Though the lives of the priests are devoted largely to meditation and the study of the sacred books, they are by no means ignorant of what passes about them. The chief priest of the Saito temple knew every detail of the casting out of the first wife; he knew, moreover, what had been the end of Ohano. As the family had not, up to the present, however, sought his advice in the matter, he had expressed no opinion.
An acolyte had quite recently come to the chief priest with a strange story. It concerned a very beautiful geisha who seemed in deep distress, who, with her maiden clinging to her skirt and a baby upon her back, had asked the boy to direct them toward a certain small temple where an ancient priestess of the Nichi sect had lived. The acolyte had been unable to direct the geisha; and, to his surprise and distress, the two had climbed higher up the mountain slope, with the evident intention of penetrating farther into the interior. Both the priest and the acolyte had waited anxiously for the return of the wanderers, for they knew there were no sheltering places in the direction the pair had taken, and the weather had turned very cold. It was not the season for an infant to be abroad. Now the chief priest called the acolyte before him and requested the boy to repeat his story to the Lady Saito Ichigo.
She listened with mixed feelings; and when the boy was through he chanced, timidly, to raise his eyes to the face of the exalted patroness of the temple, and, as he afterward informed the priest, he saw that great tears ran down the stern and furrowed cheeks of the lady, nor could she speak for the sobs that tore her.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE trees had dropped their leaves, and, with naked arms extended, seemed to speak voicelessly of the winter almost come. Only the evergreen pines kept their warm coats of green, and under their shade the travelers found a temporary refuge from the wind and the cold, piercing rain.
Moonlight had been very sure that they had climbed the hill in which was hidden the retreat of the nun who had previously harbored her, and where she knew she could find a refuge to which not even the agents of the Saito might penetrate. But Kioto is surrounded by hills on all sides, and the geisha had lost her way.
With the little Omi to run before her and sell to the chance passer-by or pilgrim, for a sen or two, the jewels of the crazed wife of Matsuda, or to beg rice and fish from charitably disposed temples, they had subsisted thus far.
At first she had turned a deaf ear to the entreaties of her maiden, that they go to the city below rather than to the bleak, deserted, autumn hills. But now, as the penetrating rain searched down through even the wide-spreading branches of the pine-trees, her heart ached heavily.