The burst of passion subsided. Azalea’s hands fell to her side; she slowly stiffened and straightened herself. She stood in giddy hesitation a moment, then slowly moved away.
Through half the length of the night she wandered about the hill country and town of Sanyo. Once she came to some water and its murmuring song evoked a momentary response in her. She began to laugh in a soft, mad way as she stepped into it; but the water came only to her ankles and the baby upon her back moved and moaned in its sleep. Something burned within her head. Words, words—words—spoken in that deep voice she had so loved. To take life was an evil and unpardonable thing in the sight of the One God! She stepped upon the bank of the brook in shivering terror. Suddenly she ran from it as though from a great temptation. She sped on from the dark allurement of the country to where the light of the city told her of the warmth and happiness of others. Through street and street she wandered, her feet dragging, her head dropped forward. She lost her sandals and her feet, in the worn and old linen, bled from the touch of the pavement. She had now lost all sense of locality. Only she knew that thrice she paraded one particular street—an avenue shaded by dark, drooping bamboos, under whose shade houses of exquisite structure and light gleamed out upon the night.
Azalea stopped before one of them—the largest of all. Her hand rested heavily upon the bamboo gate; but she did not attempt to push it open. Now she stood still with a nameless quiet and terror in her heart. Suddenly, as she wavered, the babe upon her back twisted in its wrappings, and weirdly, piercingly cried aloud. A moment later one appeared at the door of the house with a lighted andon in his hand. He came with hasty steps down to the bamboo gate, and there in the dim light of the lifted andon he saw the woman Azalea. He seized her by the arm and drew her up the path and into the house.
CHAPTER XIII
For nine days she remained in the house of Matsuda Isami. He put her into the great sleeping chamber above the ozashishi, removed the paper shoji from the house and slid into its place the winter wooden sliding walls and doors. Thus they were safe from spying intruders, and she might not leave the house, since the wooden street doors were fast. Outside her room the woman Natsu-san remained. Matsuda himself moved into the ozashiki, and from there he kept guard over the woman in the chamber above.
When first the serving-woman Natsu-san entered the chamber to serve her, she found the girl crouched off in the farthest corner of the room, whither she had crept after Matsuda Isami had set her in the room. She was numb with cold, hunger and fear. Her feverish mind could not follow the tangled sequence of events that had passed over her that night. She dimly recalled that sudden flash of and on light at the end of her wanderings, the touch of arms of seeming supernatural strength which had crushed her aching body as they carried her up and into this room of fears. The room had no light save what sifted into it from a takahiri (lantern) in the hall, which the servant had set by the dividing doors.
“I have brought food,” she said briefly, and set the tray on the floor by the famished Azalea. She reached out a trembling hand and cautiously, fearfully touched and felt of the food. Reassured of what she touched, her hands seized upon the contents of the tray. She found the milk, warm and sweet, and in a moment she had slipped the child out of its bag, laid its limp and listless little body at her feet and thrust the nipple of the bottle between the tiny, parted lips.
Some one in the night put a slumber robe upon her. Her weakness and exhaustion gave way. She slept. But in the early morning, turning in her sleep instinctively to reach out for her child, she missed it, and started with a cry of fright and anguish that rang out wildly through the silent house.
It was five days before they put the child back into her arms. At the end of that period she put her head at the feet of Matsuda Isami, swore by the eight million gods of heaven that she was his humblest and meekest of slaves, and promised to do whatsoever he should command if he would but return to her her child. After that she was like a mechanical puppet. The woman Natsu-san dressed her in softest silken crepe, loaded down her little fingers with rich jewels, and drew the hair, fallen so wildly about her face, back into smooth mode. She moved about like one in a dream, a nightmare from which she could not wake nor extricate her. She was but a passive doll in the hands of the woman, and did not even move her hands to assist the servant in attiring her. But when they brought the child, she rushed upon the woman, seized it with savage force from her arms, and then fell to weeping over it in such a way that the one she was hereafter to name “master” feared for her reason, and left her for the nonce alone. Thus a respite of a few days was given her.