eyes of the two met and for a few moments were engaged in scrutiny. Adams looked into eyes that saw more than any other two eyes in that, or perhaps any, country. And they, in their turn, looked upon and recognised—a possibility.
"An-jin . . ." The Shogun mused aloud.
Adams had no thought wherewith to answer the thoughtful summons, if summons it was. Instead of thought he made a gesture. He slipped the cord necklace over his head, stepped forward and held it out with the clumsy pendant compass, to leyasu.
The Shogun took it from him.
Adams stepped back, stripped of his last possession—for his shirt and his breeches were no more a worldly possession than the skin on his back or the hair on his chest.
The gesture may have been a happy fluke that counted for much by virtue of its symbolic value. It was a gift, given with obvious freedom and spontaneity; it was useless enough to Adams now between walls of freestone six or seven yards thick with an avenue of corpses beyond. It was the only articulate answer he had to the speaking of his name—Pilot. leyasu spoke to one who stood beside him. The man left them and returned immediately with a silk coat which he held, for Adams to thrust his arms into the loose sleeves. A second coat was handed by the bearer to Santvoort where he stood behind Adams.
So far none but the Shogun had spoken, so that speech seemed to be a thing of the past and neither Adams nor Santvoort uttered either thanks or comment.
From their dull and despondent apathy this movement and pantomime braced them into a moment of suspense. But the faces about them were impassive as ever. Impassive was leyasu with his smile; impassive the guards at the door; impassive the coat-bringer, impassive the man who had sat or stood within sword's thrust of them for every moment that they had been within the walls. Nothing, from the impassivity of them all, was likely to happen. And nothing did happen.
A nod from the Shogun on his divan produced a movement and a beckoning from their attendant. Adams and Santvoort turned, in their new coats, to follow him out. Before they went, however, the eye of Adams again met the eye of leyasu.
In their outhouse they sat and talked, while within a yard of them was their attendant, nimble as a leopard and still as an image. His presence was the presence of two swords girded to a power like the power lurking in a cloud that can split the stillness of the sky with a blade of lightning.
They talked though there was still nothing, or next to nothing, that they could say.
Adams mentioned the rich gilding of the audience chamber, the bronze and silver-work of the lanterns. They examined their coats. Adams's was the better one. They agreed that there was a general friendliness in the atmosphere; that the things on and about the crosses had been, probably, only scamps and utter rascals. They had seen no skin that was white in all the festering garbage. They wished to God that they could have spoken in the gibberish of Japan; or they wished again that someone could have come to them through the doorway of their good Dutch or indifferent Portuguese or Spanish—someone other than the sinister padre.
"Perhaps he will come," Santvoort suggested.
"Perhaps," said Adams.
"We might kill him," was the Dutchman's next suggestion.
They looked at their attendant—hands tucked into voluminous sleeves half a dozen inches from sword-hilts.
"Perhaps," said Adams.
A menial brought them food again; broth and rice and shreds of fish. They ate and then slept.
When they awoke in the morning, before they had exchanged a word, a man raised himself from squatting and went out. His place was immediately taken by their regular escort. He accompanied them to the bath and sat beside them afterwards while they sunned themselves. Even their very fair sense of well-being after their weeks of malaise scarcely opened up talk between them. If they had known anything at all they could have talked equally whether their knowledge had been of doom, or of harmlessness, or of a dog's chance between the two. But they knew nothing—except, possibly, that all the others knew something which they could not tell; the Emperor and the silent, wakeful men about him and the inscrutable escort who never left them while they woke.
Speculation could lead them nowhere.
"You would not think," Adams ventured, "that they would give us handsome coats to kill us in."
Santvoort shrugged his Dutch shoulders. "You would not think," he said, "that a man would shake hands with himself in greeting of another. Yet these men do it."
"In a latitude of thirty," Adams said later, "it would be hotter than this."
"In the latitude of hell," said Santvoort, "it would be hotter still."
The thought led no further.
"The coats, Melchior," said Adams. "The coats are a good sign."
When they had eaten breakfast their escort rose and indicated their sandals, and beckoned them towards the courtyard again. His sign towards their coats, lying on their mats, may have been meant to inform them only that they were going again to the presence whence the coats had come. Adams, however, said: "Aye; we'll wear our coats."
They were dizzied for some moments in the soft light of the chamber. They made clumsy obeisance in the direction of the divan before they exclaimed aloud, "God's body!" and "Hell's damnation!" and stopped in their breathing; for beside the divan, with his thumbs stuck in his girdle, his head and shoulders peculiarly contracted in sly humility, was the Nagasaki priest.
He, too, for a moment was shaken. He saw young men shaved and clipped and kempt and natty in silk jackets where he had expected ragged castaways.
The padre's smile was not as the smile of the others. His eyes shifted and shot from Adams to Santvoort and the guards and attendants, and slid, sidelong, to leyasu.
The Shogun did not give him so much as a glance.
As though reading the pages of a deep and difficult book he kept the focus of his eyes and of his smile on Adams. When he had read the riddle upon the page, or the answer to the riddle in his mind, he nodded.
The priest's shoulders bowed still more narrowly. His tongue played over his teeth to moisten the lips.
"Englishman and Hollander," he said, speaking slowly and portentously in his excellent Dutch, "the Lord Generalissimo's Majesty charges you with piracy, robbery and murder upon his seas. You are conspirators against his Dominion. You seek to bring war into his peace."
It was still not at the priest that leyasu looked. He glanced once at Santvoort, once at their particular escort; and then rested his gaze on Adams.
"Liar!" Santvoort snorted. And then, "Will, for God's love-"
Adams began to speak.
He started in Dutch, laboriously and thoughtfully at first, and fairly calmly.
There was strict piety and no savour at all of profanity when he asserted, by God's Body and His Blood, that the padre lied and that he knew he lied. A copy of the Rotterdam Company's indenture with him, and its Articles, was in the ship's book for any man to see that the intent of the voyage was peaceful trade. The cargezon and the bills of lading would show that there was not an article on board that had not been lawfully bought and
