The Dragon Painter Part 15

So February pa.s.sed, and March.

XI

With April came the cherry-flowers, wistaria, and peonies; with iris in the bud, and shy hedge-violets; wonder of yama buki shrubs that played gold fountains on the hills, and the swift, bright contagion of young gra.s.s. Even from old Kano's moon-viewing hillock one might see, in looking out across the desert of gray city roofs, round tops of cherry trees rising like puffs of rosy smoke. From out the face of the temple cliff long, supple fronds of ferns unrolled, bending uncertain arms toward the garden. The tangled sasa-gra.s.s rustled new sleeves of silk; and the great camphor tree, air-hung in blue, seemed caught in a jewelled mesh of chrysoprase and gold.

Down in the lower level of the garden, too, springtime busied itself with beauty. The potted plants, once Ume-ko's loved charges, had become now, quite mysteriously to himself, Tatsu's companions and his special care. Among the more familiar growths a few foreign bushes had been given place, a rose, a heliotrope, and a small, frightened cyclamen. Slips of chrysanthemum needed already to be set for the autumn yield. Tatsu, watering and tending them, thought with wistful sadness upon these plans for future enjoyment. "We are all bound upon the wheel of life," he said to them. "Would that with me, as you, the turning were but for a single season!"

"My son," the elder man began abruptly, at a certain noonday meal about the middle of the month, "how is it that you never go with me to the temple on the hill?"

Tatsu looked up from his rice-bowl in some surprise. The relations between these two, though externally kind, had never approached intimacy. Kano indeed idolized his adopted son with pathetic and undisguised fervor; but with Tatsu, though other things might have been forgiven, the old man's continued disrespect to his daughter's memory, his refusal to join even in the simplest ceremony of devotion, kept both him and old Mata chilled and distant. The one possible explanation,--aside from that of wanton cruelty,--was a thing so marvellous, so terrible in implied suggestion, that the boy's faint soul could make for it no present home; let it drift, a great luminous nebula of hope, a little longer on the rim of nothingness.

The answer now to Kano's question betrayed a hint of the more rational animosity.

"You had never seemed to desire it. And I have my place of worship here."

"Yes, I know. Of course I knew that!" the other hurried on in some agitation. Then he paused, as if uncertain how to word the following thought. "I do wish it!" he broke forth, with an effort. "I make request now that you go with me, this very day, at twilight."

"If it is your honorable desire," said Tatsu, bowing in indifferent acquiescence. A moment later he had finished his meal, and rose to go.

Kano moved restlessly on the mats. He drew out the solace of a little pipe, but his nervous fingers fumbled and shook so, that the slim rod of bamboo tipped with silver escaped him, and went clattering down among the empty dishes of the tray. Mata's apprehensive face showed instantly at a parting of the kitchen fusuma. She sighed aloud, as she noted a great triangle chipped from the edge of an Imari bowl. Only two of those bowls had remained; now there was but one.

"Tatsu, my son, may I depend upon you? This day, as soon as the light begins to fail?"

Tatsu, in the doorway, paused to look. Evidently the speaker struggled with a strong excitement. Something in the twitching face, the eager, shifting eyes, brought back a vision of that meal on the evening that preceded Ume's death, when she and her father had leaned together, whispering, ignoring him, and afterward had left the house, giving him no hint of their errand. He felt with dread a premonition of new bitterness.

"I shall be ready at the twilight hour," he said, and went to his room.

That afternoon Tatsu did little painting. Silent and motionless as one of the frames against the wall, he sat staring for long intervals out upon the garden. The sunshine gave no pleasure, only a blurring of his sight. Beauty was not there for him, this day. He was thinking of those hours of October sunlight, when the whole earth reeled with joy, for Ume-ko was of it! Where was she now? And what had there been in Kano's look and voice to rouse those sleeping demons of despair? Could any new sorrow await him at the temple? No, his present condition had at least the negative value of absolute void. From nothing, nothing could be taken; and to it, nothing be supplied!

In spite of this colorless a.s.surance it was with something of reluctance, of shrinking, that he prepared to leave the house. Few words were spoken between the two. Catching up the skirts of narrow, silken robes a little higher, they tucked the folds into their belts, and side by side began the long, slow climbing of the road.

The city roofs beneath them hurried off to the edge of the world like ripples left in the gray sand-bed of a stream. Above the plain the mist drew in its long, horizontal lines of gray.

