from the weak man’s -form of suicide—drink. - -He now came out in his old carpet slippers and read his descendant a -lecture on the text: “Thou shalt not lust after another man’s wife.” - -And he spoke hard and strong, taking almost entirely the “wumman’s” side -of the question; pointing out that society, as we know it, imperfect as -it may be, is ruled by a number of laws whose aim is the common weal and -the individual’s comfort and happiness. - -He pointed out that the life of a “wumman” is composed, not of grand -passions and Italian opera scenes, but of a hundred thousand trifles, -each one insignificant enough, yet each helping to form that grand -masterpiece, a pure woman’s life. - -That a woman might be pure in mind, even if married to a “red-headed -runt” like George du Telle. That if that was so she was a happy woman, -and that if a man loved her, loved he never so madly, it would be a -strange expression of that love to blast her happiness, and soil her -soul. - -It would not be love, but lust—the passion of those devils which Mr. -Channing had hinted at that evening, those people of the night who -slumber not nor sleep. - -Having finished, he went into his chamber and shut the door. - -And Leslie lay reflecting on his words, also on the words of Channing. - -Evil made manifest. The face of the creature on the Nikko road came -before his mental eye. That was evil made manifest. He had seen the -thing. He had known the devil by hearsay since a child. He had heard the -“Deevil” thundered at from Scotch pulpits, tracts about the devil had -been put into his hand; he had heard people make laughing remarks about -him: he was so familiar with the vague personality called Satan that he -felt no interest in him, neither interest nor aversion. Never a shudder. - -But that thing in the sky of the opium dream, the music that had brought -it—that, indeed, was evil painted by the hand of an artist; worth all -the sermons ever thundered from pulpits, all the tracts ever printed. - -Then his weary brain grew drowsy, and there strayed across it the fair -figure of the Lost One, the very antithesis of all things evil. - -Only last night before going to bed she had murmured a story half to -herself, half to him, with her eyes fixed on the glowing embers of the -hibachi, and he retold it to himself now to put himself to sleep. - -It was about the great battle between the beasts and the birds—the real -reason why the owl was reduced to shame and forced to cover himself with -night. - -“And they came from the North and the South and the East and the West in -flight, oh, many ri broad. The quails from the millet, the stork from -the river, and from the pond the king-fisher, flashing like a blue jewel -in the sunlight. - -“Then said the stork, who led all these people of the air: - -“‘Behold! we are all assembled but where tarries Sir Owl?’” - -“Then a sparrow made answer and said: - -“‘As I paused to rest on a cherry bough, for my wings be little though -my heart is big, I heard Sir Owl in treasonable conversation with a rat. -And said he, “Come forth from thy burrow, O Rat, that I may feast my -eyes upon thee; and the empire of the beasts shall be thine, and also -the empire of the birds.”’” - -“And the voice of the Hidden One replied—” - -But what the Hidden One made answer, Leslie did not remember, for the -artless story had lulled him to sleep. - - - - - CHAPTER XVIII - - MOSTLY ABOUT FLOWERS - - -O Japan! Spring! Dawn! what an exquisite and roseate mystery surrounds -the meeting of ye three! - -Night, and the owls, and the ghosts, have vanished, day and the sparrows -have come. - -Up from Nagasaki rise the murmurs of life, mists are vanishing from the -hills across the harbor, where the lateen sails of junks are rising to -find the wind, and the sampans dart about like attenuated water-beetles. - -The far, faint sound of a bugle from the man-of-war anchorage crosses -the far, shrill crowing of a cock owned by Mr. Pinecape, the cobbler of -Jinriksha Street—two rapiers of sound crossing each other in the now -brilliant air. Then the noises of the day deepen, and the whirr of the -cicala mixes with all sorts of faint domestic noises, a _mélange_ from -which the ear can pick out notes just as the eye points in an -impressionist’s picture: the clatter of a pair of clogs, the call of a -watercress seller, the clash of a tin pan dropped somewhere, and then -cock-crow after cock-crow from far and near, some loud and defiant, -others defiant enough but faint, as if coming through a pin-pole half a -mile away. - -The kitchen of the House of the Clouds is a square apartment, with no -matting on the floor, and just now flooded with sunshine. - -Leslie, in the early days, had caused to be constructed by a stranded -ship’s carpenter, a solid English kitchen-table of white pine. He wanted -to give the man a job, and he thought the thing would prove useful; and -it did. - -To begin with, it smelt deliciously, and Mother Fir-cone amidst her -avocations would take a sniff at it now and then, just as a snufftaker -takes a pinch of snuff; she would also sit under it preparing sweet -potatoes, stringing beans or what not; but as for using it as a table, -such an idea never occurred to her. In fact, she had no ideas at all -about a table, and was quite convinced that this gift of Leslie San’s -was a sort of pine-wood temple, constructed for the purpose of being sat -under. - -It was also a place of refuge in time of earthquakes, when the whole -household, saving Leslie and Campanula, got under it for fear of the -roof falling. It received the title of “Honorable,” and was altogether a -thing very much respected, and even vaguely beloved. - -Under it this morning sat Lotus-bud, preparing fish for breakfast; on it -(these new Mousmés used it as a shelf) reposed various paper boxes -containing eggs and groceries, weird-looking boxes suggesting that a -conjurer was about to commence operations, not a cook. - -The sun laid a great square of light like a burning mat upon the floor -near the table, and on her knees in the center of this mat of light sat -Pine-breeze cleaning an hibachi. Cherry-blossom, the third Mousmé, -squatted right before Pine-breeze doing nothing. - -From under the table was escaping a faint blue haze of smoke. Lotus-bud -had just taken a few whiffs from a tiny pipe. - -They all smoked, these Mousmés, pinches of stuff like chopped hay in -pipe bowls the size of a child’s thimble; but Campanula had never -acquired the art, though all her friends were ardent tobacco lovers. -Leslie San had said “No,” and that was enough. - -As Pine-breeze cleaned the hibachi and made it spick and span, she was -telling the others a yarn, mostly to do with her doings when down the -town marketing last evening. How she had bought this or that, what had -been said to her, and so forth—a tale simple enough, but a miracle of -genius considering the tongue in which it was told. For in the Japanese -there are but two parts of speech, the noun and the verb; these, and -splinters and scraps of broken-up nouns and verbs, which, in the form of -particles and suffixes, help to shore up the meaning and pin together -the common sense, have to do all the talking. - -The learner of Japanese feels at first like a person condemned to eat -gravy soup with chop-sticks. Oh, for even a pronoun! Imagine talking to -a person without being able to use the word “You,” without being able to -use the word “I”! Imagine the horrible tortures of a Japanese egoist on -his death-bed making, or attempting to make, his dying speech! - -But there are no egoists in Japan—can’t be with such a language—and -there are no purse-proud snobs, or if there are, they hide themselves -very closely. - -For self-depreciation is the key-note of Japanese conversation and -manners. - -So she goes on with her story, in a voice sweet to listen to as the -ripple of a mountain brook, and Lotus-bud listens under the table, -fish-knife held in air, for the tale is reaching an interesting point. - -Then Campanula’s voice is heard speaking to Sweetbriar San. She is -coming to the kitchen to superintend things and—crack! the fish’s head -is cut off, and three Mousmés are working like one. - -Campanula San is younger than any of these Mousmés, and she treats them -like sisters, yet strangely enough, they do not encroach, but treat her -as their mistress—a condition of things impossible in Europe, and -presently, perhaps, impossible in Japan. - -The sun has leapt now over the hills, and Leslie is heard moving -upstairs. Pine-breeze claps her hands with horror, and rises to her -feet: she has forgotten to fill his bath. - -She goes to do so, and Campanula wanders out the front way to the -balcony, where she pauses to gaze at the azaleas, shading her eyes with -her hand. - -The fire is spreading; another crimson blossom is almost unfolded, and -others are soon to be born. Every spring the coming of the azaleas is an -event in Campanula’s life. - -A wealth of crimson azaleas is one of her first recollections. Away -beyond that crimson fire of flowers lies the land of her earliest -childhood. The house with the plum tree, very vague indeed; the father -who hit things with a hammer, still vaguer; the sugar-candy dragon lost, -and so miraculously recovered; the little boy who went to sleep in the -snow—or was it in a field of lilies? - -Her real life, it seemed to her, began as she was reaching for a crimson -blossom one day in a field of crimson blossoms, and was suddenly caught -up sky-high by a thing taller than a tree, who did something to the side -of her neck, just under her left ear, that was not hurtful or -particularly unpleasant, but which, nevertheless, made her scream. - -Then, behold, she saw that the thing was a man, though in strange -clothes, but he did not frighten her in the least, and she gave him her -hand at once, and with confidence, whereupon he took her in his arms and -carried her to a road where stood another man, all black, even to his -hands, but his face was white, and he had a red beard. - -Then this man, who was also unfrightful, began to make her remember -things that she had for the moment forgotten. To remember her father, -and the fact that she had lost her way, and other things too, including -the errant dragon. He made her remember that she wished to get back to -her father, but she did not remember this so very clearly. In fact she -was quite content to go with these two men over the hills and far away, -feeling sure she was safe with them, went they where they would. - -The scenes on the road to Nikko she remembered: a funny man away in the -distance dancing amongst trees, and the entry into Nikko borne sky-high -above all the other children, the Tea House of the Tortoise, -and—grandest remembrance of all!—the miraculous awakening with the -long-lost dragon in her hand. He was so full of mystery that she never -had even dreamt of eating him, and she still possessed him. He was -upstairs in the drawer of a lacquered cabinet, cracked, it is true, by -changes of temperature and warped in the back, for age touched all -things, even sugar-candy dragons. - -Then there was her life at the House of the Clouds, the mission school; -rainy days when she splashed through the mud under a broad paper -umbrella; fine days when she flew kites with M’Gourley San, played -hop-scotch with Kiku San and Kitsune Ken, with all sorts of other Sans, -mostly with shaved heads. - -This was Campanula’s childhood as she remembered it. But as you cannot -remember your childhood till you have stepped over the line where the -child becomes a boy or girl, Campanula had not begun remembering it till -about six months ago. - -Up till then M’Gourley San, and Leslie San, and Sweetbriar San, and a -host of other honorable people surrounded her, one as important as the -other, Mac perhaps more important than any. - -Then all at once—in a week or so, to be more precise—a host of new -ideas came to her, bothersome, formless ideas, as ungraspable yet as -insistent as the great Boyg himself. - -Then the ideas began to take form. It was in the garden one day. Her -eyes fell on one of the flowerless azalea bushes, and she remembered how -it had been covered with crimson flowers last year, and how beautiful -they were, beautiful above every other flower, even the lordly peony, -who seems to hold the whole glory and mystery of summer in the gloom of -his splendid heart. And her mind wandered back from spring to spring, -led by the crimson blossoms, till she called to mind the valley where -Leslie had found her. - -It was he who had found her wandering alone there, and he had picked her -up. - -She had never forgotten the valley; it had lain in the distance in her -mind, but she had no use for it till now. Now it came to her in all its -splendor, and explained to her why the azalea was the flower she loved -above the peony, the lotus, or even that glorious mystery, the -dragon-spume chrysanthemum. - -Flowers are so bound up with the lives of the children of Japan that -they have a meaning and speak a language to them almost unknown to us. - -So Campanula sat immersed in her dream, and Leslie, who had swung a -hammock between two cherry trees and was lying in it, little knew what -was going on in the small head of the person seated near him on the -square of matting. She had been doing some needlework, but her work had -dropped in her lap, her hands were folded, and her eyes were fixed on -the azalea bush. - -Next day, or perhaps the day after, for a man’s perceptions in these -matters are sometimes dull, he noticed a change in her. He could not say -what it was, but the submissive and humble person, the very fact of -whose existence was a theme for perpetual self-excuse, had somehow -changed. She was just as submissive and humble, but there was a subdued -joyousness in her manner when excusing her existence as though she -thought that somehow it might not be such a frightful crime after all, -and perhaps capable of condonation some day. - -Then, when he called for his cigar-case Pine-breeze did not appear with -it, though Pine-breeze loved to be the carrier of it, because it was a -foreign thing, and the leather smelt deliciously. - -Campanula brought it _and_ a match-box, a thing that Pine-breeze’s -flighty little mind nearly always forgot. - -A few days before, Leslie had possessed three servants and what he -called an adoptive daughter. Then he suddenly found himself in the -possession of four servants, one of them more attentive than the other -three put together. He put it down to the fact that her housewifely -instincts were awakening, and as the change in her wrought for his -comfort and ease he did not speculate on the cause as he would have done -had the reverse been the case. - -Women are curious creatures, as the philosophic Mac once said. But on -the whole, in their way, I think men are just as strange. - -Kite-flying had now been put aside with other childish things, and the -tiny hands that had grasped the sugar-candy dragon were now preparing to -grasp the real business of life: a business whose main objective was the -happiness and comfort of “He who is taller than the tallest of trees.” - -Pine-breeze, Lotus-bud, and Cherry-blossom. Looking at them in a row, -you might have thought them pretty much alike, as far as mind and spirit -were concerned, just as three sleek, well-groomed ponies may seem -identical—until you try to drive them. - -It was not till Campanula took the reins that she found the three -underlings were each afflicted with a special infirmity, or rather -special infirmities. - -Pine-breeze was such a scatterbrain that if you sent her down town in a -hurry for eggs she would, as likely as not, dawdle home in an hour with -tomatoes and some wild tale picked up on the way, pleasant and -interesting enough, no doubt, but useless for the purpose of making an -omelette. She would leave Leslie’s bath unprepared, and then, sitting in -her own tub, would clap her hands with horror at the remembrance of her -own forgetfulness, and as likely as not attempt to rectify her error -attired in a bath towel; and she would smash things—crockery ware -understood—with almost the facility of your Western parlor-maid. To -make up for these bad points, she was literary above her class; had a -passion for flowers above her fellows, and had composed a poem about a -grasshopper. - -Lotus-bud was the cook; her infirmity was weakness. She would sit and -listen to Pine-breeze’s idle chatter and let the bread burn. Pine-breeze -could work and talk, but Lotus-bud could not even work and listen. So -she would sit with her hands in her lap, listening. She made a splendid -audience but a somewhat indifferent cook. - -As for Cherry-blossom, she was purely and simply an idler, a -lotus-eater, a hobboe in the guise of a butterfly. A thing so fragile -and pretty, so perfectly dressed and so seemingly boneless, that you -felt to expect work from her would be absurd; which, indeed, it would -have been. - -For she never worked, she dreamed. - -She was enamored of a riksha man, and she would go out and meet him -under the lilacs at the gate, and then vanish with him to goodness knows -where for the evening. - -He was the strangest natural phenomenon, this lover of Cherry-blossom’s, -for he was always changing in size, and his face was never scarcely -twice alike, and his number—rikshas are numbered just like hansom -cabs—was - - - 255. - 66. - 7. - 103. - and 42. - - -At least Pine-breeze, who was an observant body, got that far in her -notation, and then gave it up as a bad job. - -All these things, and more, Campanula had to cope with, and she did so -with more or less success, gaining in her experience much that a girl of -her age is supposed not to know, but losing nothing either in gentleness -or modesty. - -She brought Pine-breeze to a vague sense of the wrongfulness of flighty -ways, and with her own little hands she made new bread to replace a -batch of loaves burnt to cinders by Lotus-bud (bread that gave Leslie -indigestion for a week). - -As for Cherry-blossom, she told her, missionary fashion, that she would -certainly go to hell and be burnt like Lotus-bud’s loaves if she did not -stop vanishing down town with riksha men; and Cherry-blossom ground her -nose on the matting and wept, and promised reformation, and went out two -nights afterwards with No. 173 to a grand blaze up at the O Suwa temple, -where she devoured candied beans and comfits, and bowed before graven -images, and had a general good time with a host of “heathen” people like -herself. - -Cherry-blossom’s rikshas never cost her anything. Love lent them to her. - -Leslie’s socks up to this had always been vanishing, and the ones that -remained, were always, or generally, in holes. The Mousmés said it must -be the mice. Campanula, however, found Pine-breeze one morning cleaning -a kettle with a silk dress-sock. It seemed silk socks at half a guinea a -pair gave a polish nothing else would give. - -The kettles were duller after that, but the depredations of the mice -ceased. - -Having looked at the promise of the azaleas, she went in to see how -things were getting on. - -Presently she and Leslie were seated at breakfast opposite to one -another on the floor. Leslie, attired in a suit of faultlessly fitting -pale gray tweed, looked much more like an Indian cavalry officer on -leave than an umbrella merchant, as he called himself. He had arranged -to call for Jane du Telle at ten o’clock to take her out shopping; the -gloomy thoughts of the night before, the effect of the opium, and the -effect of the dream, had vanished. - -He was sipping his tea, and glancing over the _Japan Mail_, when -Campanula interrupted him. - -“What iss Dick?” she suddenly asked; she prolonged her s’s in the -faintest degree, difficult to reproduce in print, for there is no type -capable of representing an s and a quarter. - -“What is what?” asked Leslie, lowering the _Japan Mail_, and staring at -his pretty _vis-â-vis_. - -“Dick—she called you Dick.” - -“Who?” - -“She who gave you the flower,” said Campanula, lowering ever so little -her head. - -“Which flower?” - -“The one in your coat—yesterday.” - -“Oh,” said Leslie, remembering a bluebell that Jane had plucked and -given him as they went down hill the day before, and remembering also -that George du Telle and Campanula had been walking behind and must have -seen the transaction. “She calls me Dick because that is short for my -name.” - -“Dick,” murmured she, in a meditative voice. - -She seemed turning the name over in her mind. Tasting it mentally, so to -speak. - -“She is an old friend of mine,” continued Leslie. “I knew her, -Campanula, before you were born, away over in another part of the world, -where half the year it snows and where the wind blows just as hard as it -does in Nippon, but the wind never brings flowers as it does here.” - -“No flowers,” she murmured, incapable of imagining such a land. - -“Only flowers like that blue one, and wild roses and a few others, but -you never see camellia trees growing by the roads, nor lotus flowers on -the ponds.” - -“Nor azaleas?” - -“Nor azaleas—at least, as they grow here.” - -A shadow crossed the open doorway. - -“M’Gourley San,” said Campanula, who was seated facing the door. - -“Dinna rise,” said M’Gourley. “I’ve had ma breakfast, and I’ll juist tak -a seat on the verandy till y’ve done.” - -“I’m done,” said Leslie, forgetful of grammar, and rising up, he came -out, the _Japan Mail_ under his arm, and a briar root in his hand. - -They talked business a while, and then Leslie said: - -“I say.” - -“Weel?” - -“You remember that woman I told you of on the Nikko road?” - -“Which wumman?” asked Mac, taking up a pebble from the path just by the -veranda, and shying it at one of the hills of the landscape garden. - -“Girl, I meant; you remember the girl I told you of?” - -“Oh ay; the lass that flung you ower board—what of her?” - -“She’s here with her husband.” - -“Whaur?” said