"What am I to say to Gwendolen?" was now his despairing cry. Gwendolen's eager questions, Gwendolen's clear eyes,—they would soon be torture-irons. She knew enough of the situation to have a right to all, yet how on earth was he to tell of a thing which no one had stated to himself,—a fleck of terrible certainty drifting to his gaze from Yuki's soul? Now a revulsion against the whole morbid situation flooded his being. He felt as he had sometimes felt in dreams when a horrible thing crept near, and he, though half-conscious that it was only a dream, still sub-consciously must endure the pangs of reality until he could wrench himself awake. Perhaps this also might prove a phantasm of the night! He snatched at the delusion. The voices of young children, the whirr of the low red sun through fleeting jinrikisha wheels, the gentle, restraining touch upon his hand of falling petals, jeered softly at the self-deceiver.
The city streets shortened now to purple vistas. Across from the smouldering west a single planet, isolated by its own brightness, preened itself with feathers of light. Todd's thoughts moved on like the shadow-pictures of a revolving lantern. Each was a silhouette, black, angular, menacing. If Yuki had indeed held Haganè inert, if an impulse of love, even of pity for a sick man, had prevented the instant regaining of such a paper, naturally she must get it back, though at the price of her life. But what did the babbling sick boy mean by saying that he had offered to return the paper to Haganè, if only Yuki would be forgiven, and that both as with one voice had refused? Here was the knot that pulled.
Haganè did not hate or scorn his young wife; Todd would stake his honor on that point. Never had a human countenance shone with deeper tenderness than that which Haganè had turned on Yuki within a few moments, too, of her wrongdoing. The more urgently she had insisted upon fulfilling the bargain, the brighter the faith in her that Haganè's eyes had betrayed. Yuki's secret was plain enough. She was to die by her own hand, giving her hostage of a soul to Haganè, the body of her death to Pierre. Both she and Haganè had been assiduous to use the one term "body." Todd could understand this much, but what was Haganè's hidden source of light? Here conjecture failed. If Yuki's death were the only possible way of redeeming the paper, all motives would be plain; but Pierre said that he had offered to restore it. This was a great thing for Pierre to have done. Todd's heart ached for the poor, weak, tortured boy, so soon to be overwhelmed in an iridescent wreck of his own making.
Yuki was to die! This one thing alone was terrible enough. His weary thought went on in a creaking treadmill. To Haganè the mere fact of death would, of course, be less terrible and less important. Mere animal existence, for its own sake, no matter how pleasant the surroundings, is scorned by a true Japanese. They have other lives to live, even on this old planet. They are to come again, soothed and strengthened by the few years of interval, each in the fresh, new body of a little child. In such tender blossoms of their own race they re-enter a world from which, smiling or shivering, as karma may have tended, they departed. Returning, they are dazed, a little wistful, a little timorous, yet grateful for the new chance. Believing that great sorrow and great temptation come always from the deeds of a previous existence, they meet them bravely, carrying their own burdens, clear in determination to retrieve that past, and mark out for the future a straighter and a higher way. The gentle Amida, Kwannon of Mercy, Jizo with the tender smile,—all may help them. Fudo Sama, immovable in a torment of flame, Monju, Aizen, and the old Shinto Gods may give them strength; but each human soul has wrapped in itself the power of growth and of decay. So, mounting, striving, failing, reconquering, at last the pilgrim may approach that shining mystery the world calls "Nirvana,"—that glare of glory where the soul is swallowed up in light, and so passes on to new realms of a radiance so ineffable that human thought falls helpless and blind before it.
He had heard Yuki tell all this to Gwendolen before the days of her Christian conversion. His listening had been more eager than he cared to show. Gwendolen had voiced his thought, as she replied, with a long sigh of wonder, "It does seem reasonable. So many things that we have to guess at are explained by this thing you call reincarnation. Love at first sight, sudden aversions, family tendencies, that queer feeling of having been in a new place many times before—I think I'll turn Buddhist, Yuki; but don't hint it to mama."
Yuki had become a Christian. She believed her early religious training to have passed forever. She was sincere and earnest in the new faith. Her face turned, as by a gentle instinct, to the Star of Bethlehem. All that she professed, she believed truly and without question. Yet this life of hers was, after all, but a flower sprung from an eternal stem, whose roots were packed, burrowed, and buried deep in centuries of Eastern mysticism. She had drawn her convictions from her mother's breast, while, to belief of the tender nurse, ancestral spirits hovered and smiled above them both. She had breathed it in each year at Bon Matsuri, the Festival of the Dead, when little boats, laden with prayer and incense and the warmth of human food, went forth to comfort the souls of those who had died at sea, when each hillside cemetery stirred with the soft clashing of ghostly lanterns, luminous in a spectral ether, when little steaming cups of tea, and flowers, and children's toys, were offered to the dead ghost-people. Here were the meeting-places of the living and the dead. Here the two worlds answered, face to face, as reflections in still water. Yuki, in those childish days, no more doubted that hordes of spirits moved about her, lifting her hair, creeping into her sleeve, reaching even to the shelter of her faithful heart, than, later, in America she had doubted the presence of her human schoolmates, sitting in rows before wooden desks.
And now, above the blood-wet battlefields, the spirits of the great heroes of the past, worshipped by generations of the Japanese faithful, were hovering, to test, by their supreme standards of valor and endurance, the gray hosts of new aspirants for immortality. Yuki would feel that they were her judges also.
And the gentle Gods would be near,—Kwannon, Jizo, Amida—standing in great shining nebulæ of faith on the rim of night.
These sweeter visions passed, and the dark monitor in Todd's brain set him the task of fathoming Pierre's deed. The boy had stolen. Contempt swept from the thinker's mind its late compassion. Illness alone might partially excuse it; but in delirium, as in drunkenness, the latent impulse often shows itself. And Pierre, a young French dandy, a thief, expected to make, that night, such a woman as the Princess Haganè utterly his own. Yuki had probably saved his life at the expense of hers. His grateful reward would be to defame her. Then why would Haganè not take her back? Was she unworthy, simply through the act of saving Pierre, or was there a lower reason? No—no—no—the man cried out to himself. Yuki could not be evil. If Haganè believed it of her, he could not have so smiled; he had the look of a high-priest bent upon a beloved penitent. And that Ronsard should have believed,—a man who could speak and understand the Japanese language, who had lived among the people for eleven years! Having faced another blank wall, Todd turned.
He fell now to wondering in what way Yuki would choose to die. The long strain began to tell on him. Morbid thoughts and fancies assailed him. He almost gloated over the anticipation of Pierre's agony when he should be paid his price. But how would Yuki die? Would she be alone, or Haganè with her? Would her hand or his deal the final blow—give Death his first sweet sip of her? The two would be together; yes, it must be so; and the scene, unwitnessed though it was, one of unrivalled heroism, the silent speech of two Gods alone on a cloudy mountain-top. And what was he to say to Gwendolen!