The abrupt retirement of his son, however, had a strange effect upon Ichigo. He could think of nothing save the youth’s last words. He dared not confide his fears even to his wife, who was already sufficiently distracted by her task of caring for Ohano and her anxiety about her son.
Against the advice of the relatives that Gonji be left alone to fight out the battle by himself, his father forced his way into the boy’s presence. Gonji responded neither to his knocking nor to his father’s imperative call. So Lord Ichigo forced the screens apart.
In one glance the father of Gonji saw what it was the desperate young man now contemplated, for he had robed himself from head to foot in the white garments of the dead. His face was, moreover, as fixed and white as though already he had started upon the journey.
“Gonji—my dear son!”
The elder Lord Saito scarce knew his own voice, so hoarse and full of anguished emotion was it. He stood close by the kneeling Gonji and rested his hands heavily upon the boy’s slender shoulders. Gonji looked up slowly and met his father’s gaze. A mist came before his eyes, but he spoke steadily, gently:
“It is better this way. I pray you to pardon me. I am unable to serve the ancestors.”
“It is not of the ancestors I think,” said Lord Saito, gruffly, “but of you—you only, my son!”
Gonji looked at him strangely now, as though he sought to fathom the mind of his father; but he turned away, perplexed and distressed.
“You must believe that,” went on his father, brokenly. “What is best for your happiness, that is my wish, above all things. If happiness is only possible for you by giving you what is your heart’s desire, then”—a smile broke over the grave, pain-racked features of his father, as though a weight were suddenly lifted from his heart at the sudden resolve that had come to him—“then,” he continued, “it shall be!”
With a cry, Gonji gripped at his parent’s hands, his eyes turned imploringly upon Lord Saito’s face.