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Title: Mr. Wu

Author: Louise Jordan Miln
        Harold Owen
        Harry M. Vernon

Release date: December 4, 2021 [eBook #66877]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: A. L. Burt Company

Credits: Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MR. WU ***

MR. WU

  By LOUISE JORDON MILN
  (MRS. GEORGE CRICHTON MILN)

  Based on the Play “Mr. Wu”
  By H. M. VERNON and HAROLD OWEN

  [Illustration]

  A. L. BURT COMPANY
  Publishers      New York

  Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company




  _Copyright, 1918, by_
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

  _All rights reserved_


  _First published in the United States
  of America, 1920_

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS

  CHAPTER                                     PAGE

        I WU CHING YU AND WU LI CHANG            1

       II AT RICE                                7

      III THE MARRIAGE JOURNEY                  14

       IV WEE MRS. WU                           22

        V HOMING                                27

       VI HEART ACHE                            31

      VII A TORTURED BOYHOOD                    36

     VIII SOME BALM                             45

       IX WU LI LU                              52

        X NANG PING                             58

       XI IN THE LOTUS GARDEN                   62

      XII O CURSE OF ASIA!                      77

     XIII MRS. GREGORY                          87

      XIV NANG’S VIGIL                          93

       XV THE MEETING OF THE MOTHERS            98

      XVI GRIT                                 113

     XVII THE SIGNAL OF THE GONG               124

    XVIII AT THE FEET OF KWANYIN KO            128

      XIX PREPARATION                          132

       XX WHAT WU DID IN PROOF OF LOVE         137

      XXI A CONFERENCE                         146

     XXII SING KUNG YAH’S FLOWERS              156

    XXIII AH WONG                              161

     XXIV IN THE CLUTCH OF THE TONGS           170

      XXV WORSE AND WORSE                      177

     XXVI SUSPENSE                             182

    XXVII THE BEGINNING OF THE DUEL            190

   XXVIII SOMETHING TO GO ON                   203

     XXIX “WILL YOU VISIT SING KUNG YAH?”      207

      XXX SMILING WELCOME                      220

     XXXI FACE TO FACE                         228

    XXXII “CUR!”                               236

   XXXIII A CHINESE TEACHING                   241

    XXXIV ALONE IN CHINA                       246

     XXXV THE STORY OF THE SWORD               256

    XXXVI IN THE PAGODA AND ON THE BENCH       265

   XXXVII THE FAN                              270

  XXXVIII THE GONG                             276

    XXXIX AFTERWARDS                           286

       XL A GUEST ON HIGH                      292

      XLI “JUST WITH US”                       294

     XLII THE DUST OF CHINA FROM THEIR FEET    300

    XLIII ENGLISH WEDDING BELLS                307

     XLIV THE SOUND OF A CHINESE GONG          312




MR. WU

CHAPTER I

WU CHING YU AND WU LI CHANG


A look of terror glinted across the eyes slit in the child’s moon-shaped
yellow face, but he stood stock still and silent--respectful and obedient.

The very old man in the chair of carved and inlaid teak wood saw the
glint of fear, and he liked it fiercely, although he came of a clan
renowned for fearlessness, even in a race that for personal courage
has never been matched--unless by the British, the race which of all
others it most resembles. Old Wu adored little Wu, and was proud of him
with a jealous pride, but he knew that there was nothing craven in the
fear that had looked for one uncontrolled instant from his grandson’s
narrow eye--nothing craven, but love for himself, love of home, and
a reluctance to leave both; a reluctance that he was the last man in
China to resent or to misestimate.

Wu the grandfather was eighty. Wu the grandson was ten.

Rich almost beyond the dreams of even Chinese avarice, the mandarin
was warmly wrapped in clothes almost coolie-plain; but the youngster,
who was but his senior’s chattel, would have pawned for a fortune as
he stood, a ridiculous, gorgeous figure of warmth and of affluence,
almost half as broad as long, by virtue of padding. His stiffly
embroidered robe of yellow silk was worn over three quilted coats, silk
too, and well wadded with down of the Manchurian eider duck, and above
the yellow silk surcoat he wore a slightly shorter one of rich fur,
fur-lined and also wadded. The fur top-coat was buttoned with jewels.
The yellow coat was sewn with pearls and with emeralds. Jewels winked
on the thick little padded shoes and blazed on his little skull cap.

For himself the mandarin took his ease in unencumbered old clothes,
but it pleased his arrogant pride and his love of the gorgeous that
his small grandson should be garbed, even in the semi-seclusion of
their isolated country estate, as if paying a visit of state to the boy
Emperor at Pekin. As little Wu was of royal blood himself, he might
indeed by some right of caste so have visited in no servile rôle, for
on his mother’s side the lad was of more than royal blood, descended
from the two supreme Chinese, descent from whom confers the only
hereditary nobility of China. Perhaps the yellows that he often wore
hinted at this discreetly. The sartorial boast (if boast it was) was
well controlled, for true yellow was the imperial color, sacred to the
Emperor, and young Wu’s yellows were always on the amber side, or on
the lemon; and even so he might have worn them less in Pekin than he
did here in the Sze-chuan stronghold of his house.

The room was very warm, and seemed no cooler for the scented
prayer-sticks that were burning profusely in the carved recess where
the ancestral tablet hung, and as he talked with and studied the boy,
whom he had studied for every hour of the young life, the upright
old man with the gaunt, withered, pockmarked face fanned himself
incessantly. Little Wu had run in from his play in the bitterly cold
garden, all fur-clad as he was. The mandarin had sent for him, and he
had not stayed to throw off even one of his thick garments. Old Wu was
not accustomed to be kept waiting or the grandchild to delay.

“Well?” the old man demanded, “you have heard. What do you say?”

The quaint little figure kotowed almost to the ground. It was wonderful
that a form so swathed and padded could bend so low, wonderful that
the jewel-heavy cap kept its place. His little cue swept the polished
floor, and his stiff embroideries of gem-sewn kingfisher feathers
creaked as he bent. He bent thrice before he answered, his hands meekly
crossed, his eyes humbly on the ground: “Most Honorable, thou art a
thousand years old, and, O thrice Honorable Sir, ten thousand times
wise. Thy despicable worm entreats thy jadelike pardon that he pollutes
with his putrid presence thy plum-blossomed eyes. Thou hast spoken. I
thank thee for thy gracious words.”

“Art thou glad to go?”

“Thy child is glad, Sir most renowned and venerable, to obey thy wish.”

“Art glad to go?”

The boy swept again to the ground, and, bending up, spread out his
pink palms in a gesture of pleased acceptance. “Most glad, O ancient
long-beard.”

The grandfather laughed. “Nay, thou liest. Thou art loth to go. And I
am loth to have thee go. But it is best, and so I send thee.” He held
out his yellow, claw-like hand, and little Wu came and caught it to
his forehead, then stood leaning against the other’s knee, and began
playing with the long string of scented beads that hung about the man’s
neck.

“Well,” the mandarin said again, “say all that is in thy heart. Leave
off the words of ceremony. Speak simply. Say what thou wilt.”

“When do I go?” It was characteristically Chinese that such was the
question, and not “Must I go?” or even “Why must I go?” The grandfather
had said that he was to go: that point was settled. From that will
there was no appeal. The boy scarcely knew that there were children
who did not obey their parents implicitly and always. That there
were countries--in the far off foreign-devils’ land--where filial
disobedience was almost the rule, he had never heard and could not have
believed. Of course, in the classics, which even now he read easily,
there were runaway marriages and undutiful offspring now and then. But
the end of all such offenders was beyond horror horrible, and even so
little Wu had always regarded them as literary makeweight, artistic
shades to throw up the high lights whiter, shadows grotesque and
devilish as some of his grandsire’s most precious carvings were, and
scarcely as flesh and blood possibilities.

In all their ten years together there had been between these two
nothing but love and kindness. No child in China (where children are
adored) had ever been more indulged; no child in China (where children
are guarded) more strictly disciplined. The older Wu had loved and
ruled; the younger Wu had loved and obeyed always. They live life so in
China.

“When do I go?” was all the boy said.

“Soon after your marriage moon: the third next moon, as I plan it.”

The child’s face glowed and creamed with relief. He was only ten,
and--at least in that part of the Empire--older bridegrooms were the
rule. If the dreaded exile were not to begin until after his marriage,
years hence, all its intricate ceremonial, all its long-drawn-out
preliminaries, and happily to be delayed again and again by the
astrologers, why, then here was respite indeed.

“Nay,” the mandarin said, shaking his old head a little sadly, “think
not so. Thy marriage will be when the cherry trees in Honan next bloom.”

“Oh!” the boy just breathed his surprise.

“I think it best,” the old man added. “Your wife was born last month.
The runners reached me yesterday with the letter of her honorable
father.”

Little Wu was interested. He had read of such marriages and he knew
that they really took place sometimes. He rather liked the scheme--if
only he need not go to England for hideous years of wifeless honeymoon!
He had heard none of the details of his exile--only the hateful fact.
But his Chinese instinct divined that in all probability young Mrs.
Wu would not accompany him. Yes, he rather liked the idea of a wife.
He was desperately fond of babies, and often had two or three brought
from the retainers’ quarters that he might play with them and feed them
perfumed sugar-flowers. He hoped his grandfather would tell him more of
his baby-betrothed.

But the grandfather did not, now at all events, nor did he add anything
to the less pleasant piece of news, but rose stiffly from his chair,
saying, “Strike the gong.”

The boy went quickly to a great disk of beaten and filigreed gold that
hung over a big porcelain tub of glowing azaleas, caught up an ivory
snake-entwined rod of tortoise-shell, and beat upon the gong. He struck
it but once, but at the sound servants came running--half a dozen or
more, clad in blue linen, the “Wu” crest worked between the shoulders.

“Rice,” the master said, and held out his hand to the child.

“Lean on me, lean on me hard,” pleaded the boy; “thy venerable bones
are tired.”

“They ache to-day,” the octogenarian admitted grimly. “But untie
thyself first, my frogling. Thou canst not eat so--we are going to
rice, and not into thy beloved snow and ice.”

The child slipped out of his fur, and cast it from him. His quick
fingers made light work of buttons, clasps and cords. Garment followed
garment to the floor, and as they fell servants ran and knelt and
picked them up almost reverently, until the boy drew a long free
breath, clad only in a flowing robe of thin crimson tussore: a little
upright figure, graceful, and for a Chinese boy very thin. Then the old
man laid his hand, not lightly, on the young shoulder; and so they went
together to their rice.




CHAPTER II

AT RICE


James Muir was waiting for them in the room where their meal was
served. There were but two meals in that household--breakfast and
dinner--or rather but two for the mandarin and those who shared his
rice; the servants ate three times a day, such few of them as ate in
the house at all. But there was a fine mastery of the art of dining, as
well as a good deal of clockwork, in the old Chinese’s constitution;
and Muir, at liberty to command food when and where he would, found it
convenient and entertaining to eat with his pupil and his host.

For three years the young Scot had held, and filled admirably, a chair
in the University of Pekin. The post had been well paid, and he had
enjoyed it hugely, and the Pekin background of life no less; but old Wu
had lured him from it with a salary four times as generous, and with
an opportunity to study China and Chinese life from the inside such as
probably no Briton had had before, and far more complete and intimate
than the no mean opportunity afforded by his professorship in the
capital.

Chinese to the core and Chinese to the remotest tip of his longest
spiral-twisted and silver-shielded fingernail, Wu Ching Yu, astute and
contemplative even beyond his peers, searching the future anxiously saw
strange things ahead of this native land of his burning love, and he
had boldly mapped out an unique education for his grandson.

Europe was coming into China. It was too late to prevent that now; Wu
Ching Yu doubted if it had not always been too late. Well, what would
be would be; Confucius had said so. Europe was coming into China, and
Wu Li Chang, his grandson, should meet it at an advantage which other
Chinese were not wise enough to prepare for themselves. Wu Li Chang
should know Europe before Europe came to reap the wealth of Shantung
and Peichihli and to fatten on the golden harvest of four thousand
years of Chinese thrift, frugality, and sagacity. The boy should have
an English education and a facile understanding of English thought and
of English ways.

Quietly, remorselessly, the grandfather had studied the individuals
of the Aryan races already permeating in official and mercantile
trickles into Pekin, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Hankow. The Germans
commended themselves to him in much. His Chinese thoroughness liked
their thoroughness. His concentration liked theirs. But they had other
qualities he liked less. The French and the Americans he understood
least, and he somewhat under-estimated both. He liked the Russians;
but he gauged them to be threatened by the future rather than being
themselves seriously threateners of China.

It was the British, he decided deliberately, who most threatened China
and promised her most; they, above all others, were to be dreaded as
foes, desired as friends. He thought that they had staying powers
beyond all other races save his own, honorableness and breeding. He
disliked their manners often, but he liked the quality of their given
word. He suspected that the English would win in the long run in any
contest of peoples to which they set their shoulders and their will:
and it was to England that he determined to send his boy, that there
the child might learn to hold his Chinese own in China in the years to
come, let come to China from the West what would. Cost them both what
it might--and would--of heartache, the boy should go, but he should go
with such equipment, such armor of _savoir faire_ as was possible
or could be made possible. He should learn to speak English, to ride a
horse English fashion, and to use a fork before he went. And so James
Muir was selected and secured as tutor, mentor and general leader to
the little yellow Chinese bear.

Mandarin Wu had met Muir in Pekin, had studied and liked him. And Wu’s
great crony, Li Hung Chang, knew the Scot and respected him. The rest
was easy; for Wu was masterful, diplomatic, and the length of his purse
was almost endless. Muir had lived with the Wus for three years now,
and had known from the first what little Wu had only learned an hour
ago: that the boy was going to England and Oxford.

Not for a moment had the mandarin neglected the Chinese furnituring
and decorating of the boy’s mind. Such a course would have been
unthinkable. Already almost the lad might have been presented at
the great national examination, and very possibly ennobled as one
of the literati, but the mandarin had not thought it necessary. The
boy could recite the Li Ki (the old, old Book of Rites that has had
more influence than any other secular book ever written, and has done
more to make and shape Chinese character and Chinese customs than
have all other books put together) and recite it without mistake or
hesitation; he could write decorous verse, paint swiftly and accurately
the intricate Chinese characters, and he knew his people’s history.
He could wrestle and tilt, and once he had beaten his grandfather at
chess.

He had worked well with Muir, and Muir with him. They liked each
other. And after three years of constant drilling, always followed
industriously and often enthusiastically, the young Chinese had a glib
smattering of European lore, dates, grammar, facts. Europe itself--real
Europe--was a closed book to him, of course. The mandarin understood
that. But a few years in the West would mend all that: and then the
beloved boy should come home, to serve China and to rule his own
destiny.

Between the old Chinese mandarin and the young Scotchman a sincere
friendship had grown--and almost inevitably, for they had so much in
common, and so much mutual respect. Each was honest, manly, and a
gentleman. Each had self-control, generosity, deliberation, taste and
a glowing soul. Three years of daily intercourse, and something of
intimacy, had destroyed completely such slight remaining prejudice as
either had had against the other’s race when they met at Pekin.

Wu the grandfather was never long or far from the side of Wu the
grandson. James Muir had taught one Wu almost as much (though not as
systematically) as he had taught the other. And they had taught him
more than he had taught them: the child unconsciously, the mandarin
with conscious glee. All three had been eager to learn, the men more
eager than the boy; and the teacher who is at home always has a
wide and deep advantage over the teacher who is abroad. Background,
environment, each smallest detail and petty reiteration of daily life,
aid the teacher who instructs in his own country, but impede and thwart
the teacher who instructs aliens in theirs.

Chinese families who live in some state usually eat in the great
hall--the k’o-tang, or guest-hall--of their house, as far as they have
any usual eating place. But more often than not when in residence here
the Wus “dined” (of course, they used for it no such term: it was, as
were all their meals, just “rice”) in the chamber in which the two men
and the child now sat. This house had more than one great hall, and
several rooms larger than this, though it was far from small.

It was a passionate room. It throbbed with color, with perfume, with
flowers, with quaint picked music and with a dozen glows and warmths of
wealth.

High towards the red and sea-green lacquered roof, carved and scrolled
with silver and blue, a balcony of pungent sandal-wood jutted from
the wall. The floor of the balcony was solid, and from it hung three
splendid but delicate lamps, filled with burning attar. The railing of
the balcony was carved with dragons, gods, bamboos and lotus flowers,
and within the railing sat three sing-song girls. They were silent
and motionless until, at a gesture of the master’s hand, the eunuch,
who was their choirmaster and their guardian, spoke a syllable, and
then they began a soft chant to the tinkling accompaniment of their
instruments. One played an ivory lute, one a lacquered flute, the third
cymbals and bells; and the eunuch drew a deeper, more throbbing note
from his chin or student’s lute--five feet long, with seven strings
of silk, its office to soothe man’s soul and drive all evil from his
heart. In the corner farthest from the table squatted, on the mosaic
floor, a life-size figure of the belly-god. He wore many very valuable
rings, an unctuous smirk, a wreath--about his shoulders--of fresh
flowers, and very little else. He was fleshed of priceless majolica,
but his figure would have been the despair of the most ingenious
corset shop in Paris; his abdomen protruded several feet in front of
his knees; his was a masterly embonpoint of glut.

There must have been a hundred big joss-sticks burning in the room--not
the poor, slight things sold in Europe, but Chinese incense at its best
and most pungent.

The mandarin used chop-sticks. The boy and his tutor ate with silver
forks.

The food was delicious, and Muir ate heartily. But the child and the
old man ate little. Both were sick at heart. Five of the mandarin’s
concubines brought in fruit and sweetmeats. The boy took a glacé
persimmon, and smiled at the woman. He knew them all by name (there
were a score or more in the “fragrant apartments”), and he liked most
of them and often played with them. The mandarin paid no heed to
them whatever. Such of their names as he had once known he had quite
forgotten. The old celibate lived for China and for his grandson. But
he kept his Chinese state in China, and always would. And his women
were well clad, well fed, well treated and reasonably happy. And if one
of them died she was replaced, and so was one that took the smallpox
and was disfigured. But one was rarely scolded, and never was one
beaten. Wu Ching Yu rarely remembered their existence. When he did it
bored him. But they were part of his retinue, and it no more occurs to
an important Chinese to discard his retinue than it does to a portly
and decent Scot to discard his kilt in broad daylight on Princes
Street. The one discard would be as indecent as the other. Manners make
men everywhere, and they have no small share in making manhood, in
China as in Edinburgh. They differ in different districts, but, after
all, their difference is but of thinskin depth. It is their observance
that matters: it is vital.

A great snake waddled in and came across the floor--a fat, over-fed,
hideous thing. Muir knew the creature well, and that it was perfectly
tame and harmless, but, for all that, he tucked his feet between the
rungs of his chair. Little Wu flung sweetmeats and bits of sugared
fat pork to the monster, and presently it waddled off again, crawling
fatly, and curled up at the feet of the belly-god, and went to sleep
with its sleek, slimy, wrinkled head under the lea of the god’s wide
paunch.




CHAPTER III

THE MARRIAGE JOURNEY


Wu Li Chang enjoyed his wedding very much. He enjoyed all of it (except
the enforced parting with his young wife)--the wonderful journey to
Peichihli, brightened by anticipation; the more wonderful return
journey, not a little dulled by homesickness for his bride and by the
near-drawing of his voyage to England; the six weeks’ stay in the
palace of the Lis; and most of all--decidedly most of all--his wife.

He would have been ingratitude itself if he had not enjoyed his visit
at his father-in-law’s. Never went marriage bells more happily. Never
was bridegroom more warmly welcomed or more kindly entertained. The
wedding ceremonies interested him intensely; they went without a hitch,
and never in China was bridal more gorgeous. The honeymoon was best of
all--if only it might have been longer!--and had but one jar. (Most
honeymoons--at least in Europe--have more.) The one in Wu Li Chang’s
and Wu Lu’s honeymoon was acute and plaintive: it was the day that his
wife had the colic and wailed bitterly. Wu Li Chang had colic too--in
sympathy, the women said, but James Muir suspected an over-feed of
stolen bride-cake, gray and soggy, stuffed with sugared pork fat and
roasted almonds. Probably the women were right, for Wu Li Chang was not
a gluttonous boy, and he had eaten sugared pork fat with impunity all
his life; but, caused no matter by what, the colic was real enough,
and Wu Li Chang could have wailed too, had such relief been permissible
to a Chinese gentleman.

The cavalcade started at dawn on an auspicious day in early spring,
when the nut trees were just blushing into bloom and the heavy buds
of the wistaria forests were showing faint hints of violet on their
lips. The return journey was made when the short summer of Northern and
North Central China was turning towards autumn, and the great wistarias
creaked in the wind and flung their purple splendor across the bamboos
and the varnish trees, and the green baubles of the lychees were
turning pink and russet.

The marriage ceremonial took quite a month, for the mandarins would
skimp it of nothing; and a Chinese wedding of any elegance is never
brief. The engagement had been unprecedentedly brief--made so by
the exigencies of Wu Ching Yu’s plans--and to have laid on the lady
the further slight of shabby or hurried nuptials would have been
unthinkable, and most possibly would have been punished by three
generations of hunchbacked Wus.

Mandarin Wu kept his own soothsayer, of course, and equally of course
that psychic had pronounced for the brevity of the engagement, and
himself had selected the day of the bridegroom’s departure and
the marriage days. His commandments had synchronised exactly with
his patron’s desire. The mandarin’s wishes and the necromancer’s
pronouncements almost invariably dovetailed to a nicety; and when they
did not the mandarin took upon himself the rôle of leading seer, and
then changed his fortune-teller. It had only happened once, and was
not likely to happen again. Wu Ching Yu was a very fine clairvoyant
himself.

The prospective parents-in-law were old and warm friends, Wu Li’s
senior by thirty years. The older mandarin had dreamed a dream one
night, just a year ago, and in the morning had sent a runner to Pekin
with a letter to his friend:

“Thy honorable wife, who has laid at thy feet so many jeweled sons,
will bear to thy matchless house a daughter when next the snow lies
thick upon the lower hills of Han-yang. Thy contemptible friend sues
to thee for that matchless maiden’s incomparable golden hand to be
bestowed upon his worm of a grandson and heir”--and several yards more
to the same effect, beautifully written on fine red paper.

The offer had been cordially (but with Mongol circumlocution) accepted.
The match was desirable in every conceivable way. And when Li Lu was
born she was already as good as “wooed and married and a’” to the young
Wu, at that moment teaching James Muir a new form of leap-frog.

The cavalcade formed at daybreak, and Wu--both Wus--and the tutor came
out of the great house’s only door, mounted their horses, and the
journey began. It was a musical start, for each saddle horse wore a
collar of bells that the pedestrians might be warned to stand aside.

The palanquins of state and their ornate sedan chairs were carried by
liveried coolies that the three gentlemen might travel so when they
chose; and those provided for Muir were as splendid as those for the
mandarin and little Wu. Teachers are treated so in China always, though
not always are they paid as the mandarin paid Muir.

The presents for the bride were packed in bales and baskets--pei
tsz--of scented grass, slung by plaited bamboo straps from the
shoulders of the carrying coolies. There were three hundred bales in
all, their precious contents of silk and crêpe and jade and gems, of
spices and porcelains and lacquers, wrapped in invulnerable oiled silk
of finest texture and impervious to the sharpest rain. There were silks
enough to clothe Li Lu and Li Lu’s daughters forever, and the materials
for her bridal robes were as fine as the Emperor’s bride had worn.

There were five hundred bride’s cakes, sodden gray things, quite small
in size but heavy with fat pork. There were sixty tiny pipes--all
for the bride--of every conceivable pipe material and design. There
were a hundred pairs of shoes, to be worn a few years hence when her
feet had been bound. There were birds to sing to her--living birds in
jeweled cages, and birds made of gold, of coral and of amber. There
were ivories and rare pottery and mirrors of burnished steel. There
were jades--such as Europe has not yet seen--bronzes beyond price,
tea, tortoiseshell and musk, paint for her face, and a bale of hair
ornaments. There were a score of slave-girls--ten for her, ten for
her mother. In a great bottle-shaped cage of rush a tame tortoise
rode at ease. It had been procured from Ceylon at great expense for
a maharajah’s children in Southern India, and trained to carry them
on its back. It were jeweled anklets now, and was for Li Lu when she
should be old enough to straddle it. Wu Li Chang had tried it, and he
said that its gait was good. And Muir had named it “Nizam.” But it had
its own servants; for the tortoise is one of the four sacred animals
in China. A hundred and thirty musicians followed the mandarin’s cooks
and bakers--a musician for each instrument of Chinese melody, and for
many two; ten more for the flutes, four for the harps, nine for the
bells, and a dozen for trumpets, drums and gongs--the women carried in
chairs, the men on foot. There was much, much more, and at long last
the mandarin’s bannerman brought up the slow rear.

Beside the old noble’s palfrey a servant carried his master’s favorite
linnet in its cage.

There was a long wait at the temple, some yards from the house. Wu and
his grandchild went in to make obeisance and to worship before the
temple tablets of their dead, while Muir sat outside and smoked an
honest meerschaum pipe and drank scalding tea.

The road climbed hillward, and soon after they left the temple they
passed a magnificent paifang. The mandarin bowed to it reverently,
dismounted, and passed it on foot; and so did the child, knowing
that it marked the spot where his grandfather’s mother had hanged
herself--in her best robes--at her husband’s funeral.

On the summit of the first hill they halted again. The old man and the
boy took soup and sweetmeats and tea, and Muir munched fishcakes and
savory rice; and the child looked long at the house in which he had
been born.

The carved screen, standing a few feet before the door to keep the evil
spirits out, was dyed deep with sunlight, and its peaked roof’s green
and blue and yellow tiles were darkly iridescent, as were the green and
yellow and blue tiles of the old dwelling’s many tent-shaped roofs.

When they moved on, the boy trotted on foot beside his grandfather and
twittered to the linnet, and the linnet twittered back; the mandarin
smiled down at them, and Muir lit another pipeful.

All this was most irregular--so irregular that only a Wu could have
compassed it. The bride should have been coming to her husband, not the
bridegroom going to his wife. But Wu and the necromancer had managed
it. Wu was an iconoclast--China is full of iconoclasts. Moreover, it
was scarcely feasible to bring so young a bride across China in the
early spring--treacherous often and uncertain always. And Mrs. Li, who
was not well and who hated travel, had insisted upon conducting the
details of the wedding herself. That clinched it. Mrs. Li ruled her
husband. It is so in China oftener than it is in Europe.

It would be delightful to chronicle every hour of that marriage journey
and of the splendid festivity that closed it. But this is the history
of an incident in Wu Li Chang’s maturity, and the boyhood that was
father to that manhood must be hinted in few, swift syllables.

They traveled as in some highly colored royal progress. Now and again
they passed an inn. But they stopped at none. They squatted by the
roadside for “rice” whenever they would, and they fared sumptuously
every day. There was whisky and mutton for the Scot, and any number of
other things that he liked almost as well. When it rained--and in the
month it took them to reach Pekin it rained in angry torrents four or
five times--they stretched out in their padded palanquins and slept.
Each night they rested in comfortable bamboo huts that relays of the
mandarin’s servants had erected in advance; and when they had eaten
and had wearied of chess, the musicians sat outside and tinkled them
to sleep, and often the crickets joined in the throbbing music--and
sometimes the pet linnet too.

Because they traveled in such state, the peasants, with which many of
the districts through which they passed teemed, never pressed near
them. But in the wildest parts there were a hundred evidences of human
life and industries. Tiny homesteads jutted from the rocks, perched
on the crags, hung beside the waterfalls. Wood-cutters, grass-cutters,
charcoal-burners passed them hourly and made obeisant way for the
shên-shih or sash-wearers, as the Chinese term their gentry. On every
sandstone precipice some great god was carved--Buddha usually--or a
devout inscription cut in gigantic letters--gilded, as a rule. Each
day they passed some old temple, ruined or spruce and splendid; some
days they passed a score; and nearing or leaving each temple was its
inevitable stream of pilgrims with yellow incense bags slung across
their shoulders--for Buddha shares the imperial yellow in Northern
China. Each pilgrim cried out “Teh fu”--acquire bliss--or “Teh lieo
fuh”--we have acquired bliss--and to them all the mandarin sent cash
and rice or doles of cowry shells, and sometimes bowls of liangkao, the
delicious rice-flour blancmange, colder than ice and more sustaining
than beef-tea, or plates of bean-curd, the staff of Chinese coolie life.

They passed through groves of tallow trees, winged willow, hoangko,
walnut, acacia, poplar, camellia and bamboo; through miles of brilliant
fire-weed, arbutus, peanut and golden millet; through jungles of
loquat, yellow lily and strawberry.

Everywhere there was running water, jade-green or musk-yellow or
frothing white: water clear and unpolluted always, for in Asia it is a
crime to befoul or misuse water.

When the short twilight died into the dark, from every temple or hut,
by path or on hill, glints of lamp radiance sprang into the night,
and lamps glowed along the river banks; from every traveler’s hand a
jocund silk or paper lantern danced, and everywhere the kwang yin
têng--“lamps of mercy” the Chinese name these will-o’-the-wisps--darted
and burned.

The days were golden, and the nights smelt sweet.

And from then Muir had but one quarrel with China: it had made Japan
seem to him forever commonplace.

James Muir had never enjoyed himself so intensely before: every moment
was a picture and a feast. And often now, sitting alone in London, he
closes his book-tired eyes and dreams that he is back once more in
China, crossing the Sze-chuan hills with a mandarin he admired and
a boy he loved, or sipping hot perfumed wine at the indescribable
kaleidoscope that was the marriage of Wu Li Chang and Li Lu, and
thinking sometimes, not without a sigh, of all he relinquished when the
great boat on which Wu Li Chang went to England took him--the tutor--as
he well knew, forever from China.




CHAPTER IV

WEE MRS. WU


It was love at first sight. The bride crowed at the bridegroom, and he
forgot his grave new dignity and his ceremonial mandarin robes, and
clapped his little yellow hands and danced with delight.

The bride’s part might have been performed by proxy, and there had been
some talk of this, Mrs. Li volunteering for the vicarious rôle. But Wu
Li Chang’s lip had quivered mutinously, and so the suggestion had gone
no farther.

All was performed punctiliously--or nearly all. One “essential” had
been discarded perforce. The baby bride had torn off her red veil
and screamed her refusal to wear it. So Wu Li Chang had seen his
betrothed’s face some hours before he should. It was a brazen bride,
but very bonnie. She wore less paint than an older bride would have
worn, for Mrs. Li feared for the new, tender skin. Li Lu was a gleeful
bride. The feigned reluctance and the daughterly wailing had to be
omitted with the veil. She played with the strings of bright beads that
hung over her from the bridal crown, and peeped through them giggling
at her bridegroom. She laughed when their wrists were tied together
with the crimson cord. Wu Li Chang thought the hot marriage wine less
nice than that he usually drank at home; but when a few drops from his
cup were poured upon her mouth she sucked her lips eagerly and pursed
them up for more.

Even Muir, who had small flair for babies, thought this one very
pretty. She was as fat as butter, but not nearly as yellow as Devon
butter is when creamed from kine that feed on buttercups and clover
there. Her tints were more the color of a pale tea-rose. She had
bewitching dimples and the exquisitely lovely eyes which are a Chinese
birthright. And her grandfather-in-law thought that she would be
surpassingly lovely as a woman; for Mrs. Li, whom he saw now for the
first time, was as beautiful as any woman he had ever seen, and his
proud old heart was much content, for he knew well how a wife’s beauty
comforts her husband’s years.

She was married on a daïs, of course, but instead of sitting--as she
should have done--on a chair of state, she was tied upright in her
cradle, the perpendicular bamboo cradle of Chinese babyhood, very much
the size and exactly the shape of the huge tins in which farmers send
milk to London--to be seen in their hundreds any morning at Victoria or
Paddington.

When the last of the hundred rites was over, Li lifted up the mite to
carry her to her own room; but she stretched out her arms to little
Wu in unmistakable desire, and he sprang to her and gathered her into
his arms and carried her himself up to her nursery and her women: the
happiest and the proudest bridegroom that ever was--and the mandarins
almost chuckled with delight and the Scot felt oddly queer.

After that the boy was free of the women’s quarters (the fragrant
apartments) in the inner court. He had many a good game of battledore
and of kites in the spacious grounds and in the courtyards with his
wife’s brothers--she had six, and they were all very kind to him; but
most of his time he spent squatted on the polished cherry-wood floor
of her room, nursing the babe. He liked that best of all. She was a
placid mite, but she seemed to like his arms, that never tired of her,
almost as much as they loved nesting her so--and she slept longest or,
waking, smiled sunniest when they encradled her. Even the day the foul
fiend colic came and cankered them both, she seemed less tortured in
his holding, and it was he who soothed her first.

And so they spent their spotless honeymoon. And much of it they spent
alone. Her amah watched them from the balcony where she sat sewing,
and Li’s prettiest concubine tottered in now and then on her tiny
feet, sent by Mrs. Li to see that all was well. But amah and concubine
counted scarcely as more than useful, necessary yamên furniture to the
boy, and were no intrusion.

No man of his rank in all China had more or comelier concubines than
Li, and none concubines that were finer dressed. Mrs. Li saw to that.
She was a strict and punctilious stickler in such things. Her lord had
grumbled sometimes at the expensiveness of “so many dolls”--for he
was thrifty--and once he had flatly refused another semi-matrimonial
plunge. But Mrs. Li had lost her temper then, called him bad things,
and smacked him with her fan, and after that he had let her be, and
she had enlarged his string of handmaidens as she chose, and he had
paid for them; for he loved his wife, and feared her too, and she had
borne him six strong sons. But he saw to it that all the concubines
served her well. In English (and in the other tongues of Europe) more
exquisitely ignorant nonsense has been written about China than about
any other subject, and far the silliest and crassest of it all about
the facts of Chinese womanhood.

Mrs. Li did not neglect her baby, and she was too good a mother and
too proud not to nurse the little girl herself, and she toddled into
the nursery as often as the hour-glass was turned thrice, coming in
slowly, leaning on an attendant’s arm because her own feet were so
very small and useless. As a matter of fact, she could move about
quickly enough, and run too (as many of the small-footed women can), so
skillfully had her “golden lilies” been bound. But she did it privately
only or when she forgot. It was not a fashionable thing to do.

She nursed little Mrs. Wu, but she did not linger in the baby’s
room overmuch. The mother of six sons was not inordinately proud
of a daughter’s arrival, although the great marriage had gilded it
considerably. And she was greatly occupied in playing hostess to her
husband’s older guest. It is not etiquette for a Chinese lady to chat
with men friends or to flutter about her husband’s home beyond the
female apartments, but a great many Chinese ladies do--ladies in most
things as canonical sticklers as Mrs. Li. Of course she never went
beyond her home gates except in the seclusion of her closed chair. The
Emperor himself would as soon have thought of showing his face freely
on the Pekin streets.

So the boy and the baby were practically alone much of the time. He sat
and crooned to her and rocked her in his arms, and she crooned to him
and grew fast into his warm young heart. And each week passed in added
delight.

But they passed! Wu the mandarin had much business in Pekin, aside from
the paramount marriage business that had brought him so far; he had not
been in Pekin for years till now, although his official yamên was still
here, and much of his revenue. The yamên was a bleak, empty place that
he had never used as “home,” and now given up to compradores and other
underlings. He visited it daily after the wedding had been completed,
and well scrutinized his deputies’ accounts and doings. It took time.
Nothing is hurried in China except the waterfalls. But Lord Wu’s Pekin
business was done at last, and he took his elaborate farewells of the
Lis, and turned towards home, taking Wu Li Chang reluctant with him.

The boy had asked to take the baby too, even venturing to urge that she
belonged to them now. (And to Muir he confided in an unreticent moment
that he’d dearly like to include her in the ill-anticipated trip to
England.)

The grandfather agreed that she was indeed theirs now. Of course she
was. A Chinese wife is the property of her husband’s patriarch. That
is alphabetic Chinese fact. But they would lend her to the Lis until
her husband returned from Europe. The boy grieved secretly and at
heart rebelled, but outwardly he was smiling and calm, made the thrice
obeisance of respect and fealty, saying, “Thy honorable will is good,
and shall by me, thy worthless slave, be gladly done,” took a stolid
(but inwardly convulsive) leave of Mrs. Wu, fast asleep on her crimson
cushion, and turned his slow feet heavily toward his homing palanquin.




CHAPTER V

HOMING


But the homeward journey was even more delightful than the journey
coming had been. The mandarin was very good to the boy, even a little
kinder than his wont, watching him narrowly with a gentle smile
glinting in the narrow old eyes.

The air was pungent with the smells of coming autumn. In the wayside
orchards the trees bent with ripening fruit and were heavy with thick
harvest of glistening and prickly-sheathed nuts.

There were still strawberries for the gathering, and the raspberries
and blackberries were ripe. The wayside was flushed with great waxen
pink begonia flowers and fringed by a thousand ferns. The air was sweet
and succulent for miles from the blossoms of the orange trees, and on
the same trees the great gold globes hung ripe. And the feathery bamboo
was everywhere--the fairest thing that grows in Asia.

They passed groups of girls gathering the precious deposit of insect
wax off the camellia trees--blue-clad, sunburnt girls, singing as they
worked.

Once--for a great lark, and just to see what such common places were
really like--Wu Li Chang and Muir had tea at an inn, a three-roofed
peaked thing built astride the road. The mandarin did not join them,
but stayed to pray at a wayside shrine dedicated to Lingwun--the soul.

One day the three friends (for they were deeply that) saw the great
Sie’tu, the Buddhist thanksgiving-to-the-earth service, in a great
straggling monastery that twisted about a mountain’s snowcovered
crest, and blinked and twinkled like some monster thing of life and
electricity, for its dozen tent-shaped, curling roofs were of beaten
brass.

The Scot got a deal of human sight-seeing out of that return
journeying. But it was its silent pictures and its wide solitudes that
the boy, child though he was, liked best. They moved on homewards
through a pulsing sea of flowers and fruit and ripening grain, of
song and light and warmth and vivid color, but above them towered the
everlasting hills, imperial as China herself, white, cold, snow-wrapped.

The soul of China pulsed and flushed at their feet; the soul of China
watched them from her far height: China, Titan, mighty, insolent, older
than history; China, lovely, laughing, coquetting with her babbling
brooks, playing--like the child she is--with her little wild flowers.

There was a tang of autumn in the air, and the cherries were growing
very ripe.

Often at night they lit a fire of brush beside their wayside camp,
and sitting in its glow the old man talked long and earnestly to the
child. To much of their talk Muir listened, smoking his sweet cob in
silence. Some of it was intimate even from his trusted hearing. Nothing
was said of the voyage to England or of the years to be lived out
there. It had been said for the most already, and almost the subject
was taboo. But of the home-coming to follow and the long years to be
lived at home the old man said much. And most of all he talked to the
boy of--women. Again and again he told him, as he often had even from
his cradle-days, of the women of their clan. There are several great
families in China noted above all else for their women, and the Wu
family was the most notable of all.

Most of the ladies Wu had been beautiful. Many of them had been great,
wise, gifted, scholarly. Their paifangs speckled the home provinces.
One had been espoused by an Emperor and had borne his more illustrious
Emperor-son. All had been virtuous. All had been loved and obeyed. To
treat their women well was an instinct with the Wus; to be proud of
them an inheritance and a tradition.