Mac, turning his head as though he fancied Jane and her -spouse were camping out in the garden. - -“She’s staying at the Nagasaki Hotel with her husband.” - -“Whoat’s their names?” - -“Du Telle.” - -Mac doubled himself up for a moment, alleging for reason a touch of the -stomach-ache, as a matter of fact it was a touch of internal laughter. - -The day before yesterday he had found the newly-arrived George du Telle -in the smoke-room of the Nagasaki Hotel, stood him drinks, and conducted -him to Danjuro. - -There they had saki and pipes, and George du Telle had bought a -Pickford’s van-full of rubbish, and parted with a fat green check on -Cox’s. An exceedingly fat check written with one eye shut, it is true, -but quite in order. - -“I dined with them.” - -“Ye whoat!” cried Mac, coming back from a vision of the victorious -Danjuro doing the cake-walk amidst his bronzes and lacquers, kimono -pinched up on either side between finger and thumb, his nose in the air, -and on his face an assumption of stiff and haughty pride enough to kill -one with laughter. - -“Weel! weel!” said Mac, addressing the hills of the landscape garden. - -“What are you weel-weeling about?” asked Leslie irritably. - -“I am not a puncteelious man,” said Mac, still addressing the hills, “in -the small concairns of life, but if a lassie had treated me same’s she -you, _I’d a seen her dammit before I’d ha’ dined wi’ her_.” He shouted -the last words, and brought his big fist down on his knee with a bang. - -“Don’t shout,” said Leslie, “and make an ass of yourself. We didn’t -quarrel when we parted; we parted good friends. She didn’t want to marry -me—well, that was her look-out.” - -“I wish they hadna’ come,” said Mac gloomily. - -“What on earth is the matter with you _now_?” - -“I’ve seen the waurld,” said the Gloomy One, “and I’ve seen wummen. And -I’ve seen _her_—saw her in the smoke-room—” He stopped. - -“What smoke-room?” - -“Of the hotel. I was havin’ a crack wi’ her husband day-fore yesterday, -and in she come to speak a word to him; and I know wummen—and, weel, I -know, fixed between that chap with a head like a blazin’ whin-bush and -you, which way she’ll run.” - -“I wish you wouldn’t be such a fool,” said Leslie, now really annoyed -and therefore keeping himself in check; “she’s nothing to me.” - -Mac turned, and under his bushy, half-grizzled eyebrows stared in -Leslie’s face, and Leslie did not support his gaze, but turned away -irritably, and flung stones at a brown hawk that was circling in the air -before them. - -Mac got up, tapped the ashes out of his pipe, and made off. - -“See ye the morn?” he called back as he got to the gate. - -“Maybe,” said Leslie, looking at his watch and rising to go into the -house. - -He went down at ten, and shortly after his departure, out came -Campanula, a basket in her hand and sandals on her feet, for the weather -was dry. She came along the path towards the cherry trees, examining the -ground and the interstices of the bushes. - -At last she saw what she wanted, a bluebell. - -She plucked it with tender care and put it in her basket, then she saw -another and treated it the same, and another; so went she on till it -became perfectly plain that her object was not gardening, or the -gathering of a bunch of flowers, but the extermination of every bluebell -on the premises. - -When the place had been cleared and the basket was half full of victims, -the question came how to dispose of them. Impossible to throw them away -or burn them; she would as soon, almost, have treated children so. - -She stood at the gate undecided, till suddenly there came the solution -of the problem, and opening the gate she passed down the lilac-shaded -path to Nagasaki. On the way she saw more bluebells and stopped to pluck -them, so that when the lane at the bottom was reached the basket was -nearly full. - -In a rabbit-hutch of a house off the lane lay a tragedy, or the remains -of one, in the form of O Toku San, a poor work-girl. She had loved a -man, and he had not even betrayed her in the ordinary way. He had simply -changed his mind, and gone off with another girl. - -She tried to kill herself, not in the native way, but with some -abominable sort of foreign poison—Oxalic acid, most likely; but they -saved her life, and she lay in the hospital nearly a month with her -hands tied, to prevent her trying to kill herself again. - -When she came out of the hospital she made no more attempts to obtain -peace. She was in the clutches of pernicious anæmia, and she now lay -dying, a despairing shadow, the ghost of what had once been a pretty and -happy girl. - -Campanula turned to the tiny house, and that day O Toku San had a whole -silver yen to give to her mother on her return, and a bunch of -freshly-gathered blue flowers to charm her eye: things to the dying -better than all music and poetry, and far above the greatest -masterpieces of art. - - - - - CHAPTER XIX - - THE STORK AND THE TORTOISE - - -They were in the street running parallel with Jinrikisha Street, a -street truly of the old time, narrow with the house-tops, when the -houses had upper stories over-leaning the way. - -Jane seemed fascinated by the contents of the little shops, that sold -everything from cuttle-fish to paper lanterns. Shops that were, most of -them, simply raised platforms, matted and roofed. - -Here abounded the tortoise-shell carvers, and the men who can make a -netsuké to charm the eye out of anything: a knot of wood, a shark’s -tooth, a useless bit of ivory. - -“I’m going to buy things,” said Jane, looking with a lustful eye on the -cheap, or seemingly cheap, curios exposed for sale in some of the shops: -old bronze gongs, kettles, sword guards, broken crockery were carefully -mended, lamps, such as the Chinese magician might have hawked at the -back entrance of the palace of Aladdin, fans, trick toys, and tiny boxes -for holding rouge; tobacco-monos and opium pipes, broken-down English -umbrellas, lacquer trays, and a heap of other dust-traps utterly -useless, and some of them not very ornamental. - -“If you _will_ waste your money,” said Leslie, “I’d advise you to come -to Danjuro’s. We can get to it by this lane, and I won’t let him swindle -you beyond the ordinary tourist pitch.” - -“Very well,” said Jane, turning from a booth bearing this cabalistic -inscription on its front, “Come rightin!”[2] “The things look pretty -dusty, and I don’t see anything I very much want—I’d like to buy -_that_, though.” She pointed to a mite in the colored kimono, playing -battledore and shuttlecock in the gutter with another mite of its own -size. “They seem so happy and jolly, these Japanese children, and clean, -and I read somewhere they never give any trouble, or break things, or -annoy people—Bless the child!” - - [2] I presume “Come right in!” was the artist’s intention. - -A shuttlecock hit her a slap in the face, and the shuttlecock hitter -laughed, and trotted after it, without any semblance of apology to his -target. - -“There’s another illusion shattered,” said Jane, wiping her face with -her handkerchief. - -“Have you—” began Leslie. - -“What?” - -“Any children?” - -“No,” said Jane; “I have not.” - -The stork on the tortoise, emblem of eternal life, and a “supposed” -masterpiece of the great Miochin family of metal-workers, still stood on -guard in the fore-front of Danjuro’s wares. It was the same stork that -Leslie had seen five years ago—at least, in appearance. In reality it -had been sold five or six times during the last five years. - -The selling of the thing always brought forth Danjuro’s latent sense of -humor, and could Danjuro the actor have seen his namesake at these -supreme moments of trade, he would certainly have claimed him as a -brother in art. - -It would be an American woman, perhaps, in a blue veil, and with a -smattering of knowledge picked up from artistic books about Japan. Mac -would be the go-between, translating the desires of the female into -Japanese for the edification of Dan, who spoke English, by the way, as -well as Mac, and even, perhaps, better. - -“Sell it!” Danjuro would cry. “I would as soon think of selling my own -mother. Tell her Augustness to ask of me anything else. It is a piece of -true Miochin, owned by my father, and his father before him. It has -always brought my family luck, etc.” - -All of which M’Gourley would faithfully translate with the addition: - -“He’s the greatest auld scamp in the waurld; he’s only puttin’ up the -price. Bide a wee, and let him simmer doon. It is not a true Miochin, -but it’s a vara excellent imitation, made, mayhap, by some pupil of the -Miochins. Would y’ be wullin’ to pay twanty poonds?” - -The Blue-veiled One assenting, Mac and Danjuro would go for each other -in Japanese, and after five minutes’ ferocious wrangling, and five -minutes more of interpretations, the thing would change hands at -twenty-five pounds, to be replaced next day, or, at least, the day after -the departure of the Blue-veiled One from Nagasaki, by its twin image. A -man at Osaka made them by the gross, and he charged two pounds ten -a-piece for them to the trade. - -Fortunately, the dead know not the doings of the living, else would the -artistic Miochin family be turning eternally in their uneasy graves, -with the rapidity of spinning bobbins. - -Danjuro came out with his usual profound salute and low hiss. - -Hiss is perhaps not the proper word, for the sound is made by the intake -of air between closed teeth, and is intended to represent delight beyond -words. - -And, indeed, when Danjuro beheld M’Gourley entering with a client ready -to be shorn, the sound came from him as no empty compliment, but as a -natural expression of his true feelings. - -It was different as regards Leslie. Danjuro looked on Leslie with the -nervous dread with which you or I might look upon a mischievous lunatic. - -Leslie had once nearly spoiled a bargain—a delightful bargain from the -dealer’s point of view, a disgraceful swindle viewed by the cold light -of English ethics. - -An English Member of Parliament had been trepanned into paying two -hundred pounds for a pair of vases worth, maybe, twenty. Mac in his -jubilation boasted before Leslie, and Leslie had “put the stopper on,” -caused the money to be returned, with a note to the effect that the jars -were now discovered (from some documents connected with them) to be -imitation, and not as represented when bought. - -The Member of Parliament, instantly concluding that _this_ was a -swindle, and that he had obtained priceless articles by accident, -refused to accept the money, or return the jars. - -And thus was he done brown on his own spit, and basted by his own right -hand, for in his book of travels, “Amongst the Japs,” he mentioned the -transaction, and, worse still, sent a copy of the book to Danjuro, with -the passage marked with blue pencil. - -Dan read the passage with the aid of a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, -and with a face mirthless as a shovel. - -But the soul in him bubbled. He could quite understand the Member of -Parliament’s point of view, but Leslie’s was quite beyond his power to -grasp. - -Honesty for the sake of honesty, and without any ulterior reason, even -Art for Art’s sake was more understandable than that. - -So he hissed without pleasure as he bowed before Leslie and Jane, -imploring them to condescend to make the honorable entrance, and -intimating that everything in the place was theirs. - -Jane nodded to him, and looked round. - -“There’s one of the monstrosities I told you of that George bought the -other day,” said she, pointing to a bronze frog half as big as an -ordinary coal-box. “Oh, look at _that_!” - -She pointed to a furious struggle in bronze between a man and a monster. -The monster had opened its mouth to devour the man, and the man had -caught it by the tongue, which he was tearing out. - -It was the climax of the fight, and the conclusion one could read in the -triumphant ferocity of the man’s face—a thing to make one shudder. - -“Danjuro San,” said Leslie grimly, speaking in Japanese, whilst Jane -gazed at the fighting group, “this is the lady whose husband you and -M’Gourley San entertained the other day—the Red-headed One. She is a -friend of mine, and I pray you to entertain her differently.” - -This is a vague interpretation of the Japanese for “This is the lady -whose husband you swindled the other day, but if you play any of your -tricks with _her_, I’ll make you sit up—see?” - -To fight with a Japanese you must come to blows, for you can’t possibly -do it in words properly. The old Japanese who made the language had no -use for terms of abuse: swords were good enough for them. - -“I’ll have that,” said Jane, suddenly seizing the fat baby, the size of -a tangerine orange, done in ivory and engaged in feeding ivory ducks on -top of a lacquer cabinet, “and the ducks. Tell him to send them to the -hotel; you can fight with him about the price afterwards—and those two -vases; and oh, that ivory Mousmé with the umbrella—isn’t she sweet! I -don’t see anything else I want. _You_ have something, I want to make you -a present.” - -“I don’t want anything, I’m tired of curios.” - -“Well, you’ll just have to want something, for I’m going to make you a -present. I’ll give you this.” - -She took up a short sword in a carved ivory scabbard. On the ivory -handle of it was figured a grimacing god, dancing apparently. She drew -the blade, polished and razor-sharp, and then returned it to its sheath. - -“Take it; it will come in handy when those robbers you told us of last -night at dinner come again.” - -“I don’t want the thing; it’s unlucky to give knives.” - -“It’s not a knife, it’s a sword!” - -“All right,” said Leslie, “anything for peace;” and he took a great -sheet of rice paper from Danjuro and wrapped the thing carefully up. - -“Now,” said Jane, “I want something for langn-yappe, as they say in New -Orleans—something thrown in.” - -Danjuro declared that the whole shop was hers to do what she liked with. - -“I don’t want the whole shop,” said Jane, “but I’ll have that.” She took -possession of a tiny rose tree in the pot, a rose tree with blossoms the -size of farthings. - -“Now come.” - -“One moment,” said Leslie. - -His ear had caught a familiar sound. It came from the cellar where many -of Danjuro’s goods were stowed; it was the voice of Mac, and it came up -like the voice of the Hidden One in Campanula’s story. Mac evidently had -a victim in the cellar. Leslie went to the cellar stairs and listened. - -“I would not let him see you’re wanting it. Juist assume a casual -expreesion as if ye were na so vary carin’ whether ye got it or no’. -He’ll be sure to tell ye it’s a piece o’ Miochin—it is _not_.” - -“How much do you think it’s worth?” (A burly English voice, suggestive -of shepherd’s plaid trousers, a corporation, gold albert, and double -chin.) - -“All of fifty pounds, but not a penny more, not a penny more. Show him -the money; there’s not a Jap in Nagasaki can withstaund the sight of -goud—or notes.” - -“Look here, if you get it for forty, I’ll give you a ten per cent. -commission.” - -“Am no so very carin’ about commeesions; stull, as you offer it, I’ll -not say ‘No.’” - -The stork and tortoise were being sold again. - -Leslie turned away in disgust. - -“Come,” he said to Jane, “let’s go.” And they passed out into the sunlit -street, he carrying the parcel containing the sword, she the rose tree -done up in rice paper pictured vaguely with the forms of storks. - -“She has given him a wakizashi,” murmured Danjuro, and he retired into a -corner to smoke a whiff or two of hay-colored tobacco, and think -inscrutable thoughts, before addressing himself to the victim that Mac -was preparing down in the cellar. - -“What shall we do now?” asked Jane when they were in the street. - -Leslie thought for a moment. - -“I’ll tell you,” said he. “We’ll get rikshas and go to the cemetery—” - -“I’ll do no such thing,” said Jane promptly. - -“If you will allow me one moment—I’m not proposing to take you to a -place like Kensal Green. A Japanese cemetery is worth seeing, just as -much worth seeing as a Japanese town. Then we can go and have luncheon.” - -“Where?” - -“Would you like to go to an eel-house?” - -“Gracious, no! I hate eels. First a cemetery, and then an eel-house! I -have half a mind to go back to the hotel.” - -“Well, a tea house, then; we can go to the Tea House of a Thousand -Joys.” - -“Oh, that quite decides the matter,” said she, assuming an outraged air, -and hailing one of two rikshas that were passing. - -Leslie hailed the other, and quietly directed the riksha boys to the -cemetery. - - - - - CHAPTER XX - - THE SONG OF THE MUSHI - - -“It almost makes one wish one were dead,” sighed Jane. They were sitting -on a moss-grown tussock near a grave adorned with a fresh spray of -cherry-blossom, contained in a joint of bamboo. Beneath them the hill -stretched downwards, terrace after terrace, casting before their eyes -the cold color of marble, and the mournful green of cryptomeria trees, -the delicate tracery of ferns, and the glory of the wild camellias. -Beyond lay the blue of the harbor, black-blue where the wooded cliffs -met the water; from the water the hills led the eye past camphor woods -and the green of the young bamboo, up and away to where the brown of -their summits cut the dazzling azure of the sky. “I have never seen -anything so beautiful, so peaceful. What are you thinking of, Dick?” - -“I was thinking,” said Leslie, rousing himself, “that we might have -luncheon at my place.” - -“You are perfectly disgusting!” said Jane. “I’ll never go to a cemetery -with you again. Luncheon! Who wants luncheon here?” - -“Very few,” said he grimly, gazing over the tombs. - -“Now you’re trying to be smart—at the expense of these poor things. Ah! -look at that tiny grave with the white flower in the little vase.” - -“Some child.” - -“Yes; a thing with a great sash that was flying its kite or spinning its -top the other day, and now it’s here.” - -“Or hitting shuttlecocks about the street.” - -“Yes,” wiping her cheek where the shuttlecock had hit her—then -suddenly: “I think men are beasts,” addressing the distant hills. - -“I’m with you there.” - -“No, you’re not; all men are just the same.” - -“I suppose you mean to infer in a roundabout way that I’m a beast. -Thanks.” - -“There’s nothing to be thankful for, only—they don’t understand.” - -He took her hand in his as if to make friends, and she let him hold it -for a moment, then she suddenly drew it away. - -“Had not we better be going? What’s the time?” - -“Twelve.” - -“Will you come and have luncheon at the hotel?” - -“No, thanks; why not come and lunch at my place? I’ll give you all sorts -of funny Japanese things to eat. Luncheon won’t be till half-past one, -but you can have a talk with Campanula. It will only take us ten minutes -or so to get there from here.” - -They came down to where the rikshas were waiting; he helped her in, -tucked the linen apron round her, and gave the men their direction. - -Campanula San had not yet returned, declared Pine-breeze, as she -kow-towed before them on the matting. - -“Well, she won’t be long,” said Leslie. “Shall we go into the house or -the garden?” - -“The house,” replied Jane. “I’m tired of the sunlight; let’s go in, and -sit on the floor and talk.” - -“Right. But do you mind—” - -“What?” - -“Well, as a matter of fact, there’s a clause in the lease that no one is -to go in with their boots on.” - -“Why, for goodness sake?” - -“They say it spoils the matting.” - -“All right,” said Jane, holding up a small foot, and trying to unbutton -the shoe on it. - -“Let me,” said Leslie, going down on his knees. - -The shoe came off, and the little foot in its bronze silk stocking lay -in his hands for half a second—half a second during which he was seized -with a wild desire to kiss it. Next moment it was out of his hands, and -the other was presented to him. - -“You are all thumbs!” said Jane. “Do be quick! I’m not a stork to stand -on one leg for an hour. There, you’ve burst a button off! I knew you -would. Stupid!” - -“Pine-breeze will sew it on,” said he, hunting for the button on his -knees. - -“No, she won’t. It doesn’t in the least matter. Gracious, Dick! when I -see you just like that, crawling about on your knees—” - -“What?” - -“I can’t help remembering—Do you remember the rainy day at Glenbruach, -when you and I were playing marbles in the pistol gallery, and I said -you cheated, and you said you didn’t, and I said you did, and you called -me a liar?” - -“And you hacked my shins?” - -“Yes; and old Mrs. Johnstone, the housekeeper, came in and saw me and -said I was an ‘awfu’ lassie!’ Can it be that all that really happened, -and that we are the same people? Imagine me hacking your shins now! -Imagine us both playing marbles on the veranda!” - -“And we didn’t speak to each other for a day,” said he, following her -into the house. “And you looked so stiff and sour, and all of a sudden -you came up from behind and flung your arms round my neck.” - -“And you shouted: ‘Oh, get away, you little brute!’” - -“Yes; because I thought you were making another attack on me, and all -the time you only wanted to k—” - -“I didn’t. I only wanted to apologize.” - -“Well, apologize, then!” said he, arranging the cushions on the floor, -and placing the rose tree and the parcel containing the sword in a -corner. - -“It is sad to look so far away,” said she, taking as comfortable a -position as she could upon the cushions. “Life was so jolly then. Oh! a -good old day’s trout-fishing is worth all the money in the world. Money -is no use; what’s the good of it? It just makes one not care for the -simple pleasures of life. Do you remember the picnic you and I and those -American children, who were staying at Callander, had, when the -soda-water bottle burst, and we found we’d left everything behind but -the jam and the eggs? Dick, I—I—want to ask you something.” - -It was one of the peculiarities of Jane’s mind that a question -formulating there would work its way along like a worm, under, maybe, -ten minutes of conversation, and then come out at the end of a -paragraph, rise for air, so to speak, in a manner irrelevant and -sometimes startling. - -“Yes?” - -“What became of you all those three years before you came here to -Japan?