“My lord, I am unworthy to approach your honourable lordship.”
“Away with excuses! Come here, I say.”
“My lord, I cannot venture so far.”
“You try my patience beyond its limit, sirrah!”
Terumasa rose to his feet precipitately and crossed the intervening space to where Nagai crouched. The sweat burst out on the four men who were witnesses of the scene; they trembled for what would come.
“Why do you not come when I call?” thundered Terumasa, seizing the other’s wrists and dragging him over the floor. “I’ll teach you to obey at once!”
Terumasa being a big man and possessed of great strength, Nagai was as a sparrow in the talons of a hawk and entirely at his mercy. Before he had time to think, much less to struggle, he found himself landed by the cushion where Terumasa had been sitting since his arrival and on which he again seated himself.
“Look at me, sirrah!” commanded Terumasa.
“My lord,” said the frightened wretch, “I cannot do that.”
“Look at me. You were not such a craven when you killed my father Nobuteru in cold blood, on the ninth day of the fourth month in the twelfth year of Tensho.”