Daughters of Nijo: A Romance of Japan
He vaulted to the other side without speaking, then stood a moment,
looking back at her.
“Yet,” she said, almost tremulously, “the wall is not so high or stone.”
“It has the power to divide, O princess,” he replied in a husky voice.
“Now you are at the other side, you are no longer Kamura Junzo,” she
said. “You have become changed from the little boy I once knew. You are
cruel now—and—and—cold.”
“And you,” he said, “as far away and unattainable as the stars, O
princess.”
“Yet you are betrothed to one whom you called Masago,” she said
suddenly, and raised an almost appealing face to his. He looked into her
eyes and did not speak.
“And am I not like this Masago?” she asked.
“You are like no one in all the world,” he said, “save that sweet,
lovely princess that even as a boy I sought to capture for—my own.”
“You have not tried again,” she said.
“The sun is in my eyes, O princess. I am afraid.”
He turned abruptly from her and walked swiftly away toward the front of
the palace.
“I have been dreaming,” he said, passing his hand across his eyes, “and
living in my dreams. O gods!”
Sado-ko looked after him, leaning over the railing of the gate watching
until he disappeared. Then she turned and walked with dreamy step back
through the bamboo grove. She turned toward a slender, pebbled path
which she followed to a small lawn, in whose centre a stately statue,
white and pure, was set. She stood in silence looking upon it,—a statue
of the Prince Komatzu wrought by the hands of the artist-man. Suddenly
she placed her arms about the statue’s form and pressed her face against
it. Her words were strangely like to his:—
“I have been dreaming, dreaming,” she said, “and, O sweet Kuonnon, let
me not awake!”
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CHAPTER VII
THE PICTURE BY THE ARTIST-MAN
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CHAPTER VII
THE PICTURE BY THE ARTIST-MAN
THE ladies persisted, though the artist was obdurate. He stood in their
path directly before the covered picture on the foreign easel. His eyes
wandered gravely over the various faces of his fair besiegers.
Said the Duchess Aoi, with her small chin raised and her long eyes at
disdainful level:—
“Sir Artist, you invest a picture with the attributes of the original.
Yet even the princess’s most celestial person is not so sacred to our
insignificant eyes. Why, then, her august picture?”
Junzo bowed only slightly to his interlocutor, and replied briefly:—
“The portrait is unfinished, Duchess Aoi.”
“Unfinished! Well, and did we not gaze upon the statue of his Imperial
Highness while yet it was unfinished?”
The artist did not move from his position.
“Ah, it is the honorable whim of the artist, ladies,” said the little
Countess Matsuka.
“Sir Artist, you are most cruel to the kind,” chided a roguish young
lady, who leaned against the Duchess Aoi.
“Yes, indeed,” added another, “to permit a whim—an artist’s foolish
whim—to prevent our enjoyment of her Highness’s picture.”
“Confess,” said Lady Fuji-no, who hitherto had remained quietly in the
background, “that this is not the whim of an artist, but of—”
“The portrait is unfinished,” repeated the artist, raising his voice.
“Shaka! You have been most painstaking, Sir Artist. The statue of the
Prince Komatzu was completed in just half the space of time.” It was the
Duchess Aoi who spoke. To her the artist turned.
“Lady, bid me not again repeat, the portrait is unfinished,” he said
with a low, graceful bow.
Lady Fuji burst into merry laughter.
“Artist,” she said, “the foreigners whom we emulate in some things
declare that all women, royal or otherwise, have the prerogative to
command, to insist.”
Junzo’s brows were slightly drawn together. He bowed without answering
the smiling Fuji.
“And so,” she continued, taking a step nearer to him, “I am going to
look upon the picture, since you will not heed command, and even
though—”
Her hand was upon the silken covering, which she had partly lifted.
Junzo’s hand fell upon hers like a vice. She did not, however, release
the covering, but clutched at it beneath his fingers, her half-defiant,
half-smiling eyes upon his face.
“Lady Fuji-no!” he cried, breathing heavily, “I must command—”
“Command!” she repeated haughtily; “and when, Sir Artist, did you
acquire authority at court? By what right do you, a hired artist, dare
to command a lady of the household of her Imperial Highness?”
She wrenched at the covering, and it began to slip from the top of the
picture.
“In the name of Princess Sado-ko!” he cried.
The covering had slipped to the floor, and even the most impassive of
the ladies had started back with little gasps of consternation. The
canvas that faced them now was blank.
There was complete silence in the salon of the visiting artist. Then
almost simultaneously all eyes were turned from that blank canvas to the
face of the artist-man.
He stood there like one overtaken by a sudden tragedy. His face was
white and drawn, his eyes, always large and dark, were widened now. His
nostrils quivered, and his lips were dry. The very sight of his despair
had a moving effect upon all, save the Lady Fuji-no, who began to laugh
very softly. Thus she broke the silence. Her words were slow and cruel:—
“Of a truth, Sir Artist, the picture of her Imperial Highness is
unfinished.”
He did not speak. The lady leaned toward him, thrusting her face within
the range of his vision.