—you vanished. You told me the other day you were in Australia; -were you?” - -“I was in prison.” - -She turned deathly pale, and stared at him as if he had struck her. - -“Oh, you need not be so alarmed; it was not a criminal but a social -prison. My father allowed me a hundred and fifty a year, paid quarterly, -as long as I lived in Sydney, and as I had no trade and no money I lived -in Sydney for three years—tied by the leg.” - -“I think you take a pleasure in frightening me; first you told me you -were a shopman, now a prisoner. Dick, why do you _always_ make your own -case out worse than it really is? Tell me, what was the last quarrel -with your father about?” - -“Debts.” - -“And, Dick—you know you used to—” - -“I know I used to drink, but I don’t drink now.” - -They were silent for a while, then he began to speak and tell her the -story of his life as a remittance man, and he did not spare black in the -composition of his picture. - -She listened at first interested and amused by the thought of Dick tied -by the leg in Sydney, hobbled, so to speak, and made to behave. - -Then her amusement gave way to compassion. She saw him wandering in the -Domain, by the sea-shore, in the streets, a lonely figure, a man with no -interest in life, an exile banned by society. - -She thought of all the men she knew and the number of them who were just -as wicked and foolish as Dick had ever been, yet who by keeping on the -right side of their bank balance retained their social position and the -respect of all men. - -And thinking of all this the heart in her was moved. A most dangerous -condition just now, for Jane, Bessemer steel in her everyday laughing -mood, became wax when her compassion was aroused. - -“Why didn’t you write and tell me?” said she. “I’d have gone and seen -your father. Oh, it was wicked to send you off like that, away from -every one. _How_ could a father treat his child so!” - -They were silent again for a moment. - -“Poor Dick!” said Jane suddenly, and she took his hand in both hers and -stroked it. A little shiver went through him. - -Then, all at once, she felt an arm around her waist and his breath upon -her cheek, and she did not try to take her hand from his or struggle, -nor, after the first second of troubled alarm, did she feel the wish to -struggle. - -She had ceased for the moment to be Jane du Telle, a married woman, a -person with a stainless reputation. All these facts were swept away by -nature, just as shrubs and fir trees are swept away by the rush of the -avalanche. - -A great faintness came over her. She clung to him, and sinking -backwards, fell upon the matting; his arms were around her, his breath -on her cheek, her lips were returning his kisses, yet all the time her -lips were murmuring: “Don’t—don’t—don’t!” - - * * * * * - -At this supreme moment came a sound strangely alien to the -situation—the jingling of tea-cups no less—and through the wall, or at -least the opening of a panel, entered Pine-breeze, followed by -Cherry-blossom, with the luncheon. - - * * * * * - -“Dick!” she cried, sitting up with her cheeks raging red, “tell them to -go away.” - -But Dick was not heeding her. He was sitting up with his hands to the -side of his head, and an expression on his face that made her almost -forget her own position before the Mousmés. - -“Do you hear it?” said he. - -“What?” - -“That noise, my God, that noise.” - -A tiny cage was hanging from a hook on the wall. In it was a thing much -beloved by Campanula—an insect like a grasshopper that sang a buzzing -and tremulous sort of song. The mushi was a creature that only sang by -night as a rule, but some spirit had moved its poetic soul, for it was -singing now. - -“It’s that thing in the cage,” said Jane, pointing to it tremulously, -thankful for any excuse to escape the glances of the Mousmés. - -He looked up, sprang to his feet, went to the cage, and tore it from its -hook. - -The Mousmés screamed out, for from his furious manner and the expression -of his face they felt he was about to dash cage and mushi on the -matting, and trample them underfoot. - -And he was, for one horrible moment. Then something in him -prevailed—the something that had made him pick the Lost One up and kiss -her, and carry her all the way to Nikko; the spirit of good that had -made him always not so bad as he might have been. - -He rehung the little cage on the hook, and the thing in it became dumb; -the sound in his head that troubled him had died away, and he returned -to where Jane was sitting, and resumed his position on the cushions near -her. - -Then he told the Mousmés to leave what they had brought on the floor, -and to go away till he called them. - -“Oh,” said Jane, when they were alone again, “to think they should have -seen me like that. Oh, _Dick_! How could we—how could I—” - -“_They_ don’t matter,” said he gloomily. - -“Oh, don’t _talk_ to me!” She wrung her hands. - -“For goodness sake,” said Leslie, “don’t make mountains out of -molehills. They saw me kiss you, well, what of that? and they don’t talk -English—at least, English that any one can understand.” - -“But like that on the floor,” murmured Jane, comforted somewhat by the -last statement. - -“Well, what of that? We are in Japan, where people live on the floor. I -admit if a servant in England came in and saw—” - -“_Don’t!_” screamed she; “don’t speak about it again. It was a moment of -weakness; let us forget it. I mean, let us _remember_ it as a -warning.” - -“Do you feel like eating luncheon?” he asked, looking at the pathetic -little dishes and tea-cups, each on its sea-green mat. - -“No; I feel like nothing. I only want to go and bury myself.” - -He poured her out some tea and took some himself. - -“You frightened me,” she said in a tremulous voice after they had sat -for a moment in silence. “I thought you were going to do something -dreadful.” - -“When?” - -“When you took that cage down with the buzzing thing in it that annoyed -you—poor atom!” - -“It didn’t annoy me; that was not the sound I heard. It was the sound I -heard in the dream I told you of—that devil—” - -A figure stood in the doorway: it was Campanula returned. - - - - - CHAPTER XXI - - M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR - - -Mac had gone down to the office that morning in a temper. - -The staff consisted of himself and Ah Hop Sing, the Chinese office boy. -He could not quarrel with himself, so he quarreled with Ah Hop Sing, -using a rattan cane to enforce the argument, till Ah Hop Sing hopped and -sang in a fashion that justified his title. - -Then Mac wrote business letters and whilst he wrote, the thoughts of -this dusty and unlovable-looking Scot went far astray on pleasant and -picturesque roads, under blue skies, by brakes all gay with the crimson -japonica flowers and the glorious beauty of the red camellias, and -beneath the solemn darkness of the cryptomeria woods of Nikko. - -That is to say, they would stray to these places, and then he would -recall them to indite letters of advice to Maconochie of Glasgow, a -letter of abuse to Mr. Oyama—a gentleman who never fulfilled his -contracts when they threatened loss, sheltering his business self behind -the ample kimono of the Tokyo guild—and letters to divers other people -in trade. - -And still his thoughts would stray whilst he gummed and stamped the -envelopes, and they would be buying dolls now at booths in Jinrikisha -Street, or helping to fly kites at the House of the Clouds. - -They would stand watching a small person playing kitsune-ken with -another person of her own age; and the same small person laboring up the -Hill to the House of the Clouds, burdened with a bundle of books, and -sheltered beneath a many-ribbed crimson umbrella. - -Then they would glance at the same person, bigger grown, and suddenly -become beautiful; then they would heave their shoulders and sigh, and -all come back to help in the addressing of a letter to M’Clintock of -Osaka, or some other magnate of the Jap Rubbish Trade. - -Mac was in love, as I have before indicated: in love with three people. -A tiny dot in a blue kimono and stiff sash; a person somewhat similarly -dressed, whom he had sometimes helped of evenings with her lessons, or -watched as she pricked her fingers over needlework; and a Mousmé as -pretty as seven. - -He had been in love for years without knowing it; a flower had been -growing in this dusty soil, where one could not fancy any green thing -finding nutriment, unless, perhaps, a weed. A white flower, pure and -without stain. - -Nothing could be more ideal than this love, nothing with legs and arms -attached to it could be more un-ideal than Mac. And the strange thing -was that this pure blossom of the soul did not improve the soul it grew -from a bit, at least as far as human eye could see, for the man of the -Great Tung Jade and the Lessar papers incidents was, morally, just the -same—worse, if anything—as the wailing clients of Danjuro could -testify. - -When Campanula was alone with Leslie in these later days, she wore a -grave and thoughtful air. Watching her, one could perceive that he alone -possessed her mind; all the quaint and charming ways of her childhood, -all things frivolous and light, she seemed to have dropped and left -behind her with her toys. - -When Campanula was quite alone with M’Gourley, a subtle change came over -her. The child came out and played. - -Though Leslie had adopted her as a daughter, she had by no means adopted -him as a father. - -Tod M’Gourley was her adoptive father, or, at least, she treated him as -such. He acted also as uncle, aunt, grandmother, brother and general -playmate all combined; and any half-holiday during the last few years, -you might have seen Campanula and her family strolling along Jinrikisha -Street, or on the Bund: the family in an old top hat, black broadcloth -suit, and bearing a gamp umbrella in its hard fist. - -They would stray together through the wonders of the town, Mac and she, -and pause and gaze in at shops like two children, buy sweets and eat -them unashamed and openly. Stop to look at performing monkeys, or listen -to street ballad-singers, or criticize passing funerals. - -He had never seen so much of life round town as Campanula showed him, -clapping beside him in her little clogs when the streets were damp, or -gliding beside him sandal-shod in the warm, dry days of spring. - -Where Campanula was concerned, this dour and dusty Scot had all the -delicate and instinctive feelings of a woman; he had noticed “fine” the -change that had come over her of late, and the change in her manner -towards Leslie. - -The thing pleased him, yet it made him sigh—and frown, when he called -to mind “that wumman,” the mental label he had attached to Jane du -Telle. - -When he had finished business he went to Danjuro’s shop, where he had an -appointment, as we have seen, with an Englishman. The Englishman having -been duly plundered, Mac looked at his watch, found it was nearly -twelve, and was struck by a bright idea. - -He would go to the House of the Clouds, fetch Campanula out, and have -luncheon with her. - -Ten minutes later found him on the veranda. - -Campanula had just returned, having left O Toku San. - -M’Gourley sat down on the veranda, and Campanula sat down beside him on -a little fur rug made from the skin of an Ounce, or some such small -animal. She looked sad and depressed, and her eyes wandered about the -landscape garden as if questioning its hills, its streams, its old, old -forests. - -“Campanula,” said Mac, taking her little hand between his great rough, -red paws, “what ails you, child? You look sad and fashed, what’s been -worrying you?” - -“I have been to see O Toku San,” replied Campanula, speaking in -Japanese. “She is dying. Her heart is dead,” said Campanula, putting her -other little hand over her own heart. “I am—oh, so sad! for to-day the -thought of death has come to me, a thought that I never knew before.” - -“Child, child,” said M’Gourley, “dinna speak like that. We must all die -soon or later—ay, ay, we must all die, sure enough.” - -“But not so sadly as she,” replied Campanula with a little sob. - -M’Gourley looked at her; she was in tears. - -He drew her close to him just as a mother might have done, and held her -to him whilst she rested her head against his old coat, and sobbed and -wept like a little child, gazing at the landscape garden through the -veil of her tears. - -He rocked her gently to soothe her, but said nothing, holding her just -as he had held her that day in the gardens of Dai Nichi Do, as if to -protect her against Death, as he had that day protected her against the -vision of the terrible Akudogi. - -Her sobs slowly ceased, but still she kept her cheek rested against his -coat. - -“What is Death?” she suddenly asked. The question was quite beyond -M’Gourley. - -“Dinna ask me,” he said. “It’s what we all must come to some day.” - -“And will O Toku San see him she loved when she goes—there?” continued -she, as if unheeding his reply. “Perhaps”—after a long pause—“he will -know her love for him when he too is there, and make her happy.” - -“Mayhap,” said M’Gourley, who did not know the facts of the case, or -perhaps he would not have taken so cheerful a view of O Toku San’s -lover’s future state. “Mayhap.” He looked down at her little face. Her -eyes were dry, but a tear was still wet on her cheek. He took out his -handkerchief and dried it. - -Campanula smiled faintly, pressed her cheek ever so slightly against his -arm as if in thanks, and drew away from him, resuming her position on -the little rug. - -M’Gourley took out his pipe, lit it, and began to smoke. - -“Now,” said he, “just put on those sandal shoes of yours again, for I am -going to take you out with me.” - -“Where?” asked Campanula. - -“No matter where,” replied Mac, rising from the veranda. “A nice place -where you and I’ll go—you and I together, as we did along the Nikko -road, only not on my shoulder. Na, na! you’re ower big for that. Do you -remember the sugar-candy dragon?” - -“Ah! the Hon. Dragon!” replied she in the vernacular, as she bent to -pass the sandal-strap past the great toe of her white tabi. “He is -upstairs with—other things, but the Hon. Dragon is very old now.” - -Then she took her umbrella and opened it, and M’Gourley and she passed -down the path to the gate. - -He held the gate open for her, and she passed through with a murmured -word of thanks, and then she led the way down hill under the perfumed -beauty of the lilac boughs. - -About half-way down, Campanula stepped aside as if to let some one pass. -M’Gourley, close on her heels, and in a reverie, did the same thing -unconsciously. If someone had passed, that someone must have effaced -himself amidst the lilac trees on the left of the path. - -“Poor blind man!” said Campanula, looking back up the path. - -“Whoat?” cried Mac. “Whoat did y’ say?” - -“Blind man,” replied Campanula; “he who came last night—you remember!” - -M’Gourley took off his old top hat, and drew his coat sleeve across his -forehead. Beads of sweat had sprung there all of a sudden. - -He stood for a second or two looking at Campanula, and then for a second -or two looking up the path, pied with sunshine and shadow, the pretty -path that for him had suddenly been made horrible. There was nothing to -be seen, nothing but the sunshine and shadow. - -“My eyes are growing auld,” he said at length. “Do you see him still, -Campanula?” - -She had turned away to look at a fern that was growing on the bank. - -“I do not see him now,” she replied. “He has gone through the gate.” - -“Are you sure,” said Mac, speaking in a subdued voice, “that he was the -same man that came last night?” - -Campanula was quite sure. - -“Wait for me,” said Mac, “and I’ll run up and tell them to give him some -food.” - -He came hurriedly back up the path, very much against his will. - -There was nobody in front of the house, he went round to the kitchen. -The Mousmés were there, preparing luncheon—at least, preparing to -prepare it in a leisurely way. - -Had they seen anyone about the house, a blind man? - -No, they had seen nobody, only the poulterer, who had been with eggs an -hour ago. - -Had they seen a blind man last night—had a blind man called round at -the kitchen to ask for food? - -No; nobody had been for food to the kitchen last night, least of all a -blind man. - -Then Mac hurried off, and the Mousmés dropped everything to discuss the -meaning of all these questions asked by the Learned One; and Pine-breeze -embarked on a story about two blind men and a frog, and the fox-faced -representative of the rice god, a story that put the luncheon back half -an hour. - -Campanula was plucking flowers when Mac returned. Just three or four -with a delicate fern frond, such a charming little bouquet, a veritable -work of art made in a moment with unerring taste and a few turns of her -deft fingers. She made Mac bend, and fixed the tiny bouquet in his -coat-lapel. - -Then they pursued their way, Mac vastly perturbed in his mind. - -There was just now living in the pleasant city of Nagasaki an inn-keeper -of the name of Yamagata, who owned a tea house named “The Full-blown -Peony Flower.” - -Mr. Yamagata was a Progressive. He believed that a tea house where a -real English luncheon or dinner could be obtained would, judging from -his compatriots’ passion for things European, be a success. - -And it was, till half Jinrikisha Street nearly died of indigestion. - -His tea house was a tiny affair situated up an entry near Danjuro’s -shop, and surrounded by a little courtyard, wherein grew -dyspeptic-looking plum trees in pale amber-colored pots. - -Danjuro, who was a friend of Yamagata’s, had been chanting the praises -of the place so long, that Mac had become obsessed by the idea of it; -and casting about for somewhere new to take Campanula, the idea had -turned up like a horrible sort of trump card. - -The tea house was on its last legs, and practically deserted, so they -had the place to themselves; and having ordered the meal they sat on the -matting of a desolate room and waited for it to come. - -“Campanula,” said Mac, “you have never seen that blind man before?” - -She shook her head. - -“Never; nor one so ugly as he.” - -“Campanula,” said Mac earnestly, “if you see him again dinna speak with -him; he’s an ill man and bodes no good.” - -Oh, indeed, she did not wish to speak with him, but he was so old and -poor and ugly she could not but feel sorrow for him; and he said last -night that he had come such a long way off, and must soon return. - -M’Gourley shuddered. - -“Ay,” said he to himself, “a dom long way off;” then to Campanula: “Said -he anything else?” - -“No,” replied Campanula, “for I told him to go to the back entrance, and -he went.” - -At this moment the soup was brought in by three somewhat faded-looking -Mousmés, each armed with a plate, a real English soup plate. - -The soup was thin and not exuberantly hot, but it seemed vastly to amuse -Campanula when it was put before her. “A,” said she, pointing with her -spoon-tip to something at the bottom of the plate, “B—C”—she was -pointing to the little Italian paste letters floating, or rather sunk, -in the mixture. “D—and look—a cow!” - -Mac looked over to admire. - -“Ay, ay, it’s a coo, right enough, an’ there’s a cock and hen; but eat -it up before it gets cold.” - -Campanula ate her alphabet, and the next course appeared. A boot sole -labeled a beef-steak, which vanished, uneaten, and was replaced by what -seemed to be an old stone cannon-ball, such as they used to fire out of -Mons Meg. The O.S.C.B. was labeled a pudding. - -It was the caricature of an ordinary English middle-class country -luncheon. - -But it was an amazingly clever caricature: a perfect work of art. - -After luncheon, M’Gourley returned to business, and Campanula to the -House of the Clouds. - - - - - CHAPTER XXII - - THE COMPLETE GEOGRAPHER - - -On the way, she stopped at the shop of Mr. Initogo to pay a visit to her -friend Kiku. - -Campanula in her school-days had shown both qualities and defects of -mind. At languages, at least in learning the English language, she was a -success; a very moderate success where mathematics were concerned, -though she knew enough to do long division, and to keep household -accounts. They teach a lot of useful things at the mission -schools—needlework, and so forth, and in some of these branches -Campanula shone, but at geography she was a dismal failure. She had been -always lacking in the power of location. Witness her first statements as -to the whereabouts of the house with the plum tree in front of it. - -The long sea voyage from Tokyo, or rather from Yokohama, had brought -into her mind the impression that she had traveled to the end of things, -yet they told her there were things beyond. - -They showed her maps and globes. The maps were flat, and the globes were -round, yet they said they were the same thing, or were pictures of the -same thing. How a flat thing could be round or the converse, she could -not say, but Howard San, the missionary, said they were. Was it for her -to contradict him? So, instead of setting up her own wits against Howard -San, and questioning him, she accepted his words just as you or I accept -the words of mathematicians or physiologists concerning subjects on -which we are ignorant. And thus on geography she got hopelessly muddled, -and remained so. - -This morning she was lamenting her want of geography, and casting about -for some friend learned in the art. Of course she might have gone to -Howard San, but she would have to wait till school was over, and, -besides she felt a certain diffidence in approaching him on the