Page:The Sacred Tree (Waley 1926).pdf/260

254 a dull background of colourless winter grass. Suddenly from behind the frontier guardhouse there burst forth a blaze of many-coloured travelling cloaks, some richly embroidered, some batik-dyed, of every pattern and hue. Genji’s coach was passing. He too scanned the party by the roadside, but instantly lowered the carriage blind. He had recognized, among those who had come out to meet the travellers, his page and message-carrier Utsusemi’s brother—a child in those old days but now Captain of the Guard. He bade one of his equerries call this young man to his side and when he arrived said to him laughingly: ‘I hope your sister notices how attentive I am to her. It is not often that I go all the way to the Barrier to meet my friends!’ He spoke lightly, but his heart beat fast and there rose up in his mind a host of tender memories to which in this hasty message it would have been useless to allude.

It was years since Utsusemi had spoken of Genji; yet she had never forgotten what had passed between them and it needed only these few words from him to renew all the misery in which her yearning for him had plunged her long ago.

When Genji returned from Ishiyama, Utsusemi’s brother, the Captain of the Guard, came out towards the Barrier to meet him and made his excuses for having taken a day’s leave in honour of his sister’s return. As a boy he had been very good-looking and Genji had taken a great fancy to him. But despite the fact that he owed everything to Genji, without whose patronage he would never have been able to enter the Imperial Guard at all, still less to obtain promotion, no sooner had his master’s fortunes begun to decline than this young man, fearing to offend those in power, entered the service of his brother-in-law, the provincial governor. Genji, though he showed no resentment