“Is this the honorable portrait of our Princess Sado-ko, which she will
make as exchange gift to her affianced, Prince Komatzu?” she asked.
The artist turned his face painfully aside. Then the Duchess Aoi spoke:—
“Artist,” she said, “we most humble and insignificant ones copy the
august fashions from her Highness. Pray you, paint my picture in just so
fine a style.”
There were hysterical tears in the voice of the little Countess Matsuka.
She sought in vain to divert her more heartless companions.
“I,” she said, “would desire to be painted in a most gorgeous foreign
gown.”
“With the body showing?” inquired Madame Bara.
“Yes, the neck and the long arms. Why not?”
“Oh, ah, it is indecent!”
The artist stooped to the covering on the floor. He stood holding it in
his hand, as though he knew not what to do.
“Oh, pray do not cover up the august likeness, artist,” pleaded the Lady
Fuji-no, with affected solicitude.
The Countess Matsuka raised her voice almost shrilly:—
“Ladies, do let us take a vote as to the decency of the barbarian gown.”
But her suggestion was drowned in the hub-bub of gossip. The countess
was met only with this reply:—
“Countess, upon what work was this artist-man engaged when he was
closeted with Princess Sado-ko?”
The group about the picture grew closer still together. The question
grew in size, and found a hundred answers.
“It is one that only the artist himself can solve,” said Aoi, looking
toward him obliquely.
“Oh, oh, was only the artist present?” protested Lady Fuji.
“And her Highness,” said the Duchess Aoi, and bowed in mocking reverence
at the name. “Do you not recall she said she would not have her ladies
present at the sittings? When we dared to protest, in most humble wise,
she frowned and commanded us to go, which we were forced to do.”
The artist suddenly took a step forward and faced the ladies fairly. The
color had returned to his face, and his eyes sparkled in defiant scorn
at his small tormentors. His voice was raised to a clear pitch:—
“You make mistake, most noble ladies. You do injustice to the humble
artist, to his work, and to her most exalted Highness.” Here he bowed
deeply and with reverence. “It is very true you do not now behold on
this blank canvas the work of the many days of the artist. Yet that is
not an unsolvable mystery. Shall the humble but honorable artist allow
his work upon the portrait of her Serene Highness, the daughter of the
sun-god, to remain in his most public salon for the chance and vulgar
observation of the spiteful curious? Permit me to observe with proper
respect and humility that no explanation of the substitution of the
blank canvas is due. Further, ladies, you make a treasonable mistake
when you declare the august sittings were unattended. Her Highness, upon
all occasions when she deigned to permit me to paint her august picture,
was both chaperoned and attended by the honorable maid, Onatsu-no.”
A sudden little shriek broke from one of the ladies, at which all turned
toward her and then followed the direction of her startled eyes. The
next instant all this company of clattering-tongued ladies, whether in
European dress or kimono, had fallen to their knees, and were touching
the mats with their heads.
The Princess Sado-ko, attended by her maiden, Natsu-no, stepped slowly
down from the slight eminence of the adjoining room, the shojis of which
the pages drew behind her. There was no expression in the face of
Sado-ko as she crossed the room, bowing her head with grace in response
to the servile courtesies of her maids of honor. She made a slight
motion with her hands, and there was a quick movement and rustling of
the obedient ladies, moving toward the shoji that led without. One of
them, more daring than the others, the Lady Fuji-no, paused by the
veranda doors, and spoke with affected timidity:—
“May it please your Highness that we be permitted to remain to-day for
this sitting?”
Sado-ko’s eyes were above the head of her father’s new favorite and her
own maid of honor.
“Lady Fuji-no,” she said, “I have spoken.”
Fuji bowed herself down to the mats, then quietly joined those without.
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CHAPTER VIII
A SENTIMENTAL PRINCESS
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CHAPTER VIII
A SENTIMENTAL PRINCESS
JUNZO turned his head from Sado-ko. He stood still as a statue, his head
drooping, his hands clinched. She broke the strained silence with a
command to her attendant.
“Natsu-no, pray draw apart the door at once. The atmosphere is thick
with odor of our ladies. It has sickened the honorable artist.”
He raised his head sharply. She had not heard, then! The maid pushed the
shojis to either side, thus exposing the apartment to the full view of
any without. This was a daily custom and precaution. No spying maid of
honor might lurk about the balcony.
While the sliding doors remained open, neither the artist nor the
princess spoke, but when a sufficient interval had elapsed and the doors
had been drawn together again, the maid whispered a word of command to
the guard outside, who silently took his station on the balcony. Then
Sado-ko, turning slowly toward the artist, began to laugh in a strangely
quivering, and subdued fashion. The sound of the soft laughter hurt the
artist. He scarcely could command his words.
“Guileless princess, I pray you do not laugh!”
“Not laugh?” she repeated. “You are to-day a most unflattering artist.
Was it only yesterday you said my laughter was as sweet as sweetest
music of the sweetest birds?”
She passed her fan over her shoulder to the maid Natsu-no, who, whirling
it open, fanned her gently. Sado-ko smiled reproachfully at Junzo, as
she sat by a golden screen, near to a shoji through which the sinking
sun pierced and slanted just above her head.