And they did strike. Long before Hideyoshi had tried out or finished his advantage, Oyea clandestinely entered the temple and there counselled the keeper—she had known him for a long time, and designed better than he knew or Yodogima anticipated.
The morning wended brightly, and the confiding princess, departing tenderly the vain, mute welcomings of an ardently-inclined, hard-accepted husband, trod expectantly toward the selfsame edifice, devised and made in the name of One who consoles, be it man or his cold-striven image.
Two lions carved in stone stood sentinel at either side the entrance. These Yodogima contemplated in the light of a new understanding, born not of tradition, but of faith proclaimed and knowledge derived. She stood there in the footprints of an enforced progression, and must no longer question dogma, though God be greater. Then she turned toward the gate, frosted with antiquity and jealous of its passage—a receptacle midway standing glaringly reminded her of a duty that fortunately she had remembered: Yodogima, too, cast her bread upon the waters, and passed on, that others might feast as she did penance.
Intercepted now by grated screens, warning her that she must ask and it shall be given, Yodogima looked and there beheld an image, a true likeness of what she all her life had painted sublime. Neither male nor female, but of wood, carved in lines more symmetrical than reality had effected, lacquered of gold finer than the wants of ordinary man had ever acclaimed, these surrounded with safeguards seemingly beyond human invasion, guarded on either side by emblems without either beginning or ending, all surmounted in a halo that two burning pots of incense ceaselessly wafted thither, this Yodogima, a penitent, believed with the spirit of one who would suffer no transgression to stay or hinder any fulfilment that her God might elect, and clapping her hands as inwardly decreed and outwardly expressed through time hoary invoked a passage no less distant or angelic than others perhaps as discerning or more plastic, of ages recurring and lands apart, had sought or denied in the lesser stranding of a course no more divinely conceived.
No further or greater low proving and encouraging of an inspiration born within, and the spit-ball propitiously thrown—not with vulgar meaning—the gates on either side the lofty emblem swung ajar—Yodogima had gained the promise of an inner sanctuary, where moods and morals are the more finely, if not subtly, wrought and there dwells no other god or goddess than communion withal.
Yodogima chose the right approach and her prognosticator the left. As an affinity draws, so it resolves only the transverse of an attending unity. The positive and the negative harmonize upon grounds no more irreducible, and that bonze followed his prey as the quadrant confronts a Cardan.
Lying there, at one side, behind closed doors, his own view unobstructed, this godly man, with the aid of Oyea, a Christian accomplices assurances, had penetrated deeper than the veil donned in faith gained and worn as a security provisioned, and discerning the motive augured a fulfilment that Yodogima alone had striven for in vain.
Once inside the four walls of this more than sacred, an over-beautiful, a divinely wrought, and suggestively potent place, our vainly beguiled and no less hard-pressed princess dropped hopelessly to her knees and gazing round saw no other thing than one bewilderingly done round and covering of modestly drawn yet bewitchingly significant prisms or reflections that led apparently to or from nowhere, yet emanating in or symbolizing afar the one ideal that had lured her thither.
At last! whispered she, as the sun above gathered and mellowed, merging and intertwining the fanciful and the real, till comprehension ceased and ideality carried her aloft the world she knew.
Only the soft matting underneath served her now prostrate form; the spirit ceased its aching quest: a reality bordering the extremes of ethereal generation possessed her. The great sun seemed marshaling its hosts. Glad bugles sounded. A myriad cupids, winged as doves and armed with bows and arrows, balanced and made ready for the flight. The great father of fathers reached into his mighty knapsack, and Yodogima breathed sparingly lest he withdraw empty the hand she longed to realize filled. The good benefactor smiled, and that she sorrow no more revealed to her the jewel—it was a son. And as the troopers charged earthward, their purpose revealing itself in every fiber, the glad tidings of a fulfilment worthy and complete filling her to overflowing, Yodogima opened wide her eyes, and—Katsutoya stood over her.