15

“Did you have to go so soon?”

“Complaining, always complaining. Why won't they just let me be alone with you? I do find myself in the oddest situations.”

Most people, accustomed to thinking that one wife is enough for a man, would have found it difficult to sympathize. But his affairs were complicated, and what had happened had to happen sooner or later. The world had chosen to single him out, even among princes of the blood, and no one could have reproved him for taking as many wives as he wished; and so no one need think Nakanokimi's situation a notably cruel one. Quite the reverse: it was the general view that she was lucky, swept into an embrace so ardent and at the same time so estimable. To Nakanokimi herself, this sudden event was the more shocking for the fact that she had begun to take his affection for granted. She had wondered, reading old romances, why women were always fretting at such length over these little problems. They had seemed very remote. Now she saw that the pain could be real.

“And this refusal to eat—it is not at all good for you, you know,” he said gently, with every indication of real concern. He ordered her favorite fruits immediately, and put his most famous cook to work on other dishes he thought might tempt her; but her thoughts were elsewhere. It was all very disturbing.

Toward evening he withdrew to the main hall. The breeze was cool, and it was a time of the year when the skies had a particular fascination. Very much the man of fashion, he today presented an even more elegant figure than usual; but for Nakanokimi the very care that he gave to his dress deepened gloom that was already next to unbearable. The song of the evening locust made her yearn for “the mountain shadows.” *

“My sorrows would have their limits, were I yet there.

The locust's call this autumn eve—I hate it?”

He was on his way while the evening was still young. She heard his outrunners withdrawing into the distance, and an angler might have wanted to have a try at the waters by her pillow.+ Even as she wept, she rebuked herself for having surrendered so weakly to jealousy. Why should she be wounded afresh, when he had been inconsiderate from the start? Matters were of course complicated by her pregnancy. What did the future have in store for her? She came from short-lived stock, and might herself be marked for an early death. Though she had no great wish to live on, the thought of death saddened her, and the sin would be great if she left behind a motherless child. She passed a sleepless night.