“Well, what’s up, anyhow?” he demanded, no longer able to remain silent before her manner that seemed to forbode no good.
“Shin-san, I suppose you wouldn’t—.” She suddenly checked herself, seemingly on some sudden thought. She rose again and went to survey outside the door, down the stairway to its foot, assuring herself there was no eavesdropping. She returned to her previous posture to resume in a voice subdued into a faint huskiness. “I suppose you wouldn’t care so much—would you?—if I tipped it off to that man Tokubey about you and what you intend to do about yourself—even tomorrow, for that matter—to take punishment for what you’ve done—. Really, it’s too late if you did, anyhow. I’ve just done it on my own initiative—”
Shinsuké’s face blenched. And, for good reason; because, notwithstanding his mind prepared for his end, it was his fond hope to have seen himself accepted in terms of immaculate decency, even so long as he was to measure out his brief span of time.
“In the end it would have amounted to the same thing, one way or the other. But it isn’t anything I’d know to be out among people, and feel proud of. I really wish you hadn’t done that—if possible.”
“But telling it was necessary, Shin-san, unless I was to put your life itself in danger, tonight—” Whereat she again turned, casting an inquiring glance toward the door, before she went on—
“And now coming to what Tokubey wanted to see me about. ‘Shin-san is the man you love,’ he says to me, ‘so you can do what you want with him; no worrying on my account. Keep him upstairs as long as you care, and no objection. But for that,’ he goes on to say, ‘I want you to make yourself useful for my benefit, for this one night.’ It seems he has a little game up his sleeve that means easy money—some stunt to pull off with myself working at the other end of it. And he wants me now to come with him over to Mukojima, to the country villa of a hatamoto officer called Ashizawa. But, because I should not like to leave you here alone, I’ve been having it out with him—I wouldn’t agree so easily. Of course, it’s a fact that there is some arrangement for my going out to Mukojima—but not when you are with me; besides, I do feel there’s something not quite right about this thing. It is true that he has always talked and behaved decently, on the face of it all; but the truth is that he means to get me eventually after he has worked me into a place where I couldn’t free myself from him for my obligations to him. Sensing that much about him, I am afraid he might get you out and kill you, if I were not home. And, again, it might be this; Seiji, having seen you somehow, has asked him to make an end to you. But if they knew you were a man just about ready to end his own life, I thought they wouldn’t think it necessary to do it themselves. All things considered, I reasoned myself into telling him the whole business. And there you are. But what else could I have done?”
“And what did he have to say?”
“ ‘That lamb of a boy to do that?’ he said in surprise—and surprised he was, let me tell you!—But, anyway, he seemed satisfied with what I had told him; there’s little danger that he should get any foolish idea into his head.—So much for that, and now, listen, Shin-san, from what I’ve been told—the way things stand—I don’t see how I could possibly help myself about this thing tonight. That is, after all, I should have to go over to Mukojima from now—”
Tsuya followed up with her insistent entreaty that he should stay another night, because she could not get back before next morning. She would never think of accepting the call from any other place or party, she explained, but to fail this summons from Ashizawa’s villa in Mukojima this night, would mean a heap of trouble—in fact, a difference of a hundred ryo, to put it in terms of money. Not only that, but there was so much frame-up and blackmail about this scheme, which she had been hatching with Tokubey to put over by means little short of downright swindling—that everything had to be done just so-and-so and at such-and-such a time, or the whole thing would go crashing down to pieces.—She arrayed impressive facts, true and perhaps otherwise, in making out her case; and it was, presumably, her idea, in her eagerness to keep him another day, to provide a good solid peg to hang the persuasive effort.
The more he heard from her, the more depressed was he by his own helpless rage against the change seen in the young woman, dragged down so low. From the young lady of the well-honoured family of the Suruga-ya to a creature gone low so far as to assist in swindling an officer—the change was but staggering. Bereft of any ardour to attempt to bring her back to her senses, he was only conscious of a consuming eagerness to get himself gone, with the least possible delay, from this place pregnant with danger as great to his body as to his mind.
“Why shouldn’t you accept the call, if it is such an important occasion as you say? Whatever we had to talk about we have done. It would be just having the same thing over again, if I stayed here a little longer. Perhaps, this business of yours is not an ill wind that blows us no good, if it can bring both of us to it now and say a goodbye to each
