The Dragon Painter Part 8

Old Mata's wall of reserve went down with a crash. "He believes as you believe!" she cried out shrilly. "All your Shingon chants and invocations and miracles he has faith in. Is that not what you call enlightenment? He and Miss Ume worship together almost daily at the great temple above us on the hill. The two finest stone lanterns there are given in the name of my master's dead young wife. Her ihai is in this house, and an altar, and they are well tended, I a.s.sure you! My master is a true believer, poor man, and what has his belief brought him?

Ma-a-a! all this mummery and service and what has come of it?"

"I perceive with regret that you are not of the Shingon sect," remarked the priest.

"Me? I should say not!" snorted Mata. "I am a Protestant, a good Shinshu woman,--that's what I am, and I tell you so to your face! When I pray, I know what I am praying for. I trust to my own good deeds and the intercession of Amida Butsu. No muttering and mummery for me!"

"Ah!" said the priest, a most alluring note of interest now audible in his voice, "your master has so zealously importuned the G.o.ds, and, you say, with no result?"

"Ay, a result has come," answered the old dame, sullenly. "Within this week the G.o.ds--or the demons--have heard my master, for a wild thing from the hills is with us!"

"Wild thing? Do you mean a man?"

"A semblance of a man, though none such will you see in the streets of a respectable town."

"But does your master----" began the priest, in some perplexity.

Mata cut him short. "Because he can smear ink on paper with a brush, my master dotes on him and says he will adopt him!"

The woman's fierce sincerity transmitted vague alarm. Slipping his hands within his gray sleeves, the acolyte began fingering his short rosary as he asked, "Is the--wild man now under this very roof?"

"Not under a roof when he can escape it, you may be sure! He comes to us only when driven by hunger of the stomach or the eyes. Doubtless at this moment he wallows among the ferns and sa-sa gra.s.s of the mountain side, or lies face down in the cemetery near my mistress' grave. He is mad, my master is mad, and Miss Ume, if she really gives herself in marriage to the mountain lion, madder than all the rest!"

"That beautiful maiden whom I saw will be given to such a one?" asked the priest, in a startled way.

"Such are the present plans," said the other in deep despair, and huddled herself together on the floor.

Ume-ko, in her room across the hallway, had half risen. It really was time to check the old servant's vulgar garrulity. But the silence that followed the last remark checked her impulse. After all, what did it matter? No one could understand or needed to understand.

Meanwhile Mata, at first unconscious of anything but her own dark thoughts, became gradually aware of a strange look in the face of the priest. He, on his part, was wondering whether, indeed, the beauty of Ume-ko were not the sole cause of his patron's interest in the Kano family. After watching him intently for a few moments the old woman wriggled nearer and whispered in a tone so low that Ume could not catch the words, "Perhaps, after all, Sir Priest, you, being of their belief, perceive this to be a case where charms and spells are advisable. I am convinced that this house is bewitched, that the Dragon Painter has a train of elementals in attendance. Now, if we could only drive him forever from the place. Have you, by any chance, a powder, or an amulet, or a magic invocation you could give me?"

"No, no! I dare not!" said the other, in an agitated voice. He reached out for his bowl and, with a single leap, was down upon the earth. Mata caught him by his flying skirts. "See here," she entreated, "I will make it worth your while, young sir, I will give donations to your temple----"

"I dare not. I have no instructions to meddle with such things. Let me now give the house a blessing, and withdraw. But I can tell you for your comfort," he added, seeing the disappointment in her wrinkled face, "if, as you a.s.sure me, this is a house of faith, no presence entirely evil could dwell within it."

He got away before she could repeat her importunities; and the old dame returned to the kitchen, muttering anathemas against the mystic powers she had just attempted to invoke.

On the priest's return, Ando questioned him eagerly. He gained, almost with the first words, certainty of his own freedom. With Tatsu safely arrived, and the betrothal to Kano Ume-ko an outspoken affair, then had the time come for him--Ando Uchida--to rea.s.sume the pleasant role of friend and benefactor.

