Page:Four Japanese Tales.pdf/50

 rove over the quiet idyl of the temple’s ruins. He was somewhat out of breath like one who is relating things that lie too close to his heart; and when after a few moments he resumed his story, he did so with, an involuntary, profound sigh, seemingly relative to Masushige’s short happiness.

For that night O-Take disappeared from the Temple of the Winds. Not until the following day did her lover learn of it, and thinking in his first excitement that O-Take had been driven to suicide by qualms of conscience, he himself contemplated committing seppuku or harakiri, as became a samurai. Already the third day, however, it became known in the neighborhood that O-Take had run away with a young nobleman of a rich family, living in Kyoto; it transpired that she had made careful preparations for this flight, which had been agreed upon for that very night; and there were many conjectures as to the fate of both lovers, who in such an unprecendentedunprecedentedy [sic] manner had broken the customs of the country. Nobody had the least inkling that the renowned temple dancer had broken them for the first time already on the afternoon before her flight; and still less did they suspect that it was in Masushige’s embrace that O-Take for the first time scorned the grace of the Gods for the love of a man And because O-Take had been the pride of the country around and had contributed materially to the prosperity of her village, the anger of the people and their bitterest condemnation turned against the seducer of the beautiful, not against O-Take herself, in whom both the priests and the people were willing to see the poor blinded victim of a wile.

»In this light even the ballad which we heard on our way here treats the matter,« remarked the engineer, lowering his voice, as if putting this digression into parenthesis. »As an innocent victim.«

I looked at him amazed. »And the ballad does not know of Masushige?« escaped me.

»Only of his vain love, of the virtue of O-Take, and of how he mourned because of her fall «

I was on the point of asking how it was then that he had learned of the one love-meeting of O-Take with her Masushige, but at once I changed my mind. I would have been very foolish to shatter the outlines of the story; if there were some mystery here, either it would explain itself or in time I would figure out its solution. Certainly there was nothing to be gained through inquisitiveness or impatience. I did not insist on his explaining the gaps in the ballad, and he went on with his tale.

What followed, the old song did not neglect to record with due