“Yes; it shall then be yours; and you, a more gracious queen.”

The bare thought of gaining such preferment only at the will of a much sought after sister, and that, too, for the sake of serving rather her convenience, stung Esyo as no words could have done. She would fight out, now, the course sooner determined upon; hence Hideyoshi, on the very next day, found it agreeable to dispatch, without any compunction upon his part, an invitation to Ieyasu forthwith to come to Azuchi, there to pay respects and claim his intended bride.

Other advice went along, however, as Jokoin well knew, which was neither intercepted nor answered, advising him to do no such thing, but to prepare himself at once for defense.

CHAPTER IX

In the meantime Ieyasu had concluded it wise to listen to the proposals of Nobukatsu, his nearest neighbor at the west and the eldest living son of Nobunaga: pretender to the father’s estates and brother to Nobutaka, a recently defeated ally of Shibata.

This young man’s prospects had been effectively shattered, in consequence of the fall of the latter and the removal of Ishida, his supporter, to Mino; still he searched everywhere in the hope of finding some daimyo minded and able to espouse his cause against the now only too patently determined usurper, Hideyoshi. Ieyasu based small reliance upon any strength or power to be gained by as doubtful an arrangement, but wanted more some plausible excuse for the making of so unequal a stand; as had been prematurely forced.

Nobukatsu was generally looked upon as the rightful successor to his father’s rank and place, hence any friendship shown to him should in one way or another develop some greater claim to popularity. It had also come to be considered by neighboring daimyos as little less than heroic even to dare attempt any sort of armed defense against the up-to-that-time invincible Hideyoshi. All these reasons were wholly patent to Ieyasu—young, able, and perhaps ambitious. True he had not given any especial thought to the future, save only the immediate relations growing out of an endowed situation, and—Yodogima. Love, with all its soothingly absorbent benefactions, remained uppermost in his mind: was the goad that directly spurred him to undreamed energies and unlikely undertakings, would risk his life and fortune for the pleasures of a single, transcendent joy.

Yet underneath this younger development there may have lurked the ecstacy of a sub-conscious determination to loom large in the more sordid events then subtlely approaching. Ieyasu bore the blood of the Minamoto; those giants of old, whose daring alone had curbed and clipped the Taira: with such a prestige, and so potent a cross, the temporarily humbled prince of Mikawa, Ieyasu, may have inwardly harbored, without any apparent conviction or consciousness, the possibilities of a posterity acknowledging none other for father than Ieyasu and for mother Yodogima.