The castle at Ozaka now stood in the main finished, and with Yodogima’s occupancy and the kwambaku’s favor at once sprang into prominence; not only as a strategic point of first importance, but as the very seat of empire socially, possibly politically, rivaling in all respects, if not eclipsing, Kyoto, the capital and ruling post since the days of Kwammu, some eight hundred years before.

This tendency on the part of the barons, to centralize all things at the new seat of power, did not meet with Hideyoshi’s broader views; he was democratic at heart, and beside a better judgment may have preferred “toadyism,” if such there must be, at long range. He had fought his way into the foremost rank, not to tear down existing institutions or to substitute one man for another in authority or to profit personally at the expense of others: he would rise, no doubt to a heavenly sphere, but in that should not disturb earthly conditions—it were the individual, refractory and crude, who must be thrashed into peaceful, tolerant attitudes—would carve out a new place or adapt himself to an old one, enabling direction and enforcement in a manner at once effective and for the betterment of all mankind. A laudable thought, perhaps, and with an organization in keeping with his power to subjugate Hideyoshi might have become in truth a god—self-made, self-standing, and self-perpetuating: as he no doubt planned and fairly believed within the doing of man.

Purposing to distribute and maintain separately these greater divisions of human interest and essential development, the kwambaku had as wisely or unwisely sent Ieyasu into the newer regions at Tokyo, hoping to transfer as far as possible from their capital, not only a possible rival, but the larger business activities of the empire; he had left the mikado, his court and the kuge (royalty) at Kyoto, best fitted as he believed by environment and tradition to perpetuate authority on the one hand and engender respect on the other; with religion or society in the narrower sense he had little to do and much less concern: both seemed essential or vital to priest or layman, nobleman or peasant alike, hence the better adapted without seat or prestige to encourage, less deny; his own fortress he believed well established at Ozaka.

Here he could look out, at close range, upon the best that a nation had evolved or the worst suffered; wealth and poverty were alike interesting and incumbent questions. Strength within and weakness without those walls afforded a contrast deep in purport. To the southward, not far distant, lay Nara, treasured home of the beautiful in art as well as the profound of learning. Kyoto, the capital, no farther away, sheltered the revered and the dignified in statesmanship and authority. The trader’s mart and the producer’s seat, least tasteful to him, had been transported and established farthest off: intrusted to hands that he believed best fitted for that and no other, Hideyoshi sought to set himself down to the realization of a larger desire, that other faith, the reincarnation, an inter-perpetuation and glorification of self and self alone.

“You are my only hope, Yodogima. Let faithfulness adjust itself not to the exigencies of mean occasion, but give me a son; the golden thread must be stranded unbroken. Ishida shall serve, and the captains honor; the wealth and the fashion and the culture of all men henceforth bows at your bidding.”

“Do not tempt me, my lord; I should rather trust Kami; the glitter but disheartens me: in prayer I have faith.”

“I would deny you nothing: only bear me a son.”

“Then grant me fair. Remove these fawning, cringing courtiers, and bide you here; I am only human.”

“Perhaps more. Yet I’ll vow you safe in hands I know—Ishida never yet played me false. Come; out with it; who is there, that you prefer? Hideyoshi may wax blind, when occasion requires, but he need not for that be treated as dumb—to the workings of conscience or fancy. My wife loves: is her husband but a scapegoat?”

“It may be true, and she none the less abused thus accused. Take this man Ishida from the castle, and keep him without. Perhaps then you shall know that a woman may love and yet discern, if not command. I am your wife, and shall serve you as decreed; a chance is all that I shall ask or that you may require.”

Ashamed of his conduct and mortified over anxiety, Hideyoshi did not as bid, but left the castle with his suit, including the reluctant Ishida; who by long years of faithful attendance had so ingratiated himself—designing accordingly—that the kwambaku had already been put to straits upon more than one occasion to find a real or plausible excuse for keeping the fellow longer in his service. Nor was Yodogima altogether alone in her estimation of him; many of the kwambaku’s oldest and most trusted friends had suspicioned the wily body-servant’s good faith, in fact, at this early day mistrusted ulterior motives and cross purposes should the master accidentally or otherwise happen to die.

The sudden departure, therefore, of Hideyoshi, seemingly miffed and more than ever under the influence of Ishida, who grew thereby less in favor among the captains, roused some of them to greater concern, if not about somebody’s sanity, then as to their own welfare.

Among these grizzled or enthusiastic warriors and supporters none took to heart more than Kuroda the matter of Hideyoshi’s seeming change; the two had grown up together, from early days, the one as retainer, the other his aid, and they loved each other as only men similarly situated and suited can love. Ishida, however, had poisoned the elder, and with his establishment at Fushima—selected on account of its isolation yet accessibility—the veteran fighter, Kuroda, was at last turned from the door.

