Ebook Daughters of Nijo / A Romance of Japan

Illustrator: Kiyokichi Sano

 Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II AN EMPEROR'S PROMISE CHAPTER II An Emperor's Promise ON a cold morning in the month of January the Empress Dowager died. She had returned from a ceremony of the thirtieth anniversary of the death of her late consort. Exhausted, broken, and ill, she had come back to her country-seat, her visit to Kyoto having been too much for her strength. That night messengers went in haste to the capital, and the following morning brought to the bedside of the dying Empress her son, the Emperor, and his consort. All night long the little Princess Sado-ko crouched in the darkness of her room alone. Wide-eyed and tearless, she looked out from her shoji at the ghostly snow which shroudedher beloved trees and flowers in so cold and chilly a garment, eerily touched by the moon- rays. She heard, without heeding, the movement and stir within the palace; the muffled beat of a drum without quickly hushed. Early in the gray morning the royal visitors arrived. Sado-ko knew that some catastrophe was about to fall upon the palace and her beloved grandmother, and so she waited through the night for the end. She did not know that below in the sick chamber the heartbroken Emperor knelt on his knees by the side of his mother and besought her, like any ordinary man, to speak but one word to him, to express but one wish ere she must leave -him. The Dowager Empress opened her tired eyes, attempting to speak. She could only murmur in the faintest of voices, so that her son scarcely caught the words: ? Sado-ko ? Pray thee to care for ? Sado-ko! Then her eyes closed as though the effort at speech had been too much for her, butthe Emperor knew that she heard the words he spoke into her ears.