Omi finally darted into the house, and, dragging the Okusama from her dolls, drew her out into the sunlight. For a moment the demented creature stared with a puzzled, troubled look at the form upon the ground. Then she began to utter strange little inarticulate cries and threw herself upon the body of the Spider.
She seemed suddenly to regain all of her lost senses. She felt the geisha’s hands, listened to her heart, screamed for water, and tore at the object upon the Spider’s back, drawing it warmly to her own bosom.
One maiden brought water, another a parasol, another a fan, while Omi supported Moonlight’s head upon her lap. One vied with the other in performing some service for the one they all had loved.
Presently the heavy eyes of the Spider opened, and, dazedly, she appeared to recognize the faces of those about her. A faint smile crept to her white lips. But the smile quickly faded, and a piteous look of commingled fear and pain stole over her wan little face. She put back her hands to her neck and started up, moaning. Loving arms were about her. They reassured her that all about her were friends, and showed her her baby, where, safe and sweet, it rested in the bosom of the Okusama. Then for a long time she lay with her eyes closed, a look of peace, such as comes after a long, exhausting race, upon her face.
Later, when, refreshed and stronger, she rested among the geishas in the pavilion, she weakly and somewhat incoherently told them the story of her wanderings.
At first she had found employment under another name in a tea-house of the city of Tokio; but it was not in the capacity of geisha, for she knew the agents of her husband sought among all the houses of the two cities for a geisha answering her description. Moreover, she had not the heart nor the strength to follow her old employment. So she had worked in the humble capacity of seamstress to a geisha-house in Tokio, near by the very barracks where her husband daily went. Every day she had seen him, unseen by him. She had even heard his inquiries of the master of the house for one answering her description. But no one had thought of the pale and shrinking little sewing woman, who so humbly served the geishas, as the famous one they sought.
Then the war had caused business stagnation everywhere in Tokio, and the first to suffer were the geishas. Patrons now were few, confined mostly to members of the departing regiments.
Moonlight’s strength at this time had begun to fail her. Her work was unsatisfactory. She was dismissed. Now, at this time, when it was too late to please the Lord Saito Gonji and all his august ancestors, she had made the astonishing discovery, which she had not known when with him: that she was to become a mother!
Unable, even had she so desired, to return to the house of the Saitos, scorning to accept even the smallest help from the family which had divorced her, turned away from every place where she sought employment because of her condition, she had been reduced to the direst necessity. Indeed she, the once celebrated Spider, the wife of the noble Lord Saito Gonji, had become a miserable mendicant, hovering on the outskirts of the temples and the tea-houses, seeking, in the garb of her late calling, now worn and tattered, as they saw, for pity and charity. After long and tortuous wanderings, she had at last managed to return to Kioto. She wandered out into the hills in search of the House of Slender Pines.
In a secluded and quiet little corner of a seemingly deserted and unexplored hill she had found at last a refuge in a diminutive temple, where a lonely priestess expiated the sins of her youth by a life of absolute solitude and piety. Here Moonlight’s child was born. Here she might still have been, but the aged nun had finished her last penance and had gone to join the ones the gods loved in Nirvana. The geisha had set out again, in search of her former home, and now she bore her baby on her back. Without funds to pay for a jinrikisha, she had traveled entirely on foot. The journey had been long, the sun never so hot, but, ah! the gods had guided her feet unerringly, and here at last she was in their midst!