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More than one innocent visitor had been thrown into panic by the sight of three strained faces at the gate, and three pairs of shining eyes set instantly upon them. One twilight hour, late in August, Tatsu came. After an eager day of watching, old Kano had just begun to tell himself that hope was over. Tatsu had certainly been killed.
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 Umè-ko, his wife. Yeddo and modern Tokyo alike give entertainment to the traditional nine days' wonder. Sometimes the wonder does not fade at all, and so it was with the case of Tatsu and his wife.
"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!"
She trembled, and the blood slowly ebbed from her face, leaving it pale and luminous with a sort of wonder. "Go!" said Kano again, and, in a daze, the girl rose and vanished from the room. Tatsu had hurled himself toward her, but it was too late. He turned angrily to his host. "She is mine! Why did you send her away?" "Gently, gently," cooed the other.
"The letter, the letter," he cried hoarsely, pointing downward. "It is mine, give it!" Kano raised his head. The reaction of excitement was on him too, and it had brought for him a patient hopelessness. It did not seem to matter a great deal just now what Tatsu did or thought. He would never paint. That alone was enough blackness to fill a hell of everlasting night.
Tatsu generally went with her, remaining outside in the courtyard or at the edge of the cliff, under the camphor tree, while she was praying within. Her entreaties were all for divine guidance.
Farmyard fowls and swine, running always to one sty, following always one lead, doing things in the one way that other base creatures have marked out " Kano laughed aloud. His whole life had been a protest against conventionality, and this impassioned denunciation came from a new world. The sound maddened Tatsu.
"Kashikomarimashita!" muttered the old dame in sullen acquiescence. "You need not have feared that I should intrude upon him!" For three days and nights Tatsu remained to himself. The anxious listeners heard at times the sound of restless pacing up and down, the thin, sibilant noise of stockinged feet sliding on padded straw.
Tatsu's eyes, even as he ate, roamed ever along the corridors of the house, out to the garden, and pried at the closed edges of the fusuma. This restlessness brought to the host new apprehension. Such tension could not last. Tatsu must be enticed from the house.
Wait there, in the inner room, while I kneel a moment before our father. Oh, Tatsu, if you love me " The agony of her face and voice swept from Tatsu's mind all other feeling. He stood in the doorway, silent, as she threw herself before old Kano, praying to him as to an offended god: "Father, father, do not hold hatred against us!
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