About half the distance up the steep the temple bell above them sounded six slow, deliberate strokes. First came the sonorous impact of the swinging beam against curved metal, then the "boom," the echo,--the echoes of that echo to endless repet.i.tion, sifting in layers through the thinner air upon them, sweeping like vapor low along the hillside with a presence and reality so intense that it should have had color, or, at least, perfume; settling in a fine dew of sound on quivering ferns and gra.s.ses, permeating, it would seem, with its melodious vibration the very wood of the houses and the trunks of living trees.

Reaching at last the temple court, old Kano took the lead, crossed the wide-pebbled s.p.a.ce, and halted with his companion at the edge of the cliff. A cry of wonder came from Tatsu's lips; that low, inimitable cry of the true artist at some new stab of beauty. Delicately the old man withdrew, and hid himself in the shadow of the temple.

Tatsu stared out, alone. He saw the round bay like a mirror,--like Ume's mirror; and to the west the peak of Fuji, a porphyry cone against the sunset splendor. No wonder that the gray nuns came here at this hour, or that she, the slender, isolated one, lingered to drain the last bright drop of beauty! He looked about now to discover her tree.

Yes, there it was, quite close; not a willow as he had sometimes thought, but a young maple, unusually upright of growth. It had been leafless, but now the touch of spring had lighted every twig with a pale flame-point of red. He recalled that in the autumn it had made a crimson heart against the sky; and later had sent down into the Kano garden frail alms of ruby films. Ume had loved to catch them in her hands, wondering at their brightness, and trying to make him wonder, too. Love-letters of the pa.s.sing year, she called them; songs dyed with the autumn's heart's-blood of regret that he must yield the sweet, warm earth to his gray rival, winter. She had pretended that the small, crossed veinlets of the leaves were Chinese ideographs which it was given her to decipher. Holding him off with one outstretched arm she would have read to him,--fantastic, exquisite interpreter of love,--but he, mad brute, had caught the little hands, the autumn leaves, and crushed them to one hot glow, crying aloud that nature, beauty, love were all made one in her. Such grief he must have given many times.

He threw his head hack as in sudden hurt, a gesture becoming habitual to him, and drew a long, impatient, tremulous sigh. As if to cast aside black thought, he strode over quickly to the maple tree, flung an arm around it, and leaned over to stare down into his garden with the gray nun's eyes. There it was, complete, though in miniature;--rocks, pines, the pigmy pool, the hillock squatting in one corner like an old, gray garden toad, and in another corner, scarcely of larger size, the cottage.

Kano plucked nervously at his sleeve. "You lean too far. Come, Tatsu, I have a--a--place to show you."

Tatsu wheeled with a start. Try as he would he shivered and grew faint, even yet, at the sound of Kano's voice breaking abruptly in upon a silence. He gave a nod of acquiescence and, with downbent head, followed his guide diagonally across the temple court, past the wide portico where sparrows and pigeons fought for night-quarters in the carved, open mouths of dragons, along the side of the main building until, to Tatsu's wonder, they stopped before a little gate in the nunnery wall.

"I thought it was almost death for a man to enter here!" exclaimed the boy.

"For most men it is," said Kano, producing a key of hammered bra.s.s about nine inches long. "But I desired to go the short path to the cemetery, and it lies this way. As I have told you, the abbot was my boyhood's friend."

Within the convent yard,--a sandy s.p.a.ce enclosed in long, low buildings of unpainted wood,--Tatsu saw a few gray figures hurrying to cover; and noticed that more than one bright pair of eyes peered out at them through bamboo lattices. Over the whole place brooded the spirit of unearthly peace and sweetness which had been within the gift of the holy bishop and his acolytes even at that time of torment in the hospital cell. The same faint Presence, like a plum tree blossoming in the dark, stole through the young man's senses, luring and distressing him with its infinite suggestions of lost peace.

At the farther wall of the court they came to an answering door. This was already unlocked and partially ajar. It opened directly upon the highest terrace of the cemetery which led down steeply in great, curved, irregular steps to a plain. The crimson light in the west had almost gone. Here to the north, where rice-fields and small huddled villages stretched out as far as the eye could see, a band of hard, white light still rested on the horizon, throwing back among the hillside graves a pale, metallic sheen. Each shaft of granite was thus divided, one upright half, blue shadow, the other a gray-green gleam.

All looked of equal height. A gray stone Buddha on his lotos pedestal, or the long graceful lines of a standing Jizo, only served to emphasize the uniformity.

This was a place most dear to Kano, and had been made so to his child.

He even loved the look of the tombs. "Gray, splintered stalagmites of memory," he had called them, and when the child Ume had learned the meaning of the simile she had put her little finger to a spot of lichen and asked, "Then are these silver spots our tears?"

The old man stepped down very softly to the second tier. A nightingale was calling low its liquid invocation, "Ho-ren-k-y-y-o-o-o!" Perhaps old Kano moved so softly that he might not lose the echoes of this cry.

