The Breath of the Gods Part 60

"Certainly," bowed the count, who did not relish this acrobatic reversion to tranquillity. "The disclosure, I trust, makes no difference in your--sentiments."

"Heavens, man! how could it? I'm not a tin fish on a red barn, to wheel round with every wind! Don't you see it is as much to me as anybody else that the thing gets back, unopened, to Hagane?"

"Yes, yes, I presume so," muttered Ronsard, and accompanied his colleague to the door. The American went out on foot. Ronsard slowly retraced his heavy steps to Pierre. Stopping beside the sleeper, he stared down, first thoughtfully, then in growing antipathy and disgust.

France, America, political ac.u.men, possible distinction for himself or Todd,--all were blocked by this sick animal who lay, inert as a log, clear across the current of affairs. Well, endurance came with the thought that a few hours more would see the end!

Ronsard turned away at length, moved restlessly around the room, and at last, with a resigned sigh, took out a pack of cards, drew a table before a long pier-gla.s.s, and, solemnly dealing two hands, played piquet with his silent, gray shade, until the day went out, and the first purple waves of night came rus.h.i.+ng in across a soundless sh.o.r.e.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

It had been said of Mr. Cyrus C. Todd that one might recognize him for an American half a mile away. The alertness, buoyancy, and self-confidence of a growing nation had expression through him. He held himself like a flagstaff from which waved the Stars and Stripes. To-day the bright invisible folds clung about him like a shroud. He felt the weight of tears upon them, tears that soon must be shed. Look where he would, no door of escape for Yuki opened. After all it was so much more Hagane's affair and Pierre's and even Ronsard's! But what comfort would this reply bring to Gwendolen? Ah, there was the pang! Gwendolen, who had known no sister but this frail bit of pearl and moonlight that held so deep a soul! Todd's head sagged between his shoulders. His step lost firmness. He was a man aged, to outward appearance, ten years in a day.

An inspiring bit of news had come during that forenoon from Manchuria.

The land-engagements by which Russia was to restore her prestige lost at sea, and inflict a terrible retribution on her audacious enemies, had begun, and j.a.pan, as on sea, was victor. At another time Todd would have rejoiced with the nation. Now the whole campaign became to his fevered imagination a colossal Juggernaut destined to crush one little girl,--a wheel of fate (karma, Yuki would have termed it) on which a white moth should be broken.

Todd seldom gave himself over to self-communion, yet those long days in the bright loneliness of his wheat-fields had once bred the habit. An ominous and most mysterious factor in his thought was a sense of pre-knowledge, of a relentless inevitability, of the desirability, even, of the sacrifice. The thing came, like a predestined growth, from the soil of necessity. "Joint knit to joint expands the full formed fate."

As if, indeed, some ghostly counsellor leaned to him, the event, from which his human, his conventional selves recoiled, shuddering, seemed to his spirit a thing designed, not cruelly, by the G.o.ds themselves. Yet to think of Yuki--his little Yuki--dead with her youth folded like helpless wings about her! The man groaned and stumbled in his path, as, weeks before, Pierre Le Beau, dazed with a more ign.o.ble grief, had groaned and stumbled on these very stones.

The day was Friday, the hour approaching five of the afternoon. Little girls in brilliant-colored kimonos played ball, or hop-scotch, or hide-and-seek around the corners of the streets. Solemn-looking babies, with a mat of black hair tipped to the backs of otherwise smoothly shaven heads, loitered, engrossed apparently in Zen meditation, in the vicinity of their elders. The clothes of these pygmy abbots being wadded both in front and back, one, in his abstraction, toppling over, might regain his equilibrium with a single bound, like round-bottomed toys that always stand on end. Infants of a size smaller had warm swallows'

nests slung from the backs of elder sisters. These living burdens made no difference at all in the freedom of sports, or in the slumbers of those carried. In hop-scotch, the heads of the babes went up and down with each hop, until the slender necks should have snapped. But, no, babies were meant to pa.s.s most of their existence in this manner, and being j.a.panese, they took it philosophically. Sun, wind, or even a light snow might fall on the upturned faces, and sleep still line the swallow nest.

Schoolboys, in little squads, pa.s.sed at intervals. Some among them must have been of the very lot who had once informed Pierre of the meaning of "Ikusa!" Many wore the foreign school uniform of dark-blue woollen cloth made into scanty trousers and "bob" jackets. With this outfit went, inevitably, coa.r.s.e leather shoes. Other students had been to their homes to change the regulation school garb for the more comfortable wadded kimono, held in place by soft white girdles in endless yards of cloth, and completed with j.a.panese geta or clogs. All alike wore dark-blue military caps with the names of their school across the front in Chinese ideographs of gold. Their faces were smooth and brown; their eyes like dark jewels. They looked fearlessly upon the tall American. A few lifted their caps lightly, in token of respect, but many more stared, and often turned away with an independence very close upon audacity. Todd, in spite of his troubled reverie, was beguiled into smiling at them. Few indeed responded to his pleasant look. It savored to them of condescension. Abreast with a small battalion of young swaggerers, Todd, for an experiment, said distinctly, "Banzai Nippon!" The boys stood as if electrified. Todd pointed to his b.u.t.ton of the Order of the Rising Sun. Suddenly caps and voices went high in air. "Banzai Nippon! Banzai Nippon!" they shouted. They crowded now about the minister, their faces all smiles, the mistrust vanished. They examined his b.u.t.ton eagerly, then his watch-charm, his necktie, pin, and signet-ring.

"A-rr-e you the A-mer-i-kan?" asked one, in rheumatic English.

"Yes," answered Todd. "I am the new American minister,--A-mer-i-ca no K[=o]s.h.i.+." This was one of the few j.a.panese phrases he had acquired.

"Banzai Nippon! Banzai Nippon!" came the renewed shout. "American good friend to Nip-pon--yes?" asked another lad.

"Huh! We all same lick off Russia's boots," growled a surly youth.

"Well, I hope you do,--though you mustn't say I said it!" laughed Todd.

"Good-bye! Good-bye! You are fine boys!"

"Good-bye! Good-bye, sirr!" called out the boys after him, with caps in hand. It is to be regretted that most of them said, "Gooroo-bye-roo!"

but the sentiment, at least, was faultless.

Todd, looking back to them, wondered whether there were any incipient Togos, Kurokis, and Haganes among the striplings. He sighed. The untarnished enthusiasms of youth are always saddening,--though very precious. One of the boys looked like Yuki. The likeness led him back, like a jailer, to his dark cell of meditation.

"What am I to say to Gwendolen?" was now his despairing cry. Gwendolen's eager questions, Gwendolen's clear eyes,--they would soon be torture-irons. She knew enough of the situation to have a right to all, yet how on earth was he to tell of a thing which no one had stated to himself,--a fleck of terrible certainty drifting to his gaze from Yuki's soul? Now a revulsion against the whole morbid situation flooded his being. He felt as he had sometimes felt in dreams when a horrible thing crept near, and he, though half-conscious that it was only a dream, still sub-consciously must endure the pangs of reality until he could wrench himself awake. Perhaps this also might prove a phantasm of the night! He s.n.a.t.c.hed at the delusion. The voices of young children, the whirr of the low red sun through fleeting jinrikisha wheels, the gentle, restraining touch upon his hand of falling petals, jeered softly at the self-deceiver.

The city streets shortened now to purple vistas. Across from the smouldering west a single planet, isolated by its own brightness, preened itself with feathers of light. Todd's thoughts moved on like the shadow-pictures of a revolving lantern. Each was a silhouette, black, angular, menacing. If Yuki had indeed held Hagane inert, if an impulse of love, even of pity for a sick man, had prevented the instant regaining of such a paper, naturally she must get it back, though at the price of her life. But what did the babbling sick boy mean by saying that he had offered to return the paper to Hagane, if only Yuki would be forgiven, and that both as with one voice had refused? Here was the knot that pulled.

Hagane did not hate or scorn his young wife; Todd would stake his honor on that point. Never had a human countenance shone with deeper tenderness than that which Hagane had turned on Yuki within a few moments, too, of her wrongdoing. The more urgently she had insisted upon fulfilling the bargain, the brighter the faith in her that Hagane's eyes had betrayed. Yuki's secret was plain enough. She was to die by her own hand, giving her hostage of a soul to Hagane, the body of her death to Pierre. Both she and Hagane had been a.s.siduous to use the one term "body." Todd could understand this much, but what was Hagane's hidden source of light? Here conjecture failed. If Yuki's death were the only possible way of redeeming the paper, all motives would be plain; but Pierre said that he had offered to restore it. This was a great thing for Pierre to have done. Todd's heart ached for the poor, weak, tortured boy, so soon to be overwhelmed in an iridescent wreck of his own making.

