"To bargain thus with a mere girl—" the samurai muttered. Then he threw his head back. "My blood is in your veins. I trust you. Give it."
Yuki, choking back a little sob, fell at his feet and touched her forehead to the floor. She heard his quick and heavy tread shiver through the house. Then followed, coming in her direction, the gentler steps of Iriya.
Yuki lifted her arms. "Mother, mother!" she cried passionately, "why could I not have been born a man? To die for one's country, in battle, with the thought of the Emperor like a cooling draught at the lips! To stand on the great black ship, smiling in storm and snow and fog, driven in like fate itself to glorious chances! Oh, that is to live! But to be a woman—"
"Yes," said Iriya, quietly seating herself. "The fortunate are those who know, in this incarnation, full expression of a burning heart."
"Do you feel so too, mother?—you, who are always so tranquil and so dear?"
"I too am a samurai's daughter. In the strife of Restoration days I saw my father and my brother die—I saw my mother live."
"Oh, dearest one, how selfish we young souls are. We are like green fruit that has no mellowness. You have suffered so deeply—and I never guessed."
Iriya, with half-closed eyes on the garden, uttered words which until the hour of her death never quite loosed their echoes from the girl's heart. "Young souls are indeed unripe in the ways of love. That suffering of mine was mere indifference to the grief I shall know if, at an hour like this, with Nippon in the throes of re-birth, my only child should become the wife of her enemy."
Yuki cowered back. She could not look her mother in the face. Up to this moment she had never dreamed that Iriya had been told anything. The sense of comradeship and of interdependence between a Japanese husband and wife is very strong; but in this case, where Tetsujo's angry violence had been so out of keeping with the whole tenor of his life, Yuki was perhaps justified in feeling that he would prefer to maintain a sullen reticence.
Iriya's words, and the way she spoke them, showed not only that she was conversant with the whole threatening situation, but that she had thought and prayed deeply. It did not seem at all the every-day domestic Iriya that spoke, but an older and more impersonal spirit, issuing from borrowed human, lips.