Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/127

Echizen’s eccentric behaviour reached even the innermost council rooms of the Shōgunate at Edo.

But Lord Tadanao’s distemper now proceeded little by little to gnaw its way into more fundamental compartments of his life.

It was one night. Lord Tadanao had been drinking steadily from an early hour in the privacy of his own rooms, accompanied only by a small group of his favourite ladies of the bedchamber.

The girl called Kinuno, a beauty procured for him from far-away Kyoto, had recently come to monopolize the whole of Lord Tadanao’s amorous passion and affection.

The evening light had faded, the dark hours had slipped by, midnight was almost come, and still Lord Tadanao drank on. For the ladies, who did not drink, the time had been occupied solely in the monotonous and endlessly repeated business of keeping their lord’s cup replenished.

Lord Tadanao suddenly roused himself from his dim-eyed half-drunken torpor and glanced across at the dearly cherished Kinuno, seated there in attendance upon him. But these nightly drinking sessions had seemingly exhausted her. In the very presence of her lord she appeared to have lost all consciousness of what she was doing. Those superb double-folded eyelids were slowly falling, and Kinuno was about to slip drowsily away to a moment of sleep.

As he gazed intently into her face Lord Tadanao was seized by yet a new anxiety. He thought he saw there, clearly revealed in that unguarded weariness of expression, all the sadness of a woman at the beck and call of a great lord whose power is absolute, a woman unable for one moment of the day to exercise her own will, moving only to her master’s wishes, like a puppet.

Lord Tadanao considered things further. It was unlikely that this woman, any more than other people, felt any genuine affection for him. Her smiles, her alluring glances—these were all tricks of art, things which had no deep significance. Having been sold, body and soul, for a sum which made any