Yuki was to die! This one thing alone was terrible enough. His weary thought went on in a creaking treadmill. To Hagane the mere fact of death would, of course, be less terrible and less important. Mere animal existence, for its own sake, no matter how pleasant the surroundings, is scorned by a true j.a.panese. They have other lives to live, even on this old planet. They are to come again, soothed and strengthened by the few years of interval, each in the fresh, new body of a little child. In such tender blossoms of their own race they re-enter a world from which, smiling or s.h.i.+vering, as karma may have tended, they departed.

Returning, they are dazed, a little wistful, a little timorous, yet grateful for the new chance. Believing that great sorrow and great temptation come always from the deeds of a previous existence, they meet them bravely, carrying their own burdens, clear in determination to retrieve that past, and mark out for the future a straighter and a higher way. The gentle Amida, Kwannon of Mercy, Jizo with the tender smile,--all may help them. Fudo Sama, immovable in a torment of flame, Monju, Aizen, and the old s.h.i.+nto G.o.ds may give them strength; but each human soul has wrapped in itself the power of growth and of decay. So, mounting, striving, failing, reconquering, at last the pilgrim may approach that s.h.i.+ning mystery the world calls "Nirvana,"--that glare of glory where the soul is swallowed up in light, and so pa.s.ses on to new realms of a radiance so ineffable that human thought falls helpless and blind before it.

He had heard Yuki tell all this to Gwendolen before the days of her Christian conversion. His listening had been more eager than he cared to show. Gwendolen had voiced his thought, as she replied, with a long sigh of wonder, "It does seem reasonable. So many things that we have to guess at are explained by this thing you call reincarnation. Love at first sight, sudden aversions, family tendencies, that queer feeling of having been in a new place many times before--I think I'll turn Buddhist, Yuki; but don't hint it to mama."

Yuki had become a Christian. She believed her early religious training to have pa.s.sed forever. She was sincere and earnest in the new faith.

Her face turned, as by a gentle instinct, to the Star of Bethlehem. All that she professed, she believed truly and without question. Yet this life of hers was, after all, but a flower sprung from an eternal stem, whose roots were packed, burrowed, and buried deep in centuries of Eastern mysticism. She had drawn her convictions from her mother's breast, while, to belief of the tender nurse, ancestral spirits hovered and smiled above them both. She had breathed it in each year at Bon Matsuri, the Festival of the Dead, when little boats, laden with prayer and incense and the warmth of human food, went forth to comfort the souls of those who had died at sea, when each hillside cemetery stirred with the soft clas.h.i.+ng of ghostly lanterns, luminous in a spectral ether, when little steaming cups of tea, and flowers, and children's toys, were offered to the dead ghost-people. Here were the meeting-places of the living and the dead. Here the two worlds answered, face to face, as reflections in still water. Yuki, in those childish days, no more doubted that hordes of spirits moved about her, lifting her hair, creeping into her sleeve, reaching even to the shelter of her faithful heart, than, later, in America she had doubted the presence of her human schoolmates, sitting in rows before wooden desks.

And now, above the blood-wet battlefields, the spirits of the great heroes of the past, wors.h.i.+pped by generations of the j.a.panese faithful, were hovering, to test, by their supreme standards of valor and endurance, the gray hosts of new aspirants for immortality. Yuki would feel that they were her judges also.

And the gentle G.o.ds would be near,--Kwannon, Jizo, Amida--standing in great s.h.i.+ning nebulae of faith on the rim of night.

These sweeter visions pa.s.sed, and the dark monitor in Todd's brain set him the task of fathoming Pierre's deed. The boy had stolen. Contempt swept from the thinker's mind its late compa.s.sion. Illness alone might partially excuse it; but in delirium, as in drunkenness, the latent impulse often shows itself. And Pierre, a young French dandy, a thief, expected to make, that night, such a woman as the Princess Hagane utterly his own. Yuki had probably saved his life at the expense of hers. His grateful reward would be to defame her. Then why would Hagane not take her back? Was she unworthy, simply through the act of saving Pierre, or was there a lower reason? No--no--no--the man cried out to himself. Yuki could not be evil. If Hagane believed it of her, he could not have so smiled; he had the look of a high-priest bent upon a beloved penitent. And that Ronsard should have believed,--a man who could speak and understand the j.a.panese language, who had lived among the people for eleven years! Having faced another blank wall, Todd turned.

