Page:The Tale of Genji.pdf/171

Rh shown into the same small room as before. Here Shōnagon told him between her sobs the whole tale of their bereavement, at which he too found himself strangely moved. ‘I would send my little mistress to His Highness her father’s,’ she continued, ‘did I not remember how cruelly her poor mother was used in that house. And I would do it still if my little lady were a child in arms who would not know where she had been taken to nor what the people there were feeling towards her. But she is now too big a girl to go among a lot of strange children who might not treat her kindly. So her poor dead grandmother was always saying down to her last day. You, Sir, have been very good to us, and it would be a great weight off my mind to know that she was coming to you even if it were only for a little while; and I would not worry you with asking what was to become of her afterwards. Only for her sake I am sorry indeed that she is not some years older, so that you might make a match of it. But the way she has been brought up has made her young even for her age.’ ‘You need not so constantly remind me of her childishness,’ said Genji. ‘Though it is indeed her youth and helplessness which move my compassion, yet I realize (and why should I hide it from myself or from you?) that a far closer bond unites our souls. Let me tell her myself what we have just now decided,’ and he recited a poem in which he asked if ‘like the waves that lap the shore where young reeds grow he must advance only to recede again.’ ‘Will she be too much surprised?’ he added. Shōnagon, saying that the little girl should by all means be fetched, answered his poem with another in which she warned him that he must not expect her to ‘drift seaweed-like with the waves,’ before she understood his intention. ‘Now, what made you think I should send you away without letting her see you?’ she asked, speaking in an off-hand, familiar tone which he