MALE AND FEMALE NAKŌDŌ. (MARRIAGE NEGOTIATORS.)
When soberness and consciousness returned, his mortification was so great that he could not bring himself again to face the smith, and he informed the Duke of what had occurred. The latter’s passion was not so strong as to make him unable to subordinate it to his policy of retaining Muramasa at the court. He judiciously refrained from taking any further steps to carry out his design, and he was too kind-hearted to show any displeasure towards the sorely distressed old servitor, whom, on the contrary, he dismissed with gentle words and presents. Muramasa’s action in this affair was based upon opinions and convictions which with him were the result of individual thought, uninfluenced by surroundings and customs. His love for his daughter, like his love for his art, was a deep, holy feeling, emanating from the man’s inner nature. He felt that a life amid the rivalries and petty jealousies of the court could not afford her any real happiness or content; and the sturdy independence of his character prevented him from becoming imbued with those social prejudices which look to outside glitter, and to which weak natures readily succumb.
That Sennoske should have succeeded in ingratiating himself into the favor of such a man, who until now had kept everybody, high and low, at a distance, was something at which the good people of Kuwana marvelled not a little. It could only be ascribed to the boy’s frank and winsome face, to his manliness and skill of arms far in advance of his age, added to great reserve and modesty of demeanor. The court, taking its cue from the character of the Duke, had assumed a tone of levity and of boisterousness which was especially affected by the younger samurai, and to which Sennoske, with his modest and retiring ways, was almost the only exception. It was probably more especially this latter quality which had gained him the regard of the grim old smith, who taught him many new points in regard to the use of the sword, and even a few general rules as to the making of one.
Two or three days seldom passed without seeing the lad at the forge, where he was always well received. Was it altogether the samurai’s love for the sword which caused these frequent visits; and were not O Tetsu’s bright eyes even a stronger attraction? It was merely a repetition of the old, old story. When he had first come, she was only a child; and as she gradually budded into womanhood before his eyes, the young man, whose way heretofore, confined to hard work and study, had been serious and monotonous, did not himself know what it was that all at once made him look upon life and its surroundings with such bright, joyful, enthusiastic feelings. The intimacy growing up between the two young people must have been observed by the smith; and if, even by his silence, he encouraged it, the reason was simply that the boy’s character impressed him with a sense of his worth, and he felt that, joined to Sennoske, his daughter’s future would be in safe hands. Gradually his favoritism grew beyond the limits of mere passive indulgence; and Sennoske, becoming almost like a member of the family, passed in the company of O Tetsu many hours of supreme happiness such as it is only given to true, open, and honest natures like his to enjoy. Sennoske’s father knew nothing of this, and believed that his son frequented the smith’s forge merely for the sake of the lessons he received in swordsmanship and forging, or at most to listen to the smith’s weird tales of chivalrous daring, which, on returning home, he sometimes repeated. Before the young man was even himself aware of it, his passion for the girl was so great that he felt he could not live without her; and although heretofore he had had no secrets from his father, he experienced in this instance a nameless, undefined dread of disclosing his attachment. He loved, he fairly worshipped, his father; but the love was mixed with a great deal of reverential awe and deep pity, often amounting to anguish, at the sight of that frozen look of sorrow and gloom which never left Mutto’s face.
SENNOSKE AND HIS FATHER.
When not directly engaged in instructing his son, Mutto’s only discourse had been on the obligations of a true samurai; and even here he confined himself almost exclusively to what his listener well knew was a samurai’s first and chief duty,—the kataki-uchi (vendetta). Instance after instance did the youth hear of men who had sacrificed brother and sister, wife and concubine,—nay, sometimes even father and mother,—to carry out some just vengeance, and who had died happy because they survived the satisfactory end of their vendetta long enough to cast one glance of exulting victory upon the dead or dying body of their victim.