The two men seemed alone in the silent scene. Once Tatsu thought his eye caught a swift flicker, as of a gray sleeve, but he was not sure.

At any rate he would not think of it, or speculate, or marvel! He was beginning to tremble before the unknown. The sense of shrinking, of miracle, of being, perhaps, too small to contain the thing decreed, bore hard upon him. With it came a keen impression of the unreality of the material universe,--of Buddhist illusion. Even these adamantine records of death, rising on every side to challenge him,--even these might recombine their particles before his very eyes,--might shiver into mist and float down to the plain to mingle with the smoke of cooking as it rose from the peasant huts. Anything might happen, or nothing!

Kano had stopped short before a grave. For once Tatsu was glad to hear his voice.

"Here lie the clean ashes of my young wife, Kano Uta-ko," said the old man, without preface or explanation.

"In former days, before--before my illness, I came here often," said the other. His eyes hung on the written words of the kaimyo. "If you grieved deeply, it must have been great solace that you could come thus to her grave," he added wistfully. Then, as Kano still remained silent, he read aloud the beautiful daishi, "A flower having blossomed in the night, the Halls of the G.o.ds are Fragrant."

Kano drew a long sigh. "For nineteen years I have mourned her," he went on slowly. "As you know, a son was not given to us. She died at Ume's birth. I could not bring myself to replace her, even in the dear longing for a son."

"A son!" Tatsu knew well what the old man meant. He lifted his eyes and stared out, mute, into the narrowing band of light. The old man drew his thin form very straight, moved a few feet that he might look squarely into the other's face, and said deliberately. "So did I mourn the young wife whom I loved, and so, if I know men, will you mourn, Kano Tatsu. Of such enduring stuff will be your grief for Ume-ko."

It was said. The old man's promise had been torn like a leaf,--not to be mended or recalled,--torn and flung at his listener's feet. Yet such was the simplicity of utterance, such the n.o.bility of poise, the beauty of the old face set like a silver wedge into the deepening mist, that Tatsu could only give him look for look, with no resentment. The young voice had taken on strangely the timbre of the old as, in equal soberness, he answered,

"Such, Kano Indara, though I be burdened with years as many as your own,--will be the never-ceasing longing for my lost wife, Ume-ko."

A little sob, loosed suddenly upon the night, sped past them. "What was it? Who is there?" cried Tatsu, sharply, wheeling round.

Kano began to shake. "Perhaps--perhaps a night-bird," he stammered out.

"A bird!" echoed Tatsu. "That sound was human. It is a woman, the Presence that has hung about me! Put down your arms,--you cannot keep me back!"

"Be still!" cried out old Kano in the voice of angry kings. "Nothing will happen,--nothing, I say, if you act thus like the untamed creature that you were! Your fate is still in my hands, Kano Tatsu!"

Tatsu fell down upon his knees, pulling at the old man's sleeves.

"Father, father, have pity! I will be self-controlled and docile as I have been these long, long months. But now there is a thing so great that would possess me, my soul faints and sickens. Father, I ask your help, your tenderness. I think I have wronged you from the first,--my father!"

Suddenly the old man hurled his staff away and sank weeping into the stronger arms. "I fear, I fear!" he wailed. "It may be still too early. But she said not,--the abbot counselled it! O G.o.ds of the Kano home!"

"Father," asked Tatsu, rising slowly to his feet, his arms still close about the other, "can it be joy that is to find me, even in this life?"

"Wait, you shall see," cried the old man, now laughing aloud, now weeping, like a hysterical girl. "You shall see in a moment! My dead wife takes me by the hand and leads me from you,--just a little way, dear Tatsu, just here among the shadows. No longer are the shadows for you,--joy is for you. Yes, Uta-ko, I 'm coming. The young love springs like new lilies from the old. Stand still, my son; be hushed, that joy may find you."

He faltered backward and was lost. Upon the hillside came a stillness deeper than any previous interval of pause. From it the nightingale's low note thrust out a wavering clew. The day had gone, and a few stars dotted the vault of the sky. Tatsu threw back his head. There was no pain in the gesture now; he was trying to make room in his soul for an unspeakable visitor. The arch of heaven had grown trivial. Eternity was his one boundary. The stars twinkled in his blood.

He heard the small human sob again, just at his elbow. All at once he was frozen in his place; he could not turn or move. His arms hung to his sides, his throat stiffened in its upward lines. And then a little hand, stealing from a nun's gray sleeve, slipped into his, and in a pause, a hush, it was before the full splendor of love's cry, he turned and saw that it was Ume-ko, his wife.