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Page 40
* * * * *
Often and often, in his solitary walks, It[=o] revisited the village
at Kotobikiyama, vaguely hoping to obtain another glimpse of the past.
But never again, by night or by day, was he able to find the rustic
gate in the shadowed lane; never again could he perceive the figure of
the little _miya-dzukai_, walking alone in the sunset-glow.
The village people, whom he questioned carefully, thought him
bewitched. No person of rank, they said, had ever dwelt in the
settlement; and there had never been, in the neighborhood, any such
garden as he described. But there had once been a great Buddhist
temple near the place of which he spoke; and some gravestones of the
temple-cemetery were still to be seen. It[=o] discovered the monuments
in the middle of a dense thicket. They were of an ancient Chinese
form, and were covered with moss and lichens. The characters that had
been cut upon them could no longer be deciphered.
* * * * *
Of his adventure It[=o] spoke to no one. But friends and kindred soon
perceived a great change in his appearance and manner. Day by day he
seemed to become more pale and thin, though physicians declared that
he had no bodily ailment; he looked like a ghost, and moved like
a shadow. Thoughtful and solitary he had always been, but now he
appeared indifferent to everything which had formerly given him
pleasure,--even to those literary studies by means of which he
might have hoped to win distinction. To his mother--who thought that
marriage might quicken his former ambition, and revive his interest in
life--he said that he had made a vow to marry no living woman. And the
months dragged by.
At last came the Year of the Boar, and the season of autumn; but I to
could no longer take the solitary walks that he loved. He could not
even rise from his bed. His life was ebbing, though none could divine
the cause; and he slept so deeply and so long that his sleep was often
mistaken for death.
Out of such a sleep he was startled, one bright evening, by the voice
of a child; and he saw at his bedside the little _miya-dsukai_ who had
guided him, ten years before, to the gate of the vanished garden. She
saluted him, and smiled, and said: "I am bidden to tell you that you
will be received to-night at �hara, near Ky[=o]to, where the new home
is, and that a _kago_ has been sent for you." Then she disappeared.
It[=o] knew that he was being summoned away from the light of the sun;
but the message so rejoiced him that he found strength to sit up and
call his mother. To her he then for the first time related the story
of his bridal, and he showed her the ink-stone which had been given
him. He asked that it should be placed in his coffin,--and then he
died.
* * * * *
The ink-stone was buried with him. But before the funeral ceremonies
it was examined by experts, who said that it had been made in the
period of _J[=o]-an_(1169 A.D.), and that it bore the seal-mark of an
artist who had lived in the time of the Emperor Takakura.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
It was a perfect West Indian day. My friend the notary and I were
crossing the island by a wonderful road which wound up through tropic
forest to the clouds, and thence looped down again, through gold-green
slopes of cane, and scenery amazing of violet and blue and ghost-gray
peaks, to the roaring coast of the trade winds. All the morning we had
been ascending,--walking after our carriage, most of the time, for the
sake of the brave little mule;--and the sea had been climbing behind
us till it looked like a monstrous wall of blue, pansy-blue, under the
ever heightening horizon. The heat was like the heat of a vapor-bath,
but the air was good to breathe with its tropical odor,--an odor made
up of smells of strange saps, queer spicy scents of mould, exhalations
of aromatic decay. Moreover, the views were glimpses of Paradise; and
it was a joy to watch the torrents roaring down their gorges under
shadows of tree-fern and bamboo.
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