There it is! They have it! The cursed dogs! They have touched it!

Defiled it! Come with me--Kondo--Musima--Tani--Ichimon--now! At them!"

And she knew that he had retaken the flag and was bringing it gloriously back; each act was faithfully fought.

But then he missed it. He looked in his hands.

"Do you see my flag?"

"Yes," she cajoled, "it is here."

But she did not convince him, and he slept under his opium unhappily.

He thought sometimes that the enemy had again taken it.

When he awoke next morning, still unhappy and in doubt (he had not forgotten it), the flag was in his hand. There was not one in America for the little wife. But that night she made one. He shouted with sudden strength as he gripped it and kept it in his hands until they could feel no more. And then with it lashed to the foot of his bed he lived the little remnant of his life in its glory, and in sight of its crimson and white went out--mad with the supremest ecstasy a j.a.panese can know--out in the great red death to another reincarnation, at what, for the fourth time, he must have thought the happiest moment of his life.

And then--shall I tell it?--his call came.

And a letter from Zanzi, now a general commanding a brigade. Almost as one would write of love, he wrote.

"Come back, eta," it said joyously; "we need you now. You shall not go to the Hakodate men. Every one of us clamors for you at the colors.

Come! It is war. Your doctrine prevails. There are now neither samurai nor eta, but only sons of the emperor. Come! We are going to a glorious victory. Take your share. Your penance is complete. Your exile is finished. Come, the emperor himself calls his sons to die for him! Come!

The flag waits. Come!

"ZANZI."

"PRESENT FOR DUTY"

XXVIII

"PRESENT FOR DUTY"

OF Hoshiko I do not speak--I have not spoken--in these last days. I cannot. I am near her heart as I write. She for whom everything had been had nothing--was eternally to have nothing. Yet it remained for her now to make all that be which would have been--but for her. The way of the G.o.ds was quite plain.

There was no oath to this effect, no tragic undertaking before the mysterious G.o.ds. It became simply her life. Nothing else was possible with the existences which remained but to make all true which ought to be true--which would have been true--but for her happiness. She had had that, and now was to come the recompense which the G.o.ds always demanded.

And the plan of it had not consciously grown; it had been there--inside--always. Save that when she knew he was to die the small white death, all the details formulated themselves in her mind there at his side, fixed, she had no doubt, by the G.o.ds.

We know now that the war was fought to its end in the council chambers in Tokyo long before that torpedo sank the "Tsarevitch." This is the curious fashion of the Eastern mind: to see the end before the beginning. So now all that was to follow formed itself in the mind of Hoshiko as if it were already done and she saw it not from the beginning but from the end. The means to make it be would have puzzled us. They puzzled her not at all. She knew that suffering lay there; but no suffering could matter if the end was achieved and that was safe.

In due time General Zanzi received a cable, saying:--

"Keep colors. Coming.

"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

Then Hoshiko went to the house of Moncure Jones for the second time. The place of horror to her. That day she dressed once more in her best kimono,--she had always kept the white one,--and put the new kanzashi again in her hair, (which you will remember Arisuga bought for her the day after she had knocked on his shoji,) and painted her face and eyes to hide their hollowness, and put upon her dainty little body the last of the "flower perfume"--which every j.a.panese girl saves from her marriage for her burial so that she may appear fittingly as a bride indeed before the G.o.ds above. In this matter Jones must be propitiated--made sure. She did not forget their last parting. So she went to him arrayed and adorned as she had once meant to go before the G.o.ds.

And she remembered again, and was repeating their last adjuration to fealty as she stepped upon the sill of Jones's door, those forty-seven ronins whose wives lent themselves to harlotry that their husbands might the better achieve their cause. Are they not upon bra.s.s to-day, though a thousand years have pa.s.sed? Are their wives not properly forgotten?

So when she had come to Jones's house she smiled and was very gay, like a woman of joy, as she had often read had been the way of the wives of the forty-seven, and said:--

"You wish me?"

"Wish you!" cried the delighted Jones. "I have never wished for anything so much in all my life. I have never missed any one so much. It was beastly of you to go away in that fashion. I haven't married yet."

Hoshiko was very impatient inside, but outside she smiled.

"You wish me?" she repeated.

"Yes! But that beastly husband of yours, with his knives--"

"He--is--dead," said the little woman, forcing each word out of her heart with agony, laughing shrilly at the end like a creature of pleasure.

"Ha, ha!" laughed Jones.

"Ha, ha, ha," echoed Hoshiko.

"You're as glad as I am!"

"Yes," smiled Hoshiko.

"Sure he's dead?"

"By your large G.o.d!" swore the laughing wife.

"Oh! I understand. And believe you, too! All right, my little j.a.panese doll," cried the delighted Jones. "Here's money."

What followed I may not tell: save that Hoshiko made a cold bargain--Jones calls it his j.a.panese marriage to this day,--whereby she got a great deal of money in a short time.

The next day Zanzi got this cable:--

"Keep colors. Starting.

"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

Presently (it seemed years, but it was only a little while) the time was come, and Hoshiko cut her hair, rubbed her face each morning with a rough brush, put on Arisuga's uniform, pinned his medal over her heart, and sent her last cable:--

"Keep colors. Aboard.

"SHIJIRO ARISUGA."

And so it was that the morning the Imperial Guards started for the Yalu, Shijiro Arisuga, though dead in America, answered to his name at Sendai.