SADO-KO stepped from out the shadow of the bamboo grove into the moon-lit path, and seemingly pensive, made her way toward the two at the gate. She paused before them silently for a moment, then made a gesture of dismissal to the maid Natsu-no, who ceased her excited apologies for having interrupted them, through sudden fright at their appearance.
“Cousin,” said the princess to Komatzu, ignoring altogether the Duchess Aoi, “your sudden appearance at my gate has frightened both my maid and me, who in our solitary evening rambles not often meet with visitors.”
Komatzu answered:—
“The Duchess Aoi and the Lady Moon both beguiled me into a like garden wandering. We came but by chance to your august gate.”
“But will you not step inside?” asked Sado-ko. “Pray, cousin, will you not walk with me?” she sweetly urged.
Glad to accompany his cousin, the prince, softly clapping his hands, ordered an attendant to unfasten the gate. Aoi was about to follow him to the other side, when stopped by the voice of the princess. “We do not need your further service to-night,” she said.
The mortified duchess bowed to the earth, and slowly moved away.
When she was gone and the Princess Sado-ko should have breathed more freely, a reaction came. She clung with sudden faintness to the waiting-maid, Natsu-no.
“Cousin, you are ill!” cried the dismayed Komatzu.
She tried to laugh, but her voice was shaking and her words piteous.
“I but stumbled on my gown, Sir Cousin.”
She raised herself, lifting the kimono a little upward from the ground.
“It is the punishment of vanity,” she continued in a somewhat weary voice. “I was not ready to part with my fair gown, Komatzu. It is of ancient style and very long and cumbersome.”
“But the embodiment of grace and beauty,” said Komatzu, gallantly.
She pursued this light conversation, in hope of diverting him as they passed on their way through the grove.
“What, Cousin Komatzu, you praise an Oriental gown,—you who are so much a modern!”
He glanced down smilingly at his evening dress, black, immaculate, and foreign.
“The honorable gown, fair cousin, is truly exquisite; still, I confess I do prefer the foreign style, and would that you did also.”
“But I should suffocate did I enclose my little frame in so honorably tight a garb,” she protested, and at the same moment she glanced about fearfully. Komatzu seemed to perceive something of her uneasiness, for he, too, cast a keen look about them.
In nervousness she began to speak again, for somewhere close at hand she heard a stir which set her heart to violent beating.
“My ladies beg permission to deck your statue with august flowers, cousin, and—Ah-h!”
She paused. Was it fancy only, or did she see a face staring out at her from the dense foliage hard by?
“I protest,” said Komatzu, stopping short in his walk, “that you, fair cousin, are ill. You are not your familiar self to-night.”
Her fingers clutched his arm as she drew him again along the path.
“No, no, no,” she denied, “I am quite well! Do not linger here, I pray you, Cousin Komatzu.”
He frowned, glancing out with brows drawn.
“I was thinking it an ideal spot for loitering, princess.”
“’Tis dark,” said Sado-ko, still hastening blindly on.
“The moonlight is on all sides, cousin, and pierces through the thin bamboos. And look upward—see how clear and beautiful the star-lit sky above us.”
Again he paused in admiring contemplation of the night.
“The night is chill, Sir Cousin, and the grove is damp,” she said.
“Why, no—” he began again in protest, when the maid behind interrupted. She wrapped a cape about the shoulders of her mistress, and spoke in soothing tones:—
“Noble princess, the humble one was witness of your shivering just now. Permit me then to serve you.”
Still the Prince Komatzu hesitated. Suddenly Sado-ko thrust into his her own small hands.
“Cousin, feel how cold my hands are. Will you not warm them with yours?” she said.
He held them doubtfully a moment, then chafed them with his own, while she moved onward.
Once outside the grove, a great breath, a sigh, escaped the agitated Sado-ko. Then suddenly she began to laugh in a strange, mirthless fashion, as one who laughs through tears. Her cousin stood in silence, sombrely regarding her. When she had ceased, he asked:—
“Why did you laugh so suddenly just now, princess?”
“A thought came to my honorable little brain, Komatzu. I fancied that you had learned that I would keep a tryst to-night.”
He did not move, and she continued with hysterical rapidity.
“And by your face I know my thought was true. Did not the Duchess Aoi bring you to my gate for the purpose of—a spy?”
“We came by chance,” he answered gravely.
“Yes, chance dictated by your beguiling guide, good cousin. Is it not so?”
“The Duchess Aoi spoke with indignation of the tales of others, Sado-ko.”
Again the princess laughed in that weird way.
“It is a habit of my sex, Komatzu, to slander one in just that wise, veiling beneath choice, soft, indignant words against others their own subtle design of defamation.”
“Cousin, who would dare defame your name to me?”
“Oh, any fair and clever lady of the court, Komatzu. Come, cousin, were you not informed that I would keep a tryst to-night?”
“With whom could Princess Sado-ko keep tryst?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders recklessly.