“It is a terrible blow, Yodogima, to be torn from a lifelong friendship,” said he, to her, shortly afterward, while sitting in the fall of evening, at the Ozaka castle, overlooking the vast throngs around, who came and went with less attending joy or sorrow, “and Ishida is to blame. Yet I cannot criticise your resolve; you have fought a noble battle, my dear child: you did right, and there isn’t a man worth his while in Hideyoshi’s service but would stand by you to the last—I wonder; has the kwambaku lost his mind?”

“No. He has, though, lost confidence in me,” replied Yodogima, suppressing with difficulty the tears fast rising in her downcast eyes.

“Impossible!”

“It is true.”

“Then Ishida has done more than play the traitor; he has vilified a good woman: more, he has sought to ruin a worthy wife. I swear it, he shall rue the day.”

In all these years Yodogima had done everything in her power to live the life of a faithful, dutiful, and appreciative wife—such as the law and the pleasure of man had enforced. No longer might she question the act, or consult morals; she had chosen to abide the sterner edicts of a social organism utterly beyond the revision or prevision of any one individual, much less a woman: who had neither voice nor hand in the making, nor could suggest its undoing. Yet the closer the reality the more transcendant became her one inspiration. The star that had guided her from infancy shone the brighter for the gloom; that enshrouded a heart, in which there lived a conscience: the dictates of which had long ago flung her upon the mercies of a less grinding, more tolerant fate.

“I will be true to my Kami, though declared false by all the creeds of all the gods,” promised she, to herself, long after the grey-haired Kuroda had gone: when the stars had inspired that larger comprehension than of things we think we know.

The night brought, too, its peace of rest, and on the morrow Yodogima awakened to a juster realization of affairs close at hand; swift couriers brought tidings of a great change at the seat of authority, Fushima—lately established by Hideyoshi as his own official residence, but just now turned over to Hidetsugu, his nephew, whom he had adopted and made kwambaku, he himself assuming the title of Taiko.

Scorn, therefore, began, presently, to take the place of due consideration; rumor travelled fast, and the master’s change of title, and the adoption of an heir, soon raised the question of failure: Yodogima was now charged with vilest remission, and had not resignation sooner prepared the way she, too, must have fallen before the rank avalanche of duller ingratitude than follows in the wake of blind assumption.

The nation had been wronged, and the man who had placed his trust in her, abused: it devolved upon her and none other to right the grievous evil that had apparently been accepted as final.

“What in His name can I do?” begged and plead the princess, in the only way that she knew.

Then Oyea stealthily came to Ozaka, advising and befriending.

The older of the two wives did not threaten; she had learned by experience and conversion that the more effective course lay in subtler means, perhaps in truth.

“Why don’t you visit Hiyeisan? There is a temple there—”

“I thought you had turned Christian?” interceded Yodogima, thoughtlessly.

“So I have; but you may need not some forgiveness; circumstance no sooner governs than fulfilment predicates—the act, if not our meed. What matter how or where we pray and do, when wrought in heaven’s likening span? It is the consequence, and not its revelation, that makes duty paramount. Therefore, seek you, who have only to choose; it is for such as I to fashion, and when this particular god shall have served you as he never did me, why, then, you, too, may have occasion to flit and none to reason. I tell you there are as many ways as creeds, or less, and I’d try them out, all of them, though not so beautiful.”

Yodogima laughed outright in spite of conditions:

“What in heaven’s name has beauty to do with religion?”

“My dear Yodogima; it has everything to do with it; as it has to do with all things and everybody, the gods, their churches, and our bounties included. Do you suppose, for a minute, that I should be here, to-day, were it not for you? And it’s a part of my religion to serve and trust that trust may serve.”

“How kind!”

“You won’t fail me, will you, Yodogima?”

“I’ll think about it; I do not wish to be narrow, or—outwitted.”

An unlooked-for restlessness appeared to have swept into the land; and all the barons and captains grew uneasy with inaction or impatient of conditions. To Yodogima it seemed that in some way she alone were responsible for the cause, if not the effect, of such unheard-of conditions. Hideyoshi knew better; and smarting with shame or repenting of foolhardiness turned again toward Ozaka.

