12

It was a forbidding night, with snow threatening. Her brothers tried to hurry her.

“A really bad storm might be blowing up.”

They brushed away tears as they looked out into the garden. Higekuro had been especially fond of his daughter. Fearing that she would never see him again, she lay weeping and wondering how she could possibly go.

“Do you so hate the thought of going with me?” said her mother.

The girl was hoping to delay their departure until her father came home, but there was little likelihood that he would leave Tamakazura at so late an hour. Her favorite seat had been beside the cypress pillar in the east room. Now it must go to someone else. She set down a poem on a sheet of cypress-colored notepaper and thrust a bodkin through it and into a crack in the pillar. She was in tears before she had finished writing.

“And now I leave this house behind forever.

Do not forget me, friendly cypress pillar.”

“I do not share these regrets,” said her mother.

“Even if it wishes to be friends,

We may not stay behind at this cypress pillar.”

The women were sobbing as they took their farewells of trees and flowers to which they had not paid much attention but which they knew they would remember fondly.

Moku, being in Higekuro's service, would stay behind.

This was Chu~jo~'s farewell poem:

“The waters, though shallow, remain among the rocks, And gone is the image of one who would stay beside them.

“I had not dreamed that I would have to go.”

“What am I to say?” replied Moku.

“The water among the rocks has clouded over.

I do not think my shadow long will linger.”

More aware than ever of the uncertainty of life, the lady looked back at a house she knew she would not see again. She gazed at each twig and branch until house and garden were quite out of sight. Though it was not as if she were leaving a place she loved, there are always regrets for a familiar house.