His deep voice boomed into a silence long maintained. One of the tall candles sputtered and flared. Iriya rose quickly to mend it. Tetsujo's arms, within short blue cotton sleeves, were folded and pressed tightly down upon his chest, as if to keep back straining utterance. Through the stillness his quick breaths ran. The girl gazed out now, motionless, beyond Haganè into the wet blankness of the garden. Familiar outlines of rock and bridge and pine kept there, she knew, their changeless postures. Only a fallen darkness hid them. So in her heart must be immovable shapes and living growths of heroism and selfless devotion. An Occidental training superimposed upon a child's fresh fancy; a foreign love, jealously guarding for its own purpose the tissues of new thought,—these things hid the garden of her heart as night now hid her father's garden. Haganè's look and words were bringing dawn, a dawn perhaps of sorrow, a day dragged up from an heroic past, and trailing its own hung clouds of tears.
Haganè spoke again. His deep voice calmed and satisfied the unstable silence. He changed his position very slightly, facing Yuki more squarely. He raised his massive chin, and a smile played on a mouth that seemed made for stern sadness. Quite irrelevantly, he began to relate to his small audience an incident of his crowded day.
"Do you remember, Tetsujo,—Yuki also may recall from her childhood's impression,—that, as one stands on the jutting corner of my Tabata land, by the large leaning maple,—a corner so steep that it must be upheld by the hewn trunks of pines,—exactly at foot of the cliff stands a very small cottage, with roof patched by the rusted sides of old foreign kerosene cans?" He paused for an answer. Yuki's eyes would not leave the dark mystery of the night.
"I remember most clearly, your august Highness," murmured Onda, with a respectful inclination of his head toward the great man, but an indignant scowl in the direction of Yuki.
"An aged woman and her only child, a son, live in that house. He is a good son, for though hot with the desire for military service, he has kept steadily to his labor as under-gardener on my place. There seemed to be no one else with whom his mother could find a home. Of late the boy has looked ill. I have overheard the servants say that his soul was attempting to leave the chained body and go off, as it wished, to the battlefield. Such agony as this repression, I believe only our countrymen are capable of experiencing or of enduring."
Now, at last, Yuki turned and fixed her look on Haganè. He did not notice this any more than he had seemed to observe her previous indifference.
"The youth dutifully kept this longing from the old dame. But she questioned, and through her slow round of domestic services she pondered. Then she came to understand. Perhaps the young soldier-husband, dead for thirty years, had returned—to whisper. Whatever the cause, she came—to—understand." He paused an instant, as if to take a firmer hold upon his voice. "To-day,—scarcely an hour ago, Yuki,—the youth, returning from labor, found his mother—dead—before the family shrine. She had used her husband's short sword. It will be buried with her. The smile upon her old face had gained already the youth and glory of a god's. She left no message; the smile told him all.—To-morrow the son takes passage for Manchuria."
Yuki's dawn had come. It hurt her, like the birth of a soul. Haganè saw the same look which, for one fleet instant, he had evoked from her at Washington. His strong heart reeled toward the girl. Iriya was sobbing softly. Tetsujo sat square like a box. He envied the mother and the son. He saw no pathos in the tale, only victory. Those two would be together on the Yalu; while he, Tetsujo, famed warrior, skilled swordsman, must pine at home and listen to the pulings of weak women!
The glory grew on Yuki. Above the flowers of the tokonoma, above Haganè's head, hung a tattered battle-flag of their own clan. She recognized it now. Her hands trembled. She lifted them toward Haganè.
"Onda Yuki-ko!" he almost whispered, so deep and tense his voice became. "This year, this day, this very hour, may be the pivot of human history upon this planet! And is not the diamond-point on which that mighty turning rests, the Spirit of Japan?"