Yes; Esyo just now told me all about it.
Women will talk, sighed Hideyoshi, mindful of a hundred battle fields, and no one woman that he had ever conquered.
And Ill show you that they can do more, threatened she, without a change to suggest an advantage.
Yodogima had taken desperate chances in calling Hideyoshi to account as done, but she had studied him well and believed herself capable—not that she might have need to combat any mean advantage; but gossip, vain assumption, had compelled now the assertion and maintenance of a womanhood; which otherwise had not been questioned.
Hitherto Hideyoshi had been held as interested only in the affairs of men, wholly absorbed with the making and unmaking of fortune or fortunes so distant and neglectful of any influence that women might bring to bear that none had essayed to do more than serve and chatter for centuries; but now, that he had so overstepped the bounds of conventional warfare as to indulge effeminate pastimes and cringe in the presence of a princess, he himself might be excused and she most surely condemned.
Ieyasu, even, who knew in his own heart, looked upon Yodogimas heroic stand as more the result of sustained loyalty than innate purity.
And that loyalty will preserve her, as self-denial is to be the making of me, muttered he, to himself, as the preparations for his submissive removal progressed: that, from a rich and populous estate, where men had learned to love and respect him from childhood, would sacrifice their lives and their energies to defend him, to a new, and a strange, and an isolated keep, where disorder, dissatisfaction, and crude and crumbling walls abounded: that, too, with only a bodyguard, his Saji, and the vain, if not unscrupulous, Esyo to accompany him.
And as the little straggling band marched away, harboring its jealousies, it may be revenge, certainly its ambitions, Yodogima turned from them in compassion—her heart seemed breaking, but duty rallied to the call of pride, and she forgave him, perchance tried to forget.
Esyo could not be so easily dismissed; her parting words had lingered, now roused in Yodogima to the full some comprehension of what her father meant in turning her out threateningly in the company of two seemingly lovable and harmless sisters. His guidance and protection had been a world to her now, that she had, as she alone believed, reaped the fullest measure of bitterness, wherein God has endowed that man shall covet. Charms had been easily flung at them, Esyos hinted admonition seized upon with avidity, and the body sacrificed upon the altar of rapacity, but the spirit rebelled and held her fast in its higher reach.
Perhaps, Yodogima, the bushido might afford you, as it did our father, some really honorable means.