“They have all gone to bed, I suppose?”
“No, young mistress, I expect Shota back from his errand every second. As soon as he comes, he shall be sent to bed, and until then—”
“Oh, patience and more patience until I shall have no more!— When we have got to-night such a chance as we can ever hope for! Now, listen, Shin don, I hope you, after all this time, are ready to-night, with your mind made up?”
Tsuya, covered only by her under-robe of bright red dappled crepe which clung close to the lines of her form, sat unmindful of her white feet peeking out, in their dainty arrangement, from under the quilts, as she put her hands together, as in the manner of prayer offering.
“Whatever do you mean by being ready and so forth, my young mistress?”
Overcome by the force of the beauty before him, a force that seemed to sweep away his soul, the man lifted his eyes in a stare almost too frank and childlike for his twenty years, and waited for the very answer he was afraid to give to himself.
“Run away with me to Fukagawa, to-night. That’s all I’m going to say. See how I pray you!”
“Impossible,” he said; but he was really troubled to think how he might steel himself against what seemed to tempt him with a stupendous force of voluptuous bewitchery. Since he came into the service here, as a young lad of fourteen, he had got on so well that his master had come to repose in him so much confidence as he would do in few young men. A year or two more of patience and good work, and his master would set him up in business and, if he could not have the happiness of marrying the lovely Tsuya, he would be on his way to whatever fortune and name he might desire. What, then, would be the happiness of his old parents who were living only in hopes of such time? The idea of taking advantage of a girl still too young, the daughter of his own master, was preposterous; he could not—he should not do it; repeatedly he told himself.
“So, Shin don, you’ve forgotten what you promised me the other day, have you? Yes, now I see it all through. It was only a plaything you meant to make of me. And when it came to that, you would throw me away. It is as plain as I would ever care to see it.”
“It is nothing of the sort that—”