Not she, but Isonna, spoke out:--

"Yes, lord. It was as I said. I am here now, when men might wish her, to see that none approach. There has been no one but you."

"Little Lady Hoshi," said Shijiro Arisuga, to her bruised heart, "there is but one reparation I can make for yesterday. It is to wish you to become my wife--to-day."

"But, lord, beautiful lord," cried the girl, "you did not hear what I said. I spoke too low. I was at your feet--" and now she deliberately raised her agonized face to his that there might be no mistake--"Lord, I am an eta! The accursed, despised caste! To the samurai we are as lepers! No samurai in all the thousands of years of our empire has ever married an eta! None has ever touched one! Lord, you did not hear!"

"I heard. Pray, call me lord no more, but husband."

"Li--li--Pardon me, husband, I have been taught that I am not to expect marriage."

"Who taught you that?"

"Even my father! My mother!"

"G.o.ds! It shall be to-morrow."

"Yi--yes, li--li--husband," chattered Hoshiko.

"And on that day there shall be a new G.o.ddess to be worshipped, and her name shall be called Star-Dream! And the first prayer she shall hear will be from a very brutal soldier to be forgiven for a little start upon hearing a certain untrue word. For no G.o.ddess can be an eta--even if it were possible for a mortal as beautiful as you to be an eta. So, even to-day, see," as he gathered her from the floor strongly into his arms, "you are my G.o.ddess--to-morrow you will be my wife."

"Lord, I have no wedding garments! You know that though a j.a.panese maiden has always ready her garments for death or marriage, an eta maid has only those for death ready. It is presumption to have--the--the others."

"Then there shall be no wedding garment but this," and he touched the dainty thing she wore. "Where are your parents that I may ask their consent?"

Hoshiko did not know. But Arisuga suspected that they were close behind the fusuma listening with staring eyes and gaping mouths.

He suddenly pushed aside the slides--and there they were.

"To-morrow I wed your daughter," he said to them with his soldier's savagery.

He respectfully gave them time for an answer--but he meant them to understand that they dare not refuse. And together, when they had the breath for it, they bowed to the very earth and said:--

"Yea, august lord!"

Arisuga bowed haughtily in return, and closed the slides upon them.

"You see," he said to Hoshiko, "there is nothing but the three times three between us and our earth-heaven, G.o.ddess!"

"Yes, lord," she shivered.

She begged for delay, but he would not grant it, so all that night, while he slept near, she and Isonna in the next room strove to make a trousseau out of her shroud.

THE ETA

XVII

THE ETA

Now, even when Arisuga had spoken of marriage, he had the thought that it would probably not be longer than for his stay in China. At his going there would be a happy understanding that this meant divorce and that she might marry again. For he was bound by his oath to the great death, that she knew; and if this were to be all, it mattered little that Hoshiko was an eta. In China it was not heinous.

Yet even thus early the thought of some one else finding this wild flower when he was gone as he had found it--and, alas! of doing as he was about to do--he did not like that. He did not like his part in it.

It haunted his dreams there in the room next to her and he woke.

She was sobbing. Then he heard her mother:

"Here is the sword," she said, in a voice hard as steel. "Be brave!

First pray!"

"Yes," sobbed Hoshiko.

Arisuga crashed through the paper wall between them like the thunder-G.o.d. Before him was Hoshiko, preparing the sword for its work.

About her, on the floor, was spread the pitiful evidence that she had tried to improvise a trousseau out of her funeral garments. There was a sheer white kimono of silk, the sleeves of which she had lengthened to the wedding size. (Death and marriage are both white in j.a.pan.) She had just laid it down. It was with this--all useless now--that she had wrapped the sword. Above her stood her mother.

"What does this mean?" demanded Arisuga, taking the sword from Hoshiko.

"My mother wishes me to die," sobbed the girl.

"And you?" asked Arisuga, savagely.

"I wish to live. To marry you, lord."

"There are no wedding garments," said the mother.

"Nor any funeral garments now!" said Arisuga, slashing them with the sword.

"You wish my daughter for only a little while--then go!"

"That is my affair. I _take_ her!"

"O Jizo," Hoshiko whispered within herself, "I thank you! Do not let your mercy stop! Perhaps--perhaps--O Benten!"

"You become an eta if you marry her," Hoshiko's mother was saying.

"In j.a.pan," admitted Arisuga. "That is the way the unwise men of old worked to prevent the marriage of etas--and so blot out the caste. But this is China."

And now as the young soldier looked down upon the pitiful little heap at his side, a great shame rose in his soul that he had ever thought of marrying her for a little while, and, quite like Arisuga, he rushed in his penitence from one extreme to the other.

"By all the eight hundred thousand G.o.ds, I will marry her for all my lives!"

No adjuration, no promise, could be greater than that. Some men had sworn fealty to a woman for two lives--some for three or four--and it was said that once a man had sworn to love a great poetess for seven lives; but no one had ever yet, so it was said, sworn his love, much less marriage, for all his lives. Yet even this did not stop the savage mother of Hoshiko, bent upon her daughter's honorable death rather than her dishonorable marriage.