subject, -so she turned to the shop of Mr. Initogo. - -Mr. Initogo was sitting on his heels on the floor of his shop, engaged -in the gentle art of making tea; it was one of his fads that he always -made his own tea with his own hands. Beside him stood an hibachi, on -which a kettle was coming to the boil; before him, a tea-cup without a -handle on a tray, and a microscopic tea-pot. - -He warmed the tea-cup with a few drops of hot water; then, from a -cylindrical tea-canister, with a thing like a snuff-scoop, he took a -small quantity of green tea—tea of the color that an old black coat -turns after years of sun and rain—this he popped into the tea-pot. - -Then the honorable hot water being ready, he poured it into a porcelain -dish to let it cool slightly, which it did, becoming converted during -the act into the honorable old hot water. - -The honorable old hot water being now ready, he poured it into the -tea-pot, popped on the lid, looked up, and saw Campanula. - -So immersed in his darling employment had he been, that he had not -observed her entrance. - -She wished to see Kiku? She was upstairs; this with a thousand apologies -for his own blindness, and comparisons of himself with worms and other -sightless things. - -Campanula knew the way up; she had been up often enough before, and up -she went. - -Kiku San, since we hinted at her as a playmate of Campanula, had grown. -The tumbling tot that Leslie had once caught by the “scruff” of her obi -and held out at arm’s length wriggling, for the amusement of M’Gourley, -had become a Mousmé with a face at once heavy and flighty-looking; a -broad face, pretty enough, but with a maddeningly irresponsible -expression. - -Pine-breeze was bad enough in the irresponsible line, but she could have -learnt much from Kiku. - -She was the dunce, or, rather, had been the dunce at the mission school; -this is not saying very much against her, for Japanese girls are -amazingly quick in the “uptake,” learning coming to them as easily as -ignorance to English girls; all the same she had been the dunce. She had -never been able to conquer the letter “l” in English; and would say -“raidy” for “lady;” yet she had a memory of sorts, blocks of facts swam -in the ocean of her unintelligence like those houses that float about -after an inundation of the Mississippi. - -But the place left vacant in her skull by want of learning was by no -means devoid of a tenant; therein dwelt a colossal impudence, a supreme -self-assurance that sheltered and helped to hide the nakedness of her -mind, and even obtained for her, amongst her girl friends, a sort of -fungoid reputation for cleverness. - -For when Kiku San said a thing, she said it with such assurance that it -seemed true—the assurance of the absolutely untrustworthy intellect, -which of all assurances is the greatest. - -She was sitting now on her heels in a bare room on the upper floor, a -tobacco-mono at her side, and in her hands a round flat box with a glass -lid. She was playing at Pigs-in-Clover. - -The two Mousmés bowed to one another with great ceremony, enquiring -after each other’s honorific health, and then Campanula came to rest -upon the matting opposite to her friend. - -They formed a pretty picture in the bare room with its chess-board -matting, against the bare walls, whose only ornament was a kakemono -representing Fuji San crested with snow. - -Kiku was soon to be married—married to a government clerk to whom she -had been engaged nearly since birth; and she entertained Campanula with -long and uninteresting descriptions of her husband-to-be, his mother, -his father, his grandfather, who lived at Nagoya, his brothers and -sisters, how old they were and all about them. - -Kiku was a bore, a female bore of the first water, and in this respect -she could have given any old member of the Rag or Carlton points, and -beaten him. - -She told all these things looking up from under her thick eyelids, and -with a half-smile, and Campanula listened, half mesmerized, wholly -weary, but with all her courteous soul awake to do honor to the tale. - -At last an hiatus occurred of which Campanula took advantage to ask the -question in her mind. - -Did Kiku, so learned on all subjects, know of any land where the snow -lay for half the year? - -Oh, certainly Kiku did, and she told about it. - -Describing her future husband and his relations she had been vague and -uninteresting, lacking, as she did, the gifts of perception and -narration. But now, plunging into the empire of pure lies, she spoke -with an assurance that made her words sound like gospel. - -Such a country existed; as a matter of fact, she had it all in a book -somewhere, but she did not need the book, as she never forgot anything. -It lay in the sea beyond Nankin two hundred and sixty-seven ri beyond, -and the snow lay there half a year, sometimes more. - -“Is it a country where blue flowers grow, and roses—sometimes?” said -Campanula. - -“Just so, sometimes;” and Kiku, searching in the capacious bag of her -ignorance, began to produce old broken-up facts that had been lying -there like rubbish in the basket of a chiffonier. - -The sea all round that place was frozen most of the year, and the sun -shone once a month or so. - -Then she painted a graphic picture of this desolate land which she -declared to be divided into four parts, Unster, Munster, Rinster and -Comit; and Campanula sat listening and receiving it all as truth. - -Liars, somehow, are always sure of an audience; you and I, who speak the -truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, languish in -conversation and are not heard, whilst your mendacity-monger holds the -floor and absorbs the interest. - -So Kiku San went on spinning her tale, and Campanula San sat opposite to -her and listened, shivering at the dismal pictures being raised before -her. - -Then, all at once, from below came the irate voice of Mr. Initogo -calling Kiku the “Heedless One.” If he could have used a stronger -expression he would have used it, for the dinner ought to be cooking at -this moment, and the fish and seaweed had not arrived. The Heedless One -had been, as a matter of fact, playing at Pigs-in-Clover all the morning -instead of marketing. - -The Complete Geographer rose to her feet in a hurry, for filial -obedience resided in her breast, not so much as a virtue, but rather as -a sort of mainspring put in by nature—or rather, I should say, -heredity. - -They went out together, and Kiku bought the fish and the seaweed and a -few other important items, and then they parted, Kiku returned home -laden with marketings, and Campanula to the House of the Clouds. - - - - - CHAPTER XXIII - - THE STRUGGLE - - -Leslie walked back to the hotel that day with Jane. When he left her he -was vastly troubled in his mind. Troubled about Jane, troubled about -Campanula, troubled about himself, and troubled about a vast, vague, -tragic something: a shadow stealing up from his past and already -tingeing his future with the twilight that comes before eclipse. - -What demon had called Jane up from the past? - -Unconsciously during the last five years he had been altering for the -better. The friendliness and kindness of Japan, the frank friendliness -of M’Gourley, that most unconscionable Scot, the beauty of the flowers -and seasons, and Campanula—above all, Campanula—these things had -worked upon him with slow but sure effect. - -Slowly, he had learnt the great, great secret that happiness is to be -found, not in grand palaces, not in wealth, not in success, but amongst -the lowly and little things of life, the things that no man can -appreciate who has not a free and untroubled conscience. - -The new book, the pipe of tobacco smoked beneath the cherry trees of a -morning, the home-coming of Campanula from school of an evening laden -with books and perplexities, the rubber of whist with Mr. Initogo, the -quaint, funny things that are always happening in a Japanese -household—these and a thousand other trifles had made up the sum of his -life, and the addition of them made happiness. - -And Campanula—he little knew how much she had entered into his -being—what a multitude of impalpable threads bound her to him, threads -that had been spinning from the very first day, when he found her lost -amidst the crimson azaleas! - -He had eaten the lotus for nearly five years; he had been preparing a -future of happiness and peace, and who knows what boundless -possibilities of love? - -Suddenly, Satan had appeared before him with the command, “Get up and -fight, fight me for this future you have been preparing for yourself; -fight me for the beauty of it, the happiness you will have in it, the -happiness you will make for others in it; get it if you can, for my -weapon is Lust.” - -That night, when the moon, now waxing stronger, laid her patient square -of pure white light on the floor of his room, the battle began in -earnest. - -He had determined on going to Arita on the morrow to get away for a -while from the woman against whom he felt fate was driving him with -ruinous intent. - -Now, as he lay alone, with the powers of good and evil on either side of -him, he reviewed his position clearly for the first time. - -The cold, calculating, sneaking, pickpocket form of adultery, which is -the canker at the heart of English society—to put it in plain English, -the bestial use of another man’s wife behind his back—was a form of -crime as unthinkable to Leslie as the crime of cheating at cards, or -forging a check. - -To obtain the woman he wanted, there was only one way. The open way. - -That meant the smashing up of everything around him. He must leave -Japan, leave Campanula, for, deep in his heart, something told him that -Campanula could have no place in that new life. It meant the social ruin -of Jane du Telle. - -Here, alone, away from the object of his passion, all this was very -clear. - -Then that same old Scotch ancestor, with the long upper lip, and the -crude common sense, and the rigid belief in God and the law, came out of -his cell and spoke to this effect. There is no excuse before God or man -for adultery. Love, the child of God, has no part therein, but Lust, the -child of the devil, and the end of Lust is Hell. - -All this, with the thoughts that went before it, was edifying and made -for good, and the devil said nothing, for the devil, like the great -Boyg, has a method with some natures. He does not strike, but lets the -victim do the striking, hedging him gently, gently, letting him hit out -widely till he is exhausted, or beats himself to death as the Blind One -beat himself against the trees. - -Early in the morning Leslie rose, white and haggard, and dressed, and -went off to the station without waiting for breakfast. - -“Tell Campanula San I am going to Arita on business, but will be back -to-night. Tell her I am going alone,” he said to Pine-breeze. - -“Kashko marimashta,” murmured Pine-breeze, in a voice of devotion, and -he departed. - -He was going to Arita to get beyond the reach of Jane, and lo! when he -got into the railway carriage, she was there—not in the flesh, but in -the spirit. And when he alighted at Arita, she was on the platform, and -in the street she walked at his side. - -The tones of her voice thrilled him, and he smelt the perfume of her -hair, he felt the curve of her waist, and his lips felt the satin of her -throat, but the physical desire was small compared with the terrible -sentiment that was born of it, the heart-breaking longing inspired by -her idealized image. - -Passion, when it rises to this dimension in the mind of a man, has -beautiful attributes as well as vile, it holds in its hands pictures of -perfect innocence, besides the others. - -The devil takes care of that! - -He saw Jane not only as she was, but as she had been, fair, and fresh, -and innocent, against the background of the beeches round Glenbruach, -and the sea lochs, and the purple hills. - -What he did with his body that day in Arita, or where he wandered, he -could never tell, for his mind was fighting a battle so fierce that all -intelligent perception of outward things was blurred. - -At the end of it he found himself in a tea house sitting before some -food which he had apparently ordered, and the battle was won. So he told -himself. - -As a matter of fact, he was worn out. Passion was exhausted, fighting -against fate, attempting to escape from the pursuing devils, beating -himself against the trees, he had fallen beneath them, telling himself -that the battle was won, wondering at himself that he ever could have -even dreamed of the ruinous course of action which lust had urged him -to. - -But the trees remained steadfast and unharmed, waiting only for the -renewal of the madman’s strength and the inevitable end. - -It was dark when he reached the Nagasaki station. He picked a riksha -from a row of them standing outside with hoods up, for it had been -raining slightly, and looking absurdly like a row of tiny, unhorsed -hansom cabs, and told the man to take him to the House of the Clouds. - -He came up the hill-path, and as he came the wind, blowing against him, -brought a perfume with it, the perfume of rain-wet azaleas. During the -day and the previous night dozens of blossoms had broken forth, filling -the garden with their fragrance and beauty; dozens more would be born -ere the morrow under the light of the silvery moon now gliding up over -the hill-tops behind a tracery of flying, fleecy clouds. - -As he approached the house, he saw through the open panel space the -silhouettes of Pine-breeze and Cherry-blossom. - -They were sitting opposite to each other on their heels upon the lamplit -matting, and seemed at first to be engaged in the game of kitsune-ken, -but almost instantly he perceived that they were playing at no game, but -were engaged in conversation. Alarmed conversation, to judge by the -movements of their hands, now up-flung, now flung out sideways. -Sweetbriar San was promenading the matting with tail fluffed out, now -rubbing against Pine-breeze, now against Cherry-blossom, attempting -apparently to join in the conversation, and seeming to share in the -excitement. - -Something had happened of a tragic nature—but what? Two steps brought -him on to the veranda two more into the house with his boots on, despite -the clause in the lease. - -The Mousmés gave two little shrieks, wheeled round, and kow-towed before -the August One. - -“What is the matter?” he asked. “Has anything happened? Is Campanula San -safe?” - -Campanula San was quite safe. - -Then why all this? What had they been conversing about with so many -exclamations? - -Confused replies. - -“Go,” he said, “and bring me some tea, and ask Lotus-bud to come -hither.” - -In a few moments Lotus-bud, wearing a very white face, appeared, and -kow-towed. - -He questioned her. At first her answers were vague, and then it all came -out. - -Things had happened. Campanula San had gone into the town that day, and -had met he whose head was like the rising sun (George du Telle in plain -prose); and he with the sun-bright head had walked with her, and had -spoken dishonorable words. Oh, shame!—he had offered her gold. - -“God!” said Leslie, staring at the bent figure on the matting before -him. - -He remained speechless for a moment, then he took out his watch and -looked at it: it was eleven o’clock. - -He turned furiously and strode out of the room: on the veranda he -stopped like a horse suddenly reined in. - -Jane’s image had appeared before him, turning him back. - -Suppose he were to go to the hotel now and drag George du Telle out and -beat him within an inch of his life, as was his intention a moment ago? - -The idea of Jane in the midst of that scene brought his fury down from -boiling point. - -He returned to the room, where Lotus-bud was still on her knees, with -her hands clasped. - -Where was Campanula San now? - -In bed and asleep. She had returned, it seems, greatly troubled at noon, -and had confided her trouble to Lotus-bud, making her promise to tell no -one—Leslie San especially—and Lotus-bud had promised—with the result -we have already seen. - -For a moment he thought of waking Campanula, but he dismissed the -thought. The thing had occurred and was irremediable, the question now -remained, what was he to do about George du Telle. - -He went up to bed. In times past he could have obtained his remedy. - -Where lay his remedy now? The law could do nothing; there remained only -physical force. - -A wheezy pug dog protected by a woman’s skirts, that is what George du -Telle was. Leslie knew that if once he could catch the brute by the -scruff of the neck, the only struggle would be with himself as to the -limits of chastisement to be inflicted. - -If he could only get him away from Jane up a back street anywhere, just -for five minutes! The thing was to be done. With the help of the astute -M’Gourley he felt it was to be done, and would be done on the morrow. - -He got up and went to a rack on the wall where he kept his sticks, and -took down a whangee cane half an inch thick, a most efficient instrument -for the chastisement of a brute. He made it sing through the air, then -he put it on the rack again and returned to bed, and slept soundly, far -more soundly than he had slept the night before. - - - - - CHAPTER XXIV - - GEORGE DU TELLE - - -He was awakened by voices. Sunlight was streaming into the room, the -sparrows were bickering round the trees, and from below came the voice -of Pine-breeze crying, “Irashi, condescend to enter!” - -Then Jane’s voice: “I don’t understand what you say. Stop rubbing the -matting with your nose. I want your master.” Then an octave higher, -“Richard!” - -“Hullo!” cried Leslie, leaning on his elbow, and scarcely able to credit -his ears. - -“Oh, you are there! Come down at once, I must speak to you. Quick!” - -“What on earth has happened?” - -“All sorts of things.” - -“I’ll be down in two minutes, but for goodness sake tell me what _is_ -the matter.” - -“Can I speak without any one understanding?” - -“Oh, that’s all right.” - -“Well, then, George has bolted.” - -“George has _what_?” - -“Gone away.” - -“Where has he gone to?” - -“Oh! come down and I’ll tell you everything. Dick! Dick! is that a bath -I hear you dragging over the floor? Dick, if you dare to have the -impudence to keep me waiting whilst you take a bath, I’ll—I’ll come up -and pull you out of it. Do come on!” - -“Directly!” - -“Well, don’t be long,” grumbled Jane; and she apparently took her seat -on the cushions upon the matting, for he could hear her grumbling about -the absence of chairs. - -This was a new development of affairs. George bolted! It was just what -one might have expected of the man, to insult a girl and then fly from -the wrath to come. - -It was rather a relief, too, viewed by the light of morning. No man -likes the task of thrashing a dog that has misbehaved: the thing has to -be done, but it is unpleasant, and if the creature runs away and hides, -so much the better. And the thrashing of a fat, wheezy pug without teeth -or means of defense was what the punishment of George du Telle would -amount to. - -He dressed rapidly and came down to the room where Jane was sitting on a -cushion, trying to read the _Japan Mail_. - -“Oh, there you are! Come and sit down. No, not beside me; right -opposite, if you please.” - -“Tell me all about it.” - -“Oh, there’s not much to tell. I was in bed nearly all yesterday with a -headache, and George went off for a walk in the afternoon; said he was -going to call on _you_. I told him you had gone to Nagoya.” - -“Arita.” - -“It’s all the same—then he went out, I don’t know where, and that is -the last I’ve seen of him. At nine yesterday evening they brought me a -note saying he had gone to Osaka, and to follow with our luggage.” - -Leslie whistled. - -“What are you whistling about?” - -“Osaka! Why, that’s over three hundred miles away!” - -“Where is it?” - -“On the Inland Sea.” - -“Where’s that?” - -“Oh, it runs from here up to—well, practically to Osaka. At least, it -doesn’t exactly reach from here, you have to go through the Straits of -Tsu-shima.” - -“Well, I don’t care what Straits you have to go through; he’s gone to -Osaka on important business the note said. Now, what business can have -taken him there. What do they do at Osaka?” - -“Make all sorts of things, from machinery to tea-pots, and so on.” - -“Well, he can’t have gone to buy machinery or tea-pots—what can it -_mean_? He was so good, too, yesterday; brought me up some antipyrine, -and wanted to fetch a doctor, and plumped up my pillows, and then went -out and off to Osaka without a word, and how did he get there? He says -follow by next boat to-morrow. I was going to ask the hotel people, but -I didn’t like to. I just told them I knew he was going, and I was going -to follow him to-morrow.” - -“There’s no railway to Osaka,” said Leslie, “for this bit of Japan is an -island. He must have gone by a Holt liner; one started last evening. The -Canadian Pacific boats don’t stop at Osaka, they go right on to -Yokohama. I suppose he means for you to follow by the Messagerie boat -that leaves to-morrow evening.” - -“I’ll give him tea-pots,” said Jane gloomily, “when I catch him! The -idea of his leaving me like that! In a strange country, too. I wonder -_what_ is the meaning of it all!” - -“Perhaps he went away—because of a girl.” - -“You mean he’s run away with some girl!” flashed Jane. “Why don’t you -say so if you mean it?” - -“Because I don’t mean it. I said ‘because of a girl,’ not ‘with a -girl.’” - -“Dick, you know something!” - -“Yes, I do.” - -Jane turned pale, and he hated to see her like that, but he had suddenly -made up his mind to tell her all. - -“He met Campanula yesterday afternoon, and, not to put too fine a point -upon it, insulted her.” - -“Oh, Dick!” said Jane, turning, if possible, paler than before. She -stared at him in a frightened way, then she recovered herself. “There -must be some mistake; she must have