Wu Li Chang just remembered his own mother, and his father’s grief at
her death. The father had died before he had laid aside the coarse
white hempen garments of grief that he had worn for her. The epidemic
of smallpox that had pitted the mandarin’s face for a second time had
killed the only son--the father of this one child.

A great-great-aunt of the mandarin had been a noted mathematician.
Another ancestress had invented an astronomical instrument still used
in the great observatory at Pekin. On the distaff side the old man and
the boy could prove descent from both the two great sages--descent in
the male line from whom alone gives hereditary and titled nobility
in China, except in such rare, Emperor-bestowed instances as that of
Prince Kung. Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang were descended through their
mothers from Confucius and from Mencius. One foremother of theirs had
written a book that still ranked high in Chinese classics, and one had
worn the smallest shoes in all the eighteen provinces.

They had cause to be proud of their women, and to boast it intimately
from generation to generation.

Li--perhaps in compliment for the tortoise--had given his son-in-law
a tame trained bear and a skilled juggler, and Mrs. Li had presented
Wu Ching Yu with two of her husband’s choicest concubines. The
older mandarin had graciously appointed them attendants upon his
granddaughter and to stay with her in Pekin. But the bear and the
juggler were traveling with the home-returning Wus; and when the
inevitable chess-board and its jeweled chessmen and the flagons of hot
spiced wine were laid between Muir and the mandarin, Bruin--Kung Fo
Lo was his name--danced and pranced in the firelight for the boy, who
clapped his hands and shook with laughter; the heart of a man-child
cannot be for ever sad for a baby-girl, known but two months and not
able to crawl yet. But Wu Li Chang did not forget Wu Lu. He often
wished that she might have come with them. He’d willingly have traded
the dancing bear for her, with the juggler thrown in (he had two better
jugglers at home); and for permission to forego the journey to Europe
he would have given everything he had: his favorite Kweichow pony (a
dwarfed survival from the fleet white Arabs that the Turkish horde
of Genghis Khan brought into China), his best robes, the little gold
pagoda that was his very own, everything except his cue, his ancestral
tablets, and his grandfather’s love and approval--yes, everything, even
his wife.




CHAPTER VI

HEART ACHE


But it was summer again before he went. The mandarin was taken ill soon
on their home-coming, and all through the cold northern winter only
just lived. Death means little to the Chinese, but somehow, for all his
relentlessness of purpose, for all his iron of will, the old man could
not bring himself to part with the child while his megrim was sharp.
With spring he grew better, and when the great tassels of the wistaria
were plump and deeply purpled he sent the boy with his tutor to Hong
Kong.

They took their parting in a room in which they had passed much of
their close and pleasant companionship. James Muir understood that
the old man avoided, both for himself and the lad, the strain of the
parting, long drawn out, that the cross-country journey must have been.
And Muir suspected also that the mandarin did not dare the bodily
fatigue of such a journey, no matter how easily and luxuriously taken.

Muir was right. But chiefly, Wu chose to say good-by in their home--the
home that had been theirs for generations and for centuries.

Except a few pagodas there is not an old building in China. The
picturesque houses, with their pavilions and their triple roofs,
flower-pot hung, curling and multicolored, spring up like mushrooms,
and decay as soon. Houses last a few generations--perhaps. Great
cities crumble, disappear, and every trace of them is obliterated
in a brief century or two. The Chinese rebuild, or move on and
build elsewhere, but they do not repair. Their style and scheme
of architecture never alter. The tent-like roofs (or ship-prow
survivals--have it as you will, for no one knows), painted as gayly
as the roofs of Moscow, make all China tuliptinted, and looking from
a hillside at a Chinese city is often oddly like looking down upon
the Kremlin. It is very beautiful, and it looks old. But unlike the
Muscovite city, it is all new.

But this house of Wu, where both the old man and his grandson had been
born, was far older than a house in China often is. The Wus were a
tenacious race, even in much that their countrymen usually let slide;
and here, in these same buildings, or in others built on the same site,
the Wus had made their stronghold and kept their state since before the
great Venetian came to China to learn and to report her and her cause
aright.

And it was because of this, far more than because his old bones ached
and his breath cut and rasped in his side, that Wu Ching Yu chose to
take here what must be a long and might well be a last farewell.

The actual “good-by” was said standing beside the costly coffin which
had been the man’s gift from his wife the year their son was born. Wu
the grandson had played beside it when still almost a baby. He knew its
significance, its great value, and that there was no finer coffin in
China. The precious Shi-mu wood, from one solid piece of which it had
been carved, was hidden beneath layer after layer of priceless lacquer
and Kweichow varnish, both inside and out. And little Wu, who knew
each of its elaborate, fantastic details as well as if it had been a
favorite picture-book, had never been able to determine which was the
more gorgeous--the vermilion of its surface or the gold leaf of the
arabesque that decorated it.

The old man laid one thin claw-hand on the casket, the bleached and
taloned other on the young shoulder. “I hope that you will be here to
stretch and straighten me in it at my ease when my repose comes, and I
take my jade-like sleep in this matchless Longevity Wood. If so, _or
if not_, remember always that you are Wu, my grandson, a master of
men, the son and the father of good women, and a Chinese. You have
always pleased me well. Now go.”

The boy prostrated himself and laid his forehead on the old man’s foot.
The old man bent and blessed him. The child rose.

“Go!”

Without a word, without a look, Wu Li Chang went. And James Muir,
waiting at the outer door, noticed that not once did the child look
back--not when they came round the devil-protection screen, not
when they passed the ancestral graves, not when they went beneath
his great-grandmother’s memorial arch, not when they crested the
hill--nowhere, not at all, not once. He folded his hands together in
his long sleeves and went calmly, with his head held high and with a
sick smile on his pale face. They were to sail from Hong Kong in a few
days, but that was a small thing: this was his passing from China and
from childhood.

And as they passed south, bearing east, the boy said little. He neither
sulked nor grieved--or, if he grieved, he hid it well. But he wrapped
himself in reticence as in a thick cloak.

His eyes went everywhere, but his face was expressionless and his lips
motionless.

Villages, cities, gorges, lakes, hills, highways and by-ways, he
regarded them all gravely, and made no comment. Even when they crossed
the Yangtze-Kiang, he looked but showed no interest. And when at last
Muir pointed into the distance, the boy just smiled a cold perfunctory
smile, and bent his head slightly in courtesy; nor did he display a
warmer interest when the exquisite island lay close before them.

       *       *       *       *       *

The old rock that used to be the Chinese pirates’ stronghold and
tall look-out, but on which England has now built Greater Britain’s
loveliest holding--there is no lovelier spot on earth--sparkled in the
hot sunlight. The bamboos quivered on the peak, the blue bay danced and
laughed. The sampans pushed and crowded in the harbor, the rickshaws
rolled and ran along the bund, Europe and Asia jostled each other on
the streets and on the boats.

Muir stood on the ship’s white deck holding Wu Li Chang’s hand, and
taking a long last look at the city of Victoria and at the old island
it threatened to overspread, and in parts did, bulging out into and
over the sea. His thoughts were long thoughts too. He had come to Hong
Kong little more than a boy, academic honors thick upon him, but life
all untasted. Few Europeans had seen China as he had, and almost he
sickened to leave her. He was going home. In a month or two he would
see his mother, who was very much to him. But China quickened and
pulled at his heart. He knew that he would not forget China.

The boat slipped slowly off, backing like a courtier from the queenly
place. And the man and the boy stood without a word and watched the
unmatched panorama dim to nothingness. The small yellow hand lay cold
and passive in the big, warm, white one. Presently Wu drew his palm
gently from his friend’s, and turned quietly away and walked to the
saloon stairs. Muir turned too, and watched the quaint, gorgeous figure
as it went--so pitifully magnificent, so pathetically lonely--but did
not follow. He understood that the boy wished to be alone. And he
himself was glad to be alone just then.

Two hours later, when the dressing warning went, he found his charge in
their cabin. Wu had no wish for dinner. He had been crying--almost for
the first time in his life; the Chinese rarely weep--and besides, he
was very sick. Muir dressed without speaking much, and when dinner was
served mercifully left the boy to himself and his pillows.

       *       *       *       *       *

Across China an old man in shabby robes left his rice untouched, and
bowed long before the ancestral tablets of his race.

And that night in her sleep Wu Li Lu gave a little cry; she had cut a
tooth.




CHAPTER VII

A TORTURED BOYHOOD


On the whole, young Wu enjoyed the voyage. He liked the way the foreign
women eyed his clothes; not one of them had garments half so fine. He
liked the motion of the boat when once he had mastered it. There were
snatches of absorbing sightseeing at Colombo and at Malta. And in those
days one had to change boats between Hong Kong and Southampton. He had
much to think of when he chose to sit alone. He had Muir to talk with
when he liked to talk. And the captain, on whose left hand he sat at
table from Hong Kong to Colombo, was friendly without patronage and
played a good game of chess.

And by some strength of will and childhood’s splendid resilience
he had thrown off (or laid away) his heart-broken apathy with his
sea-sickness. He enjoyed the voyage, on the whole.

When they landed at Southampton Wu thought that he had found Bedlam,
and wondered, as he had not done before, why his grandfather had
condemned him to such hideous exile. Everything he saw revolted him. He
thought that nothing could be uglier. He was not even interested. The
very novelty had no charm. His little gorge rose. Europe--seen so and
so sounding--was a stench in his nostrils and rank offense to his eyes.
He held up his heavy embroidered satin skirts and tucked them about
him close, as a girl in Sunday-best might pick her way across the
malodorous street slime in a low and squalid neighborhood.

It was late afternoon, and as they were not expected at their London
destination until the next morning, Muir put up at the hotel of which
Southampton was proudest. Wu was measurably accustomed to English food.
The mandarin had seen to it. And on the liner the young Chinese, eating
tit-bits and prime cuts from the joints at the captain’s table, had
found them good. But this was English food with a difference. James
Muir was not a selfish man--far from it--but he exulted, for the time
at least, at being at home; and he ordered a truly British dinner in a
burst of patriotism (not the less deep because its expression took such
homely form), forgetting to consult the boy’s tastes, which he knew
perfectly. They began with oxtail soup and finished with three kinds
of inferior cheese and a brew of “small” coffee which _was_ very
small indeed. Wu thought it would have been an unkindness to the palate
of a coolie. And in the big, strange bed he lay awake half the night,
grieving for his old grandfather, and trying to make up his homesick
little mind which was nastiest, apple tart or salt beef and carrots,
and wondering why the gods let a people be who made and ate such salad.
His tutor had taken two helpings, and had praised the abominable beef.

The train frightened him. The little (first class, reserved) box
into which they were locked, appalled and then offended. Waterloo
was purgatory. The hansom he liked. They drove to Portland Place,
and Wu went up the steps with dignified eagerness. This he knew, was
the Chinese Legation--the London yamên of a distant kinsman. This
would be better--almost something of home. They expected him here.
But it was not better; it was worse--a purgatory and a drab, dull
one. Even James Muir was struck that the hall and the drawing-room
had been subjected to unhappy furnishing. And instead of the friendly
countryman that Wu had expected to greet him at the threshold, a sleek
young English attaché, with oiled yellow hair and a lisp, came forward
leisurely, saying, “Oh, it’s you. Hello then! Come on in.” A Chinese
servant opened the door to them, but he scarcely seemed real to the
disappointed lad, and there was nothing else in the least Chinese to be
seen.

Why the Chinese Legation in London should have been furnished from
the Tottenham Court Road passes respectful understanding; but it had.
It was magnificently furnished. It had been done completely and with
no stint by a famous firm. Probably that firm would have done the
work less crudely if it had been left to its own well-experienced
professional devices. But it by no means had. The youngest attaché--he
of the fair, sleek locks--suffered from conscience. He suspected that
he might never shine at international diplomacy, but he intended
to do what he could to earn his “ripping” emolument. And among
other self-imposed activities he had elected to direct the great
house furnishers and decorators. The red and yellow, about equally
proportioned, of the hall and the reception-rooms were not his own
first favorites. A nice Cambridge blue with rose trimmings he’d have
liked better for himself. But the Chinese Government was paying him,
and he meant to play the game by that Imperial Body of an imperial
people; and he played it by some hundreds of yards of red silk plush
and bright marigold-yellow satin that he considered utterly Chinese.
Wu thought it barbaric, demoniac. The Chinese Minister saw both the
intended kindness and the joke, and enjoyed the joke very much indeed,
laughing slyly and good-naturedly up his long, dove-colored crêpe
sleeve.

The Minister was out, the attaché explained: had had to go--“to the
F. O., don’t you know?”--Wu had no idea what “F. O.” meant--“sorry not
to be here. Back soon,” and he ushered them up into the long, draped and
padded barrack of a drawing-room, and said again, “Hello!” but added in
a verbose burst, “I say, sit down.”

It was better when the Minister returned at last from the Foreign
Office. And after lunch he took Wu into an inner room more like China,
less like Hades. But until he died Wu hated the Chinese Legation at
Portland Place. And he stayed there for five years. Then he went to
Oxford.

London he never learned to like. There was no reason why he should.
But he did learn to like the country places all over the kingdom’s two
islands. For he and Muir traveled together at Christmas and at Easter
and in the summer.

Muir had a British Museum appointment--it was waiting for him when they
landed. But his hours and his duties were easy, and he still drew his
larger income from the coffers of the mandarin in Sze-chuan, and he
gave much of his time and labor to his old pupil. But for the Scot and
a few of the Chinese at No. 49 the exiled boy might have gone mad, so
shaken and cramped was he by homesickness. But they were an enormous
help and refuge. He worked hard and learned prodigiously, as only a
Chinese can learn. And, being Chinese, what he once learned he never in
the least forgot.

Oxford he liked from the first. Always his soul ached for China, for
her people (_his_ people), her ways and her scenes: the smell of
her, the sound of her, the heart and soul of her matching to his: the
haze of her peaceful atmosphere, pricked by the music of her lutes, and
throbbing with the mystic beat, beat of the tom-tom. He thought there
were no flowers in Europe, no repose, no balance, no art, no friendship.

But, for all that, Oxford thrilled him, and though he counted every
hour that brought him nearer to China, he counted them not a little
good in themselves because they passed by the Isis and in the classic
droning of Oxford days and ways.

All the sunshine seemed to find him in Oxfordshire, all the shadow at
Portland Place.

Small things rasped him at the Legation, and two heavy trials--one a
humiliation, the other a grief--found him out there. A few months after
his arrival they cut his cue and dressed him in an Eton suit. His rage
and shame were terrible. For months he did not forgive it--if he ever
quite did. Child as he was, they might not have encompassed it had they
not assured him that it was his grandfather’s will. That silenced but
did not console him. And he treated his new garments to more than one
paroxysm of ugly rage. Chinese calm is as great a national asset as
any of the many assets of that wonderful race. Heart disease is almost
unknown among the Chinese, and probably they owe their happy immunity
from that painful scourge to their own placidity and equable behavior.
But when they do “boil over,” as they do at times, the eruption is
indescribable--they foam and froth, and until the fit ( for it is
that) has spent itself and them they are uncontrollable and beyond all
self-control or semblance of it.

Wu did not mind being laughed at in the London streets for his
“pig-tail” and his gold-embroidered satins. He was sincerely
indifferent to it. When English urchins called after him, “Chin-chin
Chinaman, chop, chop, chop,” he did not care a whit. Partly this
was good-nature--for he was good-natured as yet--and partly it was
vanity: the centuries-old vanity of a descendant of an interminable
mandarinate. He understood how immeasurably superior he was to those
who presumed to laugh at him--how much better clad, how much better
bred--and tolerated them and their peasant mirth very much in the
spirit of the old fellow in Æsop’s fable who scorned to resent the
kicks his donkey gave him because he “considered the source,” and
with, too, the quiet pride of the MacGregor who, when his acquaintance
expressed surprise that the great “Mac” had been seated below the salt
at some feast, asserted with bland arrogance, “Where MacGregor sits
is the head of the table.” But to be shorn of the cue and stripped of
the finery at which the canaille jeered maddened him and made him very
bitter.

In ten years the Chinese in exile made many acquaintances, but only
one friend. Probably he filched some profit, some equipment for his
years to come, from each of the acquaintances; but, for all that, he
found most of them no small nuisance. A Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot was
his infliction in chief. She was a distant connection of the blond
attaché’s mother, and had gone to school with a second or third cousin
of Sir Halliday Macartney. And she had no doubt that those two facts,
by the strength and the charm of their union, made her _persona
grata_ at the Chinese Legation. She called there at the oddest
times, and dropped in to lunch uninvited; and the Chinese Minister,
trained from his birth to make great and chivalrous allowance for the
vagaries of women and of lunatics, would not permit his exasperated
staff to cold-shoulder, much less to snub, Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot.
And so she came to Portland Place frequently and unrebuked. She called
the Minister “my dear Mandarin.” She doted on China, and did so hope to
go there some glad day. She loved the Chinese, poor dears. And once,
when she gave a dinner party, she borrowed the Legation cook; but she
only did this once. The Minister would have condoned a second time, but
the cook would not. Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot had called him “John,” and
asked him if Chinese children loved their mothers, and the kitchen-maid
had taken liberties with his cue.

But there were others of his race--more highly born than he--whom this
lady also called “John,” among them the Minister’s private secretary, a
very proud and solemn man who was a nobleman by inheritance--there are
a few in China--and who often longed to boil the friendly Englishwoman
alive in oil.

She took Wu to her heart at once; and, what was far worse, she took him
for “a nice long day” in Kew Gardens.

That awful day! And she meant so well! At first she merely bored him.
Then she infuriated him. It was scarcely fair to ask a Chinese boy to
think overmuch of Kew’s prized Wistaria sinensis--there were miles of
better on the estate at home. He thought the picture of the House of
Confucius hanging in the Museum an impertinence--no red scroll of honor
above it, no joss-stick burning in homage beneath it. The Chambers
imitation of a pagoda was to him even more unpardonable. What right
had this English tea-garden sort of place with a shabby mockery of a
sacred thing of China? And the bamboos and the golden-leaf flowers of
the hamamelis and the fragrant cream blossoms of the syringa made him
newly homesick. What right had the dear home-flowers to grow in Europe,
transplanted, dwarfed, caged, exhibited--as he was? And his hostess’s
remarks upon opium, as they stood beside the poppy beds, did not tend
to soothe him. Wu Li Chang did not know much about opium in those days,
but he knew considerably more than Mrs. Cholmondeley-Piggot did, and
he knew that these were not opium poppies, for all the lady or the
guide-books said--she had presented him with a guide-book, of course.
There was not much poppy culture in his part of Sze-chuan, but he knew
that much. Decent brands of opium were made from the white poppy. Some
inferior sorts, such as coolies chew, are made from the red-flowered
plants, but not such as these.

To his angry young eyes the expatriated lotus plants seemed little
better than weeds; and when she expatiated upon the wonders of Kew’s
banyan tree (a picture rather of banyan fragments) he scorned to tell
her of banyans he knew well at home, trees under any one of which a
thousand men could shelter from the rain, and of one his grandfather
had seen under which twenty thousand men could hide from storm or sun.

The day at Kew was a ghastly failure. But happily Mrs.
Cholmondeley-Piggot never suspected it, and was sincerely and
generously sorry that the boy could never seem to find time to go
anywhere with her again.

The second trouble that came to him was on a grander scale than the
cutting of hair or the enforced wearing of strange, uncomfortable
garments. It was tragedy indeed, and almost broke his affectionate,
homesick heart. When he had been in England about a year word came that
his grandfather was dead.

Wu was desperate. And now he was quite alone. He belonged to no one
in all the world. And in all the world no one belonged to him except a
baby-girl just learning to walk across a floor of polished cherry-wood,
nearly eight thousand miles away in old Pekin.




CHAPTER VIII

SOME BALM


There was a great deal in the Oxford life that reminded Wu of China:
the beauty and the dignity, the repose, the dedication (and of some
the devotion too) to the finer things, and not less the riot of
the “wines,” the crash and clash of the “rows,” the luxury and the
elaborations. It was reminder that he found, and not resemblance.
Oxford was intensely English. He liked it none the less for that.
Nothing at Portland Place had annoyed him more than the mongrel mix-up
of West and East, the fatuous attempt to blend the unblendable. It was
neither English goose nor Chinese mongoose, and he loathed it. Oxford
was good, downright English dog, and well pedigreed; he liked the bark
and the bite of it and the honest look in its eyes.

The crass mistakes so often made by his rich countrymen at such places
he avoided, partly by his own good sense and partly by Muir’s counsel
and the dead mandarin’s command. He spent of his great income lavishly,
but not too lavishly. He kept good horses, but not too good; and he
kept no valet. His entertainment was generous, but nothing much out
of the common, and never beyond the convenient return of the richer
men. He made much pleasant and useful acquaintance, but no friends.
He indulged himself a little in the furnishing of his rooms, but they
scarcely smacked of China. His jade lamp had cost a great deal, but a
young duke had one that had cost more. He had a little bronze and some
lacquer, but he had no kakemonos and burned no incense. Quite a number
of the other students had kakemonos by the half-dozen, and burned
joss-sticks elaborately.

Wu worked prodigiously at Oxford and played industriously. He enjoyed
the work. There were some brilliant men at Oxford then, but no mind
better than his, and no industriousness to equal his. He took nothing
much in honors--that was not in his grandfather’s scheme; but he
assimilated an immense amount of alien fact and thought. He learned
Englishmen. He read many books and mastered them. But he had been sent
to Europe to study men and peoples, and he never forgot it or swerved
from it for an hour. None of his fellow undergraduates particularly
liked him, but few disliked him, and he interested many. Several of
the dons and fellows did like him; with one he might have had intimacy
if he had cared to, and from studying Wu two of the wisest reversed a
lifelong estimate of China and the Chinese.

He excelled at all he did there. But almost always he was at pains to
be surpassed at the last lap; and when now and then he won, he made it
his inexorable rule to win by but a hair’s breadth.

Not all his fellow undergraduates treated him with entire courtesy.
Some laughed at him openly at times and called him “Chops.” And because
these presumably were gentlemen he was not so altogether indifferent
to it as he had been to the gibes of the gamins on the London streets.
He was young enough to wince at the criticisms of companions he was
Chinese enough to despise.

He studied women too when he had the chance, but with all them his
relations were impeccably ceremonial and on the surface. His being
was in China still, and no English girl stirred his pulse or fogged
his subtle shrewdness. James Muir, who watched over him faithful as a
mother, had somewhat feared for him when the passing of adolescence
into first raw manhood should come pounding at the door of sex. Muir
knew that in that experience Englishmen in exile usually found some
impulse toward vagary irresistible. But Wu lived on unruffled--alone in
Europe, and content with loneliness.

He did not forget Li Lu, but he rarely thought of her now. No doubt she
would do well enough when the time came to assert his ownership and
desire sons. In the meantime, he was absorbed in carrying out to the
minutest particle his grandfather’s behest.

There was a girl at a parsonage where he sometimes visited that he
thought less uninteresting than the others he met, less like a horse
or a tornado or a pudding, more like a girl. And Florence Grey made
him shyly welcome at her tea-table and taught him to play croquet.
She played a beautiful game, and in their second match he could have
beaten her. He gave her father’s church a new organ, and made her
first bazaar an unprecedented success: he half stocked the tables,
and then saw that they were swiftly stripped. She knew of many of his
“kind contributions,” though not of all his re-purchases--they were
indirectly made, and Mrs. Muir in Scotland was not a little aghast at
the frills and flummeries her son sent her in three big packing-cases.
And the Vicar looked a little askance at the presence of a smirking
heathen god, conspicuous, but not for being overdressed, on his
daughter’s stall.

After the Oxford years came several years of travel, sometimes with
Muir, sometimes not. One summer Wu was the Muirs’ guest in their simple
Scottish home.

After her first sternly concealed qualm or two, the friend’s mother
took an immense liking to the young Chinese, and her he liked at once,
perhaps better than he had ever liked any one but his grandfather and
her son. And it was in no way an attraction of opposites. Worth and
courage recognized worth and courage, and felt at home with them. Ellen
Muir and young Wu were both indomitable, naturally upright, proud,
clannish. They had twenty qualities and several prejudices in common.

They talked together gravely for hours. He helped her often as she
moved keenly about her housework, and Muir rocked with silent laughter
at the sight, knowing that those delicate yellow hands had never
performed anything menial before, and in all human probability never
would again.

Wu watched his hostess with lynx eyes, and the more he watched the more
be respected and admired. Late at night, in the hour he invariably
spent alone, and had done so from his first coming to England--the hour
in which he read and wrote and spoke and thought in Chinese, when in
spirit, and bodily too, he made obeisance to his ancestors’ tablets
across the world--he wrote down carefully much that she had said and
that he had learned from her. Among his many sons the gods might send a
daughter, and if they did she too should learn of Ellen Muir.

Wu knew, of course, that many of the English ladies he had seen at
theaters and had met at aristocratic dinner-tables were respectable,
above reproach. But he had never yet escaped a shudder of contempt when
he had seen one “dressed” for evening. He had seen the coolie women,
in the cocoon sheds on his grandfather’s silkworm farms, scantily
clad in one brief garment, that by their own chilliness they might be
warned if the room grew too cold for the delicate spinners, and that
they might easily shelter the hatching worms beneath their breasts,
but that semi-nudity was a necessity and had a use, and rarely was
the privacy of the shed invaded; but women undressed (as he termed
it) collectively, voluntarily, and interspersed among men, he thought
abominable. Ellen Muir did not dine in décolletage.

The eminent scholar--for as such the scholar world now recognized Wu’s
once tutor--she commanded, and even at times reprimanded, sharply,
exacting and receiving the docile obedience of a tractable child.
And that appealed to Wu as inevitably as did the high-necked stuff
gowns. Mother ruled sons so in China. And in China sons showed their
mothers just such meek obedience. The keeper of many of the most
valuable treasures at the British Museum spilled marmalade on her best
tablecloth one day, and she scolded him roundly, and Wu saw nothing
funny in it, and would not, had he known that the son had bought the
cloth and kept up the home.

The little house stood on one of the loveliest of Scotland’s hillsides.
A brown burn rushed by the door. Great birds wheeled and whirred above
the eaves. This woman almost worshiped the beauty of her homeland, and
it touched her to see how much their strange guest saw and felt it. He
saw even more of it than she did--though, fortunately for their mutual
liking, she could not suspect that--and he felt it very much indeed. It
reminded him of the country beside the Yangtze in the neighborhood of
the Falls of Chung Shui.

One long vacation Wu and Muir climbed the Alps and the London papers
reported Wu killed. But it was another Chinese, an undergraduate at
Cambridge whose name was Ku, who had misstepped and slid down into the
engulfing ice. But the mistake reached Oxford, and several there were
sorry to hear it. And Florence Grey, who had been married the week
before, heard it on her honeymoon, and felt a little saddened for a few
moments. He had always seemed a nice boy, and he was so far from home.

Once he lived for three months in Tours, alone with the people and the
language.

After Oxford he traveled carefully, as he had done everything so far,
sometimes alone, sometimes with Muir, searching Europe for every
experience that might serve his grandfather’s desire and plan.

When Wu was twenty-four he went home. James Muir had half expected to
be asked to go also, but Wu did not suggest it.

His European phase was over, and he wished to be alone with his own
people in his own land.

Bland and courteous to all, yet he spoke little on the long voyage, but
sat looking out across the waters towards China. And he did not trouble
to leave the boat either at Malta or at Colombo.

But he was not dreaming as he sat brooding, looking out to sea. He was
planning, for himself and for his race.

There were international clouds ahead. Wu saw them.

A week in Hong Kong--he had much to do there--and then he pushed across
the mainland that was still China, where feet of Europe rarely trod,
and journeyed to his home.

When he had paid his long respects to the graves and the tablets, he
set his house in order, and the estate. But indeed all had been well
kept in his absence. It seemed as if the old mandarin’s spirit still
brooded there and his adamant will still ruled.

To visit all he owned took Wu some months, though he went swiftly, by
boat, by horse, and in chairs with which the coolies ran, for there
were several wide estates and a score of smaller holdings.

All seen at last and ordered to his mind, he took the old winding road
to Pekin and knocked at Li’s yamén gate.




CHAPTER IX

WU LI LU


Wu did not see his wife in Pekin. He stayed with Li several days, and
long and earnest was their talk, many and deep their interchanged
kot’ows, and the cups of boiling tea and tiny bowls of hot spiced wine
they drank together innumerable. Mrs. Wu was well, they assured him,
and utterly inconsolable at her approaching departure from her parents.
She wept and wailed continuously, and would not be comforted. Wu bowed
and smiled. For this was as it should be. No Chinese maiden would do
otherwise, and his bride’s high estate predicated an utmost excess of
grief. And once he caught through a wide courtyard the noisy storm of
her grief. Evidently she had been well brought up, and Wu was highly
satisfied.

He took profoundly respectful farewells of Mr. and Mrs. Li and hurried
home.

And while he waited for the coming of his bride, some days thinking of
it a good deal, some days thinking of it not at all, he had twofold and
strenuous occupation. He divided his time between preparation for the
reception and the housing of his wife, and laying the foundations of
his own relations with the innumerable “tongs” or secret societies that
in China play so powerful and so indescribable a part in all things of
great pith and moment, and more particularly in everything touching
international affairs and the treatment of aliens in China.

Sociology and political economy had been no small part of Wu’s studies
in Europe; there he had observed and gleaned much on those lines that
he planned to graft upon the sociological and political methods of his
own people.

While studying Europe he had kept in passionate touch with China. He
knew that the mighty current of her being ran underground. He was
permeated by things European now, for the time at least, but was in
no way enmeshed by them. He did not make the mistake that some highly
intelligent Chinese have made after years of European study and
travel--the mistake of underestimating the quality, the power, and the
permanence of the “tongs,” of which so comparatively little is heard,
so much felt, in every part of China.

He knew that who ruled China in deed must rule through the secret
societies of that tong-ridden and yet tong-buttressed land; he knew
that who would influence and serve China greatly must work through the
tongs, or work but half effectually.

He intended to rule in China, to be one of the supreme powers behind
and beneath her throne; for he was loyal to the Imperial Manchu, in
his heart held no traffic with republicanism or rebellion, and meant
to hold none with his hands. He intended to rule because dominance was
his nature and his delight, and equally because he believed it to be
his duty--his duty to China and to the house of Wu. Even more than he
intended to rule he intended to serve. He was his country’s servant.
He had dedicated his life to China, and sworn her his fealty on almost
every day of his exile.

He determined to rule and to serve with and through the established
tongs, and himself to establish others, because he saw clearly that so
he could serve best, and with the surest, tightest grip.

While he waited for the girl to come with noise and cavalcade, he
stayed at home and in the neighborhood of home; but every day odd
messengers came and went, quiet, unobtrusive men. Often Wu was closeted
for hours with some shabby-looking coolie, footsore and travel-torn. Wu
was seeking and making affiliation with tong after tong. He was sowing
seed all over vast China.

But he found time, or took it, to oversee every item of the bridal
preparation. So lavish had been his orders on his first home-coming,
and so well had they been obeyed, that further preparation might have
been dispensed with--only a Chinese mind could have detected blemish or
contrived improvement or addition. Wu’s mind was very Chinese. Thirteen
years in banishment had not discolored it in the least. Everything that
Lu would touch, every place that she would see, was in some way or
detail given additional beauty or comfort. In her garden he lavished a
wealth of care. The very flowers seemed to respond to his urging, as
things much more inanimate than flowers do respond to such a master
will as that of Wu. Wu Lu’s garden foamed and glowed with bud, perfume
and flower, until even in China there could scarcely have been another
spot so roseate or so full of rapture.

There was a pagoda of course, a bridge, a lotus lake, a sun-dial and a
forest of tiny dwarf trees.

The pagoda had eleven storeys. Each storey’s projecting roof had eight
corners, and from each corner Wu had hung a bell of precious blue
porcelain, silver lined, silver clappered. The slightest breeze that
came must set one or more of the delicate things a-ringing, and by a
costly and ingenious device each motion of a bell threw down on the
garden not only music, but sweet, aromatic smell--a different odor, as
a different note, from each bell.

That was the last thing Wu could find to do.

And then they gave him his wife. They brought her to him through the
gloaming one balmy autumn eve, sitting hidden in her flowery chair,
carried through the paifang which he had regilded and newly crimsoned
in her honor and in that of his never-to-be-forgotten great-grandmother.

She came in greatest state, and much of the glittering ceremonial
they had enacted fourteen years ago they re-enacted now; and all that
necessarily had been omitted before because of her tender days, and of
the marriage having been (irregularly) celebrated at her home in lieu
of his, was scrupulously performed now.

At the house door he bent and lifted her from her chair, which the
bearers had put down on the ground. She shrank back on her cushions
into the farthest corner when he drew the curtains aside, and when
he reached to touch her she panted delicately like some frightened
pigeon. He could not see her, even when he held her in his arms, for
she was shrouded from crown to toe in her voluminous veil of crimson
gauze. There had been no difficulty about her wearing it this time.
She knew all the niceties of her important rôle, of which she had
been so outrageously ignorant before, and performed them to a Chinese
perfection. He saw only a red-wrapped bundle--it felt soft and tender
to his gentle grip--with an under-gleam of jewels and gold, and the
iridescent glitter of the strings of many-colored beads hanging from
her crown thickly over her face. And no one else saw even that much,
for when the chair had been laid at his feet the bearers and all her
retinue and his had turned away and stood backs to the chair.

He carried her in, holding her over a dish of smoking charcoal at the
threshold, that all ill-luck might be for ever fumed away from her.

In the great hall he sat her high up upon her chair of state and took
his seat on his. For more than an hour they sat so, and neither spoke.
But when the wild goose which the medicine-man flung from a lacquered
cage circled about her head and not about his own, indicating that she
would rule, not he, Wu laughed aloud, and under her red veil the girl
looked down at her half-inch embroidered shoe and smiled well pleased.

They drank from one cup. The crimson cord was tied about her wrist and
his, fastening them together now for weal or woe.

At length he rose and led her to the tablets of his ancestors--hers too
now, for Li was no longer her father--and there they bent together and
paid homage again and again.

Then came the marriage feast.

And through all the incense burned, the tom-toms bleated brazenly,
a hundred instruments gave out their unchorded melodies, and the
slave-girls shrilled Chinese love-songs in their sweet falsetto voices
and a marriage hymn that is four thousand years old.

And all this time he had not seen her face, and she but dimly his.

But at last they were left alone. One by one the horde of people who
had witnessed and served them made repeated obeisance and withdrew.

They were alone.

Gently, carefully, slowly he led her into an inner room, and there
he lifted the red veil and looked at her face. After a long moment
she raised her pretty almond eyes and looked in his--two gorgeous,
bedizened figures, standing very still, with a cloud of red silk gauze
heaped at their feet.

Wu made a sudden sound that was almost a sob, and held out his arms.

“My flower,” he said.

       *       *       *       *       *

All night long the perfume of the flowers, the sweet, shrill voices of
the sing-song girls, and the soundings of the guitar and the flutes
stole softly in through the chamber casements; all night long they
heard the throb, throb of the drums and of old barbaric love-songs; and
all night long each felt the beating of the other’s heart.

After that Wu Li Lu forgot that she had had a father and a mother,
brothers, girl-friends and a home in Pekin. And Wu let all the days
slip by, forgetting business of his own, affairs of China, life-plans,
life-schemes, almost forgetting his grandfather; scarcely remembering,
his wife’s soft hand in his, to make obeisance before the old, old
tablet in front of which their children would bow and worship them in
far-off years to come, when he and Wu Lu should be dead.

For a year they lived in paradise, the pretty paradise that comes but
once and does not come to all.

Mrs. Wu was as sweet, as delicate, as the graceful pet names he called
her. She had no great strength of character, and little distinction of
mind. How long it would have taken the infatuated man to learn this is
impossible to guess. Whether, when learned, it would have diminished
her fascination in the least is as difficult to determine, but, on the
whole, probably not, Wu being Wu in China China.

When their first year closed in she bore him a daughter, and in bearing
died.




CHAPTER X

NANG PING


The years passed, and Wu took no other wife. Time enough, he reasoned;
and while he devoted himself, body and soul and seething, subtle
intellect, to the big tasks he had set himself and had had set him
by the old mandarin long ago, the bachelor habit grew upon him and
encrusted him with its self-sufficient and not unselfish little
customs, as it does so many men of Europe. Perhaps in this and in some
other things Europe had marked and tinged him more than he knew.

Except for his wifelessness, he kept all such establishment as a
Chinese gentleman should; there were flower-girls in his retinue and
much in his life of which Ellen Muir would have disapproved violently.

He had felt no disappointment at the sex of his firstborn. Perhaps
his grief (it was very great) at Wu Lu’s death made him indifferent
to the great sex-blemish in the child. Or possibly his descent from
Queen Yenfi and from a score of ladies little less able or less
famed gave him an unconscious estimate of the woman-sex strangely
un-Chinese--unless China be misreported.

Mrs. Li had petitioned for the custody of the babe, but Wu had refused
sternly. “She is a Wu. She stays with Wu.” But he conceded a point--a
minor point. A younger sister of Mrs. Li was widowed at about the time
of Wu Lu’s death, widowed while still a bride and childless. She begged
to come and be foster-mother and servant to the motherless babe; and Wu
had consented to her coming, for a time at least, partly because he
had known and liked her husband, partly in pity for her widowhood--the
most uncomfortable condition in Chinese life, and abjectly deplorable
when the indignity of childlessness is added--partly because he had no
kinswoman of his own to fill a post which he instinctively hesitated to
confer on any hireling. Sing Kung Yah came; Wu found her amiable and
tractable, and, he thought, fairly efficient. Of her fondness for the
child or the child’s fondness for her there could be no doubt, and her
place in their household soon came to be one of established permanency.
From the first Wu exacted for her treatment from his retainers such
as Eastern widows rarely enjoy, and gradually he gave her some real
authority, as well as much show of it, in addition to the lavish
courtesy he paid and enforced for her. Sing Kung Yah was pathetically
grateful. She never heard of Ellen Muir, and little thought that she
owed her unprecedented ease of widowhood to the dignity and firm
despotism with which an Aryan woman had worn her weeds in Fife.

When Nang Ping was three her father brought her to Kowloon, and when
she was thirteen established her as mistress of the tiny and very
charming estate he had bought and perfected there, just beyond the
English holding, and where he made his home when his business lay, as
it did more often than not, in Hong Kong.

He knew now that he should take no wife. He had no wish to, and he
saw no necessity. For he could adopt a son--presently. There was time
enough. A wife was neither here nor there, but certainly a son was
indispensable. He could not die without a son. Without a son he could
not be properly buried, or mourned and worshiped.

Upon the great wealth his grandfather had left him he piled wealth
far greater. But far beyond the riches he amassed he amassed power
and influence. The ramifications of his influence were endless and
tortuous. Tze-Shi felt Wu’s influence as she decreed policies, signed
edicts and enacted laws of tremendous reach, weaving and fraying out
the destiny of China, and there was not a coolie in Hong Kong but felt
and obeyed it. No one in China--unless it was Tze-Shi herself--wielded
more power than Wu.

