THE stars were too far away and the moon had not risen. Only the peaches in their Mother-Hubbards of blossoms were here and there, thinning the dark. The voluptuous breath of Japanese spring was abroad, riding the hotoke-like hush of night.

      A young wanderer was treading the remotest hem of the castle-town of Kameyama. Into the night and out upon his dusty homelessness a red patch of lighted shoji of a peasant hut was throwing a quiet, rural, and the most lyrical home-warmth. It looked as if the cottage, like a young woman, was beckoning him with red, pouting lips, with the warmest of kisses upon them.

      He approached the cottage cat-fashion. When at last he spied a wicket, he did not enter. Skirting the cedar-hedge, making a long, roundabout curve, he stood at the well, with a tall windlass, at the back of the cottage.

      Within it a couple were looking at each other in the glow of a square fireplace dug in the ground-floor. The windlass squeaked time and again.

      "Do you hear that, Kiku? Listen! What's that?" said the husband.

      "Oh, nothing: winds playing at the well, I guess."

      "Winds! no winds to-night. 'Tis as calm as a tomb; listen!"

II.

      WHEN they were married, everybody was sure that Goro would make the best of husbands. But of Kiku the simple villagers said, with that indescribable shake of the head, —

      "She is such a pretty girl!"

      And they were right. She was beautiful enough to persuade the dawn — one of those mist-soft spring dawns of Japanese rural districts — or the sad willow, or the cherry-blossom, or the hototogisu which makes its home in the "cloud-well" above, or the teal on a lake, into the notion that, after all, they are rather common-looking sort of things.

      She was just nineteen, stepping tip-toe on the threshold of life, looking beyond, forgetful of the past.

      Of Goro also, if it be true that the ugliness of face mirror the faithfulness of heart, the villagers' prophecy was most true.

III.

      IN the twilight hour, a little before Goro shouldered his spade on the path by his rice-field to turn homeward, there was heard a low singing by the well behind the cottage, wherein Kiku was waiting for the return of her husband.

      The notes — plaintive, stealthy, full of emotion, like the echoes of heart-throbs — crept mist-like over the garden. Some one was singing a Chinese poem. They reached the cottage, those soft notes. They reached the ears of Kiku. As she jerked her head with great violence, she shook a few dewdrops from off her cheeks — like a flower which had slept out of doors all night.

      So she had been weeping.

      Like a flash, she dashed out.

      Before her, in the dusk, by the well, there rose an outline, like a pen-sketch of a Japanese Rembrandt. She stopped; stared. The figure sang on.

      There was no mistake about it: it was he! She rushed to him, with her eyes blinded with tears. With just one word, "Yoshino-san!" she was by his side.

      "Is your father in?" That was the first thing which the young wanderer said.

      "Oh!" with which she pushed herself away from him. "Fly!"

      He was silent; amazement is tongueless.

      "My husband!" she said.

      "Your husband!" he repeated, cut to the heart, astounded even to the point of absent-mindedness.

      She sprung upon him, locked her arms around his neck, and sobbed, —

      "Oh, you don't understand!"

      "Very well, good-by," he said, with something colder than frozen steel in his tone.

      "Oh, no, no, no! I will explain; come to-morrow. Oh, you will kill me."

      She again remembered that her husband would soon be at home.

      "Promise me on your sword that you will be here to-morrow night. Promise!" she plead.

      He was silent.

      "Remember, if you fail, you must seek me in the land of shadows."

      The young man melted away into dusk; and Kiku, returning to the cottage, dried her tears by the fireplace.

IV.

      TWO years before that, many samurais of Satsuma were arrested at Kioto, then the capital of Japan, for political reasons. They were a radically progressive element. Some were beheaded; many others escaped — none knew how or whereunto.

      One night Kiku's father came home from his hunting and brought back a young man with him — a young man completely masked.

      "Daughter," said her father, "I have a guest here. And one important thing is that none of the villagers should know of his presence here. Do you understand?"

      "Hai, I do, august father."

      He could not have been over twenty-three, that young guest of hers. In the dead of night they used to talk in animated whispers, her father and the stranger.

      Her father tilled the soil, ostensibly a farmer therefore, but he hunted more. And in his absence she kept company with the young stranger in his strict seclusion. How much like her father did he talk! — that was the first thing she noted.

