Once Carmen's French maid, suspecting, perhaps, more than a purely altruistic intention in Gwendolen's persistent offerings, warned her young mistress against immoderate indulgence in sweet foods, and protested, with many gesticulations and a hint of tears, that the very last importation of Paris gowns already needed the letting out of seams, and would soon be unwearable. "Nonsense, Lizette," smiled the pampered one, "not eat dulces? I have always eaten dulces. How, in the Virgin's name, would one get through a novel without a plate of dulces beside it?"
The maid sent a hostile glance to Gwendolen, which the blonde beauty had the conscience not to resent. Rapidly increasing embonpoint was Carmen's one menace to beauty. She had already begun to pray to her patron saint for diminution. On the prie-dieu invariably lay a half-nibbled chocolate. Were not Gwendolen's friendship so open, so obvious, one might have suspected that she connived with fate to circumvent her Carmen's petition; that actually she assisted in the mournful process of burying perfect features and luscious, languorous dark eyes in warm cushions of pink fat. But no, we must not think such things of Gwendolen.
Because of the new intimacy and an increasing activity in Tokio society Gwendolen now saw much less of her schoolmate, Yuki. Perhaps it was as well. The Princess Haganè had her own lessons to learn, and they were Japanese lessons. Following close upon her first sewing-meeting came Yuki's presentation to Their Majesties. The court ladies welcomed her into their midst. As in humbler Japanese circles she was immediately asked innumerable questions. In return she began learning, from her high-born interrogants, the new language of extreme court ceremony.
Another reception and another sewing-meeting fell due. To the latter of these functions a mere handful of foreign ladies came. Gwendolen and Mrs. Todd were detained, actually, by some globe-trotting Washington associates, who landed that very day at Yokohama. In the two subsequent gatherings foreign attendance ceased altogether.
Each reception was, however, a "crush." Gossip is a magnet; the presence of eligible young men not exactly detraction. Mrs. Stunt and others of her kind went openly to see whether Pierre Le Beau would attend, and how he would conduct himself before host and hostess. It was the secret craving of such social vultures that a scene, the more disgraceful the better, be enacted for their entertainment, and the disappointment was correspondingly keen when neither Pierre nor Count Ronsard attended. The count, indeed, sent cards and a gift of flowers. No mention at all was made of the younger man.
Three of the Haganè official functions had taken place. March hurled itself gruffly into the outstretched arms of spring. Gwendolen knew why Pierre stayed away and why Ronsard remained so impassive. She had good reasons for not telling Yuki. At her friend's silence the latter wondered. Instinct told her that there was a deeper explanation than mere forgetfulness. More than once she had nerved herself to inquire; but always, just on the point of asking, something had happened to interfere.
A new cry, which affected Yuki far more openly, began to ring through the current press. "If complications have arisen in Manchuria let Prince Haganè go and unravel them!" This demand grew in insistence with each day. Presently the whole nation had arisen, and was clamoring, "Send our War Lord, Haganè, to the front!" Yuki waited patiently for her husband to inform her of the reception of this demand in high quarters. Like a good Japanese wife she dared not force the issue. On every side her part, it seemed, was to wait, to command herself, to endure suspense. To an impatient nature such as Gwendolen this would have been torture. To Yuki, trained through centuries of brave ancestors to play her woman's part of uncomplaining quiescence, the strain was not so great. Her ignorance of Pierre seemed, indeed, the heaviest burden. She scanned now the English columns of every paper, hoping against hope that her eyes would seize the printed assurance of his return to France. This was the young wife's prayer, uttered on her knees each night, muttered through pale lips a hundred times each day, that Pierre would go quietly home, and in his own dear land forget the woman who had broken faith with him. His threat against Haganè's life did not sound to her absurd. It re-echoed to her, always with a pang of fear. Love and hate alike give preternatural insight. By injury to Prince Haganè alone could Pierre gain full revenge. By this means he could strip the flesh from the bones of her loyal sacrifice, laying bare the grinning skeleton of a national disaster, wreaked through her.
Of course she could not speak these fears to Haganè. There was no one, not even Gwendolen, to whom she could whisper them. Haganè was now seldom at his home. She gathered, once or twice, from gossip of the servants, that he had spent the previous night and day at the Tabata villa, with a small company of statesmen as his guests. In the infrequent visits, she, studying his face with unconscious intensity, saw the same power, the same sadness, the invincible strength unshadowed and unexcited by this renewal of popular hero-worship. The thought that he might leave her alone, to fulfil the duties of his position, brought to the young wife a pang of terror, of misgiving. She believed it to be merely a shrinking from heavy responsibility. To outward appearance she and Haganè stood on opposite shores of an increasing chasm; but in her heart, when she dared listen to its timid pleadings, she knew it to be a narrowing, not a widening, void their joint lives spanned. She could not doubt that he felt some grave pleasure in seeing her on his expected visits to the great shell of his official home. The weekly receptions, where she bore herself with ever-increasing dignity and poise, did indeed give to the husband a deep impersonal satisfaction. It was more than satisfaction that he felt, as he saw the great filled packing-cases sent away each week to suffering soldiers in Manchuria.
Once, coming in upon her unannounced, as was his custom, he had suddenly taken the white thing in his arms, thrown her head back to his shoulder, and gazed into her eyes as though to drag from some hidden depth an awakening thought,—a cradled possibility. Yuki's lids drooped under the blinding force of his look. She felt as though a great silent wind blew, pinning her against a rock. Surely in his twitching face was more than a calm self-congratulation! It was the man, the master, summoning by right what was rightly his. Love—strong, terrible, yet tender, showed for an instant in his dark eyes. He went from her as quickly as he had come. No word had broken the silence. During the rest of that day Yuki rocked in her heart a new-born hope, a possibility so strange, so ineffable that she dared not open her eyes to its tiny face. With bowed head and fast-closed lids she hushed it. That day set her feet on the temple-stair of shining prophecy. But how dare she, already to one pledge so faithless, climb upward, even on bleeding knees, to that splendid portico above?
April spread her witchery of green and flowers over a thousand barren hills. Wild azaleas, wigelia, and bokè (pyrus Japonica) barred the slopes with pink and crimson radiance. Valleys, so lately brown, spread now a wide bloom of violets, a curdled residue of purple morning mists. Earth-dwarfs, congeners of Loki, who people the under-world, drove upward from their subterranean caves huge copper spikes of young bamboo—ten inches across, some of it, as it pierced the mould—a marvellous springing column climbing by joints, two feet a day, toward the sun, and casting off brown sheaths, like outgrown jackets. Children roamed the hedges, the rice-field dykes, and copses (forgotten and unbuilded, sometimes in the very heart of Yedo) for tsukushimbo and the yellow chrysanthemum. All gardens, even those amorphous products of Eurasian uncertainty surrounding the American Legation and Yuki's official home, needed to be fair. Birds came to them, and early butterflies. The sun poured down upon them in equal measure his golden cataracts of joy.