"I have always loved you, Yendo. If you really love me as you say, you must first put my husband out of the way, and I am yours."
"How can I kill him?" whispers the determined man.
"Come to-morrow night and steal into the bedroom of my husband. I shall make him drunk with wine. You can identify him by touching his hair, for I shall induce him to wash it before retiring, and you will find the locks wet."
As Kesa whispers her plan the tense figure of the desperate knight relaxes from its stern purpose of murder. Thrilling with hope and passion, he turns to her, and in the attitude of her abandonment and yielding to his will he sees the vision of their united happiness--the gratification of his passionate desires. Little does his wild and lawless nature dream of the escape which the noble woman will force out of the toils fast closing round her. The picture as the two stand together is intensely dramatic, and vibrates with the portent of a mighty crisis.
Act III opens upon the fine residence of Watanabe Wataru, the husband of Kesa. The gleaming cream wood of the veranda and the posts, the fineness of the matting, the dainty white and gold of the walls and screens are all part of the exquisite refinements of a wealthy Japanese home. Kesa and her husband are discovered sitting side by side in a room opening on the garden. A large slab of granite forms the stepping-stone from the veranda and a line of irregular slabs makes a pathway to the bamboo gate which shuts off the outer garden. The whole arrangement and the atmosphere are realistic of a Japanese home.
The young people, both magnificently robed, have only just retired to their sitting-room, for they have been entertaining guests at a banquet. The only furniture in the room is a sword-stand, on which the knight places his long weapon, the insignia of _samurai_ honour. Before them is a small low table[3] (_sambo_) of white wood, on which stands a white wine-jar and her husband's drinking-cup. Kesa dismisses the two servants in attendance, and then proceeds to pour out some wine for her husband. Wataru little dreams that it is the last cup his wife will ever drink with him, though to her, knowing her premeditated and self-arranged doom, the little ceremony has not only a sacrificial symbolism, but the appalling pathos and irrevocable pitilessness of a last love rite.