      A flower-smile, a sword icy and sharp, a caress, a torch of an ardent nature — these were all there in his eyes which lighted the romantic pallor of the young man's cheeks — the paleness of one who had suffered too many and too great shocks of agony and excitement, and that, too, early in life.

      His lips were as eloquent as his eyes.

V.

      ON the fourth month after his arrival, in one of those moments of supreme temerity, Yoshino went forth out of his cage; of course, night had fallen on the path before him.

      He walked on, or rather staggered along under the heavy burden of his thoughts. When he stopped, it was in front of the shrine of Ujigami, in a mist-choked cedar-grove. There was the chanting, soft as prayer, of the sacred cascade, and mingled with it came the suppressed whispers of a woman. Some one was praying: certainly he would not disturb a devotee. He walked on a few steps and sought a stone bench under the mother wing of an ancient pine-tree.

      There dreams came into his mind; reveries kidnapped him. Could he but "cleanse the filth around the Mikado;" could he command a few thousand men of Satsuma clan; could he but dictate to his Majesty "under his arms," if but for a year, he would wash all the stains of humiliations inflicted by the red-bearded barbarians on the land of the gods! Ah, a sandal of scarce seven inches that would trample the world! a sword of three feet that would sway the under heaven!

      Suddenly the approaching steps woke him. And he heard a soft, sweet voice say:

      "Oh, know the gods have heard my prayers: Yoshino will be mine!"

      He recognized the voice. That made him start.

VI.

      DAYS came and went like things of wings. And as the last days of the fifth month of the young man's stay waned with the moon, Kiku's father brought home startling news.

      The Imperial party, the anti-Baku-fu, the party with the now historic motto, "Kinno-Joyi," was in ascendency.

      At once the spirit of unrest seized the young Satsuma samurai. I do not say that he did not shed a tear as the distance enfolded that kindly cottage; but what god can count the tears of Kiku?

      The evenings spent over a volume of verse; the soft rhythm of the Chinese poems which Yoshida used to sing for her, and whose echoes, every time she happened to stand in the centre of that familiar room, would start from its walls and from the walls of her memory's crypt!

VII.

      NO tidings of him reached her, but tidings of many battles where men were killed. Sorrow, like happiness, does not come alone, and amid all the distracting pains of disappointment her father became the citizen of Jodo.

      An orphan, with stone-cold despair in her bosom, where she ought to have had a heart full of hope, dreams, and throbs. And in the dark, dark days, Goro, her neighbor, a simple peasant, was kind to her. She married him.

      It was not the hard work, no! — neither the monotony, nor the ruggedness of the rough-hewn life, that made her so unhappy. But it was a hope, a doubt, a prayer — "If he be not dead after all?"

VIII.

      "WHAT, saké! What possessed you, wife? What's going to happen?" Goro said, laying down a hoe, just home from the field.

      A kettle was singing over the fireplace; and sure enough, out of its steam-choked mouth a tokuri was peeping. Saké must be warmed before it would warm the blood.

      "Oh, nothing, nothing specially," replied Kiku; "it has been such a long time since you've tasted a drop. It won't do you any harm to screw up your spirit a bit now and then. Money? Well, never mind. Oh, ho-ho-ho!" she laughed, as if she were already happy, intoxicated by the very aroma of saké. "You know it's the funniest thing. That bald-headed saké-dealer. They say he is the shrewdest fellow in the village. It's a big joke and all nonsense. I said to him: 'My man has no cash now, but you see his crop will be very good this year. And I want to make him merry to-night. He comes home so dead tired every evening, you know; can't you help me?' Then he was cheerfulness itself. He salaamed and smiled and blushed too, and filled my two-sho cask. Look here. Wasn't that luck?"

      "Oh, the rascal, I know him. You have such a likely face, and they say he is bad on pretty women."

      "Hush! how absurd! that old, ugly, bald-headed man; why, he hasn't a solid tooth in his head. But, my man, are you jealous?"

      She turned up her face at him. Was ever a face so bud-like, so elfishly coquettish, so full of mockery, modesty, innocence, and confidence?

      Never was Goro in a better humor in all his days. He stared at the saké cask in a laughing amazement. That was a deal of saké indeed.

      "Come, now," she said, and poured into a large rice bowl the liquid temptation of such a romantic, pale, golden hue. Saké cups had long been set aside ; they were too small.

      Bowl after bowl was drained.

      "Now this is beautifully tempered, this tokuri."

      "No, wife, no more — I dare not!"

      That was the last spark of sanity left in him.

