Daughters of Nijo: A Romance of Japan
flight of the butterflies, until she came to a wall, over which the
purple visitor flew.
Flushed and disappointed the princess sat down breathlessly on the grass
beneath a cherry tree. She had been seated but a moment, when the tree
above her began to shake and a score of ripe cherries descended upon her
head. She sprang to her feet, and looking upward saw a roguish face
peering down at her from the cherry tree. The face belonged to a boy of
possibly fourteen years. He was laughing with delight at the amazed and
frightened face of the little princess, and he kept pelting her with
cherries, some of which actually broke on her small Imperial person. As,
however, Sado-ko continued to gaze up at him in that frightened manner,
he sprang to the ground, rolled himself about on the grass for a spell,
and then turned several somersaults so grotesque that Sado-ko forgot her
fear and burst into childish laughter, clapping her hands delightedly as
he came to his feet before her. They were both laughing heartily now, as
they surveyed each other. The boy’s sleeves and the front of his obi
were filled with cherries, so that his figure was a succession of
grotesque bunches. There were cherry stains, too, on his face,
particularly in the region of his laughing mouth, through which Sado-ko
saw the whitest of teeth gleaming. He had brown eyes, and soft silky
hair, unshaven in the centre of his head, as was the case with the
palace attendants. Gradually as the princess surveyed him she became
grave.
“Who are you?” she said at last. “What is your honorable name, and where
do you live?”
“I am Kamura Junzo,” said the boy, “and I live over yonder.” He waved
his hand toward the wall.
“On the other side?” inquired Sado-ko in an awed voice. He nodded.
“I know who you are,” he continued.
“I am the Princess Sado-ko,” said the child, gravely.
“Yes,” said the boy, “and the august Sun was your ancestor. You live
shut up in this place all alone, and no one plays with you.”
“I have my honorable dear birds and butterflies,” she said.
He looked at her curiously.
“Yes, I have heard you singing to them.”
“And you wished also to see me?” she questioned.
“Yes.” He flushed boyishly, and then added with Spartan honesty, “Also I
wanted some of your cherries.”
“They are very good,” said the princess.
“Oh, yes, there are none so good without.”
“Did the guards deign to let you pass through the gates?”
“No.” A pause, then: “I deigned to climb over the wall.”
“Some day,” said Sado-ko, wistfully, “her Majesty says a prince will fly
over the walls and carry me away. Perhaps you are that prince.”
“Oh, no; I am not a prince, but if you wish, I will play that I am one.”
“How is that?” she asked, bewildered.
“This cherry tree will be your august castle. I will come over the wall,
and you must run around the castle to escape me. I will pursue you, and
then I will carry you off from this dark and lonesome prison over the
walls to the beautiful world outside.”
“But it is not a lonesome prison here,” said the princess, “and outside
it is very cold and miserable, for her Majesty has told me so.”
“Oh, well, let us play it is so.”
And so they played together until past noon, when the maid and gardener
were both sent to seek the Princess Sado-ko, who was chasing
butterflies. They rescued her just as the “prince” was about to carry
her over the walls, upon the top of which he had placed her, by climbing
up in the cherry tree and across a bough which sloped to the wall.
The rescued princess stamped her foot angrily at the gardener when he
threatened the boy, who laughed jeeringly from the top of the wall; and
she scolded the maid when that menial drew her by the hand from the
scene. She would not leave the vicinity of the wall until the boy had
disappeared completely, which he did by jumping off to the other side.
Then she burst into tears for fear he had come to harm in the wicked
world without.
Thereafter a close watch was kept upon her movements, and she was not
permitted to go near that portion of the walls where stood the
cherry-tree castle. Often she heard the boy whistling from that
direction, and once she awoke in the night, because she had dreamed that
he was calling her name, “Sado-ko! Sado-ko!” After that life was a
little more lonesome for the Child of the Sun.
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CHAPTER II
AN EMPEROR’S PROMISE
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CHAPTER II
AN EMPEROR’S PROMISE
ON a cold morning in the month of January the Empress Dowager died. She
had returned from a ceremony of the thirtieth anniversary of the death
of her late consort. Exhausted, broken, and ill, she had come back to
her country-seat, her visit to Kyoto having been too much for her
strength.
That night messengers went in haste to the capital, and the following
morning brought to the bedside of the dying Empress her son, the
Emperor, and his consort.
All night long the little Princess Sado-ko crouched in the darkness of
her room alone. Wide-eyed and tearless, she looked out from her shoji at
the ghostly snow which shrouded her beloved trees and flowers in so cold
and chilly a garment, eerily touched by the moon-rays. She heard,
without heeding, the movement and stir within the palace; the muffled
beat of a drum without quickly hushed. Early in the gray morning the
royal visitors arrived. Sado-ko knew that some catastrophe was about to
fall upon the palace and her beloved grandmother, and so she waited
through the night for the end.
