She moved now deliberately to Umè's fusuma, tapping lightly on the lacquered frame. "Miss Umè! O Jo San!" she called. Nothing answered.
Mata parted the fusuma an inch. The Japanese matted floor, even in darkness, gives out a sort of ghostly, phosphorescent glow. Thus, in the unlit space Mata could perceive that the girl lay at full length, her Dragon Robe changed to an ordinary house dress, her long hair unbound, her face turned downward and hidden on an outstretched arm. It was not a pose of grief, neither did it hint of slumber.
"Honorable Young Lady of the House," said Mata, now more severely, "I came to announce your bath. The august father having already entered and withdrawn, it is your turn."
This time Umè answered her, not, however, changing her position. "I do not care to take the bath to-night. You enter, I pray, without further waiting. I—I—should like to be left alone, nurse. I myself will unroll the bed and light the andon."
Mata leaned nearer. Her voice was a theatrical whisper. "Is it that you are outraged, my Umè-ko, at your father's strange demand upon you? I was myself angered. He would scarcely have done so much for a Prince of the Blood,—and to make you appear before so crude and ignorant a thing as that—"
Umè sat upright. "No, I am angered at nothing. I only wish to be alone. Ah, nurse, you have always spoiled me,—give me my way."
Mata went off grumbling. She wished that Umè had shown a more natural indignation. The hot bath, however, notwithstanding Kano's five lost years of pain presumably in solution, brought her ease of body, as did the soothing potion, ease of mind.
All night long the old folks heavily slept; and all night long little Umè-ko drifted in a soft, slow rising flood of consciousness that was neither sleep nor waking, though wrought of the intertwining strands of each. Again she saw the dark face in the gateway. It was a mere picture in a frame, set for an artist's joy. Then it seemed a summons, calling her to unfamiliar paths,—a prophecy, a clew. Again she heard his voice,—an echo made of all these things, and more. She tried to force herself to think of him merely as an artist would think; how the lines of the shoulders and the throat flowed upward, like dark flame, to the altar of his face. How the hair grew in flame upon his brow, how the dark eyes, fearless and innocent with the look of primeval youth, indeed, held a strange human pain of searching. The mere remembered pictures of him rose and fell with her as sea-flowers, or long river grass; but when there came remembered shiver of his words, "I drink no more until my cup of troth with the maiden yonder!" then all drifting ceased; illusion was at an end. With a gasp she felt herself falling straight down through a swirling vortex of sensation, to the very sand-bed of the stream. Now she was sitting upright (the sand-bed had suddenly become the floor of her little room), her hands pressing a heart that was trying to escape, her young eyes straining through the darkness to see,—ah!—she could see nothing at all for the shining!
She listened now with bated breath, thinking that by some unconscious cry she might have aroused the others. No, Kano breathed on softly, regularly, in the next room; while from the kitchen wing came unfaltering the beat of Mata's nasal metronome.
In one such startled interval of waking her caged cricket had given out its plaintive cry. All at once it seemed to Umè-ko an unbearable thing for any spark of life to be so prisoned. She longed to set him free, but even though she opened wide her shoji, the outer night-doors, the amado stretched, a relentless opaque wall, along the four sides of the house.