He held the Chinese in Shanghai, in Penang and in Rangoon, in Bentick
Street and in Yokohoma, in the hollow of his hand.

Wu wore a mandarin’s button now. And he had presented himself at one of
the great national examinations in the first year of his fatherhood. To
be enrolled among the literati served him and his purposes, as it did
to wear the coveted peacock feather. But he did not overvalue either of
the showy distinctions, or often wear them conspicuously. Chinese to
the core, superficially he was no little cosmopolitan. All that he had
found good in English life and in English ways he adopted frankly, but
always for a Chinese purpose, with a Chinese heart. At home he usually
wore the dress and ate the food of his country, but not always. Out
of his home, at least in the treaty ports, he was usually dressed as
Englishmen dress, but not always.

Nang Ping had more apparent freedom than other Chinese girls of fair
birth have; and some of it was real. She had English governesses from
time to time. She spoke English almost as purely as her father did, but
with less vocabulary and far less command of idiom, and French quite as
well as he; she played Grieg and Chopin better than Hilda Gregory--the
rich steamship magnate’s only daughter, and not a contemptible
pianist--so the German music master who taught them both had told the
Governor’s wife.

The Gregorys had been in Hong Kong for a year--the mother, the son and
daughter, as well as Mr. Gregory himself. But the two girls had never
met. Hilda Gregory went everywhere, but Nang Ping did not often leave
Kowloon.




CHAPTER XI

IN THE LOTUS GARDEN


Kowloon was drenched with sunlight, and the lotus garden was drenched
with music. A minstrel paused a moment to drink in the beauty of the
great lilies, white, yellow, pink, amber and mauve, one that had cost a
fortune, clear pale blue, one that had cost more, a delicate jade green.

The strolling singer retuned his lute and moved across the garden,
singing as he went.

It was the typical garden of a rich Chinese home--so repeatedly
caricatured on the “willow-tree-pattern” crockery of cheap European
commerce--caricatured but also somewhat accurately portrayed. But the
gardens on the plates for sale in half the pawnshops in outer London
(the aristocracy of the pawnbrokers will not look at them any more), in
every household furnisher’s in Marylebone and Camberwell, in Battersea
and Shoreditch, and on the business streets of every British town and
village, are of one uniform Chinese blue--the blue the sampsan women
wear when their clothes are new--and background of white, Chinese
white, appropriately enough. This living garden in Kowloon was of every
vivid hue on nature’s prodigal palette, and its background was of blue
hills and purple haze and blue, white and limpid golden sky.

A twisted camel’s back bridge of carved stonework, like coarse lace in
its pierced tracery, dragons squatting and guarding its corners, and
flowers hung from it everywhere in baskets of bamboo, of crystal, of
painted porcelain and of lacquer, spanned one corner of the lake, above
which a crooked flight of steps at each bridge-end lifted it high.
Dwarf trees in glazed pots, some on the ground, rarer specimens on
carved stands of teak wood and of ebony, stood here and there. And in
the artificial water, half river, half lake, which the miniature bridge
crossed, the priceless lotus grew and glowed. Most of the great lily
cups were pink, others were deeply red.

Some distance from the house there was a pagoda open to the garden, its
plaid floor strewn with cushions, a book or two, a woman’s scarf, and
from every outer point and eave hung a pot or a basket in which flowers
of every brilliant hue grew and bloomed.

A sinuous gravel path turned from the dwelling-house to the outer wall,
twisting and turning ingeniously all over the garden, passing close
to the cypress bush at the foot of the steps that led to the bridge,
skirting the baby grove of dwarf orange and lemon trees, and encircling
the gnarled old cherry tree.

Whatever we may think of China, the sun thinks well, and shines so
gloriously nowhere else. It made the flowers in Nang Ping’s garden
glow with a vivid brilliance that was part their own, part his; it
touched the summits of the hills seen in the distance with a light blue
haze which deepened to purple at their base. Against that dark purple
background the sumptuous little garden foreground glowed with a riot of
color, and quivered with pulsing, scent-breathing flowers.

A servant squatted on his yellow heels, picking up dead leaves and
broken flowers heads, gathering them into his tidy basket. Another
gardener was sweeping the gravel path as carefully as if it had been
the velvet carpet than which it was no less soft.

Four girls tripped down the bridge, chattering and laughing as they
came, and the gardeners took up basket and broom and moved away.

Hearing the singer (he had left the garden now), the girls rushed
with one accord, and climbed and clambered up until they could peer
at him over the wall. One poised like a fat balloon-shaped butterfly
on the high edge of a great flower-pot, two jostled together tip-toe
on a majolica bench, and one (the smallest footed of the lot) climbed
squirrel-nimble up a tulip tree. They pelted him with flowers, tearing
blossoms ruthlessly from shrub and vase and vine and tree, and each
commanded him shrilly to sing to her her favorite song.

“Chong-chong er-ti” (professional singer), “sing on,” one cried; “Yao
won chong” (let us play with him), another; and the girl in the tree
tore the jasmine from her hair and tossed it into his hands.

He leaned against the wall and sang:

  “Over green fields and meadows Tiny Rill ran
           (The little precocious coquette!);
   She was pretty, she knew, and thus early began
           Gayly flirting with all that she met.
   Her favors on both sides she’d gracefully shower;
   One moment she’d kiss the sweet lips of a flower,
           The next lave the root of a tree;”

and as he sang, Nang Ping, with Low Soong, her cousin, in her wake,
came slowly from the house, and stood listening too, one finger on her
lips, her eyes far on the fading hills.

They did not see their mistress--they were her play-girls, in
attendance on rich Wu’s child--until the man had done and gone. But
when they did they rushed to her, laughing and pelting her with speech.
“Nang Ping! Nang Ping! Come, play with us! Come, play!” But she beat
them off, saying, “Go away. I do not want you now. Go away.”

But they clustered the closer and girdled her with their arms, but
again she shook them off, repeating impatiently, “Pa choopa, pa
choopa;” and realizing that she meant it, they went, tumbling against
each other as they ran laughing and singing, and turning as they went,
and hurling flowers at her, and crying, “Pu yao choopa,” that they did
not wish to go away.

When they had gone the cousins went to the pagoda, looked in it, and
then about it, carefully. Then they beat the garden as some careful
watchman might some treasure-place of price.

It was growing dusk.

The girls went together to the lotus basin, and stood a long time
looking down into its darkling glass. But neither spoke. The brilliant
lilies were softer-colored now, turning to pink and blue-greys, and the
red few almost to ruddy black.

A long, low whistle pierced through the gloaming from beyond the wall.

Nang Ping’s tiny hand clutched excitedly at her sash. “Soetzo”--“go and
watch over the bridge,” she told her cousin quickly. But Low Soong had
already gone.

The blackbird whistle came again, nearer, but very soft.

Nang Ping answered it with a high falsetto crooning, and in a moment
more a man cautiously parted the bamboos that grew clumped beyond the
wall, vaulted it, and stood within the garden. Nang Ping ran to him
with a little gurgling cry, and he caught her in his arms.

No Chinese lover this, in Oriental gala dress, with glancing amber eyes
and coarse threads of strong red silk prolonging his long braid of
straight hair, but a Saxon, wide gray-eyed, a distinct wave in his fair
short hair, trim and British in his well-cut suit of white duck, with
the crimson cummerbund wound about his waist.

He looked down with laughing tenderness at the picturesque little
creature in his clasp, half-affectionate, half-amused, and she looked
up at him with all a woman’s soul--soul aflame--and all a nation’s
passion in her eyes, adoring and perfect trustfulness.

“Oh! my celestial little angel,” he murmured at her flushing cheek.

The girl nestled closely and sighed with content, and he held her, and
played with the dangling jewel in her fantastic hair.

“You have been so cruel long, Basil,” the girl told him gently, but
moving not at all.

Basil Gregory laughed lightly. “So? I could not come before. You’re an
impatient puss.”

Nang Ping shook her sheeny head, and the red flower in her wonderfully
dressed hair shook and quivered, and all the jade stick-pins and the
hanging emeralds and turquoise jangled against the tassel of small
pearls that she wore pendant from her comb. “No. I am never impatient.
But the sun-dial tells not lies. You came not soon, and I did miss you
hard.”

“Well, I’ve brought you news. Guess.”

“Thy honorable mother----”

“Good girl! You’ve guessed it first go. My mother and Hilda are coming
to-morrow to make the acquaintance of pretty Miss Wu and to see her
very honorable garden.”

“Your mother and your sister,” the girl said under her breath softly.
“Ah!”

“They were no end pleased to come, especially the mater. She’d come
quick enough anywhere I told her to. We’ve been the greatest chums
always, the mater and I. Hilda pals with the governor, but she’s no end
keen on China, the motherkin--goes into all sorts of smelly dives and
dens after blue plates and shaky ivory balls, and--and all that sort
of thing, you know; reads the rummiest books, knows all about spotted
dragons and crinkly gods. She bought one yesterday, a rum, fat fellow
made out of some sort of crockery stuff; he sits squatted on the floor
this minute in her own room, and if you pat him on his noddle the old
chap nods it, and goes on nodding it, too, for a blessed hour by the
clock”--Nang Ping understood less than half of this truly British
ramble, and listened to it with a puzzled smile--“and she is no end
keen to come, to see how things are done in real China. I wouldn’t
wonder if she wrote an article for one of the picture papers at
home--‘The Chinese at Home,’ or some such stuff. I say, you’ll be sure
to give her tea Chinese fashion. No borrowed European tricks, you know;
just pucka Chinaman way!”

Nang Ping understood the drift, if not quite all his words. “It shall
be as you wish: Chinese reception, Chinese delicacies, offered Chinese
way.”

“That will be ripping then.”

“How strange it will be to talk with thy honorable mother!” the girl
said wistfully. “And thy sister! Is she like me, or more beautiful?”
she asked most seriously. And that he might judge his answer the more
nicely and adjust his answer to exact truth, she went from him a few
paces, opened her fan wide, spread out her arms, and stood very still,
a pathetic figure of Chinese girlhood on view, waiting, anxious but
meek, an Englishman’s verdict. And then, remembering that the light
was somewhat dim, she came a little nearer, but not too close, and
repeated her grave question, “Is thy honorable sister like Nang Ping,
or even more beautiful?”

Basil laughed with kindly patronage. “Hilda?” Strolling to the wide
stone bench he threw his hat on to it and sat down. “All nice girls are
like each other, Nang Ping. Hilda’s so-so. But Tom Carruthers thinks
she’s ‘top-side’ nice. Carruthers, the governor’s secretary, and I
rather think he’s going to be my honorable brother-in-law. The governor
won’t object. Tom’s right enough, and old Carruthers got any amount of
tin. The Right Reverend John B. thinks Sis nice too, or I’m greatly
mistaken. It’s a queer freak for a parson, for Hilda isn’t exactly
churchified, but Bradley finds her nice all right.”

“And my lord finds me nice?”

The gray eyes narrowed. “Very nice,” the man answered, and held out his
arms.

She went at once and sat down on the other end of the bench. Gregory
bent and kissed her, and presently she kissed him in return. And the
sudden darkness thickened, creeping closer, for there is no true
gloaming, no lingering dusk, in the Orient. It is day there, or else it
is night.

The glow-worms came out then and speckled the garden with tiny points
of fire. Nang Ping called them by a prettier name: kwang yin têng,
lamps of mercy, as her father had called them when, as a boy of ten, he
crossed Sze-chuan to wed her baby mother in Pekin.

They kissed again, the man and the girl. Kissing is not a Chinese art.
Basil Gregory had taught Wu Nang Ping to kiss.

“Oh! if only I could!” the girl said impulsively, and then broke off as
suddenly as she had begun.

“Could what, Nang Ping?” He asked it a little uneasily--uneasy at a
something in her voice.

“Tell them all about us,” she replied simply, but her voice aglow with
ecstasy at the thought.

Gregory was aghast. “Tell them all about us!” he cried hoarsely.

“Oh! not all things,” she whispered, creeping a little closer in his
arms. “There are some things one would not tell, even to the birds.”

Basil Gregory’s conscience, to its credit, shuddered sickly then, and
his arm trembled, not in tenderness, but in shame.

But self-preservation is indeed the first law of much man-nature, and
he said quickly, “I don’t mind what you tell to the birds, but you must
be extremely careful not to let my mother or sister know. _Extremely
careful_,” he repeated with dictatorial emphasis.

“Why?”

“They would not understand.”

“Why?”

He made no answer, and after a little she questioned on, “They would
not like to know that _you_ are happy?”

“Of course they would, but----”

“And that it is I that make you happy?” the light young voice pestered
on wistfully.

The Englishman shifted uneasily on his seat. “Oh, no! nothing of
that sort, to them, Nang Ping,” he said petulantly. “Don’t try to
understand. Just leave it all to me.”

“But,” the girl persisted, “do they not understand love?” She put her
arms about him.

“Oh! well,” he parried, “you see, they are English--very English.”

“But they are women.” The Chinese girl shook her head, smiling
unconvinced, and all its jeweled filigree twinkled and winked in the
opalescent half light. “They are women. All women understand love, even
before the man comes to teach them. We are born so. Your honorable
mother and the honorable Hilda, they understand; Nang Ping is sure they
do, the wise and virtuous ladies.”

“Not--not altogether. You see, things are different with us. Secret
love is not looked upon like--like married love.”

The girl laughed softly. “Then let it be no longer secret!” she purred
contentedly, warmly willing to make his people hers, their ways her
ways. “You shall tell them!” she said brightly, laying her little hands
palm down on his.

“Oh! but, Nang Ping,” Basil began miserably. But Nang would have none
of that. She nestled to him closer still. “Basil,” she interrupted,
“if our love were not secret, but married love, and I flew away with
you before my honorable father came back, then would thy honorable
mother like me in her house?--if I did that--for love make brave for
everything?”

Gregory was almost choking. But he controlled himself: that was the
least he could do for her now. “Dear child!” he said huskily, and then
he kissed her. There was tenderness in his kiss, and passion and bitter
remorse. She felt the passion and the tenderness. He broke from her
gently and moved away, standing looking down moodily at the darkening
lotus flowers, distressed, all his light-hearted happiness of idle,
selfish weeks gone, gone forever. “Oh, Nang Ping!” presently he said
ruefully, “it would be better if you had never met me,” and he moved
restlessly still a little farther away.

But still she would not understand. She rose and went to him, and put
her little arms about him again. “No,” she said with tender, caressing
emphasis, “because I am happy.” And then she added--for it was growing
dark, something that lay warm on her heart to say--that must be said
soon now, “Basil’s honorable mother would like me then, if--if I gave a
son to worship at the grave of thy ancestors!”

Gregory recoiled a little from the girl’s gentle, clinging
arms--recoiled with a startled cry: the world-old cry of man confronted
for the first time with very self; the cry of man hoist at last with
his own petard. But pity, too, for her, as yet so free from pity
for herself, welled up in him (he was not all bad--who is?), and he
controlled himself again for her sake. It was difficult, but even so
it was not much to do in return for what she had done for him. And it
was the only return that he could make, or would, the giving her some
gentleness of treatment even in the crash of his own dismay. He came
back, and caught her elbows in his hands, and held her from him so--at
arm’s length. “Nang Ping,” he tried to say it lightly, “what amazing
ideas you get into your head!”

“No,” she said stoutly, “not so! Listen! All the women in China make
one big prayer in the temples to the goddess Kwan-Yin”--he released her
arms, letting his fall at his sides helplessly, his fingers clenched in
his palms--“a prayer to her to bring them a son!”

Her lover turned away, distressed, tormented.

“Oh!” he said brokenly, “what a fool I’ve been!” It is almost the
oldest of the man-cries, almost as old as “I love you” and “I take you
for my own.”

Nang Ping ran to him, crying, “Oh! how I love you, Basil! I want to
fill my hands with happiness to pour it at _your_ feet. Do you
know how my mother died? She died when she bore me to her lord my
father. And I would gladly die so, only the child must be a son, to
worship at your grave and to teach his sons and his sons’ sons to
worship so.” The pretty, delicate creature clung to him in an ecstasy
of devotion, all her fresh womanhood dedicated to him, and then she
laughed softly, pressed her hands together in a lightened mood. “Oh! I
would gather the dew from the cherry blossoms to bathe me in its scent,
to make me more beautiful to thee!” And this, too, was an old, old cry,
as old as woman-sex.

    “You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,
  Such as I am: though for myself alone
  I would not be ambitious in my wish,
  To wish myself much better; yet, for you
  I would be trebled twenty times myself.”

A girl in Belmont put it so, in a dream a man dreamed beneath an
English mulberry tree. And girls have said it countless times, each
girl after her own sweet fashion, and men have accepted it, some in
manhood splendidly, some in dastardy cravenly. Basil accepted it in
shame, drinking the bitter cup of his selfish brewing.

“But,” he said, bending over her tenderly as she clung to him, “you are
as beautiful as the cherry blossom itself, Nang Ping.”

She bent back and looked up searchingly into his face, and then she
broke away and danced a little from him, as if too quick with her own
joy to stand longer still. “And as happy as heaven!” she cried. “Ah!
and when they see me, will they not guess?”

“Oh! but you mustn’t let them; you must not,” his answer came quickly.

She shook her head slowly. “But I am all happiness that I cannot
hide.” Then a new thought caught and frightened her, and she turned
back to him anxiously. “If they guessed, would they take you from me?”

“Why, yes,” he told her quickly, snatching at her idea; “they
might--yes--yes--certainly they would.”

“Oh, no, no! That would kill me.” She shuddered as she spoke.

He went to her now, and standing behind her put his arms about her
again. “Oh!” he said contritely, “you mustn’t think so much of me, Nang
Ping. You were happy before--before you met me----”

“But I was only waiting for you to come,” she said.

At that he kissed her. How could he help doing it?

“I was really only two moons old. I was only sleeping and waiting, like
those lotus flowers, waiting for you to come and wake me. You are my
summer and my sun.”

“That’s all very poetical, Nang Ping,” he said, fondling at her
elaborate and stiffened hair, “but you must not take all this too
seriously, you know.”

She broke away from him at that, speaking wistfully as she moved. “I do
not understand you. You are the poem of my life and the song that sings
in my heart!”

The man’s face darkened with trouble. He was indeed troubled. But
still he spoke kindly, and he went to her and caressed her lightly,
soothingly, as he said, “Listen, Celeste.”

“Ah!” the girl cried, “you gave me that name. That makes me yours. I am
Nang Ping no more.”

“Listen, Celeste”--at a change, a chilliness in his tone, she stiffened
a little; it is so most women face a blow--“my people are going
home--father, mother, my sister Hilda----”

“So soon!” But her face brightened, in spite of herself, as she said
it; it was not such very bad news after all. “How can they bear to
leave you?” she added wonderingly.

“They can’t,” Gregory said desperately. She did indeed stiffen then.
And there was piteous accusation in her eyes. But she said nothing; and
presently he went on lamely enough, “and that is what I had to tell
you.”

“You--you are leaving me?” the girl said very quietly.

“I must.”

“But,” she said intensely, “you will not go. You will tell them that
you cannot go--_now_!”

He must have understood her then, if he had failed, as he had tried to
fail, to do so before. “I couldn’t tell them about you, dear.” Poor
wretch! it was the best that he could find to say. “With us, things
like that are not so easy,” he added weakly.

“But you could tell them that you cannot leave me,” Nang Ping pleaded.
“You _must_ tell them that,” she whispered desperately.

“But I am not leaving you forever, little one,” the man faltered.
“England is not many weeks from here.”

“Yes, but I cannot follow you!”

Follow him! The heavens forbid! “No, of course not,” he said quickly,
“of course not, you silly little Celeste. But I shall come back. Some
day, when you least expect me, I shall be here in the lotus garden or
in the pagoda.”

“The pagoda!” she moaned.

“The pagoda,” he hurried on, “where we learned to love.” He tried to
draw her to him, but she recoiled. “No, no!” she cried hotly. “If the
bird of love once leaves its nest, the nest grows cold.” And then she
broke quite down and threw herself sobbing on the steps of the bridge.

“Oh, Celeste!” Basil Gregory said wretchedly, humbly--he was humbled,
for the hour at least, and wretchedly uncomfortable--“I--I didn’t know
your love could mean so much, but--but--oh! well, don’t you see?--won’t
you see?--even if I didn’t go it could not last forever, this.” That
was bad and crude enough; but he went on and made it worse (such men
usually do). “I--I am not a mandarin in my own country, not even the
son of one; and you know _you_ are to marry a mandarin here in
your--your own country.” (He had heard that more than once in Hong
Kong; and really he had supposed she knew he knew. It was commonly
known. And many wondered why Wu Li Chang had let it wait so long.)

Nang Ping looked up at him, her narrow eyes wide with horror. “Not
now!” she said tensely. “And when I tell my august father why, he will
kill me,” she added as quietly.

“You--tell him why?” the man cried in consternation.

“Yes, because now I do not wish to live.”

“You must not tell him!” he said roughly.

“Only when you are gone, or he would kill you too!” Nang said, simply
and without bitterness. The Englishman winced. “He will ask me why I
disobey him, and I shall tell him.”

“Don’t do that--not that! I couldn’t have it on my conscience!” And
indeed he tried to believe that he said it for her sake. “Keep our
secret, Celeste,” he begged. “Think of the perils we have run whilst
he was here”--the Chinese girl smiled a little at that wanly--“of the
happiness we have had when he has been away, as he is now. Tell him
nothing, for fear, for fear, dear, that when I came back we should
never again be able to meet.”

“You will never come back.”

“I will, Celeste--I swear it! I swear it now! I see things differently.”

“You will never come back.” She turned slowly, and without looking back
went on into the house.

“Celeste, come back! Nang Ping! Nang Ping!” he called, and she knew
that he was calling her to say at least good night, as was their
custom, in the pagoda. But she neither slowed her quiet step nor turned
her head. The pagoda had sheltered her happiness; it should not be
soiled by her despair. She went on and left him standing alone by the
lotus lake.

He waited there a while, confident that she would come back to him; but
presently, convinced that she would not come that night, or perhaps
could not, he went stealthily away, very sorry for himself and not a
little vexed with Nang Ping: the offender is easily vexed.

Low Soong came from the coign of watch, looking after him curiously,
and wondering what had happened. She had seen little and heard nothing,
but she sensed trouble in the air. Basil did not turn or speak to her,
and when he had gone she passed slowly into the house.

There was not a sound in the garden. The darkness had come. Nothing was
visible except the gay lanterns and many lamps lit on the walls and
at the house-door, and in the deserted garden itself the vivid pulse
of the glow-worms poised on shrubs and trees or winging brilliantly
through the purple night.




CHAPTER XII

O CURSE OF ASIA!


Do you know Hong Kong? If not, you are poor with poverty indeed. Except
in China earth has no lovelier spot, and heaven itself needs none. The
interior of the island is almost bleak, not beautiful, but its edge is
paradise.

Other unknown wonder-places you may a little learn from books, from
travelers and from pictures, but not Hong Kong. No words can in the
least describe it. The attempt is an impertinence. Canvas and camera
are useless too. “Hong Kong,” the gazetteers say, means “Fragrant
Streams” or “Place of Sweet Lagoons.” But they are absurd. “Hong
Kong” means “superbly beautiful.” If you know it, your eyes have been
enriched forever. Climb the Peak, feathered with fern and bamboos, you
are enwalled in beauty. Go far along the island by-ways, beauty leans
toward you from every side, and beckons you on and still on. Pause on
the bamboo-outlined path that bisects the great amphitheater of Happy
Valley, and you may bathe your spirit and your sight in beauty, whether
you look to the right, where the graves of European dead in China rest
beneath their sumptuous coverlets of flowers, or to the left, where the
Chinese jockeys, with their blue petticoats tucked up above their brown
hips, and their bright satin jackets showing up their dancing cues, and
English boys in regimental colors--gentlemen riders--canter neck to
neck on the race-course, rehearsing the ponies for to-morrow’s race.

It is a unique juxtaposition, that sweet and perfumed bit of God’s
acreage, and the lurid, teeming race-course, the dead men’s bones
(and women’s, too, and babes’) just under the grass, and the betting,
straining, champagne-drinking, well-dressed crowd, with only a narrow
strip of yellow, bamboo-fringed path between; unique as is the old
juxtaposition of life and death, and, too, strangely eloquent and
appropriate of Anglo-Chinese life.

Hong Kong! Heaven and Hell in one. Hong Kong a gem of lovely, laughing
China given to Britain--or, perhaps, loaned for a century or two. Wu
often wondered which.

Every light in Victoria seemed twinkling hard as Basil Gregory’s boat
gained the shore, a lamp in every window, a thousand painted paper
lanterns, no two shaped or colored alike, swaying ambiently in the
hands of coolies who trotted along the bund and up the hill paths,
along the Bowen Road and peak-climbing streets, carrying chairs,
pulling rickshaws, or running errands, uninterested but faithful, the
most reliable hirelings on earth, and often, when the European employer
gives himself half a chance with them, the most devoted.

Basil walked some distance from the spot where he had landed before he
hailed a rickshaw. The naked coolie grunted a little at the address the
Englishman gave him, but said grimly, “Can do.” For Gregory had named
a bungalow that nestled in a tiny grove of persimmon and loquat trees,
nearly halfway up the Peak--and Hong Kong Peak is steep.

It was not his home address that he had given, nor that of any club
respectable or otherwise, or tree-hidden wayside tea-house, but the
bungalow of a man he had treated none too well, and to call upon whom
this was an odd hour.

In our moments of greatest personal dilemma and peril we seek the
strangest confidants: sometimes in half-crazed desperation, sometimes
in shame and fear of our nearer and dearer, sometimes instinctively,
and _then_ oddly often it proves well done. But whatever the most
general explanation, most of us are prone at such tremulous times to
lean upon some one not of our constant or closest entourage.

Basil Gregory had little estimate of Wu’s position and power, and
none at all of Chinese character. But he had heard something of Wu,
of course, and had read unconsciously something of her father between
the pretty lines of Nang Ping’s gilded home life, and the young fellow
realized that he was in personal peril, though he had not the least
impression of how much.

He knew that he needed advice and a sounder judgment than his own.

His mother was his chum, and had been from his birth--they had stood
together and pulled together always; but he could not take this to
his mother. And he hoped to goodness it need not reach his father’s
ear. He feared his father’s anger far less than he did his mother’s
sorrow, and he divined that the paternal anger would be nine-tenths
financial and not more than one-tenth moral. But such an escapade as
his was calculated to injure a business that depended considerably
upon a nice balance of British interests and Chinese industriousness
and acquiescence. And the elder Gregory could be nasty at times, and
disconcertingly close-fisted too. Certainly he could turn to neither
parent now. He was not brave, but he certainly would have thrown
himself into Hong Kong harbor or into the deadlier foaming rapid of
Tsin-Tan rather than have had his mother know the truth about Nang Ping.

In his schooldays he had made half friends, half foes with a boy a few
years his senior, whose influence, the little way it had gone, had all
been to the good for Basil.

Basil had not done well at school or at ’Varsity. But ’Varsities
are fairly used to that, and are built of long-suffering stuff, and
young Gregory’s shortcomings had not over-mattered at Queen’s. But at
school--a nice school, strictly run--he had been in serious trouble
more than once, and once had been saved from expulsion by Jack Bradley,
and at some sacrifices on Bradley’s part.

Both the school and the ’Varsity had been rather inappropriately
selected. Basil came of commercial stock and was dedicated to a
commercial life, and commercial life of a sort for which a few years’
business training in Chicago would have been more useful preparation
than any amount of term-keeping at Oxford. But Gregory the father, who
had had a very limited education, was, as is usual with such men of
means, obsessed that his son should have the public-school and ’Varsity
hallmark that he himself lacked. And Mrs. Gregory had wished it no less
ardently. She had Oxford associations in her blood and of her girlhood,
and her own father had worn an Oxford hood and held a modest incumbency
near the town.

Basil Gregory learned some of the prescribed lessons at public school:
he had to. And he might have learned something of books and other
erudite lore at Oxford, for they do teach at the ’Varsities any one who
insists upon being taught. But Basil had not insisted, and left Oxford
knowing a little less than when he went.

Bradley had been at Queen’s, but had worked while Basil played, and
such intimacy as had been between them died away, naturally enough,
in the wider life and the greater individual freedom and scope of
’Varsity. But they had met sometimes; and once Bradley had been of
great service to Gregory.

When Basil had reached Hong Kong a year ago, John Bradley had been
serving there for some time as a curate in the Cathedral Church of St.
John.

The young priest had held out an eager, friendly hand at once, but
Basil had almost ignored it. It was shabby of him, and he knew it at
the time. He knew that the other’s overtures were not in the least to
the rich ship-owner’s son, but altogether to an old schoolmate newly
come to a foreign country.

The priest--he lived quite alone--was just sitting down to his solitary
dinner when Basil’s rickshaw came through the gate, ran up the path
between the tall lychee trees, and stopped at the door.

The older man gave the younger the cordial greeting of their old days,
and added, “Come and eat. Oh! but you must. I’m famished.”

And Basil sat down, both glad and sorry to postpone even by half an
hour the unpleasant tale he had come to tell.

The priest was no anchorite, and his simple food was good, his
wine sound. Both had their flattering tonic effect upon the easily
influenced peccant, and as he ate and drank his misdemeanor dwindled
away in his own eyes, until almost it seemed to him that he had been
more sinned against than sinner.

But it seemed nothing of the sort to John Bradley, and it was soon
evident as Gregory unfolded his errand while they smoked on the tiny
balcony that jutted out into the begonias and laburnums of the little
garden. The priest was sorrowful, but the man was furious. With some
effort he heard the other through, and then he ripped out an ugly oath.

The visitor was astonished. Old John had always been a bit particular,
of course--had to, don’t you know, and all that--but a man of the world
and a thorough good sort. And this was not the first confession his
schoolfellow had made to him.

“I say, easy all,” Gregory protested. “I wish it hadn’t happened”--you
nearly always do--“but you needn’t play Peter Prigg. It isn’t one of
your flock. The girl’s a nice little girl. I’m fond of her, I tell you.
But she isn’t one of your reserved flock. She’s Chinese----”

“Oh, hell and damnation!” interrupted Bradley, striking the well-built
railing with a fist so angry that the interlaced bamboos quivered and
shook, “that’s the infamy of it. If you had to be a beast, don’t you
see how much less loathsome you’d have been if you had seduced some
girl of your own race?”

The other was too dumbfounded to reply, and the priest pounded on:
“O curse of Europe! That such men as you pour into Asia and do this
damnable thing! You’ll boil in oil for this. You insufferable ass!
Don’t you realize in the least who and what her father is? You might
better have affronted Tze-Shi herself. Boil in oil, I tell you, and, by
God, so you ought! If it were not for your mother, I’d help Wu to heat
it. How would you like some Chinese man to do to your sister what you
have done to this girl? Oh! you needn’t spring up like that. You’ll not
put a finger to me. I could pitch you over there, down to the road a
thousand feet below, and for half a string of counterfeit cash I’d do
it too. Oh! Basil, old chap, how could you, how could you----”

“Well,” sulkily, “I’m not the first.”

“No,” brokenly, “and you’ll not be the last. And where will it end,
where will it end!”

“I thought you----”

“Oh! I don’t mean where will this special case end--for you and for
that poor child I know how it will end--but how will it all end?--the
putrid inter-racial welter and tangle that we Christians have made!
And we--misunderstanding China, spoiling China, insulting her people,
fattening on her industry--we, we English call ourselves men! We push
our way into China. We laugh at everything she holds sacred, mock what
we should admire, condemn what we lack the brain to understand, spit on
a culture four thousand years older and in a good deal as much deeper
and more sincere than ours, we steal what we want--oh, yes! it’s just
that, most of it--we teach her boys to smoke opium, we show her a dozen
new corruptions, teach her twenty new sins, we seize and spill her
thimbleful of saki and give her a tumbler of brandy, and her women--her
women----” he broke off.

The other man winced now. He knew there were tears in Bradley’s eyes,
perhaps on his face. Just once before he had known John in tears, and
he thought of it now, a never-to-be-forgotten radiant summer day when
a young boy, an only child, had been publicly expelled from school for
the saddest of young crimes--the one crime that even the laxest of our
public schools neither forgive nor condone--and sent broken home to his
mother, a widow.

“You’d like to throttle me when I dare say, ‘How would you like it,
what would you think of it then, if a Chinese man treated your sister
as you have treated this Chinese girl?’ Well, I say it again--and I
hold your sister very dear--I say it again. And I say more: I say,
‘_Why not?_’ You have set the example--you and some generations of
Christian gentlemen! And I tell you the day of reckoning will come.”
With a gesture of despair he picked up his discarded pipe and filled it
with nice men’s opium--tobacco.

When he had lit his pipe, Bradley sat and pulled at it moodily, and for
a while Basil, thrashed and sore, sat and watched him. But the prick
of personal dilemma could not give way long to, or even be dwarfed by,
any thought of a general tragedy, be it as great and terrible even as
Bradley averred.

“You said you knew how this was going to end for me----”

“And for her! Yes. It began in selfishness. It will go on, forever, in
misery. It will end in misery. But there is just one thing now. A crime
can never be so damned black that it can’t be made blacker. Yours is
black enough, and it is going to stop right there. You must marry her.”

“I say----”

“You needn’t. There is nothing for you to say; you have come to me for
help, and I am going to help you, as far as I can.”

“But----”

“Oh! there’ll be trouble--plenty of trouble. Wu will never forgive
you or the poor child; though it’s he himself he ought not to forgive
for having let a Chinese girl out and unwatched so _with us English
about_. He’ll punish you both, and what Wu does he does well.
There’ll be no escaping him. No boat will take you beyond his reach, no
spot on earth hide you. You can’t stay in China with her. Her position
would be too intolerable, even for one of us to inflict on a woman.
You must take her to England--if you can get there. And even if Wu lets
you do the best you can with the monstrous mess you’ve made of life for
yourself and for her, you’ll both be miserable there, but not quite so
miserable as you’d be in China. England is the one country on earth
where the Eurasian, the poor innocent mongrel result of such conduct as
yours, is treated a little better than contagion and vermin. Think what
chance your children would have here! You have seen such children here,
and how they fare!”

Little as he, in common with most of his race, had troubled to observe
in Asia, Basil Gregory knew well enough how those half-European,
half-Chinese were despised and treated in Hong Kong, and how much
more despised by the Chinese than by the Europeans. And he knew
too--though not so thoroughly as Bradley did--that to the Chinese at
least such Eurasians were doubly despised when born in wedlock. The
Chinese mind has some contemptuous shrug of “n’importe” for such racial
misdemeanor that is unaffectedly wanton, but to that mind marriage
makes the gross miscarriage ten times more putrid. Such few attempts at
European-Chinese marriage as are braved in China are between, almost
always, European men and Chinese women. Exiled, the Chinese will marry
and treat well and honorably the women of the race of the place in
which he lives--he does it in Singapore, in Chicago and in Rio--but
never for him such mixed marriage in China.

Basil had no intention of making the experiment in China or otherwise.
Escape, not atonement, was his intention.

“Yes,” he said presently, “and if only for that reason, the children,
don’t you see that it would better end here and now? At the
worst--now--one. But if--if I did marry Nang and take her to England,
there might be others.”

Bradley groaned. “It is all very difficult. The consequences of wrong
always are. I don’t see my way. You must let me think a bit; perhaps
to-morrow I’ll see what’s best, least bad!” He groaned again, but
he did not tell Gregory that it had just occurred to him that legal
marriage without Wu’s consent might prove impossible. Wu’s consent
would never be had, he thought. They solve such problems differently in
China. They cut them.




CHAPTER XIII

MRS. GREGORY


On one point, and on just one, John and Basil had agreed last night:
Mrs. Gregory was to be spared as much as possible. She and Hilda were
to remain happily ignorant of what had happened--ignorant of it in its
worst form, if that could be compassed.

Basil had carefully omitted telling the clergyman of the proposed visit
of the morrow. He would have cancelled it if he could have thought of
any way. But he had not a devisive brain. His mother had quite set her
heart on the excursion. He felt safe that he could trust to Nang Ping’s
pride. Her pride would carry her through, and save and screen him, as
such outraged womanly pride has saved and screened such men ever since
Eve gave an apple to a man in Eden.

In this episode of Nang Ping (a little nefarious episode of his life;
the soul-crux, the supreme tragedy of the girl) Basil Gregory cut
the sorriest figure, for he had but toyed with her, he had indulged
passion, passion had not mastered him, she was his toy, he her god; he
felt tenderness for her, but not love; he had not the great excuse of
a great love. His lingering by the sun-drenched lotus pond and in the
scented dark of the old pagoda had been mere dalliance, not obsession.
And yet the young Englishman was not all bad--far from that. To no one
do the wise lines of the Western genius apply more closely:

  “In men, whom men proclaim divine,
     I find so much of sin and blot;
       In men, whom men condemn as ill,
       I find so much of goodness still--
   I hesitate to draw the line
     Between the two where God has not.”

There is a streak, at least, of angel in most women and in all men.
Basil had a rich vein of angel. All that was best in him leapt to his
mother. They had been sweethearts from the first. Such love as he had
loved as yet was hers. It was a chivalrous love, and passionate. The
other primal love, the love of man for his mate, might come to him:
probably it would; it comes to most, but it would never equal the love
he bore his mother. No other woman would ever be to him half that his
mother was, or have from him half that he gave her.

Mothers that are loved so can face most sorrows with some buoyancy.
This mother had sorrow, and she fronted it almost blithely.

Between these two, in a very beautiful sense, the spiritual umbilical
cord had never been cut, and never would or could be cut.

She appealed to him in a dozen ways. She was gifted with youth. She
laughed at the years, and they laughed back at her and caressed her.
She looked his own age, scarcely more, and some days, in some moods and
in some lights, she looked his junior. And, too, hers was a radiant
personality. Her son joyed in her. He was proud of her, and proud to
be seen with her. And she gave him love for love. But her love for him
needs no explanation, nor merits one; he was her boy and her firstborn.

The night before, after Bradley had cried, “I don’t see my way. You
must let me think,” the two men had sat silent for a time, and then
the clergyman had re-begun, trying again to thrash it out, breaking
nervously the silence he himself had enjoined. And he had referred
again to the hideous discomfort of mixed marriages.

The waters of the Tigris do not mingle with the salt water of the
sea until they have flowed through it a long, long way from the
river-mouth. And so, it seemed to him, many suffering generations
must pass before, if ever, any marriage could in truth unite races of
East and West, or result in descendants less than sorely unhappy and
bitterly resentful.

But marriages that tie the bloods of alien races are not the only
mixed marriages. There are mixed marriages of another sort that bring
as much, perhaps more, discomfort to the two most directly concerned,
although they entail no social inconvenience: marriages of alien
individualities. Such his mother’s marriage had proved, and Basil
sensed it, and that she winced daily. He had never definitely realized
it. He had never thought about it clearly. But he felt it. And this had
roused all the angel in him to her defense, and made him very true and
knightly to her.

The daughter of a poor Oxford cleric, Florence Grey had married
“surprisingly well.” Robert Gregory was rich even then, good-looking,
jovial, and to his young and pretty wife indulgent. He was indulgent to
her still.

