He heard his steps on the garden walk dying towards the gate.
How had she discovered with whom he was going?
If she would only weep or cry out, or move, or break in some way this terrible stillness. If she would only reproach him. But she said nothing, nor even sighed. She seemed like a person stricken not by grief, but death. Then he began to talk again, telling her of the arrangements he had made. How M’Gourley San would look after her, just as he had done before, till he came back. And he would write every week—till he came back. And they would all be happy together again, as happy as ever they had been—when he came back.
To which she replied:
“If you are going away to find happiness, my happiness is great.”
Fancy a white house, lantern-lit, and steeped in dusk, a tall man walking away from it rapidly, three Mousmés on their knees on the veranda crying after the vanishing form: “Come again, oh, condescend to come again quickly!”
The sound of their voices rings in his ears as he passes through the little gate. He hears it pursuing him like the faint murmur of bees, until a puff of wind blows it away and replaces it by the faint sound of the city below.
Come again! He will never come again to lie in the hammock beneath the cherry trees. Never more shall Lotus-bud hand him the night lantern to light him to his bed, nor thy small hands, O Pine-breeze, bear him the brown leather cigar-case that thy small nose loved to smell!
As he came down hill towards Nagasaki he felt as though he were leaving spring for ever behind him.
Thrice he stopped as if to return, and stood gazing into the darkness of the uphill path, listening to the wind in the branches of the lilac trees.