The Honorable Miss Moonlight. Winnifred Eaton
of her bewitching head, was directed at the guest of honor, the son and heir of the house of Saito. For him alone she seemed to dance. To him she threw her joyous smiles, and, in the end, when the dance was done, it was at his feet she knelt, raising her naïvely coy, half-questioning glance. Then, very softly and with gentle solicitation:
“At your sole honorable service, noble lord,” she said. “What is your pleasure next?”
He said, like one awakening from some strange dream or trance:
“It is my pleasure, geisha, that you look into my eyes.”
She glanced up timidly, as if troubled and surprised. A wistfully joyous light came into her dark eyes; then they remained unmovingly fixed upon his. Very softly, that those about them might not hear, he whispered:
“I saw your face dimly in the firefly-light. I was possessed with but one ambition—to look into your eyes!”
Her pretty head drooped so low that now it touched his knee. At the contact he trembled and drew sharply away from her. Alarmed, fearing she had unwittingly offended him, she raised her head and looked at him with a mutely questioning glance. There was a cloud, dark and very melancholy, upon the face of the one she had been ordered to entertain. She thought of the instructions of Matsuda: that it should be her paramount duty to beguile and distract the Lord Saito Gonji. Her fortune for life might be made by succeeding in arousing him to a joyous mood. But, lo! the one she sought to please drew back from her, gloomy, troubled.
Her rapid rise to fame had not brought to the Spider the peculiar joy she had anticipated. Fame carries ever with it its bitter savor, and, although she had not alone become the darling of the celebrated geisha-house, but had brought fame and fortune to her master, many of the things she had most cared for she had been obliged to forego in her new position as star of the House of Slender Pines.
No longer was it possible for her to be shielded by the loving arms of the Okusama. Out into the broadest limelight even the delighted Okusama had pushed her, and this blinding light entailed a thousand duties of which she had only vaguely heard from the patronizing elder geishas. She had ceased to be the cuddled and petted little Moonlight, loved and stroked and tossed about by the geishas, because of her beauty and ingenuous wit. Suddenly she had become the Spider! It was a new and fearful name that terrified her.
Matsuda, proud of her success, and at last completely won over, surrounded her with every luxury. So far he had forced upon the girl none of the odious exactions often demanded of the geishas by their masters, even though the law had defined the exact services to which he was legally entitled.
A thousand lovers a geisha might have, said the unwritten law, but to possess one alone was fatal! She must place a guard of iron before her heart! A geisha must sip at love as the bee culls the honey from the blossom, lingering but a moment over each. The rivers and the many pits of death were filled with the bodies of the hapless ones who had gone outside this law, who had dared to permit the passionate heart to escape beyond the prescribed bounds.
Moonlight, with all the witching arts of the geisha at her finger-tips, with a beauty as rare and mysterious as though she were a princess of some new world, had found it thus far an easy task to follow the rules laid down for her class. Like a fragile flower that must not be touched lest its bloom be soiled, the master of the geisha-house jealously protected his star from all possible contamination. She was held out as a lure to captivate and draw to his house the rich and noble ones; but, like some precious jewel in a casket, she was but to be seen, not touched! Matsuda was determined to save his most precious possession for the highest of bidders. Now his patience had met its due reward. The most illustrious head of the house of the exalted Saito solicited his services!
So, while Matsuda gloated over the rich reward to be reaped surely from his lordly patron, the Spider was looking with frightened eyes into those of the Lord Saito Gonji, and she trembled and turned very pale under his somber glance. All her gay insouciance, her saucy, quick repartee, the teasing, witching little graces for which she now was noted, seemed to have deserted her. It troubled her that she was unable to obey the command of her master and make his most noble patron smile. Within the piercing eyes which sought her own she seemed to read only some tragic question, which, alas, she felt unable to answer.
“I desire to please you, noble sir,” she said, plaintively, and added, with an impulsive motion of her little hands: “Alas! It is my duty!”
For the first time a faint smile quivered across the young man’s lips; but he did not speak. He continued to regard her in that musing fashion, as though he studied every feature of her face and drank in its loveliness with something of resignation and despair.
His curious silence affected her. Was it not possible to arouse the strange one, then, to some animation and interest? Timidly she put out her hand—a mute, charming little gesture—then rested it upon his own. As though her touch had some electric power which stirred him to the depths, he leaned suddenly toward her, inclosing her hand in a close, almost painful grip. Now hungrily, pleadingly, his look enveloped her. His voice trembled with the emotion he sought vainly to control.
“Geisha, if it were possible—if we belonged in another land—if it were not for the customs of the ancestors—I would tell you what is in my heart!”
Like a child, wondering and curious, she answered:
“I pray you, tell me! To keep a troubled secret is like carrying a cup brim full!”
“I will ask you a question,” he said incisively. “Wilt thou be my wife for all the lives yet to come?”
As he spoke the forbidden words the Spider turned very pale. She sought to withdraw her trembling hands from his, but he held to them with a passionate tenacity. She could not speak. She could but look at him mutely, piteously; and her lovely, pleading gaze but added to the man’s distraction.
“Answer me!” he entreated. “Make me the promise, beautiful little mousmé!”
His vehemence and passion frightened her. She tried to avert her face, to turn it aside from his burning gaze; but he brought his own insistently close to hers. She could not escape his impelling eyes. At last, her bosom heaving up and down like a little troubled sea, she stammered:
“You speak so strangely, noble sir. I—I—am but—a geisha of the House of Slender Pines. Thou art as far above my sphere as—as—are the honorable stars in the heavens.”
Her voice had a quality of exquisite terror, as though she sought vainly to thrust aside some hypnotic force to which she yearned to yield. It aroused but the ardor of her lover.
“It is not possible,” he murmured, “for one to be above thee, little geisha. Thou art lovelier than all the visions of the esteemed Sun Lady herself. I am thy lover for all time. I desire to possess thee utterly in all the lives yet to come. Make me the promise, beautiful mousmé, that thou wilt travel with me—that thou wilt be mine, mine only!”
She drew back as far from him as it was possible, with her hands jealously held by his own. Her wide, frightened eyes were fixed in terror upon his.
“I cannot speak the words!” she gasped. “I dare not speak them, august one!”
For a moment his face, which had been lighted by excitement and passion, darkened.
“You cannot then return my love?”
“Ah! They are not words for a geisha to speak. It is not for such as I to make the long journey with one so illustrious as thou!”
A sob broke from her, and because she could no longer bear to meet his burning gaze she hid her face with the motion of a child against their clasped hands.
For a long moment there was silence between them. Louder, noisier, rose the mirth of the revelers about them. A dozen geishas pulled at the three-stringed instruments. As many more swayed and moved in the figures of the classical dance. Like great, gaudy butterflies, their bright wings fluttering behind them, the moving figures of the tea-maidens passed before them. Almost it seemed as if they two had been purposely set apart and forgotten. No one approached