Before that reasoning even Kokan was silent, and because he was Jukichi’s son the master found a way to let the matter drop.
Soichi had given a proof of his spirit, which every boy in the school was ready to accept. He had won his point, but the young Samurai went away to his military school with a bitterness rankling in his heart it was to take years to cure. The quarrel had its effect in the house in Timber Street no less than in the home of Kutami. Jukichi at once left his place as instructor and opened classes of his own. It did not matter. The work for which the school had been founded was done, and the Commoner, grieving that it had come to such result, nevertheless was satisfied, and more than ever proud of the son who had shown both his courage and his patience.
VI
The period of “Little Plenty” was wearing to its close. Already the wistaria blossoms were fading and the gorgeous azaleas were dropping their petals. In the fields the barley heads had turned to yellow and the young rice in the seed beds stood tall and strong in its thick green rows awaiting the harvest that should make room for it. It was a day when even nature rested and basked in the smile of heaven. The sun shone as if pouring the accumulated experience of millions of years into each moment, saturating earth and trees and flowers and grass with a deluge of molten gold. The vast blue arch gleamed like a great aërial mirror, reflecting the wide expanse of motionless sea that lay shimmering in the sunlight, unmarked by a single ripple. On its sleeping surface myriad fishing boats, with dull gray hulls and red brown sails, drifted and dozed. The noisy calls of the city were hushed, and to the girl sitting among the trees on the crest of the pine-clad cone beyond the end of Timber Street there rose only now and then a muffled sound, like the dull roll of surf on a far-distant beach. Only life that was wild sent its challenge to her. Natsu-zemi shrilled his strident ji-i-iii from the branches over the Shinto shrine in vigorous chorus, as if determined to make the uttermost of such a day, and Min-min-zemi chanted his ritual over and over from scores of trees, singing the prayer that has no end.
Six years had more than fulfilled the promise of her childhood for Kudo O-Mitsu. At eighteen she was the full-blown flower of which at twelve she had been only the bud. Such an one she was as would set the hearts of half a city a-throb by a single glance, even a city where men care not overmuch for maidens, and passion is rarely of the tender sort until years of association have coddled it into flame. Her face was a long, narrow oval, the stamp of her gentle birth, exquisitely curved from cheek to chin and rounded to the delicate point that emphasized her beauty and yet revealed her determination. Narrow at the top and broadening to the temples, her ivory-white forehead disclosed the outline of beloved Fujiyama, the sacred mountain of her race. The full lips of her little mouth were brilliant with the stain of luscious cherries. Above a great mass of shining, jetlike hair gleamed softly the green jade of the ornaments that betrayed her years.
She sat leaning a little forward, the slender fingers of one hand half supporting, half caressing her chin, and gazed dreamily out at the splendid pageant of sea and shore spread before her. But its beauty was not in her thought. The wonderful shimmer of the opalescent water, now heliotrope, now tan, now pearl, under the rapturous rays of the afternoon sun, the soft blue of the roofs rising here and there through the brilliant green of the verdured hills, had now no charm for her. The melancholy note of the wild dove, calling sweetly from the deep recesses of the pines, suited more her mood. For trouble had come to O-Mitsu, of a kind she did not know how to meet. Chukei, the nakodo, the professional matchmaker, had called to see her father.