Chapter XVII: The Eta

Now, even when Arisuga had spoken of marriage, he had the thought that it would probably not be longer than for his stay in China. At his going there would be a happy understanding that this meant divorce and that she might marry again. For he was bound by his oath to the great death, that she knew; and if this were to be all, it mattered little that Hoshiko was an eta. In China it was not heinous.

Yet even thus early the thought of some one else finding this wild flower when he was gone as he had found it--and, alas! of doing as he was about to do--he did not like that. He did not like his part in it. It haunted his dreams there in the room next to her and he woke.

She was sobbing. Then he heard her mother:

"Here is the sword," she said, in a voice hard as steel. "Be brave! First pray!"

"Yes," sobbed Hoshiko.

Arisuga crashed through the paper wall between them like the thunder-god. Before him was Hoshiko, preparing the sword for its work. About her, on the floor, was spread the pitiful evidence that she had tried to improvise a trousseau out of her funeral garments. There was a sheer white kimono of silk, the sleeves of which she had lengthened to the wedding size. (Death and marriage are both white in Japan.) She had just laid it down. It was with this--all useless now--that she had wrapped the sword. Above her stood her mother.

"What does this mean?" demanded Arisuga, taking the sword from Hoshiko.

"My mother wishes me to die," sobbed the girl.

"And you?" asked Arisuga, savagely.

"I wish to live. To marry you, lord."

"There are no wedding garments," said the mother.

"Nor any funeral garments now!" said Arisuga, slashing them with the sword.

"You wish my daughter for only a little while--then go!"

"That is my affair. I _take_ her!"

"O Jizo," Hoshiko whispered within herself, "I thank you! Do not let your mercy stop! Perhaps--perhaps--O Benten!"

"You become an eta if you marry her," Hoshiko's mother was saying.

"In Japan," admitted Arisuga. "That is the way the unwise men of old worked to prevent the marriage of etas--and so blot out the caste. But this is China."

And now as the young soldier looked down upon the pitiful little heap at his side, a great shame rose in his soul that he had ever thought of marrying her for a little while, and, quite like Arisuga, he rushed in his penitence from one extreme to the other.

"By all the eight hundred thousand gods, I will marry her for all my lives!"

No adjuration, no promise, could be greater than that. Some men had sworn fealty to a woman for two lives--some for three or four--and it was said that once a man had sworn to love a great poetess for seven lives; but no one had ever yet, so it was said, sworn his love, much less marriage, for all his lives. Yet even this did not stop the savage mother of Hoshiko, bent upon her daughter's honorable death rather than her dishonorable marriage.

"How will you assure me of this?" demanded she.

"By nothing but my word," said Shijiro, with all his samurai's haughtiness.

"Gods! Gods! How mighty and wise you are, lord!" sobbed Hoshiko, kissing his feet.

"But you will not be satisfied to live in China. You will take her to Japan, where both will be accursed etas," went on the implacable mother. "You are a soldier."

"I am a soldier," answered Shijiro Arisuga. "In the army there is neither eta nor samurai. All are equal. All are sons of the emperor. This is Yamato Damashii. The New Japan! And I am Shijiro Arisuga! That is the end!"

And it was the end. Here was a soldier who could vanquish the Medusa mother of Hoshiko by the cold process of words.

"Witnesses! Sake! I will not leave this lady again until she is my wife!"

And so terrible was this Shijiro Arisuga in his wrath that everything happened as he ordered--and they were married. I wish they might have lived happily ever after. But it was only a few glad weeks. Yet, in those little days and hours, she did what she had threatened: crept into his heart so deeply that he was never to dislodge her quite until he died. And it was here Shijiro Arisuga thought for the second time, without suspicion to mar it, that the happiest moment of his life had come.

Fancy the joy of it all! Sure, I cannot tell it. I have no fit words. It was infinitely better than either had dreamed. The dainty little creature known as Hoshiko bloomed into splendor as Madame Shijiro--perhaps because she had no thought--absolutely none--for anything but him. And he was daily more and more amazed at the number of thoughts he spent upon her, who, he had once fancied, he could leave behind for some one else--for many others.

Indeed, it came to such a state that he had little thought for anything but her. The military death was forgotten--Yone was.

"Now if we dream," he laughed to her one day, "take heed that we do not wake. For this dream is such as I have never dreamed before. In it are perfumes and melodies, caresses and touches, passions and calms, sleeps and wakings, and all delights."

"And you," laughed his wife, flinging herself upon him.

"And you," he laughed back, not putting her away.

"And that thing the foreigners call love."

"Grown larger in our sunny East than they know it in their chilly West!" added her husband.

TO THE EMPEROR