"You become an eta if you marry her," Hoshiko's mother was saying.
"In Japan," admitted Arisuga. "That is the way the unwise men of old worked to prevent the marriage of etas—and so blot out the caste. But this is China."
And now as the young soldier looked down upon the pitiful little heap at his side, a great shame rose in his soul that he had ever thought of marrying her for a little while, and, quite like Arisuga, he rushed in his penitence from one extreme to the other.
"By all the eight hundred thousand gods, I will marry her for all my lives!"
No adjuration, no promise, could be greater than that. Some men had sworn fealty to a woman for two lives—some for three or four—and it was said that once a man had sworn to love a great poetess for seven lives; but no one had ever yet, so it was said, sworn his love, much less marriage, for all his lives. Yet even this did not stop the savage mother of Hoshiko, bent upon her daughter's honorable death rather than her dishonorable marriage.
"How will you assure me of this?" demanded she.
"By nothing but my word," said Shijiro, with all his samurai's haughtiness.
"Gods! Gods! How mighty and wise you are, lord!" sobbed Hoshiko, kissing his feet.
"But you will not be satisfied to live in China. You will take her to Japan, where both will be accursed etas," went on the implacable mother. "You are a soldier."
"I am a soldier," answered Shijiro Arisuga. "In the army there is neither eta nor samurai. All are equal. All are sons of the emperor. This is Yamato Damashii. The New Japan! And I am Shijiro Arisuga! That is the end!"