misunderstood him. He couldn’t have -done such a thing; however foolish he may be, he’s a gentleman.” - -“Yes, a gentleman in England, but not a gentleman in Japan. He—God damn -it!” blazed out Leslie suddenly, bringing his fist down with a bang on -the matting—“he offered her money.” - -“I must go to him at once,” said Jane, making as if to rise, “and ask -him if this thing is true.” - -“Sit down for a while; you can’t possibly get to Osaka to-day. Oh, it’s -true enough. I was in a boiling rage last night when I came home and -heard it all. I was going down to the hotel with a stick to have it out, -and then I thought of you, and the disgrace and uproar there would be, -so I just bit on the bullet and went to bed. Honestly, I was going to -have got him somewhere by himself to-day, and have it out with him, but -it seems he prefers insulting women to facing men. Forgive me, Jane, for -all this; I feel bitter about it, but I hate to have to say these things -to you.” - -“It was good of you to think of me last night,” said Jane in a broken -voice, gazing at the matting as she spoke, then looking up full in his -face, “very good of you.” - -“Oh, I suppose it’s really nothing, after all,” he said. “Those -confounded fools that write books about Japan have got it into English -people’s heads that every ‘Jap-girl,’ as they call them, is a -what’s-its-name at heart. Let’s say no more on the matter, the affair is -closed. Have some breakfast?” - -“No, thanks; I’m too much troubled and worried,” said Jane, sighing and -folding her hands in her lap. - -“Oh, don’t trouble about it. I told you because—well, I thought you -ought to know.” - -“Richard,” said she, looking up, “if you meet George again—” - -“Don’t be a bit alarmed. I will do nothing to him except to cut him. He -has run away; that closes the affair entirely. A man can only be really -angry with a man.” - -“Richard,” said she, now half tearfully, “I’m going to say something I -want to say. Men don’t understand women. I’m fond of George. Men are -always talking about love, and so are novels. I never loved George that -way. I don’t think I ever loved any one really in that way, but I have -an affection for George; I suppose that is the best name to give it. I -know he’s ugly, I know he’s a lot of things he ought not to be, yet I -feel he belongs to me. - -“It’s the sort of feeling one has for an—for an animal. I’m just -telling you what I feel. An animal may be terribly ugly, yet one may -love it. George has been very good to me, and he has grown into my life; -that is the only way I can express it. - -“Do you know, Dick, when you have your face very close to another -person’s face you cannot tell what they are like. Well, it’s just the -same with marriage. After people have been married some time they don’t -see each other as they saw each other before; they have lost their -identity—each is part of the other. And, Dick, I know George has been -wicked, but ought we not to remember, the day before yesterday—” - -“Yes,” he said; “the day before yesterday I kissed you.” - -“It was a moment of weakness on my part,” continued Jane. “We are all -very weak and wicked, but I have always been faithful to my husband—I -should say, to myself. It is strange to talk like this.” - -“The whole affair is closed,” he said. “Let us wipe the slate clean and -begin again.” - -Sitting opposite to her here in the morning light he was a very -different person from the man wandering about Arita yesterday, pursued -by her image. - -The course of a great passion like his is not a high level line. If a -man were to live through such a phase of existence at Italian opera -heights he would be mad or dead in a very few days. - -Its course is most like the temperature chart of a typhoid fever case: -tremendous ups and downs, fever point now, a few hours later almost -normal. - -He clapped his hands, and Pine-breeze appeared. - -“Breakfast,” he said. “You’ll stay to breakfast,” turning to Jane. “And -there is something I forgot day before yesterday. You have come to see -Japan—well, look here—” - -He went to a big lacquer cabinet where he kept his papers, and returned -with a large, square, cream-colored card covered with Chinese -ideographs. - -“What is it?” said Jane, turning it over. - -“An invitation to a garden-party. A man named Kamamura is giving it -to-morrow at O-Mura.” - -“A Japanese garden-party!” said Jane, with interest in her voice. - -“Yes, very Japanese. He told me to bring any of my friends.” - -“But to-morrow,” said Jane—“I am going away to-morrow.” - -The words went through him like a pang. - -“Never mind,” he said. “Your boat does not start till evening; you will -have plenty of time to get back.” - -“I’d love to go,” she said; “but—are you sure it’s all right for me to -go without an invitation?” - -“Perfectly, or I would not bring you.” - -Pine-breeze entered with a tray. - -“Where,” enquired Leslie, “is Campanula San?” Campanula San had not -risen yet; she had a headache. - - - - - CHAPTER XXV - - RETROSPECTION - - -“I’ll go up and see her,” said Jane, when they had finished breakfast. -“May I?” - -“Yes, if you like; Pine-breeze will show you the way—but, Jane, say -nothing to her of what occurred yesterday; she thinks nobody knows -except one of the servants here.” - -“I’ll say nothing,” replied Jane; “but I’ve got some antikamnia tabloids -in my pocket, fortunately, and I’ll just make her take one.” - -“All right,” said Leslie; “but for goodness sake don’t poison her.” - -This was another point on which Jane had not altered. As a girl she had -been possessed by a passion for drugs, and would swallow anything in the -way of medicine she came across or was given. She had always been -doctoring rabbits and other unfortunate animals, and had once nearly -poisoned herself by taking half a bottle of pain-killer for a dose. And -now here she was, nearly fifteen years after, in Japan, going upstairs -to doctor Campanula, with just the same manner and seriousness of face -with which long ago, medicine bottle in hand, she would give the order: -“Prize its mouth open, Dick; don’t hurt it. Steady now, I’m going to -pour.” - -Quarter of an hour later she came down triumphant. - -“She took it like a lamb. She’s the dearest child! Now I’m off. I have a -hundred things to do. Will you walk down with me as far as the hotel?” - -He accompanied her to the hotel, and neither of them spoke much on the -way. - -“I won’t ask you in,” said Jane, when they reached the door, “because it -wouldn’t be proper. Now let me see. To-morrow is the garden-party; we -might do something to-day, you and Campanula and I—might not we?” - -“We could run over to Mogi,” he said. “We can get rikshas, have luncheon -there, and come back to tea at my place; and to-night there’s an affair -on at the O Suwa temple, we might go there. Shall I call for you at -twelve or so?” - -“Yes,” said Jane, “if you’ll bring a chaperon. You see, now George is -away I must be awfully ‘propindicular,’ like that person in Uncle -Remus—the Terrapin—wasn’t it?” - -“I’ll bring Campanula—or one of the Mousmés, at a pinch.” - -“Campanula chaperoning me!” said Jane with a laugh. “Well, I don’t care. -It’s only for the sake of Mrs. Grundy.” - -“There is no Japanese Mrs. Grundy.” - -“No, but there is an English one.” - -They parted, and Jane entered the hotel. - -She went to her bedroom, got her writing-case out of a portmanteau, and -began to write. She was writing a letter to George. - -The first began: - - “Your abominable conduct has been discovered. You have heaped - shame on me, you have heaped shame on yourself—” - -When she got as far as this she found that it was too melodramatic, -somehow, and the “heaped shames” did not ring true, so she tore it up -and began again: - - “My cousin, Richard Leslie, sent for me this morning in great - distress. _How_ you could have acted as you did towards that - sweet child surpasses me. Fortunately for yourself you have run - away—” - -She tore this up too, flew into a temper with herself, and then wrote as -follows: - - “GEORGE,—I’ve heard everything. Dick is furious, but he’s not - going to do anything, so just stay at Osaka till I come, and - don’t go bolting off anywhere else. And don’t drink too much - port, for if you get another attack of gout _I_ won’t nurse - you.—JANE. - - “_P.S._—You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” - -She sealed this classical epistle and addressed it. Then she remembered -that she might just as well have left it unwritten, for there was no -communication to be had with Osaka till the morrow; and if she posted -it, it would go by the same boat as herself. So she tore it up. - -Then she sat down on the side of her bed and bit a corner of her -handkerchief. - -She was thinking. - -To-morrow she would never see Dick again, most probably, after that. - -She had never loved Dick, that is to say in the good old _Family Herald_ -way. Their boy and girl relationship had been anything but sentimental. - -Recalling the past she could conjure up no tender pictures. - -She could see herself clinging to a rod bent like a bow, and shouting to -Dick: “Now then, chucklehead, gaff him!” - -She could see herself tramping after him like a squaw after a chief on -rabbiting expeditions—dozens of pictures like this, but none of them -sentimental. She had never thought of marriage till the day she received -a letter from Dick, asking her to marry him; to which she replied by -writing half a dozen letters refusing him, which letters she tore up one -after the other, and then wrote a seventh accepting him, which she -posted. - -Now one of the worst evils in an accepted proposal of marriage is this. -That directly they hear of it, the girl’s relations, male and female, -take their implements—nets, ferrets, and so on—and go off rabbiting in -your past. - -Dick had not much of a past as far as size goes, but it was well stocked -with game for hunters such as these. - -So well stocked that old Mr. Deering, a retired London wine merchant who -had taken a country seat in Scotland, near Glenbruach, put his foot down -and forbade Jane to have anything more to do with her cousin: an order -which would have driven her straight into his arms, had not the -unfortunate Dick, hearing of the inquisition that had been made, come -North inflamed with rage and whisky. - -Men drank harder even in the ‘eighties than they do now, and Scotland -was never the home of abstinence; yet the scene Dick Leslie created in -Callander went beyond the bounds of even Scottish convention, and -utterly destroyed any chance of his marriage with Jane du Telle. - -Remembering his description of the affair which he gave to M’Gourley on -the Nikko road, you will agree with me that he was not a man who viewed -his own acts—well, as others viewed them. - -In this, however, he was by no means singular. - -Jane, sitting on her bed and biting the corner of her handkerchief, was -at the same time looking back over the past. She was a person with -an infinite capacity for affection, with no capacity at all for a Grand -Passion. Her life was made up of a bundle of petty interests, and her -history was the history of a pure and somewhat commonplace soul. - -She had loved Dick as a brother in the past, and now that he had come -into her life again after all those years (even after that terrible -scene long ago), bringing with him so much from the happy days that were -for ever gone, her heart went out to him as it had never gone to human -being before. - -And to-morrow she must say good-bye to him, and never, perhaps, see him -again. - -They must part; there was no other thing to be done. She was her own -mistress, with plenty of money at her command; she could have flown in -the face of society, and made Dick forever her own. Such a course did -not even occur to her, for she was a creature bound by the laws of -convention, almost as rigidly as you or I by the laws of gravity. - -Out of very light-heartedness she would do things and say things that -would have been dangerous symptoms in a woman of a sterner mold; and men -had often pursued her, led on by this laughing spirit that vanished -behind a veil, which, being lifted, disclosed an adamant door. - -Her great danger lay in her compassionate emotions, and all the womanly -nature that lay behind them. Her great danger lay in Richard Leslie, for -he was the only being that had ever aroused them to their full strength. - -All at once she cast herself upon the bed, and after the fashion of her -childhood, buried her face in a pillow, and sobbed, and “grat.” - -When she had occupied herself thus for some ten minutes, she rose and -looked at herself in the glass, and wondered at her own distorted image, -and how she could possibly be such a fool. But she felt better; the pain -of parting with Dick was not quite so bad, and she felt kindlier towards -George. - -If his conduct had taken place in England, I doubt if her anger would -have been so soon assuaged. But they were in Japan—and the Japs, you -know!— - - - - - PART THREE - - THE BROKEN LATH - - - - - CHAPTER XXVI - - THE BROKEN LATH - - -A heat wave from the Pacific had stolen over Nagasaki, and the windless -night was filled with stars and lights. - -Stars in the sky, and stars in the harbor, long wavy reflections of -light from the ships in the anchorage, and ten thousand lanterns -spangling the mysterious city. - -A spangle of colored lamps that spread away to the base of the O Suwa -hill which they stormed, covering it with a thousand sparkles like -phosphoric sea-spray, and cresting its summit with a burning zone, -bright as the snow crest of Fuji. - -It was a gala night, and the O Suwa, that galaxy of temples, had called -the true believers in love and beauty to worship in the name of -religion. - -From the great double temple, which is the crowning glory of the hill, -Leslie and his companions looked down upon shrine after shrine, broad -flights of steps stained with the soft amber and pink of lantern light, -and the colored crowd ever shifting, and murmurous as the sea. - -The shadow spaces and the vagueness of night made great distances in -this dim but splendid picture, till the moon, rising over the hill-top, -chased the shadows away, paled the lamps, and drew the distances -together. - -Touched by her light the crowd below became sonorous as a musical glass -touched by the finger; the murmur of voices, the ripple of laughter, the -sigh of moving silk and the flutter of a thousand fans intensified, rose -blended and mixed, and dwelt in the air a nimbus of sound. The native -city beyond grew more distinct, yet more unreal in the moonlight, which -strengthened the black shadows of the wooded cliffs and converted the -harbor into a trembling mirror. - -“We shall never see anything again so beautiful as that,” said Jane, “so -mysterious, so strange.” - -He did not reply. A small hand had stolen into his; it was Campanula’s. -She, too, was gazing at the scene around and below them, filled with who -knows what thoughts. - -They were not alone here on the utmost heights; women, gayly dressed, -were passing into the temple behind them to pray and clap their hands -before their gods. Women surrounded them, laughing, chattering, -dispelling quaint perfumes on the air from large incessantly-waving -fans. From the tea houses behind the temple came the thready music of -_chamécens_ and sounds of unseen festivity; and from the great park -beyond, through the hot night, the perfume of azaleas and the odor of -the dew-wet cryptomeria trees. - -“Come,” said Jane, “let us go and take the picture with us before it -gets dulled. I will never forget this night—there is something in the -air of this place I have never felt before. No, thanks, I don’t want to -see the tea houses, I am quite content with this; let us go down right -through it, and home.” - -They descended the broad flights of steps through the murmuring, -laughing, and perfumed crowd. There was something in the air indeed, -something as intoxicating as wine, yet far more subtle, subtle as a -poison or a love philter. - -They found rikshas to take them back, and the whole party returned to -the hotel, where they left Jane. - -“To-morrow at noon,” she said to Leslie, as she turned to enter. - -“Yes, or even a little later; the train doesn’t start till after one.” - -“Good-night!” She waved her hand in the lamplit portico and vanished. - -They had no need of lanterns to show the way up the hill-path to the -House of the Clouds; the path was a tangle of moonlight and lilac-bough -shadows, a tremulous carpet upon which above them they perceived a -creeping and colored thing. - -It was Cherry-blossom. She, too, had been at the festival at the O Suwa, -and was now returning, wearied out and walking like a somnambulist, a -lantern painted with butterflies held before her nodding at the end of a -bamboo cane. - -In the house, when he had fastened the shoji and taken his night lantern -from Pine-breeze, he turned to where Campanula was standing, a vague -figure in the dimly-lit room. Yielding to a sudden impulse he picked her -up from the ground, just as he might have picked up a child, and kissed -her—kissed her just as he had kissed her when she was a child that day, -years ago, in the valley by the Nikko road. - -That night sleep was impossible. The lights of the O Suwa burned before -him, the perfume of the azaleas and cryptomerias pursued him, lighting -always and leading him always to the same image—Jane. - -He lay considering what the future would be when Jane was gone; the -rainy season would soon be upon them, and then the autumn and the winter -and the spring again after that, and the years to come. - -Whilst thus torturing his soul his mind was steadfastly making a -resolve. A resolve that, come what might, Jane must not go out of his -life. That to-morrow he must act in such a way as to make her for ever -his own. - -Come what might! - -There was no time left for thought, scarcely enough for action. - -He had quite ceased to battle with himself, to say this is right or this -is wrong. Time had cut all these arguments short with the command: “Act -now, now, in the next twenty-four hours! for after that your chance is -gone.” - -Then he began to sketch out the plan that had been vaguely forming in -his brain all the evening—a plan that the villainous conduct of George -du Telle made possible and practicable, and, to Leslie’s mind, almost -plausible. - -As he lay thus, a faint sigh came through the lattice of the window. The -wind had risen, and was moving the cherry branches and the azaleas. - -Then came another sound—the sound of a stick tapping on the garden -path, as if some blind person were cautiously feeling their way round -the house. - -Up along the garden path, pausing now, now advancing, now dying away, -now returning, somebody was promenading in front of the house, keeping -watch and ward like a sentry, somebody whose feet made no sound, -somebody blind. - -A feeling of sick terror came over him—terror not to be borne. - -He pulled the mosquito-net aside, and rose, shivering and trembling, -feeling that he must look out at all hazards—even at the worst. - -He pulled the slats aside and looked out. Nobody. The moonlight lay on -the azaleas and the garden path, but of the prowler there was no sign. - -Then he saw the cause of the sound. A lath broken from the house wall -was hanging with tip touching the path, and tapping upon it as the wind -shook it. - -He returned to bed, and tried to snatch a few hours’ sleep, but the -sound of the blind man tapping his way continued all night long—now -faint, now loud, and insistent as the wind rose and fell. - - - - - CHAPTER XXVII - - THE “EMPRESS OF JAPAN” - - -If Mr. Kamamura had sent a special messenger to Paradise to pick from -the aviary there a blue-winged and bright-eyed day for his garden-party, -he would not have obtained a better one than that which came by chance. - -A haze hid its coming. Just after sunrise, looking from Leslie’s garden -one could scarcely see Nagasaki down below—a toy town, seen through -faint blue gauze, it seemed. The wind came in puffs, hot from the -Pacific, shaking the cherry branches. - -The great double cherry-blossoms were falling. The close, even moss -under the trees was white, like ground after a mild snowstorm. - -There was something in the atmosphere which loosened the petals this -morning. At each puff of wind a fresh shower fell, sifting through the -air to scatter softly on the ground. It was a ghostly sight in the gray -and silent dawn; the trees seemed despoiling themselves, casting their -blossoms from them in sorrow or fear. - -In the veranda stood the crimson garden umbrella, all damp with dew, and -four pairs of clogs in a row. The house was deathly still; and one might -have likened it to a tomb, had it not possessed so much the appearance -of a bandbox, looped and latticed. - -Presently a faint sound might have been heard. A panel slid back, and a -figure appeared, holding in its hand a lighted paper lantern. - -It was Campanula, clad in blue, her feet peeping from beneath her skirt -like two white mice. - -She put out the lantern, and hung it on a hook. Then she put on a pair -of clogs, and clicked down the steps. She went down the path, through -the little gate, and vanished from sight; and as her footsteps died -away, silence returned to the house and the garden. - -Then in a few minutes a glorious transformation scene took place. The -haze turned to a golden mist; it became sundered by rivers of clear air, -and from it leaped the sun, like Helios from the sea. - -Instantly the silence of the orchard became broken by the bickering of -birds; a cock crowed somewhere in the back premises, and he was answered -by the cock that lived half-way down the hill at the cooper’s shop—who -was answered, a minute later, by all the roosters in Nagasaki. - -The mist vanished entirely now, the sun began steadily to mount into the -vault of perfect blue; his slanting rays shot through the cherry -orchard, striking here the bole of a tree glistening with great tears of -fragrant gum, and there on the ground besnowed with blossom, even the -fierce old hills of the landscape garden lost something of their -ruggedness in the warm and mellow light. - -Then the house began to awaken. Pine-breeze appeared on the veranda, and -after Pine-breeze the other Mousmés all busy, or appearing so, dragging -out futon to air for a moment in the morning brightness, and lacquer -screens to be dusted. - -“Summer has come in the night,” said Lotus-bud, pointing out the fallen -cherry-blossoms. - -“Yes,” chimed in Pine-breeze, “but spring has gone.” - -“I dreamt last night of frost.” This from Cherry-blossom, who was busily -engaged watching the others at work. - -Frost is a bad dream in Japan, and the Mousmés conferred in murmurs as -to what it might mean. - -“I know,” said Lotus-bud suddenly, with an air of conviction. - -“What?” - -“The riksha man will die.” - -“Which?” asked Pine-breeze. - -Then the two Mousmés began to “guy” Cherry-blossom as to the number of -the riksha man destined to die. - -“Ichi-ban, Ni-ban, San-ban,”[3] murmured Lotus-bud. - - [3] Number one, number two, number three. - -“Shi-ban, Go-ban, Roku-ban,” rippled Pine-breeze. - -“Hachi-ban!” suddenly cried Lotus-bud, with an air of inspiration. - -“Ku-ban!” replied Pine-breeze, with the air of going one better. - -“Leslie San!” said Cherry-blossom: and Pine-breeze got up and scuttered -into the house, where Leslie San was calling for his bath to be heated. - -An hour later he appeared on the veranda, fully dressed. - -He noticed the promise of heat in the air; he noted the great fall of -cherry-blossoms that had occurred during the night; he noted the lantern -that Campanula had hung on the hook. - -Then he left the veranda, came down into the garden path, and through -the gate. - -Outside the gate there was a little by-path that led upwards and to the -left, between a double bank of bushes to an open space like a natural -platform, from which a splendid view of the harbor and hills could be -obtained, A great camellia tree forty feet high grew here, alone in its -splendor, and beneath it he stood gazing at the harbor. - -He could hear the faint monosyllabic cry of the brown hawks ever -circling above the blue water, and the distant sound of a drum from the -_Rurik_ where she lay at anchor. He could see the sampans shooting -hither and thither, carrying fruit and what not to the ships in the -anchorage, and the Junks floating like brown phantoms past the shadow of -the opposite cliffs. - -But his eye was searching for something that was not there. - -He looked at his watch, put it back in his pocket with an impatient -gesture, and continued to gaze. - -Suddenly—Hrr-’mph!—Haa-aar!—the blast of a syren came shouting up the -harbor, and chasing the echoes through the hills. The brown hawks rose -and circled in wild flight, and past a bend came a great, white, -double-funneled steamer. - -It was the Canadian Pacific boat, the _Empress of Japan_, touching at -Nagasaki, and due to leave the morning following for Yokohama and -Vancouver. - -He watched her for a moment as she swam to her berth, beautiful and -graceful as a swan. Then he turned to the house. - -To-morrow morning he and Jane would be on board that boat, bound -northward up the Inland Sea, past Tsu-shima, past Osaka, past Yokohama, -and away across the blue Pacific to Vancouver. - -The whole plan was cut and dried. Jane had given no consent; that did -not matter. She would consent; he felt the power in himself to _make_ -her consent. - -Men of his stamp, lazy, neurotic, yet strong-willed, stung into action -by love or hate, sometimes assume momentary but terrible command over -events; they infect with their passion, infuriate with their hate, or -paralyze with their love. - -He entered the house, ordered breakfast, and enquired for Campanula. - -She had gone down at dawn, said Pine-breeze, to see O Toku San, the poor -girl who was so ill, and was now dying. He was glad Campanula was out, -and determined if possible to get his preparations over before her -return. Jane and he would return from Mr. Kamamura’s about six that -evening. It would be time enough then to tell Campanula of his journey. - -As he breakfasted, he completed that part of his plans which had -reference to Campanula. - -She would be safe and well looked after by M’Gourley, till—he came -back. He told himself he would come back some day; perhaps in six months -or so he would come back. - -And why should he worry about leaving Campanula for a time? He had often -gone away before, once as far as London; he had always come back. - -Why should Campanula mind his going away again? - -Why, indeed! - -He tried to forget how her little hand had stolen into his on the -evening before as if for protection. How, when he had kissed her, she -had suddenly flung aside her timid reserve, and with her arms around his -neck, but without a word, had told him what only a woman can tell -without speech. - -Perhaps it was because he loved her far more than he knew, that his mind -was filled with gloom and apprehension. - -But it was the time for action, not for thought; only a few hours lay -before him in which to prepare for this journey—the journey from which -he would return quite soon perhaps. - -He would leave the house just as it was to Campanula and the Mousmés -till he came back and made other arrangements. M’Gourley, as his agent, -would supply them with all the money needful just as he had done before. - -Then he called Pine-breeze and told her to get his portmanteau up to his -room, as he was going on a journey. - -He packed hurriedly, whilst Lotus-bud handed him things. He wanted to -get the packing over and done with. - -The strong sunlight reflected from the matting lit up the room with a -golden glow. Pine-breeze in the kitchen below was singing a song about a -lilac bough—the same song he had heard in the orchard that day when -Campanula had cried: “Hist, some one at the gate!” - -He leaned back sitting on his heels to listen. He heard the end of the -song now. He did not hear it that day, for Jane, knocking at the -veranda, had cut it short. - -This was the gist of the last verse: - - - “_The bee comes no more - When the lilac’s white blossom is dead_.” - -Then he went on with his packing at a furious rate, stuffing in shirts, -collars, handkerchiefs, his mind wandering over all sorts of subjects. - -His packing finished, he went to the window, took out his pocketbook, -and examined its contents. Three hundred and ten pounds, half in -circular notes, half in notes of the Bank of England. - -Then he took out a check-book and a stylograph pen, and wrote a check -for five hundred, payable to himself. - -Ten minutes later he was in a riksha making for the Bund, where he -stopped at Holme & Ringers, the shipping agents, bought two first-class -tickets for Vancouver, and changed his check, receiving part in cash, -and part in a check upon the National Specie Bank of Yokohama. - -It was now eleven o’clock, and he had practically completed his -preparations. He had now to see Mac, and he turned his steps to the -office, which was only a stone’s throw from the shipping agents. Mac was -writing letters. - -“Morning,” said he, glancing up, and seeming surprised to see his -partner at that hour. - -“What’s agate?” - -“I am,” said Leslie, trying to assume a jovial manner. “I’m off for a -holiday, and I want you to look after things same as you’ve done -before.” - -“This is sudden,” said Mac, going on with his correspondence without -looking up. - -“Oh, it’s never too sudden for a holiday. And see here, I’d better leave -you some ready cash: here’s a check for two fifty. I want you to look -after the bairn whilst I’m away.” - -“Keep the money,” said Mac, “and pay me—when y’ come back. Ay, ay, -it’ll be soon enough then—soon enough then.” - -“I’d sooner leave you the money.” - -“Weel, put it in that drawer.” - -“Well, you _are_ a bear this morning. See here, I’ve put it in the -drawer, but I’ll see you again before I go: I’m not off till to-morrow.” - -“Imphim!” replied the Dour One, and Leslie went off. - -Your true Scot has a very nasty habit of expressing his bad opinion of a -man. He does it in a round-about way, using hints and innuendoes, -instead of coming to the matter by a direct route. - -What Mac suspected or what he knew, Leslie could not tell; judging from -his manner, however, he knew or suspected a lot. - -However, he had no time to trouble about Mac. He had one thing more to -do before meeting Jane, Mr. Initogo the landlord had to be interviewed, -and the rent paid. - -There was a fair of a sort on in the street that formed the shortest cut -to Mr. Initogo’s. It was filled with a many-colored crowd, flags were -fluttering, awnings flapping in the wind; every shop had some extra -advertisement to attract customers, and during the past night, like -mushrooms, extra booths had sprung into being. - -A roaring trade was going forward; here, all kinds of fruit, there all -kinds of fish, some with bunches of violets in their mouths; cakes -reposing on branches of cherry or myrtle; cakes in the form of donkeys -and monkeys and goats; cakes shaped like spinning-tops; cakes in the -shape of suns, moons and stars; candied beans, beans mixed with comfits, -kites, masks, and paper dragons. Paper fish shaped like carp for the -Little-boys’ Festival of the 5th of May. - -The noise and bustle somehow pleased Leslie, and soothed him; and he -drifted along with the chattering stream of men, women, Mousmés, little -boys and mere babies. Some of the children had long, curved trumpets of -glass, from which they blew the most horrible of hobgoblin sounds. Here -a man was frying pancakes, wrapping them in rice paper, and flinging -them to unseen customers in the crowd, who flung him back the money. -Here a person in spectacles, who looked like a professor of chemistry -gone mad, was blowing from a glass-blower’s tube dragons and fish in -sugar-candy. Apothecaries, with great golden eyes painted on their -booths, were selling little rice paper charms, one to be taken dissolved -in water for the stomach-ache, two for lumbago, three for migraine. Here -stood a man who would pull your teeth out with his fingers, three sen a -tooth. - -The cheap curio dealers were in evidence with their wares cheap and bad; -those quaint perambulating curio dealers, who, as a rule, only start -business at sundown, and whose stock-in-trade include old top hats, old -boots, old—anything—European. “Caw—caw—caw!” You look up, and see a -great kite straining at its strings. - -And then the umbrellas! Leslie had a good view of them, for he was head -and shoulders taller than any one in the crowd. Red, pink, gray, -gray-green, pink-and-white, blossom-bestrewn, stork-bestrewn, a shifting -mass of color reflecting the sunlight. - -But though he saw all this, and though the noise and bustle and laughter -and general atmosphere of festivity fell in with his humor, his thoughts -were far away at Osaka; he was wondering what George du Telle was doing, -and what George du Telle would say in a day or so, and how he would -look. He had never hated George du Telle really till now that he had -determined to rob him of his wife. - -Now that he was about to commit, or attempt to commit, a vile and -abominable act against George du Telle, that person seemed to him the -acme of all things vile and abominable. - -Suddenly, through an opening in the crowd, Leslie caught a glimpse of a -face, the face of a blind man, stolid, stony, with a flattened nose and -wearing an indescribable expression of eld, weariness, and misfortune. - -It was only a momentary glimpse, but revealed just for a moment, and -contrasted with the shifting colored mass around him, with the noise and -laughter, the sunlight and the movement of life, it was like a vision of -death. - -Leslie stood for a moment startled and chilled; the joyous exaltation in -his mind a moment ago had vanished: it was as if a cloud had come -between him and the sun. - -Why were these things always occurring to fret his soul and trouble his -imagination? This blind man was nothing but an ordinary blind man of -Japan such as one might see any day. The broken lath that had troubled -him all night was but a broken lath; the song of the mushi that had -started that infernal sound in his head was but the sound of an insect -buzzing; the azalea that had caused that frightful dream was but a -flower. - -These slight things, he told himself, acting on a brain made -over-sensitive by opium, were not warnings, but simple causes of complex -effects. And he passed on his way, cursing himself for a fool, till he -reached the shop of Mr. Initogo. - -That gentleman, for a wonder, was not making tea, but the sight of -Leslie San instantly inspired the desire for his favorite beverage, -caused him to clap his hands, and the tea-tray to appear in the hands of -his wife almost instantly upon the sound. - -He received his rent, which he put away with an appearance of -indifference, expressed sorrow on hearing that Leslie was going away for -even a short time, but joy at the thought that the journey might benefit -his honorable health. - -He was really fond of Leslie, this old Japanese gentleman; but the worst -of the flowery Japanese language is that it remains always, so to speak, -at boiling point, and towards friend or perfect stranger is the same. -You can’t cool it, and you can’t warm it. - -Whilst they were talking Kiku came in; her eyes were red and she had a -snuffle in her voice. - -She had been, it seems, to see the poor girl who was dying, O Toku San; -Campanula was with her. - -“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Initogo, as his daughter retired upstairs. “Most -sad, poor girl. A man whom she loved left her, and she is dying of it, -just as a flower dies from want of water.” - -Leslie looked at his watch: it was after twelve. He hastened from the -shop of Mr. Initogo, and securing a riksha drove to the Nagasaki Hotel -on the Bund. - - - - - CHAPTER XXVIII - - M’GOURLEY’S LOVE AFFAIR - - -At about three o’clock on that eventful day M’Gourley met one of Holme & -Ringer’s clerks in the street. - -“So your partner’s off for a holiday,” said the clerk. - -“So he tells me,” replied Mac. - -“He’s going pretty far afield,” went on the clerk; “Vancouver isn’t—” - -“Where did you say?” cut in M’Gourley. - -“Well, he’s bought two tickets for Vancouver this morning, one for his -cousin and one for himself. She is married, and they are going to pick -her husband up at Yokohama,” he went on, smiling slightly. - -“Vancouver!” said Mac. He stood for a moment in astonishment, then -hailing a passing riksha he jumped into it, and told the driver to take -him to the House of the Clouds. - -Campanula had just returned, she was in the garden; and when she heard -his step coming up the hill path she came to the gate to meet him. - -She greeted him with a smile, but there was something about her that -struck M’Gourley strangely. - -She had a far-away look in her face, and she wore an abstracted air. -Away from the world her mind seemed wandering in some far, strange -country, whilst her little body walked beside him, and her lips answered -his questions, and told him things. - -“O Toku San is dead,” said she; “I have just left her.” She spoke -gravely, but without any sorrow in her voice; one might even have -imagined that she was referring to some good fortune that had fallen on -O Toku San; and perhaps, indeed, she was. - -“Ay! puir thing, is she?” said Mac, whose mind was also astray. - -He asked had Leslie returned, and Campanula told him that he had gone to -a garden-party at Omura, and would not return till evening. - -“He is going away,” finished Campanula, pausing on the veranda steps and -unlatching the strap of her sandal. - -“Oh! so he’s told you?” said Mac. - -Campanula said nothing; possibly she did not hear the question, so -absorbed was she by her own ideas and thoughts. Suddenly she said, -turning to Mac, who was leaning his shoulder against the veranda post -and feeling in his pocket for his tobacco-pouch: - -“I saw the Blind One to-day as I was leaving O Toku San’s. I did not -speak to him; he spoke to me. He said the master of the house on the -heights is going on a journey from whence he will not return. Then he -went away. A wind from the hill blew my kimono apart and a chill came to -my breast. I do not know who the Blind One is—perhaps he is Death.” - -M’Gourley, as she spoke, noticed that she had refolded her kimono from -right to left instead of from left to right. - -Now in Japan, the only people who wear their kimonos folded from right -to left are the dead. - -He felt sick and shivery at the words she had just spoken, and he could -not reply to them or ask questions; he was filled with a horror of the -subject, a dead, blind terror of it. He looked down and said gruffly: - -“What way is that you’ve folded your kimono? Just run into the house and -put it right. I’ll bide here on the verandy and smoke my pipe.” - -She vanished into the house, and Mac sat down, but he did not light his -pipe. What could be the meaning of all this? Surely he was dead, and -laid long ago in the green woods of Nikko—could it be possible that the -dead return? - -Why was it that she alone could see him, hear him, and speak to him? - -His eye caught the crimson azaleas as they bloomed in their beauty and -splendor, and the Nikko road rose before him, the mysterious valley, -peopled by the crimson flowers, the cypress trees, the far-off country, -and the distant sea hills beyond Tanagura. - -He heard Leslie’s voice as it denied the existence of God, and declared -that if he had ever been given a creature that loved him, he would have -cared for and loved it. - -Then he felt something touch his shoulder, and, turning with a start, -found it was Campanula. - -“Come,” said she, in the manner of a person who would say, “I wish to -show you something.” - -He rose and followed her into the house. She led the way upstairs, and -down the narrow passage to Leslie’s room. - -At the door she paused and pointed to an object on the floor. It was a -portmanteau packed and strapped. - -They both looked at it without saying a word: a silence, that spoke of -the deep, unconscious understanding between them. - -“Come,” said Mac in his turn, and taking her by the hand he led her -downstairs. - -Had the portmanteau been a coffin, containing some being beloved by -Campanula, he could not have spoken more gently, or led her away from it -more tenderly. - -Downstairs the old, rough, gruff M’Gourley seemed very much perturbed. - -Could he have found Leslie alone at that moment, a very regrettable -scene might have ensued. - -And yet at the bottom of all his anger and perturbation lay a golden -gleam. If Leslie went off like this, Campanula would be all his (Mac’s) -own. - -He had no idea of marrying her, or anything of that sort; but he had an -immense idea of possessing her all for himself. - -He had, proposed to buy a half share in her at Nikko, and he would have -made a bad bargain, for during the last five years he had possessed a -full half share without paying a cent, unless we count the pounds and -pounds expended on dolls, sweets, and so forth. - -But this was not like having her all to himself: a creature to feed and -clothe, to buy hairpins for and tabis, fans and sweets; to listen to of -an evening, as her fingers strayed over the strings of a _chamécen_, or -her tongue told fabulous tales of folk clad in fur or feathers. - -All at once, as he paced the room, he turned to her, literally picked -her up, hugged her, gave her a kiss, and said: “He’ll come back to you. -Dinna greet; I canna stand it. I’ll be back and see you the morrow morn -before he goes.” - -He hurried out of the house, and went raging down the hill. - -To be in anger with one whom one loves works, indeed, like madness in -the blood. - -Mac, as he plunged down the hill, was lashing himself into a fury -against Leslie. He turned into a saki shop and drank half a pint of that -seemingly innocuous liquor; then he went to the office, took a whisky -bottle from a cupboard, and poured himself out a liberal peg. - -He was an abstemious man as a rule, but once he took the bit between his -teeth nothing on God’s earth except death would stop him, till the next -morning’s headache came. - -At five he recognized that he was hopelessly embarked on a grand drunk, -and determined to take a riksha over to Mogi; there complete the -business, and return in time next morning to see Leslie before he -started. - -Just before starting from the hotel a waiter brought him out a cablegram -from Shanghai, which had come round from the office. It was relative to -a bank disaster that had occurred in India. He read it, stuffed it into -his pocket, and ordered the Djin to proceed. - - - - - CHAPTER XXIX - - THE GARDEN-PARTY - - -Within an hour of the great city of Nagasaki, in the midst of a park -that was at the same time half a garden, lay the country residence of -Mr. Kamamura; once a man who carried two swords, with the longer of -which he would have beheaded you for two words and have done it with -neatness and despatch, now a gentleman in a frock-coat and tall hat, -wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a smile. - -The long, low house, white as snow and surrounded by a narrow veranda, -faced west, and was surrounded by a garden recalling the gardens of Dai -Nichi Do: a garden filled with the music of fountains and the poetry of -birds. - -Alas! on the day of his garden-party Mr. Kamamura, seized with the -spirit of modernity and the savagery of civilization, not content with -the music of heaven, and prompted, no doubt, by the devil, had hired a -brass band and placed it in a little kiosk, with orders to bray Strauss -in the face of Nature from three o’clock till dusk. - -There were many guests, and