“With whom, Komatzu? The stars, the moon, the night,—perchance, a lover.”
“You laugh at me, fair cousin.”
“Permit me, then, to weep.” She clasped her face with both her hands, but she did not feign tears: they came too readily.
“Cousin,” said Komatzu, solemnly, “will you make an exchange gift with me for my august statue?”
She raised her face defiantly.
“And why should you and I make exchange gifts, Komatzu? We are not affianced.”
“Are we not?” he asked sternly.
“No, save for the gossip of the court and popular fancy. Yet his Majesty has not betrothed us, and I am both his niece and ward.”
“He will betroth us,” said Komatzu, with gloomy assurance, “for all his ministers are in favor of the union.”
“We will abide the time, Komatzu, when his Majesty sanctions it. Meanwhile we are but cousins.”
“Sado-ko, give me that picture of you painted by the artist.”
She turned her face away. Her nervous hands were clasped.
“When we are betrothed,” she said.
“Sado-ko, you know I am your lover.”
“So it is said.”
“Who but a lover should possess this likeness of your Highness?”
“You are not my lover—yet.”
“I will be so,” said Komatzu. “Give me, I repeat, the portrait of your Highness.”
She turned toward him, like one brought suddenly to desperate bay.
“Why require this of me? You have already learned there is no such picture.”
“What, you admit it!”
“I admit it,” she returned quietly now.
He changed his haughty tone to one wherein there was more sorrow than anger.
“Tell me this, Cousin Sado-ko, why did the artist remain, and upon what work was he engaged when closeted with you?”
“He did not work, Komatzu. He but spoke to me—and I to him. He would have gone, but I commanded him to stay. There was no option for the man. He could not paint. I knew this all the time—yet—still—I bade him stay.”
“Why, Princess Sado-ko?”
“For many reasons. I wished to know of other lives. The shallow, shameless ones of those about me enervated my body and my soul. I wished to learn of others in the world, fresh, cleaner, cousin.”
“Sado-ko, I fear you were misjudged. I fathom now your reasons. Just one more bit of eccentricity so natural to our cousin.”
“And so he stayed,” she said, her voice now slow and almost absent in its tone, as though she were recalling incidents in some far past. “He stayed, as I commanded. He told me of his world,—the great world without, Komatzu, where men were men, not puppets. He had travelled much, Komatzu,—fairly round the world, it seems; and though he dressed not in the garb of the barbarian, he knew more of them than the whole of this affected court.”
“He spoke of the foreign world?”
“That and of other things.”
“Other things?”
Her voice dragged slowly over the word as she spoke in answer.
“Masago!” she murmured in a low voice.
“And who, I pray, is this Masago?”
“Masago,” she repeated; and then again, “Masago. Do you like the sound of the name, cousin?”
“It has a fair but common sound. The ‘morning glory’ is esteemed. It is, in truth, a pretty name.”
“But not so sweet as—Sado-ko. Pray you, say so, cousin.”
“Why, no; not so sweet, so rare, so royal. Who but a princess might carry such a name as that? Does not the ‘ko’ mean ‘royal’ and ‘Sado,’ sweetest name for maiden, ‘chastity’?”
Her restless hands unclasped. She raised a trembling face.
“Komatzu, I would exchange that royal name for the simple one—Masago.”
“Princess!”
“I weary of that title, cousin.”
“Who is this Masago?”
“A simple, happy maid, Komatzu. She is the daughter of a late countryman of Echizen, and now a famous merchant of Tokyo.”
“What is his name?”
“Yamada Kwacho. Ah, I see you start, Komatzu. You, too, it seems, have heard the story?”
“And you?”
“And I. But not until he came to Komatzu.”
“He?—this artist-fellow told you of your father?”
“No. His coming simply widened the lips of the ever open mouths of my sweet maids of honor. By a female chance of listening, a weakness common to our race and sex, Komatzu, I heard the tale retold.”
Komatzu made a gesture of impatience.
“Cousin, I apologize for the vile gossip with which my palace seems infected.”
“Oh, spare your august tongue, Komatzu. ’Twas my own maids who spoke.”
“And this Masago? I do not altogether understand. She is a daughter of Yamada Kwacho?”
“A daughter of his wife, Komatzu.”
The subtle meaning of her words was not lost upon the prince. He frowned.
“What relation does this Masago bear to this artist-man?” he asked.
Sado-ko looked up at him in the now fading moonlight, but did not answer. The expression of her face was strange. She turned suddenly, and moved with slow and almost dreamy step toward her rooms, Komatzu following at her side, awaiting her reply.
Sado-ko paused on the steps, and then she answered in the faintest voice:—
“Masago is his bride to be, Komatzu.”
In the opening of the shoji she paused a space, looking up at the sky.
“The moon is gone,” she said. Her cousin did not know whether to him she breathed farewell, or to the moon, for she said:—
