It is nearly a month since our night of pleasure at the temple fÊte of the thousands of lanterns, and I have been in terrible trouble.

Something has happened to MousmÉ, and till that catastrophe—to me it seemed nothing less—I never realized what she was to me.

It was so sudden.

I had left her in the morning, bright as the sunshine which forced its way through the bamboo and paper shoji, and, filtering thus, fell in golden, thread-like rays like spun silk upon the floor. The last I saw of her was a tiny figure upon the balcony as I turned the corner of the road, blowing kisses to me with one hand, and waving a huge bunch of crimson lotus in the other, flowers we had just gathered together in the sun-bathed garden.

And in three or four hours all this was altered, obliterated.

I climbed up from the town leisurely, taking the shady side of the road, and availing myself to the full of every shadow cast by the trees or by the queer old villas with their mossy roofs and eccentric architecture. If I had but known, how my steps would have hastened!

Arrived at the wicket, I cannot see even a flutter of MousmÉ’s dress to-day. She is usually awaiting my return in the shady corner of the verandah with her samisen, or with a pile of books at her side, from which she has been trying to spell out the words in big print.

I walk up the path, which is flower-bordered, and alive with bees whose humming sounds are like the deeper notes of an Æolian harp, and across the garden where dragon-flies flit, iridescent shuttles weaving their colours, blue, green and yellow, into the sunlit air, darting between the little ponds in which gold-fish hide from the sunlight beneath the tranquil floating lotus-leaves.

I enter the house. Everything is strangely still.

There is no one in the room in which we usually sit. The blue-and-white vases of Arita porcelain are filled with lotus-blooms, dainty, fantastic in their arrangement, with spiked grasses and sedges. A tiny vase of bronze stands upon my writing-table. As usual, dear little MousmÉ has placed in it the finest blossoms, and in their rose-hued cups I fancy some of her kisses may lurk. Her shoes are standing in a patch of sunlight on the floor. “She cannot have gone out, then,” I say to myself. “It is evident that she is not down at mother-in-law’s.”

Where is she?

I push back one of the panels to enter the next room. Perhaps she is there.

The room is so dark that I can scarcely see across it; but in the dimness I can just discern a something stretched upon the floor.

I step hastily forward.

Yes, it is MousmÉ lying there, with her face, upturned, looking a white, featureless oval in the gloom, her gown elongating her slender figure, and her huge sleeves of blue flowered silk with orange linings spread out like the maimed wings of a brilliant, long-bodied moth.

I stoop down.

Is she asleep? No, but she is terribly still. Is it a coquettish ruse on her part, and will she open her eyes in a minute or two, and burst out laughing in my face, and then pull it down for a shower of kisses from her rosebud mouth?

Half expecting this, I wait an instant, and feel as if I were kneeling beside my own grave. But the fantastic little figure I love so well gives no sign of movement. My alarm increases. I get up, hastily push back one of the sliding paper panels, and let in a flood of sunlight from the garden.

It streams full on MousmÉ’s face; it searches out the gold threads in the embroidery of her gown; it tells me in an instant that there is something seriously wrong.

There are no bells in this strange little house of mine, so I beat upon the floor with my heel to summon Oka or his wife.

I wait anxiously, kneeling beside silent little MousmÉ. Each second seems to extend itself into an hour. How long it seems—that minute or two ere I can hear some one ascending the rickety stairs from the basement. It is Oka’s wife who enters, her eyes still but half unfastened from an interrupted siesta.

She comes forward to where I am kneeling beside MousmÉ.

Unlike women of her class in England, Oka’s wife is laconic.

“Fever,” she says, on catching sight of MousmÉ’s face. “Send for the doctor very quick!” She is evidently waiting for me to give my assent to her suggestion, so I nod my head, and she goes away softly across the room.

A few minutes later I hear one of her numerous progeny go away down the path at a run, and I know the doctor has been sent for.

MousmÉ remains unconscious all the time that we are getting her partially undressed and on to the mattress.

Am I to lose her?

The bare thought drives the blood away from my heart. I know what Kotmasu would say, for he still disbelieves, or at least pretends to disbelieve, in my marriage.

“There are velly plenty more mousmÉs.”

“Yes, very well,” something inside my mind replies, “but only one MousmÉ.”

Whilst we wait the coming of Han Sen, the doctor, I am driven almost frantic by the noises which one can never shut out of a Japanese house. The droning hum of the bees at work on the roses outside, the unceasing chirruping whirr of the cicalas, all the sounds of a garden in summer-time, are magnified tenfold because I fear that MousmÉ will be disturbed.

