With being told that Hideyori had not the intelligence to cope with Hidetada, and deciding that only Yodogima stood between himself and ultimate supremacy, Ieyasu estimated carefully the former, and planned the necessity of immediate action against the latter.

He had grown old in the harness, would thence witness a widening of the channel: the prop that he had visioned must inure to the swift, for Hideyori justified a mother’s confidence.

The lotus studding the ponds below lagged lazily in the breeze that fanned them off the coast at Ozaka. Softened evidences of his good taste toned and inspired every nook and cranny of those immaculate halls and safely trodden grounds, but steel had marked each turn toward their advance. Must steel again assert superiority? Would he die fighting? Why should man at first despise, then relish, the olive? In his younger days Ieyasu, too, had balked at culture, but with ripened years it had become a slogan, compelling, all-forceful, and inevitable.

“I’ll crush him, untutored man, vain infant, inspired mongrel; endowed with better wit than I, he lacks only the wisdom—but his mother! Oh, well; she might as well be Christian, and dangle her bells at church; the taiko’s jingle shall be split, and men can very well spare their better halves, in the pursuit of a less obstreperous divertisement—

“Hideyori, my lad, what do you think of women?”

“They are the pendulum in a clock.”

“Pouff! I’ll make cogs and spindles of them. Kitagira, show this young man thence he came, and send Hidetada hither; I am satisfied; either of you have more brains than pluck; the sword is master, and not a balancer. Hence; and let me strike while the blood yet runs hot; I have neither time to wait nor patience to woo a goddess that isn’t mine; Ozaka must fall.”

“I thank you for the entertainment, also for losing your head, horonable host,” vouchsafed Hideyori, in parting; “the former, because it is meet to respect gray hairs: the latter, that honest men may make due defense. You need not spare Kitagira, or his kind, for escort; a newer generation makes it possible for me to leave here, not as you once entered there—in a woman’s palanquin—but as the defender of my own fortune, and the builder of a nation’s hope—both the usefulness and the sacredness of mothers: no less their motherhood.”

Hideyori withdrew, the more a man, if such had been his failing. His elder at arms and with diplomacy, had thrown to the winds all the finer notions that the younger had been taught about man’s province and woman’s part. Look as he would into the fading realities of a living yesterday, adjure from scenes imagined against the dawning to-morrow as he did, the one thought that man is a free agent and beholding only to the God that lives within drove him toward his destiny like the thundering waters of a mighty gorge leap and laugh their way to the calm and peace always lying somewhere in the untimed, but certain beyond. And as he tramped along, looking to the right and to the left, there appeared myriads of living atoms answering to the same call that so eagerly gladdened his step, and when the sun burst through, upon these, their faces turned heavenward—only the dead and unborn failed a natural appeal, Amaterasu had written Ieyasu down, and the younger man hastened to accept the responsibility.

“Woman a slave to man, men the creature of state, and the state no better than a mechanism? Hearken not the vulture, but to arms: Christ died upon the cross; let these hills and valleys grow green in the blood of Hideyori; a mother’s will and not a father’s way is the final test of a beginningless God.”