Part 14

“I do not paint,” he said. “I am but a sculptor.”

They walked slowly up the pebbled path, and through the bamboo grove, until they came to the little gate over which he had stepped.

“Now we have reached the wall,” she said with childish lightness. “You are not so brave nowadays, I fancy, as to carry me across by force.”

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!”

------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTER VII

THE PICTURE BY THE ARTIST-MAN

------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.”