He was a small, but very dignified and important individual, whose most noticeable features were his bright eyes, which twinkled incongruously beneath a pair of fierce and uncompromising eyebrows. In his well-fitting English clothes he was as out of place in the Tojin’s great chamber as was the awkward furniture the deluded Genji Negato had chosen for his master.
Now he wandered about the room examining this and that article, and fingering the gifts brought by the Japanese with anticipatory fingers. His eyes, however, turned constantly toward his friend, who, now that they were for the first time alone together, had nothing to say.
The American surgeon was blessed with more than an ordinary intelligence, and he had learned a great deal from the students. A man seemingly absolutely wrapped up in his work, he had for years secretly cherished what he had become to believe was positively a vice. He was in fact as sentimental as a girl. When supposedly he was deeply engrossed in the study of some scientific work, locked in his study with stern orders without that on no account was he to be disturbed, he was in fact reading some love-story—or some romance of adventure usually enjoyed by very youthful persons.
Now he felt himself, as it were, part of a moving captivating drama cut out of life itself. No written page had ever absorbed him quite like this love-story of the fox-woman and his friend the Tojin-san.
There was something appallingly tragic in that little listening, waiting figure crouching there in the hall against the Tojin’s door! The Be-koku-jin knew very well indeed what it was this forlorn little creature of the mountains wanted; he knew, too, why it was that the Tojin believed he could not give it to her.
He had come to Fukui chiefly because he had been unable to resist the lure of the story of the fox-woman as the Tojin-san had written it to him. Now here he had stumbled upon a more entrancing story still.
He looked at his friend with his bright, clear eyes, and it occurred to him that there was something wonderfully attractive about the man’s face, grim and stony as was its expression, marked and marred as were the features. The mouth was that of the revolutionist, grim, unyielding, almost bitter; but the eyes were those of the poet, full of vague dreams and tenderness. The Be-koku-jin, assuming his most professional and uninterested manner, drew up a chair before his friend, and settled his plump little body comfortably into its depths.
“What are your plans?” he asked abruptly.
The other did not look up.
“That depends on you,” he said quietly.