When Tetsutaisho struck Shibusawa he did so intending to cut him down as an example of authority--and as a warning to others of his supposed class--and thinking he had killed him outright with only a stroke and a thrust he squared about and swaggered on with his chest distended and his head thrown back.
It was a fortunate circumstance that Okyo was near at hand when Shibusawa fell, for though the thrust was not a vital one, it was dangerously near the heart and occasioned considerable loss of blood and much weakness. The blow had so stunned him that he lay unconscious and not only in the way of those marching, but subject to the cuffs and kicks of his fellows, who were profuse in their cries of, "Shame be upon the etas![8] He insulted his honourable superior!" However, Okyo's faithfulness and the father's coming saved him, while proper treatment and a vigorous constitution soon effected his complete recovery.
Nor was it any the less luck that Maido was there, for only his intense patriotism caused the lord daimyo, in the uncertain absence of his son, to quit his comfortable Kanazawa place and repair thus early to the Tokyo castle. It was an unusual thing for him to take up his residence at the capital city before late in the autumn, though in point of elegance and diversion of thought the latter home far surpassed the former.
This, the largest and oldest of the several daimyos' castles at Tokyo, stood inside the second and just outside the inner moat which surrounded the palace. The grounds were spacious, and lay to the left of the main driveway, going toward the palace, close up against the inner moat. Indeed, it was the choice of a gentle slope which fringed the hill, rising on the opposite side of the moat, within the sacred enclosure above. A high stone battlement, battered and overgrown, stood sentinel at the water's edge, and all around giant cypress and strange foliage told of another day. Here, in this place, was builded the official seat of one man, a daimyo, now Maido, who was the most favoured and courted at a shogun's court, and who commanded the wealth, the intellect, and the aspiration of a thousand years of unbroken, unknown, and unsatisfied progress. Its environment spoke for the present; its tombs, of the past.