the gardens soon presented an animated -appearance. Many of the ladles had retained the national dress, and -marvelous were the fabrics to be seen in the form of the obi or flowing -loose in the graceful kimono. - -Some of the guests surrounded a pair of jugglers, two terrible men -dressed in red, who fenced with and transfixed one another with long -swords, swallowed fire, and belched it like dragons. - -In another corner of the grounds fireworks were whizzing and cracking, -filling the clear air above with a thin blue haze through which, just as -Jane and Leslie entered the grounds, there rose a wonderful fire balloon -made of colored paper and fashioned in the form of a turkey cock. - -“It’s like a party in the lunatic asylum,” whispered Jane, as they -threaded the maze of guests in search of their host and hostess. “And, -Dick, you _do_ look perfectly awful in that panama amongst all these men -in tall hats—I mean they look awful beside you, but they are _de -rigueur_; and it’s better to be _de rigueur_ and look frightful, than to -be not _de rigueur_ and look nice. How d’y’ do?” and Jane extended her -arm, pump-handle fashion, to the little gentleman with the sallow face -to whom Leslie was introducing her. - -“Much pleasure, much pleasure,” said Mr. Kamamura, whose English was -mixed and limited, and who, like Kiku San, had not completely mastered -the letter “l.” “Will the honorable rady so make equal health Nagysaki -(the proper way to pronounce Nagasaki) you stay? So good. Over there -Mrs. Kamamura; you make known;” and Mr. Kamamura presenting his arm Jane -was led away through the crowd like some tall and graceful frigate -threading a maze of painted cock-boats. - -Leslie, left to himself, turned with a gloomy expression of countenance -to where the jugglers were dislocating each other’s necks. He did not -see them; he was looking out of the side of his eyes at Jane. - -She had been led across one of the willow-pattern bridges, and he could -see her now standing at one of the kiosks, a tea-cup in her hand. She -was talking to Mr. Kamamura and a little lady in European dress—Mrs. -Kamamura, probably. - -What could they be talking about? Conversation, probably, sufficient to -dislocate the gravity of a Socrates. - -He turned his head impatiently and tried to take an interest in the -jugglers, without success. There was something deeply irritating about -the scene of frivolity in which Fate had staged the last scenes of the -most important act in his life. - -The _Empress of Japan_ sailed at eight on the morrow morning, and as yet -he had made no movement as regards Jane. All this trifling was but a bad -prelude to those words so soon to be spoken. - -He little knew that Tragedy stood at his elbow in the form of James -Anderson, manager to M’Cormick, the great silk dealers on the Bund. - -“Why, Leslie, man! I thought I knew the nape of your neck. How are you?” - -“Hullo, Anderson!” said Leslie, returning the other’s hand-grip. “What -are you doing here?” - -“I’m just looking round,” said Anderson. “I’m just looking round, and -you’ll admit it’s worth the turning of one’s head. I shouldn’t mind -exchanging places with Kamamura. It’s not a bad life, his, by a long -penny. This affair will bang a hole through a good pile of ten pun -notes. They tell me those balloons made like dicky-birds cost—I forget -now, but it’s a good pile of dollars a-piece, for every feather is -painted correct, and that’s just like the Japs—make a pretty thing, and -then stick it away in some hidey-hole where no one can see it, or burn -it—What’s agate now?” - -The crowd was in motion, flooding towards a part of the grounds where a -little stage had been erected, backed and half surrounded by cypress -trees. On the stage, against the dark-green background, could be seen -the graceful figure of a girl. - -She was dancing. It was a dance that at first insipid, became after a -few moments fascinating, lulling, exquisite to watch as the movements of -a flower blown by the wind. - -They drew close and stood to look. The girl was dressed in amber and -scarlet, with a scarlet flower in the night of her hair—a _bijou rose -et noir_, recalling Baudelaire’s Lola de Vallence. - -Her supple body seemed inspired by the mysterious music we hear -wandering through the land of spring, and expressing itself in the -voices of the wind and the birds and the streams. - -She seemed to have learned her art in the academy where the daffodils -are taught to dance and the bluebells to make their bow. - -“It’s the Geisha Kamamura has hired—paid her something like two hundred -to dance that fan-dance, or whatever they call it. She was a Tokyo girl, -and had left the business to get married, but she couldn’t withstand the -two hundred; the best Geisha in Japan, they say. What’s this her name? O -something San. Hoots! but my memory is gone fishing to-day. Listen! -she’s talking.” - -The dance had ceased, and the girl, in the silence that followed the -tinkling of the three accompanying _chamécens_, had commenced one of -those poetical recitals in favor with an intellectual Japanese audience. - -Her recitation was sad; it bemoaned the thing we call change. The -cherry-blossom is fair, ran this untranslatable poem, but it must die -and give place to the lotus. - -“I cannot understand this depression in trade,” murmured the muted voice -of Anderson, as he stood beside Leslie. “It’s been spreading and -spreading, and there’s nothing it hasn’t spread into.” - -And the lotus parts with its petals to give place to the chrysanthemum, -the Royal chrysanthemum. - -“We’ve had a good year till now, ourselves, but hech! man, there’s a -matter of fifteen thousand gone over the breaking of the Bombay and -Benares bank—clean gone, never to come back—and that takes the sugar -off the cake—ay, the devil himself won’t whistle it home again.” - -And the gray winter sky and the snowflakes, like ghosts of flowers, -finished the poem of the Geisha, whilst Leslie stood transfixed for a -second, frozen by the news he had just heard, and unable to turn. He -turned round full on Anderson. - -“The breaking of _what_?” - -“The Bombay and Benares. Have you not heard the news? It came by cable -to-day at one o’clock. Good God! man, you hadn’t much money in it, had -you?” - -“Everything—everything,” said Leslie in a stammering voice. “I’m -smashed.” - -He linked his arm in Anderson’s, and dragged him along hurriedly. He -wanted to go, nowhere in particular, but just get away from the spot -where Anderson had sentenced his future to death. - -“Man, I’m sorry! Man, I’m sorry!” said his companion. “I should not have -told you so sudden, but how was I to know?” - -“Smashed—smashed—smashed!” said the other, talking as a man talks in -his sleep. - -He held Anderson by the arm as he spoke. All around spread the -many-colored crowd; fans were fluttering, umbrellas bobbing, tongues -chattering, soft women’s voices inlaid like music of gold on the silvery -music of the fountains and cascades. - -“Anderson, man, are you sure they’ve broken—sure?” - -“Ay, ay, sure. Better to tell you straight. Sure as my name’s James -Anderson.” - -Boom! Boom! Boom! the band broke into a march by Gungl, and Leslie, -releasing Anderson, ran after a figure in the crowd some twenty paces -distant. - -“Jane! I must speak to you at once.” - -Jane looked up from the little Japanese gentleman who was escorting her, -saw the distress in her countryman’s face, and dismissed Asia with a -bow. - -“I have just had frightful news. Come with me to some quiet place till I -tell you about it. Anywhere. No matter where. See! there are no people -across that bridge where the trees are; let us go there.” - -Jane spoke not a word, but he saw that she was very pale and trembling. -That weakness of Jane’s gave him a strange sensation. It said something -that her lips had never uttered. - -They passed over the little bridge. They passed over another bridge; -there were no people here, only trees; they went no further. - -They were in a small forest. The garden was lost to sight; only the -music of the band, muted by distance, told of the festivity so near, yet -apparently so far away. - -The trunk of a felled tree lay in the path; they sat down upon it by -common consent. Leslie took out his watch, and looked at it attentively. -Then, still holding it open in his hand, he spoke. - -“I want you to listen to me for five minutes—only five minutes; you can -hold the watch, and measure the time yourself. Jane, when a man is going -to be hanged, they will give him a glass of brandy to help him along to -the drop. Will you do the same by me—give me five minutes’ clear -speech, and let me say just what I please without interruption; will -you?” - -“Yes,” said Jane, and she shivered as she spoke the word. She had -maintained a strange silence; impulsive as she was, one might have -expected her to implore him to tell her the worst, and have it over. -Perhaps she understood dimly that Leslie’s disaster was personal to -herself, a cataclysm the effect of which would reach her future as well -as his. - -“You remember,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “how I asked you to -marry me long ago, and everything that happened after? Well, when I -think of all that, it seems to me that I must have passed through life -in a state of insanity, and only awakened to consciousness now. Jane, I -am feeling now as a man must feel when he wakes in hell, and -remembers—No matter, it is all done with now; and even if you loved me -as well as I love you, it’s all over and done with and useless now.” - -He leaned forward with his face in his hands. Jane did not speak; the -music of the band had ceased, and the only sound to be heard was the -weary sighing of the warm wind in the pine-tops. - -“I’m broken utterly, I have just heard the news. Don’t think I brought -you here to listen to me whining about my misfortunes. I brought you -here to tell you I love you. I meant to have carried you off in the -steamer that sails to-morrow morning for the north-west. With the money -I had yesterday, I would have supported you, I would have torn you out -of society, and made you love me. I would have made you a Paradise. Yes, -by the living God, a Paradise, or there’s no such thing as love. But now -I’m a beggar, and I love you too well to drag you into my ruin, and it’s -Fate, Fate, Fate that has done it all, and cursed be its name!” - -Again silence, broken only by a faint, dreary sound. Jane was weeping. - -“Don’t, for the love of God!” cried Leslie. “Don’t cry, or you’ll make -me cry too. Oh, miserable life! why was I ever born into it?” And he -moved his hands in the air, as blind Samson might have done amidst the -pillars of the temple. - -A bird piped three times in the recesses of the wood, three flute-like -notes sweet as the notes of a bell-bird. They were answered by its mate -in the branches above. - -Leslie put his hands to his ears, as if to shut out the happy sounds. - -Jane’s tears had ceased, but she did not speak, she did not breathe; -only a deep sigh occasionally escaped from her. - -“And now, we can only say good-bye. Let us part here for ever. We will -meet again in—Heaven,” said Leslie, with a horrible shuddering laugh. - -He stretched out his hand and took hers. She let him have it without -seeming to know that he had taken it. - -She was murmuring his name in a whisper, staring at him and through him, -and as if her gaze was fixed on some terrible catastrophe beyond. - -“Dick! Dick! Dick!” All poetry could not express the helpless, hopeless -sorrow she put into those three little whispered words. - -Suddenly, filtering through the wood, came a sound, a voice, a spirit, -that unrolled around them a panorama of loch, moor, and sky, hills -purple with heather, lakes dark with shadow. “Auld Lang Syne.” - -The band was playing it, villainously enough, but the distance smoothed -away the defects. - -It broke Jane down. She leaned against his shoulder and sobbed like a -child, and then, with both hands upstretched, she drew his face down to -hers and murmured—no matter what. - -Then all at once—heedless of ruin, forgetting all things, carried away -on the dumb tide of passion, the wave that had retreated before -disaster, only to come shoreward again resistless and gigantic—all at -once, and without a word, he took her in his arms. - -It was the eloquence of passion and despair, the speech without tongue -of a soul tormented and _in extremis_. - -It broke Jane down utterly. Hopeless, haggard, and pale as a person in -the midst of some terrible disaster, she clung to him, whispering in his -ear words repeated over and over again, with that reiteration which -forms the rhetoric of the dying and the lost. - -She had cast everything aside, the world, her position in society, her -husband, her wealth. Passion and pity, that strange combination, had for -the moment blinded her eyes to everything but the man beside her—but -did she love him? Fate had not yet disclosed the answer to that old -fatal question, that sphinx-like question whose answer forms the plot of -each man’s story. - - - - - CHAPTER XXX - - THE FALSE REPORT - - -Mr. Kamamura never again saw his two tall English guests. - -As a matter of fact, they sought for and found a means of leaving his -garden by a back way that brought them to a road which in its turn -brought them to the station. - -And the native gentlefolk in the train, which brought them back to -Nagasaki by six o’clock, could not imagine what great grief it was that -made the tall English lady so pallid, and so like the very picture of -woe. - -At the Nagasaki station Leslie helped his companion into a riksha. - -“Don’t come back with me to the hotel,” she murmured; “I will drive -there alone. I want to be alone, quite alone for a while. All our -arrangements are made, and there is nothing more to be said. God help -me!—God help us both! Good-bye, Dick, for the present.” - -He watched her drive off. Then he took a riksha himself, and ordered the -man to take him to the House of the Clouds. - -Everything was arranged. Jane was to be his for ever. But there was no -triumph in the thought. The battle had been won by his own weakness, not -by his strength. Jane’s compassion for him had betrayed her. - -They were to sail to-morrow by the _Empress of Japan_. He was to stay -the night at the hotel, for he could not possibly remain the night at -the House of the Clouds having once bidden good-bye to Campanula. - -Beyond Vancouver lay the scheme traced out by him, accepted by Jane. -They were to buy a farm in the Canadian North-west, and live there for -ever happily. He would not touch a penny of her money; he had jewelry -worth at least four hundred pounds, which would be amply sufficient to -start on. His share in M’Gourley’s business was to be left for -Campanula. - -It is true he knew little about farming, but—love can do anything. - -Viewed from a natural standpoint the whole arrangement was not only -natural but praiseworthy. That a woman, fond of a natural life in the -open air, should leave a creature like George du Telle, and cast herself -into the arms of a man like Leslie. What could be more in keeping with -the grand aim of Nature, the propagation of the fit in body? - -Viewed from a social standpoint the whole arrangement was wickedly -absurd. And from a moral standpoint simply wicked. - -Nature stood decidedly on Leslie’s side; God (according to the -theologians) and society stood against him. - -These problems are occurring every day and every minute of the day, -perplexing the thinker and confounding his belief, unless he looks upon -the world as a higher thing than a breeding ground for animals. And it -is generally by their side issues they are to be solved, and the side -issue in Leslie’s case was Campanula. - -He was nearing Danjuro’s shop when he saw a riksha with a disguised -figure in it. - -It was Mac, and Mac was disguised with whisky. - -He was flushed, and his hat was on the back of his head, and he was so -obviously fuddled that the gentle Japanese who passed smiled and passed -on, without looking back. - -“Stop!” cried Leslie to his man, then jumping out he ran to M’Gourley’s -riksha, which had also stopped. - -“Have you heard the news?” - -“News?” said Mac. “News—what news?” - -“The Bombay and Benares bank is broken.” - -“It is not,” replied the other, fumbling in his pocket. “Na, na—false -report. Bombay and Ta-Lien, you mean.” Then, drawing a paper from his -pocket, and with ferocity: “Canna ye read?” - -Leslie took the paper; it was a cablegram from Shanghai. - - “False report. Bombay and Ta-Lien suspended. Bombay and Benares - safe. - - JARDINE MATHESON.” - -“Good Heavens!” said Leslie. “When did you get this?” - -“Hoor ago. Drive on, you—wheel me awa’.” - -“Where are you going?” - -“Mogi—to forget I was ever such a fule as to go into partnership with a -man like—_wheel me awa’_!” - -“Steady on, steady on,” said Leslie. - -“I’ll be back the morrow morn and see y’ before you’re awa’ to -Vancouver.” Then, leaning back as the riksha started: “I may be a fule, -but I’m not a blind fule, and I’m not a—(_hic!_).” - -The riksha joggled over a stone and he collapsed like a shut-down opera -hat. - -Leslie continued his way. - - - - - CHAPTER XXXI - - FAREWELL - - -It was seven o’clock; the birds were taking their nests in the cherry -orchard with one final burst of chattering. The sky in the west, -wave-green melting into vaguest blue, held one solitary cloud floating -like a rose-leaf beneath the evening star. Leslie stood at his gate, -looking for the last time at the twilight stealing over Nagasaki. He had -just arrived. - -M’Gourley’s words were still ringing in his ears, and his mind was in a -turmoil. - -He was in exactly the position of the man who has cheated unwittingly at -cards, who has found out his mistake, and who has still time to save his -honor. - -If the Bombay and Benares bank was safe, it was his plain duty to go at -once to Jane du Telle and inform her of the fact. She was laboring under -the impression that he was a ruined man. Half of her sympathy, the whole -of the present situation, had arisen from that misconception. To leave -her under this delusion would amount to fraud—the meanest of all -frauds. - -He was feeling this keenly, but unfortunately his mind, instead of -grappling with the situation, and forcing his body to act, was engaged -in cursing Fate, and the tangled net in which he found himself taken. - -Was it his fault that the false news had come just at the psychological -moment, the news that had actually thrown Jane into his arms? He kept -asking himself this, as he gazed across the dusk-eyed harbor to the -hills now becoming dimmed by the twilight. - -This last touch of Fate would, if he accepted it without resistance, rob -him of the last remnants of honor and all self-respect. - -His hand was upon the stakes, he had a moment to decide whether to take -them or leave them: to be a thief or an honest man. - -Suddenly, as if silence had placed her finger upon their throats, the -birds in the orchard ceased their chatter. - -The warm day dying seemed to have called all the spirits of beauty from -air and earth and sea, to stain the skies above its death-bed with the -tints of the ocean and the dawn. Over the tomb of light Color, Light’s -firstborn child hovered like some exquisite ephemera whose wings change -from beauty to beauty before dissolving for ever in darkness and death. - -The silence that had come over the orchard was broken occasionally by -little outbursts of squabbling from over-full nests, sounds like the -flirting of a fan amongst the leaves, chirrupings that told of -differences made up. Then final and complete silence that would last -till night woke the owls. - -Leslie at the gate suddenly made a gesture as if he were flinging -something away, turned on his heel, and came towards the house. - -He entered just as Cherry-blossom, with a white flower in her hair, her -amber sleeves fallen back and exposing her fore-arms, her body stretched -to its fullest height on the tips of her tabis, was in the act of -lighting the big hall-lamp. She looked like a little cat stretching -herself. - -A pang went through his heart. He would never see Cherry-blossom light -the big hall-lamp again, never again see Pine-breeze bring in the -tea-cups, nor Lotus-bud carrying off Sweetbriar San to his box in the -kitchen. - -You cannot possibly live in Japan without loving your maid-servants. I -mean by love that sort of passion which was inspired in Matthew Prior by -the lady of fashion aged five. - -It was a feature of the House of the Clouds that sometimes on the lower -floor you would find a hall with two rooms on either side of it, and -sometimes two rooms and no hall, and sometimes, in very hot weather, one -huge room. The sliding paper partitions made this possible; nay, very -easy, for Mr. Initogo had improved upon the ordinary Japanese method, -being of an inventive turn of mind. - -He looked into the room on the right of the hall. A _chamécen_ lay on -the floor, an hibachi showed a crimson spark, and a dwarf maple in a pot -of Arita ware displayed its pretty form vaguely in the twilight. - -He looked into the room on the left: no one. - -Where was Campanula? She must have returned by this, surely. Perhaps she -was upstairs. - -He went up, making little noise in his stocking-feet. At the door of his -room he peeped in. - -There was Campanula. Oh, desolate sight! She was sitting on his big -portmanteau all alone in the dusk. Her head was bent. - -She looked so forlorn and so small, and the sash of her obi so huge in -comparison with the wearer, that he could not but recall how she sat -that morning in the Tea House of the Tortoise. That morning, when she -had likened herself to a lump of mud; the morning he had proposed to -adopt her, and care for her, and make her a chattel of his own. - -A moment later, he had caught her up in his arms. She did not resist, -but he seemed to