"Your early training was Buddhistic, child," answered Haganè, in the gentlest of voices. "You know the doctrine of rebirth! Instinct tells you the price already."
Tetsujo had withdrawn his eyes from their fierce contemplation of his daughter, as if the sight continually fed his anger. He rocked now, with downcast eyes and folded arms, on his cushion, ignoring everything but his own black thoughts.
Gwendolen tried in vain to catch Yuki's eye. She saw that already Yuki was betraying what Haganè and old Onda wished to know. The moment was fatal and memorable.
The servant now returned, bearing a long box of dull red lacquer. Yuki shivered so that all saw her.
"Examine the quaint carvings of devils, Monsieur," said Haganè to Pierre, with light affability. As Pierre leaned to take the box, Yuki gave an imperceptible start forward, caught her breath, and then resumed self-control.
"Gems, all of them!" cried Pierre, in impersonal delight. "They are unbelievable in cleverness. Each seems an evil passion caught in fleeting human form."
"Monsieur is intuitive. They are hungry spirits of the Gaki underworld, creatures of ever aching, ever unsatisfied desires. The Hindoo scriptures call them 'preta.' Perhaps you Christians have not such uncomfortable passions, ne?"
Gwendolen had another shock to receive. In this new light, flashed past before one realized its presence, Haganè showed to her the eyes of a demon, a creature of power and of passion. She recoiled from him as from the supernatural. The new discomfort was vented on the box. "Let us have the picture, Prince, or I'll go wild. Please, somebody sit on that box,—the squirming devils give me a waking nightmare. Why did anybody want to carve such things?"
Haganè smiled a very quiet smile, just on the borderland between his demon and his statesman's self. Yuki, too, watched him, with an intensity of which she was not aware. Slowly he lifted the lid of the box, and took out a long cylindrical roll wrapped in some faded stuff that exhaled a strange, stifling perfume, as of old shrines. Then he rose, with his usual dignified, deliberate motions. The servant, who had been waiting, handed him a small wand tipped with a claw of ivory, such as is used everywhere in Japan for hanging kakèmono. Passing the cord over a brass stud on the wall, he leaned over and downward, unrolling the painting by slow inches.
At first nothing appeared but a groundwork of dark silk, a surface crackled and blackened as by heat and time. A pointed, thin flame first arose, then a fiery crown of filigree work that hid suggestions of strange animal forms, then a staring countenance of an archaic, Hindoo type, provocative, menacing, appalling! Shoulders rose, swathed thick in springing flame; a body hung with jewels of red gold; arms bended at the elbow, crossed legs just visible through drapery, and lastly the incandescent throne of a vermilion lotos. The thing glowed wet and fresh, like new-spilled blood. Before its artistic wonder was the wonder of vitality, for the image lived,—not in a world of heavy human flesh, nor yet in realms ethereal, but in some raging holocaust where the two worlds chafe and meet. One flaming hand grasped a bunch of golden arrows; from the other depended coils of gold and orange rope. Each petal of the lotos throne stood sharp and clear in an outline of hot gold, and the long, parallel veinings were of copper. In a room suddenly darkened it should spring out in illumination of its own. A scorching breath blew from it. The leer on the god's face deepened.