She had married him quite gladly, and for a time been well enough
content. But after a year or two the sag had come and the disillusion.
What in him had seemed once tonic and individuality came to seem
brusque, and even boorish at times. She grew used to silken raiment
and spiced meats, used and a little indifferent, though doubtless she
would have missed them had she lost them, a tinge contemptuous of them.
And often in the whirl of life--in Manchester, in Paris, in Calcutta,
and now in gay Hong Kong--she longed a little for the Oxford quiet and
Oxford ways, cool, green lanes, a dim old church, a shabby old library,
dim too, full of well-worn books, simple usual things--roast mutton,
milk pudding, and soft English rain, gray English skies.

But, too, she enjoyed life, and reaped from it with both hands. And her
husband had been and was well content. He had married her for love,
and he loved her still. But he had had no exultation and no opalescent
anticipations. And so, reasonably enough, he had suffered no relapse.
Such extremes of feeling, such quiver and ardor as he had ever known,
had come to him in office and shipping yard. Business was his cult.
And so far he had proved an excellent business man. He was perfectly
satisfied with himself; and it never occurred to him that any one else
was not. That would be preposterous, and certainly Florence was not
preposterous. He was magnificently satisfied with himself, and in a
suitably smaller way he was satisfied with his wife.

She had given him no cause to be dissatisfied. And they got on well
together. They always had. She wore well. She dressed well. She never
tried to understand his business, or to talk to him when he was reading
the market reports or the shipping news. She was a handsome creature.
People liked her. And she had borne him two children. He would have
resented a third; to have had none would have enraged him as much as if
he’d been a “Chinaman.”

Yes, Florence had done him very well, and he acknowledged it to
himself, and boasted of it to all his cronies. And he had done her
well too, by Jove! He was always kind to her. He let her have her own
way absolutely when her way did not cross his, and their ways too
rarely met (in any soul-sense) to cross often. And he was generous
to her. He began that way, and, it is no little to the credit of so
busy and business-bound a man, he had always kept it up. They had been
married twenty-five years, and he bought flowers for her still. And
jewelry he gave her constantly. No woman, unless she was the wife of a
rich noble or a millionaire, had more good jewelry.

Mr. Gregory had given his wife some good jewelry for a wedding present.
But the handsomest gifts she had received then had been sent her by an
acquaintance he had never seen: a Chinese undergrad who had left Oxford
the year before--“damned rich Chink,” as Robert Gregory expressed it,
when he did not put it even more chastely, “a Rothschild of a nigger.”

The Chinese gift, a bracelet of emeralds and turquoise and jacinths and
pearls, still was the most beautiful and the most valuable jewel Basil
Gregory’s mother had, and she wore it on every occasion that justified
such splendor. And Hilda, watching its green fire and blue softness on
their mother’s fine white arm, could but wonder hungrily whether it
would become ultimately the possession of herself or of Basil’s wife.

“It is the most beautiful jewel I have ever seen,” John Bradley said
when he first saw it.

“Yes, isn’t it?” its owner acquiesced; “but when I have it on, I always
feel as if I were wearing a bit of Revelation.”

“More like a bit of the Koran,” the priest had reassured her with an
odd smile.

She was greatly puzzled. She had always supposed the Koran was a
somewhat indecent book, quite the sort of book a clergyman would not
mention to a lady. She resolved to get a cheap copy--she believed there
were cheap editions; there were of almost everything now--the next time
she sent to Kelly and Walsh’s.

And this resolve was not born of any wish to sample a questionable
classic, but of a wish to repair an injustice she was regretful to have
done even to a book or a heathen faith. Mrs. Gregory was a thoroughly
nice woman.




CHAPTER XIV

NANG’S VIGIL


Sing Kung Yah was away temporarily from her important post as Wu
Nang Ping’s chaperone-guard, spending a few weeks of semi-religious
villeggiatura in a Taoist nunnery with a kinswoman who was its abbess.

So powerful was Wu’s personality and his wealth that he had been able
to command for his widowed kinswoman and for her participation in the
gala things of life, even from the most conventional of his countrymen,
considerable courteous toleration. But it was toleration only, and
never approval. His influence was enormous. Every tong in China would
have torn at the vitals of any one rash enough to exercise against
Sing Kung Yah a social ostracism contrary to his wish. And so the
unprecedented festivity of the kinswoman’s widowhood was tolerated even
by the Chinese whom it both shocked and affronted.

But anything more, or kindlier, than tolerance, even the great Wu was
powerless to win for her--at least from the Chinese. And both he and
she knew this, and it was the one fly in her very nice amber. She
would have been ostracized fiercely if those of their own caste had
dared; but, they not daring, she was tolerated coldly. And feeling it
(approving it even in her thoroughly Chinese heart) she was often glad
to steal away into the quiet, and behind the screen, of the Taoist
nunnery on the cool, far-off hillside.

She had quite a number of English friends in Hong Kong and at Sha-mien.
The English thought her great fun, and she was eagerly sociable. And
English merchants, anxious to conciliate the powerful Wu, encouraged
their womenkind to friendliness with his kinswoman. But she longed
for friends of her own race; and except Nang and Wu she had none. She
longed for cronies, and she had not one, except the Taoist abbess.

Strange that a people so implacable to comforted and comfortable
widowhood should be ruled by a widow! But so it is. And, after all, the
Chinese race has a right to its share of human inconsistency. Tze-Shi
was an Empress, the mother of a son, and had a great personality.
Sing Kung Yah had been born a long way from the imperial yellow, was
childless, and had little personality of her own. And so Nang Ping, in
the sweetest way, had run a little wild, as roses and honeysuckle do,
and so the frequent visits--that were something of a skurrying too--to
the Taoist convent on the hills.

The Wus were not Taoists, strictly. Like most Chinese of their class,
they mingled a loyal observance of the rites of all three of the great
Chinese sects and an anxious acceptance of their tripled superstitions,
with an easy and respectful contempt for them all--certainly for all
except the Confucianism that has made and welded China for twenty-five
centuries, but that every Chinese of half Wu’s intelligence knows is,
in fact, a magnificent irreligion, a philosophy, a patriotism, but no
God-cult.

In her aunt’s absence, as well as her father’s, Nang Ping was
absolutely mistress of herself and of all in her father’s house. When
she left Basil Gregory she had closed the door panel of her own room,
hanging a purple scarf in its outer carving, and no one, not even Low
Soong, dared disregard the imperative silken signal that she would be
alone and unmolested. Even when the gong brayed out the call of evening
rice she made no sign. Wu Low Soong brought a tray of food and laid
it gently on the floor, with a timid supplicatory clatter, beneath
the purple scarf, and, after listening a moment as she knelt with her
hands still on the tray, crept ruefully away. She had shared in the
outer edges of all Nang Ping’s love raptures, shared the dangers of the
forbidden sweetnesses, and it was very hard to be shut out from the
newer excitement of what was evidently a jagged love-rift.

Nang Ping lay very still all night, uncushioned and uncovered on her
polished floor. Her frightened eyes were closed, but she was wide
awake--wider awake than she had ever been before.

She felt Basil linger. She heard him go. She heard each night-sound all
the night long. She heard her household’s every stir, and heard it hush.

In the morning, before any but the night-watchman stirred, she stole
out into the garden and wandered about it aimlessly. But she did not
enter the pagoda.

While it was still very early she went back to her own room, beat on
her own gong, a little burnished steel disk, summoning her women. And
when they hurried to her, surprised and heavy with sleep, she bathed
and put on fresh garments. It was her habit to chatter gayly with her
women while they dressed her, but to-day she scarcely spoke and they
scarcely dared speak. She sat quite motionless in her ivory chair while
Tieng Po dressed her hair. Tieng Po was one of the cleverest tire maids
in China, and wonderfully quick. It rarely took her more than three
hours to do her lady’s hair, and to-day she did it in even a little
less. But she had never done it more elaborately, and all the time her
mistress watched her with cold, critical eyes. For Nang Ping had a
glass, a very lovely one that Wu had bought in Venice. It had been her
mother’s, and reflected more clearly and with less strain on the eyes
than the mirrors that most Chinese women consult.

When Nang was dressed--she was very fine--she sent for Low Soong and
ordered food.

The two girls breakfasted together in silence, and were silent
afterwards as they paced the Peacock Terrace together until the sun was
high and cruel. But Low Soong began to understand, and as each moment
passed understood more and more. The women and the peasants of no other
race chatter so much or so incessantly as the Chinese do; only the
gentlemen and the children are often still. But no other race has so
little need of words. The Chinese is the psychic of all the races. Even
the women have wizard minds. They are all sensitives. And as the girls
paced silently, but arm in arm, Low Soong learned it all.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the early afternoon Basil contrived to send a note to Miss Wu, and
it reached her safely. Indeed, it ill needed the subterfuge he spent
upon its delivery, for its few formal lines, saying that he would,
as promised, have the honor to wait upon her presently, and have
the pleasure of begging her acquaintance for his mother and sister,
might have been cried aloud from the Kowloon housetops, or published
in the _Pekin Gazette_ and the _Shanghai Mercury_ or the
_Hong Kong Telegraph_. Written words could not have been less
compromising; such a love-letter could not have compromised a nun or
a female fly. And it was the last that he would write her. (It was
almost the first.) Nang’s little lip quivered as she read it, and she
made to tear it into bits; then the little painted lip quivered more
piteously, and she thrust the paper inside her robe. He had had no need
to warn her. She should play her part. He might have trusted her in
that, and in all.

She began to think that Englishmen were timid. And she wondered too if
they might not be dense, some of them, sometimes.




CHAPTER XV

THE MEETING OF THE MOTHERS


Basil Gregory had written his formally couched note of warning in a
fidget. Nang Ping had no experience of masculine fidgets. She had seen
her countrywomen fidget, but never her countrymen.

And Basil was in a fidget still when he came to her presently, not by
stealth this time, no whistle heralding him, but walking swiftly from
beyond the bridge.

She greeted him placidly, too proud to show the hauteur she felt now;
but Low Soong knew that Nang Ping’s heart was fluttering sickly under
her jade and coral girdle.

Low returned his greeting with a placid face, but her narrow eyes were
yellow with hate, and she turned at once and went to her old place of
watch on the bridge.

“They will come soon?” Nang asked.

“Yes, they are lingering by the big lake, in the outer garden, and
that gave me the chance to speak to you a moment. Oh! my darling.” He
had been near to hating her as he had been coming to her across the
rippling water--hating her because he had wronged her, and now feared
that he might not escape quite all share in her punishment; but now, as
she stood there in all her pretty feminine trappings among her flowers,
he longed to take her into his arms. She had never looked so altogether
desirable to him before--probably because he had made up his mind to
leave her, to snap his life and his years from hers. “Have you missed
me? Why did you leave me so? How are you, dear?”

Nang Ping smiled oddly. She said nothing.

And Low Soong called from the bridge, “Chillee! Chillee!”

Women’s voices, deeper throated than Nang’s and Low’s, European voices,
could be heard coming that way, and Basil said nervously, “Yes,” adding
in English what Low had just said, “They are coming. I shall leave them
when they are going--make some excuse, and I shall go and hide in the
pagoda by the lake----”

“Oh, that pagoda--by the lake!” Nang Ping interjected softly, but her
voice was grim.

“I shall see them pass, and when they have quite gone I will come back.
Wait for me when they are gone. I must speak to you. Remember!” He
moved away from her, and went and stood beside an old stone lantern, as
if examining and admiring it for the first time.

“Low Soong!” Nang Ping said breathlessly, and Low hurried to her from
the bridge and put her arms about her. And they stood so for a moment.

But the voices and the footsteps were close now, and Nang Ping released
herself from Low’s comforting arms, and stood gracious and alone.

This was one of Florence Gregory’s young days--one of her very
youngest. Still in her early forties, she looked a radiant twenty-five
as she stood an instant on the bridge, and then came gayly down it.
And her radiant English beauty--blue eyes, golden hair, cream and rose
face--looked all the more radiant because of the delicate gray of her
gown--a dress of artificial simplicity, Paris-made. It had not cost as
much as Chinese Nang’s fantastic clothes had, but it had cost a great
deal, and it was the more perishable.

Hilda Gregory, walking beside her mother, quite a pretty girl seen by
herself, seemed in the mother’s wake rather than side by side, though
far the more brightly clad, and was a dim afterglow of the matron’s
glory--as Low Soong, for all her gay apparel and own high coloring,
standing a little apart, seemed too of Nang Ping’s. And Florence
Gregory looked as much Basil’s sister as Hilda, who was a few years his
junior.

A Chinese serving woman followed the Gregory ladies. She was palpably
Mrs. Gregory’s maid, and not Hilda’s; why, it is impossible to say,
unless because the mother was unmistakably of the woman-type to which
servants and dogs attach themselves, that claims them, and to which
they belong. Hilda Gregory probably played tennis and golf better than
her mother, and plied a more useful needle; but she buttoned her own
boots as naturally as it came to the mother to lean well back at ease
against down cushions and have her hair brushed by a servant. Ah Wong,
the amah, carried a closed parasol, a costly European thing of lace
and mother-o’-pearl, that would have suited Miss Gregory’s rose crêpe
quite as well as it did Mrs. Gregory’s silver ninon; but the sturdy
Chinese figure, plainly clad in dark blue cotton, was unmistakably in
attendance on the mother.

There were six here now, not counting the Wu servants moving on the
outskirts of the group, silent and busied. But Mrs. Gregory and Wu Nang
Ping held the stage: English womanhood and Chinese something at their
best.

They made a great contrast than which the old beauty-packed garden had
seen nothing prettier: two living, sentient expressions of womanhood,
greatly different, greatly alike.

Each was natural, each was artificial--sweet, elaborate, decorated,
highly bred.

Nang Ping’s face and lips were painted; Mrs. Gregory’s were not.
But her nails were slightly, beneath her gloves, and so were Nang’s
that had never worn a glove. Mrs. Gregory’s eyebrows were lightly
penciled. Nang Ping’s were not. Nang Ping’s hair had taken the longer
to dress, but the dressing of the other’s had cost an hour. The black
hair was stiffened into shape with thick scented gum; the blonde
hair was marcelled into shape by hot tongs. And Mrs. Gregory had the
slightly smaller feet, and far less comfortably shod. For Wu had set
his face against one custom of his country, and braved the anger of
his ancestors. Nang smoked a pipe--Basil Gregory could not insert
his smallest finger-tip into its tiny bowl--Florence Gregory smoked
cigarettes; and they both inhaled sometimes. And each considered the
other of inferior race.

They looked at each other curiously--Mrs. Gregory frankly so. Nang
veiled her keen interest. But her interest was the more. The English
woman was keenly interested in China and in things Chinese. The country
had fascinated her powerfully, its odd people considerably. But she did
not take Chinese womanhood very seriously. Every one of intelligence
knew by now that many Chinese men were clever, almost hideously so,
but equally every one knew that Chinese women were limited--very. Of
course, the terrible old woman who ruled at Pekin was shrewd, unless
her ministers, Li Hung Chang and the rest, did it all for her, which
was probable; and then, too, she wasn’t Chinese really, Tartar not
Mongol. And Mrs. Gregory had no suspicion of what must have interested
her in Nang Ping indeed. She was keener to see the garden, and, if
possible, the house--it was said to be very wonderful--than to exploit
little Miss Wu. But she thought the girl pretty after a grotesque
Chinese fashion, “cute” and not unattractive, and she looked at her
with sincerely friendly eyes.

The young eyes that looked back at her were mingled adoration and
resentment. This was Basil’s mother, and she was like him. This was the
honorable mother who had given him life and nursed him at her breast.
And this was the woman because of whom he was going to forsake her, and
shut her out forever from peace, honor and paradise. Because of this
woman standing smiling at her here he forbade her Europe and joyful
motherhood. And he had shut her forever out of China! Why? Oh! why?

There are three supreme moments in the life of every Chinese girl to
whom the gods are not hideously unkind: the moment when her unknown
bridegroom lifts up her red veil and looks upon her face--perhaps to
love and cherish, perhaps to loathe and punish; the moment when the
midwife says, “Hail, Lady, it is an honorable _son_,” and lays
the funny little red, squirming firstborn on her breast to be adored,
and always to adore her; and the moment when she meets eyes with her
husband’s mother, and they look a little into each other’s souls. And
this last is _the_ supreme moment of her fate. In all the small
ways that make up the most of every woman’s life, her comfort and
happiness will depend upon this mother-in-law even more than upon her
husband--and mothers-in-law live long in China. Women are the pampered
class in China, as they are almost everywhere, and will be until “new”
hermaphrodite “movements” have pulled nature from her throne. And in
the quiet ways, the ways that count, the supremacy of the Chinese
mother is even greater than the autocratic supremacy of the Chinese
father. Occidental readers may believe this or disbelieve it as they
like; superficial travelers, ill-equipped for Asian sojourn, may see or
miss it, but the fact remains. Motherhood has ruled China for thousands
of years. It is not the fair young wife or the favorite daughter who
rules a Chinese, but his mother, old, wrinkled, toothless, bent.
From the thraldom of his father, from the thraldom of his gods, he
_may_ escape; from the thraldom of his mother, never! Nang Ping
knew now that she would never wear the soft red veil. That great moment
had been, and passed, for her when Basil had kissed her first in the
pagoda. The child that even now just fluttered beneath her breast--a
son, she thought, and surely blue-eyed--must die unborn; she knew that
now. He would never purl and pull and purr at her exultant breast. But
this was Basil’s mother, the honorable grandmother to whom she had
given a first grandson! What this moment might have been! Something of
the agony of the disappointment gnawing at her baffled heart crept into
her narrow eyes, and turned her faint and sick, and almost she swayed
an instant standing proud and gracious among her flowers--and the child
leapt.

Basil Gregory stood irresolute, embarrassed, looking from his mother to
Nang Ping, from Nang Ping to his mother.

Mrs. Gregory turned to him with a happy smile. “Ah! Basil, there you
are.”

“Yes, Mother, I missed you,” he said as lightly as he could, “and found
my way here to make the acquaintance of Miss Wu.”

He gestured courteously toward Nang as he spoke, and Mrs. Gregory moved
to the girl and held out her hand. Nang Ping moved too, a little
towards her guest, and made the elaborate gesture, hands clasped, of
Eastern greeting. Mrs. Gregory still held out her hand, and wondered,
when she gained the girl’s, which was the softer or the better kept,
Nang’s or her own. Basil had wondered it often.

“This visit to your beautiful garden is the greatest treat I’ve had
since I arrived in China, Miss Wu,” she began.

Wu Nang Ping bowed. “I am pleased to receive you in my honorable
father’s absence. He has had much kindness in England. It is his
command that always English friends have most honorable welcome here,
and it gives me happiness. My cousin, Low Soong.”

“How do you do?” Mrs. Gregory said cordially. “And this is my
daughter.” The three girls bowed, the two Chinese with grave formality,
a gesture of the arms more than a bending.

“Such a perfectly beautiful place!” Mrs. Gregory said it sincerely, her
beauty-loving eyes here, there and everywhere gloating.

“This is my own garden, where I walk with my women,” Nang Ping told her.

“It beats our poor little garden, Hilda,” the mother said gayly.

“Into fits.” Just a trifle of the surface vulgarity which, with its
hard coating of adamant varnish, covered and hid Robert Gregory’s soul
side--even from his wife--and wronged him, had caught and scorched,
slightly, the delicacy of Hilda’s breeding. Even Florence Gregory, some
rare times, used a slight word of slang: “As the husband is, the wife
is.”

Low Soong listened to Hilda with polite indifference. Low Soong had
no English. But Nang Ping wondered dully how a garden could have a
fit; she thought an epileptic garden must be very horrid. But she said
smoothly, “Ah! in London you have only walls and roofs, I think.”

“You have been there, Miss Wu, of course?” Mrs. Gregory asked.

“I have never been to any country.”

“Really? But--you must excuse me--but your excellent English.”

“My honorable teacher was English. My honorable father knows it like
you; he has been there--to Oxford.”

“Really! I was born at Oxford. And my son”--she turned to him a little,
meaning to coax him into the talk, and wondering to see him stand so
awkwardly and wordless--he was not often so socially inept, and never
gauche--“my son was there.”

“And my honorable father has taught me to esteem English people because
they are all”--she paused an instant, but she did not glance towards
Basil, and added with a grave, deferential smile--“all honorable men.”

“Well”--Basil’s mother smiled too, a prettily pathetic smile which
was half good manners and half sincere--“I am afraid there are a few
exceptions, sometimes.” She went up to her boy and laid her hand fondly
on his arm. “But”--not speaking to him, but still to Nang--“it is the
duty of all Englishmen to live up to such a high reputation.”

“I must be off, Mother,” the man said hurriedly, releasing himself
gently, “if Miss Wu will excuse me. I thought Father was coming.”

“He has. We left them down by the fish-pond, him and Tom, talking to a
quaint old gardener.”

“Oh! Well, I’m afraid I ought to be off--to the office. I’ll go
straight to the hotel afterwards--dinner usual time?”

“Of course, dear, unless you’d like it earlier or later. Do you know,
Basil, you haven’t dined with us for days?”--Nang Ping knew it. “I’m
getting quite anxious about your health, dear. Bother that fusty
office! You don’t seem a bit yourself.”

Her boy laughed at her and put his hand under her chin. (And Nang Ping
watched them curiously.) “You dear--why--I--I’m as right as rain.”

“Then prove it, my son--a big man’s dinner at eight. Now, if Miss Wu
will excuse you”--for evidently he was uncomfortable here--and why
not, the dear English child? How should he be anything else in this
funny Chinese nook with these Chinese girls? Probably he could not
even see how pretty this smaller one was, for all her narrow eyes and
absurd, grotesque clothes and paint, and it was plain that he could
not find a word to say to either of them, not even to this one who
was playing hostess so nicely, and who understood English and spoke
it surprisingly. His silence towards the plump dumpling of a cousin,
who was showing Hilda about the garden with quaint bobbings and solemn
pantomime, was excusable enough. She didn’t know a word of English,
it seemed; though you never could tell what a Chinese did or didn’t
know, John Bradley said, and Ah Wong said so too. But really, Basil
might have made an effort, and said a little something civil to the
English-knowing hostess; he was not often so shy--he _had_ been at
Oxford, and he was her son. Robert had no _savoir faire_, but, as
a rule, the boy had some.

When he was free from his mother, Basil moved to Nang Ping to take
leave of her. She received him with a quiet dignity that seemed
perfectly natural. “Chinese, but quite the grande dame,” the mother
thought.

He uncovered and looked down at Nang. “Good-day, Miss Wu.” She shook
her hands at him in Chinese-salutation way, and straightening up
looked at him with just the edge of a courteous smile--not an eyelash
quivered. He turned and looked towards the other girls, but Low Soong
had turned her back and was bending and gesticulating over a peony bed.

“By the way, Basil,” his mother said as he passed her, but paused to
give her one more smile, “the gardener was telling your father that he
knew you.” She wished him to go, and yet she stayed him.

Basil shot Nang a look--of consternation--taken aback and off his
guard. Mrs. Gregory did not catch it, but both Hilda and Low Soong
did. Nang Ping held herself impassive, but distress flickered for a
moment in her eyes. Then he turned back to his mother, trying to seem
unconcerned.

“Knew me? Why, I--he’s never seen me here in his life.”

“He didn’t say he had, silly,” Hilda Gregory said, strolling towards
them, Low Soong tottering deftly beside her--Low’s feet were bound--“he
said he’d seen you in Hong Kong.”

“Oh!” her brother laughed feebly, “in Hong Kong--that’s quite possible.
Well, now, I really am off. Good-by, Miss Wu.” And Nang Ping bowed to
him once more, in the prescribed ceremonial way, her face perfectly
emotionless, dismissing him suavely, turning from him before he had
quite gone.

“Will you not be seated?” she asked Mrs. Gregory, with a deferential
gesture pointing to the old stone seat.

Hilda and Low Soong still strolled about among the treasures of the
garden.

Ah Sing and perhaps half a dozen other servants moved about on padded,
noiseless feet, preparing Miss Wu’s tea-table with all its picturesque
paraphernalia of elaborate teakwood stools and benches, lacquer
sweetmeat-cabinets, glazed porcelain tea-bowls as thin as gauze and
painted by master craftsmen, trays of candied fruit, and several
delicacies of which Florence Gregory did not know the name and could
not guess the nature.

“So,” she said, surprised to find how comfortable a stone bench could
be, “Mr. Wu was at Oxford. How interesting! I wonder when. I knew a
Chinese gentleman--a student there--when I was quite a girl. We lived
at Oxford, my father and I. I forget his name. I have the saddest
memory, especially for names, and it could not have been your father
whom I knew, for I distinctly remember hearing, the year after I was
married--or some time about then--that my friend was dead, killed in a
climbing accident somewhere on the Alps. He was a fine sportsman.”

“Many Chinese gentlemen are sent to Oxford, I have heard my honorable
father say,” Nang Ping rejoined. “The Japanese go more to Cambridge.”

“Yes--and yet,” Mrs. Gregory said musingly, but more interested in
watching the servants than she was in her talk with this rather wooden
and very painted-faced child of the East, “your name--‘Wu,’ I mean--has
seemed familiar to me from the first, and now I seem to remember that
the man I knew at Oxford had a surname rather like that--or even that.
How odd!”

“There are many Wus in China,” the girl said. “It is a most large clan.
All our clans are very large. We are, you know, so old.”

“Wu.” The English woman said it slowly, as if trying to send, on the
sound of it, her peccant memory back to some forgotten hour.

“Oh! it is a most general name. It means Military. I do not know
why, for,” she added almost hastily, “we have had no soldiers in our
family--everything almost but that. All Chinese names mean something,
but of most of them--they are so old--the meaning is lost in the mists
of far, far back, uncounted years before history was written or kept
in record. And perhaps I ought to have remembered that one Wu was a
soldier once. Wu Sankwei defended Ningyuan against T’ientsung when
the Manchus first overran China. But that was, oh! so many years ago,
and since then none of my honorable ancestors have been soldiers--or
at least very few,” she added, with a sudden blush beneath her paint,
too honest to conceal from Basil’s mother, who was also her guest, her
military forbears, descent from whom she felt to be a bitter disgrace,
though she knew, as every educated Chinese must, that in all China’s
long history there are few greater names than that of Wu Sankwei, the
defender of Ningyuan. “‘Li’ is the name in China the most common and
perhaps the most proud. It is our ‘Smith’ name. And we are very proud
of it, because many of its men have been great and noble, and because
their honorable wives have borne them many children. Scarcely the
census-takers can count the Lis. My honorable mother was a Li before
my honorable father married her to be Mrs. Wu. They were cousins, but
more than a century away--‘twenty times removed,’ as you would call it
in your English. The honorable Li Hung Chang’s our distant kinsman, my
honorable kinsman on both sides. My own honorable father has ‘Li’ blood
on the side of distaff; his honorable name is Wu Li Chang. We are
Chinese, we of our house, but now in some of our blood we are Manchu
too.”

Mrs. Gregory smiled up at the girl. “Will you not sit here too?” And
Nang Ping bowed and curled up on the other end of the big seat.

Ah Wong opened her mistress’s parasol and brought it, and Mrs. Gregory
took it with a grateful “Ah!” “We have enjoyed ourselves so much in
your wonderful country, Miss Wu,” she went on; “we are quite sorry
our time here is drawing to a close. You know--but I forgot, you know
nothing of us, of course--well, we are going soon, going home.”

“All of you go?” Nang Ping knew that they all were to go, but she could
not resist the self-inflicted pain of hearing it again.

“Yes, all four of us--we are just the four--and I think my son will be
glad to get home again, after a year in the East.”

“I doubt that not,” the girl replied, in an odd, quiet voice. “But,”
she added, reaching up one ring-heavy hand to pull down a flower, only
to pitch it aside when she had smelt it once--the Chinese rarely do
that--“but he said he liked the East.”

“Oh! yes, indeed he does. We all do. Who could help it? But, after
all, it is not quite the same thing as home, you know, especially to a
man; and, besides, Basil has many friends whom he longs to see again.
And”--adding this good-naturedly, anxious to interest the girl and
smiling significantly--“we don’t want an old bachelor in our family,
you know; we have but the one son.”

“‘Bachelor’--that is one English word I do not know.”

“Well, what I mean is that Basil must return home before all the
eligible young ladies of his acquaintance forget him.”

“That means”--the girl’s voice hurt her throat--“he is going home to
marry?”

“Well,” his mother admitted, “there is a young lady at home, I believe,
who will be very glad to see him again, so I hope it will eventually
come to that.”

Nang Ping laughed. And Mrs. Gregory thought, “How very oddly the
Chinese laugh! It’s anything but gay.”

“And he will never come back?”--the strange creature said it with a
smile.

“Oh, yes!” Hilda said, joining them, “some day, perhaps, when he has
settled down, to take charge of this branch.”

“I’m afraid Basil is the sort of son who never settles down,” his
mother said lightly. Nang Ping thought it most strange, and not nice,
that the mother should say it at all, but she quite believed--now--that
it was true. She rose, and clapped her hands for Ah Sing.

“If you will honor me by taking tea,” she said, and led the way to the
highly decorated table where the ornate meal was elaborately laid, the
blue-clad servants standing about it in a circle, as still as stones.
At their young mistress’s approach they bowed almost to the ground--so
low that their cues swept the grass, and one caught and tangled in
a verbena bed. Mrs. Gregory suppressed a smile, but Hilda could not
suppress a low giggle. But she tried to, and that much is to her credit.

“How jolly!” she cried, as they sat down to an accompaniment of many
bows from the cousins. “How perfectly jolly!”

“Delightful!” agreed her mother. And Nang Ping, in spite of the
choking misery in her throat and smarting in her breast, was pleased
at their pleasure. She thought it sincere, and both Low Soong and Ah
Wong, watching lynx-eyed and imperturbable, knew that it was. Low Soong
was but an obliging mannequin this afternoon, Ah Wong but a lay figure,
expressionless and almost motionless, but neither had missed a word, a
look, or a meaning from the first, although Ah Wong had little English
and Low Soong had none.




CHAPTER XVI

GRIT


Mrs. Gregory bore her part in the pretty little function with
creditable imitation of Chinese propriety. She had been coached by a
woman at Government House. She blessed her own foresight that she had,
and reproached herself that Hilda had not.

Nang Ping raised her bowl of scalding tea almost to her forehead, and
then held it out first towards Mrs. Gregory and then towards Hilda, and
waited for them to drink--and so did Low Soong; and when they drank,
the two girls bowed several times and then drained their tiny bowls.

When the sweetmeats were pressed upon them Mrs. Gregory took one
candied rose petal, and then--after much urging--took, with a fine
display of reluctance, the smallest crystallized violet on the dish.
But when Miss Wu entreated Hilda, “I beg you to condescend to accept
and pardon my abominable food,” Hilda helped herself generously to five
or six of the glittering dainties. A guest at a London dinner-table who
had seized in her own hands a roast fowl by its stark legs, conveyed it
to her own plate, and then began to gnaw it, without even wrenching it
into portions as Tudor Elizabeth would have wrenched it, would not have
committed a more outrageous act. Nang Ping immediately helped herself
even more generously than Hilda had, and Low Soong, after one startled
instant, did the same. Mrs. Gregory saw it all, and wondered, with a
social conscience abashed and chastened, if she would have had the fine
courage, had the situation been reversed, to seize the second chicken
and chew at it noisily. And she looked at her little hostess with
new respect, convinced again that Nang Ping was exquisitely “grande
dame,” and beginning to suspect that the pretty, painted doll-thing
had something in her after all, if only one knew how to get at it. She
wondered what a girl living so, amid such a riot of fantastic ornament
and seemingly meaningless petty ceremony, thought and felt. Did she
think? Did she feel? Or was her mind as blank, her soul as impassive
as her face? What did motherhood itself mean to such dolls, and could
wifehood mean anything? Ah! well, if marriage was but a gilded mirage
on the horizon of such opera-bouffe existence--as, for all she could
see, the existence of well-to-do Chinese women was--that unreality
might lessen pain more than it dwarfed happiness. The English woman
sighed a little. But they must love their babies, these funny little
creatures. Every mother loved her baby. And there was something gentle
and loving, she thought, in this girl’s face, beneath the paint and the
conventional mask. She looked up and searched the younger face with
kindly, motherly eyes. Yes; it would be pretty to see a baby cuddled in
those gay silken sleeves. She smiled at the thought and at the girl,
and Nang Ping smiled back at her. Something cried and fluttered at
Nang’s heart, and flashed softly from her eyes, and found a moment’s
nesting in the older woman’s heart. And for an instant the Chinese girl
and the English woman were in close touch; and, if they had been alone,
perhaps--who knows--

But before the tea-bowls had been replenished four times they heard
the truants, Mr. Gregory and Tom Carruthers, coming.

Carruthers was speaking. “There, Mr. Gregory, there’s a pond full of
goldfish--and such goldfish! By Jove!”

“My dear Tom,” an older voice said impatiently, “there’s more sense in
a bowl of herrings than a pondful of silly goldfish.”

“Ah!--still,” the younger persisted, as the two men came in sight, “you
must admit this is another lovely spot.”

“H’m, yes,” Robert Gregory allowed, pursing up his lips deprecatingly
in a way he often had when bartering in boats or rates. “Rather reminds
me of Kew Gardens, but inferior--too gimcrack!”

But Carruthers saw the others then. “Ah! There they are! Taking tea
under rather better conditions than Kew, I fancy.”

Nang Ping rose and went towards Gregory hospitably. He lifted his hat
perfunctorily and spoke to her crisply, not waiting for the welcome she
had risen to accord. “How do you do? Miss Wu, I presume? It’s awfully
good of you to let us have a look around.”

Mrs. Gregory rose too, and came up to Nang Ping, feeling the girl’s
resentment at a tone to which she was unaccustomed--a resentment she in
no way showed.

“My husband, Miss Wu,” the English lady said, presenting him to the
girl, and speaking to her with pointed respect, and the man took the
hint a little, and bowed pleasantly enough as Nang Ping almost ko’towed.

So this was the father--Basil’s honorable father! She liked him least
of the three--the three who might have been her relatives--more to her
than her own father, whom she had known so long and loved so well. He
was not like Basil, but like the daughter. Of the three she liked the
honorable mother best--much. “You are just in time to take tea, if you
will honor me,” she said.

“May I present Mr. Carruthers to you, Miss Wu?” Mrs. Gregory asked.

Nang Ping greeted the additional guest with the widest outpush of her
joined hands and the most stiffly formal bow she had made yet. But she
liked this face; he looked, she thought, indeed an “honorable man.”

“Tea! By all means,” Mr. Gregory said briskly, steering for the richly
laden toy tea-table in a businesslike way. He thought there’d been
bowing and arm-shaking enough for a month o’ Sundays.

Low Soong giggled a little when Tom Carruthers lifted his hat to
her--Nang shot her cousin a severe look--and then, to Mr. Gregory’s
disgust, all the bowing and arm-waving was to do again.

“I am sorry not to serve tea in the English way,” Nang Ping said, as
she returned to her seat. (Gregory had already taken his.)

“Why!” Mrs. Gregory protested, “what can be more delightful than to
serve China tea in the Chinese way in China? And this is such a real
treat to me! I can have my tea in our stupid home way--half cold and
quite insipid--any day.”

“Well,” Gregory commented, leaning back negligently in his chair and
stretching out his legs in comfortable abandon, “perhaps I’ve not been
here long enough to appreciate Chinese customs. That’s the worst of
being a real Englishman, Miss Wu--one misses English comforts.”

Tom Carruthers saw a tiny shadow of disgust cloud across Nang Ping’s
painted mouth, and he knew, without looking, the distress on Florence
Gregory’s face. “Mr. Gregory,” he interposed, “your tea,” and pointed
to Gregory’s waiting cup.

They all were waiting to drink together; not to have done so would have
been a rudeness.

“Oh!” Gregory vouchsafed, lifting the tiny piece of porcelain
critically and tasting the brew gingerly when he had discarded the
covering saucer a little roughly. And when he drank, the others drank
with him.

He tasted the delicate tea superciliously, and disapproved it frankly.
“Here, boy,” he called to one of the Wu servants, and holding out the
cup with a disgusted grimace, “take it away.” The servant with the Wu
crest embroidered on his back bowed low, stepped forward, bowed lower,
and then took the offending handleless cup and gravely bore it away.
And the four women looked on, Hilda amused, his wife distressed, the
two Chinese girls smilingly imperturbable. It is difficult to decide
which owes China the more apology--English missionaries or English
manners.

“By the way, Miss Wu,” Gregory said, speaking staccato between sugared
mouthfuls--he had appropriated the nearest dish of sweetmeats to his
sole use, and evidently approved its candied contents as much as he had
disapproved the tea--“I’m very dissatisfied with your father.”

Nang Ping smiled a little haughtily, rising as she spoke. “I am sorry
my honorable father should offend.”

“Yes, so am I. Of course, business is business. I admit I live up to
that myself, and I must expect others to. But I have heard that he has
just bought over my head--over my head, mind you--a dock site which is
indispensable for my new line of ships to Australia. I wrote him about
it, and reply seemed, I must admit--well, a trifle vindictive.”

The girl sat down again quietly, but Tom Carruthers, who had risen when
she had, stood still leaning a little on his chair and watching her
closely.

“But you have not seen my honorable father for a long time,” Nang told
the financier.

“Oh!” he returned, “I, personally, have never seen your father, Miss
Wu; but my manager, Holman, saw him a couple of hours ago.”

Nang Ping’s fingers tangled quickly in her girdle. Only Ah Wong saw it,
but several of them noticed Low Soong’s start--it was noticeable. “It
cannot be so,” Nang said.

“Eh? Of course it is so. Old Holman’s got both his eyes; he sees all
right.”

“But”--and, in spite of her, a little of the concern she felt crept
into her voice--“but he has been in Canton for twenty days.”

“Oh! well,” Mr. Gregory returned indifferently, “then he must have come
back. It’s scarcely two hours since Holman met him and told him we were
visiting Kowloon. And your father particularly requested that we should
visit his garden. He said any member of my family would be made very
welcome. Holman said those were Wu’s exact words--exact old josser,
Holman, always. Any member of my family would be made very welcome.
And, you know, that’s all very well when you’ve just done a man down in
business--any one can afford to be polite then.” He got up and dragged
his chair a few feet and reseated himself beside his wife.

“Robert,” she greeted him, “you can scarcely expect Miss Wu to be
interested in your business disappointments.” She turned then to the
girl. “It will be a pleasant surprise for you; you did not know your
father had returned?”

Nang shook her head a little. “No. It is strange, for he is never
unkind to me.”

“Oh! I know what brought him back,” Gregory persisted bellicosely, “and
it’s a dog-in-a-manger business, and I wrote and told him so, because
the dock site isn’t any earthly good to him.”

Florence Gregory sighed. “Robert,” she said severely, “I am sure Mr. Wu
does not trouble his daughter with his business worries.”

“My dear,” her husband snapped irritably, “it is not his worries we are
discussing, but mine. By the way, Miss Wu, has your right honorable
father by any chance a brother?”

“Alas!” the girl replied sorrowfully--she had missed the slur in that
“right honorable” (no one else had missed it, not even Low)--“alas! His
honorable mother was unfortunate in only having one son.”

“Well,” almost grunted the Englishman, “I could have sworn she’d had
twins.”

“Robert!”--his wife’s voice was coldly angry. But Hilda giggled.

“Twins!” Carruthers said, a little fatuously. He was puzzled, and he
liked to understand things as he went along.

