When, being nourished, Tatsu insisted on sitting upright, and had recalled the scene about him, his first question was of Umè's shrine, where the ihai had been set, and what the kaimyo. This loosened Mata's tongue, and, with a sensation of deep relief, she began to empty her heart of its pent-up acrimony. Tatsu listened now, attentively; not as would have been his way three months before with gesticulations and frequent interruptions, but gravely, with consideration, as one intent to learn the whole before forming an opinion. Even at the end he would say nothing but the words, "Strange, strange; there must be a reason that you have not guessed."
"But we will get the ihai, will we not, Master? Together, when you are strong, we will climb the long road to the temple?" she questioned tremulously.
"Indeed we shall," said Tatsu, with his heartrending smile; "for at best, the thoughts of Kano Indara cannot be our thoughts. He let her die."
At this the other burst into such a passion of tears that she could not speak, but rocked, sobbing, to and fro, on the mats beside him. He wondered, with a feeling not far from envy, at this open demonstration of distress.
"I cannot weep at all," he said. Then, a little later, when she had become more calm, "Are your tears for me or for Umè-ko?"
"For both, for both," was the sobbing answer. "For her, that she had to die,—for you, that you must live."
"Both are things to weep for," said the boy, and stared out straight before him, as one seeing a long road.
Kano, returning later and finding the two together, marking as he did, at once, with the quick eye of love, how health already cast faint premonitions of a flush upon the boy's thin face, had much ado to keep from crying aloud his joy and gratitude. By strong effort only did he succeed in making his greeting calm. He used stilted, old-fashioned phrases of ceremony to one recently recovered from dangerous illness, and bowed as to a mere acquaintance. Tatsu, returning the bows and phrases, escaped in a few moments to his room, and emerged no more that day. Kano sighed a little, for the young face had been cold and stern. No love was to be looked for,—not yet, not yet.
For a few days Tatsu did nothing but lie on the mats; or wander, aimlessly, over the house and garden. He came whenever Mata summoned him to meals, and ate them with old Kano, observing all outer semblances of respect. But it seemed an automaton who sat there, eating, drinking, and then, at the last, bowing over to the exact fraction of an inch, each time, and moving away to its own rooms. The old artist, mindful of certain professional warnings from the hospital physicians, never spoke in Tatsu's presence of paintings, or of anything connected with art. Within a few days it seemed to him that Tatsu had begun to watch him keenly, as if expecting, every instant, the broaching of that subject which he knew was always uppermost in the other's mind. But the old man, for the first time in his whole life, had begun to use tact. He never followed Tatsu to his rooms, never intruded into those long conversations now held, many times a day, between Mata and her young master; never even commented to Mata upon her change of attitude. About five days after his first appearance in the kitchen, Tatsu and the old servant left the house together, giving Kano no hint of their destination. He watched them with a curious expression on his face. He knew that they were to climb together to the temple, and that it was a pilgrimage from which he was contemptuously debarred. They returned, some hours later, and were busied all the afternoon with the placing and decorations of an exquisite "butsu-dan," or Buddhist shelf, on which the ihai of the dead are placed. At the abbot's advice (and yet against all precedent) this was put, not beside the butsu-dan, where Kano's young wife had for so many years been honored, but in Tatsu's own bed-chamber, thus making of it a "mita-yama," or spirit room.
Kano, visiting it, unperceived, next day, noted with the same curious, half-quizzical, half-pathetic look that no Buddhist kaimyo or after-name had been given to his daughter. It was the earth-name, Kano Umè-ko, which the old abbot had written upon the lacquered tablet of wood. Added to it, as a sort of title, was the phrase, "To her who loves much." "That is true enough," thought old Kano, and touched his eyes an instant with his sleeve.