him in your glib Portuguese."
"I have heard," said the escort. "I heard your speech in the chamber; and I have heard you two in speech by yourselves."
"But—listen-" Adams began.
The escort shook his head. "To-morrow," he said, "you will go again before the General. Or the next to-morrow."
"But the priest?" Santvoort insisted in his question. "He has gone?"
"Yes," said the other. "He is gone."
"And the others—the traitors? The English-bastard-Frenchman and the misbegotten Hollander?"
"They," said the escort calmly, "are of little consequence."
"And we?" The question came from Adams.
"You," the escort shrugged his shoulders. "You would seem to be neither crooked men nor yet enemies."
"Why then are we prisoners?" Adams asked.
"Prisoners?" said the other in some surprise. "Who made you prisoners? There are no prisoners in this land. There are some men who await speech with the General . . ."
"Yes," said Adams. "And there are crosses with rotting flesh upon them."
"But no prisoners," said the other. "The crosses are for low-born, crooked ones who ply no good among men. Thieves and informers and mischief-makers of small account—but that account a bad one."
"We are safe then?" Adams exclaimed; and to Santvoort, too, the thought pointed towards speculations completely new.
"Safe?" said the soldier thoughtfully. The thought itself was as alien as the word. "Am I safe?"
"You have two very handy swords," said Santvoort. "We are naked."
"You have hands," said the other. "If I have swords, myene-mies also have swords, as yours have hands; so where is safety?"
"For me," said Adams, "I would deem it safe not to be set upon those crosses."
"Crosses," said the soldier, "are for malefactors. I have told you; thieves and house-burners and such."
"And who is to say whether or no we be malefactors?" It was again Adams who spoke; and he asked his question not as an eager, anxious man in present torment but as an old man wearied by a bother.
It was as a mere bother that the soldier, too, considered the question.
"Some say this," said he, "and some that. It is for the Shogun to judge. To-morrow, perhaps. Or to-morrow." He yawned.
The other two turned from him towards each other. Speech which before had been so sparse between them for the emptiness of their thought had now become itself a hazard. Yet they found themselves soon talking about the ship and the trimming of her that would be necessary, and the waiting of many months for the change of wind. They had seen the timber for new masts and spars, on junks and in gateways and bridges. Sections of it they had seen in the crosses. They would do better, Adams was sure, with an altered rig; instead of the square sails on the main and fore with the small lateen mizzen, they would try a fore-and-aft sail at the fore. The loss of charts and instruments was no great matter. He knew that he could make a cross-staff for the reading of his bearings, and with his eyes shut he could plot a course from Japan to Java. The chief question was how many of the fourteen they had left behind at Oita (striking out the dogs de Conning and van Owater) should survive their dysentery and fever, to man the Liefde homeward. . . .
So they were back in their old familiar world again where life was an hourly counting of resources and possibilities; a chaffering with Destiny.
Puzzled by the question of the Liefde's new rigging, and how far a dozen men could handle her; menaced by the gauntlet of Spaniards and Portingalls that would have to be run off the Philippines and Moluccas, they went at length to sleep.
CHAPTER V
THE next morning they were a little shy of each other, for their ecstasies of speculation had carried them further than the bounds of seemliness as these bounds appeared in the light of day. They were not given time, however, to adjust their relationship to their embarrassment, for they had only bathed and eaten when the escort told them they were to go again before the Shogun.
"We'll be shaved, Will," Santvoort suggested. "We'll show him a cleaner face than the padre's."
He crackled the stubble on his chin and asked the escort for the barber.
When they had been shaved—to the eyelids, ears and inside the nostrils so that only eye-brows remained—they followed across the outer yard and then through inner yards and arrived finally into a room where they had not been before. It was startling at first, because it was the only room they had entered in Japan with all its walls of masonry. Built in the fortification of one of the inner ramparts it had the aspect of a large prison cell with a door of bronze-covered timber, and was lighted only by lanterns.
Ieyasu was seated before a writing-desk studying what turned out to be the pair of brass globes from the Liefde. Beside the globes were the ship's log-book, some papers, Adams's dividers and a roll of charts.
"Look, Melchior," said Adams, and the two smiled. Once again in the mellow light that played on the familiar objects that had been blotted from memory by the apathy of sickness and despair, the intimacy of hope was again seemly.
The escort took instructions from the Emperor and then said, "Speak, An-jin. Tell him."
The questions he asked appeared to be mere formality. He had had answers to them all the day before and Ieyasu seemed to pay no attention to the translated replies. He was concentrated upon the brass globes and upon the two pale men. His tongue asked one question—some seeming triviality such, as whence or why they had come—and he got a straight answer in words; but his eyes and his knitted brows asked another to which the answers were not so straight or clear.
Adams was given a writing-brush and ink-tablet from the desk, and a sheet of paper. He scribbled a map of all the world as he knew it, starting from Holland and a little cross that was his own country, showing the coasts of the enemies, Portugal and Spain. He plotted the course Southward and Westward, Southward and Westward again, then North and again West, touching in the coasts as they had touched them on that two-year-long journeying till it ended in the Emperor's own Japan and the stone-girt room wherein he now expounded the way.
When he had done and laid down his brush, wiped his brow on his hand and his hand on the worn weft of his breeches, leyasu the soldier, the designer and the dreamer had found some answer to the question asked not by words but by his gaze and by the knitting of his brows.
Adams met his gaze and smiled; for there was a nearness in the gaze for a moment that bridged the accidental silence of strange speech.
Santvoort had followed the plotting of the course and the exposition so that when they were done he, too, stood back as though the completed task had been his also. He saw the interchange of glances and saw therein some glint of approval that gave him confidence.
"Ask him, then," he said quickly to the interpreter-escort; "ask his Lordship if we may do our business and go."
Adams, too, in the same moment, had leapt upon the same thought. But Adams, instead of tumbling into speech with the question, had paused.
He
