Page:The Tale of Genji.pdf/65

Rh ‘Well’ said Genji ‘and did she write a message to go with it?’ ‘Oh nothing very out-of-the-ordinary’ said Tō no Chūjō. ‘She wrote: “Though tattered be the hillman’s hedge, deign sometimes to look with kindness upon the Child-flower that grows so sweetly there.” This brought me to her side. As usual she did not reproach me, but she looked sad enough, and when I considered the dreary desolation of this home where every object wore an aspect no less depressing than the wailing voices of the crickets in the grass, she seemed to me like some unhappy princess in an ancient story, and wishing her to feel that it was for the mother’s sake and not the child’s that I had come, I answered with a poem in which I called the Child-flower by its other name “Bed-flower,” and she replied with a poem that darkly hinted at the cruel tempest which had attended this Bed-flower’s birth. She spoke lightly and did not seem to be downright angry with me; and when a few tears fell she was at great pains to hide them, and seemed more distressed at the thought that I might imagine her to be unhappy than actually resentful of my conduct towards her. So I went away with an easy mind and it was some while before I came again. When at last I returned she had utterly disappeared, and if she is alive she must be living a wretched vagrant life. If while I still loved her she had but shown some outward sign of her resentment, she would not have ended thus as an outcast and wanderer; for I should never have dared to leave her so long neglected, and might in the end have acknowledged her and made her mine forever. The child too was a sweet creature, and I have spent much time in searching for them, but still without success.

‘It is, I fear, as sorrowful a tale as that which Uma no Kami has told you. I, unfaithful, thought that I was not missed; and she, still loved, was in no better case than