Suddenly she felt something cool placed within her hands, and her fingers were pressed gently but forcibly about the object. It was the sword she had left behind. A superstitious fear assailed her that the gods had perceived her weakness and inexorably had placed the sword within her hands, demanding of Ohano that she do her duty.
Within the girl’s breast a new emotion arose—the ambition to prove to all the ancestors that within her weak and insignificant body yet glowed the spark of heroism; that she was, after all, a true daughter of the samourai.
Her hands acquired a miraculous steadiness and strength. She set the sword firmly before her, point up. Grasping it with both hands about the middle, she dumbly, and with a certain dignity and even grace, rested her body upon it. Slowly she sank down the full length of the blade.
CHAPTER XXVI
MEANWHILE, within the war-torn heart of Manchuria, the last words of Ohano came up to torment the soldier. His days and nights were made horrible by the imagined reiteration in his ears of the words of Ohano.
By the light of a hundred camp-fires he saw the face of Moonlight, the wife he had discarded at the command of the ancestors. He tried to picture it as he had first seen her, with that peculiar radiance about her beauty. She had appeared to him then like to some rare and precious flower, so fragile and exquisite it seemed almost profanation to touch her. How he had desired her! How he had adored her!
He recalled, with anguish, the first days of their marriage—a mixture of exquisite joy and pain; then the harrowing, heartbreaking months that had followed—the metamorphosis that had taken place in his beautiful wife. How timid, meek, submissive, they had made her in those latter days! He paced and repaced the ground, suffering torments incomparably worse than those of the wounded soldiers.
To think of Moonlight as an inmate of the Yoshiwara, as Ohano had insisted, the last resource of the most abandoned of lost souls, was to arouse him to an inner frenzy that no amount of action in the bloodiest encounters could even temporarily efface.