M'GOURLEY'S LOVE AFFAIR

Following Pine-breeze, who went before her like a fantastically colored glowworm, Campanula ascended to the house.

As she stepped onto the veranda she heard the voice of M'Gourley San addressing Lotus-bed, and asking when she thought Leslie San would be back. Mac's elastic-side boots were in the veranda, and his gamp was propped against the wall.

He was sitting on the floor smoking a pipe and reading the Japan Mail through a pair of spectacles when Campanula entered.

Mac often came up of nights like this. He was a vivid Radical, and Leslie was a hide-bound Conservative, so they had a splendid time together when they got on politics; or they would play chess, or Mr. Initogo would drop in and they would have a rubber of dummy whist.

But what Mac really came for, though he scarcely knew it himself, was Campanula.

Campanula was a lot to Mac; much more than one can express in prose, and M'Gourley is scarcely the figure to make a ballad of. Yet the poem was there round about him, unsung, unuttered, unguessed by any one, least of all by himself.

When he had made chickens out of orange-pips for her at Nikko, she just as cunningly had made him her slave.

She had taken this dull, hard-grained, and shady old business man into a byway, of life, and made him spin tops and fly kites. She had made him admire flowers and listen to fairy tales, and all as naturally and as peacefully as though these things had been matters of everyday occurrence with him the whole long length of his arid life.

"Einst, O wunder!"—that ballad might have been inspired by Mac—had the writer ever met him in business or seen him in the flesh.

"Hech!" said Mac. "There you are; and where have you been trapsing to this hour of the evening?"

Campanula explained that Leslie had met friends, and that he had gone to dine with them at the hotel.

"Wonder who they can be?" soliloquized Mac, as Campanula clapped her little hands together for Pine-breeze to bring refreshments. "Some people he has picked up at the hotel, maybe."

They sat opposite to each other on the matting, this strangely assorted pair. A panel in the front was open, for the night was warm, and the lamplight fell on the veranda and the garden path beyond.

And they ate salted plums and crystallized prawns, soup with seaweed in it, and rice with fish sauce, whilst the perfume of the cherry blossoms stole in from the night outside, and the twang of a chamÈcen came from somewhere in the mysterious depths of the house.

It was Lotus-bud relieving her soul with music, mournful as the sound of the wind blowing over the wet fields of millet in the rainy weather.

The things having been removed, Campanula brought forth a chess-board, which she laid on the matting before Mac.

He had taught her chess, and had found her an apt pupil, a veritable Zukertort, a female Nogi, who attacked his positions with her ivory army, stormed his fortifications, and put him to rout when she chose.

Yet he often won. She would make amazing blunders just in time to save him from defeat, and Mac would chuckle and say—

"There you are, there you are—thrown a pawn away that might have given you back your queen in two more moves. Never mind, you're getting on; I'll noat say ye aren't im—" long pause—"proving. Check—and how's that for mate?"

Then Campanula would throw her hands up in assumed horror at her own stupidity, and Mac would chuckle over his own supposed cleverness, and all would be harmony and peace.

To-night, however, Campanula's mind was somewhat astray, and the chess-player who lived in her brain took advantage of the fact, and beat Mac thoroughly in the course of a dozen moves.

"I'm getting auld," said Mac testily. "Here, put the things away. Na, na, I'll play no more the night."

He lit his pipe at the tobacco-mono and moodily smoked it. He could not bear being beaten at chess, and now he looked as if he would be sour for the whole evening.

She reached for a long-necked chamÈcen that lay near her on the matting, and tuned it, striking a few somber notes.

"Ay, sing us something," said Mac, and as the night wind sighed and the cherry blossoms filled the room with their faint, faint fragrance, Campanula, her eyes fixed across illimitable distance, sang in a voice like the ripple of a mountain brook, a song telling of the Miakodori, and the sunlit slopes of Maruyama, where the great old Gion cherry tree blooms at the foot of Yaamis lane. And then an old love-song strayed in from the night and was caught by the strings of the chamÈcen and made articulate by her voice.

It told the fate of a maiden named Pine-bough, who lived by the sea at Hamada where the foam and the sand are as snow.

She loved a noble, this maiden named Pine-bough—you can guess the rest. Mac listened, soothed; it was the case of David and Saul over again—a very inferior sort of Saul, it is true.

"Now," said the Charmed One as the rafters absorbed the last echoes of the fate of Pine-bough, "tell us a story."

Campanula, with the chamÈcen lying across her lap, knitted her brows in thought. She was evidently pursuing strange beasts across the fields of Fancy, and undetermined as to which she would mark down and serve up to her guest. Then she solved the matter by suddenly clearing her brow and telling a tale without any beasts in it at all.

"There is a garden," declared Campanula, "where every one may enter; the Mikado himself goes there, and the riksha man, the MousmÈ and the Mousko, Bo Chan, and Kiku San. Even Campanula herself, lowly as she is, may enter there. And there the Mousko pulls the beard of the Emperor unafraid, and the riksha man forgets his riksha and drinks tea at the tea houses, where no money is paid and no money is asked for."

"What's this garden you're telling me of?" demanded Mac, his business instincts and common sense in arms at the latter statement.

"It is the garden of sleep," answered Campanula cunningly. She had been waiting for the question and now she paused, gently plucking a string of the chamÈcen, filling the air with a faint throbbing sound as if to summon around her the tale-bearers of the night.

"Here in the garden of sleep," pursued the dreamy voice, as the vibrations died away, "every tree bears a lighted lantern swinging in the wind and painting the grass beneath with its color—red lanterns painted with storks, and blue lanterns pictured with the blossoms of the cherry; lanterns on which dragons fly pursuing each other, and lanterns disported upon by my lord the Bat.

"A wanderer in the garden has but to pluck a lantern from a tree, and his dreams will at once turn in a happy direction, and by the light of the lantern he will see before him the object of his desire, be it what it may."

"I'll remember that," said Mac grimly, "next time I find myself there."

"One has no memory there," said Campanula, "and few people know of the secret of that place, else every one would be happy in their dreams.

"One night entered the garden Taro San, a child no higher than one's knee. He was the son of a tea-house keeper, and he had plucked a glowworm from a bush, by which feeble light he was lighting himself through the darkness of the garden.

"All at once he found himself beneath a tree, from the lowest branch of which swung a huge lantern of wistaria-blue.

"It was the lantern of Spring, and the painted butterflies upon it, by some magic, moved their wings in flight, yet remained always in the same place, and the painted cherry-blossoms upon it waved in some magic wind, yet never faded or lost a petal, and the bird upon it pursuing the dragon fly was always gaining upon the dragon fly, yet the dragon fly, oh mystery! always outstripped the bird."

Campanula paused in thought, and a faintly plucked string of the chamÈcen filled the air with the hum of the dragon fly's wings as it flew by reed and iris, by mere and pond, by the unblown lotus and the blue of the river in the country of eternal spring.

"O Taro San," continued the story-teller, "gazing up and beholding this fair thing, strove to reach it, and failing, he began to weep.

"Now, there was passing by at that moment the Daimiyo of his province, and the great lord walked with his gaze fixed upon the ground overcome as he was by the reverie of sleep; but hearing the sound of Taro San weeping, he paused and asked the child what ailed him, and hearing the trouble, he lifted him upon his shoulder; and Taro San grasped the lantern and waved it in the air and laughed, for its light showed him a pleasant path beset with roses and leading to a sea, blue as the sea of Harima, and in the path stood a little girl plucking the amber and crimson flowers.

"Taro cried out to the Daimiyo to take him to the little girl, but the Daimiyo did not heed, for to him the lantern had shown Osaka Castle stormed by knights in armor, and the spears of the Samurai all bent towards its walls under a roof of flying arrows. Towards this sight he ran, and Taro dropping the lantern, it went out, and the Daimiyo awoke in his palace and Taro awoke in the tea house upon the futon, where he slept beside his father.

"Another night stood Taro beneath the lantern which hung beyond his reach, but a beggar man who chanced to pass lifting him upon his shoulder, the child seized the lantern and waved it in the air, and instantly before him appeared the flower-set path and the form of the MousmÈ, more beautiful now and attired in a kimono of palest amber embroidered with silver bats.

"But the beggar man saw nothing but a purse of silver lying before him on the ground, and, stooping to pick it up, Taro fell from his shoulder, the lantern went out, and the beggar man awoke by the roadside where he had fallen asleep, and Taro on the futon beside his father.

"Many times did Taro stand beneath the lantern of spring and many people raised him towards it, but never one of them saw what Taro saw, all their dreams being of things other than flowers and the time of spring.

"One night," resumed Campanula after a pause, "Taro entered the garden, and beneath the lantern there stood a child, and the child implored him to lift him upon his shoulder, and being there the child seized the lantern and laughed aloud with pleasure at the vision of the roses, and the MousmÈ, and the sea. But Taro saw nothing of this. He only saw a tea house where customers were waiting to be served, for Taro," said Campanula, "Had now grown up, and was a man."

She finished her little tale with three mournful notes drawn from the bass string of the chamÈcen.

"Humph!" said Mac.

He tapped the ashes out of his pipe into the little receptacle of the tobacco-mono, refilled it, and lit it with a glowing ember.

Whilst he was thus engaged, Campanula rose and went to the open panel space leading on to the veranda. He heard her addressing some one in her low, sweet voice, then there was a pause, then she spoke again as if in answer to some remark, then she returned.

"Blind man," said Campanula, putting the chamÈcen away.

"I heard nobody," said Mac, looking up as he finished lighting his pipe. "What did you say? Blind man? Was it he you were speaking to?"

"Yes; he said he had come from a great way, and he looked oh, so ugly and tired! He has gone to the back entrance, and they will give him food."

"It's these blessed paper houses," said Mac.

"They either swallow a sound or magnify it, so's you can't hear yourself speak if a man sneezes in the next room."

He smoked for a while, and then rose to go.

"There!" said Campanula, as she too rose. "He's gone away again down the path towards the gate."

"I'll just follow him," said Mac, "and see what he's like."

He bade Campanula good night and departed.

The gate was closed, and there was no one on the garden path; no one on the hill path either, he found as he descended it slowly, peering through the gloom before him.

"It's dom queer!" muttered Mac to himself as he reached the street. "I'd have staked my life she was talking to herself."

He felt vaguely uneasy, and thought of returning. Then he decided not. The path looked gloomy and mysterious viewed from down below, and its descent without meeting any one had already given him a slight attack of the "creeps."