32

Genji came in from the Third Princess's rooms. There was no time to hide the letter, but the lady pulled up a curtain frame and half hid herself.

“And is he awake? I want to rush back for another look at him when I have been away even a few minutes.”

The princess did not answer. Murasaki had taken the child, said her mother.

“You must not let her monopolize it. She is always carrying it around and so she is always having to change to dry clothes. She can come here if she wants to see it.”

“You are being unkind, and I do not think you have thought things through very carefully. I would have no doubts at all about letting her take a little girl off with her, and we can be much bolder with little boys even when they are princes. Is it your wise view that the two of them should be kept apart?”

“I shall defer to your wiser view, though not before protesting your treatment of me. I have no doubt that I am a pompous old fool, but you need not make me so aware of that fact by leaving me out of things and talking behind my back. I have no doubt that you say the most dreadful things about me.”

He pulled aside the curtain and found her leaning against a pillar, dignified and elegantly dressed. The box was beside her. She had not wished to attract his attention to it by pushing it out of sight.

“And what is this? Something of profound significance, no doubt. An endless poem from a lovelorn gentleman, all locked up in a strong box?”

“Again you are being unkind. You seem very young these days, and sometimes your humor is beyond the reach of the rest of us.”

She was smiling, but it was clear that something had saddened her. He was so openly curious, his head cocked inquiringly to one side, that she thought an explanation necessary.

“My father has sent a list of prayers and vows from his cave in Akashi. He thought that I might perhaps ask you to look at them sometime. But not quite yet, I think, if you don't mind.”

“I can only imagine how hard he has worked at his devotions and what enormous wisdom and grace he must have accumulated over the years. I sometimes hear of a priest who has made a most awesome name for himself, and find on looking into the matter a little more closely that he still smells rather strongly of the world. Erudition is not enough, and in the matter of sheer dedication and concentration your father is, I am sure, ahead of all the others, and besides his learning and wisdom he has a feeling for the gentler things. And through it all he is a very modest man who makes no great show of his virtues. I thought when I knew him that he did not live in the same world as the rest of us, and now he is throwing off the last traces of our world and finding true liberation. How I would love to go off and have a quiet talk with him!”

“I am told that he has left the seacoast and gone off into mountains so deep that no birds fly singing overhead.” *

“And this is his last will and testament? Have you had a letter from him? And your mother—what does she think of it all?” His voice trembled. “The bond between husband and wife is often stronger than that between parent and child. As the years have gone by and I have come to know a little of the world, I have felt strangely near him. I can only try to imagine what that stronger bond must be.”

The part about the dream, she thought, might interest him. “It is in an outlandish hand—it might almost be Sanskrit. Perhaps certain passages might be worth glancing at. I thought I was saying goodbye to it all, but there are some things, it would seem, that I did not after all leave behind.”

“It is a fine hand, still very young and strong.” In tears, he lingered over the description of the dream. “He is a very learned and a very talented man, and all that has been lacking is a certain political sense, a flair for making his way ahead in the world. There was a minister in your family, an extremely earnest and intelligent man, I have always heard. People who speak of him in such high terms have always asked what misstep may have been responsible for bringing his line to an end—though of course we have you, and even though you are a lady we cannot say that his line has come to a complete end. No doubt your father's piety and devotion are being rewarded.”

The old man had been thought impossibly eccentric and wholly un-realistic in his ambitions. Genji had been in bad conscience about the d ole Akashi episode. The crown princess's birth had seemed to tell of a bond from a former life, but the future had seemed very uncertain all the same. He now saw how much that one fragile dream had meant to the old man. It had fed the apparently wild ambition to have Genji as a son-inlaw. Genji had suffered in exile, it now seemed, that the crown princess might be born. And what sort of vows might the old man have made? Respectfully, he looked through the contents of the box.