Gregory answered his wife’s expostulation with expostulation. “My dear,
it’s scarcely two hours ago since Holman saw him in Hong Kong. And yet,
as soon as we get this side of the water, your gardener, Miss Wu, tells
me that your father has just arrived here in Kowloon, and that he was
here for a while yesterday, and yet I don’t see him about anywhere,
and I particularly want to see him.”

“In that San Fong make a mistake,” Nang Ping said quietly. But she
had risen to her feet in evident distress, though she controlled it
bravely, and the others had all risen too, as if her sudden motion was
a one that prompted them. Even Gregory saw that he had made a _faux
pas_, and looked awkwardly towards his wife, saying, “Oh! well,
maybe he did, but I don’t believe it. I’m not educated up to green tea
and chop-sticks, but I’ve lived in China off and on some good few years
now, and I understand your lingo right enough, at least the ‘pigeon’
variety of it, and that’s what the gardener said, and if you ask me, he
savvied what he was talking about.”

Low Soong had slipped round to Nang’s side, and stood very close to it.

“Robert,” his wife said bitterly, “I really don’t know which is worse,
a bull in a china-shop or you in a Chinese lady’s garden. You make
one understand why they call us foreign devils.” He shrugged his big
shoulders sulkily in reply, and moved off to the pond, whistling
unconcernedly.

Mrs. Gregory followed him, and he turned towards Nang and said
patronisingly (but that was unintentional--he couldn’t help it), “It’s
really quite a charming place, Miss Wu, ’pon my word it is--charming.
Quite Oriental, isn’t it?” He paused at that to let them all appreciate
his unique discovery, and wondered impatiently why the dickens
Carruthers grinned. “I suppose every country has the landscape that
suits it best, but there are some little bits of England that take a
lot of beating.”

“The light is failing now,” Florence said--she had quite relinquished
her hope of seeing the interior of the house--“and I am afraid we are
keeping Miss Wu long after her tea-time.”

“Oh, no!” Nang Ping said, “not at the least; but”--for she knew her
strength was ebbing fast, and she felt very ill--“I--I am not strong
to-day. And--I must seek my apartments early, as my honorable father
has returned.” She turned to Ah Sing, who had not moved from his
sentinel place in front of the pagoda, and said to him, “Tsu tang yang
ur!” And he bowed and went to summon the lantern-bearers.

Florence Gregory took both the Chinese girl’s little hands in hers.
“How cold they feel, even through my gloves!” she thought. “Good-by,”
she said very gently. “Good-by, Miss Wu, and let me thank you for the
great treat you have given us.”

Nang Ping made no reply--she couldn’t--but she looked up at her going
guest with something so pathetic in her odd eyes and something so
nearly a-tremble on her mouth that the older woman almost bent and
kissed her.

“Where’s Basil?” Tom Carruthers asked. “Has he cleared off, Hilda?”

“Yes,” she told him, “he had a conscientious fit and has gone to the
office to work. Good-by, Miss Wu,” she said to Nang Ping, “and thanks
awfully. It’s been quite too ripping.”

Nang felt too faint by now to wonder what the odd English words the
other girl used meant. But she smiled up at Basil’s sister very kindly.

“You shall be attended to the gates,” she said to her, and added to
Carruthers, as he came to take leave, “My own garden is locked at
sunset.”

Carruthers said something brief, and then looked about to take his
leave of the cousin, and wondered to see her slipping stealthily away
and out of sight. She was a funny little bunch, he thought.

“Father hardly brought his garden-party manners with him, did he?”
Hilda said unconcernedly to her mother, as they and Carruthers passed
from the garden, four blue-robed Chinese, with great lanterns swinging
from their hands, in close attendance, and Ah Wong just behind them.

“No,” his wife said wearily. “And I’m afraid he didn’t leave many
behind, either.”

Except for a group of silent, motionless serving-men, Robert Gregory
and Wu Nang Ping were alone in the darkening garden now.

He held out his hand to her. “Good-by, Miss Wu.”

She did not take it, but she bowed to him deeply, and because he was
Basil’s father and she thought that she should not see him again she
gave him the utmost obeisance of Chinese ceremony, sinking quite down
to the ground. That extremest collapse of leg and knee, the ko’tow of
utmost reverence, is reserved, as a rule, for an Emperor, an imperial
mother or first wife, the grave of Confucius in the Kung cemetery,
outside K’iuh-fu (where only the crystal tree will grow) and for the
tablets of one’s own ancestral dead.

“Oh! To be sure,” he said good-naturedly enough, letting his extended
hand drop to his side. “Well, good-by and good luck. I had hoped to
meet our interesting friend. I had quite a lot to say to him. But I’m
pleased to have met you, even if I don’t think much of your tea. You
must come up to our hotel one day, and Mrs. Gregory and Hilda’ll give
you the prime stuff. Good-by.” He added to himself only half under
his breath, as he marched off, “And I hope my visit isn’t going to be
wasted!”

Nang Ping stood motionless and watched him till he was out of sight.




CHAPTER XVII

THE SIGNAL OF THE GONG


And then the breakdown came, and she sank down, weeping and distracted,
on the long stone seat. Her father in Kowloon! Her father who was
almost omniscient! How long had he been there? What had he learned?

Somewhere in the house a great gong sounded--seven slow beats, deep
throated as the braying of some bloodhound, but low and soft at first,
growing louder, then soft again, all musical, but almost uncannily
significant. As the second note beat into the garden, Nang Ping
roused herself, and sat up against the seat’s back, clutching at it
desperately. She listened in fear that grew to anguish as note followed
note. Only one hand ever struck that gong! As the brazened signal died
away in the scented evening air, she sprang up and ran distracted on to
the bridge, calling, “Basil! Basil!” thinking no longer of herself but
only to save the lover who had spoiled her life. Women are like that in
China--and in England.

He came at once, and she bent over the bridge to him and said, as he
stood on the path he had come by, “You must go. My father! Go quickly!”

“Your father!”

“Go--go now! Quick!”

“But we’re safe here--for the moment.” He was glad of an excuse to
leave her, and yet he wanted too to stay, to toy, if but for a moment,
by the lotus lake where he had found the dalliance sweet that had
proved fatal to poor Nang Ping.

“No, no!” she told him frantically. “Not safe. Safe nowhere. Never safe
again. But most dangerous here. Go! Fly, Basil, fly! Before my father’s
wrath falls on you, fly! Take the path by the Peacock Terrace and go.”

She had infected him now with her own breathless fear, but even so he
hesitated an instant longer, for she had urged him to go; and when is
not the man reluctant to go whom a woman forbids to stay?

“Celeste”--he called her by the name with which he had wooed her and
never wooed in vain--“little flower, our happiness has been too great,
too perfect. There must be some other way: there shall!”

“None! None!” the girl said solemnly.

“I love you, dear,” he whispered passionately.

“No,” Nang Ping said gently, “your love has flown away from me, and the
nest of my heart is cold for always now.”

“It isn’t true,” he protested hotly. “It is not true.”

“Go!”

“I will come back to you.”

“No!” Nang Ping’s voice was soft and clear and tender as a flute. “Go.
Go, and forget.”

“Then”--he lifted his hat and came towards her uncovered, his arms
outstretched--“farewell, Celeste.”

But she turned and moved a little away, not even facing him again.
She was afraid to trust those arms, a thousand times afraid to trust
herself. “Farewell to life and love,” she said under her breath,
smiling wanly but moving steadily towards the house.

With a cry--half remorse, half passion, and something too, just
a little, of the brute, grim and primal, not to be baulked of his
prey--Basil Gregory sprang after her to catch her in his arms. But
before he reached her, just before, other arms caught him and held him
in a vice.

Ah Sing had glided like some upright indigo-colored snake from the
pagoda--“the pagoda by the lake”--and, springing seemingly from space,
one from one direction, one from another, two of the gardeners,
almost as quick as he, reached the Englishman almost as soon. Six
arms pinioned him, without a word, without a sound. And there was
no expression on the Chinese faces of the three--no hatred, no
determination, not even interest.

But another man, a dark-robed figure, stood on the bridge, above them
all, and slowly he smiled--a terrible smile.

Nang Ping had not heard the four Chinese--no one could have heard them.
But she caught the slight sound of Basil’s desperate struggles--he was
struggling too frantically to waste any of his strength on voluntary
noise. She turned and ran to him, crying, “Oh, Basil!”--no matter who
heard her now. The end had come, and Nang Ping knew it. She threw
herself in front of him, thrust herself into the seething coil, to
protect his body with hers, as far as she could.

With a supreme effort--or did that still figure on the bridge give a
slight signal that Ah Sing caught?--perhaps both--for a moment Basil’s
right arm was free. He whipped out his revolver. But with a touch of Ah
Sing’s finger-tips--it looked an indifferent touch, and the servant’s
eyes had not turned even for the smallest space of time from that quiet
figure on the bridge--the English arm fell helpless at Gregory’s side,
the revolver clattered down the stone step, and Basil, turning his head
up in pain, saw the motionless looker-on.

“My God!” the boy cried. “Mr. Wu!”

Nang Ping turned slowly round, looked at her father as if entranced and
dazed, then with a scream that cut through the hot air like the voice
of a child that had been knifed and was dying, fell prostrate at the
foot of the bridge, and lay moaning with her face on Basil Gregory’s
shoe, her hands, with some last instinct to protect him, clasped about
his silk-clad ankle.




CHAPTER XVIII

AT THE FEET OF KWANYIN KO


Nang Ping sat crouched at the feet of Kwanyin Ko, the Goddess of Mercy,
on the floor of her own room. She had been alone all night.

She remembered seeing her father on the bridge. She remembered falling
at Basil’s feet. She remembered nothing more--clearly. She thought she
recalled, as from a dream, being carried from the garden and laid here.
She thought it had been gently done. Whose arms had lifted and borne
her? She thought that she had been laid on her bed; across the room
her sleeping-mats were unrolled, and a light down coverlet was tossed
across the hard little cylinder which was her pillow. Some one had laid
her down to sleep. Who? And some one had brought her food and drink,
for on a tray near the mats there were fresh fruit and a dish of wine.

Had she been awake when she crawled here to lay her sorrow at Kwanyin’s
feet? Or had she thrown off the coverlet and crept across the floor in
her sleep?

A nightlight burned dimly in an opalescent cup, and across the garden
she could hear a cricket call and some big insect buzzing in the dark.

She tried to think, but she was too tired. She turned her face to the
floor and laid so, prone before the painted graven figure which was the
only succor left, the only semblance of woman’s companionship within
her reach. Where was Low Soong? Had Low been caught too in the coil?
If not, surely Low would come to her presently, if she could. What had
they done to Basil? She clenched her hands together in supplication
so frenzied that her nails cut into her palms and her rings tore her
flesh. What would come now? Or, rather, when would it come, and how?
She knew what was to come.

But she could think no more. She could suffer. That faculty was left
her, but she could neither reason nor plan. And why should she? The end
was absolute, and absolute the uselessness of thought.

Towards morning she found the little tinder-box, stuffed her pipe,
and began to smoke. It was innocuous enough a drugging, but gave her
growing nervousness something to do. Three or four whiffs empty those
tiny pipes. To throw out the ash took a moment, to refill the bowl took
another; the drawing on the stem killed a third--over and over again,
and one of the terrible night hours had gone. And still the Chinese
girl lay on her hard wood floor smoking mechanically, as in Europe
a girl so placed might have crocheted, or a woman older but no less
desperate have played patience, or tried to play.

When the first streaks of day came to sharpen the familiar outlines
of the room and of its furnishings, and sharpen her sense of pain and
peril, she threw the tiny silver pipe across the floor. It fell with a
clatter on the arabesque of the hard inlaying.

This Kowloon house of Wu was a veritable treasure-house. Not an
apartment in it (for the servants lived, and cooked even, outside) but
held much that was priceless. And no other room had been plenished with
such lavish tenderness as had this room of his one child.

The old bronze table that pedestalled and throned Kwanyin Ko had not
its match in Europe, neither in palace nor museum, and Kwanyin Ko,
herself looted from a palace six hundred years ago, was worth something
fabulous: no dealer would have sold her for sixty thousand yen.

The lapis-lazuli peacock, so exquisitely carved that its feathers
were fine and delicate as those of the big birds that strutted in the
sunshine on the terrace beyond the lotus pond (and the emerald points
that studded each feather thickly and the threads of gold and silver
that just showed their threads of burnishing here and there were real)
was worth its weight in rubies.

In all the room--and it was large--there was not one thing that of
its own kind was not the best. Wu had skimmed China relentlessly, and
much of its cream was embowled here: Nang Ping’s. And China is wide
and rich. Every inlaid instrument of music that strewed the cushions
and the floor, every classic book, the picture on the wall (there was
only one picture, of course--a landscape by Ma Yuan--heavily framed in
carved and inlaid camphor-wood) was a masterpiece, the culmination of
some imperial art of an imperial people, art begotten of a spiritual
and indomitable race’s genius, and nursed and perfected by centuries of
unfatigued patience. Cedar and sandal-wood and ivory hung and jutted
from walls and painted ceiling in cornice and lambrequins cut into
lace-work, as fine (though thicker) and as beautiful as any ever made
on a Belgian pillow. Three hundred robes, each in its scented bag of
silk, each costlier than the others, were piled on the next room’s
shelves of camphor-wood, and the lacquer chests of drawers and the
carved coffers that stood beyond the sleeping mats were crammed with
jewels. Nang Ping had sapphires that Maria Theresa had worn and a ruby
that had been Josephine’s, a pearl that had blinked on the hand of
England’s Elizabeth. She had, and often wore, a diamond that Hwangti’s
Queen Yenfi had worn four thousand years before. And the girl’s best
gems had been her mother’s.

And in this toyed temple of Chinese maidenhood and her father’s
devotion Nang Ping lay huddled on the floor, “by Love’s simplicity
betrayed, all soiled, low i’ the dust.”

Remember Nang Ping so long as you live, English Basil--while you live
and after!

The day came in, a lovely, laughing day of perfect Chinese summer, and
Kwanyin Ko blinked and grinned in the early radiance.

Nang Ping rose up a little and knelt before the joss, praying, as she
had never prayed before, the old, old prayer of tortured womanhood,
Magdalene’s petition, echoing, moaning in every corner of earth,
girdling the world with a hymn of shame and with terrible entreaty, the
saddest--save one other--of all prayers; never to be answered on earth,
never to be disregarded or coldly heard in heaven.

And in another room, ko’towed before an uglier, sterner joss--the God
of Justice--Wu the mandarin was praying too.

And in the pagoda--for it was there that it had been Wu’s humor to
prison him--Basil Gregory was praying, trying to remember words of
simple, tender supplication that his mother had taught him in England
when he was a little child.




CHAPTER XIX

PREPARATION


A bird was singing rapturously in a honagko tree as Nang Ping rose
from her knees. She stood awhile at her open casement--it had been
flung wide all night--listening to the little feathered flutist, saying
good-by to her garden. The pagoda gleamed like rose-stained snow in the
rosy sunrise, and the girl smiled wanly, thinking how like a bride’s
cake it looked--the high tapering towers, white-sugared and fantastic,
that English brides have. She had seen several at a confectioner’s in
Hong Kong, and she had seen an English bride cut one with her husband’s
sword at a bridal in Pekin. It was far prettier, Nang had thought, than
the little cakes, gray and heavy, that Chinese brides have, but not so
nice to the taste--flat and dry. The lotus flowers were waking now,
slowly opening their painted cups of carmine, white, rose and amethyst;
the peacocks were preening to the day, the king-bird of them all
flinging out his jewels to the sun, and the shabbily-garbed hens, in
the red kissing of the sunrise refulgence, looking to wear breasts of
rose. A lark swayed and tuned on the yellow tassel of a laburnum, and a
bullfinch see-sawed and throated on the acacia tree. And every gorgeous
tulip was a chalice filled with dew.

“Good-by,” the girl said gently, and turned away.

She still wore the rich festive robes of yesterday. She began to take
them off, slowly, drawing strings from their knottings, slipping hooks
from their silver eyes, pushing jewel-buttons out of their holes,
letting the loosened garments fall one by one in a rainbow heap of silk
upon the floor (as Wu, when a boy, had shed furs and gems upon a floor
in Sze-chuan). Her women would find and fold them presently. But it
mattered nothing. Nothing mattered now.

She still was wearing her nail-protectors, two on each hand--necessary
adjuncts to the toilet and to the comfort of many Chinese ladies, whose
long spiral nails would be a torture if unprotected. But it had been
Wu’s pleasure to have Nang Ping taught the piano, and so, of course,
she had to wear her nails short. But whenever she was “dressed” she
wore the fantastic ornaments, to indicate that Wu’s daughter did not
work. She discarded them now, and listlessly let them fall upon the
silks heaped at her feet: two were of green jade (one finely carved,
one studded with diamonds), one was silver set with rubies, the fourth
was gold set with pearls and moonstones.

When all the finery--such finery as Europe never sees, except
burlesqued on the stage--had been cast off, she began to re-dress
herself, steadily and very carefully.

From the silver ewer she poured water into the silver basin. It needed
both her hands and much of her strength to lift the ewer; it was heavy
with the precious metal’s weight, and she had never lifted it before.
In all her life she had never once dressed or undressed herself.
When the attar and the sweet vinegars had creamed in the basin she
bathed her face again and again until all the paint was gone. She only
wore rouge and thick-crusted white paint on days of function and of
festival. On days of homely ease and unceremonied home-keeping her skin
was as clean and unprofaned as a baby’s.

It is a canon of Chinese womanhood never quite to undress
unnecessarily. Modesty at her toilet, even when performing it alone, is
enjoined the Manchu girl as it is the Catholic girl of Europe. And this
Manchu niceness has permeated the other Chinese races. And in China
a maid would be held not chary, but prodigal indeed, did “she unmask
her beauty to the moon.” A land of several peoples sharply distinct in
much, China is in much else the land of great racial amalgamation. And
it is impossible to trace back to their source many of this wonderful
people’s most salient qualities. Tartar has infected Mongol, Mongol
inoculated Tartar, Taoist taught Mohammedan, Confucianism and Buddhism
have mixed and fused, Teng-Shui tinged all, sometimes tainting and
degrading, occasionally idealizing and lifting up to poetry. And
modesty of body is simple instinct with Chinese girls of every blend
and caste. Nor is it lost--as so many of youth’s sweetnesses always
must be everywhere--in the gray slough of old age. Nowhere in China
will you encounter the unique exhibitions of antique female nudity that
occasionally startle one so extraordinarily in Japan. The old women
of China, even the poorest, are always clad, and a Chinese girl slips
from the screening of her smock into the screening of her bubbling bath
without an instant’s flash of interim.

The early daylight showed Nang Ping very lovely, as she stood there in
her one last garment. Chinese women of the mandarin class are often
exquisitely lovely, especially those of mingled Manchu and Mongol
bloods. Nang’s sorrow was too new to have bleared or blowsed her yet;
it had but thrown a gracious, pathetic delicacy about her as a veil.
And even the charming coloring of her was not impaired.

There is no greater beauty of coloring than the coloring of such
girls--not in England, not in Spain. Nang Ping’s skin was no darker
than the liquor of the finest Chinese tea, and not unlike it in hue,
not green, not buff, but white, just hinting of each, and in her cheeks
the delicate pink of a tea rose told how red the blood at her heart
was, and how thin the patrician skin that masked and yet revealed it.
The little figure, tall for a Chinese, was tenderly drawn and perfectly
proportioned; the young presence, for all its gentleness, was queenly;
the firmly modeled head was well set on the straight shoulders. Hair
could not be blacker or arched jet brows more beautifully drawn. The
girl’s mobile mouth was large, but exquisitely shaped, and her red lips
parted and closed over teeth that could not have been whiter, more
faultless or more prettily set. There was a dimple in the obstinate
chin, and one beneath the tiny mole on her right cheek; and her black,
velvet eyes (soft now, and almost purple with unshed tears) were as
straight set in the small head as the eyes of any Venus in Vatican or
Louvre.

She stood a moment, gazing into space, clad only in her delicate smock,
and then slowly she redressed herself in her simplest robes--soft,
loose and gray. She had many such gowns, and wore them often. The
Chinese are too greatly, too finely artist to let the gorgeousness
in which they gloat degenerate by over-use into a commonplace. The
blare of their brazen music has its long reliefs of slow, soft minor
passages; their gayest gardens have prominent heaps of dull, barren
stone, long stretches of cold, gray walls; each sumptuous room has its
empty, restful corner. Nang Ping had fifty pictures of great price,
and more ivories, each a gem, but all the pictures save one, all the
ivories save one, were stowed away always, and just one at a time
placed where it might joy her sight; and most often she moved softly
about her home habited in plain raiment of neutral tints as gentle as a
dove’s.

Her hair took her longest. She had never brushed it before, and the
unguent took time to remove. But at last even that was done, the
jeweled pins heaped away, the long black strands braided about her head.

And then she sat down on the floor again, her cold, ringless hands
clasped at her knees, and waited and listened until her father’s gong
should strike.

She knew that she should hear it presently.

Once she started, and caught up from the floor a little scented bead.
She held it to her face, and then laid it away in her bosom. It was
her father’s, one of a string he often wore, and in her bitter misery
she was pathetically a little happier for the proof it gave her that
his own hands had carried her here. She would keep it in her bosom
always--while she lived.

Twice servants came in with trays of food and drink; blanc-mange, soup,
tea and wine. They made deep obeisance to her when they came and when
they went. But she did not speak to them, nor they to her.

And no message came until the message of the great gong’s soft boom.




CHAPTER XX

WHAT WU DID IN PROOF OF LOVE


Wu, when he had laid Nang Ping on her mats and covered her, went to his
library, and sat thinking through the night.

When he had lifted her, he had not glanced at the Englishman, nor
had he even looked in the direction of prison or prisoner since. The
servants had their orders. Those orders would be obeyed. With Basil
Gregory, Wu had nothing more to do--yet.

All night long he scarcely moved by so much as the drumming of finger
or toe, by so much as the quiver of a lash. None of Nang Ping’s
restlessness was shared by him. He was beyond restlessness. His agony
was absolute. Mothers suffer acutely when daughters “fall”--good
mothers and bad. But such mothers’ sorrow can never equal the red
torment of fatherhood so punished. Nature holds stricter justice
between sex and sex than she is credited. And such partiality and
unfair favoritism as he does show now and then is given, as is the
gross favoritism of man-made laws constantly (in Europe and in Asia),
to women.

Analyze what law of life you will, and the resultant conclusion will
have something to testify of Chinese wiseness. The punishment of a
crime never falls solely upon the direct miscreant. Blood and love must
pay their debt. And the Chinese legal code which allows and decrees
that kindred shall suffer (even to capital punishment) for a kinsman’s
crime is less fantastic and less fatuous than it seems to Western minds.

Basil Gregory and Nang Ping had sinned. Wu and Florence Gregory were to
be punished with them. And because Nature forgives man less than she
forgives woman, the sharper, surer punishment was to fall on the father
and the son.

Compared with one year in Wu’s life, the joy Nang Ping had stolen in
the garden was but “as water unto wine.” And, suffering now to her
sharp young utmost, she was suffering less than he.

When day came he rose, as Nang Ping did, and went to the window. Her
room was on the one higher floor; his looked almost level with the
garden--his own garden. For he too had his own private pleasance,
taboo to all, unless expressly bidden there. And Wu rarely gave that
permission, even to Nang Ping. That bit of garden was his outer
solitude, and this room was his indoor privacy. It was here and there
he kept alone.

No race prizes privacy more, more realizes its value, conserves and
guards it with more dignity and skill, or with so much. A people of
interminable clans, knit together and interdependent as is no other
people, yet it is with the Chinese people, both Mongol and Tartar, that
individuality has its fullest rights, its surest safety.

Towards noon he bathed, put on again his plain dark robes, went into
the great hall and ate a little rice. He had work ahead, much work, and
he intended to do it well. He had no more time for thought, nor need.
His thinking was done. His years of selfishness were past. He no longer
saw or felt “a divided duty.” He was China’s now--Wu the mandarin. Each
hour should be full. He would serve assiduously and relentlessly, not
with brooding thought, but with action piled on action.

At dusk he smote upon the gong hanging in the smaller audience hall, an
apartment half of state and half of intimacy.

Nang Ping heard the deep notes reverberate through the house--she had
been listening for the sound all day--and rose to her feet before
they died away. She was standing ready at her door when her father’s
message came, and she followed the servant, for herself relieved that
her waiting was done, for herself feeling little else, but miserable
for Wu. He had been tender to her always, and she had loved him with
an absorbing love, until the Englishman had come to kiss her face,
dislocate her life and change her soul.

She went in steadily and alone, bent in obeisance three times, and then
stood before her father quietly, her hands folded meekly at her breast,
her eyes patient and sorrowful, but not afraid.

And she was not afraid. Basil was dead by now--she made no doubt
of that; the spoiler of Wu’s daughter could not have lived in Wu’s
vengeance for a day. There was no more to fear for Basil. For him the
worst had come, and was done. For herself fear had no place in her now.
Her father would not torture her--that she knew. But she thought that
she should scarcely have winced if he had. A slight, slip of a girl,
slim as willow in her scant dull robe, she came of a race whose women
had hung themselves more than once to honor a husband’s obsequies; and
one--a queen--had burned to her death, lighting beside the imperial
grave her own funeral pile of teak- and sandal-woods, oil-and-perfume
drenched, Nang Ping was not afraid.

Wu met her eyes, and she met his; and his were not unkind.

“Will you tell me all?” Wu did not speak unkindly. And this was the
first time he had couched command to her in interrogative.

“My honorable father,” the girl said sadly, “I will tell you nothing.”

The mandarin smiled. This was too grave a time for anger. And he had a
bribe that he knew could be trusted to buy from her what he would, let
the telling cost her what it might.

He had never bribed his child, not even with sugar-plums for her smiles
when she was a babe. But he would bribe her now. Their old days were
done, and with them some old principles of conduct. And their old
relationship--spoiled now--was drawing to its close.

“You fear to injure the Englishman!” But even that he did not say
roughly.

“My honorable father, not that. He is past beyond injury now; Nang Ping
knows that.”

Again he smiled. But he only said, “You fear to implicate Low Soong?”

At that Nang Ping raised her eyes to his in entreaty.

“Have no fear. No punishment shall fall on her. She is not worth it.
She shall be well dowered and honorably wed soon. She has dealt ill by
me, and by you, her kinswoman, foully; but even so, I will not do her
an injustice to you. She never betrayed you. In her first panic the
slight, silly frog-thing fled--to save her own dishonest skin--but she
came back but now, creeping to share your lot, and begging to speak
with you. Do you care to see her?”

“I wish to see no one, O honorable sir.”

“I thought you would answer so. Be at rest for her. She shall fare
well.” He did not add that he would keep his word. There was no need:
Nang Ping knew it.

He called for lights, and when the red candles were lit and the sweet
torches in their sconces until all the room flamed with light, and the
noiseless servants had withdrawn to await his next command, whether it
came in a moment or in a year, he began to speak again. And because he
was Chinese, and because he still loved her well, his words were long.

“Sit. Listen. I am not blameless. I shall be blameless from this hour.
My venerable, honorable grandfather, the sainted Wu Ching Yu, dedicated
me to a great task. I have obeyed him for the most, fulfilled it in the
main, but not with the single purpose such high duty claims. I loved
your mother. That was most right. Less would have wronged her; and she
was fragrant as the yellow musk, holy as the queen-star. But for one
celestial year, at her plum-blossom side, I forgot my task; at least I
let it wait, and sometimes I have let it wait for you. Not again shall
I do so. Scarcely time for suitable penance will I allow myself. I am
Wu, and the house of Wu shall be avenged. I shall live for that and for
China. My venerable grandfather, three thousand times wise, did well
to send me to England. And he bade me study Englishmen closely. But I
did ill to take to myself too much of their custom. We have learned too
much of Europe. It is well to learn of every nation, but to accept too
much from inferior peoples is a hideous crime; and in that crime I have
shared to China’s hurt--and yours. You are undone. China is threatened
with the loss of all that has made her for thousands of years paramount
and exquisite. Sometimes, alone at night, I have thought that I have
heard the wind cry, and Heaven sob, and the parting knell of China
toll. And I have thrown myself prostrate before our gods, and entreated
that China--our China--may prove stronger than her enemies, stronger
than her fools. But my soul aches. For I realize that change is in our
air, from Canton to Pekin, from Ningpo to Tibet, and that any hour
revolution may strike our mighty empire to the heart. The rebel, the
missionary, the fanatic and the adventurer, the foe without and the
dolt within, press her hard. Her plight is sore to-day. But China has
held together longer than any other empire in history. We Chinese never
forget, and we do not meekly forgive. Again and again we have seemed
to accept innovations, have tried them, have found them unacceptable,
and then we have discarded them once and forever. We are in peril now;
but the end is not yet. Already the word passes over China, as a breath
of summer over the head-heavy poppy fields, ‘Back to Confucius’! And
I--I descended from that great sage--I, too, who love China as I did
not love your mother--I, too, have betrayed China--and you! I have
given you a freedom that was in itself a soil to a maiden. I ask your
pardon. All night long I have asked your honorable mother’s, and the
forgiveness of my most noble ancestors. You have been to me both son
and daughter; the women of the Wus have often been so, and endowed in
it with great merit. But in me it was a sin. But from this I shall
be wholly China’s. This moon I perform a duty to our house--my last
selfish rite. It done, I am my country’s, my people’s. I shall wed now,
and give my honorable ancestors other sons, China men-Wus to be her
rulers and her servants. That I have not done so before is my crime. I
thought to adopt your husband, or if that might not be, he too highly
ranked in his own great clan, one of your younger sons, that all I
had might go to you and to one you had borne. I sinned to think it.
Adoption is honorable, decreed of our sages, countenanced of our gods,
but only for those to whom sons of their bodies are denied. A man
should beget men, father his own heir.”

He said much more. It was his last indulgence of self, for even his
stern resolve yearned over her, and his tortured heart delayed the
parting with the girl. He spoke of her childhood and of his own. But of
the high traditions of the women of its blood, upon which their great
house was built as on an impregnable rock, he did not speak again. He
spared her that--his only child, the first woman of her name to err in
the degree that is not forgiven Chinese gentlewomen.

Presently he commanded again--and no question now--that she should tell
him all, and commanding turned his screw.

“He is not dead,” he said. “He lives. He is unharmed.” Nang Ping swayed
a little on her stool and caught at her knees with her hands. “Tell me
all.”

“O honorable sir,” she sobbed, huddling at his feet, “I cannot.”

Wu smiled. “All! Omit nothing. You can save him so!”

Nang Ping started up, sitting bolt on her heels, and searched her
father’s face with narrow eyes widened and piteous.

“All! And he shall live. Even, he shall go free!”

Nang Ping moaned, hung down her head, and began to speak, for she knew
that Wu Li Chang would keep his word. And even this price of shame her
discarded love would pay to save her man. Her words came with tortured
breath--in gasps. But it was for Basil, and she kept her bond. She told
of their first meeting and their last. She told it all--all but those
utmost things that never have been told, and never can, and in China
least of all.

Why Wu exacted it was hard to say. Perhaps he could not have told
himself. If it tortured her, more it tortured him an hundred fold.
And there was little of it in detail, nothing of it in essential,
that he did not already know. Much of it he knew better and deeper
than she did. Perhaps to hear it from her lips was no small part of a
self-inflicted punishment he had decreed his scourge since he had been
so lax a father--lax a father, and he Chinese! And she motherless!

He heard her in silence--without once a word of prompting or of
interruption. And not once did she raise her head or look at him.
If she had looked, her faltering words must have died. For his face
twitched with convulsive pain again and again, and foam beaded white on
his clenched lips.

There was a long silence when she had done, and neither moved.

At last he said, “Is there something you would ask of me, some message
you would give?”

Nang Ping trembled violently. But the message her soul cried out to
send she dared not speak; and if she had dared, surely she must have
spared him it, for she was gentle, and he had always loved her well
and shown her tenderness. When she could command herself a little, she
said, falteringly, “If Low Soong might have a jewel or a robe--one,
from me.”

“Of all that was not your mother’s or my mother’s, or any mothers’ of
theirs, Low Soong shall choose all that she will. And I promise you
that I will bear that frail no ill-will. It was not for her to guard
what I, your father, failed to guard.”

Nang Ping tried to thank him, but she could only bow her head and lay
it near his shoe. She dared not touch that shoe. It was an old, easy
shoe. She had embroidered it when a child.

“The day grows warm,” Wu said presently, rising and bidding her rise.
And when she stood before him, he laid his hand a moment on her
shoulder and said softly, “Nang Ping!” for she was motherless, and very
young, and he loved her still.

“The day grows warm. Go to the easement and tell me if the sun is on
the tulip tree.” And as she moved away, without a sound he seized the
great sword hanging beside the shrine and struck her once.

It was enough.

She scarcely moaned--just a soft quick sigh--and one smothered word.

Wu Li Chang caught the sigh but not the word. Surely Kwanyin Ko had
granted something of Nang Ping’s prayer, and was merciful to Wu in
that. For the Chinese girl had died speaking an English name.

He did not catch the word; but he saw something fall from her dress and
roll towards the altar, and he rose and found it--a little scented bead.

And all night long, until the day broke over China, Wu sat motionless
and alone in the room where he had played with her often in her baby
days, taught her as a child, decorated her fresh young womanhood with
gems and love: sat immovable and alone, while the heart’s blood of his
only child clotted and crusted at his feet.




CHAPTER XXI

A CONFERENCE


Lord Melbourne once said that “nobody has ever done a very foolish
thing except for some great principle.” Well, it would be difficult
to find the great principle underlying most of the very foolish
things the average European does in Asia. As a nation we British are
very wise in our conduct there. As a race we deal honorably with the
Oriental peoples--when once we’ve conquered them--and honorable conduct
is a high wisdom in itself, and from it we reap a fine reward--the
respect of the Eastern races. But as individuals we perpetrate a long
series of crass blunders, of petty daily idiocies, whose sum total is
tragedy and sometimes threatens international holocaust. And it is
the Englishwoman, not the Englishman, who is the worst offender. Our
security in Asia is built up on Oriental respect and liking, and Mrs.
Montmorency-Jones can do more in a day to undermine it than a Sir Harry
Parkes can do in a month to build it. Insolence is her method; fair
dealing is his.

The average British man in Asia learns little enough, Heaven knows!
of the natives among whom he lives; the average British woman learns
nothing. She does not decline to know the natives; no, indeed--she
simply ignores them. Woman rules in Asia--and especially in China--as
(if a woman may be allowed to hint it) she does almost everywhere. And
Englishwomen living in Calcutta or Shanghai do English interests grave
injury, by courting, winning (and meriting) the dislike of Indian and
Chinese women. The Englishwoman does it not by any overt act or series
of acts, but by a consistent supercilious contemptuousness of attitude.
I am a memsahib. You do not exist. The secret societies--the tongs and
the brotherhoods--are responsible for much of our Asiatic difficulties;
our own women are responsible for more. If the Boxers made Pekin run
red with European blood, some women of the European Legations did even
more to bring down the trouble and to foment it.

And the pity of it is its absolute unnecessariness: just a cup of cold
water now and then, just a little human kindliness now and then, and
the liking and sympathy of Oriental womanhood were ours. Some one has
written of “the heart that must beat somewhere beneath the impenetrable
Oriental mask.” The mask is not impenetrable. An honest, friendly smile
will pierce it. The Oriental is nine-tenths heart. A typical Asiatic
can be won by moderate kindness to great loyalty and devotion. Page
after page of the history of the Indian mutiny proves it.

And of the Chinese people this is even truer.

Florence Gregory was a kindly, likeable woman, and during her year in
Hong Kong she had not thought it necessary to make herself detestable
to the Chinese with whom she came in contact.

On her part this was neither tact nor studied policy. They interested
her and she liked them, and in return they liked her. She gave them
courtesy and decent treatment, and sometimes a sunny word or two, and
in return they gave her of their best and served her loyally. Ah Wong,
her amah, adored her.

There was nothing that Ah Wong would not have done for her English
mistress. And the story of it is this: Mrs. Gregory had never saved Ah
Wong’s life or rescued her son from slavery. She had just been quietly
and decently kind to her in the little daily ways. Oh! those little
ways, the little things--too small to chronicle, almost too small to
sense sometimes--but to women they are _everything_! The big
things scarcely count to women; but the little things--they count.

When Basil Gregory did not keep his promise to dine at their hotel
his mother was disappointed, but not inordinately surprised, and only
moderately hurt. It had happened before.

They waited dinner half an hour. Robert Gregory would not allow a
longer waiting. And even the mother dined with an unruffled appetite.
Even when midnight came without him it occurred to no one to be in the
least alarmed--to no one but Ah Wong.

Ah Wong had seen the impalpable intrinsic stalking in the garden at
Kowloon. And what she saw alarmed her then. Basil’s continued absence
alarmed her more and more. She was alarmed for her mistress’s peace of
mind. Basil himself she neither liked nor disliked. She thought Robert
Gregory a funny old chap. The son did not interest her.

When Basil did not appear at the office the next day his father was
angry. When three days passed, and no word came of the truant, they
were alarmed--all of them. And in a week the island rang with hue and
cry for him.

Mrs. Gregory was distraught.

Perhaps the son’s disappearance might have worried the father even more
if there had been no other pressing anxieties. But there were--several.

There was the very deuce to pay at the Hong Kong branch of the Gregory
Steamship Company, and a good deal of inadequacy with which to pay it.

It was a bright, hot day--a blue and gold day, without a trace of Hong
Kong mist and murk--and the windows in the manager’s room were open
wide. The furniture was sparse but rich; it was Robert Gregory’s own
room, and he was of the type of business man who likes to do himself
well in the format of his office routine, more in a sincere pride in
his business cult than in personal vanity or any pampering of self, and
also in a well-defined theory of advertisement: Persian carpets and
Spanish mahogany desks indicate a firm’s prosperity clearly. Gregory’s
furniture was very expensive, but sensible, solid and untrimmed. He
earned and amassed money in big ways and in small, but, in the main,
he left the spending of it on fripperies to Hilda and his wife. A
photograph of Hilda--the one ornament the office confessed to--stood
on her father’s desk, in a splendid wide frame that might have been
Chinese, so costly and so barbaric was it, had only the design and the
workmanship been better. But if the picture was somewhat over-framed,
its girl-subject was not over-dressed, for English Hilda, who from her
father’s office table smiled up at all the world, was several inches
more décolleté than even the moon had ever seen Nang Ping.

But modesty and even decency are as much virtues of the eye that looks
as of the creatures of its glance; and John Bradley, sitting in Robert
Gregory’s chair, saw only maidenhood delectable and flawless in the
picture his eyes sought again and again. And any man who, to Robert
Gregory’s knowledge, had seen anything coarser, Robert Gregory would
have shot cheerfully.