He moved into Yeddo before nightfall. His first visit was, of course, to Kano. Elaborately he explained to the sympathetic old man how he had been summoned by telegram into a distant province to attend the supposed death-bed of a relative, how that relative had, by a miracle, recovered.

"So now," he remarked in conclusion, "I am again at your service, and shall take the part not only of nakodo in the coming marriage, but of temporary father and social sponsor to our unsophisticated bridegroom."

Certainly nothing could have been more opportune than Uchida's reappearance, or more welcome than his proposed a.s.sistance. Mata, indeed, hastened to give a whole koku of rice to the poor in thank-offering that one sensible person besides herself was now implicated in the wedding preparations.

Uchida justified, many times over, her belief in him. In the district near the Kano home he rented, in Tatsu's name, a small cottage, paying for it by the month, in advance. With Mata's a.s.sistance, not to mention a small colony of hirelings, the floors were fitted with new mats, the woodwork of the walls, the posts, and veranda floors polished to a mirror-like brightness, and even the tiny garden set with new turf and flowering plants. Tatsu was lured down from the mountain side and persuaded to remain at night and part, at least, of each day, in this little haven of coming joy.

A secluded room was fitted up as a studio, for his sole use. Here were great rectangles of paper, rolls of thin silk, stretching frames, water holders, mult.i.tudinous brushes, and all the exquisite pigment that j.a.panese love of beauty has drawn from water, earth, and air; delicate infusions of sea-moss, roots, and leaves, saucers of warm earth ground to a paste, precious vessels of powdered malachite, porphyry, and lapis lazuli. But the boy looked askance upon the expensive outlay. His wild nature resented so obvious a lure. It seemed unworthy of a Dragon Painter to accept this mult.i.tude of material devices. He had painted on flakes of inner bark, still quivering with the life from which he had rudely torn them. Visions limned on rock and sand had been the more precious for their impermanence. Here, every stroke was to be recorded, each pa.s.sing whim and mood registered, as in a book of fate.

For days the little workroom remained immaculate. Kano began to fret.

Ando Uchida, the wise, said, "Wait." It was Mata who finally precipitated the crisis. One rainy morning, being already in an ill humor over some trifling household affair, she was startled and annoyed by the sudden vision of Tatsu's head thrust noiselessly into her kitchen.

Rudely she had slammed the shoji together, calling out to him that he had better be off doing the one thing he was fit to do, rather than to be skulking around her special domain. Tatsu had, as rudely, reopened the shoji panels, tearing a large hole in the translucent paper. "He had come merely for a glimpse of the Dragon Maid," he told the angry dame.

"In a few days more she was to be his wife, and this maddening convention of keeping him always from her was eating out his vitals with red fire,"

so declared Tatsu, and let the consuming pa.s.sion blaze in his sunken eyes.

But Mata, undismayed, stood up in scornful silence. She was gathering herself together like a storm, and in an instant more had hurled upon him the full terror of her vocabulary. She called him a barbarian, a mountain goat,--a Tengu,--better mated to a fox spirit or a she-demon than to a decent girl like her young mistress. She denounced her erstwhile beloved master as a blind old dotard, and the idolized Ume, she declared a weak and yielding idiot. Tatsu's attempts at retort were swept away with a hiss. For a while he raged like a flame upon the doorstep, but he was no match for his vigorous opponent. It was something to realize his own defeat. Gasping, he turned to the friendly rain and would have darted from the gate when, with a swoop like a falcon, Mata was bodily upon him. He threw his right arm upward as if to escape a blow, but the old dame did not belabor him. She was trying to thrust something hard and strange into his other hand. He glanced toward it. The last indignity of an umbrella! "Open it, madman!" she cried shrilly after him, "and hold your robe up; it is one of your new silk ones!"

Tatsu had never used an umbrella in his life. Now he opened it eagerly.

