"I understand. It was he who stole it. You are my deliverer. You have brought me news."
"And he knows not your fate, but is not deceived. He lives and I am still his wife. Shibusawa will vindicate his father's name. I swear it!"
Takara straightened up and the fire flashed from her eyes, as her words pierced the dull air around her.
These were the words with which Maido bade the world a last farewell, with which he forgave his traducers, and with which he welcomed death. He knew Takara's power and believed in her sincerity. He was ready to die.
Maido fell face downward, and Takara bathed her handkerchief in the blood that flowed from the wound at his waist; then wrapping up the stained symbol, hid it in the folds of her obi;[20] she had taken the oath that is--until avenged.
Takara stood there as if held by some wild, untrained spirit; she stared this way and that, then a low cry escaped her lips. The haunted woods around mocked her, and trembling she listened. Not until now had she realised the awful situation or divined the peril of her strange adventure. She turned to go, but a rough officer seized and quickly led her away.
Upon learning of the wholesale arrests, as they were being made, Takara had missed from its place of keeping the document which Maido had intrusted to her care. She recalled Daikomitsu's nervousness at the time of her reading it, his chance of seeing her hide it away, and his sudden departure from the garden, and thought of his strange actions afterwards; then she concluded--not reasoned--that these peculiar circumstances bore some connection with the unexpected seizure of so many of the daimyos who were present at the meeting. No one knew Daikomitsu better than Takara, and while she believed him a coward of little consequence she considered him capable of the meanest villainy--in the prospect of gain without detection. She did not stop to inquire about a motive, though she might have discovered one lurking between his repeated trips to Tokyo and the few unguarded disclosures made to her in the course of their long acquaintance.
Divining the clue to Ikamon's source of information the mikado's daughter had set out post-haste to frustrate his designs. She first called upon Kido, but he proved to be powerless, in fact was only too glad to have escaped. Then she went to Kanazawa, and there was horrified to learn that her beloved father-in-law too had been snatched away. She did not stop to right herself with Shibusawa, who now charged her with being the accomplice of Daikomitsu--the one person more than any other interested in the downfall of the house of Maido--and when he finally dismissed her, saying: