Gonji looked at the pleading women with blank, cold eyes. Then, abruptly, he would return to his labors.
Never since the day they had married him to Ohano had he voluntarily addressed a single word to his wife. When forced finally at night to return to her sole company, he would creep back stealthily to the house like some guilty wretch entering upon some infamous errand. There, always, he found her patiently, dutifully awaiting his coming.
“My dear lord,” she would humbly say, “though it is very late, I pray you feed the honorable insides. Permit the honorable interior to wait upon your excellency.”
He ignored the tray of viands thus nightly tendered him as completely as he did her words; but when she made officious efforts to assist him to undress, kneeling in the attitude of a servant or the lowliest of wives, to wash his feet, he would quietly push her to one side, just as though she were some article that stood in his pathway.
Sometimes he would point silently to his wife’s couch, thus sternly bidding her retire. When this was accomplished, he would lie down beside her, and not till the heavy, even, healthy breathing of Ohano proclaimed she slept would he close his own weary eyelids.
Beside Ohano’s blooming, satisfied face (for with feminine logic Ohano set her husband’s curious treatment of her down to his absorption in the war matter, and thus in the proud knowledge of possession still found happiness), he conjured up always that thin, white, wistful one, whose long dark eyes had drawn the very heart out of his breast from the moment they had first looked into his own.
Sometimes in the night he would arise, to tramp frenziedly up and down, as he pictured the fate that might have befallen the beloved Moonlight. What had become of her? Whither had she gone? How would she fare, now that, penniless and without even her old employment (for now in time of war the geishas were in reduced circumstances), she had been cast adrift?
He cursed his own folly in not having foreseen the way in which she would go; for not having provided for her, forced her to accept at least monetary assistance of some kind from his family.
His agents had assured him she had not returned to Matsuda; neither had a trace been found of her in any of the geisha-houses of Tokio or Kioto. Whither, then, had she gone? A sick fear seized upon him that she had started upon the Long Journey alone, without waiting for him, who had promised to tread it with her. He knew that he would never know a moment’s peace till the time when, face to face, they should meet each other upon the Long Road which has no ending.
Thus the wretched nights passed, giving the unhappy man little or no rest; and that he might not encounter the ingratiating smiles and questions of Ohano, he would depart hurriedly ere she awoke, and plunge into the war preparations with renewed fervor and desperation.