Arisuga sang for the Guards, and made rhymes and laughter, and they liked him tremendously, as big men are inclined to like little ones, until they reached Ping-Yang, when they liked him still more for something better. You will remember how the first assault of the Japanese was met by the Chinese, who had yet to be taught defeat. The big Satsuma color-bearer was killed, and the flag fell in the polluting Chinese dust. It was little Arisuga who raised it—to such a shout as cost the Chinese the hundred or so men they could spare at that time. And he stayed out there, with the flag, where the Chinese were, when the rest retired, and taunted the enemy with polite epithets, kept his pistol going, and finally came through without a scratch!
Thus, the smallest member of the Guards had demonstrated to the greatest, the thingwhich helped to win their other victories: that though their enemy was not lacking in courage, as they had thought, yet he could neither manœuvre nor shoot.
Afterward, there was a contest for the picturesque office of color-bearer. Some of them wanted Okuma. And Arisuga was willing, of course. He knew how impossible it was to him at his size. But Colonel Zanzi said the colors belonged to Arisuga.
"Men get what they win in the army—nothing more, and not less. Here, no honor goes by favor! A man passes for a man until he is proven otherwise, no matter who or what he is, or whether he be five feet or six. In the army there are neither eta nor samurai, only sons of the emperor."
After the peace of Shimenoseki there was dull barrack life for little Arisuga, far from Yoné, until he led the allies in their assault upon the gate of the Hidden City. You will remember that the Japanese were conceded the advance. After the first repulse they disentangled Arisuga from a heap of Chinese with the colors still upright in his hands. The wound was in his forehead. The great death had been near.
Now it happened that the next day a man with a Japanese name was brought before Colonel Zanzi and desired to know why it was that wounded Japanese soldiers were taken to the houses of the Chinese when there were Japanese houses near where they would be not only welcome but—Well, he had a pretty daughter, and the Chinese annoyed her by their attentions. A Japanese soldier in the house, a flag in the yard, and a pink ticket at the door would be not only glory but protection.
"I see," laughed the colonel. "Will a wounded one do?"
The visitor thought he would—if he were the young man who had been carried to the house of Han-Hai next door to him, the day before.
"Very good," smiled the colonel. "I observe that we are not only glorifying the emperor, but assisting a countryman to humble his Chinese neighbor. Very good!"
"It is not that," said the Japanese in China. "My daughter has seen him."
"Oh-h! Oh-h! He will have good care!"
Without another word the smiling commanding officer wrote the order for his transfer.
And the next day Orojii Zasshi was the proudest Japanese in China. For the imperial sun-flag waved over his roof; the pink ticket, to indicate that a soldier was quartered there, was tacked to his door-post; and within, in the most sumptuous room the house afforded, lay Shijiro Arisuga, color-bearer.
When Arisuga saw the face of "Hoshi-no-Yumé," some days later—and this "Dream-of-a-Star," as he at once called her, was well enough worth seeing—he said first:—
"It is not like what I thought it, angel."
Referring, of course, to the great red death, which he thought he had suffered—and what had necessarily followed.
"No," answered Hoshiko, comfortingly, remembering what the surgeon had said, that when he came out of his delirium he would probably be a bit queer.
"I suppose, after all, that the earth-heavens are much like the earth."
"Yes," from Miss Star-Dream.
"I don't think you understand me, since you answer only yes and no?"
"I understand yourwordsperfectly. I am Japanese!" answered the lips of Hoshiko, while they slowly smiled. "But your thought—"
"How lucky! For, I suppose here all peoples are mixed."
"Yes. There are all sorts: Russians, Germans, Americans, Frenchmen—"
She was thinking of the allies.
"It looks like Japan."
This was the interior which he was seeing.
"But you think it is China?"
"Yes! Out there it is precisely like the place where we fought."
"Yes," said puzzled Hoshiko.
"I suppose the gods surround us in the heavens with the things which have pleased us most on earth."
Something made him look at the girl who flitted near, and the same thing made him connect her with this state of celestial bliss.
But he sighed and turned from her. In the heavens, of course, she was incorporeal, and, while patent to the eyes, would fail like the air itself to the touch.
He looked through the window, then, at the Forbidden City.
"But there is no fighting here now," ventured the girl.
"Naturally," agreed the soldier.
"The Forbidden City is taken."
"I am glad to hear it. How long have you been here?"
"About thirteen years."
"You couldn't have been more than three or four when you died! I don't understand."
But, now, Hoshiko at last did. And she laughed.
"Excuse my levity," she said. "I am not dead, and you are not. I am not an angel, and this is not a heaven!"
"Oh!" said Arisuga; and then, "All right," as if it were a thing to be endured. He ended by also laughing. "But you must excuse the mistake. It seems a good deal like a heaven, and you more like an angel."
Still, as he looked about, and at the girl, he was not sure. That is what they were likely to tell a sick man.
"Might I touch you?" he asked.
"Oh, yes!" cried the girl, with a pleasure which challenged his attention. She put herself within his reach.
"It isnota heaven," he agreed, when he had passed his hand along an exquisite arm.
"I am honorably glad that you are not dead," breathed the girl, bravely. "Are not you?"
And every little atom of her showed that she was glad and begged that he might be. Though the mists were still in the brain of Shijiro Arisuga, he could not help knowing both of these things: her innocence had uncovered them so completely. For a moment he studied her. Then he answered a tardy yes to her question.
"For such as you it is good to live—yes—and—" The soldier stopped to sigh. "Good for others to live near you for the little while."
"For a little while, lord?"
She thought it the mere hyperbole of their race.
"Oh, you shall be old, old, old, and beautiful, with long white hair and perhaps a beard, and all the earth shall worship your piety—"
Arisuga laughed and caught a hand to stop her.
"Lord," she went on, "most vast lord, I will make you. Yes! I have thus far made it to be. When they brought you they said you would die. So said my father and mother. But I—"
She turned and summoned her maid with fierce irrelevance.
