CHAPTER XI

He heard her soothing the child within and the sound of its subdued cries. Finally, comforted, it must have slept, for there was no further sound within.

Matsuda pushed open the shoji door. The house and furniture were his. He would enter when he pleased.

She was standing behind the shoji, as though awaiting his coming. Her baby was strapped to her back and she held something clasped close to her heart. It was a large black book. Matsuda recognized it. She spoke in unfaltering accents.

“Pray you walk in, Matsuda Isami. Thefurniture is waiting to be taken. Truly an empty house will be of more comfort than one dressed in what belongs to you.”

“An empty house?” he repeated. “But I do not propose to empty my house. The house, too, is mine since I bought it within the month.”

“Ah,” she said, “I suspected as much. Very well, take also the house, most honorable Matsuda Isami. We will leave it at once.”

He followed her down the path for a space. When he seized her sleeve, she shook it from his grasp.

“Do not make claim upon us, also, Matsuda Isami,” she scornfully mocked.“It is not possible you purchased us, too?”

“No, but I shall do so, Madame Azalea.”

“Oh, no, that is not possible.”

Her proud and stubborn demeanor caused him to change his tone.

“Listen,” he said. “By the law you are no longer the wife of the barbarian. He has deserted you and hence you are divorced. Become wife with me. My house awaits your coming, and I have sworn to possess you.”

“I would rather wed with Death,” was her answer.

“‘My house awaits your coming, and I have sworn to possess you.’”(Page162)

He turned in savage exasperation and ran toward the house. She, standing still now, watched him enter. A moment latershe heard his hoarse laughter and the crashing of articles within. Sick despair crept through her being, freezing her faculties. She could not move, but stood like one fascinated, watching the trembling of the house itself. It shivered, swayed and shook from side to side, as though a very tempest were sweeping it within. Then suddenly there was an upheaval, a splintering crash, and the little house upon the hill was a mass of broken debris. Matsuda, his passion unsatisfied with the destruction of the furniture, had seized the main pole of the house—the support of the frail structure—and had shaken it with such violence that the house itself had collapsed. Aprovidence which seems by some irony of fate to watch over the fortunes of the evil, had saved the man himself from so much as a scratch. He was snorting and puffing like a bull as he sped down the hill past the trembling, shrinking Azalea.

A sound escaped her lips. It could not be called a cry. She made a little rush toward the fallen house, then stopped and covered her eyes with her sleeves. She was homeless, without means, and upon her back her warm, sleeping babe hung heavy and helpless.

Dazedly, almost blindly, Azalea made her way down the hill slope, across the little bridge that spanned the narrow riverin the valley below, up another hill, and on through the fields. She had come to the house of her step-mother. At least she had never been denied a roof there.

Her knock was timid and faint. As though expecting her, Madame Yamada hastened to the door. Azalea spoke in the weariest, the faintest of accents.

“Excellent mother-in-law, my house has fallen and I am without money and very tired. I wish to come into my father’s house a little while.”

Madame Yamada laughed shrilly.

“The doors of your father’s house,” she said, “are closed to the one who has dishonored them.”

Azalea stood in silence. Even in her misery, her pride withheld her from pleading. She bowed her head in apathetic politeness.

“Say no more, then,” she said. “We will go elsewhere.”

“The shadows of the night were her only covering, and the soft, mossy grass her mattress.”(Page166)

That night she slept under the open skies. The shadows of the night were her only covering, and the soft, mossy grass her mattress. She slept well, as the exhausted often do, and felt nor knew the discomfort of her unusual bed, for she was close to the ruin of her home that had been, and near, too, to the little mission house. Her last thought ere she slept was a vague and almost childish remembranceof an argument she had once had with her husband. She had protested against the locking of the mission house, declaring that locks were unknown and unneeded in Japan. He had insisted that thieves might enter the place and despoil the little church of its few possessions. Now Azalea thought with a strange feeling of bitter triumph that she had proved herself right. Oh, if the little church were but open, what a haven of refuge it would prove now for her and for their child. Who had better right to its protection than the wife and offspring of the priest of the church?

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