“It is my wish,” said the Lady Saito Ichigo, “that you retire to your chamber, and there remove the garments of your trade.”
So strange and unexpected were the words that at first the Spider did not realize that they could possibly be addressed to her. She looked up, bewildered, and encountered the steely gaze of the mother-in-law. Moonlight never forgot that first glance. In the unrelenting gaze bent upon her she read what brought havoc and pain to her heart, for all the stored-up resentment and hatred that burned within the Lady Saito Ichigo showed now in her face. Her voice droned on with mechanical, incisive calmness, but always with the cruel and harsh tone of contemptuous command:
“It is my wish that your maiden of the geisha-house be returned at once to her proper home.”
She clapped her hands precisely twice, and a serving-woman answered the summons and knelt respectfully to take the order of her mistress.
“You will conduct the wife of the Lord Saito Gonji to her chamber.”
The servant crossed to the still kneeling Moonlight, and while the latter, mystified, looked dumbly at the exalted but, to her, horrible lady, she assisted the Spider to arise. Mechanically and fearfully, pausing not even at the wrathful, sobbing outcry that had broken loose from Omi, she followed in the wake of the serving-maid.
Presently she found herself in an empty chamber, unlike any she had known in the geisha-house, with its golden matting shining like glass, and its lacquer latticed walls of water-paper, and the sliding screens, rare and exquisite works of art. Here the maid fell to work upon the geisha, removing every vestige of her attire and substituting the plain but elegant flowing robes of a lady of rank.
From the geisha’s hair she removed the ornaments and the poppies. She swept it down, like a cloud of lacquer, upon the shoulders of the girl, then drew it up into the stiff and formal mode proper for one of her class. From the girl’s face she wiped the last trace of rouge and powder, revealing the rosy, shining skin beneath, clear and clean as a baby’s.
When she emerged from the hands of the maid, Moonlight looked at herself curiously in the small mirror tendered her, and for a moment she stared, dumbfounded at the face that looked back at her. It seemed so strangely young, despite its wide and wounded eyes. Though she was in reality more charming than ever, seeming like one who had come from a fresh and invigorating bath, the geisha felt that the last vestige of her beauty had fled. Within her heart arose a panic-stricken fear of the effect of the metamorphosis upon her lord. She wished ardently she were back in the noisy geisha-house, with the maidens clamoring about her and the apprentices vying with one another in imitating her. She put the mirror behind her. Her lips trembled so she could hardly compress them, and to avoid the scrutiny of the maid she moved blindly to the shoji. There she stared out unseeingly at the landscape before her, heroically trying to choke back the tears that would force their way and dripped down her dimpled cheeks like rain.
Some one whispered her name, very softly, adoringly. She turned and looked at him—her young bridegroom, with his pale face alight with happiness. She tried to answer him, but even his name eluded her. It was the first time they had been alone together, the first time they had seen each other since that night in the gardens of the Saito.