A month! inwardly had snorted Matsuda. Why, even the last batch of troops would be at the front by then. Japan would be emptied completely of her men. Now was the time, if ever, to draw patrons to the house, since the departing soldiers celebrated their going at the most popular geisha-houses. Only the fact that the House of Slender Pines was some distance away among the hills kept the soldiers from patronizing it in preference to those in the city of Kioto. But, could Matsuda venture down below, proclaiming the fact of the return of the Spider, ah, then indeed he might be assured of customers for a time at least!
No amount of pleading or reasoning, however, moved the Spider. With the pitying, solicitous, fond arms of the Okusama about her, she languidly proclaimed herself still ill, as indeed she looked and was.
So Matsuda chewed on his nails and thought and thought. He thought of the agents of the young Lord Saito Gonji, who had come to see him at the time Gonji’s regiment was stationed in Tokio. He thought of the exorbitant reward temptingly tendered him for any information of the Spider. How he had cursed his inability to find the girl at that time. But the young Lord Gonji was gone—gone forever, undoubtedly. Who was there in all this haughty family, which had disdainfully and contemptuously cast out from its doors the miserable geisha, who could now possibly be interested in her lot? Nevertheless, the master of the geisha-house pondered the matter, and as he did so there came up suddenly before his mind’s eye the round rosy face of the rightful heir of all the Saito ancestors. His heart began to thump within him with a strange excitement. Suddenly he set out upon a journey.
CHAPTER XIX
THE ancestral home of the Saitos was situated in the most aristocratic of the suburbs of Kioto. Walled in on all sides by the evergreen hills and mountains and sharing in eminence and beauty the most famous of the temples, the shiro should have proved an ideal retreat for the saddened female relatives of the Lord Saito Gonji.
Here, with their household reduced to a single man and maid, and themselves performing menial tasks the more to chasten their spirits, as had become the custom during this period among the nobility, the mother and the wife of Saito Gonji lived silently together. For even the father of Gonji had heard the stern voice of Hachiman, the god of war, and had taken up arms dutifully in his Emperor’s defense.
No longer was the harsh, sarcastic tongue of the Lady Saito Ichigo heard in insistent berating of maid and daughter-in-law; nor did the loud, mirthless laughter of Ohano ring out. Mute, their white faces marked with the shadow of a fear that fairly ate at their hearts’ core, the two Saito women plodded along daily together.
For a time, after the going of Gonji, the older woman had waited upon the younger; but as the days and weeks passed her solicitude for the health of the young wife slowly diminished, and in its place came a scorching anxiety to torture the now aging woman.