Taken quite off their guard, the young pair helplessly looked at one another, as they felt cold shudders run down their backs. Seiji, however, framed himself in an air of so knowing assurance and worked himself up into voluble exuberance, for the reason he seemed to know the best.
“A man who means to love must never be so weak-kneed. Might as well come out with the whole thing, and why not? You shouldn’t keep such a thing in your young hearts and suffer. It would be a far sight better—a shortcut, too, if I were to take the whole thing up with the master and reason him into allowing you both to marry. No flattery, but Shin-don ought to be a good enough man, what of his handsomeness, clean mind, and cleverness. I should be surprised if our master wouldn’t agree to it.”
“If that were possible, we should ask him ourselves, without giving you the trouble.”
The young Shinsuké was inveigled, in spite of himself, into giving a full account of the situation they were in. Tsuya was the sole heiress of the family, and he was the only child his old parents had; each was bound to remain in his or her own family. However much they might think, there was no way in which to make their marriage possible.8
“I would kill myself, if we couldn’t be together!”
Tsuya broke down on this, after she had followed the rueful account of her beloved one; she sobbed as one no longer able to fight down her rising emotion.
“Calm yourself, young lady, calm yourself,” consoled the boatman. “Now, I know what I could do. Listen to me. You will run away from here and come to my place. It will be just a way to get round the trouble, and I know what I talk about. You can leave the rest to me. I will see the old folks of both sides, and, depend on it, I shall reason it out with them and get them to agree to it!”
In fact, the young lovers had talked of eloping earlier in the very same evening. Seiji’s suggestion came to prompt Tsuya in her ready decision, right then and there. Shinsuké, however, had not been able to see his way quite so clear in his decision to this day, and even to this moment.
“Do you mean to back out, now?”
As she spoke, she clasped the wrists of the man who still lingered in a pensive attitude, his hands folded and his head drooped low. With her form bent over, like a bamboo bough under a heavy weight, she leaned herself against him. She fidgeted, fretted, and shook him, threatening with “I’ll kill myself, if you don’t come.”
“I give way! I can’t be firm! And let things take care of themselves, for I go with you, as you say.”
Shinsuké quickly went back to the shop, and pulled his own wicker box out of the deep recess of the closet. He took out of it a heavy cotton dress and changed it for the one he had on. It was a gift out of his father’s old wardrobe and the only piece of clothing that had not been given him during these years of service. He felt he could not go off in any of these clothes without his thanks to his master. Then, going to the case at the side entrance, he noiselessly picked out Tsuya’s lacquered pair of rain-clogs which he hugged tightly under his arm, as if he treasured them, in retracing his way to the verandah.
The sight of the girl at a pause there. He was almost aghast to think that she meant to go out in this bitterly cold weather in such attire; her hair bared to be seen in its freshly made coiffure, silk checker dress of bright gold and black, heavy sash of brocaded satin girt just below the breast—and nothing to cover her feet.9 She who had always shown, with a woman’s instinct, a partiality for the piquant manner of the geisha, would assert her taste even before such a venture.
“Come, here is our way,” said Shinsuké, as he dropped into the garden, by pushing the doors open two or three feet at the end of the verandah. The snow which had been going on without stir or noise, had already lain to a depth of a few inches. Wattle-fence, shrub-beds, and the wainscoted walls round the verandah corner were all covered with an alabaster mantle. He felt for the feet of the girl who sat over the edge of the verandah. In the faintest half-light of the snow, he managed to place the soft, but icy, soles of her feet over the bottom of clogs. And it was with tremulous hearts that they measured each step that made a slish-slash as it sank into the snow. At last, they made their way as far as the little gate in the backside wall. Through this and crossing a line of boardwalk over a sewer passage, cautious of any noise, they stole out into the open street.
The