"Isonna, come here!"
The maid hastened from the next room, where, it is almost certain, she had lain with her ear to the fusuma, and then Hoshiko's mysterious purpose appeared.
"But I—Isonna and me—this is Isonna, my ugly maid—Isonna and me prayed for you—wept for you; you were so beautiful and bloody. And Benten—see, I have Benten always near! Benten loves the tears of sympathy, and to her we prayed, so—"
"I owe you and Isonna my life," laughed the soldier.
"No, Benten," whispered the girl, now answering his laugh with a smile. "And she will grant other prayers of ours—Isonna and me—will she not, Isonna, you little beast? Why do you not speak?"
Isonna corroborated her mistress by a deep prostration.
"And so we have asked for long life for you, very long, until the pebbles grow to boulders and the moss grows to your shoulders—"
Arisuga laughed, in frank joy of her.
"And suppose, you who are so powerful with the goddess of beauty—for which I do notblame the goddess—suppose I have sworn to die the great death, to release my father's soul from the Meido so that he can be born again, and for the glory of the emperor?"
"Oh!" gasped the girl.
The soldier went on.
"—what will the other gods think of me, saving Benten, if I stop here and forget to die because a woman has hands, a voice, and eyes?"
"No, no!" cried Isonna, in sudden strange anguish.
Then she prostrated herself in abjection.
Arisuga rose on his elbow to look at her.
"What have I said to cause such sorrow?" he wondered. "Let me see. It was about your hands and voice and eyes."
"Yes!" cried mistress and maid together.
But it was the maid who went on:—
"And you must not, mighty lord. You must not find any beauty in my mistress's eyes and hands and voice. None anywhere. It is evil for both you and her!"
"Who said I found any beauty there?" smiled Arisuga, languidly.
"There is a secret, lord—" the maid went on in a frenzy.
But Star-Dream, suddenly grasping the place of her heart with both hands, cried out to the maid, as if she were desperately wounded:—
"Go, go, go, little foul beast! What do you do here? Who called you? Go!"
The maid disappeared like a spirit. Star-Dream found herself upon her feet, still gasping with ecstasy and terror together. Then she at last turned slowly toward the bed and smiled a sick mechanical smile.
"Lord, you said," she prompted. "Say on. Do not listen—do not observe the ugly Isonna. She has a trouble of the head."
Hoshiko drooped her own in some sort of gentle guilt.
"Ah, but I displeased you also," said Arisuga.
"Lord—I—no. I have a distemper. In it I am harsh to Isonna. That is what she is for. That is why my father keeps her. That she may bear my distemper. Presently I will go and put my arms about her, so, and all will be well!"
She illustrated with her own person.
"So?" asked the soldier, laughing; "certainly all will be well!" and she came withanother laugh and knelt at his bed. She touched him. She chattered on helplessly.
"Truly, all will be well. She loves me, wicked as I am to her, and with a touch I can win her!"
"Yes!" he agreed. "Or any one, I should fancy!"
Thus, at least, she had cunningly won him from his wonder at the scene he had just witnessed, if she had not won all else she had hoped for.
"May I ask a question?" said the girl.
"A hundred," said Shijiro.
"Lord, you said—you called me—"
"Yes," laughed Arisuga. "The eyes, the hands, the lips—"
"I am not beautiful—"
"I did not say so."
"My hands are not—"
She held them out that he might see that they were not. The soldier examined them and then said:—
"No, the maid was right. I find no beauty there."
"And my eyes—they are only beast's eyes—"
"Let me see," begged the soldier.
She came closer, and seriously opened them upon him. It was very hard for Shijiro looking into them to nod his assent that they were beast's eyes.
"Then the question is," said the girl, with innocent mirth, "why, if I am not beautiful, if nothing about me is, why did you do so?"
"Do what?" demanded the soldier, with a pretence of savagery.
"Look so into my eyes, touch so my hands, listen so to my miserable voice?"
"I supposed that I was in a heaven, and that you were an—attendant," said Arisuga.
"But after you knew that you were not in a heaven?"
The soldier gave up with a laugh.
"I see that we shall be very good friends," he said. They laughed together.
"Lord," she said, "I do not know whether you speak true!"
"I," said the soldier, "have the impression that I have lied to you about you."
"Shaka!" breathed the girl, between laughter and fear.
"Did you wish it—what I did—said?"
"Lord," confessed the girl, "I wish to be as beautiful as the sun-goddess, so that you must—do—say—!"
She crept closer. It was as if she caressed the soldier.
On another day Hoshiko asked:—
"Lord, must it be soon—now—that you die?"
"Now," he said, with a pretence of severity.
"Is the day fixed?"
"Yes. Am I to wait here because your eyes are not exactly a beast's, while my father languishes in the Meido?"
"Yea, lord, if you are hap—happy. For the spirits of our augustnesses, no matter where they are, even in the suffering of the hells, are not sad while they make us happy."
"In what book did you learn that?" demanded the soldier.
"In the Bushido," lied the girl, seriously.
"Then I have not read the commandments of the Bushido with sufficient care. I must do it all over. I am glad that there is such a doctrine. One may keep to a holy purpose, butneed not hasten it. And to-day I like to linger from the red death; I like it well!"
"Yes, lord, that is a filial duty. To die for—for—the repose of your father's soul. But there is no need of—haste?"
"No," said the disgraceful young soldier, "there is no need of haste."
She laughed and touched his face—where he caught and held her hand.
"Perhaps, many many years?"
"Perhaps," said Arisuga.
"Until you are mi—married?"
"Perhaps until I am married."
"Beautiful!" cried the girl.
"And who would you have me marry?"
"Isonna!" laughed Hoshiko, "if you were not so great, lord. Oh, she is most sweet to men! Often I have wondered that men do not marry her! Isonna!"
Again the girl plunged from the next room.
"Isonna," said her mistress, "ugly little beast, you are to marry the lord soldier when he is a trifle better."
