Episode 68
“I did not turn my back on you! You hid yourself away in the countryside and cut off contact with us. How was I supposed to explain every detail of the family’s circumstances to you?”
After that brief rebuttal, his father fell silent for a time. Unlike his sons’, his pale blue eyes, faint in color, sank heavily.
“……Ejekail, I imagine you are confident that you are fundamentally very different from Akenaus.”
His tone was deeply weary.
“In truth, the two of you differ in many ways. I think you suit Valdemaera far better than Akenaus does, in many respects. And yet, in some ways, you two are alike. Especially in that you force upon me choices that cannot be chosen.”
Ejekail closed his mouth and watched his father.
“Perhaps that girl did not relay it to you, but I had intended to expel you from Valdemaera. Not because I had turned my back on you, but because if you were separated from Valdemaera, at least your life would be spared. Was that not precisely the point Akenaus was wary of?”
His father wore a complicated expression. Yet the speed of his words could not keep up with the speed of all the thoughts behind them.
“If you gave up your status as a Valdemaera, he would not go so far as to harm you anymore, blind as you were. You had Serva, so I could worry less. That steward, who raised you as dearly as his own child, would gladly set himself up as your guardian, and even when he grew older and passed away, he would have made thorough provisions so your future would not be lacking…….”
Little by little, his speech slowed.
“Even if Valdemaera is in my hands now, I cannot be certain that real authority will still rest with your mother and me twenty or thirty years from now. I must act while I still can. Besides, it has been a long time since either you or Akenaus grew too old to be controlled as I wished.”
A long sigh swallowed his father’s voice for a moment.
“But that boy has no one who will support him wholeheartedly, as Serva supports you, and once the money for those countless mistresses runs out, they will abandon Akenaus as well. Moreover, you have no intention of forgiving Akenaus.”
For the first time, Ejekail broke his silence and answered.
“You see that precisely. I have no intention of living under the same sky as that man.”
“……What are you planning to do?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Whatever wrong he has done, he is still a Valdemaera. At the very least, we must not show the world the sight of a son bearing the Valdemaera name dying alone outside. The family’s honor is at stake. So we must find him and bring him back. Even if we bring him here, strip him of the Valdemaera name, and send him to the provinces, should this family not be the one to settle the matter?”
“I guarantee you, if that man sets foot in this house again, it will lead to even greater strife.”
After staring blankly at his son, who would not be swayed no matter how he tried to persuade him, his father wiped a hand down his fatigue-soaked face.
“Until now, the world has always been clearly divided for you into what is right and what is wrong, what must be fought and what must be protected. Studies and physical training are things to which one must devote one’s utmost effort; the nation is something one must protect with one’s body; pleasures are things to be kept at a distance. That is why you have no hesitation when you decide and act, but…….”
Ejekail maintained his silence with a cold demeanor.
“The world is not always divided so neatly into black and white. You are still young, and you have never stood in a position where you must choose something when neither side can be chosen easily. That is why you cannot understand this feeling of having to agonize at every moment as the head of Valdemaera and as the father of two sons. But someday, you too will certainly arrive at a crossroads where you must choose what you cannot possibly choose, and by then, you will understand what I am saying.”
Ejekail twisted the corner of his mouth askew.
“I wonder. I do not think I will be able to understand you even with the passage of time. To my ears, everything you say sounds like indecisive sophistry from someone who does not want to let go of either this or that.”
That feeling of being a father who could not bear to see things through to the end with either side, because both he and that man were his sons, was nothing more than self-satisfaction. To the two sons themselves, it merely became an opportunity to make them conscious of each other at every turn and encourage their ill-fated bond.
“It would be better if you simply said honestly that you cannot bear to see him die and be left lying around because he resembles Mother so much. Is that not the only advantage he was born with?”
Even in a family where emotional exchanges were exceedingly rare, there were currents one could sense little by little. From Ejekail’s earliest memories, his father had paid without a word the enormous costs his mother spent on recuperation, though she hardly ever stayed at the main residence.
Ejekail turned the subject back again.
“Did you think that if you told me you would expel me from Valdemaera as a way to save my life, I would say, ah, then I will at least try to survive that way? Did you think that because I had lost all authority, he would abandon his suspicions of me?”
There was no way Akenaus, a man made entirely of inferiority, would do that.
Ejekail had seen many examples of just how ugly an inferiority complex could make a person. His company had even been dispatched to clean up after officers ruined an operation while fighting among themselves over merit.
The conclusion was all too obvious. While his father held real authority, Akenaus might live quietly, but the moment Valdemaera’s power fell into his own hands, he would want to erase Ejekail, the proof of his shame, from the world.
“And now that the situation has changed, do you think that if you tell him to lay down the Valdemaera name and go down to some rural corner to live as if dead, he will gladly accept? Do you also believe that I will forget him and live on? If so, Father, you know me even less than Rose does.”
The virtue demanded of a soldier was not magnanimity, but rewards and punishments carried out thoroughly and sternly, with merits and faults clearly distinguished.
“Rather, Rose was wise not to relay anything at all. Even beyond the reach of my ears, Rose saved me. If that news had reached me, I cannot be certain my treatment and surgery would have ended as safely as they did.”
And Rose must have believed, in the end. That he would open his eyes. Bearing alone all the anxiety and pressure pressing in from outside, she did her utmost to protect his peace.
“There will never be another woman like her in my life.”
At his assertion, his father mastered his emotions with a deep breath.
“Ejekail, why on earth are you going this far? The one who has caused headaches over women until now was Akenaus. You had not even shown interest, had you? I never imagined you would have gone mad over a woman in the meantime.”
“Because if Rose had not been there, I would not be here today either.”
She was the woman who had held his hand and walked with him through an endless darkness. Because Rose was there, he had been able to trust people again, and he had been able to rest his weary, pained heart. At times he was happy, at times his heart fluttered, at times he was at ease, and on some days he even laughed aloud. And at some point, Ejekail had been rather surprised by the fact that he had gained the leisure to laugh.
All of it was a change Rose had brought him.
She was his refuge.
“Where is Rose?”
Ejekail pressed again.
But this time, too, his father’s answer did not change.
“I do not know. She did not seem like the sort of girl who would linger around you to the very end and cause future trouble, so I did not ask.”
“I cannot believe that.”
After quietly looking at his son, who stood firmly in place, his father swept his hair back with an exhausted expression.
“I do not wish to continue this tiresome argument with the son I have met again after so long. What happened today alone has given me such a headache I can hardly bear it, so if you are curious about that girl, call in the errand runner who met her and ask him yourself.”
His father shook the bellpull to summon a servant, then spoke a name.
“Bring Merlo.”
It did not take long. Upon hearing that the head of Valdemaera was looking for him, the errand runner soon appeared.
He was quite a young man. At first glance, he had an ordinary impression, but the suitably smooth, glib air about him made him seem like someone who could easily win anyone’s favor.
Ejekail let out a short, hollow laugh. His mood sank once because the main house had secretly sent an errand runner while his sight was blocked, and then once more because a likable man, clearly chosen and sent on purpose, had been hovering around Rose.
The errand runner, appearing in bewilderment, spotted Ejekail and his lips trembled for a moment. He had immediately grasped why he had been called. He was not witless. However, as befitted an errand runner carefully selected from many, Merlo quickly composed his flustered expression and bowed his head.
“Did you call for me?”
The moment Ejekail heard the errand runner’s first words, he sharply swept his gaze over the man.
The voice was familiar. It was certainly a voice he knew.
When on earth had it been? Where could it have been?
As Ejekail searched his memory, he suddenly seized upon a fragment that flashed through his mind.