The house on the drive had a butler, a great man whom Sanétomo detested and feared, to attend to such things. Sanétomo was no longer a factotum and an artist; he was the merest valet.
And he could remember the time he had overheard the beautiful Nella Somi say to his master: “My dear M. Brillon, I do not come here for love of you, but to taste this gibelotte of Sanétomo’s!”
So it is not a question which of the two men, the master or the servant, most regretted the old free life. It may be doubted, in fact, whether Henry Brillon regretted it at all; at least in the first year or two of his marriage.
His wife, who had been Dora Crevel, daughter of old Morton Crevel, was fair — fair to divinity; and in her large, dark eyes, with their shadowy depths, Brillon found happiness and the recompense for his sacrifice of freedom.
Her face was noted for its beauty; she was young and healthy; she was intelligent; she was in love with the man she had married — small wonder if she filled his thoughts.
So they prospered and were happy. If now and then a tiny cloud appeared on the horizon, they rushed together to drive it away.
One or two small irritations there were, of course. Brillon’s favorite painting, a copy of a Degas, which hung in the reception hall, was an eyesore to his wife, though he never knew it. He was more frank in his disapproval of her activities — feeble and innocent enough, goodness knows — in the interests of women’s rights.
Of more importance, perhaps, than either of these, since it did cause them some slight inconvenience, was the unaccountable dislike Mrs. Brillon had taken to the Japanese valet.
She had said to her husband one night, a month or two after the wedding:
“Ugh! Every time I see him I shudder.”
“Who? Sanétomo?” asked Brillon in surprise.
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know.” Already Dora was sorry she had spoken. “He seems so snaky, so silent — I don’t know just what. It makes me feel creepy to know he is near me.”
“In point of fact, he isn’t very pretty to look at,” Brillon admitted. “He’s even ugly. But you see, darling, I’ve grown attached to him; he’s been with me ten years now, and he saved my life once in Brazil. I don’t believe I could get along without him. You don’t mean — are you really annoyed by his being here?”
Of course, Dora replied “No,” and punctuated it with a kiss. For the moment Sanétomo was forgotten.
But as time went on her repugnance for the little yellow man increased until she could scarcely bear the sight of him; not that this caused her any great discomfort, since he scarcely ever left his master’s dressing room. She would probably not have seen him oftener than once or twice a month but for the fact that she had contracted the habit of spending a half-hour or so before bedtime in that very room with her husband; it had been begun by her desire to read aloud to him a novel of Dreiser’s.
One evening as she read she became suddenly aware that the Japanese was sitting on a stool at the farther end of the room, absolutely motionless, with his little, expressionless eyes gazing straight ahead. Sometime later, when he had gone, she had said to her husband:
“Really, Harry, I don’t think it’s a good idea to allow the servants to sit around like that.”
But he had only laughed, and replied that Sanétomo was not a servant, but a seneschal.
Every evening thereafter the yellow man could be seen on his stool in the corner; and when the sight of him became an irritation too strong for Dora’s nerves, she solved the difficulty by simply turning her chair the other way. There she would sit for an hour or so, usually after midnight, three or four times a week, reading aloud from a novel or play, or conversing with her husband, who would he stretched out in a big Turkish chair in front of her.
And Sanétomo would squat on his stool in the shadow, unnoticed and unheard. Not a sound would come from him during the whole hour; not a cough, nor a movement of the body, nor even a deep breath; none of those little noises by which a human being reveals its presence even in sleep.
Heaven only knows what he was thinking of, or why he sat there. He gave no evidence of any interest in the story that was being read; Brillon might roar with laughter at a humorous passage, or Dora’s voice tremble and her eyes fill with tears at a tragic or pathetic one, but Sanétomo gave no sign.
After learning that her husband was genuinely attached to the Japanese, and that it would give him real pain to part with him, Dora said no more about it. But her feeling of aversion increased, in spite of her desire to ignore it.
She would feel his eyes on the back of her head, and then, turning suddenly, would see plainly that his dull and impassive gaze was either fixed straight before him or on the floor, and she would become impatient with herself for her childishness.
“Certainly I am not afraid of him,” she would argue with herself; “men why in the name of common sense do I think of him at all? It’s absurd; mere stupid fancy; the poor, harmless thing!”
Then she began to come across him in other parts of the house; in the corridors, in the servants’ room downstairs, once even in the reception hall; and though she never once succeeded in catching his eye, she persuaded herself to the belief that his gaze was constantly on her.
The day she met him in the reception hall she turned in a sudden flash of anger and said:
“What are you doing down here? Why aren’t you upstairs?”
“Yes, ma’am. I sorry,” replied Sanétomo, backing off.
“I suppose you know you should not be here,” said Dora quietly, ashamed at having shown temper with a servant.
“Yes, ma’am.”
And he backed clear to the door and disappeared without turning.
These were small incidents, of course, in the life of the wealthy and fashionable Mrs. Brillon; the little yellow man was for her merely one of those petty annoyances of existence which meet us in so many forms and disguises, and he probably would have remained so indefinitely — for she had finally decided to tolerate his presence out of consideration for her husband — had it not been for the curious adventure which explained Sanétomo and finished him all at once.
Early in the summer of the year which saw the second anniversary of his wedding, Brillon took it into his head that he wanted to see the Rocky Mountains; the idea having been suggested by a friend who offered him the use of a bungalow on a ranch near Steamboat Lake, some three hundred miles west of Denver.
Mrs. Brillon, having looked forward to a season at Newport, made some objections, but was won over with little difficulty, and toward the middle of July they departed for the West, accompanied only by Mrs. Brillon’s maid and Sanétomo.
They found the ranch, consisting of a few hundred acres of wild forest and tumbling streams — for everything from a cabbage patch to a mountain range is called a ranch in Colorado — sufficiently delightful to repay them for their tiresome journey. More important still to these New Yorkers, the bungalow was furnished completely throughout its nine or ten large rooms, and had been kept in excellent order by the caretaker, an old grizzled veteran of the mountainside who called himself Trapper Joe.