Isonna forgot her manners in the violence of another amazement. Arisuga shouted with happy laughter.
"Vast lord," wailed the maid, as if she believed it all, "there is the same reason in me as in my mistress, that—"
"Sh!"
Hoshiko put her two hands violently upon the garrulous mouth of the servant.
"You little beast! Is not once enough? I dislike to kill you. But I suppose I must!"
When all was well again she turned to Arisuga:—
"Then you will need a servant—and I am very industrious, am I not, Isonna?"
Isonna said nothing. This seemed safest.
"Is she industrious, Isonna?" asked the mystified young soldier. "We will have no servants who are not industrious!"
"No," said the frightened maid to him, and "Yes" to her when she had looked, first, the way of her mistress, then the way of the soldier.
"Do I not curl the futons, dress my hair, fill my father's pipe, clean the sand out of his sandals, mend his bed-netting, tie his girdle, cook his rice?"
Isonna said yes.
"I am convinced," laughed the soldier. "When I marry Isonna you shall serve us."
"Go," said the girl to the maid, "and be ready when the lord commander wishes."
And when she was gone the young soldier and the girl laughed again together.
"Almost," said the girl, "she lost me my place in your household."
And one could not be certain from her words that she was not serious.
The soldier had again the impression that she had barely prevented some momentous disclosure. It gave his gayety pause and his coquetry caution.
"Then I am not in a heaven," said he, "and—youare not a heavenly person?"
The girl dropped to her knees beside him and asked:—
"I wish I might make this a heaven to you, and that I might seem—truly—like—a heavenly—person!"
"I never knew one on earth who seemed more like one! Be content."
"Alas! that is only because you have been ill and I have been kind to you?"
"You are very pleasant—very pleasant!" said Arisuga, setting the current of desire away from the peril of her. "What have you beendoing with me all the while I have been here?"
Nevertheless, and notwithstanding his retreat from sentiment, the wounded soldier possessed himself of one of Hoshiko's hands—quite by an unconscious act of fellowship. But one was not enough; he took the other. As he did it, he remembered and smiled because his hands and his will were at such variance.
The Lady Hoshi did not stay him. Indeed, she had always liked the stories of those bandits in the mountains, who took pretty girls and were never heard of again.
But she had to get away just then, much to her regret, because, out of her innocent honesty, she was not prepared to answer the question he had asked her—What had she been doing with him during the period of his delirious unconsciousness? And he repeated it!
Now to call one a pleasant person is about as far as a Japanese lover ordinarily goes. But Hoshiko was disappointed with it. What had gone before promised more.
In her disappointment, her humor became as testy as it was possible for her humor to become, which was, after all, not very testy. And so it remained for the day.
"Why didn't he take me?" she demanded savagely of Isonna the maid that night as she was putting her mistress to bed in the adjoining room. "And quickly! Like that! I would!" She clapped her hands—and then said: "Sh! Do you think he heard that?"
The maid reassured her.
"Butwhyis a man satisfied with a hand—even two—when by a strong arm he might have—" she stopped to sigh and to look into the round mirror which the maid was holding up to her—"all!"
"All of what?" asked the astonished maid.
"Me! This."
"Oh!" said the maid.
"If a man calls a girl an angel when he thinks he is in heaven, he has no business to call her only—" she stopped and sniffed disdainfully at the word—"pleasantwhen he finds he is not."
"What would you, then, have him to call you on earth?" questioned the puzzled maid.
"Angel still."
"Permit him a little time, mistress."
"Time! Time! What do you call time, you ignorant one? It was fifteen minutes! Yes! We had been talking fifteen minutes when he said I was apleasantperson! After saying I was an angel!"
"Oh!" said Isonna—which Hoshiko took for reproof.
"I have known him two weeks!"
"Yes," agreed the maid.
"And if you speak—if you suggest again, that which twice nearly escaped your lips, I will kill you. One night you will lie down, and, into your horrid, tattling mouth, I will pour, as you sleep, a something which will prevent you from ever rising. I have it always ready for you."
"But, your father?" whined Isonna.
"I, not my father, am speaking now!"
"I will be silent," agreed the maid.
"What is the use to take the trouble to tell him? Soon he will go and forget both us and that—what is the use?"
"I will be silent," said the maid, again. "I do not wish to die."
"And then—O Jizo, punish him!" She broke off and addressed another of her goddesses. "And then he had the unparalleled audacity to ask me what I had been doing with him all the while he has been here! After he had said angel repeatedly! O Jizo, punish him!"
"Well, well," comforted the maid, "why did you not inform him? Surely that was not difficult!"
"Oh! it was not, eh? Well, you blind little beast, do youknowwhat Ihavebeen doing?"
"You have recovered him from his illness with the utmost tenderness and beauty," said the maid.
"Oh, you little fool!" cried her mistress, first striking her, then embracing her; "I have been falling in love with him. It happened that day they carried him into the house of Han-Hai, where live three daughters, all unmarried. You saw it; you were present! Do you not remember how beautiful and bloody he was? His eyes were closed, the sun shone in his face, and that was pale with here and here thewindings of a bandage, like an aureole. Oh, how we both wept! He was so young; and we thought that we could heal him with great care! We wept. My father did the one thing which would stop our tears—brought, him here!"
"Yes—yes!" agreed Isonna.
"Now! Shall I tell him?"
"Oh, no, Lady Hoshi, no! That is a dreadful thing to do," sighed the maid.
"It is not dreadful. It is beautiful."
"But, dear, dear mistress, you must not love a man. That is what your father pays me to prevent!"
"Well, you haven't prevented it. And I shall tell my father, and he, also, will kill you and get me some one who is more useful. That is two killings for you!"
"But I did not know, mistress! Perhaps I do not know love."
"You do not, Isonna. For it has been right under your nose these two weeks. After all, I will not tell my father. For he might give me a maid who would not be as pretty as you," and she hugged Isonna, who was not pretty at all. "And in exchange for my mercy youmust not be odious, but recognize that it is too late. Is it a bargain?"