      "What's the matter with you, husband. Catch it when you can. Fun is not as common as flies in this life."

      Stretched on a rough straw mat by the fireplace he lay, a big, awkward doll of soft dough. His wife's lips curled over him in contempt.

      The sound of the bell in a far-away belfry of a Buddhist temple came tangling itself with the mists and tolled off midnight.

      Just then the windlass squeaked on its pivot.

      That gave a bird-like start to the woman in the cottage.

IX.

      "I'M saved, thank Heaven! I'm saved!" and she dropped before him in the attitude of prayer. "Take me away — take me away with you — oh, take me away!"

      He stood silent, with his arms crossed over his breast.

      A silence like that cuts something more vital than flesh in a woman.

      "Oh, I love you, — love you, — love you! Don't kill me by leaving me. Oh, take me, carry me away!"

      A whisper, suppressed, hard, and very cold, answered her flame-like prayer.

      "But your husband!"

      She had never thought of him!

      "You are my husband," she retorted with spirit. "He who loves me truly, he whom I can truly love, is the only husband the gods give to a woman!"

      "But you have married him!"

      "A blunder! I sinned, I don't deny that. It was a serious mistake,- but I thought you were dead — killed on a battle-field. Yes, I sinned, and gravely too, but can a sin never be forgiven against a woman who forgives more than any creatures of the gods? And is there a woman so sinless that she has never made a mistake?"

      How it all came about, Yoshino did not know, but he found himself very close at her side, his arms about her.

      "Say, in mercy, that you will forgive me," Kiku pleaded.

      "But, Kiku ——" said Yoshino.

      "Say you will forget all. Don't leave me here to die. Ob, take me, take me away with you!"

      "But to steal you like a coward!"

      Kiku was silent.

      "A samurai can never do that." His tone was as grave as the judgment of the gods.

X.

      GORO, a hoe on his shoulder, was returning home from the field Never had his lips curled and rippled more merrily with a rice-field song as, on that evening, he shook the twilight into a charming confusion. All of a sudden, from behind the cedar-hedge, a voice called out, —

      "Goro-don chetto!"

      It was a woman's voice; and O-man (the breathing newspaper of the village in those unsensational days) craned over the hedge.

      She opened her mouth and spake, half an hour on a stretch at the rate of three hundred words per minute, — the miracle not altogether peculiar to the womanhood of Japan as I am told, — but the substance of the discourse was that there was a man at Goro's place all morning and afternoon that day with his wife, Kiku, and that she had seen him and her in a dear attitude with her own eyes — "a very handsome man-of-hue he was too!"

      Without a single word Goro turned away. The merry field-song which was suddenly interrupted was never continued. He said to himself, "No, I don't believe it!" But man has a most sceptical faith.

      Meanwhile he rounded another corner of an enclosure; he was within a quarter of a mile of his house.

      "Goro, wait!"

      He stopped with a shock; his eyes fixed on an indefinite corner of the cosmos, and his mouth threatened to swallow the skies.

      "Goro!"

      "Hai, O-samurai!" Goro found the speaker standing by a pine-tree.

      The storm of the samurai's brow, the lightnings of his eyes, the quivering line of his sensitive mouth, told the story beforehand, and very emphatically too. But Goro was a simple peasant, and in order to give him a hint one had to employ a brickbat. And then too night was falling.

      "Goro, I see you have a hoe. Can you use it?"

      "Certainly, sir; the humble one has been using it since his earliest days."

      "Can you use it on a man?"

      "On a man," repeated Goro after him, — "on a man, O-samurai?"

      "Yes, on a man!"

      "Oh, namuamidabutsu! Buddhas forbid! A hoe, as you so well know, honorable sir, is to tickle the mother earth into a kind and fruitful humor. It's a great wrong, a great shame, as I have heard my sires say oftentimes, sir, to use it in fighting, as some of the disgraceful ones have done."

      "Very well, then, here is something which is meant for men." And Yoshino pulled his sword from his girdle and threw it out to Goro.

      He jumped off from it. Then, hastening back, he fell on his knees and lifted it up on his palms.

      "No, take it. If I were to tell you to cut that pine-twig with it, you can use it well enough, can you not?"

      "Hai, honorable samurai, but I, of course, dare not touch it."

      "But you must. Draw it, Goro."

      "Is it your august pleasure — your august command?"

      "Yes, I wish it."

      "May I be forgiven for asking why the humble peasant should touch the sword of O-samurai?"

