Some kindly woman brought in the little Wistaria and held her towards him with a pitying exclamation, knowing that this little life could not but comfort the bereft man. He seized the child wildly in his arms. Then holding his one-day-old babe over the dead body of his wife, he swore a fearful oath of vengeance.
From that day the samurai had but one purpose in life, but one hope and ambition: to encompass the ruin and death of those he deemed the murderers of his wife. It happened that he came of a powerful family, who, in all his troubles, had offered him their sympathy and would gladly have received him back among them in spite of his marriage to an Eta girl. They were in high favor at court, and now they carried his case to the Shogun himself. The exiled samurai was forthwith ordered to appear before the Shogun, who had been deeply impressed and touched by his sorrows, and who had cause for prejudice against his former lord.
The Shogun offered to force his lord to restore to the samurai his estates and rank, but Shimadzu fiercely refused to accept these favors, wildly declaring that he would rather be buried alive than enter the service of such a lord. The Shogun, still anxious to please his family, begged him to make some request which it would be in his power to grant, whether for service under another lord, or at court in attendance upon his own person.
“I have but one request to make, my lord,” responded the samurai.
“That is?—”
“To be made the public executioner.”
All these things the Lady Wistaria now learned for the first time. She was as one struck down by a sudden shock of grief. In one little hour she had fallen from a great height, and had learned of things that had caused her to quiver with anguish and shame. She could not at once share the thought of the father whose wrongs haunted him, demanding vengeance and justice. She thought, instead, of other things. She was the daughter of the public executioner, the hangman!—an Eta girl—an outcast! The odium of it all crushed her. In that hour of agony her imagination conjured up the noble, highborn face of her lover, torturing her soul with its infinite distance from her. She knew now that he was as far beyond her reach as the sun.
“Shrink not, my daughter,” came her father’s voice harshly upon her thoughts; “your father’s hands are not stained in the blood of any of his fellow-men save those who were his by divine right. To underlings I gave the punishment of the public criminal, but to myself I kept the sacred task of seeking, tracking, ruining, and killing with my own hands the destroyers of my house.”
“Then,” said Wistaria, in a strangely pleading voice, “you have avenged my mother. All is done, all is finished. Oh, my father, let us forget all this past, and go away where we may not be known and pass our days in peace until the end.”
“Nay, all is not done,” replied the father. “You forget that while I have had the holy joy of executing the six murderers of my wife, their prince still lives.”