Well, any bargain the lovely Hoshi might propose to the plain Isonna would meet with her approval, though it should mean her death the next instant, and so this one was approved.
Now, the next day, Arisuga, laughing, greeted her with that very word—"angel"! Perhaps he did hear a bit of their talk. For the walls between them were very thin. This was the way of it: He clapped his hands so early in the morning that he was amazed at the despatch with which she arrived. But we are not. For we know that she was waiting just outside of his screens to be called. She meant to dissemble and pretend that she was at a distance. But you can fancy how instantly she forgot that when he called:—
"Angel! Angel of my earth-heaven!" Though there are no angels in the Japanese heavens.
You have seen that, in her presence, he had forgotten his caution! Observe, now, that he did likewise in her absence! What end but one could there be to such recklessness!
"Stand there! I want to look at you!" he cried when she came. For the light of the morning was in her face—and the light of love, too! "By your Jizo," he said, then, "I am glad you arenotan angel!
he sang, laughing, and her heart was so choked with ecstasy that she had to put both hands to her face and run from the room hearing him still call "Angel" after her.
"O Benten," she cried to the goddess of beauty in her room, "that is different! He is not careful now—he is awake to-day!Wemust beware of him! There is danger!"
And at once she returned—with the water for his bath!
For, that was always her way: when he would say something to make her heart leap into her mouth, to fly from him in the direst panic, suborn the goddess, then hasten back to have it happen again.
"A heart is a strange thing," she laughed to him. "Sometimes it is here (at the proper place for it), sometimes here (in her throat), and sometimes here (in her sandals)."
"And sometimes," laughed the young soldier, "one's heart, which should be here (in his own bosom), is there (in hers)."
"And again," she rioted with him, "one's heart, which was here (in herself), is gone—gone—utterly gone—"
"That is quite proper," the soldier said. "For if you kept your own, you would have two and I none!"
"It is trying to get out!" she cried in mock alarm, holding it in.
"Let it come!"
But, just then, they heard the sigh of a moving screen, and the acid face of Hoshiko's mother looked in. She said nothing, only let her eyes rove from face to face. But that was very cooling. She closed the shoji and went away—apparently.
Now, for the benefit of her mother, whom she knew to be still behind the fusuma, Hoshiko tried to look very severe. She had taken the poppies from behind her ear and had pinned a napkin about her hair, and turned up the sleeves of her kimono, making herself all the lovelier as she very well knew in this fashion of a nurse.
"You are to wash your hands in this cold water to refresh you. Then I will take it away and bring you other water for your face."
But, in the end, she washed his hands for him, and his face, too, amid a great deal of laughter and splashing.
"And now," he said, "I will take every advantage of my defenceless enemy. I will make her give me my breakfast."
Though she demurred, Hoshiko was quite mad to do it.
"Beware!" she whispered, as she let a persimmon slip from between her chopsticks into his mouth. "In the East, walls have not only ears but eyes!"
"And no conscience!"
"What would you?"
She hoped that he might desire walls without senses, where they might be fearlessly alone.
"Another persimmon!" he laughed.
"No," she pouted, for his punishment, "nothing but the rice."
"Not all the hard hearts," he sighed, "are behind the walls!"
Then she gave him the most luscious of the persimmons.
"You haven't told me yet," he insisted, "what I did and what you did while I was unconscious. That is always interesting."
She filled his mouth with rice.
"But what did you do and what did I do?"
It came through the rice.
"Please drink," she said.
"What did you do, what did I do?" he sputtered.
"Pardon me while I wipe your mouth."
"But what—"
"Nothing. I did nothing, you did nothing."
"It must have been very dull for you," sighed the defeated soldier.
"Jizo—" she was praying to the goddess at her small shrine that night—"I am going to conceal and lie! I pray you to intercede with the Lord Shaka for my pardon. He loves me—and he must not know. It is for happiness, Jizo.Hishappiness, do you understand, dear Jizo?"
She cried out savagely in her further confidences to Jizo that night, when she was ready for bed.
"Iwasvery busy—yes,verybusy—falling in love with him! And you must intercedewith Shaka for my forgiveness. It was a lie. But could I tell him that I was busy falling in love with him?"
The maid had come in to put her to bed.
"Strange prayers!" she said.
The mistress turned, intending to rebuke her. But she laughed.
"Come here and stop that laughing. He will hear!"
"Mistress, I did not laugh."
"Come here!"
When the maid was abject before her she said:—
"Why do you stare?"
"At the joy."
"Where?"
As if it were a symptom of disease.
"In the face."
"I have a trouble of the heart. Feel! That is why!"
"Yes!" said the maid, pretending terror.
"It will kill me!"
"Yes!"
"It will not!"
"No!"
They fell, laughing, together, to the floor.
"He does love me!"
"I know that much."
"But he does not know it—yet."
They laughed again.
"ItWASforhishappiness!"
"Certainly!"
"Not mine!"
"No!"
"He shall be told that he loves me!"
She shook her fist at her favorite deity, sitting unruffled in her shrine.
"Benten! You shall let him know!"
"The goddess is too decorous for that," chided the maid. "The only woman who tells a man that she loves him—"
"Is me!" cried her mistress to the shocked maid.
"Aie!" wailed the maid. "There is a kind of woman who does that, but she is not the lady Hoshi—"
"Oh, silence!" laughed the girl. "It would not take me a moment to tell him, if it were not for what he might think! And, perhaps, he is not wise and will not know enough wisdom to think that!"
"All men think that!" said Isonna.
"But, how can they," argued Hoshiko, "if they are not taught? How can he if I do not teach him?"
"It is born in them!"
"But how do you know?"
"I have studied," said the maid.
"Well, at all events, it was not that for which I petitioned the goddess: to tell him—that I loved him, you ignorant little animal. I asked her to tell him that he loved me!"
"Oh!" cried the maid, kowtowing. "I misunderstood."