She did not know that below in the sick chamber the heartbroken Emperor
knelt on his knees by the side of his mother and besought her, like any
ordinary man, to speak but one word to him, to express but one wish ere
she must leave him. The Dowager Empress opened her tired eyes,
attempting to speak. She could only murmur in the faintest of voices, so
that her son scarcely caught the words:—
“Sado-ko—Pray thee to care for—Sado-ko!”
Then her eyes closed as though the effort at speech had been too much
for her, but the Emperor knew that she heard the words he spoke into her
ears.
“Divine mother, the Princess Sado-ko shall have my personal care. She
shall be nurtured and cared for as the highest princess in Japan, and
when she has attained to a fitting age the greatest honor in my power
shall be given to her.”
There was no further sign from the Dowager Empress.
“Princess!” called a voice penetrating the darkened room, by the shoji
of which the child crouched dully. “Noble princess!”
Sado-ko did not stir, though she looked with wide eyes toward the
sliding door through which came her maiden Natsu, holding carefully
above her head a lighted andon. She had not seen the little figure by
the shoji, and she shuffled toward the couch. A startled exclamation
escaped her when she discovered that the couch was empty. At that the
princess called to her in a strange voice, which seemed somehow unlike
her own.
“I am here, honorable maid.”
The woman hastened forward, the light still swinging over her head. She
stopped aghast before the still little figure of the princess, who was,
she could see, fully dressed. It was plain that the child had robed
herself with her own hands, after she had left her for the night.
The maid set the andon down, then touched the floor with her head. After
her obeisance she went nearer to Sado-ko, and spoke with the familiarity
which years in the child’s service had allowed her.
“Thou art not unrobed, noble princess!”
“I have not slept,” said the child, quietly.
The maid seized her hands with an exclamation of pity.
“The hands are like ice!” she exclaimed immediately. “Exalted princess,
you are ill!”
“No,” said Sado-ko, shaking her head, “I am not ill, Natsu-no. But tell
me your mission. Why do you come so early to my chamber?”
There was nothing childlike now in the grave glance of Sado-ko’s eyes.
She seemed to have aged over night. At her words the maid burst into
tears, beat her hands against her breast, and finally bent her head to
the floor. The princess waited in silence until the maid had regained
somewhat of her composure. Then she said severely, quite in the manner
of her august grandparent:—
“Maiden, such emotion is unseemly. Speak your mission, if you please.”
“Oh, august princess, her Imperial Majesty—” She fell to weeping again.
Sado-ko leaned forward, and placing her hand on the maid’s shoulder,
peered into her face.
“—is dead?” she said in a whisper.
The maid’s head bowed forward mutely. After that there was a long
silence. Then Sado-ko arose to her feet, her hands pressed to her face
on either side. Her eyes, between her little parted fingers, were
staring out in shocked horror. Her strange silence stilled the sobbing
maid, who tremulously arose.
“And if it please thee, noble princess,” she said, “his August Majesty
is below and commands thy immediate presence.”
Sado-ko did not speak or move. The maid falteringly touched one of the
drooping sleeves.
“Nay, do not look so, sweet mistress,” she implored; “the gods will not
desert you. His Majesty himself has deigned to adopt thee, and to-morrow
thou wilt go to the great capital as his ward.”
Sado-ko’s hands fell from her face. Her voice was not childlike, and
quite hoarse.
“Pray thee, lead me below, honorable maid.”
* * * * *
It was lighter now in the palace, for a wan sun was creeping upward in
the pale heavens. There were signs of a dreary day about to dawn.
Through the winding corridors of the palace the princess and the maid
moved toward the august chamber of death. At its door they paused and
the princess’s hand dropped from that of the maid. Having permitted her
attendant to push the sliding doors apart, she entered the chamber
alone. Without, the maid bent her face to the mats, stifling her sobs in
her sleeves. Within, the little princess hesitated a moment in doubt,
then rushed to the death couch, threw herself down by the still form
there, and unmindful of those within, encircled it with her arms. But no
cry escaped her lips, for well had she been bred as a Daughter of the
Sun-god by the old Empress Dowager.
The days that followed were hazy and unreal to Sado-ko. Strange women
and men, with cold impassive faces, were about her at all times. She
could scarcely tell one from the other, and it wearied her to be forced
to listen to their words of caution and counsel. Then she made a
journey. Strangely enough, when she was lifted into the covered
palanquin and the curtains drawn about her, she knew that now she was to
be carried beyond the gray palace walls. The journey was made at night,
and the tired little princess slept throughout it, so that she was
spared the tediousness of time.
In the morning her eyes opened upon a new world. As the day streamed
through the bamboo curtains of her norimon, she pushed them aside, to
see that they were passing along what seemed to be a stone road, upon
either side of which were endless buildings unlike anything she had ever
seen before. Although there were throngs of people everywhere, a strange
and solemn silence prevailed, as the norimon and parade of the princess
passed along, and the people bent their heads to the earth. Sado-ko
could see that many of the women and some of the men wept. She did not
know that the whole nation had gone into mourning for the one she had
loved so well.