No such joy had come to Yodogima since the day Ieyasu promised his love and protection. While Oyea had never broken faith, and still professed friendship, the younger wife had long ago amply discovered the reason, and knew fairly in her own heart that once a wife in fact no husband might share his love or respect or favor without breaking the tenderer thread, no matter what the demands or the edicts of society and of law, or both. Whether for good or for ill there could be no compromise where an affinity had laid its hand upon that and that alone vital, if not sacred, unto itself. The older wife’s interest had resolved only the shielding of an inner vanity, as Hideyoshi’s accusations laid bare the outward appearance of that same inborn, unmanageable tendency: call it by what name one might, govern as the world should see fit, it were yet a force no less determinate of man than absolute in the revelation of God.

“I did you a very great wrong,” began Hideyoshi, by way of remission, as Yodogima and he strolled away, through the bramble, at the hillside, toward the lower castle wall; “and, as you see, in recognition of your superior trust and my acknowledged duty, I have willingly left Ishida behind. What more would you have me do, lady patience?”

“Love me, truly love me, my lord; then, also, you might, sometimes, address me, as Yodogima—only Yodogima, if no more.”

“And, will you, too, call me Hideyoshi?”

Yodogima bowed low, and the scarlet rushed to her face. The soft, warm air of early spring fanned the flame, and Hideyoshi felt as never before the glow and the warmth of rising confidence. An image carved in stone of the good and the great stood near at their side and returning the cherished salutation of that one higher held our taiko for the first time in his life approached this in some way fashioned god who had for many thousand or more years held and swayed the hearts of a nation so deep-grounded and far-seeing that no truth revealed or possibility conjectured had escaped their discerning, eager quest for that we wish were what we would it were. And approaching, he did the one thing that really distinguishes man and establishes for him a world apart.

Hideyoshi prayed; and Yodogima marvelled the force of an environment.

All her prayers had arisen within the solicitude of tried-out conviction, a consciousness fraught with distrust in everything not wholly proven or self-satisfying, were invoked of a Being that she knew, One standing revealed in the light of His beneficence, not some unknown but hoped-for God, conjured as the result of a longing on her part to escape the heartless dark of earth’s vain, momentary alternations. Follow that beacon—above the need or beneath the power of faith—she would; there could be no doubt in her mind as to His supremacy, Its ultimatum; but might she not for that, without overstepping the borders of a bidden track, nor any the less losing sight of her own true inspiration, might she not, in her flight toward an unalterably preconceived and self-attainable end so govern her steps that no conflict ensue with others bent on no less holy, yet more uncertain, grounds?

The stars seemed whirling in space measured and adjusted to the balance of a perfect equilibrium; all the elements, no matter whether it be the rushing of the winds, or the rumblings of an avalanche, or the belching forth of fire and the downpourings of waters from heaven upon earth, each found in due time and with perfect accord its own properly allotted place or plan; the soul and the body lived their destined duality with no more positive dissolution than death itself scarce renders; the negative forces of earth and eternity, heaven or oblivion, were but the positive’s own postulate, working out its never-ending, all-propelling grind toward an essential individuality, supreme and overreaching, whether wrought in the fiery evolutions of fate or suffered of an humbler, more easily gotten, commonly adapted belief, its godhead a trinity or as we please, and its doctrine but a faith or something less: why deny anything, anybody, or their pleasure?

Jokoin had fully demonstrated the larger possibilities of any ordinary sort of real susceptibility, Oyea had suggested the temple as a more fitting place, and a particular one as the most likely of transmission if not remission, and Hideyoshi really made no outward protest against its individual use or secular purposes: there must be some strange potency hidden underneath the force of prayer wafted within the portals of a place guarded so sacredly and approached in faith. The church too, then, either temple or edifice, held its secret, perchance worked an instrumentality, no doubt brought compensations that she, in her lone environment, had failed to realize: the world demanded of her that she leave no thing undone, make every effort to resolve its higher blessing, and through that and that alone she must and could attain her own true ideality.

Hideyoshi had, for all she knew or could surmise, done his part and faithfully.

“You have now my very soul, Yodogima, and are proffered as well its beggarly hull. All these trappings, with which I have fairly endowed you—a castle not made with common hands, the finest silks evolved of Uena’s grace, food that no god might disdain, and service from no lesser educator than time itself—are nothing as compared with the spirit I would invoke. Hear me, O Benten, O Yodogima, O Eternity; I must have life, shall survive the grave. Grant me this, mother of time, goddess on earth, and love to men; I can do no more; the blood of man is final; it is supreme, an only offering. Let me survive,” begged Hideyoshi, utterly oblivious of anything and everything, except the one woman who stood over with anxious, motionless face.

“It shall be done,” replied she, not any less driven or conscious of the broad seas of uncertainty raising and lowering their frail bark upon its never ceasing, always mysterious trend or disregarding travail.