"Now go to bed, you little scandal-monger!"
Isonna started. Her mistress recalled her.
"And—and, if there is a way of letting him know thathe—"
"Yes," answered the maid, understandingly.
"And as to letting him know that I lovehim—"
"Yes?"
"Do you think that necessary?"
"I do not know the ways of love," confessed Isonna.
"You are a little beast," said her mistress. "That can wait—if he once knows that he loves me. At all events it is too dangerous. Go to bed, wicked one!"
But the next day trouble, though not exactly of the heart, did arrive. It was one of Arisuga's days of retreat from Hoshiko. He asked her why she lived there—in China—when she might live in Japan, where she belonged.
She answered him that her father had come there many years before, when she was a child.
"I will ask him the reason if you wish."
"No, no, no!" laughed Arisuga. "What does it matter, my dear child?"
She ran away from him again. And all that day she kept repeating:—
"'My dearchild'! I am as tall as he!"
And at night, again, while the maid was undressing her, it was that still.
"Now he shall never know who—what I am. For Iambeautiful. The mirror says so. As beautiful as if I were not—what I am. Look, look and tell me!"
This the maid, for the hundredth time since he had come, did.
"You are, indeed, beautiful, dear mistress, yet, nevertheless, it is your duty to tell him! Otherwise he might wish to marry you. Already he loves you."
"I will not! And if you do, I will kill you!" threatened Hoshiko. "I will have these few days of heaven. He will go and not think of me again. He will never know. He will not have been contaminated. But I will have the few days in heaven! To him I am only a child."
And she fell to the floor and sobbed for an hour, during which the maid lay like a graven image at her side. Then she sat up and asked:
"Nowyou don't blame me, do you?"
"No."
"Anyhow, he will go as soon as possible."
"No, he will not," said the impertinent Isonna.
"He will! You know that he will! Say that he will!"
But the maid knew better.
"That is what men always do when they find out."
"He will not," said Isonna.
"You are very impertinent!" And her mistress punished her maid's impertinence by flinging her the amber bracelet she wore.
"Now, disobedient one, you shall tell me why you think such a naughty thing. Yet you cannot know. No one can see into his large mind. He keeps it closed. He is as wise as a priest. Not even I can enter it. And you are very ignorant, Isonna."
"Nevertheless, his mind is as glass to me!" insisted the maid.
"I will tell my father and he shall punish you with whips. Now, you dear little beast, I shall force you to tell me the reason you think in your evil mind the great color-bearer to the prince of heaven stays here!"
"You," said the maid, coolly refilling first the pipe of her mistress, then her own.
"I shallnottell my father," said Miss Star-Dream, "for I pity you. It is such a great lie that he would make Ozumi whip you to death. Yet it is a lie which makes me happy. Was I ever so happy as I am now—since he came?"
"No," said the maid.
"But hewillgo sometime—we agree uponthat?" questioned the mistress, once more hoping anything but that they did agree upon that. The maid was not blind to her hope.
"Not yet," she answered with a decision which gave joy to the girl's soul.
"He will. He must die."
"Not yet," declared the maid again.
"Do you suppose his love for me—yousaid it was love, I did not!—is greater than his love for the spirit of his father?"
"Yes," answered the maid.
"Oh, little beast!" cried her mistress, embracing her. "Benten, but I am happy!"
She chattered on:—
"Also have you noticed how beautiful he is? He has hair like the pictures of the gods—though he is a shaven samurai. And those songs he sings he makes himself. I am going to learn a thousand musical instruments so that I may play them all. I wish I could sing! And, Isonna, we never laughed—really—until he came, did we? Always that thing hung over us. But he is not to know it. And we may forget it! And, Isonna, have you noticed that exquisite habit he has of touching me, here, here, here?"
She laughed and made the serving-girl the illustrant of this aberration of the soldier.
"That he does when he wants me to look at something—often only himself. Or when I am not attending to his words. I used to shudder and go away from it—it was so strange—no one else ever did it. But I now think it very foolish to start and be frightened by such small things."
"I have observed you go toward it!" droned the maid.
"That is a vile lie!" cried Hoshiko. "Say, do you know what causes that?"
"No."
"His wife; he does that to his wife, and she—she is not a nice person, and likes it! Aha!"
"He has no wife," said the maid.
It was this she was hungry to hear.
"How do you know? Did he tell you?"
"No. But he wears stockings, not tabi. All soldiers do."
"Well, you suspicious little beast, what has that got to do with his wife?"
"I wash them."
"Well?"
"There are no darns."
"Oh! What then?"
"Holes."
"Isonna," said her mistress, solemnly, "I believe that you are as wise as you say you are! But, then, how do you suppose he learns it?"
"From you!"
"Am I so dreadful?"
"I have observed you giving those touches."
"He will hate me."
"Hate is not in the direction he is going," said the wise maid.
Hoshiko could have endured more of this ecstasy. But it was very late, and Arisuga had the soldier's habit of early rising. Moreover, the first thing he was wont to do when he rose was to clap his hands, in that way, and call for his earth-angel. So she said to Isonna:—
"You have been a naughty, impertinent, gossiping little beast. Put me to bed."
Yet, when this had been done the mistress embraced the maid and would hardly let her go.
"What a shame it is that one must sleep when one might talk of him! But, then, if one does not, one is hideous in the morning! And he calls the moment he wakes. Put out the lights and go to bed! I will listen to you no longer!"
Isonna had not spoken. But she did as she was commanded.
"Isonna!" the mistress called after the maid—who instantly returned—"I have had such a thought! Suppose he should never know! Suppose I should go to some place with him where there is no one who had ever known me? Marry him?"
"I should be there."
"You! Not unless I should first cut out your gossiping tongue!"
"It would be wrong. The gods must punish you!"
"How would the gods know? I should lie to them also."
"It would be very wrong," the maid repeated. "The only woman who deceives a man—"
"Is hiswife, you naughty little beast! Go straight to bed! I hate you!"