Anything to escape that frightful voice! In the windy street he clutched at his fluttering skirts as he had seen other men do, and, with a last terrified backward glance, ran breathlessly toward the haven of his temporary home.

The little house was empty. Tatsu was thankful for so much. The rooms were already pre-haunted by dreams of Ume-ko. Tatsu felt the peace of it sink deep into his soul. Instinctively his wandering feet led him into the little painting room. As usual, the elaborate display of artist materials chilled him. After his recent exasperation he longed to ease his heart of a sketch, but obstinacy held him back. He sat down in the centre of the s.p.a.ce. A bevy of small, squeaking sounds seemed to enclose him. It took him some moments to recognize them as the irritating rustling of his silken dress. He sprang to his feet, tore off the new and expensive girdle of brocade, flung it into one corner and the offending robe into another, and remained standing in the centre of the small s.p.a.ce clad only in his short white linen under-robe.

He looked about, now, for a more congenial sheathing. If he could but find the tattered blue kimono worn during that upward journey from Kiu Shiu! Stained by berries and green leaves, torn by a thousand graceful vines,--for laundering only a few vigorous swirls in a running stream with a quick sun-drying on the river stones,--yet how comfortable, how companionable it was! There had been a blue something folded on the shelf of his closet. He found it, opened it wide in the air and would have uttered a cry of joy but for the changed look of it. Even this had not escaped Mata's desecrating hands! It was mended everywhere. The white darning threads grinned at him like teeth. Also it was washed and ironed, and smelled of foreign soap. For an instant he tore at it angrily, and was minded to destroy it, but the sense of familiarity held him. He wrapped it about him slowly and, with bent head, again seated himself upon the floor.

The rain now fell in quivering wires of dull light. The world was strung with them like a harp, and upon them the wind played a monotonous refrain. Against the wall near Tatsu stood a light framework of wood with the silk already stretched and dried for painting. At his other hand a brush slanted sidewise from a bowl of liquid ink. The boy's pulses leaped toward these things even while his lips curled in disdain at the shallow decoy. "So they expect to trap me, these geese and jailers who have temporary dominance over my life," thought he, in scorn.

No, even though he now desired it of himself, he would not paint! Let him but gain his bride--then nothing should have power to sting or fret him. But, oh, these endless days and hours of waiting! They corroded his very thought as acid corrodes new metal. He felt the eating of it now.

A spasm of pain and anger distorted his face. He gave a cry, caught up suddenly the thick hake brush, and hurled it across the room toward the upright frame of silk. It struck the surface midway, a little to the left; pressed and worked against it as though held by a ghost, and then, falling, dragged lessening echoes of stain.

Tatsu's mirthless laugh rang out against the sound of dripping rain. The childish outburst had been of some relief. He looked defiantly toward the white rectangle he had just defaced. Defaced? The boy caught in his breath. He thrust his head forward, leaning on one hand to stare. That bold and unpremeditated stroke had become a shadowed peak; the trailing marks of ink a splendid slope. Had he not seen just such a one in Kiu Shiu,--had he not scaled it, crying aloud upon its summit to the G.o.ds to yield him there his bride?

Trembling now, and weak, he crawled on hands and knees toward the frame.

He had forgotten Kano, Uchida, Mata,--forgotten even Ume-ko. Fingers not his own lifted the fallen brush. The wonderful cold wind of a dawning frenzy swept clean his soul. He shivered; then a sirocco of fire followed the void of the wind. The spot where his random blow had struck still gleamed transparent jet. He dragged the blackened brush through a vessel of clear water, then brandished it like the madman Mata thought him. With the soft tuft of camel hair he blurred against the peak pale, luminous vapor of new cloud. Turning, twisting sidewise, this way, then that, the yielding implement, he seemed to carve upon the silk broad silver planes of rock, until there rose up a self-revealing vision, the granite cliff from which a thin, white waterfall leaps out.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "With the soft tuft of camel hair he blurred against the peak pale, luminous vapor of new cloud."]

