did not ask the question.
In his silence his gaze steadied upon leyasu, and he continued to smile.
The interpreter put his question and received first a pause and then an answer. He gave it to them, slowly as leyasu himself had spoken slowly. The address of it seemed mostly for Adams.
"It is a poor country upon which you have chanced," he said. "Its hospitality is meagre and shabby. Nevertheless, such as it is, it is yours. You are his Lordship's guests."
He bowed before leyasu and they also bowed; for the doorkeeper was swinging open the door and they were being conducted out through it into the twilit passage and the sunlight beyond. leyasu had made his guess; for guessing was his occupation and his sole preoccupation now. His greatest faculty was that of assessing men; of forming a quick opinion that this man was a keeper of faith while the other, possibly, was not. It was for the purpose of exercising this faculty that he was now at Osaka instead of three hundred miles away in his fortress court of Yedo.
For two years he had searched his country from its one horizon to the other for a peer, and found none; and he was now preparing to exterminate a rival.
For a generation and a half of men the Mikado had been confined in the sacred retirement of Kioto which was to last, undisturbed, for three centuries. For those three centuries the ruler of the country was a military dictator, the Shogun— generalissimo. So absolute was he, and so negligible (and revered) the Mikado, that foreigners so intelligent and truth-seeking as Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries, as business men and solid sailors from Portugal and Spain, recognised the Shogun as "Emperor"; and an Englishman, thirteen years later, described the Mikado as "thould Pope of all Japon."
The first of the ruling Shoguns, Nobunaga, cut his belly at the successful treachery of an underling Lord when leyasu was a brilliant and courageous soldier of thirty-eight. Eight years later leyasu was appointed by Hideyoshi, the second of the Shoguns, as governor of the Eastern Provinces, whose turbulence and hardihood had brought about the death of Nobunaga.
Hideyoshi, the second Shogun, before his death appointed leyasu president of a board that was to act as regent for his infant son. The infant son and his mother leyasu placed in retirement, for the obvious successor of Hideyoshi was not any possible board or council but the president, leyasu. As governor of the Eastern Provinces he had held a court at Yedo, and it was from Yedo that he proposed to rule Japan, It seemed the lesser of two immediate evils, the better of two chances. In Yedo and the North he was strong. He knew the gruffer type of Lord and vassals that he had there subdued. Already his system was pretty well established, of peopling his court with hostages and governing the eight wild provinces through the hostage-givers; either the provincial Daimio himself served at Court while his son governed the province, or the son was at Court—with a sound spy in the shape of a rival on his right hand and a possible enemy on his left—while the Daimio governed the province. So the North and East had for two years been in the hollow of his hand while the South, for the same time, had been a growing problem. The memory of Hideyoshi's regard for him had made his name great enough in the South; but now the memory of Hideyoshi himself was being utilised by an enemy to undermine the greatness of the name. Ieyasu's governor of the South was Ishida Mitsunari, a man admirable in every respect save that he was Ieyasu's enemy. No man knew whether, in his heart, it was for himself that this Ishida Mitsunari wanted a power unshadowed by the might of leyasu, or whether it was in accordance with the memorable will of Hideyoshi that he was proclaiming to the Lords of the South how leyasu was distorting this will for his own ends, overshadowing the unlimited power of the board of Regents with his own usurped power, setting at nought the edict of their dead Lord Hideyoshi that his infant son should in fact, as in spirit, be Shogun.
The infant, moreover, and his mother were in the South also, a focus for the loyalty and enthusiasm of the anti-Ieyasu party.
It was in the variety of the party that Ieyasu's problem lay. It was in the South that the words and works of at first Xavier and his proselytes, and later of the Franciscans, had spread. Christians had arisen to the number of nearly half a million souls, to shake the power of the Buddhist monasteries. Men of business had arisen to trade with the Portuguese and Spanish traders; and a new strength had arisen to rival the strength of the loyal sword and the soldier's arm—the strength of the Spanish piece-of-eight. Yet among the new minds there existed still some who had been vassals of leyasu before they had been vassals of Hideyoshi; and these were his vassals still.
Assassination would have seemed to some, in Ieyasu's circumstance, a ready way out of the Ishida Mitsunari difficulty; but leyasu had little use for the assassin. His mind was balanced, for he was now an ageing man. Buddha, whose image hung at his breast (where Will Adams had carried a compass-needle), gave him his dreams of perfection in the individual soul. Confucius gave him dreams of a nation and a polity built out of what others had seen to be only alert War-Lords. The Bushido—the code of the Samurai—gave him his guide to immediate action wherein the infallible standard of right and wrong was benevolence of conduct only. Buddha and Confucius and the Bushido agreed for the moment that the assassin was not a means to Ieyasu's end.
Thus leyasu himself had come to the South. He had come with a retinue sufficient to defend his person and to maintain his dignity; but the work before him was the work which he must do alone. It was to see men and talk with them; to see them singly in quiet speech—out of scores and out of hundreds and out of thousands—and to conclude from a glance, from a word, from a silence or from the mysterious something or nothing that holds men together in friendship or thrusts them apart in enmity, whether this man was a well-wisher, or evil.
In such a mood he was, and tautened to a pitch of particular alertness, when the two sailors were brought before him, bathed and shaved as clean as boys.
The familiar padre standing at his right hand clamoured for their death, seeing in them the enemies of God and Church and the ruinators of a possible Holy Empire in the East, and of the Eastern trade. leyasu saw his very proper vehemence of spirit. Priests were familiar to him. Looking at the strange sailors, he meditated upon the fact that the power of the priests and of their Church was a mighty power indeed in the South—it was the power which Hideyoshi had encouraged to grow so that it extinguished the might of the Buddhist monasteries. Seeing the greatness of this power, and feeling the weight of it that could so easily go into the scales against him, leyasu saw nevertheless in the sailors—in their glance or their speech or in their silence —whatever it was that caused him to dismiss the padre with courtesy and benevolence and full hospitality, but without satisfaction: and to have Adams and Santvoort moved to a better lodging.
CHAPTER VI
"So Anjy," Santvoort said as they followed the escort to their new lodging which stood apart from the barrack-like group of houses under the walls. "So ... we are his Lordship's guests."
It was the escort who answered. "Yes," he said. "I no longer attend you; but I will come from time to time to see that you want for nothing."
"And what are we to do?" asked Santvoort.
"What you will," said the other. "You may not open doors. But all doors already open you may enter, with welcome. And those who wait upon you you may command to do your bidding; for they are not soldiers but servants."
He left them at their new lodging's door.
They inspected their house, seeing the tub of water which would be hot from coals in a cylinder in the middle of it whenever they should be minded to take a bath. They saw a man stooping busy over pots and pans on the kitchen hearth, one who smiled and indicated that whenever they should clap their hands together he would come. In the cupboards of the centre room they found cotton drawers and tunics, straw-hats, paper napkins and sleeping coverlets.
"It
