 | Daughter of Two Lands |  |
VI.
Boys were selling newspapers in the streets, sheets no larger than a piece of American note paper. The Countess Sano, driving abroad in her lacquer jinrikisha[5], stopped her carriage boy to buy such a paper. As she looked at it, she turned pale and crushed the sheet viciously in her hand.
“Let me see it,” commanded her father, who was with her, and, as she released the crumpled paper to him, he laughed at the hideous picture upon it—a caricature of the American President.
“Well,” inquired the Count, good-humoredly, “what do you think of this work of art?”
“It is vile!” she declared in a strangled voice.
Several days later, at her father's house, she heard the arrival of the Japanese men of power to whom she was to reveal her secret. Now, in the guest room, ceremoniously welcomed by her father, they were waiting for her—Sakura. How much did they know? she asked her beating heart. What had her father told them? And then she experienced an uplifting sense of strange relief in the knowledge that he could have told no more than he knew. Always she had put off the day of revelation, saying that it would be time enough when the information should be actually needed. Now!
The sudden sliding of a door startled her. Only a maid, prying. “Okusama[6]'s honorable service? What could the humble one do to oblige her excellency?
To the great, empty chamber again, to pace back and forth, back and forth. Not a single article of furniture was there in the room, just that clear, clean expanse of exquisitely matted floor and paneled sliding walls; as, in the homes of the rich and cultured Japanese, works of art in themselves. Once she had thought ardently of possessing such a home again; now the thought filled her with a sense of desolation. There came to her mind vividly, as though she still were in it, a picture of that room of hers in far-away America—America which she was never again to see!
A fit of shivering seized her. She looked about her wildly, as if desperately in search of something.
“Betray America!—her dear dead mother's home!”
She crouched down by the great trunk which had come across the seas with her from that far-off land. It was the only article in the room not purely Japanese. Her hands trembling, she unlocked the trunk and opened it. Then she searched for the papers and plans they were waiting for below in the ozashiki[7]. How they creaked under her touch— these crackling, treacherous papers! She glanced backward, across her shoulder, furtively, fearfully, like a thief about to steal; and as she looked, the Frenchwoman who loved and served her, pushed the sliding doors softly open, and she saw Anthony Burrows standing there, looking gravely down at her.
So white was her face, her expression so agonized and tragic that for a moment he stared at her in amazement. Then he crossed swiftly to her.
She began to plead with him wildly, her little hands clasped frantically about the papers.
“Oh—if you truly love me—you will understand and forgive me. I cannot do it—I cannot do it! D-don't you see why? I— I—am as much—I belong to you! It is here I am an alien—”
She was wrenching the papers apart, tearing them into tiny pieces.
When she had finished, she looked up at him, mutely regarding her. Then, while below the men of power still waited, she fluttered into his sheltering arms, like one broken and exhausted.
| Daughter of Two Lands | |