the rich gilding of the audience chamber, the bronze and silver-work of the lanterns. They examined their coats. Adams's was the better one. They agreed that there was a general friendliness in the atmosphere; that the things on and about the crosses had been, probably, only scamps and utter rascals. They had seen no skin that was white in all the festering garbage. They wished to God that they could have spoken in the gibberish of Japan; or they wished again that someone could have come to them through the doorway of their good Dutch or indifferent Portuguese or Spanish—someone other than the sinister padre.
"Perhaps he will come," Santvoort suggested.
"Perhaps," said Adams.
"We might kill him," was the Dutchman's next suggestion.
They looked at their attendant—hands tucked into voluminous sleeves half a dozen inches from sword-hilts.
"Perhaps," said Adams.
A menial brought them food again; broth and rice and shreds of fish. They ate and then slept.
When they awoke in the morning, before they had exchanged a word, a man raised himself from squatting and went out. His place was immediately taken by their regular escort. He accompanied them to the bath and sat beside them afterwards while they sunned themselves. Even their very fair sense of well-being after their weeks of malaise scarcely opened up talk between them. If they had known anything at all they could have talked equally whether their knowledge had been of doom, or of harmlessness, or of a dog's chance between the two. But they knew nothing—except, possibly, that all the others knew something which they could not tell; the Emperor and the silent, wakeful men about him and the inscrutable escort who never left them while they woke.
Speculation could lead them nowhere.
"You would not think," Adams ventured, "that they would give us handsome coats to kill us in."
Santvoort shrugged his Dutch shoulders. "You would not think," he said, "that a man would shake hands with himself in greeting of another. Yet these men do it."
"In a latitude of thirty," Adams said later, "it would be hotter than this."
"In the latitude of hell," said Santvoort, "it would be hotter still."
The thought led no further.
"The coats, Melchior," said Adams. "The coats are a good sign."
When they had eaten breakfast their escort rose and indicated their sandals, and beckoned them towards the courtyard again. His sign towards their coats, lying on their mats, may have been meant to inform them only that they were going again to the presence whence the coats had come. Adams, however, said: "Aye; we'll wear our coats."
They were dizzied for some moments in the soft light of the chamber. They made clumsy obeisance in the direction of the divan before they exclaimed aloud, "God's body!" and "Hell's damnation!" and stopped in their breathing; for beside the divan, with his thumbs stuck in his girdle, his head and shoulders peculiarly contracted in sly humility, was the Nagasaki priest.
He, too, for a moment was shaken. He saw young men shaved and clipped and kempt and natty in silk jackets where he had expected ragged castaways.
The padre's smile was not as the smile of the others. His eyes shifted and shot from Adams to Santvoort and the guards and attendants, and slid, sidelong, to leyasu.
The Shogun did not give him so much as a glance.
As though reading the pages of a deep and difficult book he kept the focus of his eyes and of his smile on Adams. When he had read the riddle upon the page, or the answer to the riddle in his mind, he nodded.
The priest's shoulders bowed still more narrowly. His tongue played over his teeth to moisten the lips.
"Englishman and Hollander," he said, speaking slowly and portentously in his excellent Dutch, "the Lord Generalissimo's Majesty charges you with piracy, robbery and murder upon his seas. You are conspirators against his Dominion. You seek to bring war into his peace."
It was still not at the priest that leyasu looked. He glanced once at Santvoort, once at their particular escort; and then rested his gaze on Adams.
"Liar!" Santvoort snorted. And then, "Will, for God's love-"
Adams began to speak.
He started in Dutch, laboriously and thoughtfully at first, and fairly calmly.
There was strict piety and no savour at all of profanity when he asserted, by God's Body and His Blood, that the padre lied and that he knew he lied. A copy of the Rotterdam Company's indenture with him, and its Articles, was in the ship's book for any man to see that the intent of the voyage was peaceful trade. The cargezon and the bills of lading would show that there was not an article on board that had not been lawfully bought and peaceably loaded before the anchor had been weighed. If they were murderers and pirates, where were the witnesses to their murder and their piracy?
"Witnesses!" said the priest. "Good." He licked his lips again. "His Majesty has his witnesses."
Bowing, he clicked out some sounds and leyasu nodded.
"They have confessed all. Both of them." While the priest said this, two men were brought in, pale and travel-worn, still wide-eyed and a-tremble with their fever, ragged and haggard.
Adams and the Dutchman stared at them aghast; for they had left these same men, restless and scratching and mumbling on their mats, in the house at Oita.
"Master Gilbert de Conning," the priest said, "has made and signed a deposition. He is chief merchant of your ship."
"Chief merchant my—" said Adams. "He is a Huguenot, and a whoreson cook."
"Chief merchant," insisted the priest, "merchant of the goods you bought; receiver of the goods you stole. He has confessed and firmed his confession in writing. Witness thereto is Jan Abelson van Owater." The second man slunk a little forward.
"Bastards both," snorted Adams, and the chamber spun about him.
The Dutch language was shrunk too small and too thin for any further use. His mind flung away from it to the mother language spoken by that other William of his age, more famous than himself. Most of the lively, robustious words that have been cut, from time to time, out of the works of Shakespeare, tumbled over each other upon ears that understood them not but felt only the heat of the explosion that shot them forth. Other words came too, that would probably have been new and vastly interesting to Shakespeare himself—words peculiar to docks and wharves and bawdy-houses of the riverside; and words used only in the fo'c'stle of ships labouring at sea.
Santvoort recognised some of these and they gave him the spirit of the Pilot's discourse. In the specialised remarks of any Dutch seaman who had sailed with Spaniards, he added anything that Adams might have missed in his homely English.
Adams was still convalescent and the outburst left him pumped, and a little exhausted. It left him, too, with a sudden feeling of flat futility. The turbulence of speech in live words had given an illusion of the old, familiar world again wherein effort brought, sometimes, its result; where strife, sometimes, brought victory to the strivers. But the illusion was suddenly gone. Words, here, were meaningless and forceless, like water squirted over statues. Effort was a fantastic memory for naked men among men clad in swords.
The two renegades, de Conning the cook, and Owater whom Santvoort had cuffed a dozen times over the head, grinned in calm discomfort at each other. Thought of strife was thought of suicide. Adams shrugged his shoulders and abandoned it. leyasu himself was seen to have been studying this outburst —for was not the conduct of men but writing on the page of Life?
He straightened a little on his divan and spoke.
Adams and Santvoort were led back to their outhouse, where they lay down upon their mats and found, at their leisure, new words and new combinations of words to apply to the priest and to Conning and van Owater.
Their escort sat by the door, deaf as ever and dumb, filled with his own distant thoughts.
CHAPTER IV