have taken up a lifeless thing. - -As he carried her downstairs, had he known, it might have seemed strange -to him that so great a grief should be so light a burden. - -He brought her to the room on the right, where Cherry-blossom had just -lit the lamp, and sat down beside her on the matting. - -He took a cigarette from his pocket, and approached the tobacco-mono -with it. Then, without lighting it, he flung the cigarette away. - -“Campanula, I am going on a journey. I did not tell you last night, for -I had not made up my mind.” - -“I have heard it,” she replied. She sat there beside him, a small figure -with head bowed and hands folded in her lap; and the sadness and -sorrowful sweetness of those four words pierced his heart. - -To get this terrible interview over, to tear himself away at once, he -would have sold years of his life. But it had to be gone through with. - -Whether she loved him as a woman loves a man, or a child loves a father, -she loved him, loved him as no person had ever loved him before—and he -knew it. - -Then he talked to her, telling her that he would come back. - -“I have been away before, Campanula, and I have returned. Will you not -believe me that I will return?” - -“Ah yes,” she answered, “but you did not go with her.” - -He said nothing for a moment. There was a sound outside; it was the -coolie he had ordered to take his portmanteau to the hotel. He heard -Pine-breeze accosting him, he heard him go upstairs and come down again, -walking heavily. It was like the sound of a man carrying out a coffin. - -He heard his steps on the garden walk dying towards the gate. - -How had she discovered with whom he was going? - -If she would only weep or cry out, or move, or break in some way this -terrible stillness. If she would only reproach him. But she said -nothing, nor even sighed. She seemed like a person stricken not by -grief, but death. Then he began to talk again, telling her of the -arrangements he had made. How M’Gourley San would look after her, just -as he had done before, till he came back. And he would write every -week—till he came back. And they would all be happy together again, as -happy as ever they had been—when he came back. - -To which she replied: - -“If you are going away to find happiness, my happiness is great.” - -Fancy a white house, lantern-lit, and steeped in dusk, a tall man -walking away from it rapidly, three Mousmés on their knees on the -veranda crying after the vanishing form: “Come again, oh, condescend to -come again quickly!” - -The sound of their voices rings in his ears as he passes through the -little gate. He hears it pursuing him like the faint murmur of bees, -until a puff of wind blows it away and replaces it by the faint sound of -the city below. - -Come again! He will never come again to lie in the hammock beneath the -cherry trees. Never more shall Lotus-bud hand him the night lantern to -light him to his bed, nor thy small hands, O Pine-breeze, bear him the -brown leather cigar-case that thy small nose loved to smell! - -As he came down hill towards Nagasaki he felt as though he were leaving -spring for ever behind him. - -Thrice he stopped as if to return, and stood gazing into the darkness of -the uphill path, listening to the wind in the branches of the lilac -trees. - -The last of these pauses ended more abruptly than the others, and he -plunged on again down hill through the gloom. - - - - - CHAPTER XXXII - - HER HOUSE IN ORDER - - -Left alone, Campanula sat, her hands folded in her lap—a Lost One -indeed. - -Before her mental vision, beyond Japan, beyond that desolate country -always surrounded with ice, the country where the bluebells grew—beyond -all this lay the land where O Toku San had gone that day, the land where -one never regrets, one never forgets, one never remembers. - -He had gone to find happiness. Not one word had she spoken to hold him -back or keep him by her, this true daughter of Dai Nippon, soul sister -of O Gozen San, daughter in spirit of the immortal Hirose. - -Cleopatra with the asp and all the mouthing heroines of history would -seem cheap indeed beside this small and faithful figure to whom death -was nothing, passion and personal happiness nothing beside the happiness -of the being she loved. - -She sat for an hour scarce moving; then she rose up. She had no more -time for personal thoughts; all things had to be left in order, and her -trust to the least detail faithfully fulfilled. - -She called the Mousmés to her, and told them that now Leslie San had -left, they would be discharged until he came back. They could go that -evening to their homes in the city below. She would pay them their wages -and a month in advance, and a little present for each out of money of -her own. And the three kow-towed, delighted at the prospect of change -and the month’s money for doing nothing, and the little present besides. -They never thought to ask her what she would do herself in the house -alone, their butterfly brains were so filled with the thoughts of -pleasure. - -Then she made Lotus-bud bring all the bills owing, bills yard long and -extraordinarily minute in detail. These she discharged. There were chits -out, but these were Leslie’s affair, and he had no doubt settled them. - -She thought of Sweetbriar San the cat, and as he was fondest of -Pine-breeze, she gave Pine-breeze a small sum to take him home and keep -him, applying to M’Gourley San if more money were needful. - -Then she went upstairs to her own room and folded neatly the obis and -kimonos in the drawers of the great lacquer cabinet. In one of these -drawers were things she had only, as it were, dropped from her hand; the -toys she had played with as a child. Here was the doll bought in Nikko, -and bouncing balls, ever so many; and in a piece of rice paper, still -ferocious, but terribly old and warped, the famous dragon. - -She took him out and tried to remove the paper from his sugar-candy -sides, but it was stuck too tight. She put him back, and, holding the -drawer with both hands, pressed her forehead against them. - -As she stood like this, mute and utterly motionless, the night breeze -came through the window, bearing the perfume of the azaleas. - -It was as if they were calling to her, and she closed the drawer gently -and turned, as if to say, “I hear.” - -Then she came down and found the three Mousmés waiting, each with a -lighted lamp on the end of a stick, and her frail belongings on her -back, luggage consisting of cardboard boxes, except in the case of -Pine-breeze, who was also burdened with a basket containing Sweetbriar -San. - -They had received their wages, and there was nothing left for them now -to do but go; which they did, after profound salaams, murmurs and -declarations of personal unworthiness. - -Then Campanula found herself standing alone. The only living thing -beside herself in the house was the mushi, that musician of the night, -already saluting its mistress with a thin stream of song. She went to -the doorway where it hung, and unhooked the little cage. - - - - - CHAPTER XXXIII - - THE “LA FRANCE” - - -The fair that had been going on all day in the street leading to the -Bund was still in full swing. A lurid sight the street presented, lit by -lanterns of all colors, and flare lamps near the booths. - -Leslie was glad of the noise and bustle around him; one cannot think -much when pressing one’s way through a Japanese fair, colored lamps -dancing, Mousmés laughing, and showmen shouting, rikshas passing at a -trot, or attempting so to do, children blowing trumpets, babies whirling -rattles, men-of-war’s men from the ships in harbor walking four abreast -and arm in arm, singing “Jean Francis de Nantes,” or “We won’t go Home -till Morning.” _Chamécens_ and moon fiddles buzzing and tinkling, dogs -barking, and gakunin wailing. - -It was ten when he reached the hotel. In the entrance-hall, where the -orange trees in tubs reflected the lamp-light from their glossy leaves, -a Chinese hall porter in a blue silk blouse sat on guard. From the -half-open door of the _salle à manger_, where a party of Russian -officers were at dinner, came the sound of laughter and the clinking of -glasses. - -As he entered the hotel the whole world around him changed. Campanula -vanished from his mind. He was no longer in Japan. He was in the same -house with Jane, and in a few more hours she would be his. - -The Chinaman rose from his seat when he saw Leslie enter and led him -down a corridor to the door of the private sitting-room where he had -dined with Du Telles. He had promised Jane to wait for her there till -the morning. - -The sphinx-like Celestial closed the door, and Leslie found himself -alone. - -The windows were open on account of the warmth, and they gave a view of -the narrow mysterious harbor that seems to have been cut in the old -heroic days by some giant who was also a poet. The high cliffs cast -their shadows like sable robes upon the water, jeweled with the lights -of the shipping. The sky all silence and stars, paling now in the -moonlight, was almost the sky of Europe. Orion was there, and the -Pleiades, and Cassiopæa dreaming in her diamond-studded chair. - -The room itself was a strange mixture of Japan and Europe. The floor was -the matted floor of Japan, the cane sofas might have been bought at -Shoolbred’s. The walls were as plain and unadorned as the walls of a -Japanese house are wont to be—that is to say, under the fans which the -hotel proprietor had fastened to them—fans from Kioto, Tokyo, and Nara -crucified against the white paneling and looking like great butterflies -in some giant’s collection. - -He lit a pipe. Jane was upstairs in some room, but there were still nine -hours of waiting to be done; and he had promised that he would not go -upstairs if permitted to pass the night in the hotel, but wait patiently -for her to come to him at the hour of starting. - -He felt that if he thought about her he would break his oath, so he -drove her from his mind. - -He watched the twinkling lights in the harbor; those darting about like -fire-flies were the sampans; that long hulk all crusted with light was -the _La France_, the ship in which Jane had intended to sail for Osaka. -It was after ten now, and she was overdue to leave. That sister-hulk, -equally gemmed, was the Nord Deutscher Lloyd boat leaving at dawn for -Colombo. Those three lights in a triangle were the anchor lights of the -great Russian cruiser _Rurik_—the ill-fated _Rurik_. - -Suddenly a horn of light shot out from the bow of the _La France_, and -she began to move like a glittering town towards the sea, and the wind -from the west brought the faint music of a band. The _La France_ had -unbuoyed and was away. - -He watched her as she picked her course through the shipping stealthily -like a robber. Now with all side lights showing, now with them half -extinguished as she veered to avoid the bell-buoy of the Atraska shoal; -now a vague phantom swallowed by the shadows of the night. - -The hotel was silent now, the Russians had gone off to their ship. -Somewhere outside, somewhere in the gloom of the mysterious night, a -_chamécen_ was tinkling to the muttering of a little drum. What dancing -girl was setting her steps to that tune—and where? - -He rose to his feet and began to pace the room, then he turned the lamp -up till it smoked, and turned it down till it was nearly out, and cursed -the burner for his own stupidity. - -Still the distant _chamécen_ kept up its buzzing to the devil’s tattoo -of the distant drum. - -He walked to the window and shut it. Result—absolute silence and -stifling heat. No matter; anything was better than that infernal drum. - -He had shut out the drum, but he had shut in a mosquito. It was in the -lace curtain, and its twang brought him again to his feet. He tried to -find it in the curtain, failed, pulled the whole curtain down from its -attachment, and trampled it under-foot. - -Silence, this time unbroken, until one of the fans upon the wall -rustled, and from beneath it crept a frightful-looking spider as brown -and as broad as a penny. - -He did not see it; he was sitting in the arm-chair with his head between -his hands, breaking his promise to Jane. - -When it was broken he got up, crossed the room, opened the door, and -went into the hall. - -The Chinese night-porter was sitting like a figure of stone in a blouse -of blue silk. Leslie went up to him, spoke some words in a low tone, and -handed him some money. - -The Chinaman rose and led the way upstairs. Down a passage they went -till the guide stopped, pointed to a door, turned, and vanished as -silently as he had come. - -Leslie went to the door and knocked softly. No answer. He turned the -handle, the door opened and he entered—an empty room. - -A lamp was burning on a table in one corner, a bed stood close to the -window: the bed was empty. - -It was Jane’s room, for there lay her trunks. A glove lay on the floor. -He picked it up, looked at it, smelt it, and then threw it down. The -dressing-table held none of those articles of the toilet one might have -expected to see. Beside the lamp on the side-table lay a letter. - -He had seen the letter almost on the first moment of his entering the -room, with that vague, half-terrified comprehension which we may imagine -in the brain of the bull when the sun-light flashes on the sword of the -matadore. - -He approached it now, and read the superscription: “Richard Leslie, Esq. -Important.” - -He opened it, and a number of bank notes came out. These he laid on one -side, took the letter that was with them, and began to read. - -He read the letter, not as if he were reading a letter, but the face of -some scoundrel he had dragged by the ears into the zone of lamplight. He -envisaged it, took whole sentences in _en bloc_. He read first at the -end, then in the middle, then at the beginning. - -“And now good-bye for ever. Oh, Dick, don’t think badly of me for this; -I have only done what was right. - -“When you get this I shall be gone. I am leaving by the _La France_ to -meet George. - -“I leave you money. Half what I have is yours; remember we are cousins, -and ought to help one another. - -“Oh, Dick! Dick! I _can’t_ do what you want. I am not thinking of myself -but of my people. Imagine the disgrace and ruin it would bring them. My -dear old father, it would kill him.” - - - - - CHAPTER XXXIV - - AMIDST THE AZALEAS - - -It was very late at night; clouds from the Pacific were rolling over -Nagasaki, and it was evident that the hot weather of the last two days -had been the prelude of a storm. - -The House of the Clouds, lamp-lit and deserted, cast from the opening in -the shoji a long parallelogram of light that cut the darkness like a -sword; a sword of light lying upon the veranda, the graveled walk, and -the landscape garden. - -With the darkness outside had come a great silence broken only by the -wind. - -Had you been standing on the veranda you would have sworn that some -blind person was prowling before the house, soundless of foot and -cautiously feeling his way by tapping on the ground with a stick. - -It was only the lath shaken by the wind, the tireless lath that all day -and all the night before had kept the echoes of the garden answering its -summons, and still kept up the unwearied sound-semblance of a blind man -who walked without footstep, a patient sentinel, now advancing, now -retreating, now at the garden gate, now near the azaleas, and ever -waiting. - -The garden gate clicked, and hurried footsteps came up the path. - -It was Leslie, hatless, bright and wild of eye, walking rapidly, but in -a tottering manner. His lips were of a dull purple color, and he had the -aspect of a man heavily drugged with opium. - -He crossed the veranda and entered the deserted hall. He looked into the -rooms on either side—they were both empty. Then he came back to the -hall, and cried out, “Campanula!” The rafters returned the sound of his -voice, but she did not answer. - -He was perfectly clear of mind, but his breathing was affected, and a -deadly torpor hung over him which his will alone prevented falling. - -He took in all the details around him with extraordinary clearness, -amongst others the fact that the mushi’s cage had been removed. - -Having waited for a moment, straining his ears to catch the faintest -sound, he seized the swinging paper lantern that lit the hall, and with -it in his hand went into the kitchen. It was deserted. Then he went -upstairs—every room was empty. It was like a house from which the -people had fled in terror, and he came down again, wild with the -apprehension of some unknown tragedy. - -He brought the lamp into the room on the right of the passage, and -placed it on the floor. Something crimson lay on the primrose-colored -matting. He picked it up; it was Campanula’s obi. Why had she cast it -there? - -He was looking round him as if for a person to explain all these things, -when his eye caught an open drawer of the great lacquer cabinet that -contained his papers. He looked into the drawer, and it was empty. It -was the drawer in which he had placed the waki-zashi—the suicide sword, -given to him by Jane. - -From the open drawer his eyes turned to the obi, which he had dropped, -and then he looked round him, as Dives looks round him in that picture -of Teniers, where Dives wakes in Hell. - -As he stood, the wind shook the broken lath outside, and played with it. -“Tap! tap! tap!” - -He saw the sunlit Nikko road, the valley of the crimson azaleas, the -Lost One who had loved him as no other being had loved him—the one he -had lost for ever. - -She was dead, yet it was denied to him to find her, and clasp her in his -arms, and die with her. - -Death was nothing, but never to find her again, never to see her again, -or touch her small body, that was an agony far beyond death. - -He left the room, feeling by the walls like a man without sight. - -Outside, the world was in utter darkness. More clouds had rolled up over -the sky, as if called by the Blind One, the tapping of whose stick -betrayed him, as he walked, waiting for his prey. - -If he could find her, what cared he for the Blind One! If he could not -find her he felt that he would be for ever lost. But he could never find -her more, for the opium sleep was falling upon him now. He had no more -strength to fight it, and the darkness of the pit lay around him. - -Suddenly, the night wind changed, and brought him the perfume of the -unseen azaleas, and with the perfume a thin thread of song. - -It was the song of the mushi—the atom of life he had spared that day in -his fury, even as God might now be sparing him—the mushi she had loved -so well. Feeling by the veranda wall, he followed the song like a man -led by a thread, and as he came he crushed something beneath his foot: -it was the lath, whose sound would never trouble him again. - -He felt the azalea bushes around his knees, and advanced amongst them, -still led by the tremulous song, till his foot touched something soft, -and his hand a tiny cage, hanging to one of the crimson-flowering boughs. - - - - - CHAPTER XXXV - - BON MATSURI - - -It was the 18th of August—the last night of Bon Matsuri. - -Under a sky splendid with stars, the hills about Nagasaki were gemmed -with colored lights. Ten thousand colored lanterns adorned the terraced -cemeteries, and towards dawn each lantern would be fixed to a tiny boat -of straw, freighted with a few small coins, and some small offering of -fruit, to stay the souls of the dead on their long journey home. - -M’Gourley had come out to see the fairy-like spectacle, for he knew that -Mr. Initogo, that faithful old Pagan gentleman, was amidst the rejoicers -on the hillsides, and had lit two lanterns, and freighted two small -boats, for the souls of two friends he had known on earth. - -Just as the morning breeze began to blow, and before the first star had -paled in the dawn breaking over the Pacific, the gazers from the ships -and the shore drew their breath, for suddenly the whole hillsides seemed -in motion, shifting and glittering down to the water’s edge, till the -ripples became surrounded by a zone of rose-colored fire. - -Then the water itself became dyed with the glow of ten thousand -lanterns, each bravely upborne on its little ship of straw, whose sails -took the Eastern breeze. - -As the fairy flotilla sailed away, spreading the harbor with light and -color, ship after ship took fire, and ship after ship was lost. - -M’Gourley, hat in hand, stood watching till the last spark had vanished -in the lilac of the dawn; then, with a sigh that spoke of things that -were not, but might have been, he turned slowly home. - - - - - * * * * * * - - - - -Transcriber’s note: - -Throughout the dialogues, there were words used to mimic accents of the -speakers. Those words were retained as-is. - -Errors in punctuations and inconsistent hyphenation were not corrected -unless otherwise noted. - -On page 17, a quotation mark was removed after “Lord sakes!” - -On page 29, a superfluous quotation mark was deleted. - -On page 29, a quotation mark was moved one space to the correct -position. - -On page 47, a period was added after “as fraunk as mysel’”. - -On page 81, “Lesile” was replaced with “Leslie”. - -On page 120, “perfumed hair” was replaced with “perfumed hair”. - -On page 128, “acros” was replaced with “across”. - -On page 150, a quotation mark was added after “Lord and also -the empire of the birds.” - -On page 243, “though” was replaced with “through”. - -On page 264, “horor” was replaced with “horror”. - -On page 272, “Baudelaires” was replaced with “Baudelaire’s”. - -On page 281, “jewelery” was replaced with “jewelry”. - - - - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CRIMSON AZALEAS *** - -***** This file should be named 55709-0.txt or 55709-0.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/5/5/7/0/55709 - -Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. 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