The Romance of the Milky Way Part 11

"We shall meet again the next Year of the Boar, at the same hour of the same day of the same month that you came here. This being the Year of the Tiger, you will have to wait ten years. But, for reasons which I must not say, we shall not be able to meet again in this place; we are going to the neighborhood of Ky[=o]to, where the good Emperor Takakura and our fathers and many of our people are dwelling. All the Heke will be rejoiced by your coming. We shall send a _kago_[76] for you on the appointed day."

[Footnote 76: A kind of palanquin.]

Above the village the stars were burning as It[=o] pa.s.sed the gate; but on reaching the open road he saw the dawn brightening beyond leagues of silent fields. In his bosom he carried the gift of his bride. The charm of her voice lingered in his ears,--and nevertheless, had it not been for the memento which he touched with questioning fingers, he could have persuaded himself that the memories of the night were memories of sleep, and that his life still belonged to him.

But the certainty that he had doomed himself evoked no least regret: he was troubled only by the pain of separation, and the thought of the seasons that would have to pa.s.s before the illusion could be renewed for him. Ten years!--and every day of those years would seem how long!

The mystery of the delay he could not hope to solve; the secret ways of the dead are known to the G.o.ds alone.

Often and often, in his solitary walks, It[=o] revisited the village at Kotobikiyama, vaguely hoping to obtain another glimpse of the past.

But never again, by night or by day, was he able to find the rustic gate in the shadowed lane; never again could he perceive the figure of the little _miya-dzukai_, walking alone in the sunset-glow.

The village people, whom he questioned carefully, thought him bewitched. No person of rank, they said, had ever dwelt in the settlement; and there had never been, in the neighborhood, any such garden as he described. But there had once been a great Buddhist temple near the place of which he spoke; and some gravestones of the temple-cemetery were still to be seen. It[=o] discovered the monuments in the middle of a dense thicket. They were of an ancient Chinese form, and were covered with moss and lichens. The characters that had been cut upon them could no longer be deciphered.

Of his adventure It[=o] spoke to no one. But friends and kindred soon perceived a great change in his appearance and manner. Day by day he seemed to become more pale and thin, though physicians declared that he had no bodily ailment; he looked like a ghost, and moved like a shadow. Thoughtful and solitary he had always been, but now he appeared indifferent to everything which had formerly given him pleasure,--even to those literary studies by means of which he might have hoped to win distinction. To his mother--who thought that marriage might quicken his former ambition, and revive his interest in life--he said that he had made a vow to marry no living woman. And the months dragged by.

At last came the Year of the Boar, and the season of autumn; but I to could no longer take the solitary walks that he loved. He could not even rise from his bed. His life was ebbing, though none could divine the cause; and he slept so deeply and so long that his sleep was often mistaken for death.

Out of such a sleep he was startled, one bright evening, by the voice of a child; and he saw at his bedside the little _miya-dsukai_ who had guided him, ten years before, to the gate of the vanished garden. She saluted him, and smiled, and said: "I am bidden to tell you that you will be received to-night at ohara, near Ky[=o]to, where the new home is, and that a _kago_ has been sent for you." Then she disappeared.

It[=o] knew that he was being summoned away from the light of the sun; but the message so rejoiced him that he found strength to sit up and call his mother. To her he then for the first time related the story of his bridal, and he showed her the ink-stone which had been given him. He asked that it should be placed in his coffin,--and then he died.

The ink-stone was buried with him. But before the funeral ceremonies it was examined by experts, who said that it had been made in the period of _J[=o]-an_(1169 A.D.), and that it bore the seal-mark of an artist who had lived in the time of the Emperor Takakura.

STRANGER THAN FICTION

It was a perfect West Indian day. My friend the notary and I were crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds. All the morning we had been ascending,--walking after our carriage, most of the time, for the sake of the brave little mule;--and the sea had been climbing behind us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the ever heightening horizon. The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath, but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor,--an odor made up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under shadows of tree-fern and bamboo.

My friend stopped the carriage before a gateway set into a hedge full of flowers that looked like pink-and-white b.u.t.terflies. "I have to make a call here," he said;--"come in with me." We dismounted, and he knocked on the gate with the b.u.t.t of his whip. Within, at the end of a shady garden, I could see the porch of a planter's house; beyond were rows of cocoa palms, and glimpses of yellowing cane. Presently a negro, wearing only a pair of canvas trousers and a great straw hat, came hobbling to open the gate,--followed by a mult.i.tude, an astonishing mult.i.tude, of chippering chickens. Under the shadow of that huge straw hat I could not see the negro's face; but I noticed that his limbs and body were strangely shrunken,--looked as if withered to the bone. A weirder creature I had never beheld; and I wondered at his following of chickens.

"Eh!" exclaimed the notary, "your chickens are as lively as ever!... I want to see Madame Floran."

"_Moin ke di_," the goblin responded huskily, in his patois; and he limped on before us, all the chickens hopping and cheeping at his withered heels.

