The great sacrifice that Yodogima made only strengthened Hideyoshi’s respect for her, whetted the appetite to a keener appreciation of the virtues underlying righteous generation. Ieyasu had surrendered the heart to save his neck; no such thing as pretence or any amount of subterfuge could deceive the inner workings of an understanding wrought in the light of penetration like Hideyoshi’s. Yodogima had reserved the heart, sacrificing personal predisposition only that she might serve fairly the honor of an under-sex—she had not submitted through compulsion or fear of any man; the kwambaku knew that, if others did not, and the very consciousness of it made him what no earthly power could have done.

“Such generosity,” said he, to Oyea, in answer to her questioning, “cannot be requited so easily; there must be a place set apart for them; perhaps among the stars, and such as you and I can best attain our peace in humbler ways—reverence has withstood the storm of ages.”

“But are not the gods self-asserted?”

“Well, yes; I once thought so, perhaps do yet; but self-assertion, not grounded upon self-denial, may prove an empty blessing—as it has with me. Would you profit by example, then look; even Hideyoshi has found it meet that we reason together; who declares himself wiser than the humblest is in truth an ass; deception cannot weather the test of time.”

They were sitting in the dusk, midway between day and night, and arising, Hideyoshi approached the family shrine—it seemed empty and so unlike the needs of distinction, yet the kwambaku had, upon his return from Odawara, stopped at Nakamura and done reverence to his long buried but sadly neglected parents. Nor had Nita (a first, but intractable, therefore divorced, wife) been passed by without some little recognition—possibly as an encouragement to this one, Oyea, in this her most trying need.

“What of night following the day?” asked he, of her, lighting one, then the other of five carefully selected and wistfully named sticks of incense for her to sniff and guess or call as pleased her most and fitted best his mood.

“That a sun may rise to outshine another,” retorted she, wholly mindful of her own situation, if not his method.

“You say rightly, Oyea, and woe be unto him or her who would deny or abuse the virtue of sniffing; only through a son can man attain heaven.”

Hideyoshi’s words pained Oyea; she had trusted him, served dutifully, and conformed to the requirements of the age, only to be told in the end that there could be no salvation for her—the stork had withheld her lord’s divinest blessing.

Oyea looked round at the scant necessities with which all her life she had been making both ends meet that he, her husband, should lack no aid within her rendering to help him onward toward the goal she, too, believed him most worthy to hold. Were she to receive now, at the bidding of charm, or the failure of chance, only the bare habiliments of respectable doing? She had forfeited at marriage better opportunity, suffered the finger of scorn more than once, upheld patiently the laws of the land and bowed reverently before the gods of time, and yet no one had awakened within her a light revealing more than earth’s proffered bounty. And if the bitter must be hers, why not as well partake of the sweets?

The very thought for the moment raised her from lowest despondency to highest anticipation. Rising to her feet the world seemed rejuvenated with a thought as glorious as new—Hideyoshi lay stretched upon the matting, snoring away fonder dreams than she had dared conceive.

The cold sweat oozed in beads at her forehead.

Here, contentedly and at her mercy, rested in peace and expectation the one who could at will and without retribution give or take her happiness. Then conscience rushed to the fore, and Oyea stood more pitifully than purpose had made her. Calmly surveying the relaxed features in whose justness had been for a lifetime her only faith, the at last enraged wife unwittingly loosed her would-be grasp in the face of another vision which as incomprehensibly rose to stay her hand.

“Woman!” snarled she, “the curse of her kind, and a vexation always. I’ll don another dress: therein lies my only recompense.”

After a while Hideyoshi arose, and rubbing his eyes, asked doubtfully:

“Did I sleep, Oyea?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Then it was a dream: I would that it were real.”

“For that, it may be none the less.”

The great man looked up, puzzled though wilful. He could, nor did, comprehend that she, too, might have dreamed, marvelled the penalties exacted of rightful living, and evolved a retribution, if less human, then the more in keeping with an instinct born of subtler virtues.

“You shall not deny me, Oyea?” plead he, half doubtful of the motive, if altogether innocent of her intentions.

“Deny you? Of what? Yodogima?”

“No. A son.”

“Aye, aye, my lord. A higher authority than mine denies you that.”

“There is none higher. You are my lawful wife.”

“Fie on you! We but declare, while impotency reigns. My faith is in virtue.”

“Then I’ll not trust you—though the bonzes had served better, your purpose, than these self-called priests: who preach to prey while their victims pray but ‘peach.’ I once had confidence in you: I never had any in them.”

“What of priests and bonzes, you might yet better charge a blessing to the care of one whose influence nor beauty stands anyone in hand or harm: though only a wife, I should serve no less an encouragement.”

“Rickety, rickety, fiddlede, fiddlede; a woman is a woman, her tongue an appendage. Therein the certainty of wagging. Both jealousy and consistency may be jewels, superb and allusive, but each in a tiara. I’ll let you have it out in Azuchi; Yodogima is already at Ozaka: between creeds, or independently, there may yet formulate a crown. See you that your conduct is no less attuned than her estimate deserves; I have business at the capital.”

Taking his departure forthwith, Oyea bowed low and reverently—not so much, perhaps, now, out of respect for a husband alone, or for anything he had done personally to deserve as much, but more as a result of some inner quality or natural-born trait that abuse could not eradicate or dull even into vain misapprehension. Oyea was of better stock than Hideyoshi: better insofar as tradition or probability had seen fit to record and make known, yet looking out upon the world in which she lived, and reflecting the obligations imposed by a social organization with which it seemed that she had had so little to do, a growing sense of something wanting burned the harder into her now softeningly bewildered consciousness. Had she accused him wrongly? Might it be, after all, verily some shortcoming of her own which had for so long a time denied to him an inalienable right? And what of society?

Her religion—that one handed down from an ancestry antedating all creeds, surmounting any profession—had provided the means of escaping just such a failure as she, by virtue of feeling as pitted against reason, had suffered; though as religiously, if not as rigorously, courted. And why had she done so?

The only reason that she could fairly call to mind was that the priests had told her differently; that a dawning trust in Christ was at that very moment sapping the only foundation that she may have had for a belief; that the doctrines of a new church were separating her forever and helplessly from all that had been dear and possible to her and hers—and, asked she, of herself, and her God:

“For what?”

Oyea awaited patiently some response from this newly proclaimed Savior, whom the priests had set over her and home—no other voice than conscience answered; and therein she conjured many thoughts, divined a reason for things, and fell hopelessly at the shrine of an uncontrollable, undenying, born-unto impulse. Yodogima possessed an attraction, Kami in his wisdom had equated life and death, and no man’s blood or woman’s want could save a soul or regenerate an unregenerate.

Then she marvelled the seeming vanity of all that is more than crude, and out of the black there rushed the possible saving grace of man’s own involution-both prayer and confession had failed to wrest her from worse than perdition.

“That woman enjoy my husband’s favor, in a castle of her own, because she is more than I? Hugh! I’ll see her humbled.”

“Otoshi?”

“Yes, my lady.”

“Fetch the smelling-salts, and my vanity case. Further, I shall not require your service, perhaps, till the sun is risen—at Ozaka.”