Young heroic fatalists! His heart went out to them overwhelmingly.
X
They had dug a trench hard by the castle moat. Over this they spread a net made of stout hempen rope, the edges of which were threaded in and out with elastic of great strength. This was stretched out and pinned, not too firmly, till it encircled and covered the pit. Then the sod and leaves and flower petals were carefully, though thinly, replaced, and the trap was ready for the Fox-Woman of Atago Yama.
Over all the Matsuhaira Shiro a tense, silent excitement pervaded. Though the students had worked in secret, swiftly and silently on a dusky, rainy night, when their prey would not be likely to be abroad, nevertheless no smallest menial on the place but knew that measures had been taken to entrap the fox-woman. They shivered deliciously over the dreadful prospect, for dire things had been promised them by the too garrulous Genji Negato, should any slightest inkling of the plans leak out from the Shiro itself.
Even the Tojin-san, who had been kept in complete ignorance of the actual methods they had taken to entrap her, was affected by that nameless feeling of uneasiness and unquiet, of repressed excitement and strained fear, which animated every other individual of his household.
Throughout the evening he paced his great chamber in a moody, wretched silence. The sense of aloneness, of homesickness that sometimes came upon him in this land, seemed somehow this night to be deeper, more depressing. For days, indeed, he had been affected by a feeling of impending gloom and disaster. He had been restless, dissatisfied, nervous—unconsciously listening and waiting for something he seemed to expect was about to happen. Now he found himself analyzing this sick sense of depression which had pervaded his whole being these latter days, and seemed to reach its culmination on this silent night.
Was it something in the look or tone of a student who recalled one of his own people, or was it the letters that had come to him from across the seas that made him realize they had cared for him more in that other country than he had realized? No—he faced the situation. This was not what had awakened the fever within him.
It was something deeper, something very beautiful and mystic. It was the golden hair of this Japanese Lorelei which had ensnared his longing! He could not banish its glitter, its “sun” as they called it here, its wild appeal from his mind. What was this creature of the mountains then, whom the gentlest of people had outcast? And what was this spell they said she had cast upon him? The words seized upon his fancy, writhed his lips into a tortured smile. He, whom a mere woman had scorned, under the spell of a witch—a wild creature of these Japanese mountains whose face he had never even seen! It was preposterous—fantastic! And yet!
The blood forsook his face, his lips. For days, for weeks, aye, for months he had thought of little else. Through half the luminous nights he had watched and waited for her—had sought her desperately, hungrily. Day and night he had been waiting for her—waiting and listening, always listening, for that appealing voice of mockery and anguish that called to him insistently—to him alone! What mad fancies were these that had woven themselves like a subtle spider’s web into his clear, sane mind? It was the country, the people! He was in a land of gods and spirits!