She uncloses her eyes once when the doctor’s steps are heard coming up the garden-path. But she says nothing, and only takes my large brown hand in her small one.

I have not much faith in the doctor. His phials are so finikin and toy-like, and I have heard something, too, about their drugs, and my memory of their fantastic and extraordinary nature does not tend to reassure me.

He is a little, oldish man with gimlet eyes in a face full of wrinkles, which seem to serve no other purpose than to disguise his emotions if he has any. He treads softly across the matting floor, with Oka’s wife hovering, anxious-faced, in the rear.

“Madame the most honourable lady has been unwell some time?” he inquires in a high-pitched key, with an insinuating inflection on the first word, which many people annoy me with when referring to MousmÉ.

“No.”

“No!” and his eyebrows depart upward from overhanging his narrow, beady black eyes.

“Her illness dates but from an hour or two ago.”

“Ah, then she will get better, most honourable English Mister,” is the reply. And then, whilst I am explaining matters, the doctor’s yellow fingers, with their wrinkled, dried-parchment skin, are busy compounding something which smells abominably, and in the efficacy of which I feel I have no faith, notwithstanding his reiterated assurance that “the most honourable madame” will speedily recover.

When he has finished mixing the medicine in the little jar-like cup Oka’s wife has brought him, he examines his patient very carefully with a pair of spectacles thrust up on his forehead, holding MousmÉ’s hand and counting the pulse-beats, lifting her eyelids and staring into her unseeing eyes, talking all the while in the high-pitched, squeaky tone which reminds me of the old man who sits at the corner of Nisson Street and writes the illiterate mousmÉs’ love-letters, putting in all sorts of dreadful things in response to the usual, “You know what to say,” of his unimaginative clients.

When Dr. Han Sen has finished the examination, and has listened with a stethoscope of native manufacture to the beating of MousmÉ’s heart, to the bird-like fluttering of which I am so used in the wakeful stillness of the night, he rises to go.

Shall he come to see the most honourable lady to-morrow?

A vague idea formulates itself as I look into his unintelligent, vacuous face.

“No, I will send if I want your services,” I hastily explain.

“No?” There is a look of almost professional regret on the wizened face. Do I know my most honourable madame is ill, very ill?

“Yes! I know. I will send if I require the most honourable Dr. Han Sen.”

Then he goes out down the path, no doubt mystified at my eccentric conduct.

What a fool I was not to have thought of this before!

As soon as Dr. Han Sen has had time to get clear of the garden, I hasten off down into Nagasaki, leaving MousmÉ, who is evidently sleeping now, in charge of Oka’s wife.

I am going to get the European doctor of the mail-boat to come and see her.

“Why did not I think of this before?” I ask myself as I hasten over the roughly paved roadway down the hillside towards the harbour. Ah! why, indeed, not?

MousmÉ was very ill, and at one time I watched beside her day and night, fearing every hour, nay, almost every moment, lest the frail thread of life should be snapped, and the sun of my happiness go down with that of her life.

My friend M’Phail, the cheery doctor of the mail-boat, was most untiring in his attendance; and at last I think professional interest in the case was replaced by a deep and friendly one. Oka’s wife, who has seen so many cases of fever, and so many lives allowed to slip through the native practitioners’ fingers, is unceasing in her praises of the ship’s doctor, whose skill and resourcefulness seem to her simple mind nothing short of miraculous. Indeed, she almost forgets to give the family god, before whose impassive figure a light has been kept burning night and day during her mistress’s illness, any credit for MousmÉ’s wonderful recovery.

However, when she remembers it, she in penitence places additional offerings of fruit and flowers on the little shelf on which the image stands, and when I go down to give some order to Oka, I see her prostrated, in the comparative gloom of their basement bed-chamber, pouring out her supplications, whilst the scent of burnt incense pervades the house more than ever.

When she hears me she comes out, half fearing lest I should treat her orisons with ridicule.

“Him hear,” she says, pointing and nodding in the direction where the idol sits solemnly, in a halo of yellow light from the little earthen-ware lamp. “Missus”—she has mastered the word, and uses it with infinite care—“velly much better.”

“Yes,” I reply.

And who knows, Oka’s wife, perhaps your prayers offered in good faith have reached ears that are not deaf, and have brought an answer from “the God of the English sir,” I say to myself.

CHAPTER NINE