Holman, Gregory’s head clerk, sat moodily opposite the priest, looking
out into the quay. The long window he faced was the apartment’s most
conspicuous feature, and through it outrolled a teeming panorama of
steamships and shipping industries. Docks and shipping in the near
distance looked even nearer in the clear magnifying atmosphere, and
close at hand smoke curled up from the funnels of a large steamer,
flying the house flag of the company--a noticeable pennant even in that
harbor, where noticeable objects jostle each other by the hundreds.
The big lettering--“G. S. S. Co.”--was as bright and blue as the
sky against whose brilliant background the smoke belched forth from
the fat funnels, and the bunting that backgrounded the letters was
yellow--impertinently yellow, for it was of the precise shade that in
Pekin would have spelled death to any other who wore it or showed it on
his chair, so sacred was it to reigning Emperor and Empress. But Robert
Gregory did not know that, nor did Holman. But they should have known
it--certainly Holman should, for he had lived in China many years now,
and was far from being so crassly stupid concerning the Chinese as his
chief was.

Between the big ship and the office building a constant procession of
coolies passed up and down the dock, and the hum of their incessant
intoned chatter filled the room with a noisy sing-song that rose and
fell but never rested or drew breath.

On a rostrum behind the _Fee Chow’s_ side, Simpson, an old and
trusted clerk, was watching the coolies load, and a Chinese clerk
perched near him on a high stool, checking each bale and box. A
compradore sat at his desk on the wharf, wrangling with a knot of
loin-clothed coolies who were gesticulating wildly with arms and poles
and chattering like angry chimpanzees.

“And that is all you can tell me?” Holman said, as Bradley rose to go.

“All I care to say. I’ve strained a point to say that much.”

“And you will not tell me where you got your information? Is that quite
fair?”

John Bradley shook his head. “Not information. I have no
information--none. But I have my suspicion, and I believe it is well
based.”

“Built on Chinese rock!”

“Well--yes--in part. And I have a great deal of respect for Chinese
rock. As for being unfair, that is the last thing I’d be willingly. And
I have tried to look at this from every side. A man likes to respect
confidence; with a priest it is a duty, solemn and imperative. But if I
chose to blab, I have not one concrete fact to state. A Chinese woman,
I will not tell you her name--if I know it--comes to me in the middle
of the night, getting into the grounds somehow over the wall or up the
hill, certainly not through the gate, and begs me to find some way of
getting Basil Gregory’s people out of China. She urges me to let them
lose no time in searching for him, because no searching will find him;
and they, she insists, are in danger that will grow deadlier every hour
they stay on here. I did not know that Basil was missing until she told
me; it’s two nights ago. I had been expecting him to call--to complete
some talk we’d begun----”

“About a girl?”

“But I was not particularly surprised that he delayed keeping
an appointment that was not very definite. Basil was always a
procrastinator. The woman does not know where he is or what has
happened to him. Take that from me. She said so, and she was speaking
the truth. It is part of my business to know when people are telling
the truth and when they are lying to me. She had some suspicion--what
it was I have no idea, or whether it was right or wrong--but she would
tell me nothing, except that she risked her life to warn me that at all
costs the Gregorys must go from China, and go now.”

“And leave poor Mr. Basil to his fate?”

Bradley made a gesture of baffled helplessness.

The clerk’s lip curled. “You have a poor idea of my intelligence. I
know it all now--all that you know--and what you suspect.”

“Then you do not know much,” the other retorted hotly.

“No,” Holman admitted grimly. “Not much to chew on, and nothing at
all to go upon. Ah Wong comes to you in the middle of the night--it
_was_ Ah Wong; she is devoted to Mrs. Gregory, and quite
indifferent to Mr. Basil, dead or alive. You learn from her, or from
some one else, the next morning, of the visit three days ago to Wu’s
garden at Kowloon, and off you go to Kowloon to dig it all out. You
said you went to Kowloon to try to interest your friend Wu in the case,
because he is the one man who can do anything that can be done in
China. Now, you did not go--excuse me, Mr. Bradley--to Kowloon to try
to interest Wu in the case; you went to find Mr. Basil.”

Bradley threw down the hat he had taken up and sat down again. “You
are wrong there,” he said. “For I too believe that Basil Gregory will
not be found. But I did go to try to interest Wu Li Chang in what is
very urgent to me--for--for several reasons--because I know him to be,
humanly speaking, almost omnipotent, and because I trust and like him.”

“Trust and like Wu Li Chang!”

“Emphatically,” was the quiet answer. “I’ve seen a great deal of
Mandarin Wu since I first came out. He’s a gentleman, and every inch a
man. There is no one I respect more, and very, very few of my own race
I respect as much. We are friends, I tell you. And I think he likes me.
I went to beg a great favor of him.”

“H’m!” the clerk mused aloud. “And he wouldn’t see you?”

“And I couldn’t get in. I have never been refused ‘come in and welcome’
at Wu’s before, and I must have been there fifty times. But I couldn’t
get past the outer gate yesterday. The mandarin didn’t refuse to see
me; I just couldn’t get in.”

“Much the same thing----”

“Not at all! I was met at the gate and turned away from it with every
courtesy. If Wu had wished to avoid me, I might still have been made
free of the grounds, as I have been a dozen times when he has been away
or too busy to chat. But I was driven--with the utmost politeness--from
the gate. Why? Because there was something in there I was not to see--I
believe, Basil. And if Basil, Basil alive. A dead Englishman would have
been obliterated.”

“But could not a living one be hidden beyond your suspicion, even by so
astute a Chinaman as Wu Li Chang?”

The clergyman looked puzzled. “Yes--yes--undoubtedly, most probably,
but such men as Wu take no chance, and there is always just one chance
that any living prisoner may make himself heard or seen. But dead men
tell no tales.”

Holman shook his head. He was unconvinced.

And Holman was right. Wu Li Chang would, had he chosen to do so, have
let all Anglo-Hong Kong stroll through his gardens, and have kept
twenty prisoners there undiscovered at the same time. He had had
Bradley denied entrance at his gate because his home was the home of
mourning, and in it there was no room or welcome for any Englishman,
except the one grimly guarded guest in the pagoda by the lake.

“Well,” Bradley said, rising again, “I can only repeat, as you value
Basil’s life, let Mr. Gregory do nothing to rasp Wu Li Chang. See him,
I must and will. But it will have to be at his convenience and consent,
not at mine. I don’t know why I should hope to influence him. But I can
only try.” He picked up his hat, and continued looking at the girl in
the frame. “Wu may be coaxed; he cannot be coerced. There is no force
to which we could appeal, even if we had anything to go upon, and we
have nothing. The Tsungli yamên itself, at Pekin, could neither coerce
nor punish Wu Li Chang if it were minded to----”

“You know that Mr. Basil was seen here on the island after they had all
returned from their visit to Wu’s daughter?”

John Bradley waved that aside contemptuously. “Rubbish!”

“Precisely what I think,” Holman acquiesced tersely.

At the door the priest turned to say earnestly, “Remember, Mr. Gregory
must do nothing to annoy Wu now--absolutely nothing. Basil’s very life
may depend on that.”

“I’ll do my best,” Holman said, none too confidently, rising wearily
and taking a step towards the other.

“And, Holman, not one word about Ah Wong--that you think she has been
to me. It would serve no purpose, and it might cause her trouble--so--I
expressly ask you, not one word.”

“Not one word, then,” the other man said, taking Bradley’s outheld hand.

And they parted with a grip long and strong. They were brother Masons.




CHAPTER XXII

SING KUNG YAH’S FLOWERS


That afternoon Florence Gregory, coming in with Hilda and Ah Wong from
a weary, distracted searching--searching here, there, everywhere--found
in her sitting-room such a basket of flowers as she had never seen
before, and a red Chinese visiting card, three inches wide and fully
eight inches long. Ah Wong eyed it dismayed, and at her lady’s command
translated the ideographic characters reluctantly. “No like,” she
added. “Chlinese lady no make vlisit so way--Chlinese lady no have
vlisitling clard chit. No like.”

“But who is Sing Kung Yah?” Mrs. Gregory asked wearily, not interested
to know, except that any straw might prove a clew to the only thing on
earth that mattered now, and so must be clutched.

“Lido wuman,” the amah said contemptuously, her fine, acrid Mongolian
disgust in no way softened by the unhappy fact that she herself was a
widow also.

“Whose widow is she?” Mrs. Gregory was puzzled.

“Not know.”

“Who is she? Why has she called?”

“Not know--whly she clome--or send slweet blossoms. Not know if she
clome itself.”

“Find out.”

“Madam, can do,” the woman said, running off on her errand reluctantly.

“Did,” she reported presently. “Top-side chair. Plenty coolie.”

“Who is she?”--the English voice implied that the English mistress
intended to be answered explicitly this time.

And Ah Wong answered desperately, “Her all same klinsloman Wu Li Chang.
Live Kowloon yamên. Be mock mother lonorable miss-child we dlink tea.”

“Great Scot!” Hilda exclaimed. “What a time to choose to force her
acquaintance on us--a Chinawoman! Even they must have heard of Basil’s
disappearance, with every wall and corner in Hong Kong placarded with
his description and his picture.”

“Oh! be quiet,” the mother told her. Florence was thinking--thinking
hard.

Ah Wong was thinking too, and on the Chinese face, usually so
inscrutable, there was an unmistakable pinch of anxiety, and her
dog-like, devoted eyes were growing haggard.

“Take them away--where Mr. Gregory will not see them. But take care of
them. Let the hotel servants see that we are treating them with the
greatest respect. Do you understand?”

“Ah Wong understland,” the woman said. “Can do.” And she did do; but
she only just could, for the great gilded bamboo basket of flowers was
so heavy and so huge that she could scarcely lift it; she staggered a
little as she carried it from the room.

And Basil Gregory’s mother went on thinking--on and on.

The mandarin Wu was said to be the most powerful man in China--at least
in this part of China. Surely he could help them to find Basil. And
he was a kind man--his girl had said so. And his near kinswoman--the
aunt who had been on a visit at a Taoist nunnery or something when they
were in Kowloon--had called and brought a garden full of flowers. That
call should be returned, post-haste. Perhaps she could help, the woman
who had left the flowers and the absurd red card; and the girl, the
little girl who had given them tea, she could help, too, to persuade
the all-powerful mandarin, if it needed much to persuade him; of course
she could and she would; of course she would--she had had the kindest
eyes and a soft, girlish mouth. How she, his mother, wished that Basil
might have shown little Miss Wu just a little more attention--not too
much, of course; that might have alarmed or even offended a Chinese
girl--you never could tell about such oddities; but if only he’d shown
a little less--yes--a good deal less cold indifference--indifference so
cold that it had been almost a rudeness--and girls felt such things,
and resented them too--even Chinese girls, probably. Of course, she,
his mother, rejoiced in the niceness of her boy, and that he was not
as other young Englishmen were in China--some of them--but manly
Aryan self-respect was one thing, and an almost brutal display of
racial superiority and masculine indifference was quite another. She
wished indeed, that he had treated the only child of the great Wu less
cavalierly, for his manner to the pretty Chinese creature had been very
cavalier--Chinese, but a girl for all that. Still, his fault was in his
favor, and it was no part of a mother’s office to forget that. Basil
was innately and intrinsically--and she believed irradicately--nice.
Thank God for it! He had been a little wild at school--the best boys
always were (repeating to herself the foolish old threadbare paternal
fallacy); a trifle lax at Oxford too--but, her son and always nice!

There was nothing cavalier about the way in which Ah Wong carried
her fragrant burden through the hotel corridors. Her manner to the
honorable flowers grown in the garden of the jade-like mandarin, and
gathered by noble, jeweled hands, was conspicuously obsequious.

But when she had placed them in a cool, dark room, sacred to an adjunct
of her lady’s toilet, and into which Robert Gregory never came, nor
the hotel servants, her manner changed. She put them down abruptly,
fastened the doors (there were two) feverishly and securely, and
gestured angrily towards the gleaming golden basket of bloom, with
a use of arms and fingers strangely identical with the motions with
which the Neapolitan peasant averts the evil eye. Then she ran one
matting-blind up, letting such breeze as there was blow across the
flowers and out of the room through the window.

She even knelt down by the big basket, and with a guttural groan
sniffed--not at the blossoms, but at the stems, and at the gilded
wicker-work. But if there was some insidious poison hidden in the gift,
to kill or disfigure whoever smelt or touched, Ah Wong could not detect
it.

But how could she? Why should she hope to pit her wit against the wit
of Wu?

Next, the woman got a sharp bamboo, and, kneeling down again, prodded
cautiously but thoroughly among the leaves and stems and the depths of
moss. She trembled as she worked, for she was prodding for some small
poison-snake or asp, and was terribly afraid; but because another woman
had treated her decently for a whole year, and kindly more than once,
she worked on until convinced that nothing that crawled or stung was
hidden in the glowing gift.

Then she unlocked one door and made several hurried journeys into the
adjacent sleeping-room, carrying a small tub, a spirit-lamp, a box, a
manicure set, a dozen sundries, and arranging them as best she could,
first locking the dressing-room door from the bedroom side and hiding
the key in her bosom.

The flowers seemed innocent enough, but Ah Wong would die before her
English lady should touch them or inhale their breath.

Ah Wong was absurdly wrong--if devotion can ever be absurd; the flowers
were exactly what they seemed. Wu Li Chang was no crude bungler. When
he unsheathed his knife the knife would cut, but it would leave no
trace of Wu.

Of the tragedy that had been enacted at Kowloon Ah Wong knew exactly
nothing; but she suspected almost all, and the details of her suspicion
were uncannily accurate. She was Chinese.




CHAPTER XXIII

AH WONG


That same night, at midnight, Tom Carruthers and Hilda Gregory sat hand
in hand on a verandah that looked down the Peak on to the city and
the water beyond. The midnight sky was thick with stars, and up and
down the Peak’s town-side thin snakes of light crept now and then--the
lantern lights of late-sojourning natives, or of those pulling and
pushing the rickshaws, and carrying the chairs of European merry-makers
returning to the Peak to sleep in its comparative cool--a party that
had dined at Government House, a dozen who had made moonlight picnic in
the grounds of Douglas’ Folly or at Wong-ma-kok, a man who had worked
late at the bank, three who had played late at the club, several who
had been at a dance, and perhaps fifty who had been yawning over the
Richelieu of a very scratch Australian company. In Hong Kong--the
town itself--the lights were still many, for Hong Kong both works and
revels late o’ nights, and on the nearer water dimmer lights blinked
sleepily. And from the mastheads of many a ship larger lights hung
bright and clear--red, green, blue, orange. There were half a dozen
that Carruthers could identify as theirs--lanterns slung from craft of
the Gregory Steamship Company--and he pointed them out to Hilda.

They spoke to each other but fitfully. Each was trying to think of some
worth-while suggestion to make about poor Basil, and neither could.

A window that led from the balcony to the room beyond was open, and
Robert Gregory and his wife were sitting in there, not silent like the
two on the verandah, but going together over and over again a dozen
sorry theories of their son’s disappearance, a dozen feverish plans for
his rescue.

The island and the mainland beyond had been well beaten by now. All
the Europeans, the Government House, the Civil Service, residents,
officials big and small, had tried to help in the search. For Robert
Gregory was a power in Hong Kong, and Mrs. Gregory was well liked. And
many of the natives were trying, too, to help in the search, or seemed
to be.

In the Company’s offices on the bund, a light still burned in the
manager’s room, and Holman and William Simpson sat there in earnest,
anxious conclave.

“Nothing could look much blacker,” Simpson was saying.

“Nothing.”

“The bottom seems about out!”

Holman nodded grimly.

And indeed the affairs of the great Company seemed desperate, and
all in the last few weeks, chiefly in the last few days! Strike had
followed strike among the dock hands, inexcusably, inexplicably.
Demands for increased wages, made when some important contract, already
overdelayed, must be fulfilled quickly, or lost, were scarcely acceded
to when they were renewed. It looked as if their hands were determined
to ruin and shut down the Company by which they all lived and that had
treated and paid them well for years. It was one of Robert Gregory’s
boasts that he believed in keeping his tools bright and his machinery
well oiled. The _Fee Chow_ must not miss the next morning’s tide,
and yet her loading had been hindered and bungled consistently. A
dozen mishaps and a dozen odd financial backsets had followed each
other, and it looked as if disaster had come to the Gregory Steamship
Company, and come to stay.

Too anxious for the house they had served long and staunchly to rest,
and anxious for their own salt too, the two men had returned after
office hours to talk it over--to find a way out, if they could.

And the deeper they went into their canvass of affairs, the
more difficult and bad it all seemed. And certainly the strange
disappearance of young Gregory was far and away the worst feature of
the entire complication. The Gregory purse was long, the Gregory credit
enormous; both would stand a great deal of strain. But the accident (or
whatever it was) to his boy was beginning to tell upon the father--that
had been evident all day; and when Robert Gregory’s nerve went, the
greatest asset of the firm went.

And for this reason, rather than for any keen feeling for the young man
who had shown but little for the business at which they toiled loyally
early, and late, while he neglected it or played at it flippantly, and
from which, as a rule, he drew in a day rather more in the way of cash
than they together did in a week, it was of his disappearance and of
the chance of his return that they spoke and planned, much more than of
the ledger that lay between them, or the more immediate affairs of the
office.

And while the six--two here, four in the hotel on the Peak--were trying
to think and to contrive, two others, but quite separately, were doing
something more active.

John Bradley, just at midnight, came out of a tiny house in Po
Yan Street, not far from the Tung Wah Hospital, in the heart of
Tai-pingshan, the poorest part of the Chinese quarter--a malodorous
hovel in which a native miscreant, whom Bradley had befriended more
than once, and whom, rightly or wrongly, the clergyman thought he could
trust, lived. Sung Fo would have come to the Englishman on receipt of
a message, but Bradley had thought it best to manage otherwise. And he
feared nothing in Hong Kong, and indeed had nothing to fear, not even
here in its worst quarter of slime and dirt and worse, tucked away
behind the cobblers’ lanes.

He had found Sung Fo at home, and had made the bargain he had come to
make. Sung Fo had promised to “look-see” and “try-find,” and for the
rest Bradley thought he could do nothing but wait and watch and pray.

Like Ah Wong, he knew nothing but suspected everything, but with much
less accuracy than she.

Unlike Ah Wong, all John Bradley’s sympathies were with Wu Li Chang.

He would do anything that a man might do to find Basil Gregory.

He would do anything that a man might to avoid injuring Wu Li Chang.

And to spare Wu he would have gone even a little farther than he was
prepared to go for Basil’s sake, had not Basil been Hilda’s brother.

But if his sympathy was all Wu Li Chang’s, his anxiety was not. He had
a firm conviction that nothing he could do, by purpose or by accident,
could harm or imperil Wu Li Chang.

When he had been walking away from Sung’s--perhaps for ten
minutes--picking his way over garbage heaps and broken side-paths, he
paused to look curiously at a house of which he had heard a great deal
but had never entered--a well-kept brick edifice, taller and better
built than many houses in that quarter, painted a dull light blue, and
owned and inhabited by a Chinese apothecary who was infamously famous
throughout the Empire.

It looked an innocent house, clean and law-abiding. It was lightless,
and each of its shutters was tightly closed; but at midnight--a
quarter-past midnight now--that it was darkened and closed but added to
its air of trim respectability. And yet, to this quiet blue house half
the poisoning crimes in China were attributed by the native and the
European authorities alike--attributed, but not one ever traced.

The authorities had raided the place again and again, but always
uselessly. Nothing incriminating was ever found--nothing but the
ordinary wares of a well-stocked apothecary: glass bowls of Korean
ginseng-plant roots (one, five inches long, was worth ten pounds, and
a little of its dust would give vigor to the old, hair to the bald),
skins of black cats and dogs (stewed, they prevent disease, and are
the best hot-weather diet), musk, rhubarb and silk-covered packets of
dragons’ blood (invaluable medicinally, but not what it sounds--a dry
resinous powder scraped from Sumatra rattan), cups of rhinoceros’ horn,
skins and horns ground into powdered doses, antidotes to poison, or
guaranteed to impart the qualities of the animal which it had protected
or adorned. Horns of cornigerous animals hung in tidy rows, and formed
a conspicuous part of the stock-in-trade, for they give the human
partaker strength and courage, still silly nerves, quell fearfulness. A
pyramid of the hoofs of young deer, specific to inculcate fleet gait,
half-screened the chief treasure of the place: a lacquer cabinet of
hearts. There were three hearts, each in its own well-sealed jar: a
lion’s heart, and two that were human--a pirate’s and a young girl’s.
The criminal’s was preserved in alcohol, the maiden’s in honey; and
each was of fabulous value. There was no secret about their being here.
They had been honorably bought: one from the criminal himself just
as he bent down smilingly on the Kowloon execution ground, the other
from a widowed grandmother who was a holy woman and very poor. The
girl had been very lovely, and some rich man would buy her heart one
day, no doubt, to enhance the marriage chances of a plain but favorite
daughter. The pirate had been a monster of ferocity, and to eat his
heart would be to become forever brave. Chinese warriors have eaten
the hearts of their bravest foes. They can pay no greater compliment,
none more sincere. Two alabaster boxes were stowed carefully beneath
the counter: one held charms; the other held smaller boxes of p’ingan
tan (pills of peace and tranquillity), the choicest drug in China.
Tze-Shi sent boxes of p’ingan tan to troops sorely pressed or whom she
wished greatly to reward. There were ointments here made from the gums
of trees that surrounded the tomb of Confucius, and precious medicines
brewed or pounded beside the Elephant’s Pool, where Pusien washed
his elephant after crossing the great mountain from the west; some
in Pootoo, the sacred isle of Nan Hai, and still others in a garden
that Marco Polo knew. There were simples here that would cure women of
vanity, and one (but this the apothecary would by no means guarantee)
that healed them from overtalkativeness. But all this was as it should
be, and the police had never been able to find here anything nefarious
or even objectionable.

Something about the building fascinated Bradley--probably the
contrast between its docile and pleasant seeming and its sinister
reputation--and he stood some time gazing at it, scrutinizing each
closely shuttered window--there was not a balcony; it was unique in
that--and the tight-shut door with the apothecary sign hanging from the
lintel.

“It looks a peaceful place, innocently asleep after a day of honest
industry,” he said to himself; and then some old words that were great
favorites of his, from a book he never tired of reading, came to his
memory, and he bespoke them aloud softly to the star-emblazoned Chinese
night: “He it is who ordaineth the night as a garment, and sleep for
rest, and ordaineth the day for waking up to life.”

But the apothecary’s house was not quite asleep. A thin line of light
trickled out from below the door, and then the door opened narrowly
and a woman, shrouded from crown to shoe in humble blue, came into the
street.

He did not see her face, although, as by law obliged, she carried a
lantern, but she saw his, clear-cut in the white moonlight, a late,
just-rising moon, and for an instant she turned as if to speak to him;
but she thought better of it, and walked quietly but quickly away.

Bradley wondered who she was--up to no special harm, he hoped. It did
not occur to him that her gait was familiar, at least not individually
so--thousands of amahs walk so. But he noticed that her coarse blue
clothes looked very clean--as clean and as blue as the blue house of
Yat Jung How.

He went home then, and Ah Wong went too, back to the hotel, slipping
out of the Chinese quarter stealthily, but going along the Praya
unconcernedly and through Queen’s Road and Ice House Street, and up the
long climb to the Peak, and past the night watchman at the hotel door.
She had a night-police pass; and her mistress had given her leave to
spend the evening on some errand of her own.

It’s a long climb up Hong Kong Peak. Ah Wong was very strong, but
her indefatigable little feet ached when she slipped into the room
where she had locked the flowers almost twelve hours ago, and day was
slipping rosy up the sky.

Day was coming, but she did not lift a blind. She lit a candle. And
when she had laid off the long blue cloth in which she had veiled
herself, closely in the Chinese quarter, carelessly in English-town,
she took from her dress the spoil of her visit to Yat Jung How’s blue
house: three bottles.

The smallest of the three was filled (it was very small) with a few
drops of opalescent green liquid. Ah Wong studied it grimly awhile, and
then she knotted the phial in some corner of her garments, and tucked
it securely back inside her dress.

The second bottle held about a dram of something that smelt
disagreeably when she uncorked it; but she kept it well away from her
own face and nose, and turned it instantly into the moss in the basket.
It was deadly poison this, and would destroy any reptile or scorpion
thing that came within a yard of it, and so potent was it that being
near it would render any other poison quite innocuous--Yat had told
her so. And she trusted Yat Jung How. She had known a way to make him
trustworthy.

The third bottle was a generous, roomy receptacle, squat but wide. It
held nearly a pint. And this was disinfectant, warranted to purify a
poisoned room, and smelt of an acceptable cool pungence as Ah Wong
threw it lavishly about the room, until she had spilled the last drop.

Then she lit several handfuls of joss-sticks and pulled up the blinds.
But she did not unlock the doors, or leave one unlocked when at last
she left the room, to sit outside it till her lady called. She intended
that no one but she should pass into that room until the Kowloon
flowers were all dead, and she had won Mrs. Gregory’s permission to
burn them herself, basket and all.

The sweet pungence of the joss-sticks came to her from under the door.
From under the room’s other door no doubt it was filling her mistress’s
chamber with thick sweetness--but that was well, for the English lady
loved the smell. Mr. Gregory did not especially. Quite possibly he
might swear a little in his sleep. But he often swore in his sleep. Ah
Wong had heard him.

She leaned back her head against the cool corridor wall, anxious and
tired, but well content with her night’s work.

And she had left her three jade bangles (and they were good) and her
seven silver ones and her stick-pin of seed pearls and coral with Yat
Jung How. And almost she had pawned her soul to him, and had quite
pawned all she would earn for years.

Heathen Chinee!




CHAPTER XXIV

IN THE CLUTCH OF THE TONGS


The next day there was still no word of Basil, and at the Steamship
Company’s hong the tangle was steadily tightening.

Holman sat glowering at a telegram he was reading for the third or
fourth time, but looked up impatiently as a Chinese clerk came in and
stood waiting to speak.

“What now?”

“Coolie men talkee muchee. No plenty money, no can do plenty work.”

“Fetch the compradore here,” Holman snapped, thrusting the telegram
into his waistcoat.

“Can do,” the clerk said, and went out.

Tom Carruthers stood by the window, doing nothing in particular, but
watching with a rueful, puzzled face the seething, jabbering coolies
outside. He swung round as the clerk went. “I say, Holman, what is all
this? A third demand to-day for more wages!”

Holman pushed a ledger aside abruptly. “That’s what I am trying to find
out, young man,” he said--“just exactly what it all means.”

The compradore came in a moment--a middle-aged Chinese, as capable
looking in his way as Holman was in his. He stood waiting stolidly for
the manager to speak, but Holman delayed a little, measuring the Mongol
with his shrewd blue eyes before he said: “Look here, compradore, what
the devil is the matter with your coolies now? Why have they struck
work again, and why the blue blazes have you let them, when you know
how late we’re with the loading of the _Fee Chow_ already, that
she’ll miss the tide if there’s more delay, and that she _must not
miss_ the tide? Eh?”

“Coolie men talkee muchee”--the compradore said it sadly. “They talkee
stlikee.”

“Strike!” Tom Carruthers cried. “Strike! That’s the limit! A strike
halfway through loading. You damn well tell them----”

But Holman interrupted sharply, “Hush, Mr. Carruthers, please. Leave
this to me. Now, compradore, what’s the grievance? Come, out with it,
chop, chop!”

“Coolie man likee work,” the compradore replied gently, “no likee
money. No plenty money, no can catchee plenty Chow-chow. They talkee me
they wantee more money.”

“All right, then----” Holman began crisply.

“What?” Carruthers broke in excitedly. Holman paid no attention to
that, but continued to the Chinese, “Tell them double pay if she’s
loaded up to time.”

“Can do,” the other answered, and went slowly out.

“Well, I’m blowed!” Tom gasped.

Holman went wearily to the window, and stood watching moodily the human
yellow kaleidoscope. The compradore was among them now, and gradually
the trouble cooled and slacked, and the men began to slouch off to
work, but reluctantly, the manager thought. Things looked ugly to
him--very ugly.

“I say, Holman,” Carruthers persisted impatiently, “isn’t that playing
rather into those chaps’ hands?”

Holman was furious--he had been furious for days now--and he welcomed
some human thing upon which he dared to vent his rage. He was “about
fed up” with the frets and troubles of the last week. He fixed
Tom Carruthers with a vindictive eye. “See here, Mr. Carruthers,”
he spat out, “if I have any further interference I’ll resign
instantly--understand? I managed this branch for years, until the
governor took a notion to come out. Well--he’s a genius at business,
and I’m proud to take my orders from him. But somehow, the very devil’s
in it these last two weeks, and we’re up against a bigger proposition
than you--or the governor either--have any idea of. I’m doing my best
to cope with it, and, by heaven----”

“Sorry to upset you, old chap,” the other interrupted regretfully,
“but, believe me, this succession of disasters has just about whacked
me.”

“Oh! all right,” the older man said, relieved by his own explosion,
and easily mollified after having let slip the snappy little dogs of
his badly over-tried temper, “I haven’t the heart to show this to Mr.
Gregory,” he said, taking the wire from his pocket into which he had
thrust it, “damned if I have.” He spread the flimsy paper out on the
desk, and sent Tom a glance that was an invitation. He wanted sympathy,
even that of the “somebody’s son sent out to learn the business,”
as he contemptuously said of Carruthers when he did not call him “a
flannelled fool.” The latter gibe was not quite fair. Tom usually wore
ducks, as Holman himself did--you had to in Hong Kong--and though the
younger man did squander (if it were squandering) a good deal of time
with Hilda Gregory, he only gave a reasonable, wholesome amount to
rackets, cricket, and Happy Valley racecourse.

“On top of all else,” Holman continued, “look here!”

Tom came and stood at Holman’s chair, and read over his shoulder. “Good
God, Holman!” he cried, “the _Feima_ sent to the bottom!”

“The biggest and finest ship in our fleet,” the other said bitterly.
“Mutiny of the coolies--they scuttle the ship and bolt with the boats
two days out!”

“This will about kill him!”

Holman nodded. “And look here”--he struck the ledger near him with an
angry fist--“I say, do you know anything about safes?”

“Not much.”

“Well, ours is the finest made. And the one make that _is_ ‘safe.’
There probably aren’t a dozen artists that could pick it--all told,
Sing Sing, Portland, Joliet--that could pick it in a week. Well, look
here; this ledger was taken from the safe--I suppose one night a week
or more ago--the page referring to the dock negotiation torn out--and
so prettily you can’t see that it was ever in, except for the missing
number--and the ledger returned to its place and the safe relocked
without so much as a scratch being left to show how it was done.”

“No wonder we were outbid for the site--_somebody_ knew our price!”

“Knew our price!”--he closed the ledger with a bang, and slapped it.
“Why, damn it, man, somebody’s got us tied in a knot, and it’s being
drawn tighter every day--every hour.”

“It’s beyond me, Holman!”

Holman rose and laid his hands on Tom Carruthers’ shoulders. “Mr.
Carruthers, you don’t for one moment believe this awful--simply
awful--sequence of disasters to be due to accident, do you? Sunken
ships, docks burnt to the water’s edge, strikes on shore, mutinies
afloat, and--and above all--the disappearance of Mr. Basil?”

“I don’t know what to believe--I simply don’t. What does it all mean,
Holman? I say it looks like some curse, don’t you know, come home to
roost!”

“You are in the confidence, quite outside of business, of Mr. Gregory,”
the manager said, sitting down again heavily--“of Mr. Gregory and his
family. I want to ask you a straight question.”

“Yes?”

“Do you know of any one thing, however slight, that Mr. Gregory may
have done to upset Wu Li Chang?”

“Wu Li Chang?”

“Yes, or ‘Mr. Wu,’ as he’s mostly called by the Europeans.”

“No,” Tom said decidedly, seating himself on the table--that was one of
his ways that ruffled Holman--“no, absolutely no. Why, only the other
day--Thursday, wasn’t it?--we visited at his place--it was there, you
know, that the last was seen of Basil, except for his having been seen
here, on the island, with two other Europeans later that same evening.”

Holman smiled sourly. “Who saw him?”

“Why, those Chinese johnnies who brought the information to Government
House.”

Holman grunted. “Volunteered the information, didn’t they? Went direct
to the Governor instead of lodging information with the police in the
usual way?”

“Yes.”

“Basil Gregory was no more seen by those Chinamen than I possess the
Koh-i-noor.”

“What?” Carruthers stood up in his surprise.

“Take it from me,” the other said emphatically, “in some manner Mr.
Gregory has stung Wu Li Chang, and, by Jove, that wound will want some
healing.”

Tom Carruthers was hopelessly puzzled. “Well,” he said slowly, “just
who is this chap, Wu Li Chang? And what’s his strength?”

“I’ve been here for twenty years,” Holman told him, “and in all that
time there’s been just one man I’ve made it a point to steer clear of,
in business and out of it--a strong personality, possessed of unlimited
wealth, mixed up in every big deal in Hong Kong, swaying a sinister
power that we Europeans cannot understand. Mr. Wu is hardly the man
to cross swords with. No European can afford to; and there’s only one
of his own race who ever got the better of him, and that was only
momentary, for he was never seen again.”

“You mean----”

“The inevitable where Wu is concerned!”

“But how on earth,” Carruthers said, “could Mr. Gregory have offended
such a man?”

Holman gestured his inability to answer that, but persisted, “There’s
no doubt about it. To you all Chinamen look alike, but they don’t
to me. And I’ve seen men, whom I know to be in Wu’s employ, mixing
with our coolies for days now. There are two of them down there
now--to my knowledge--and probably more. And I know for a fact that
several such shipped in the _Feima_; every man jack of ’em is a
Highbinder--member of one or other of the rival tongs.”

“Tongs?” Tom queried. “That means secret societies, doesn’t it?”

“You bet your life it does: secret societies that _are_ secret,
guilds that are a monster-power--the greatest power in China, the
only power that Tze-Shi is afraid of. There are two or three in every
province--a heap more in some. And our friend Wu is Past Master of the
whole bally lot of ’em. Most of the mandarins hate the tongs, and
are in deadly fear of them. But Wu knows a game worth ten of that: he
handles them--the ‘White Lily’ (about the dirtiest of them all), the
Triad (that bunch made the T’aiping Rebellion), the Shangti Hui (the
Association of the Almighty, if you please), and that prize band of
villains, the Hunsing Tzu, and the devil knows how many more. I tell
you, Mr. Carruthers, we’ve got to get to the bottom of this thing, and
get there quick, or there won’t be a stick left in China belonging to
the Company, or a vessel on the high seas flying its flag.”

“Well, old chap,” the junior said cheerfully, “Mr. Gregory is no
schoolboy. He’ll give this cursed gentleman of tongs and mystery a run
for his money--a damned fine run--I’ll have a bet with you, any odds
you like--and we’ll have a damned lot of fun watching him do it. But, I
say, we don’t know that you are barking up the right tree; but if you
are--and admitting for argument’s sake that Mr. Gregory has offended
this top-dog Chink or whatever he is--I say, why the deuce should Lord
High Pigtail want to take it out of Basil?”

Holman--his mother had been a Scotchwoman--had a tingling suspicion
why, but he shrugged his shoulders and evaded, saying didactically,
“When you’ve been in China as long as I have, you’ll know as much about
their ways and their motives as I do, and that’s--_nothing_!”




CHAPTER XXV

WORSE AND WORSE


The hot day burned on towards its hottest, and the troubles at
the Gregory Steamship Company boiled and bubbled like a veritable
hell-broth.

At eleven a coolie was caught smuggling paraffin, disguised as a chest
of tea, on to the _Fee Chow_. Not a word could be got out of
him as to what or who had instigated him; neither threats nor bribes
would make him speak, and indeed Holman had little time or nerve to
spare to try the application of either coaxing or kicking. He knew
that he needed all he had of both to save what was undoubtedly the
ugliest situation he had ever faced. The tide _must_ be caught at
Shanghai: it was vital. And yet the ship must be searched, every inch
of her--and the crew. That was even more imperative. One tin of the
deadly, dangerous stuff had been detected going aboard--a dozen might
be aboard undetected, hidden among the cargo.

It was terribly exasperating; but now that things were at their worst
Holman faced them coolly enough, a resolute, resourceful man--strong,
crisp and vigorous still after twenty years of seething Hong Kong
business life. For several of those years he had, until Robert
Gregory’s arrival, managed the firm’s affairs efficiently. He looked
capable of doing so still for quite a number of years.

He gripped the situation hard, and dealt with it briskly, and Tom
Carruthers looked on fuming, and Simpson and the other half-dozen
European subordinate old hands obeyed him with confident alacrity.
Carruthers would have “wrung every dirty yellow neck,” “kicked them
to blazes,” “boiled them in their own paraffin”; but Simpson and the
English others thought that old Holman would win through somehow--if
he couldn’t, no one could--and they were serenely confident that every
troubling coolie there would get his drastic deserts to the full--when
Holman thought wise and had time, but not before.

But just once Holman forgot himself. When the searching was over (sure
enough one tin had been successfully smuggled on and hidden) and the
reloading half done, the coolies struck again. And the over-tired
manager felt with Tom that that was too much.

Tom was nearly maudlin with rage by now, and when, in reply to Holman’s
angry, “The men never behaved so like hell before. What the thunder
does it mean?” the compradore had said oilily, “Me no savee--no catchee
more money--no can do work,” Holman lost grip on himself and blurted
out thunderously, “They work damn well for Wu Li Chang, don’t they?”
and regretted it as soon as he had said it.

Murder flashed through the compradore’s eyes for an infinitesimal
instant, and a venomous hiss snarled through his teeth. Holman had
heard and seen a rabid dog snarl so once. But the Chinese commanded
himself again instantly, and said meekly, almost sweetly: “Me no savee.
Wantee more money, lelse no can do work.”

Holman commanded himself as quickly and as well as the native had,
and said, speaking as calmly (and almost as slowly), “Get that ship
loaded--three days’ pay--understand?”

“Savee. Can do.”

But Tom Carruthers collapsed upon the window-seat. “If this was lording
it over the poor, over-worked, underpaid natives, all he could say
was----”

But the bitter and brilliant remark was never made, for as the
compradore padded softly out, Murray, a senior clerk and the
book-keeper, rushed in excitedly. And European clerks do not rush
about much between noon and three in Hong Kong, not even indoors with
drenched tatties at the windows and punkahs well manned. There were no
tatties in this room--its occupants too often desired to keep an eye on
the wharf.

“Out, John,” the book-keeper ripped at a Chinese clerk who had come in
while Holman was speaking to the compradore, mounted his high stool,
and began to write busily. At Murray’s order he slid off the stool,
closed his book, and went out impassively.

Scarcely waiting until the door had closed, Murray said anxiously,
“But, Mr. Holman, I understood you to say that the overdraft for the
new dock had been arranged with the Bank--I drew up the exchange
accordingly----”

“Quite correct--the transfer is to be made to-day.” But Holman’s voice
was less sanguine than his words. He scented more trouble still, and he
eyed askance the letter in Murray’s hand.

“There must be some mistake, sir,” Murray said desperately. “The Bank
has just notified our accountancy department that an overdraft is
impossible.”

“Why?”

“They write that our security is insufficient and further we must
vacate these premises immediately.”

“What?” Carruthers sprang up as if some inimical concussion had
impelled him.

“The landlord having disposed of the property,” Murray continued.
And he perched himself dejectedly on one of the Chinese clerks’ high
stools, as if the accumulated strain of a few morning hours had
unnerved his sturdy legs.

“What about the Company’s lease?” Tom persisted miserably.

