Yaé came with the girl friend, a lean and skinny half-caste girl like a gipsy, whom Yaé patronized. She came once again with the girl friend; and then she came alone.
Reggie was relieved, and said so. Yaé laughed and replied:
"But I brought her for your own sake; I always go everywhere by myself."
"Then please don't take me into consideration ever again," answered
Reggie.
So those afternoons began which so soon darkened into evenings, while Reggie sat at the piano playing his thoughts aloud, and the girl lay on the sofa or squatted on the big cushion by the fire, with cigarettes within reach and a glass of liqueur, wrapped in an atmosphere of laziness and well-being such as she had never known before. Then Reggie would stop playing. He would sit down beside her, or he would take her on his knee; and they would talk.
He talked as poets talk, weaving stories out of nothing, finding laughter and tears in what she would have passed by unnoticed. She talked to him about herself, about the daily doings of her home, its sadness and isolation since her father died. He had been the playfellow of her childhood. He had never grudged his time or his money for her amusement. She had been brought up like a little princess. She had been utterly spoiled. He had transferred to her precocious mind his love of excitement, his inquisitiveness, his courage and his lack of scruple; and then, when she was sixteen, he had died, leaving as his last command to the Japanese wife who would obey him in death as she had obeyed him living, the strict injunction that Yaé was to have her own way always and in everything.
He left a respectable fortune, a Japanese widow and two worthless sons.
Poor Yaé! Surrounded by the friends and amusements of an English girl's life, the qualities of her happy disposition might have borne their natural fruit. But at her father's death she found herself isolated, without friends and without amusements. She found herself marooned on the island of Eurasia, a flat and barren land of narrow confines and stunted vegetation. The Japanese have no use for the half-castes; and the Europeans look down upon them. They dwell apart in a limbo of which Baroness Miyazaki is the acknowledged queen.
Baroness Miyazaki is a stupendous old lady, whose figure might be drawn from some eighteenth-century comedy. Her late husband—and gossip says that she was his landlady during a period of study in England—held a high position in the Imperial Court. His wife, by a pomposity of manner and an assumption of superior knowledge, succeeded, where no other white woman has succeeded, in acquiring the respect and intimacy of the great ladies of Japan. She has inculcated the accents of Pentonville, with its aitches dropped and recovered again, among the high Japanese aristocracy.
But first her husband died; and then the old Imperial Court of the Emperor Meiji passed away. So Baroness Miyazaki had to retire from the society of princesses. She passed not without dignity, like an old monarch en disponibilité, to the vacant throne of the Eurasian limbo, where her rule is undisputed.