10

“Do not come to me. I am as you see me, lost to this world. I would be an obstacle on his way through the next.”

For the Second Princess there was the added sorrow of not having been able to say goodbye. Sadly, day after day, she sat looking over the wide grounds of her mother's Ichijo~ house, now almost deserted. The men of whom Kashiwagi had been fondest did continue to stop by from time to time. His favorite grooms and falconers seemed lost without him. Even now they were wandering disconsolately over the grounds. The sight of them, and indeed every small occurrence, summoned back the unextinguishable sadness. Kashiwagi's belongings gathered dust. The lute and the japanese koto upon which he had so often played were silent and their strings were broken. The very air of the place spoke of sorrow and neglect. The princess gazed sadly out at the garden, where the trees wore the green haze of spring. The blossoms had none of them forgotten their proper season.

Late one morning, as dull as all the others, there was a vigorous shouting of outrunners and a procession came up to the gate.

“We had forgotten,” said one of the women. “It almost seemed for a moment that His Lordship had come back.”

The princess's mother had thought that it would be one or more of Kashiwagi's brothers, who were frequent callers, but the caller was in fact more stately and dignified than they. It was Yu~giri. He was offered a seat near the south veranda of the main hall. The princess's mother herself came forward to receive him—it would have been impolite to send one of the women.

“I may assure you,” said Yu~giri, “that I have been sadder than if he were my brother. But there are restraints upon an outsider and I was able to offer only the most perfunctory condolences. He said certain things at

the end that have kept your daughter very much on my mind. It is not a world in which any of us can feel secure, but until the day when it becomes clear which of us is to go first, I mean to exert myself in your behalf and hers in every way I can think of. Too much has been going on at court to let me follow my own inclinations and simply withdraw from things, and it would not have been very satisfying to look in on you and be on my way again. And so the days have gone by. I have heard that To~ no Chu~jo~ is quite insane with grief. My own grief has only been less than his, and it has been deepened by the thought of the regret with which my friend must have left your daughter behind.”

His words were punctuated from time to time by a suggestion of tears. The old lady thought him very courtly and dignified and at the same time very approachable.

There were tears in her voice too, and when she had finished speaking she was weeping openly. “Yes, the sad thing is that it should all be so uncertain and fleeting. I am old and I have tried to tell myself that worse things have happened. But when I see her lost in grief, almost out of her mind, I cannot think what to do. It almost comes to seem that I am the really unlucky one, destined to see the end of two brief lives.

“You were close to him and you may have heard how little inclined I was to accept his proposal. But I did not want to go against his father's wishes, and the emperor too seemed to have decided that he would make her a good husband. So I told myself that I must be the one who did not understand. And now comes this nightmare, and I must reprove myself for not having been truer to my very vague feelings. They did not of course lead me to expect anything so awful.

“I had thought, in my old-fashioned way, that unless there were really compelling reasons it was better that a princess not marry. And for her, poor girl, a marriage that should never have been has come to nothing. It would be better, I sometimes think, and people would not judge her harshly, if she were to let the smoke from her funeral follow his. Yet the possibility is not easy to accept, and I go on looking after her. It has been a source of very great comfort in all the gloom to have reports of your concern and sympathy. I do most sincerely thank you. I would not have called him an ideal husband, but it moves me deeply to learn that because you were so close to him you were chosen to hear his dying words, and that there were a few for her mixed in among them.”

She was weeping so piteously that Yu~giri too was in tears. “It may have been because he was strangely old for his years that he came at the end to seem so extremely despondent. I had been foolish enough to fear that too much enlightenment might destroy his humanity and to caution him against letting it take the joy out of him. I fear that I must have given him cause to think me superficial. But it is your daughter I am saddest for, though you may think it impertinent of me to say so.” His manner was warm and open. “Her grief and the waste seem worse than anything.”

This first visit was a short one.

He was five or six years younger than Kashiwagi, but a youthful receptivity had made Kashiwagi a good companion. Yu~giri had almost seemed the maturer of the two and certainly he was the more masculine, though his extraordinary good looks were also very youthful. He gave the young women who saw him off something happy to think about after all the sorrow.

There were cherry blossoms in the forward parts of the garden. “This year alone” *—but the allusion did not seem a very apt one. “If we wish to see them,” + he said softly, and added a poem of his own, not, however, as if he had a specific audience in mind.

“Although a branch of this cherry tree has withered,

It bursts into new bloom as its season comes.”

The old lady was prompt with her answer, which was sent out to him as he was about to leave:

“The willow shoots this spring, not knowing where

The petals may have fallen, are wet with dew.”

She had not perhaps been the deepest and subtlest of the Suzaku emperor's ladies, but her talents had been much admired, and quite properly so, he thought.