“Expired in March,” Holman said doggedly. “We’re here on monthly
arrangement--I supposed you knew that; every one else does--we expected
to move to the new buildings at our own docks. The very roof taken from
our own heads!” he concluded bitterly, dropping down heavily into his
chair.

Tom looked at him ruefully for a moment, and then went up to Murray. “I
say, how much do we need? That’ll be all right. I’ll cable over to my
father----”

“I’m afraid it’s no use, sir,” the book-keeper said regretfully. “You
see, it’s this way: the Wang Hi Company refuse to go on with the
negotiations; all their principal shareholders are natives, and these
threaten to withdraw their capital if any business whatsoever is done
with us.”

Tom Carruthers gave a long, sharp whistle.

Holman looked up. “Precisely,” he said dryly.

“But--but--something’s got to be done. We can’t sit here and see
the ship go down--I’m blowed if we can. And I’m damned if I will.
Something’s got to be done. But I say, you two, what shall it be? What?”

He spoke to them, but he had picked up Hilda’s photograph, and was
looking not at them but at it.

They paid his question as little heed as the photograph did in its
frame. They had no answer to give him. And he got none--unless he
could piece one out from the hubbub that bubbled up from the sweating,
teeming wharf, from the screaming, pushing coolie women in the
sampans, from the pandemonium of noises and of smells that seethed up
from a hundred junks, and from the mighty conglomerate waterside life
and boat life that is the Greater Hong Kong. For there are two Hong
Kongs--one old and shabby and battered, one smiling and well kept; and
the smiling city on the hill-sides is Hong Kong the Little.




CHAPTER XXVI

SUSPENSE


The three sat brooding in silence for several minutes, until one of the
native clerks came in and held the door open respectfully. That meant
that the chief was coming, and Murray slid off his perch and slipped
quietly out as Gregory came slowly in.

In the unsparing afternoon light he looked a broken lion--an old
king-beast with sagging skin and weakened mouth, but with fierce fight
still in his tired and anxious eyes.

Hunters know that the smaller breeds of lions are the most dangerous.
Robert Gregory was not a large man--he barely reached his wife’s good
inches. But he was jungle-fierce and jungle-strong. He had fought many
a hard fight and had been torn and scarred in fights, but he had never
lost one yet. He had pounded his way through the world, butted his way
to victory and wealth. He had no finesse and no super-judgment, but he
had splendid pluck, lion courage, bulldog pertinacity; and often for
his wife, and for his daughter always, he had the charming tenderness
that bulldogs show to children.

There was a hint of unscrupulousness in his face, and he had a jaw of
iron. He was a very thin man, and it saved him from looking a very
common one.

He was scrupulously dressed--now as ever--and, now as ever, just
a shade over-dressed. His appearance would have gained had his
watch-chain been a trifle slenderer, his cummerbund a less youthful
rose, the canary-colored diamond in his ring half its size, or,
better still, not worn. But his small, well-kept hands were dark,
and unmistakably the hands of a man. He wore a bangle--just a thread
of twined gold set with two or three inferior turquoise, and it kept
slipping down his arm, almost over his knuckles--a cheap thing that had
cost less than his cravat. Hilda had given it to him several years ago.

He came in deliberately--almost as if he too were very tired or beaten
by the day’s terrific heat--but with a determined air of briskness, and
nodded crisply to Carruthers and Holman as he took his own chair at his
own desk.

He was at bay. And he was going to fight--to the very end, let the end
be what it might. But, in spite of his fierce self-control and genuine
grit, he did not look a man “fit” to put up a big fight. For two nights
he had had little sleep, and none that was restful. And to Holman’s
friendly, searching eyes he betrayed several signs of the hideous
strain and worry with which he was battling. The business catastrophes
that had heaped up about him were bad enough--enough to unnerve any
man, and he was palpably unnerved--but the first thought in his mind,
the burning object of its ceaseless search, was--his son. He was
holding his head defiantly, but the veins at his temples were twitching.

Holman took the telegram out of his pocket, and, with emotion that he
could not quite conceal, leaned across the desk, holding it out to
Gregory.

“Mr. Gregory,” he said--“the _Feima_----” But he did not have to
finish.

“Oh, yes! I know, I know,” Gregory said listlessly.

“I’m sorry,” Tom Carruthers began; “I’m awfully sorry for this, Mr.
Gregory.”

Robert Gregory swung round in his chair and banged the desk fiercely
with his clenched fist. “Sorry--Tom! By God, I’ll make some one pay
for this--but _who_? What have we got to fight? Holman, you still
think it’s this man Wu? Eh?”

“I don’t think, governor,” Holman said, leaning across the desk in his
earnestness, “I’m positive. In some way we’ve run up against the most
powerful man in China.”

“Well, I’m testing your theory, Holman. I’m having that cursed Chinaman
here.”

Tom Carruthers turned in his insecure seat on the window-ledge, so
astonished that he very nearly slid off it; and Holman was distinctly
perturbed.

“I sent him a chit this morning from the club, telling him I wished
to see him here urgently at two o’clock on a matter of the gravest
importance.”

William Holman shook his head.

“Take it from me, sir, Wu Li Chang is not the man to call upon any
one,” he said; “they must go to him.”

“Indeed!” Gregory snapped.

“And did you see him at two?” Tom said eagerly.

“No, Tom; he sent a coolie with a chit to say that he would call here
at three--unless he found it inconvenient--_unless he found it
inconvenient_! Look. I’ve hurried over from the club to see him.”

Tom came across the room and picked up the note Gregory had tossed
towards him, and stood studying it closely.

The trouble on Holman’s face thickened. “If Mr. Wu condescends to
answer such a summons,” he said earnestly, “why, that very fact
strengthens my belief. I tell you he never discusses anything outside
his own offices--never! And if for once he breaks that rule, he has
some terrible reason for doing it--some damnably sinister motive.”

“Pretty cool sort of johnnie, anyway,” Tom commented, still
scrutinizing Wu’s note. “But I say, what an educated, professional sort
of fist he writes.”

“Oh!” Holman said impatiently, “he’s got us both ways. He has all
the advantages of a Western education without having lost a scrap of
his Eastern cunning. I came out once with the skipper who took Wu to
Europe--Wu and an English tutor he’d had for years--he was only a
kid then, but Watson said he played a better game of chess than any
white man on board--unless it was the tutor chap--had ever seen played
before, bar none. Wu was nine or ten then. He’s forty now, and no doubt
his chess has been improving every day since.”

Gregory smiled nastily. “Well,” he said, “you may be perfectly correct
in all you say, Holman, but it seems to me that you’re all afraid of
these Chinamen.”

“I am, for one then,” Holman muttered. “And I’ve been here twenty
years.”

“Unnecessarily afraid. I think you’ll find that I’m perfectly capable
of dealing with the fellow when he comes--and he’ll come all right--oh,
yes! he’ll come.”

“I wonder,” Holman said.

“I’m sure I hope so,” Tom Carruthers said heartily.

Holman devoutly hoped not, but he did not say it.

“He’ll come,” Gregory repeated didactically, almost truculently; “he’ll
come, as full of oil as a pound of butter. What the devil!” he added,
with a displeased change of voice, as silk skirts and high-heeled
shoes sounded in the hall. “I told you not to leave the hotel,” he
complained, with affection and dismay mingled in his voice, as his
wife and daughter came through the door.

“Of course you did, poor old dear,” Hilda told him soothingly, seating
herself on the corner of his desk and patting him encouragingly on
his shoulder. “But Mother can’t rest. How can she? And if she isn’t
scouring the island--she must know every inch of it by now--she is
hunting on the mainland with Ah Wong.”

“Oh! I know, I know,” Florence Gregory said wearily, subsiding
indifferently into the chair Holman placed for her.

“You’ll wear yourself out,” her husband said roughly, but not unkindly.

The mother smiled, contemptuous of the fatigue from which she was wan
and trembling. “It’s no use saying anything to me. I can’t rest. Have
you heard anything? That’s all I’ve come for.”

“Not yet, dear. I’ve seen the Governor again. He was most kind--really
very kind. Everything is being done--everything--and will be--and it is
foolish to go on wearing yourself out like this.”

“I am not wearing myself out,” his wife returned petulantly. “The
suspense is wearing my heart out--and no one seems to care--no one!”

“Yes, I know how you feel, dear,” her husband answered her gently, “and
what you must be suffering. But try to spare yourself just a little,
for my sake. And believe me--you can--all that is possible is being
done--and this--this is man’s work.”

“Is it?” the mother said dully. “I’m not so sure, I’m not so sure.” She
closed her eyes and leaned back in the big office chair, burning and
shivering with excitement, and terribly, terribly tired.

Ah Wong looked about the office desperately. She wanted cushions,
but there were no cushions there, and she went and stood very close
behind her mistress; and when Mrs. Gregory moved her head restlessly,
the Chinese woman slid her hand between it and the sharp edge of the
chair’s hard back.

And they might well be tired--the amah too, as well as the frailer,
fairer woman. For they had indeed been beating the island and the
mainland for days now--searching, searching, and often in quarters of
whose existence the English woman could not have suspected, and whose
nature she had but dimly grasped--some of them quarters into which no
European woman, nice or otherwise, had penetrated before. But Mrs.
Gregory had been in no peril. She had not suffered rudeness even. Ah
Wong had guarded her well. Ah Wong had known how to do it.

But not one clew, not even the hint of a clew, had they found. Nor had
John Bradley, who, in a different and quieter way, had been hunting as
indefatigably--and was hunting now.

Robert Gregory sat crouched a little forward now, leaning on the
desk, watching his wife miserably, but saying no more--tortured for
her (almost forgetting his own pain in hers, or feeling his own only
through hers), but pathetically glad to have her rest even this little.

Holman slipped over to the window and stood looking moodily out to the
Chinese-and-Mongol-teeming dockside. Tom Carruthers sat quietly down on
the big desk too and took Hilda’s hand in his.

For several moments there was a silence in the room that was broken
only by the ticking of the clock and the incessant echo of hubbub that
buzzed in through the windows, the other five all conspiring eagerly
to hold and guard Mrs. Gregory’s rest undisturbed until she broke it
herself. Even the Chinese clerk who had come in just after Ah Wong,
and who sat, with his face to the wall, writing in the farthest corner,
began to drive a noiseless pen, without looking round.

But the clock struck three, and after a startled glance thrown up at
it, Mr. Gregory said softly, “Florence.”

“Yes?” his wife answered drearily, without moving; she did not even
open her eyes.

The husband sighed remorsefully. “Dear, I’m afraid you’ll have to go.”

“Why?” she asked indifferently, as if the answer could not interest
her, and still without moving her head or opening her eyes.

“Well, you see, I’ve made an appointment here at three--and it may, it
just may, prove important, with--with a man.”

“Who?” Her voice was still devoid of interest.

“I expect Mr. Wu here.”

Before her husband had spoken the last word Mrs. Gregory was bolt
upright in her chair, wide-eyed, alert--as if galvanized, revitalized,
tense and acute.

“Mr. Wu?” she whispered eagerly.

“Yes,” he told her.

And the amah fingered softly something hidden in her gown.

“About Basil!”

“About a lot of things,” Gregory said grimly. “And Basil in particular.”

“Oh! and he can help us! You think so, don’t you, Robert?”

“He can help us all right, Mrs. Gregory,” William Holman said sternly,
“if he will.”

“Oh! he must. He shall!” she said hoarsely.

“At any rate, he’s coming. And that’s more than I thought,” Holman
said, as a new degree and quality of hubbub belched up from the yard.
And as he spoke Murray came in with two cards--a long, thin slip of
crimson paper, the mandarin’s name and title inscribed on it in black
Chinese characters, and an ordinary English visiting card, simply
engraved “Mr. Wu.”

“He’s getting out of his rickshaw, sir,” Murray told his employer.

“And every man jack of the coolies is ko’towing to him as if he was a
god,” Holman grunted from the window.

Gregory rose to his feet with a careful show of calm. “Well,” he
remarked cheerfully, “we’ll soon see now what sort of stuff this
well-advertised Chinaman is made of. Show him in, Murray. Holman, take
my wife to the den near the counting-house. She’ll want to stay, of
course, to hear the result. Now, please, off you all go.”

The others turned to the door to which he had pointed--not the door
that led to the hall, but at the other end of the long room--but
Florence Gregory went up to her husband. “Robert----” she began, but
she could not say more, and her eyes were swimming.

Her husband cupped her face in his hands. “There, Mother, there,” he
said tenderly, and just a little brokenly, “I know, dear, I know. I
understand. There--there. It’s all right. I’ll be careful--very, very
careful. Ah Wong!” But he need not have called Ah Wong--she was there
already, waiting to serve; and though Hilda turned to her mother as if
to help her, and Tom Carruthers and Holman did too, it was Ah Wong who
led her out, Ah Wong to whose hand she held and leaned on a little as
she went.




CHAPTER XXVII

THE BEGINNING OF THE DUEL


At the door Holman, as devoted a servant in his masculine and British
way as Ah Wong was in her way, turned back almost peremptorily, and
coming close to Robert Gregory said sharply, “Governor!” There was
entreaty in the word, and there was command.

Gregory recognized both, and accepted both loyally from so tried and
loyal a servant. It was one of his strengths that he recognized and
appreciated valuable subordinates. “Well?” he said.

“Handle this man carefully,” the old clerk said, speaking more
emphatically than he had ever spoken to any one before--and he was an
emphatic man always.

Gregory nodded.

As Tom held open the door behind his chief’s desk, Murray opened the
other door and announced, “Mr. Wu, sir.”

“Ah! show him in,” Mr. Gregory said, rather too indifferently, and
so scoring the first mistake in the duel of which it was the first
thrust. Holman knotted vexed brows, and the wife threw an imploring
look. But Gregory saw neither, but busied himself ostentatiously with
his papers, writing with head down, posing as being deeply immersed in
business--and just a little overdoing it.

The mandarin stood in the doorway.

It was dim there, and at first glance he might have been thought
an Englishman. A second look showed his Chinese nationality but
accentuated by his European clothes--a light summer suit, a little
better cut, if that were possible, than Robert Gregory’s, and more
quietly worn. No silk handkerchief showed from a pocket, no gay
cummerbund swathed his waist, and Wu wore no jewelry, for the short,
black fob of watered silk that hung from his vest was plain as
plain. He stood a moment in the doorway perfectly at ease, dignified
but urbane. As tortured by the tragedy in which he had played
high-sacrificial priest as Robert Gregory, who did not even guess at
its crux, could possibly be, Wu showed of that torture no trace. In
appearance, in demeanor and in breeding the advantage seemed with the
Chinese man, not with the English. And why not? For the advantage in
all was Wu’s.

The slenderness of the Oxford days and the Alpine climbing was gone;
but no man could have looked less “full of oil,” less fat. “Mr. Wu” was
tall and powerfully built, pleasant visaged and altogether gentlemanly,
and unmistakably, in spite of his “smart” tailoring, an athlete.

The two English women in the other doorway turned to look at him, and
he bowed to them quietly, catching the elder’s eyes and for an instant
holding them. Something in his quiet, respectful gaze fascinated
while it disturbed her. She turned again to go, but on the door-ledge
turned and looked at him again, almost as if some power of mesmerism
had brushed against her. Wu almost smiled--not quite--and bowed
again, lower than before, but not too low. And she went out a little
hurriedly, the others with her. But Ah Wong, who naturally went last,
looked at the great man deliberately--a strange thing for a Chinese
woman of her caste to do. And as he looked, she read his face and saw
the tragedy hidden there. But Ah Wong and the Mandarin Wu had met
before.

The Chinese clerk had slid off his stool and crept cringing towards
Wu--cringing, almost grovelling. Wu snarled at him noiselessly, and
the fellow almost crawled from the room; and Murray went after him and
closed the door. Holman had already closed the other. The duellists
were alone.

They had no seconds.

Neither spoke. The clock tocked on.

Outside a new note, a note of exultation, had come into the incessant
coolie chorus; and Wu’s jinrickshaw man--for Wu had not come in state,
but very simply--squatted between the shafts and smoked.

Gregory continued to write. Wu watched him with a faint, contemptuous
smile, and then he made a slight gesture towards the Englishman.
Gregory did not see, but he felt it, and he obeyed it, and fidgeted
uncomfortably, and then spoke, saying, still writing and without
looking up, “Sit down, Wu.”

A deeper smile flitted across the Chinese face. “I beg your pardon, Mr.
Gregory?”

At the man’s voice Gregory almost started--it was at once so masterful,
so pleasantly pitched and so highly bred. It was a clear voice--as the
Chinese voice almost invariably is--but it was deep and rich, which in
the Chinese is very rare. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Gregory?” Wu had said.

And Gregory recognized and regretted his blunder. But he stood by
it--there was nothing else to do, he thought--and said again, “Sit
down, Wu.”

“I would suggest,” the Chinese remarked smoothly, “that Mr. Gregory
should not call me ‘Wu,’ but ‘Mr. Wu’----”

Robert Gregory looked up sharply, and, when he had looked, rose less
sharply and even a little less confidently. He had never seen Wu
before. And he was not a little taken aback at the man’s dress, his
splendid size and undeniably superior manner. And with that first look
something very like a touch of fear came to Robert Gregory, and a
subtle, vague sense of the almost hypnotic power of Wu’s personality.

“--Otherwise,” the Chinese continued--just the faintest hint of
amusement in the quiet, courteous voice--“I shall be compelled to call
Mr. Gregory plain ‘Gregory’ to reciprocate the honor he has done me,
and I do not think we are sufficiently intimate to allow of such a
familiarity--on my part.”

“Oh!” the other said, as nonchalantly as he could, and looking not
at his visitor but at the letters he was holding, “I’m a busy man.”
He felt the prick. Wu had drawn first blood. The duel was far from
fair--one foe played a rapier with a master-wrist; one bungled with a
bludgeon awkwardly.

“Quite so,” Wu agreed; “but such a fraction of a second only--Wu is so
short a name that you could say ‘Mr. Wu’ while I was saying ‘Gregory.’”
A threat was never made more delicately--or with a nicer smile--but it
was made, and recorded in both minds, and with it a sinister something
of prophecy.

Robert Gregory winced. “Oh! sit down,” he said uneasily.

The reply was easy and pleasant, “Thank you!” And, laying his hat on
the desk, Wu sat.

Gregory remained standing--fussing at the papers and his pigeon-holes.
And his tone was mandatory. “Now, Mr. Wu”--Wu inclined his head
slightly--“I’m not given to fine shades, equivocations, diplomatic
finesse or any other Eastern method of wasting time.”

“Quite so.” Wu’s tone was as polite as his words. But the
amusement--imperceptible to Gregory--was a little less, the contempt a
little more.

“And so,” the Englishman continued, “If I’m blunt, it’s because--I mean
business.”

“Business!” the mandarin exclaimed, “Ah! I wondered what had procured
me the honor of this invitation--somewhat peremptorily conveyed, I fear
I must remark. But doubtless that was done to save time too. However,
if it is upon a matter of business----”

“If you’ll allow me to tell you first,” Gregory broke in irritably (and
he was irritated almost beyond endurance), “then you’ll know better,
won’t you?”

“One moment,” Wu interposed, slightly smilingly, “pardon me, but I do
not like to remain seated whilst you are----”

“Never mind me,” the other said gruffly.

“Oh!” Wu returned simply, “I don’t. But still----”

“I think a man may please himself in his own office”--Gregory’s voice
was querulous with irritation.

“Quite so,” the bland voice replied, “when he is alone.”

“Then”--pugnaciously--“if you don’t object, I think I’ll remain as I
am.”

“Not at all,” Wu said gravely, and rising; “in that case, we’ll both
stand.”

For a moment the two men measured each other and themselves against
each other--Wu very politely, but with a thin, cold smile just lurking
at one corner of his mouth. Gregory fumbled for a cigarette, lit it
clumsily, drew a whiff, then threw it down and stamped on it, Wu
waiting patiently, and watching with an almost flattering evidence of
interest.

“The fact is, Mr. Gregory,” Wu continued, “I have my own little
prejudices; and if you remain standing whilst I am seated, it will seem
to me--possibly very unreasonably--that you are standing, not out of
courtesy to me, but to exhibit to me a minatory and even overbearing
presence.”

For a moment Gregory fought with himself. He was hotly angry, and more
chagrined than angry. And he knew now that he was completely at sea.
But he made a brave effort to control himself. He had promised Holman
and his wife--tacitly--in response to Holman’s earnest word and the
pleading in her eyes as she had turned to go. And he wanted to find or
trace his son.

“Pray be seated, Mr. Wu,” he said, after an instant, and indicated with
a bow a chair. But Wu caught the irony, of course, in the elaborate bow
and the mock-courtesy of the request. But he bowed quite gravely in
return, and again said, “Thank you,” as he sat down.

Gregory sat also; he did not dare to have his own way in this small
thing, and the little defeat irked him and contributed to his
thickening uneasiness. However, if he _had_ to sit, whether he
chose or not, he could sit as he liked, in his own chair, in his own
office, he’d be damned if he couldn’t--and he did. He put his elbows
decidedly on the desk, rested his chin firmly on his knuckles, and
faced Wu with a fixed look and fighting eyes, his face thrust forward
aggressively.

Wu regarded the Englishman placidly.

“Now, Mr. Wu, what the hell are you up to?” Gregory spoke quietly but
decisively, and he leaned still farther across the table.

Wu took his time before he returned blandly, “Would you mind repeating
your question?”

“I think you heard it plainly enough.”

“Quite plainly, thank you--quite. Most audible. But I thought you would
perhaps welcome the opportunity of expressing yourself a little more
politely.”

“I’m not out for a ceremonious talk,” Gregory blurted. “You’ll notice
there’s none of your customary tea on the table--no whiskey and soda
either--no cigars.” He was too good a business man not to know that,
young as the interview was, he was losing ground already, but he was
not skilful enough, and far too overwrought, to conceal the anger he
felt at the unwelcome knowledge.

“Thank you,” Wu replied lazily, and with nice good humor, “I do not
smoke”--that was not quite true. He smoked a water-pipe at home. He had
smoked so with Nang Ping a thousand times. “I never drink whiskey, and
I am degraded enough to prefer tea made in our Chinese way. However, I
have perceived, as you say, that this is not--a ceremonious occasion.”

“Meanwhile,” Gregory snapped, “I’d like an answer to my question.”

“Which was----” the Chinese asked gently, but there was a narrow glint
of contemptuous laughter in his eyes.

“My question,” Gregory almost thundered, “was--‘what the hell are you
up to, Mr. Wu?’”

“Pray be a little more explicit,” Wu said coldly.

“I have every intention of being so,” was the sharp reply. “Now, please
listen to me very carefully.”

“I am all attention.” A very stupid listener might have thought the
smoothness of the mandarin’s voice meekness. Gregory did not make that
mistake.

“Let me preface what I have to say,” he said warningly, “by remarking
that I have the reputation of being a very good friend--but a dangerous
enemy.”

“Who could doubt it?” Wu murmured, bowing admiringly.

“He is a rash man who dares to oppose me, Mr. Wu. Do you know my method
of dealing with such a man?”

“I tremble to contemplate his fate. But I am never rash.” Wu’s voice
_was_ meek now--for no counterfeit could be so fine.

“I crush him, sir--crush him relentlessly.”

“It is always interesting”--giving Gregory a half look--“to hear about
the methods of great men.”

“I mention these things to you by way of warning.” The Englishman spoke
gropingly; his irritation was growing.

“Warning?” Wu raised his delicate eyebrows delicately. “Really”--he
sighed--“I’m almost afraid to follow you.”

“I think my meaning is sufficiently clear.”

“To yourself, no doubt; but to my limited understanding--if I might beg
you to speak a little more plainly.”

“I will. I will ask you a plain question. Are you my friend, Mr. Wu, or
are you my enemy?”

Wu smiled openly, and there was a slight drawl in his voice answering,
“Could I aspire to be the one, or presume to be the other? Can the
rush-light claim friendship with the sun, or the mountain-stream
declare war against the ocean?”

“Oh, yes, yes! you’re very plausible!” Gregory threw himself back in
his chair wearily, and he was weary.

“‘Plausible’ is not a very pleasant word, Mr. Gregory,” Wu said
quietly, but in a tone of curt resentment.

“You ask me to speak plainly.”

“But not to speak rudely. I do not employ rudeness, nor do I accept
it. And now may I ask how this hypothetical hostility of mine has been
manifested?”

“In a number of ways,” Gregory returned, a little sneeringly.

“Will you name _one_?” Wu was entirely bland again.

“You must be aware,” the other told him, “that my firm has recently
sustained a somewhat extraordinary series of setbacks.”

“I regret to hear that you have been somewhat unfortunate”--Wu said it
sympathetically.

“I am determined that these annoyances shall cease”--Robert Gregory
said it doggedly.

“But even Mr. Gregory,” the Chinese man said sadly, “can hardly hope to
order the workings of Fate.”

“But are they workings of Fate”--Gregory leaned across the table
aggressively again, his bullet head thrust out--“or of Mr. Wu?”

For a moment Wu regarded him in silence. Then, “Surely you are joking?”

“I know pretty well as much about you as you know yourself”--Gregory’s
voice was as insolent as his words.

“Why should you not?” Wu replied cheerfully. “My life is an open book.
All who run may read.”

“But there’s one thing I don’t know!”

“Surely not?”

“Your object. Now you see I speak frankly--I lay my cards on the table.
What is your motive? What do you want? Come, Mr. Wu, I’m willing to
meet you on a friendly footing.”

“You are very kind,” Wu said subtly.

Gregory made an impatient gesture, and the framed picture fell between
them. The Chinese picked it up--“Mrs. Gregory?” he said courteously.

“Our daughter.” The English father bit his lip. He was convinced that
to press the quarrel further with this opponent would be to press to
his own defeat. But he restrained himself with heroism. To see Hilda’s
photograph in Wu’s Chinese hand, Wu’s Chinese eyes on Hilda’s face,
maddened him. Twenty Europeans had lifted the picture from his desk,
held it so, and commented on it admiringly--and her father had been
highly pleased. Wu merely bowed and replaced it quietly, face towards
Gregory--and Gregory itched to throttle him.

If Robert Gregory had known of his son’s spoiling of the Chinese
girl--a girl of gentler birth and softer rearing than Hilda’s--he
would not have considered Basil’s crime unforgivably heinous. “Damned
foolish!” would have been his stricture. But that this Chinese man--a
father too, as he knew, and, for all he knew, as clean-lived and as
nice-minded as himself--had held Hilda’s portrait in his hand, and look
at it quietly, seemed to Gregory hideous, and his gorge rose at it.

Wu Li Chang read the other clearly, and, quite indifferent alike to
the man and to his narrow folly, he stiffened coldly, for he knew what
Robert Gregory did not, and he was thinking of Nang Ping as he had
looked down upon her last, heaped and stricken in final expiation on
his floor.

But, both through an instinct of breeding and through utter
indifference, he made no comment on the picture, either in flattery or
in admiration, as he replaced it. But he bent his head congratulatory
toward the other and said: “Ah! yes. Miss Gregory reminds
me--slightly--of some one I have known. Probably an English lady--I
met years ago when I lived in England. I regretted not being at home
when Mrs. Gregory and your daughter so honored my poor garden--and my
daughter.”

He did not admire Hilda’s picture, and it was far too much trouble to
pretend an appreciation he did not feel. And he thought her dress, or
lack of it, disgusting, precisely as he had thought the décolletage
of “honorable” (and entirely “honest”) English ladies abominable when
he had been a boy at Portland Place. And his Chinese taste (good or
bad) would never have put a picture of Nang Ping in his offices, where
casual callers and mere business acquaintances might scrutinize and
comment on it. He had killed his girl--this man sitting easily there;
calm and imperturbable--not a week since, and neither waking nor
sleeping had he regretted it--not even for an instant. But a scented
bead that he had found beneath her robe, when they had lifted up what
had been his only child, lay now secure in an inner pocket. He could
feel it where it lay.

“On a friendly footing, Mr. Gregory?” Wu took up the broken thread.
“You Westerners are truly magnanimous. ‘Friendship’ is usually actuated
either by hope of gain or by--fear.”

“Don’t you trifle with me, _Mister_ Wu,” Gregory said hotly,
rising and beginning to pace up and down the long room--an ugly and
determined look hardening on his face--“I’ll have no more of this
beating about the bush. To begin with,”--controlling himself a little
better: there was so much at stake--“to begin with, Mr. Wu, the
mysterious disappearance of my son is only one of the long series of
unexplained disasters that have recently fallen on me, and concerning
which I want an explanation.”

“Then why not seek it from those who can enlighten you?”

“There’s no one more capable of doing that than yourself,” the
Englishman said, swinging round on the Chinese fiercely. “What’s
behind it all, Mr. Wu? What’s the game you are playing at? Why have
you devoted your sinister attentions to me and mine? What have we
done to start you on this career of kidnapping--of ship-scuttling--of
incendiarism, among the coolies out there--and all the rest of it?”

Wu looked at his watch, put it back in his pocket, picked up his hat,
and rose deliberately. “Mr. Gregory,” he said coldly, “my time is of a
certain value. Time is money, you Westerners say. Well, I never waste
time--although I am never in a hurry. You will excuse me if I wish you
a very good afternoon.”

“No so fast, Mr. Wu,” the shipper said ferociously, thrusting himself
between Wu and the door. “My time’s precious too, but I’m going to
devote all that’s requisite to getting an answer to my question. I’ve
got the conviction lodged in this obstinate British head of mine that
you know quite well what I want to know--and what I am going to know.
And that’s what I’ve got you here for--to tell me what I want to know.
And, by the Lord, you will before you leave this room. I know that you
can lay hands on my son--dead or alive. I know that you can--by God! I
know that you can----”

“Can you lay hands on him?”

“I? No! No!” the English father almost sobbed it, recoiling.

“Well, when you can----”

“But I can lay hands on you if you don’t satisfy me----”

“I do not think that Mr. Gregory will commit that--indiscretion,” Wu
said significantly.

There was a bitter pause. When Gregory broke it his voice wavered;
he was greatly moved. “You’re ruining my business,” he cried, “you’re
hanging over me like a sword of Damocles.”

“That sword may have had two edges, Mr. Gregory,” Wu said quietly. “The
man who wounds his enemy with one is apt to cut himself with the other.
The sword,” he added, strolling to the window, “is not my weapon.”

Robert Gregory backed stealthily up to the door and fumbled with his
right hand in his pocket. And Wu, turning to go, saw that his face was
twitching.

Wu Li Chang had no thought of sparing this other father--Basil
Gregory’s father--but he was sorry for him now; and it may be
recorded--as a modest contribution to the study of racial comparisons.

Wu moved to the door which Gregory stood barring. “And now, if you will
kindly allow me to pass----”

And Robert Gregory thrust his revolver in Wu Li Chang’s face.

The Chinese looked into the shining barrel. He smiled. “Ah! A Webley,
I observe. Very good make. I have made excellent practice with them
myself.”




CHAPTER XXVIII

SOMETHING TO GO ON


Gregory, nearly exasperated by the other’s coolness, made a threatening
gesture. And then came the sudden blazing out of ferocious rage
that smolders always under the quietest Oriental seeming, and that,
enkindled instantly by the tiniest spark, transforms a peaceful,
obliging native into a spitting, hissing human volcano.

“You fool! You white-eyed dodderer, you green-hatted goat-man!” Wu Li
Chang barked, “do you think I care for your shiny barrel? You English
idiot! The slightest signal from me”--he pointed to the window--“and
those coolies would swarm in here like so many devils.”

“Yes, but you’d have gone to blazes first,” Gregory said grimly, the
revolver still well aimed, “to join those damned ancestors of yours.”

Something as terrible as the death-rattle in a mad dog’s throat tangled
and gurgled in Wu’s and a fiendish look leapt into his eyes--they
narrowed until they were mere slits. But he recontrolled himself
almost instantly--angry still, but coldly so, and imperturbable again.
“I would have gone to blazes first?” There were snarl and sneer in
the low-pitched voice. “Then we should have been able to resume this
interesting conversation elsewhere! Come, come! Put your toy back into
your pocket. If you insist upon playing the play out on these lines
(but I think you will not), believe me, this is not the stage for it.
And you know where I live. You also, I understand, broke and honored my
unworthy bread the other day. And I am an easy man to find.”

Robert Gregory deliberately pointed his revolver at Wu Li Chang’s
heart, and said as pointedly, “Pray be seated, Mr. Wu.”

Wu bent his head politely to the pointed pistol, as if to thank it for
the invitation. “With pleasure,” he said, moving leisurely back to his
chair. Gregory, eyeing Wu stormily, passed too to his own chair. For
just a fraction of a second his back was turned to Wu; but that thin
shred of time sufficed the Chinese to whip a revolver from his pocket,
concealing it in his hand and in the loose sleeve of his tussore coat.
Gregory banged down his chair, and, covered by the ill-humored noise,
Wu clicked his revolver open.

They sat and faced each other in ugly silence, dislike and defiance
very differently expressed, but expressed, on each face. Even wider
apart by caste and by breeding than by race, Wu’s tranquillity was
terrible, his quiet at once a menace and a taunt, while Gregory’s
growing nervousness would have been a little comical if its primary
cause had not been so pitiful.

“I perceive, Mr. Gregory,” Wu Li Chang said pleasantly, “that you still
keep your toy in your hand; kindly cease holding it. I do not fear
it, but the implication of its presence is somewhat aggressive and
offensive. Let us pretend, at least,” he added lazily, “that we are
gentlemen.”

That taunt got through. Gregory winced, and after a moment of sulky
hesitation put the revolver on his knee under the desk.

“Now then, Mr. Wu----” he began.

“One moment,” Wu interrupted him. “Excuse my seeming so exacting, but
I believe that revolver is loaded.”

“It is--in every chamber,” the other snapped.

“Well,” the mandarin spoke so indifferently that he almost drawled,
but his voice was honeyed, “if we are to arrive at an amicable
understanding, I think I should prefer, as a matter of politeness--we
Chinese lay such foolish stress on politeness--not to feel that I was
discussing matters at the cannon’s mouth, so to speak. Retain the
weapon, by all means, but be so good as to remove the cartridges.”

Gregory fidgeted, hesitating nervously.

“Merely as a matter of good faith,” Wu urged conciliatorily. “That
weapon might go off, you know--by pure accident.” He stretched his
hand, palm up, across the desk.

Gregory looked at the open palm oddly, embarrassed, and then looked
round anxiously at the window. Then, shrugging his shoulders and trying
to speak indifferently, “Why not?” he said, and lifting the pistol,
jerked it, and the cartridges fell out onto the desk.

“Thank you,” Wu said genially. “That makes the interesting
conversation much more possible.” He began playing with them lightly,
throwing and catching them as nimble-fingered boys do jackstones;
and Gregory watched the deft, sinewy yellow hand, fascinated.
“One--two--three--four--five--beautifully made little things, are they
not?” Wu’s voice was dove-like. “Now we can start fair. Pray continue,
Mr. Gregory, from the point where you left off.” One yellow hand
dropped nonchalantly on to Wu’s knee below the table, two cartridges in
the subtle fingers. “But please omit to make any further disrespectful
allusion to my ancestors.” He was leaning forward on the desk, both
hands beneath it now, and the revolver had slipped from his sleeve.
“I do not misunderstand your having made the offensive remark--it was
a mere mark of difference of caste and education. But do not repeat
it,” he added smilingly, “or in any way allude to my ancestors”--the
bullets were in his pistol, and Gregory was putting his emptied
weapon irritably into a drawer. “You were asking me, I think, what I
knew about the disappearance of your son and of certain commercial
catastrophes which, I regret to hear, have lately overtaken you. Well,
I will be perfectly frank with you--perfectly frank, Mr. Gregory,
perfectly frank. I will conceal nothing.” The yellow hands slipped up
quietly on to the desk. “And the first thing I have to say is”--the
barrel of the pistol thrust forward--“look at this!”

Robert Gregory sprang up with a smothered oath, and his hand went
convulsively towards the bell on the desk, “Ah, no!” Wu said, “don’t
move, or it might go off by pure accident.” Gregory shifted out of
Wu’s aim and made a foolish furtive attempt to ring. Wu covered him
instantly, smiling still. “Don’t move, I say! Sit down! Sit down,
Gregory!”

And Robert Gregory very slowly sat down--obedient partly in fear,
partly in defeat, and a little in a somewhat hypnotized subjection to a
bigger, more skillful man. Then suddenly he pulled the drawer open to
look at his own revolver.

“No,” Wu told him, “not sleight of hand. This is not your revolver, but
it’s identical----”

“That’s my son’s revolver. I know. I gave it to him myself. Now, damn
you, I have got something to go on!”




CHAPTER XXIX

“WILL YOU VISIT SING KUNG YAH?”


“Quite right,” Wu Li Chang said cordially. “This is--or was--your
son’s property. My servants found it in my garden, after your son had
left there. I intended to give myself pleasure of returning it to you
in person”--that was perfectly true--“although I hardly anticipated
doing so in so--humorous a manner. Now kindly ring your bell”--his
voice stiffened suddenly, still low and easy; it had a new percussive
note, and the words came quicker. “When it is answered, merely say
to whomever enters, ‘Pray desire Mrs. Gregory to step this way.’ Do
nothing more, say nothing more. Because”--the voice grew beautifully
soft again--“if you should draw attention to this, or anything of that
kind, my hand might tremble so much with fear that it might go off, and
that would be too ridiculous, with one of your own cartridges! Please
ring.”

At the mention of his wife--by Wu--Robert Gregory drew himself up
stiffly. “What do you want with Mrs. Gregory?”

“I might merely wish to show her how foolish her husband has been
in trying to bully and intimidate me instead of dealing with me
reasonably. But also I have a message I have promised my daughter to
deliver for her to your wife. Chancing to see Mrs. Gregory here reminds
me of it, and it will be more convenient to me to deliver it here
than to call at your hotel”--Gregory’s eyes blazed--“and possibly as
agreeable to the lady. Also I have a message--but less important--from
Madame Sing, my relative.” (Gregory grunted curtly.) “Ring!”

“Ring--yourself,” the Englishman at bay said sullenly.

“That is a liberty I would not dream of taking in another man’s office.
You’ll ring”--the revolver’s barrel repointed insinuatingly. “You will
ring now, Mr. Gregory.”

Robert Gregory pressed the bell push on his desk and leaned back
heavily in his chair, with an unhappy sigh, defeated.

As Murray came in, Wu so moved his body that the clerk could not see
the little pistol which still covered Gregory. “Murray,” his employer
said wearily, “ask Mrs. Gregory to step this way a moment.” Then he
began breathlessly, “_Ce sacré Chinois me_----”

But Wu interrupted with a contented laugh and, “Oh! this damned
Chinaman understands French perfectly. And I’ve often heard Englishmen
pronounce it very much as you do. You are a linguist too, Mr. Murray?
_E’um dom util--o dom das linguas--e de alto valar em cidades
cosmopolitas!_”

Poor Murray stood bewildered, quite uncertain what to do. And Wu turned
pleasantly to Mr. Gregory with, “Please repeat your instructions, as
Mr. Murray does not seem to understand quite.”

And Gregory said at once--broken, defeated--in a whipped tone his clerk
had never heard from those thin lips before, “Please ask Mrs. Gregory
to come here.”