But this one swift achievement only whetted the famished appet.i.te to more creative ardor. Sketch after sketch he made, some to tear at once into strips, others to fling carelessly aside to any corner where they might chance to fall, others, again, to be stored cunningly upon some remote shelf to which old Kano and Uchida and Mata could not reach, but whence he, Tatsu, the Dragon Painter, should, in a few days more, withdraw them and show them to his bride. The purple dusk brimmed his tiny garden, and yet he could not stop. Art had seized him by the throat, and shook him, as a prey. Uchida, peering at him from between the fusuma, perceived the glory and turned away in silence; nor for that day nor the next would he allow any one to approach the frenzied boy. The elder man had, himself in youth, fared along the valleys of art, and knew the signals on the peaks.

Tatsu, unconscious that the house was not still empty, painted on.

Sometimes he sobbed. Again an ague of beauty caught him, and he needed to hurl himself full length upon the mats until the ecstacy was past.

Just as the daylight went he saw, upon the one great glimmering square of silk as yet immaculate, a dream of Ume-ko, the Dragon Maiden, who had danced before him. This was an apparition too holy to be limned in artificial light. When the sun came, next day, he knew well what there was for him to do. He placed the frame upright, where the first pink beam would find it. Brushes, water vessels, and paints were placed in readiness, with such neatness and precision that old Kano's heart would have laughed in pleasure. That night the shoji and amado were not closed. Tatsu did not sleep. It was a night of consecration. He walked up and down, sometimes in the narrow room, sometimes in the garden.

Often he prayed. Again he sat in the soft darkness, before the ghostly glimmer of the silk, tracing upon it visions of ethereal light. When, at last, the dawn came in, Tatsu bowed to the east, with his usual prayer of thankful piety, then, with the exaltation still upon him, lifted the silver thread of a brush and drew his first conscious outline of the woman soon to be his wife.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "He walked up and down, sometimes in the narrow room, sometimes in the garden."]

VI

Through all these busy days Ume-ko moved as one but little interested.

Kano and Uchida noticed nothing unusual. To them she was merely the conventional nonenity of maidenhood that j.a.panese etiquette demanded.

It never entered their heads that she would not have agreed with equal readiness to any other husband of their choosing.

Mata knew her idol and nursling better. Hints of character and of deep-sea pa.s.sion had risen now and again to the surface of the girl's placid life. There were currents underneath that the father did not suspect. Once, during her childhood, a pet bird had been injured in a fit of anger by old Kano. Ume-ko, with her ashen face under perfect control, had killed the suffering creature and carried it, wrapped in white paper, to her own room. The father, ashamed now, and filled with genuine remorse, had stormed up and down the garden paths, reviling himself for an impatient ogre, and promising more restraint in future.

Mata, silent for once, had crept to her child-mistress' close-shut walls, heard the last sobbing words of a Buddhist prayer for the dead, and burst through the shoji in scant time to catch back the stroke of a dagger from the girl's slim, upraised throat. Her terrified screams summoned Kano and the neighbors as well. A priest hurried down from the temple on the hill. In time the culprit was reduced to a condition of tearful penitence, and gave her promise never again to attempt so cowardly and wicked a thing as self-destruction, unless it were for some n.o.ble and impersonal end.

The good old priest, to comfort her, chanted a sutra over the bier of her lost playmate, and bestowed upon it a high-sounding Buddhist kaimyo which Kano carved, in his finest manner, upon a wooden grave post. In time, the artist forgot the episode. Mata never forgot. Often in the long hours she thought of it now as she watched the girl's face bent always so silently above the bridal sewing. No impatience or regret were visible in her. Yet, thought Mata, surely no maiden in her senses could really wish to become the wife of an ill-mannered, untamed mountain sprite! Could Death be the secret of this pale tranquillity?

Was Ume-ko to cheat them all, at the last, by self-destruction?