pleading gaze but added to the man’s distraction.
“Answer me!” he entreated. “Make me the promise, beautiful little mousmé!”
His vehemence and passion frightened her. She tried to avert her face, to turn it aside from his burning gaze; but he brought his own insistently close to hers. She could not escape his impelling eyes. At last, her bosom heaving up and down like a little troubled sea, she stammered:
“You speak so strangely, noble sir. I—I—am but—a geisha of the House of Slender Pines. Thou art as far above my sphere as—as—are the honorable stars in the heavens.”
Her voice had a quality of exquisite terror, as though she sought vainly to thrust aside some hypnotic force to which she yearned to yield. It aroused but the ardor of her lover.
“It is not possible,” he murmured, “for one to be above thee, little geisha. Thou art lovelier than all the visions of the esteemed Sun Lady herself. I am thy lover for all time. I desire to possess thee utterly in all the lives yet to come. Make me the promise, beautiful mousmé, that thou wilt travel with me—that thou wilt be mine, mine only!”
She drew back as far from him as it was possible, with her hands jealously held by his own. Her wide, frightened eyes were fixed in terror upon his.
“I cannot speak the words!” she gasped. “I dare not speak them, august one!”
For a moment his face, which had been lighted by excitement and passion, darkened.
“You cannot then return my love?”
“Ah! They are not words for a geisha to speak. It is not for such as I to make the long journey with one so illustrious as thou!”
A sob broke from her, and because she could no longer bear to meet his burning gaze she hid her face with the motion of a child against their clasped hands.
For a long moment there was silence between them. Louder, noisier, rose the mirth of the revelers about them. A dozen geishas pulled at the three-stringed instruments. As many more swayed and moved in the figures of the classical dance. Like great, gaudy butterflies, their bright wings fluttering behind them, the moving figures of the tea-maidens passed before them. Almost it seemed as if they two had been purposely set apart and forgotten. No one approached them. With concerted caution, all avoided a glance in the direction of the guest of honor and the famous one who had been chosen to beguile and save him. How well she had performed her task one could see in the beaming face of Matsuda, the uneasy face of the elder Lord Saito, and the somewhat scowling one of the uncle of Ohano.
The Lord Gonji saw nothing of the relatives. He was oblivious indeed of everything save the shining, drooped little head upon his hands. Scarcely he knew his own voice, so superlatively gentle and wooing was its tone.
“I pray you, give me complete happiness with the promise, beloved one,” he entreated.
She raised her head slowly; and gravely, wistfully, her eyes now questioned him. Dimly she realized the effect of such a union upon his haughty family and the ancestors.
She was but a geisha, a cultivated toy, educated for the one purpose of beguiling men and making their lot brighter. Like the painted and grotesque comedian who tortured his limbs to make others laugh, so it was the duty of a geisha to keep ever the laugh upon her lips, even though the heart within her broke. It was not possible that to her, a mere dancing girl, one was offering the entrancing opportunity of which lovers whisper to each other. Her face was very pinched and white, the eyes startlingly large, as she answered him:
“I dare not speak the words, noble sir. I do not know the way. The Meido is very far off. We meet but once. Your honorable parents and the ancestors would turn back one so humble and insignificant as I.”
“The honorable parents,” he gently explained, “can but point our duty in the present life. In the lives yet to come we choose our own companions. If I could—if it were possible—how gladly would I take thee also for this present life.”
She drew back, puzzled, vaguely distressed.
“You—you do not wish me now also?” she stammered, and there was a shocked, dazed note in her voice. He saw what was in her mind, and it startled him.
“Do you not know why they have summoned you here to-night?” he questioned.
“At—at the command of my master,” she faltered. “I am here to—to please thee, noble sir. If it please thee to make a jest—”
She broke off piteously and tried to smile. Her hands slipped from his as he arose suddenly and looked down at her solemnly, where she still knelt at his feet.
“You are here,” he said, “to celebrate my honorable betrothal to Takedo Ohano-san.”
She did not move, but continued to stare up at him with the dumb-stricken look of one unjustly punished. Then suddenly she sobbed, and her little head rested upon the ground at his feet.
“Geisha!” He called to her sharply, commandingly, and yet with a world of pleading emotion. Matsuda, hovering near, turned and looked loweringly at the girl on the ground. Her face was humbly in the dust at the feet of the Lord Saito Gonji. It was a position unworthy of a geisha, and Matsuda moved furiously nearer to them. This was the work of the Okusama, inwardly he fumed. Now when the geisha was put to the greatest test she was found wanting. At the feet of the man when he should have knelt at hers.
“Geisha!”
This time there was nothing but tenderness in his voice. He was conscious of the fact that the girl at his feet was suffering. He loved her, and was sure that life without her would be both intolerable and worthless. He had begged her to travel with him upon the final “long journey.” She, in her simple innocence, believed he had asked her in marriage for this life also. Now, humiliated, she dared not look at him.
Down he knelt beside her; but when he sought to put his arms about her, she sprang wildly to her feet. Not for a moment did she pause, but like some hunted, terrified thing fled fleetly across the garden.
He started to follow, but stopped suddenly, blinded by the sudden excess of madness and rage that swept over him. For, as she ran, her master, Matsuda, doubled over in her path. His face was purple. His wicked little eyes glittered like one gone insane, and his great thick lips fell apart, showing the teeth like tusks of some wild beast. Gonji saw the shining doubled fists as they rose in the air and descended upon the head of the hapless Spider. Then he sprang forward like a madman, leaping at the throat of Matsuda and tossing him aside like some unclean thing.
She lay unmoving upon her back, her arms cast out like the wings of a bird on either side. Gonji caught her up in his arms with a cry that rang out weirdly over the gardens. It stopped the mirth of the revelers and brought them in a hushed group about the pair. Now silence reigned in the gardens of the Saito.
On the upper floor of the mansion the walls had been pushed entirely out so that an open pavilion, flower-laden, made a charming retreat for the “honorable interiors,” the ladies of the family, who might not, with propriety, join their lords in the revelry. Here, unseen, these “precious jewels of the household” might watch the celebration; but it was the part of the geisha to entertain their lord. Theirs the lot to receive him when, weary and worn, he must eventually return for rest.
Now, from their sake-sipping the ladies were aroused by that cry of Saito Gonji. Over the lantern-hung,