"That fellow," my friend observed, "was bitten by a _fer-de-lance_ about eight or nine years ago. He got cured, or at least half-cured, in some extraordinary way; but ever since then he has been a skeleton.

See how he limps!"

The skeleton pa.s.sed out of sight behind the house, and we waited a while at the front porch. Then a metisse--turbaned in wasp colors, and robed in iris colors, and wonderful to behold--came to tell us that Madame hoped we would rest ourselves in the garden, as the house was very warm. Chairs and a little table were then set for us in a shady place, and the metisse brought out lemons, sugar-syrup, a bottle of the clear plantation rum that smells like apple juice, and ice-cold water in a _dobanne_ of thick red clay. My friend prepared the refreshments; and then our hostess came to greet us, and to sit with us,--a nice old lady with hair like newly minted silver. I had never seen a smile sweeter than that with which she bade us welcome; and I wondered whether she could ever have been more charming in her Creole girlhood than she now appeared,--with her kindly wrinkles, and argent hair, and frank, black, sparkling eyes....

In the conversation that followed I was not able to take part, as it related only to some question of t.i.tle. The notary soon arranged whatever there was to arrange; and, after some charmingly spoken words of farewell from the gentle lady, we took our departure. Again the mummified negro hobbled before us, to open the gate,--followed by all his callow rabble of chickens. As we resumed our places in the carriage we could still hear the chippering of the creatures, pursuing after that ancient scarecrow.

"Is it African sorcery?" I queried.... "How does he bewitch those chickens?"

"Queer--is it not?" the notary responded as we drove away. "That negro must now be at least eighty years old; and he may live for twenty years more,--the wretch!"

The tone in which my friend uttered this epithet--_le miserable!_--somewhat surprised me, as I knew him to be one of the kindliest men in the world, and singularly free from prejudice. I suspected that a story was coming, and I waited for it in silence.

"Listen," said the notary, after a pause, during which we left the plantation well behind us; "that old sorcerer, as you call him, was born upon the estate, a slave. The estate belonged to M. Floran,--the husband of the lady whom we visited; and she was a cousin, and the marriage was a love-match. They had been married about two years when the revolt occurred (fortunately there were no children),--the black revolt of eighteen hundred and forty-eight. Several planters were murdered; and M. Floran was one of the first to be killed. And the old negro whom we saw to-day--the old sorcerer, as you call him--left the plantation, and joined the rising: do you understand?"

"Yes," I said; "but he might have done that through fear of the mob."

"Certainly: the other hands did the same. But it was he that killed M.

Floran,--for no reason whatever,--cut him up with a cutla.s.s. M. Floran was riding home when the attack was made,--about a mile below the plantation.... Sober, that negro would not have dared to face M.

Floran: the scoundrel was drunk, of course,--raving drunk. Most of the blacks had been drinking tafia, with dead wasps in it, to give themselves courage."

"But," I interrupted, "how does it happen that the fellow is still on the Floran plantation?"

"Wait a moment!... When the military got control of the mob, search was made everywhere for the murderer of M. Floran; but he could not be found. He was lying out in the cane,--in M. Floran's cane!--like a field-rat, like a snake. One morning, while the gendarmes were still looking for him, he rushed into the house, and threw himself down in front of Madame, weeping and screaming, '_Ae-yae-yae-yae!--moin te tchoue y! moin te tchoue y!--ae-yae-yae!_' Those were his very words:--'I killed him! I killed him!' And he begged for mercy. When he was asked why he killed M. Floran, he cried out that it was the devil--_diabe-a_--that had made him do it!... Well, Madame forgave him!"

"But how could she?" I queried.

"Oh, she had always been very religious," my friend responded,--"sincerely religious. She only said, 'May G.o.d pardon me as I now pardon you!' She made her servants hide the creature and feed him; and they kept him hidden until the excitement was over. Then she sent him back to work; and he has been working for her ever since. Of course he is now too old to be of any use in the field;--he only takes care of the chickens."

"But how," I persisted, "could the relatives allow Madame to forgive him?"

"Well, Madame insisted that he was not mentally responsible,--that he was only a poor fool who had killed without knowing what he was doing; and she argued that if _she_ could forgive him, others could more easily do the same. There was a consultation; and the relatives decided so to arrange matters that Madame could have her own way."

"But why?"

"Because they knew that she found a sort of religious consolation--a kind of religious comfort--in forgiving the wretch. She imagined that it was her duty as a Christian, not only to forgive him, but to take care of him. We thought that she was mistaken,--but we could understand.... Well, there is an example of what religion can do."...

The surprise of a new fact, or the sudden perception of something never before imagined, may cause an involuntary smile. Unconsciously I smiled, while my friend was yet speaking; and the good notary's brow darkened.

"Ah, you laugh!" he exclaimed,--"you laugh! That is wrong!--that is a mistake!... But you do not believe: you do not know what it is,--the true religion,--the real Christianity!"

Earnestly I made answer:--

"Pardon me! I do believe every word of what you have told me. If I laughed unthinkingly, it was only because I could not help wondering"

"At what?" he questioned gravely.

"At the marvelous instinct of that negro."