Page:Modern Japanese Stories.pdf/111

People like ourselves are no longer worthy opponents for you.”

The merest mention of the Osaka campaign was enough to make Lord Tadanao childishly happy.

But even Lord Tadanao was by this time feeling very much unsteadied by the wine. Looking about the assembly he could see that a large number of his guests had already lapsed into some kind of drunken stupor. Some had reached the stage of incoherence. Others were softly murmuring sentimental songs. It was obvious that there was little life left in the evening’s entertainment.

Lord Tadanao recalled suddenly the aura of feminine refinement which pervaded his own apartments, and he sickened at the boorishness of this all-male carousal. Abruptly he rose.

“Gentlemen, I beg your leave!” Without further ceremony he left the hall. Even the most heavily intoxicated of his guests managed somehow to straighten their disarray and make a low obeisance. The small page boys, who had been fast asleep until this moment, opened their eyes with a start and hurried out after their master.

Lord Tadanao, emerging on to the long open verandah which led to his apartments, sensed with pleasure the cold caress on his cheeks of the early autumn air. Beyond, from where thick clusters of lespedeza flowers showed faintly white in the dim glow of a tenth-day moon, he could hear the singing of autumn insects.

Lord Tadanao decided to take a stroll in the garden. He dismissed the serving-maid sent from his apartments to meet him, and, accompanied only by a single page boy, stepped down from the veranda. The surface of the garden was moist with dew. The dim moonlight made the town beneath the castle seem like some chiaroscuro painting afloat in a vast luminous space of night air.

It was long since he had found himself in surroundings of such utter quietness. All heaven and earth was sad and still. There was only a faint, confused sound of revelry, drifting across from the great hall he had just left. Since his departure