He fell now to wondering in what way Yuki would choose to die. The long strain began to tell on him. Morbid thoughts and fancies a.s.sailed him.

He almost gloated over the antic.i.p.ation of Pierre's agony when he should be paid his price. But how would Yuki die? Would she be alone, or Hagane with her? Would her hand or his deal the final blow--give Death his first sweet sip of her? The two would be together; yes, it must be so; and the scene, unwitnessed though it was, one of unrivalled heroism, the silent speech of two G.o.ds alone on a cloudy mountain-top. And what was he to say to Gwendolen!

The treadmill creaked again, and registered the notch of another empty revolution. Now Todd shook himself and raised his eyes to see how far he had come. Not a hundred yards ahead of him began the slope of Azabu.

Blackening swiftly against the copper sky loomed the great j.a.panese entrance to his Legation. Evidently he must decide swiftly what to tell or not to tell his daughter. He thought of Dodge. Dodge knew the j.a.panese better than he; maybe he knew girls better. In the breaking of the news to Gwendolen he might be of great help. Then the tiny flicker of comfort died. Dodge and Gwendolen were playing at being enemies. They scarcely spoke. It was a lover's quarrel, Todd supposed, for Dodge certainly loved her; and the sudden friends.h.i.+p, on the girl's part, of a successful rival betrayed clearly her sentiments. Lovers' quarrels were well enough in their way; but why should this have come just now when Dodge could be of use?

He drew a sigh that racked the meagre frame, and started up the slope.

"Kuruma, Dan-na San! Rick-shaw,--Dan-na San?" cried a group of coolies who had a little station at the base of the hill. Their accents were persuasive, even plaintive. They moved forward in a body, the empty black vehicles (inseparable from them as sh.e.l.ls from snails) rattling behind them. They clamored like crows.

"No, I don't want you. No, I say, I-I-ye! Go back," he cried, and waved them off, with some irritation at their persistence.

The smooth gravelled driveway of the hill might have been a trough of viscid red clay, to judge from the slow and dragging steps of the one who now ascended it. The rejected coolies, staring up from the street level, a.s.sured one another that the tall foreigner was both sick and stingy. For the latter fault they hoped he would fall down before reaching the top of the hill. Then they would run to him, and charge a yen apiece for picking him up. They began to ascend, stealthily, like human vultures.

The dark spot of his ascending head could scarcely have been seen through the opened gate, when, in a whirl of rustling skirts, Gwendolen came down upon him. "I cannot tell her," he muttered between clenched teeth, as she came. "I shall die. She must not know what I believe!"

Gwendolen did not reproach him for being late, though he had thought her first words would be a playful chiding. She did not speak at all, only took his arm, pressed it lovingly with her own, and with cheek sometimes laid for an instant against his shoulder made the rest of the ascent with him. The tenderness, the consideration of her manner, touched him profoundly. He looked down into her face, white and fair even in the dying light. She smiled up at him. He saw a new beauty, a hint of new strength in her. For a moment his hara.s.sed sense clutched the impossible. Maybe good news of Yuki had come to her!

"What is it, child? You look different? What has happened?"

She gave a low little laugh, and did not answer. They had nearly reached the gate. In the great shadow a smaller shadow stepped out to join them.

Gwendolen put out a white hand and drew it near. "This is what has happened, father--" she whispered. "We are--friends again."

"Friends?" echoed Todd; "you and Mr. Dodge,--thank G.o.d!"

"Friends!" came Dodge's pleasant voice; "well I rather guess not!"

"Gwendolen," said her father, drawing her close, "is this true?"

She clung to him, crying just a little in her excitement. "Yes, dad, if you are willing--if it will not make you unhappy. He has talked with me,--of the other thing; he has comforted me,--though he believes it to be, oh, so terrible! Are you--willing, dearest father?"

Todd put an arm around each, pressing the brown and the golden heads close. "I wish it of all things," he said. "Dodge is an American and a gentleman; nothing is better than that. Just now this--happiness of yours is a gift of G.o.d, for I bring nothing joyous."

"Tell us everything," pleaded Gwendolen. "I can stand anything now; my heart couldn't break with you one side of it, and h-him the other."

Dodge went around to his side.