It happened precisely as the wise maid had said. He did not go, but, on the contrary, protracted his recovery in a scandalous fashion.
For here it was that Arisuga began to suspect, for the second time, that the happiest moment of his life had come. If he had known that he was in love, as he did not, or that there was such a thing as this love he was experiencing, which he did not, he would have been more certain of that happiest moment. But a Japanese must be told when this has happened to him. And it must be in another tongue than his. For in his language there are no words for it—and he knew no other. He really was not quite sure, therefore, why he was lingering in China—only suspected it. How could he know, under the circumstances? No feeling like this had insidiously crept upon him when he had taken Yoné to Mukojima orShiba—even upon that great night which now began to go more and more out of his memory. And he did not even think of what he had laughingly prophesied to her—that forgetting—her waiting. He simply forgot her. Perhaps if Hoshiko had known of this defect in the character of Arisuga, she might not have loved him. What Arisuga remembered most about his and Yoné's excursions was that when they got hungry they went separately home and ate. But he had the feeling that he would stay here with Hoshiko and starve—or until some one from the regiment came and took him back at the point of a bayonet. For this was a most piquant and unusual condition of affairs between them: that they should be so much alone together, that there should be so little—almost nothing—of Hoshiko's parents, that she should be as frankly intimate as a geisha at a festival, who meant to please at all hazards. It was this volunteer intimacy which puzzled him most about the girl. But who was there to tell him that she had known him two weeks longer than he knew her? And that during all that halcyon time she had had her way with her adoration of him—and saw no reason in his returned consciousness for changing it? Or that she had lived here untaught as a child? That to her, since she frankly adored him, there was only one reason why he might not as frankly know it—the one she had decided never to tell?
Before Arisuga became a soldier he had been a poet, a musician, a songster—one who had responded at nature's high behest to all manifestations of beauty. Now, in this time of peace and indolent convalescence, he went back to all that—almost as if the life of the soldier, which intervened, had never been. He had instantly called her "Dream-of-a-Star." And she was all this to him. It was good to lie in his futons and see the perfections of her grace as she moved about intent upon his healing. It was better to hear her pretty voice. It was best of all to feel her touch upon him and to see the lighted eyes which always accompanied it. At first there was the sense of having found a butterfly by the dusty roadside of his duty which might yield a moment of joy. But when he knew that, whether he wished it or not, he must lie here many weeks before he could fight again, the sense that he wassacrificing duty to pleasure disappeared, and he let himself enjoy his nearness to the girl and let his poetic spirit revel in her fragile beauty without further thought of the duty which lay in wait for him. That, he finally decided, would attend to itself. A soldier is not long permitted to forget his duty.
But, the thing which continued to stir and puzzle him most was the fancy which now and then came, that he might have this wonderful creature precisely like the butterfly he had thought her. Indeed, he could scarcely get away from the impression that there were times when she offered herself to him. Yet though he was not very learned concerning women himself, he knew that there was only one sort who offered herself to a man. Sometimes her little timorous darings let him believe, for a moment, that she was of this kind. But nearly always the idea was quenched out by some act of such utter innocency as could not be mistaken for coquetry. Still the recurrence of an idea, originally erroneous, is likely to be strengthened by each repetition. And this was what was happening to the sick soldier.
Nevertheless he continued to fancy that ofall the spirits, from the moon-goddess down, none were so dainty, so fragile, so tender, caressing, and altogether lovely as this Hoshiko, who was not a spirit at all, even though she was there, day after day, at his bedside, suggesting herself to him with either the abandon of a child or the intention of a woman of joy. Had he been as wise about women as he was simple, and she as wise about men as she pretended, who had no wisdom at all concerning them, such a misunderstanding would not have occurred.
For she was not offering herself to him at all. She was a child with a toy. And at first the subtraction of this toy, even though the like and fascination of it exceeded any other she had ever had, would have portended little of tragedy. But later it was more serious. Something inside which had never stirred before began to stir now. This contact with a man, these intimacies with one not much more learned in the art of loving than she, had awakened the sleeping thing within which would one day be her womanhood.
As for her, one must not forget that at the last she wished to be adored. All women do.But if a woman loves a man too much, he runs away. If she loves him just enough, he stays. If she loves him a little less than enough, he runs after her.
"If I were a man," said Isonna, "I would care for only such pretty things as you—not for wars and fightings—even great deaths. For what is the last heaven but a state of bliss! And if one has all the bliss one can bear or understand here on earth, is that not a heaven? And truly if I were a man, it would be extreme bliss to touch you, here, and here, and here, to put an arm about you so, to sit in the andon light, so—"
All of which things the adoring maid illustrated, to her saddened mistress, in the light of the night lamp, and to all of them her mistress agreed.
For the soldier must go. There was not a vestige of excuse for remaining longer. The terrible mother had entered his chamber, had looked at him, had said briefly that he was quite well. And Hoshiko herself had done everything but ask him flatly to stay. How could she do that? Isonna had warned her constantly of the sort of woman who did that in Japan. The mere asking would be enough—in such a woman—to advertise her as of joy. And for want of this word of asking, the heaven she had made was closing.
But Isonna and some of the circumstances of the case had taught her more and more that any more forwardness would be seriously misconstrued by the invalid.
"You are awake," said Isonna, mysteriously, who was not blind to the maturing of the thing called womanhood.
"Ah," sighed the happy and miserable girl,"if to wake means this, then I wish that I might always have slept."
"You did not sleep," said the still mysterious maid.
"What did I then, little beast?"
"You dreamed."
"Then," begged the girl, with a piteous smile, "make me to dream again, and take care that I never wake."
"Ah, sweet mistress," said the maid, "there comes to all, in the matter of men, a time to sleep, a time to dream, and a time to wake. The sleep is best. For in that one knows nothing. The dream is sweet. But it never lasts. The waking sometimes is good—sometimes evil. Good it is if all is fair between a man and a woman. Evil it is if all is not. And, mistress dear, all is not fair between you and him. So there is another thing after the waking—which the gods make."