      "Because it's my command. Moreover, because you need it. And I will give you a man upon whom to use it."

      Goro came very near dropping the sword — a livid statue of silent bewilderment.

      "Here, Goro" — and the samurai stripped himself bare down to his girdle — "head, neck, heart — anywhere you choose. Use it on me."

      "Eh, tohomonai! Never-to-be-dreamed-of thing! The curses of gods and Buddhas are fearful, august master."

      "You don't understand. Listen, then. I, Yoshino Takanori, a samurai of Satsuma clan, have stolen your wife."

      "An honorable O-samurai stolen the wife of a mud peasant! Master is joking."

      "O Kiku, Kiku-ya!" the samurai called.

      A pale face emerged from the twilight under the pine-shade.

      "Do you know this woman?"

      Goro's hand was on the hilt of the sword.

      "Kiku!" His voice was husky; Goro, for a second, seemed to have forgotten the samurai completely.

      "Man," she said, meeting her husband's eyes, "we had loved each other, he and I, long before you married me. I thought the O-samurai was killed in a battle, and you married me."

      The sword gave a silver dash across the falling night; the scabbard fell upon the ground.

      Quicker than a ray she shot towards Yoshino. Her arms around his neck, her head on his shoulder, she said, "We are ready, Goro."

      Something snapped the muscle in Goro's arm; the sword, falling, liberated a spark from a stone with a clear ring.

      Speechless, with his head heavy on his chest, Goro turned away.

      "Stop, Goro! Goro, wait!" the samurai called after him.

      Goro only quickened his pace.

      The samurai started to follow him.

      "Oh, stop, stop!" and Kiku held him by the arm. "He is fleeing, not we."

      He paid no attention and dragged her with him.

      "O my lover!" she sobbed, "are you, then, going to force him to kill us?"

      Yoshino stopped. In the distance the steps of Goro were chasing the ghost-like echoes of temple bells, melting fainter and fainter, and the night was eyeless overhead.

      Taking her gently into his arms, and in a still gentler tone of voice, he said, — "So you want to live, Kiku?"

      "Yes, with you, my own."

      "But have I not sinned? Have I not robbed him of his wife? Do I not deserve death at his hand?"

      "Oh, no, it is I who left him; you have never taken me away from him."

      "Then you should die, and I will follow you wherever you go!"

      "I sinned while I lived with him. I prostituted my body; made a base slave of my free heart; and as the punishment of the enormous crime the hell of marriage without love was mine! In leaving him, dear, I but cut short this awful, awful sin."

      "You are right; but you see, Kiku, we have sinned. against the laws and the conventions of society. We are worthy of death. Moreover, shall we not be much happier in the land where Love reigns supreme, where no earthly rules can tyrannize? Do you love me well enough to leave this world with me?"

      She tightly embraced him.

      "I am ready, dear, let us go — hold me fast to you," she said quietly.

XI.

      THE front door of the cottage was obstinate and would not be persuaded. Yoshino's banging and kicking made it shudder a little — nothing more.

      "Let us try the amado (weather shutters)."

      They smashed their way in.

      The darkness within the cottage was as dense as coagulated blood.

      "Stay here — let me get a flint and strike a light."

      Kiku felt her way across the room, into the kitchen.

      "A—ah!" And there was the sound of a falling body.

      "Here he is, — here!" she shrieked: She got up and rushed back to Yoshino. All in a shudder, she flung herself upon him, buried her face upon his shoulder.

      "By the fireplace! by the fireplace, there!"

      "Let us go and strike a light."

      There was a black mass by the fireplace. And the light fell upon it with its nervous and very uncertain, ruddy feet.

      Goro sat cross-legged, but his head was touching the ashes of the fireplace — he was folded in his last prostration. The ashes were black and wet in front of him.

      "Goro! Goro!"

      Seizing him by the collar over the nape, Yoshino gave an upward jerk. A scythe fell into the ashes.

      A ghastly sight stared Kiku in the face — full in her face.

      The eyes closed in blue lines, his teeth set, the cheeks dug hollow by agony; the violent death painted the face purple and black — her husband's face!

      "E—eh!" She flung the candle into the ashes.

      The light went out.

      There was a heavy thud on the earthen floor.

      Another light was put out in the heart of the woman.

      In the darkness; in the silence:

      "Goro! Goro!" The tear-choked voice of Yoshino.

(THE END)