CHAPTER IX.
Mousmé is better.
At last, after weary and anxious days of waiting and watching, the crisis is past. From that mysterious land, whose borders so often touch ours in sleep and illness, in which Mousmé had almost set foot, my little wife has returned. A frail ghost of her former bright self. One who looks as though she had seen visions.
She seems more fairy-like than ever, sitting out under the verandah, wrapped up in an elaborate dressing-gown of silver-grey silk with a delicate rose-pink lining. She doesn’t look a whit older—Japanese women never appear so till they are quite old—only more like some toy woman taken bodily from off a screen or jar decorated by an artist drawing his inspiration from models of the highest types.
There seems something almost unreal in the slight figure in its quaint Eastern dress, and the dainty ways that are returning to her one by one with the strength which comes back so slowly.
Oka’s wife is delighted. She is very fond of the little mistress, who is so gay and childlike and amiable. I shall be sorry when the time comes for us to leave old Oka, with his ugly, amiable, yellow face, and his wife, who is, as are many of the lower-class women, really more than passably good-looking, though verging upon forty.
We sit out almost all day long; and when I am obliged to leave Mousmé to attend to business in the town, Oka’s wife sits within call, and Mousmé looks at the pictures in the illustrated papers and magazines Lou has from time to time sent me; or pores over a tattered copy of a rudimentary English spelling-book and grammar combined, which Chen Yo, the publisher of the principal paper, put aside for me as a great curiosity which he had bought one day.
Mousmé is learning English well. Her accent is still peculiar, of course, though her vocabulary is greatly extended. I talk to her as much as I can, for soon English will be the only language she will hear.
These are ever-to-be-remembered days, spent in my Japanese home overlooking the wonderful garden, full of brilliance of flower, earth, life and sky. I smoke, and Mousmé plays her guitar; and she sings in a voice into which love and patience have translated greater harmony and sweetness than any other woman’s voice that I have heard during the last four years—
“What shall I sing to thee, my love?