"What is that, wise little beast?" laughed Hoshiko.
"It is the forgetting which heals," said the maid.
"I do not wish to be healed," answered her mistress.
"Then must you be always ill of this thing."
"So be it. That is better than a forgetting."
"But it must go no further," pleaded the servitor. "There must be no touches, no eyes, no beatings of the heart."
"Can you stop the beating of the heart? The adoring of the eyes? Can any one?"
"Yes. In your room waits always the goddess of tranquillity. Go there. Stay there. She will soothe you."
"Yes, when he is gone—quite gone—then we will try for that tranquillity. We had it before he came!"
"We shall have it again," cheered the maid. "As soon as he is gone—"
"Oh!" A flash of Hoshiko's old manner energized her. "I know a better and happier way to insure that tranquillity."
"What is it?"
"Ask him to—stay! You!"
The maid only gasped.
"Yes," said her mistress, more timorously than she had ever spoken of him.
"Ask a man to stay?"
"Certainly! That is what I said. Am I so hard to understand?"
Hoshiko spoke with more pain than asperity.
"You may—with honor—" pleaded Hoshiko. "He doesn't love you. You do not love him."
"And if the asking of these lips and hands and eyes and this voice, all that are permitted you, are not potent—how shall I be? How shall any one or anything be? Let him go."
"Stop!" cried her mistress. "He is a god. We are creatures. What we wish we must petition for as we do the gods. Yet I dare not—will not you?"
"No!" said the maid. "I know the penalty. I do not wish you to know it."
However, it all came out involuntarily when, at last, he began with tremendous difficulty to go away. He was already at the courtyard gate when she sobbed. He was gone—oh, it mattered not now what she did!
But Arisuga hearing this, of course, returned. His renewed presence only renewed the Lady Hoshi's tears.
"But what can I do?" he kept on asking politely.
"Stay!" cried the Lady Hoshi, madly, forgetting everything but that one wish.
"Oh!" said Arisuga.
"Gods!" breathed Isonna.
"Only till to-morrow; that is but one day; to-morrow, lord—lord of my soul!"
"Oh!" said Arisuga again, and, at once entirely willing, dismissed his 'rik'sha.
The next day he took her to the ForbiddenCity and showed her the tragic, broken wonders of it, while he puzzled out that scene of the day before. There were times when he had to help her up on broken walls and over fallen sculptures. And more and more as he possessed her thus for one day he wanted to possess her indefinitely. For the hands were very soft, the eyes luminous, the small body where it touched his exquisite.
He found it hard to believe—that, like a courtezan, she would beg him to stay. Yet, it was for but one day! No woman of joy would stop there! At last he spoke:—
"Were you educated in Japan—or China, angel of my earth-heaven?" he asked of her.
"In China, lord, such things as a girl learns after three years, but in the Japanese way entirely."
There was little enlightenment in that.
"And have you known many men?"
"Yes," she answered at once, thinking that was what he wished.
"No!" cried Isonna.
The two girls turned together. Hoshiko was about to chastise the maid. But she was terrified at the pallor of her face. Neverthelessshe insisted, with a certain pathetic dignity:—
"I said—yes!"
"I say no!" stubbornly cried the maid. "None! none!"
Arisuga deprecatingly waved his hand, and courteously believed what they disagreed about.
"What does it matter?" he said.
But the maid whispered tragically to her mistress:—
"See what you have done!"
"What?" asked Hoshiko.
The maid's whisper was sinister.
"Do you wish him to think that you have been any one's? Every one's? That is why he asked."
"It is not!" protested Hoshiko. "He asked to learn how many others love me."
"And why should he ask that?"
"Becauseheloves me," was Hoshiko's enigmatic answer.
There was no time at this moment for further explication. Arisuga had evidently decided something which was in his mind when he asked his first question, and Hoshiko fanciedthat his decision was against her. For he laughed (not as she would have wished him to laugh), and took an almost rude and assured possession of her.
"When the mistress says yes and the maid says no, one must believe his eyes, which say it is improbable that so fair a flower has bloomed unseen even in this arid plain of China!"
"You think, then, that Ihavehad—twenty lovers?" asked Hoshiko.
"Certainly," laughed Arisuga.
"No!" still cried the maid in her terror. "You believe, lord, that she has had none—not one—until you came!"
"Certainly," laughed the soldier again.
The two girls looked at each other dazedly. Arisuga laughed again in that unpleasant way.
"Now he will never know that I love him," chided the mistress, at an opportune moment. "If he had thought that I gave up twenty lovers the moment he came—"
The maid had not seen the value of creating such a situation. Hoshiko practised tremendous wisdom. She repeated to Isonna, in theintervals of the day, the very things Isonna had taught her with great pains.
"A man will think nothing of you unless he knows that others do. If one has two lovers, one can easily have twenty. If one has one and is truthful—that is all one will ever have. If one has none, how is one to get even one unless she pretends to have many? For if no man cares for you, no man will. If many men care for you, many more will. If a man loves one and he sees that no one else does, he persuades himself that he does not. For he thinks that if no one else loves one, one is not worth loving. But if many love one, he persuades himself that he does, because if many love one it must be right and proper for him to do it. Now, you little beast, you must help, after putting him further off, to bring him nearer by making him think that he loves and desires me more than any of the twenty."
These philosophies of her own teaching, changed and informed with the aroma of Hoshiko, went far to convince Isonna.
"Sweet mistress," said the repentant servant, "the gods pardon me—and you—you also pardon me—if I have done wrong. Butthis—this I will do—and swear it on the tablet of my father: If he should offer you marriage, I will go with you to some place where he can never know. I will keep your secret forever. Such things have happened. In another country the gods will not follow. Even to the country of some barbarian people, like America, I will go. What gods are there? Certainly none of our gods—such as know you and him. But I willnotsay that you have been the creature of twenty lovers!"
