But those dreaded days still seemed a long way off. Meanwhile, Stanislas de Güldenfeldt sat during the whole of those sweet, summer afternoons in the presence of the woman he loved, drinking in the poison of her returning beauty, and dreaming dreams of untold happiness and content.
CHAPTER X.
In the Shadow of a Tomb.
It was an early summer, and as Pearl's health was sufficiently restored to render her fit for travel, she was ordered by the doctors to leave Tokyo. By the end of June the heat became intense, and early in July she and the Rawlinson ladies departed for Nikko, en route for Chuzenji.
On the borders of the beautiful lake of Chuzenji, Pearl, following her cousin's example, had built herself, during the first year of her arrival, a small and picturesque Japanese house. She loved this charming spot, as all must learn to love it who have passed the summer months by the borders of its blue, rippling water, and beneath the shadows of its wooded mountains. Pearl was peculiarly susceptible to the influences of nature, and the summers already spent by her at Chuzenji had been principally employed in sailing her little boat on the lake, watching with keen delight the changing scenery, sometimes so dazzling in its sunlit verdure, at others, beneath its sudden storms, so sombre, terrible, and forbidding. Pearl knew the lake under all its aspects, and from constant watching could foretell almost as well as a Japanese sendo, [11] the rapid transformations that metamorphosed in a few minutes the whole face of Nature. For it is a lake not only to be loved, but with its sudden rages, sweeping mists, and boundless, unknown depths, equally to be feared.
[ [11] Boatman.
During a happy summer on the Thames many years before Martinworth had taught her how to manage and to sail a boat, and the knowledge of this art had proved one of Pearl's greatest pleasures during those calm, peaceful months, spent high in the Japanese hills. She would sail for hours in her little skiff, gazing with eyes full of mystery into the glittering blue expanse of sky and waters, while the perpendicular sides of the sacred mountain Nantai-san, black with the shadows of its impenetrable forests, stood like a giant sentinel among its lesser brethren, overshadowing, in its gloomy, threatening darkness, the glowing outer world.
But this year, before attempting the ascent to Chuzenji, it was thought advisable, on account of Pearl's health, to pause half way for some days at Nikko. The nights of this lovely mountain village were refreshingly cool and invigorating after the suffocating airlessness of the city, whilst during the lovely summer days Pearl and her cousins would wander through the romantic grounds of the Nikko temples, or seat themselves for hours by the borders of the river, watching its hurried rush over rocks and colossal boulders, which year after year, to the destruction of roads and bridges, are borne by resistless floods from the mountains above.