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Updated: May 28, 2025
But my poor old master still dotes on him, and, with Miss Umé vanished, if this Dragon Painter, too, should die at once, Kano could not endure the double blow!" The old woman began to sob in her upraised sleeve, apologizing through her tears for the discourtesy. The physician comforted her with kind words, and thanked her very sincerely for the visit.
"Is it is it Tatsu?" screamed the old man, hurling his voice before him. "It is a madman," declared the servant, and flattened herself against the hedge. Umè said nothing at all. After one look into the stranger's face she had withdrawn, herself unseen, into the shadowy rooms. "I am Tatsu of Kiu Shiu," announced the apparition, in a voice of strange depth and sweetness.
I myself will unroll the bed and light the andon." Mata leaned nearer. Her voice was a theatrical whisper. "Is it that you are outraged, my Umè-ko, at your father's strange demand upon you? I was myself angered. He would scarcely have done so much for a Prince of the Blood, and to make you appear before so crude and ignorant a thing as that " Umè sat upright. "No, I am angered at nothing.
Rising against the sky a temple roof, tilted like the keel of a sunken vessel, cut sharp lines into the crimson light. Tatsu flung himself full length upon the bank. He patted the soil with its springing grasses, and felt his heart flow out in love to it. Then he reached up, caught at the drifting gauze of Umè's sleeve, and made as if to pull her down. Umè clasped the tree more tightly.
Are you mad, indeed, this immodesty, this disrespect to me. Mata was right, a Tengu, a barbarian. Go, go, ere I rise to slay you both!" The utterance choked him, and died away in a gasping silence. He clutched at his lean chest. Umè would have sped to him, but Tatsu held her fast. His young face flamed with an answering rage.
After watching him intently for a few moments the old woman wriggled nearer and whispered in a tone so low that Umè 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.
"You are old enough to realize also, Miss Kano Umè-ko, what is the meaning of adoption into a family where there is a daughter of marriageable age." Umè's face drooped over until the pebble caught a rosy glow. The old servant chuckled. "Eh, young mistress, you know what I mean? You are thinking of it?" "I am trying very hard not to think of it," said Umè.
Mata's eyes gleamed sharp and bright as the needle. "Because he is as mad as the wild man, and all for pictures! They would strip their own skins off if that made better parchment. Miss Umè has been influenced by them, and now is to be sacrificed. Alas! the evil day!" and Mata wiped away some genuine tears on the hem of a night-robe she had finished.
"I am the child of Kano Indara," she said. "He, too, has power of the gods, and I obey him. Oh, sir, believe that you, as I, are subject to his will, for if you set yourself against him " "Kano Indara concerns me not at all," cried Tatsu, half angrily. "It is with you, with you alone, I speak!" Umè poised at the very tip of the hill. "Look, sir, the plum tree," she whispered, pointing.
The noise and buzz of incessant conversation affected her pleasantly, but remotely, as the chatter of distant sparrows. The girl had too much within herself to think of. "May Kwannon have mercy upon my young mistress," sighed the nurse, one day, as Umè left the room. "Does she require mercy?
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