Yet he often won. She would make amazing blunders just in time to save him from defeat, and Mac would chuckle and say—
“There you are, there you are—thrown a pawn away that might have given you back your queen in two more moves. Never mind, you’re getting on; I’ll noat say ye aren’t im—” long pause—“proving. Check—and how’s that for mate?”
Then Campanula would throw her hands up in assumed horror at her own stupidity, and Mac would chuckle over his own supposed cleverness, and all would be harmony and peace.
To-night, however, Campanula’s mind was somewhat astray, and the chess-player who lived in her brain took advantage of the fact, and beat Mac thoroughly in the course of a dozen moves.
“I’m getting auld,” said Mac testily. “Here, put the things away. Na, na, I’ll play no more the night.”
He lit his pipe at the tobacco-mono and moodily smoked it. He could not bear being beaten at chess, and now he looked as if he would be sour for the whole evening.
She reached for a long-necked chamécen that lay near her on the matting, and tuned it, striking a few somber notes.
“Ay, sing us something,” said Mac, and as the night wind sighed and the cherry blossoms filled the room with their faint, faint fragrance, Campanula, her eyes fixed across illimitable distance, sang in a voice like the ripple of a mountain brook, a song telling of the Miakodori, and the sunlit slopes of Maruyama, where the great old Gion cherry tree blooms at the foot of Yaamis lane. And then an old love-song strayed in from the night and was caught by the strings of the chamécen and made articulate by her voice.
It told the fate of a maiden named Pine-bough, who lived by the sea at Hamada where the foam and the sand are as snow.
She loved a noble, this maiden named Pine-bough—you can guess the rest. Mac listened, soothed; it was the case of David and Saul over again—a very inferior sort of Saul, it is true.