Part 61

He leaned a trifle toward her, as though his boredom were lifted for a second.

“Are you not at home already, princess?”

She shook her head in mute negation.

“What do you call your home, then?” he inquired.

She answered in a whisper:—

“Kamakura!”

“Ah, yes, the castle Aoyama is there.”

She could not speak further. A page brought tea on a small lacquered tray. She touched it with her lips, then again relapsed into her attitude of weariness and languor.

The Crown Prince thought his cousin both stupid and dull. He mentally decided that her beauty had been overrated. Bright, flashing eyes, rosy lips, a vivacious countenance, in these days were considered a more desirable type of beauty than this tired, languid, waxen sort, mysteriously sad, despite perfection.

He wondered whether her allusion to Kamakura had to do with the famous artist there, of whom the young prince had heard.

Report had told him that the capricious Sado-ko had treated this plain artist with familiarity such that the court gossiped. While these thoughts ran vaguely through his mind, the princess interrupted with a question:—

“When is the wedding-day?” she asked.

“It is not set,” he replied somewhat stiffly.

Her hands moved restlessly in her lap.

“Are there not other ladies of the royal house more exalted than I?” she asked.

“None, illustrious princess,” he answered coldly.

She turned her miserable face aside, and stared at the company with eyes that would fill with tears. Suddenly, hardly conscious of her words, she exclaimed, in a low, passionate voice:—

“I hate it all! I hate it all!”

The Crown Prince stared in astonishment at her feverishly flushed face.

“I overheard your words, princess,” he said, with forbidding candor. “I do not know to what you are alluding. The words themselves have an unseemly sound.”

She pressed her lips together, and sat in bitter silence after that. Suddenly she became conscious of compelling eyes upon her. She moved and breathed with a new excitement. Then she heard the Crown Prince speaking in a sarcastic, drawling way, which already she had begun to dislike.

“Our cousin, here, Komatzu, is sick for Kamakura.”

She turned her helpless eyes upon Komatzu’s face. To her passionate, hungry eyes he appeared impassive and unmoved. Had the horrible tidings, then, left him only cold? Were the words of love he had whispered so often in her ear but the carefully prepared words of a formal suitor? Was he so much a prince that he could mask his heart behind so impenetrable a countenance?

Tears, welling up from her aching heart, dropped unheeded from her eyes. She made no effort to wipe them away, or to conceal her childish grief and agony. So this lately elevated princess, affianced to a future emperor, sat by his side in a public place, with tears running down her face. The Crown Prince was impatient at this display of weak emotion, she knew, and her action was unbefitting a princess of Japan; nevertheless she found herself repeating over and over again in her heart:—

“I am not a princess! I am not a princess! I am only the maid Masago. That is all. I have been but playing at a masquerade, and I am tired. I want my home—my parents. My heart is breaking!”

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CHAPTER XXV

THE EVE OF A WEDDING