"But only to make him understand that he loves me—now—here—to-day? We have given him doubt! The rest does not matter."
Isonna was repentant but not helpful.
"Well—study—think—you little beast! And be more careful next time—then whisper it to me. How to make him understand!"
But there was no further communication from the maid.
In the evening Arisuga said:—
"If what I have been thinking all day—since the events of last night—is correct, and also meets your approval, I will take you."
And the little Lady Hoshi, shocked and stunned and shivering at her heart, answered:—
"Yes, lord."
And again that night she wept—not an hour—many hours. For you will have observed that Shijiro Arisuga did not say that he would marry—but only take her. (There is a difference in Japan.) And he did not ask her parents.
"You see, he knows!" she sobbed to the faithful maid. "Oh, it was so sweet—so sweet—that I forgot that I must not. And when I thought he loved me I was sure he would say 'I will marry you,' even if he did not mean it. But he only said, 'I will take you.' So—he does not love me—no! Well, Isonna, he shall have me. And I will enter his very soul! And then, some day, he will regret those awful words, and when he does I will die where he can see me afterward. You shall dress my hair in the shimada fashion, with flowers."
"He doesnotknow," said the maid. "And he does love you. It is the result of telling him that you have had twenty lovers!"
"Ah, Isonna, do not make my sorrow heavier. That would be worse. He would not dare to say that to even me—if I were not what I am."
The maid still insisted.
"Then to-morrow I will tell him. If he would say that to a lady, who he thinks has dismissed many suitors for him, he shall know that he has said it to one who is not a lady and who has had no suitor but him alone."
"And one who has parents to be consulted! Not like one who goes to Geisha street without the leave of parents or uncles," advised the maid, with great severity.
"Yes," sobbed the girl. "Geisha street! Refuge of the forsaken! Oh, love exalts, as we do our parents. It does not demean. So, there is no love, no love! No matter what I am, however low, no matter what he is, however high, if he loved me he would ask my parents for leave to marry me—even if he only meant to take me. And I thought he loved me! Do you remember how, only a little while ago, I wished him only to know well that he loved me! Alas, he knows now that I love him, but he has told me odiously, odiously, that he doesnotlove me! Yes, Isonna, he shall have me. Then I will die."
So she said the next day, not now with the aplomb of a lady, but as a servant:—
"Lord, there is a reason why you cannot—even—" she choked in her throat—"take me. Do you not know it?"
"Do not call me lord," he said, "as if you were a servant and I your master."
"It is right that I should do so, lord."
"I won't have it," he laughed.
And he had never seemed so beautiful nor the sound of his voice so tender. But she went on as she had planned in her sleepless night.
She was kneeling at his feet now—her head upon the mats—reaching out to touch him.
"Dear lord, I have deceived you," she said. "My only excuse is that it was sweet. All the sweetness I have had in my small life. Lord, I am young. But I had scarcely smiled untilyou came. In Japan we were accursed. I was beautiful and my father pitied me and brought me here where no one knew. Lord, I am an eta."
Arisuga recoiled from the word. The instant would have been inappreciable to measures of time. But in it the girl's heart leaped and fell with its own understanding. In the same instant Arisuga knew all that had so puzzled him concerning the beautiful creature at his feet. And he understood what his saying must have been to her. For this he would make a soldier's great reparation—and at once! That was the way of Arisuga.
"Then you have known no one—no man but me?"
"No," whispered the girl. "I thought if I had twenty lovers, you would wish me the more."
"And what I have foolishly taken for the advances of experience have been innocencies!"
Not she, but Isonna, spoke out:—
"Yes, lord. It was as I said. I am here now, when men might wish her, to see that none approach. There has been no one but you."
"Little Lady Hoshi," said Shijiro Arisuga, toher bruised heart, "there is but one reparation I can make for yesterday. It is to wish you to become my wife—to-day."
"But, lord, beautiful lord," cried the girl, "you did not hear what I said. I spoke too low. I was at your feet—" and now she deliberately raised her agonized face to his that there might be no mistake—"Lord, I am an eta! The accursed, despised caste! To the samurai we are as lepers! No samurai in all the thousands of years of our empire has ever married an eta! None has ever touched one! Lord, you did not hear!"
"I heard. Pray, call me lord no more, but husband."
"Li—li—Pardon me, husband, I have been taught that I am not to expect marriage."
"Who taught you that?"
"Even my father! My mother!"
"Gods! It shall be to-morrow."
"Yi—yes, li—li—husband," chattered Hoshiko.
"And on that day there shall be a new goddess to be worshipped, and her name shall be called Star-Dream! And the first prayer she shall hear will be from a very brutal soldier tobe forgiven for a little start upon hearing a certain untrue word. For no goddess can be an eta—even if it were possible for a mortal as beautiful as you to be an eta. So, even to-day, see," as he gathered her from the floor strongly into his arms, "you are my goddess—to-morrow you will be my wife."
"Lord, I have no wedding garments! You know that though a Japanese maiden has always ready her garments for death or marriage, an eta maid has only those for death ready. It is presumption to have—the—the others."
"Then there shall be no wedding garment but this," and he touched the dainty thing she wore. "Where are your parents that I may ask their consent?"
Hoshiko did not know. But Arisuga suspected that they were close behind the fusuma listening with staring eyes and gaping mouths.
He suddenly pushed aside the slides—and there they were.
"To-morrow I wed your daughter," he said to them with his soldier's savagery.
He respectfully gave them time for an answer—but he meant them to understand that they dare not refuse. And together, when theyhad the breath for it, they bowed to the very earth and said:—
"Yea, august lord!"
Arisuga bowed haughtily in return, and closed the slides upon them.
"You see," he said to Hoshiko, "there is nothing but the three times three between us and our earth-heaven, goddess!"
"Yes, lord," she shivered.
She begged for delay, but he would not grant it, so all that night, while he slept near, she and Isonna in the next room strove to make a trousseau out of her shroud.