And indeed the hard little man was broken and defeated, and he knew it.
The Chinese duellist had made but little lunge, but with a gentleness
more cruel than any storm, and a suave persistence that under such
circumstances no mere European nerve could outfight, he had borne his
opponent to the knees; slowly, deftly had worn him out. His method and
his touch had been--almost consistently--velvet, but through the velvet
of the fur that hid them, relentless claws had found and torn and
jagged the English adversary.

Robert Gregory was down and out.

“Now,” Wu said in a changed tone, speaking briskly and quick, as the
door closed on Murray, “I will open the matter to Mrs. Gregory--if you
please.”

“What’s your object in wanting to humiliate me before my wife?” Gregory
asked drearily.

Wu smiled. “Merely a ‘Chinaman’s’ idea of--humor, let us say.” He slid
the Webley lazily into his sleeve.

Florence Gregory came in eagerly. Knowing less than her husband did of
the mandarin’s important place in international finance, yet she had
a far clearer estimate of Wu Li Chang’s personal potency than Gregory
had. Ah Wong had coached her--if only with a hint or two--and she had
her own woman’s instinct, fine and alert.

Wu had risen instantly, and taken a courteous step towards her. He
paused as she did. For a moment she stood looking from one man to the
other questioningly, and then she fixed her anxious eyes on Wu, and
they stood measuring each other quietly.

For once the English eyes were the quicker. Perhaps sex and motherhood
combined outweighed any and every superiority of race. Perhaps he gave
her a much more careless gaze than she gave him. Perhaps her exquisite
anxiety gave her sharper sight. At all events, as they looked, she
almost recognized him, but he had no such experience concerning her.
For a puzzled instant her mind trembled towards “When? Where?” and in
a few moments, or in less mental turbulence, her half-awakened memory
might have caught up a broken thread, a forgotten acquaintance; but Wu
spoke, and in the tension of her anxiety the chance passed.

“Mrs. Gregory,” Wu Li Chang began, deferentially bowing and going a
little nearer, “I am sorry to be compelled to ask your presence, but,
before I explain, will you take this weapon from me? You see”---he
laughed a little, lightly--“I present it to you with the barrel toward
my own breast--but”--and this he added with quiet emphasis--“do not
give it to your husband.” As he indicated Gregory he gave him a
straight look. “I trust to your honor.” And he bowed again as he held
the pistol out towards her.

She took it wonderingly, and held it so. She was not one of the women
who have an exaggerated fear of weapons, but neither was she one of
those who rather affect them. She had never hunted, and she had never
practiced pistol shooting (Hilda had done both). Ordinarily Florence
Gregory would have declined to hold a revolver. But she took this and
held it steadily--puzzled but not afraid. She was in an abject terror
for her boy that left no room for petty, personal, bodily qualms.

“What--what is all this?” she said ruefully. “Robert, what have you
been doing?”

He sighed heavily before he answered her. “Mr. Wu has rather
over-reached me in--a little transaction.”

“Oh! pardon, pardon,” Wu protested pleasantly. “You over-reached
yourself. May we be seated?” he asked Florence Gregory; and as she
sat down he drew himself a chair conveniently towards her, and
convenient for an unimpeded view of Gregory. “I called here to-day,” he
continued suavely, “at your husband’s invitation, on a matter of grave
importance.”

The woman leaned forward towards him quickly, her hands knotted at her
knee. “Yes--yes--my son,” she began eagerly.

“What the matter was,” Wu went on smoothly, “he did not say. Of course,
I knew of your son’s disappearance--everybody in Hong Kong knows
that--so I fancied that your husband wished, perhaps, to ask me that
any influence I might possess among my countrymen should be exerted to
assist you in your search----”

“Yes--yes,” she said, “if you could!”

“Could!” Gregory muttered, “he knows all about it.”

“To assist you in your search,” Wu repeated blandly. “His reception of
me, however, was strangely unlike that of a man--asking a favor.”

“Favor!” Gregory flamed out--he couldn’t help it--“I was going to ask
no favor, I can tell you.”

His wife sent him a peremptory glance, but Wu paid him no attention,
but continued:

“And in the end, Mrs. Gregory, he presented a revolver at me, and
practically held me prisoner.”

“Yes,” Gregory snarled, “and by a cunning ruse, like a man of your
crafty nature----”

Wu Li Chang smiled deprecatingly. “Listen to him, Mrs. Gregory! It is
cunning of me to endeavor to save my own life. It is not cunning of him
to beguile me here under the pretext of----”

“Pretext be damned!” Gregory blustered, beside himself now, rising and
going to the window. His face was twitching. He stood looking out at
the seething humans on the dock-side, but it is doubtful if he saw them.

“You see,” Wu said gently, “the strange means by which your husband
seeks to enlist my help and sympathy.”

Florence Gregory hung her head.

Wu moved his chair an inch towards hers. Gregory did not turn round
at the sound. The Chinese spoke lower, and the sympathy in his voice
seemed very real, “And all your natural maternal anxiety----” He paused
eloquently, and the mother looked up at him, eagerly, gratefully.
And in return he gave her a long direct look--there were respect and
friendship in it. And after a moment she rose abruptly and went to the
window.

“Robert!”

He did not answer. She touched his shoulder. He paid no attention.
“Leave me to talk to Mr. Wu! Please!” But her tone was imperative.

A smile, a glint of triumph, flickered across the Chinese’s face. “You,
Mrs. Gregory?” he said, just stepping towards her--he had risen when
she rose--“that would be different.”

“He needs a man’s methods of dealing with him!” Gregory growled,
without turning.

“But they don’t seem to have been very effective in your hands, do
they? Robert,” she urged more appealingly, “I want to find my boy! Let
me try--my way.”

“I’ll send Ah Wong to you,” was the grudging reply, and Robert Gregory
shuffled awkwardly from the room. He did not even look at Wu again--and
Wu barely looked at him.

“And who is Ah Wong, Mrs. Gregory?” Wu asked amiably, as the door
closed.

“My servant,” she told him.

“Your amah? But I do not need an interpreter,” he laughed.

“She rarely leaves me.”

“Who could?” he said with a little bow.

Ah Wong came noiselessly into the room.

“And now, Mr. Wu,” the woman asked earnestly, her voice low and tense,
“will you help us?”

“You, if I can--but--I am not sure if----” He broke off and gave Mrs.
Gregory a little inquiring gesture that said, “Are you going to let her
stand there?” For Ah Wong had come steadily across the room until she
stood quite at his elbow.

“Wait, Ah Wong,” her mistress told her, with a gesture of the head
towards the door. And Ah Wong moved back as quietly as she had come,
and waited just inside the door, immovable, expressionless. But not
for an instant, never once, did her eyes leave Wu Li Chang. A critic
at a “first night” could not have watched and listened more closely or
seemed less interested.

Ah Wong and the mandarin were ill matched, but better matched than he
and Robert Gregory had been.

Mrs. Gregory wasted no time on preliminaries. She forgot that he was a
stranger. That he was man, she woman, she forgot that she was English
and he Chinese. She had but one thought, one memory--Basil. “Oh! Mr.
Wu,” she pleaded--urged--at once, “if you can help us, if you could
even give us your advice as to the best way of appealing to the natives
or of offering a reward----”

“Ah!” Wu interjected gently, “for your sake, Mrs. Gregory--as his
mother--I would do much.” He picked up his hat and moved towards the
door. But Ah Wong did not trouble to move from it--she knew that he
was not going yet. But Florence Gregory did not know--and she followed
him a step. Wu bowed to her with the utmost courtesy, and said--as if
considering the situation--“Well, we must meet again.”

“Oh! I hope so, Mr. Wu. But now--when every moment is so precious----”

“I am thinking, Mrs. Gregory, and I will not waste one of them, you may
trust me.”

“I do,” she said impulsively.

Wu bent his head gratefully--perhaps, too, to veil a smile--“But I will
venture to take just two of those precious moments, to ask a great
favor of you.”

“Oh, anything!”

“You were visited yesterday by a lady of my house, Madame Sing, a
kinswoman who has, since my wife’s death, taken a mother’s part--so far
as it ever can be taken--to my daughter. Sing Kung Yah suffers a great
humiliation and an intolerable loneliness----”

“I was sorry I was out----”

“And she was grieved to find you not at home. May I solicit your
kindness for Madame Sing, Mrs. Gregory?”

“Oh--indeed--anything. But what can I do?”

“Much,” Wu said. “She is ostracized by the ladies of our race. I am a
powerful man among my own people, madame, but I cannot influence or
soften the prejudices of Chinese femininity in the slightest. Because
she is a widow, she should, according to one of the absurdest of the
many absurd canons of our race, live in seclusion, sackcloth and
discomfort. She is a nice creature, Mrs. Gregory, and she longs for
friends. Will you visit Sing Kung Yah?”

“Oh--of course--gladly.”

“It will open many doors to her, for Mr. Gregory’s wife is a social
power in Hong Kong. Chinese doors we are both powerless to open--in any
real sense. Chinese cordiality I am not rich enough to buy for her or
strong enough to seize. But life will be less dull for her if she can
sometimes exchange visits with English ladies.”

“I shall be so glad.”

“Soon--perhaps?”

“Indeed, yes. Of course, until this terrible anxiety is removed----”

“It would be cruel of me to ask you to come to Kowloon to drink tea
with Sing Kung Yah. And yet I do ask it--but for your own sake too.
Yes, if you will be so kind--it will delight Sing--you shall be my
guest.”

“We have been already, Mr. Wu,” she said a little sadly. “You remember
it was in your house, or rather in your gardens, that I last saw my
son. It was there he left us--and disappeared as completely as though
the earth had swallowed him up.”

“And it is from that point that we will begin our investigations--you
and I--his mother and a Chinese who is honored to serve her. We will
take the thread up from that moment--when you last saw him--from that
place--my own house.”

“But you know that he was seen afterwards here--in Hong Kong?”

“I know that it was said so,” Wu replied judicially. “It may, or it
may not, be true, and we will begin at the beginning--and end by
discovering the truth. That at least I can promise you.”

“Oh! You do?” she almost sobbed.

“I am sure of it.”

“Then when may we come? If we must.”

“Must,” the man deprecated. “My dear Mrs. Gregory, I employ no such
word where you are concerned. I merely point out to you, and I hope as
delicately as possible, that--aside from the very real kindness your
visit would be to a Chinese woman somewhat pathetically placed--that
the--the circumstances of my visit here this afternoon hardly make this
a--a propitious place--indeed, I am sure you will understand I am only
too anxious to find myself outside this room--and to forget--as far as
such things can be forgotten----”

“Yes--yes!” Mrs. Gregory interjected contritely, “I do indeed
understand. I am so ashamed----”

Wu waved that aside, and then he broke out with sudden feeling--it was
finely done; even to Ah Wong it almost rang true--“Why, I wonder, do
some Europeans--Mr. Robert Gregory and others--think God in heaven came
to be guilty of making the Chinese race? You come here and reap the
harvest of our centuries of sowing, and affront us while you fatten on
our industry; teach the foolish among us to suck and smoke the poppy,
and condemn us for it while it enriches you; brand the vice ‘Chinese’
while you revenue India from it--you treat us a thousand times worse
than the leech-like fops of Venice treated the Jews they exploited and
plundered--at least the Venetian cads were in their own country--you
are in ours. I tell you, madame, a Chinese _hath_ eyes, hands,
organs, dimensions, senses, affections--_yes, affections_,
passions--fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by
the same winter and summer, as you English Christians are! If you prick
us, we bleed. If you tickle us, we laugh. If you poison us, we die. If
you wrong us, shall we not revenge? For sufferance is _not_ the
badge of _our_ great tribe. Oh! forgive me, dear lady,” and his
voice that had been a shaking whirlwind was regretful, soft and humble.
“Forgive me--not you--I do not mean you. Mrs. Gregory,” he said with
deep earnestness, “I _will_ help _you_--to my utmost, to find
your boy. And I _am_ powerful. But, Mrs. Gregory, I will not help
your husband. Nor shall he have the satisfaction of knowing that I have
been instrumental in restoring Mr. Basil Gregory to you.”

“Oh! I do not blame you,” Basil Gregory’s mother said. And her eyes
were full of tears.

“Thank you,” Wu said softly. “I will help you to find your son. I swear
it. Trust me--and I shall not fail.”

“I do.”

Wu bent his head.

“And try to believe how much I regret to seem petty; but, really, Mrs.
Gregory, frankly, if your husband and I were to meet again, even under
the restraining influence of your presence, his strange animosity,
his extraordinary prejudice against me, and his curious ideas of the
language which a European may use to a Chinese gentleman--if I may
so describe myself--would, I fear, tempt me to wash my hands of the
whole affair. In short, I can not again enter any place that is Mr.
Gregory’s, and he has made it impossible for me to invite him to my
house or to receive him there; but if you will so far honor me, and my
kinswoman Sing Kung Yah, and my daughter--bring your amah with you” (he
indicated Ah Wong with a gesture), “she has a loyal face, and I am sure
you can trust her not to report your visit--and indeed,” he added in a
low tone, “she need not know how far I aid you. But all that I leave
to you, naturally. All I ask is your promise that Mr. Gregory shall be
ignorant always that your son has been restored to you by a ‘damned
Chinaman’; promise me that, and----”

She bowed her head.

“I promise you that it shall not be my fault if your son is not
restored to you within a few hours.”

“Then you know----”

“I know nothing,” Wu Li Chang said earnestly, “Mrs. Gregory, that you
yourself shall not know--at Kowloon.”

“When may I come?” she begged.

“To-morrow, at four? I will be entirely at your service----”

“To-morrow?” Her voice broke on the word.

“To-night, then?” He glanced at the clock consideringly. “Yes, the
time is short--but I think I can contrive it. I will employ myself so
diligently in the meantime that I think I can promise you that your son
shall be brought into your presence before you leave mine. I cannot put
in words how much I shall rejoice to see that meeting--and how proud to
have achieved it.” His voice trembled at the last words. And she could
scarcely command hers to say, “At what hour?”

“Six, or six-thirty? That will give time for the visit to which I shall
so look forward--and my daughter and her aunt--and time to permit you
to return while it is light, in time to dress for dinner.”

“Return--with Basil?”

Wu Li Chang smiled kindly. “I believe--with--Basil.” He spoke the name
as tenderly as she had, or as Nang Ping might have done.

“Oh! Mr. Wu!” the woman cried, and held out to him both her hands. He
took them and bent over them gravely.

“Oh! tell me,” she begged, her hands still in his, “Mr. Wu, do you
think he is safe and well?”

“I have no doubt of it,” Wu said earnestly. “And that it is merely a
question of making terms with those who are detaining him. And now,”
he said in a bright, brisk tone, turning alertly to the door, and this
time Ah Wong drew aside, “there is so much to do, and I have put
myself upon my honor not to fail in my--promise--if you do not fail----”

“I fail!” the mother said. “And you promise that I shall see my boy
to-night?”

“I promise!”

“Oh!” she went to him impulsively again and held out her hand. But he
seemed not to see it.

“Till six,” he said bowing, and was gone.

The woman sat down in the nearest chair and began to cry softly. Ah
Wong huddled over to her quickly and bundled down at her feet. “No,
no,” the amah said, catching her lady’s hand, clutching her dress. “No,
no, madame. Not go! Not go!”




CHAPTER XXX

SMILING WELCOME


Again, as Wu Li Chang passed through the office yards, the coolies
almost groveled at his feet, and this time he threw a curt but not
unpleasant word to one or two of them.

He had been with the Gregorys some time, the afternoon seemed at its
hottest, but he was as fresh and crisp as when the close duel began;
and yet in a more resilient, a more stimulated way, he had felt the
strain as they had not, for he had known the story of Basil and Nang
Ping.

But “crisp” and “fresh” were the last words that could be applied
to the shipper or his wife, or, for that matter, to any of their
companions. Robert Gregory was having a stiff “peg,” and needed it; and
Mrs. Gregory, less unnerved, was tired and anxious enough. And Holman
and his fellow faithful few were on desperate tenterhooks both for
their chief (he was roughly lovable and not a mean master) and for the
threatened business to which they were sincerely and doggedly devoted.

Perhaps Tom Carruthers and Ah Wong were the two Gregoryites least
unhinged by the day’s fusillade of miscarriage and by its recurrent
stalemate. Ah Wong was anxious, but she had been racked by no surprise.
Of the Steamship Company’s business she knew little--and cared less.
But, even so, she probably had, next to Wu Li Chang, a correcter
estimate of the whole complicated situation than any one else. Bradley
and Holman came next in prescience, but neither of them suspected, much
less knew of, the particular slant the diabolism of Wu’s vengeance had
taken, or of the appointment he had made with Basil’s mother.

Tom Carruthers was “no end” sorry, and sincerely so. But he could not
quite help getting a certain enjoyment out of it all. He was built
that way--and he was only twenty-four--and he had come to China to
have an occasional nibble at the spice of things, almost as much as he
had come to master the details of a business to which his father had
assigned him not too sanguinely. The bankruptcy that positively seemed
to threaten the great firm could not even embarrass him. His father was
a very rich man (as mere British wealth went), and he himself an only
child. Mr. Gregory’s wealth had not in the least added to Hilda’s charm
in Tom Carruthers’ eyes.

But the depression at the office was growing tormenting, and so was the
heat, and Robert Gregory’s nervous irritability was a bit trying, so
when Hilda announced her determination to “go home” Tom resigned the
affairs of the business cheerfully enough and picked up his hat.

Hilda saw that she could do nothing for her father by “hanging round.”
And “hanging round” was an occupation she particularly disliked. And
when she learned that her mother had slipped off with Ah Wong without a
word, she said, “How shabby!” and prepared to follow suit.

Robert Gregory scarcely noticed his wife’s defalcation--and certainly
did not resent it. The business turmoil did not lesson with the
lessening day; it increased. His tired, unsteadied hands were
overflowing full, and towards dinner-time (another whiskey and soda had
taken the place of tea) he deputed Murray to ’phone Mrs. Gregory that
he would not be home till very late that night, if at all. Hilda had
answered the ’phone, and had said, “All right,” Murray reported. And
Gregory grunted an acknowledgment, paying little attention, engrossed
in other things.

Florence Gregory was a just and a good-humored mistress, not an
indulgent one. And she was in no way of the class of women who court
or accept the advice of their servants. Even in the days of her modest
Oxford housekeeping, when her own youthfulness and the deficiencies
of the vicarage purse would have made most girls so placed peculiarly
vulnerable to the insidious encroachment of hireling “I wills,” and “I
won’ts,” she had been truly mistress of that manse, adamant towards
would-be familiarity. And that natural smooth caste hardness had not
softened under the flux of travel or the sunshine of affluence. From
their first quarter of an hour together she had commanded distinctly,
and Ah Wong, without comment, had obeyed. During the last week Mrs.
Gregory had leaned not a little on her amah, sensing in the Chinese
woman, who too was a mother, a something of sympathy that even Hilda
could not give her, but she had in no way abrogated any of her personal
autocracy to Ah Wong or let the space of discipline between them
lessen. When Ah Wong had exclaimed, “No, no, madame! Not go!” the first
liberty Ah Wong had ever taken, the mistress had scarcely heard and had
not heeded; but when, on their return to the Peak, the amah had again
urged “Not go!” Mrs. Gregory had checked her sternly, and Ah Wong had
known that it was worse than useless to repeat the entreaty. To appeal
to any one else, against her mistress--to Missee Hilda, to the master,
or even to John Bradley--never occurred to her. And she submitted
silently, only venturing a piteous, “Me clome? Madame take Ah Wong?”

“Of course,” Mrs. Gregory said, not unkindly. “He expressly said I
should bring you.”

That there could be no question between them as to who “He” was told
clearly of how Wu Li Chang had gripped the thought of both these women,
and (at least of one) had gripped also the imagination.

At five o’clock--the hotness of the terrific day was scarcely waning
yet, and Hilda and Tom in the darkened sitting-room were eating ices
with their tea--Mrs. Gregory and Ah Wong went quietly out and took
the next car down the Peak. On the level (such level as terraced
Victoria City can show) the amah hailed two rickshaws, and they bowled
inconspicuously to the water’s edge.

They did not use the ferry. A little boat was waiting for them. Ah Wong
had secured it by messenger; and she took care that the jinrickshaw men
should hear her tell the boatmen where they were to pole--which they
already knew perfectly.

And then she sat down at her mistress’s feet and waited. She had done
all she could.

The boat slipped slowly through the gurgling water, the coolies
sing-singing droningly as they poled her. Neither of the women spoke
until the little vessel grated against the shore. Ah Wong was strangely
calm, her very nerves hushed but alert in her lady’s service, and the
Englishwoman felt calmer than she had been for days, soothed that she
was doing something definite at last, and not a little confident in the
promise of Wu Li Chang.

She had made a special and somewhat magnificent toilet for this visit,
pathetically anxious to seem to pay every honor to the Chinese lady
for whose social peace of mind the mandarin had seemed so anxious.
Mrs. Gregory was wearing more jewelry than she had ever worn before
in the daytime, so thinking to do honor to a hostess who was of
the inordinately jewelry-loving Chinese race. Even the wonderful
bracelet--kept until now for functions of real importance--was hidden
beneath the laces of her sleeve.

The boat grated in the gritty earth, and Mrs. Gregory looked up, glad
to have arrived, confident of her reception and of the wisdom of her
visit.

Wu Li Chang need not have been at such pains to tempt his prey and to
bait his trap. Convention did not exist for Florence Gregory now, or
fear. Basil and Basil’s plight left her no thought, no consciousness of
lesser things. And she had as little thought of the safety or danger
of her act as she had of its propriety or impropriety. But if she
had known her coming at Wu’s bidding to Kowloon to be as imperilled
as it was, and as Ah Wong sensed it, still she would have come, as
unflinchingly, for Basil. Wu Li Chang had squandered inducement
needlessly. And he need not have played poor Sing Kung Yah for trumps.

That widowed gentlewoman was greatly bewildered and scarcely less
perturbed. Never before had she returned home ungreeted by Nang Ping.
And of Nang Ping she could hear nothing. To all her questions the
servants were deaf. The honorable master would tell his honorable
kinslady all to interest her in his own honorable time. To them he had
commanded silence.

She could not see Low Soong; it was forbidden--for a time. Wu Li Chang
she scarcely saw; and, when she did, him she dared not question.
He sent her to call on an English lady in the Barbarians’ Hotel on
the Peak, and she went, half dead with embarrassment, and carrying
a splendid offering of flowers. The lady was out--the mandarin had
almost counted on that--and Sing Kung Yah scudded back home, as fast
as she could induce the servants to carry her, and burned a score of
“thank-you” joss-sticks.

That she was to receive that same lady to-day, and at the very gates,
was a care, but one that sat on her more lightly. She was at home here,
surrounded by her customary servants, and she might know more or less
what to do, how to conduct herself in the unprecedented presence of a
foreign guest. And she was thinking of Nang Ping far more than of her
own approaching social ordeal, as she sat in her own apartment eating
perfumed ginger and quails dressed with sour clotted cream, and waiting
for the summons to the gate.

Both were very good: the ginger embedded in jelly-of-rose leaves, and
the hot, hot quail smothered in thick ice-cold sauce. She was very
nervous, but somewhat phlegmatically resigned, plying her delicate
chop-sticks industriously, now in the deep blue and white Nankin-ware
jar of fragrant confiture, now in the silver dish where the sizzling,
savory quail was too hot to be cooled by the icy cream, the sour cream
too cold to be lukewarmed by the quail.

Just at six her summons came. She sighed a little, gulped down a tiny
bowlful of bright green tea, and toddled off almost confidently to play
hostess to the lady of the mandarin’s latest whim, a little at a loss
for herself, but happily and proudly confident that Wu Li Chang could
do no wrong, much less blunder, and toddling fantastically because her
feet were very small--Sing Kung Yah had no claim to Manchu blood, had
had no traveled eccentric for a father and lord, and so, unlike Nang
Ping, her feet had been well bound. Because she was a widow she used no
cosmetics. But her clothes could not have been gayer: she was gorgeous.

She was standing smiling at the gate, servants on either side, when
the Englishwoman reached it. And when Mrs. Gregory held out her hand
she took it warmly, giggled and held it to her cheek, said a gurgling
something that sounded Italian but wasn’t, and drew her guest along the
path to Wu Li Chang’s threshold.

The two women went hand in hand, and Ah Wong walked close behind,
carrying a tortoise-shell card-case in her hand. If anxiety and torture
had made Basil’s mother oblivious of conventions as they affected
herself, they made her acutely careful to avoid every possible giving
of offense and appearance of slight. And she would not forget to leave
three cards, of her own and Hilda’s, one for each of the ladies of Wu’s
household.

Her reception encouraged her. This little creature was very friendly,
and it was nice of Mr. Wu to have stationed her at the gate, for he
was master of the smallest details here, she made no doubt of that.
She wondered at what point Miss Wu would appear, and the funny,
pigeon-plump cousin.

They went along the tortuous paths, through the lovely, elaborate
gardens (not Nang Ping’s garden), hand in hand up to the very door,
and Sing Kung Yah chatted incessantly in her pretty, musical mandarin
Chinese, and the guest said an amiable word now and then. Neither
understood a word the other said, or ever could, and Sing Kung Yah
thought that screamingly funny--and screamed with high-pitched, tinkly
laughter.

The sun was brilliant still. Flowers leaned with friendly welcome from
every ledge and corner. How perfectly absurd Ah Wong had been!

And Ah Wong kept closer and closer, growing more terrified every moment.

At the door Sing Kung Yah slid her hand gently away, and, toddling back
a step, gestured laughing that Mrs. Gregory was to go in first.

When the door had closed again, the guest was surprised to find that
the hostess had stayed outside. On what “Martha” errand had the little
housewife thought it necessary to go herself, in this household
overflowing with servants? But she was not altogether sorry. It was the
mandarin she wished to see--to hear what his success had been. Perhaps
it was his kindness that had arranged it so. But she must not forget to
ask the Wu ladies to lunch, and, above all, she must remember to leave
cards. The Chinese set such store on such things.

She caught her breath. The servant who was conducting her paused at a
door. Probably she would see the mandarin now.




CHAPTER XXXI

FACE TO FACE


It was four when Wu Li Chang reached Kowloon and his own home. Barely
two hours in which to arrange the details, the scenic background, of
the last act of the tragedy--the exquisitely horrible details of his
revenge. But it was time enough, for he had planned it all down to the
smallest point as he sat with Nang Ping dead at his feet. A few moments
would suffice for the orders he had still to give Ah Sing, and upon the
implicit obedience of his servants he could depend absolutely.

He bathed, dressed in the garments of his country, took rice, spoke
briefly to Ah Sing, then sent for Sing Kung Yah and coached that
surprised and flustered lady in the part she was to play in the events
of the afternoon. She was not a particularly skillful or astute
coadjutor--indeed, for a Chinese woman, she was dull, inept and dense;
but for seventeen years it had been her invariable habit to give him
minute obedience, and the habit would stand her in good stead to-day.
And, too, she had, of course, a Chinese memory--the most wonderful
memory bestowed on any race. He had little fear of Sing Kung Yah, and,
for that matter, the rôle he had assigned to her was but that of a
well-dressed supernumerary with a few unimportant lines to speak. She
was not essential to the movement of the piece, and her rôle might well
enough have been “cut” from the cast, but with the evil seething at his
heart all the native artist in him was aflame. He intended to carve
his victims delicately--a dish for the gods. On the terrible altar of
his hatred, yes, and of his just resentment, he would lay an English
woman who had never wronged him and an English son who----. But he
intended it all to be done as exquisitely as some finest ivory carving
cut by a master Chinese hand.

When he had dismissed Sing Kung Yah he went into his study and waited.

It was the room in which perhaps he had lived most. It was here
he studied; and in the many long hours of leisure which he always
relentlessly kept for himself, Wu Li Chang was a devoted student.
It was here he wrote; and Wu was an author of some distinction in
the current literature of China--the land in which a genuine love of
letters counts as nothing else does, a fine skill in literature is
respected as no other human quality is. There were poems to his credit
in the Imperial library at the pink-walled palace in Pekin, a book of
philosophy, a comedy, and a history of the women of his house. And he
contributed almost regularly to the _Pekin Gazette_ and at long
intervals to _Le Journal Asiatique_--in French, of course.

The hour-glass--he had turned it when Sing Kung Yah had left him--was
running down; almost was run.

Wu rose, and stood looking out into his garden, saying good-night to
it something as Nang Ping had said “good-by” to hers four mornings
ago--saying good-night, for it would be dark when Mrs. Gregory left him.

He had no doubt that she would come.

He turned from the window, and walked gravely into the next room, where
he intended--in less than an hour now--to receive his guest.

It was a curious room: Chinese, but with some differences from other
Chinese rooms. For this man dared to tamper with custom when it suited
his convenience, and to modify an architecture that had been unaltered
almost since Kublai Khan ordered every grave in China to be plowed up
remorselessly, and so made room for homes and crops for the living,
till then out-crowded by the honorable dead.

This was a very beautiful room, and so richly furnished that its
opulence must have been oppressive had it been less beautiful, its
taste less distinguished.

Essentially and strikingly like Nang Ping’s room, unlike hers it
was not so exclusively Chinese, and it was more nearly crowded. The
Chinese--like all Orientals--are fantastic collectors, even of European
flotsam and jetsam, though more discriminatingly so than the Turk, the
Indian, or the Japanese. In the remotest yamên in Honan or Kwei Chau
you may find a Dresden vase, a music-box from Geneva, a silver dish
from Regent Street, and--most probably of all--half a dozen clocks,
made anywhere from Newhaven, Connecticut to Novgorod, and all ticking
away together, but quite independently, and all giving a different lie
to the old dial in the sunny Chinese garden. (There were eighty-five
clocks--and all “going”--in one of the Pekin throne-rooms.) But you are
not apt to find, except in the poorer quarters of the treaty ports, the
gimcrack chandeliers and tawdry vases, Europe-made, which will astonish
and shame you in a palace in Patialla or Kashmere.

Wu had collected in princely fashion during his years in Europe.
There was a Venetian harp, a German grand piano, and an English
organ in an adjacent music-room. And in this, the smaller of
his own reception rooms, there were several European treasures.
Unlike most Chinese rooms, this was carpeted, not with one of the
beautiful native carpets, but with a great mat of silk and mellow
splendor--Constantinople was the poorer since Wu had purchased it.

It was an octagonal room--perhaps the only one in China--and when all
the sliding panels were closed its only ventilation came from a small
window or opening high up against the ceiling. The panels were made
to slide back or up, and out of sight; each was in the center of one
of the apartment’s eight walls, and cut into about half of the wall’s
width. The widest panel was open wide, and through it Wu could see his
garden, with all its pretty architecture of pagoda, bridge, pavilion
and “tinkly temple bells,” all its lush and flush of flowers, all its
affected labyrinth of yellow path and costly forests of dwarf trees,
and, beyond the garden, the bay, terraced Hong Kong, the imperial
Chinese sky.

The room was furnished in ebony, as costly and as carved as ebony could
be made. There were no chairs, but several stools. A stool stood on
each side of the moderately-sized square table, behind which stood the
most noticeable article in the room--the huge bronze gong, swinging in
a frame of chiselled ebony lace and silver and onyx, which no hand but
the mandarin’s ever struck.

There were several cabinets, Chinese masterpieces, holding china and
bric-à-brac, chiefly Chinese and all priceless.

Chinese antiquities of every description were on the walls and on
narrow tables against the walls--bronze from Soochow, porcelain from
Kintêching, cornelians from Luchow cut into gods and reptiles, jades
from the quarries of Central Asia, bowls, weapons, vases, statues,
armor, a piece of Satsuma that Yeddo could not match.

There were two scrolls inscribed with lofty sentiments Tze-Shi
herself had brushed one, and Kwang-Hsu had given it to Wu with his
yellow-jacket. Aside from its imperial association it was very
beautiful--even a European could see that, and Bradley had spent
much covetous time gazing on it--for in all China, where the cult of
“handwriting” is an obsession, no one has ever written more beautifully
than her majesty. The other said in the original Arabic, “Es-salam
aleika.” (John Bradley had another verse from the same Sura over his
bed.)

And, as in Nang Ping’s room, there was just one picture--this one a
bird perched on a spray of azalea painted by Ting Yüch’uan.

Wu prostrated himself before the altar which proclaimed the owner’s
importance. He had come here to do worse than butchery, but to do it
as a priest--to sacrifice to his gods and to his ancestors, to scourge
in their service a woman who had never injured him or them, as much as
to scourge a man who had; but he had vocation in his heart rather than
personal vengeance--and such is Chinese justice.

Fantastic--is it not?--the Chinese code that ennobles and flagellates
the dead ancestors and the living kindred in punishment of the raw
present sin! And yet, even for it, there is a poor, feeble something to
be said. We dig down into the earth and uproot the diseased tree, burn
it _all_, search out and burn, too, its suckers and its saplings
lest all our orchard suffer worm-breeding blight.

From an alabaster box, gold-lined, he took a handful of yellow powder,
dribbled it into the tiny saucer of sacred oil burning before the
tablet, and as the pungent blue flames hissed up, prostrated himself
again, and knelt for a long time--in prayer.

When he rose Ah Sing had entered, and stood waiting to say, “Your
honorable instructions have been obeyed.”

“Good,” Wu said grimly, throwing more powder, from a different box, on
to the votive oil. A thin smoke curled up, thickening as it rose into
perfumed clouds that broke in waves of jade hues until all the room was
a glow of green.

“Bring him now!” the mandarin said, seating himself beside the table
and waiting with an expressionless face.

Ah Sing said something to a servant waiting outside the door through
which he had come, and presently feet came along the passage. They were
bringing Basil Gregory to Wu Li Chang.

They had not met or exchanged a message since Wu had bent and gathered
up Nang Ping where she had swooned at Basil’s feet. Since then no
slightest message from the outer world had reached the prisoner in the
pagoda. Wu’s servants had brought him food, and, on the second night,
even a rug; but not once had they spoken to him or appeared to hear
what he said to them.

The hours in the pagoda had marked him. And--why not? Those other hours
there had marked Nang Ping down to doom. The man does not go scot-free.
Never! That is immemorial fallacy. Nature would be full-moon mad if
that were so--and nature is very wise and sane, as wise as she is old.
The partners foot the bill both--always. Nang Ping had paid her share.
Now he was paying his.

He looked ill and haggard, and his wrists were bound together. Two
Chinese servants stood guarding him, close on either side. Almost at
the threshold Ah Sing halted the three.

Basil Gregory had no doubt that he was about to die and little hope
that he would not be tortured first. And the horrors of Chinese
tortures lose little hideousness in the telling at English clubs in
China. Basil was abjectly tormented.

The mandarin sat and studied his prisoner curiously. His lip curled,
and his soul. What had his daughter, bred for centuries from China’s
best and finest, descended from Wu Sankwei and from the two supreme
Sages, and who might well have made an Imperial marriage, seen in this?
He had known such slight men by the dozens and twenties at Oxford,
scant-minded, uncultured, clad like popinjays; and for this--this
English nothing, this manling thing too slight for Wu Li Chang’s hate,
almost unworth his crushing--she had made the father that had adored
and cherished her grandsire to a mongrel of shame. The pain at Wu
Li Chang’s heart was greater and gnawed sharper than that at Basil
Gregory’s. The Chinese was the bigger man, and paid the bigger penalty.

And Nang Ping had died for this: degraded herself beneath Chinese
forgiveness, beyond pity, for this: disgraced him, her father, and the
great ancestry of a thousand years for this! _This!_--and she
might have been the bride of a _man_!--loved as he had loved her
mother, cherished as he had cherished Wu Lu--and the mother of sons,
honorable, love-begotten Chinese sons!

Almost Wu Li Chang’s Chinese imperturbability cracked under his strain.
His sorrow and his rage panted in his throat, battled, almost squealed
aloud. But he was master yet a little, and he said smoothly, “Well, are
your thumbs more comfortable?”

“If I were only free, I’d throttle you.” Basil said it, of course, to
cover his own terror--but, too, he meant it. He was insanely angry
with Wu. The offender rarely forgives!

“The heated language of youth!” the mandarin said with contemptuous
patronage. “But I will be indulgent. You will admit, I think,
that, so far, you have been dealt with leniently--considering the
resourcefulness usually attributed to us in the matter of ingenious
torture.”

“I presume you have not yet exhausted your ingenuity,” Gregory said
with sullen, trembling lips.

“By no means,” was the bland reply.

“And that is why I am brought here; I supposed so.”

“Partly,” the Chinese replied coldly; “also to prepare you for a shock.”

“Death”--Basil tried to say it stoically. And, too, since it was to
come, it would almost be welcome in place of such suspense.

“Nothing so pleasant,” Wu replied.




CHAPTER XXXII

“CUR!”


“Nothing so pleasant”--and the perfect placidity of his voice was more
cruel than any outburst could have been.

“Well,” the other said desperately, “but there’ll be a reckoning for
all this--my father----”

“Not necessarily, my young seducer,” the Chinese said softly. “Your
father I do not regard as a man at all formidable. I had a most
interesting interview with him--to-day. And I formed a low opinion
of his abilities. There is a positive hue and cry after you, of
course--almost a paper-chase. The walls of Hong Kong city are plastered
with your portrait, and even here, on the mainland, it is to be
seen. It is a very nice portrait, too--the nice likeness of a nice
English--gentleman--the portrait of a very handsome young--seducer.”
Wu Li Chang was not quite his own master now. The storm was rising,
threatening his own insolent calm. He rose and moved a little up and
down the carpet--quietly but stealthily, as hungry-for-flesh and
thirstily-dry-for-blood cats move through the jungle in the night.

His last word cut Basil Gregory. Wu was behaving like the yellow dog he
was; but he--Basil--was not entirely blameless: he had said as much to
himself, alone in the pagoda--that cursed pagoda. Oh, well!

“Your daughter loved me,” he began. And at a something manlier in his
tone than Wu Li Chang had expected to hear, Wu paused still and met
the English eyes squarely. “We are both young.” And after a pause,
so throbbing that even the three automaton servants must have felt
it beat, he added slowly, “Except that the two races don’t mingle, I
would----”

“Marry her?” Wu interrupted haughtily.

“Yes,” Gregory replied, as if proclaiming a determination and a
promise. “Yes--if she still wishes it.”

“A very interesting suggestion,” Wu sneered. “In your country, when a
woman has been dishonored, marriage is called ‘making an honest woman
of her.’ It is a quaint notion. To me it seems a nasty one--plastering
some putrid sore with gold-leaf! _Here_ we have other methods. To
us a woman’s honor, once stained, no more can be clean again than the
petals of a rose, torn and scattered by the storm, can be gathered back
into their opening bud to perfume the dawn and glisten with its dew.
If marriage, and with such as you, would redeem the honor of a ruined
girl, what would redeem the honor of a father and a house so desecrated
as mine? Nothing! And nothing is left me but to avenge. And I avenge it
now.” He turned and confronted the trembling wretch with a look before
which a braver and a less guilt-stained man might well have quailed,
and each word curled and hissed from his mouth like a snake.

Basil moistened his lips, tried to speak, but failed.

“However,” Wu continued, “I was going to say that although your
disappearance has become a matter of public advertisement, yet the
last place where you are looked for happens to be your present, if
temporary, abode. I say ‘temporary’ because in this life everything
is temporary--even life itself. You might be buried here--though I
don’t say you will be--without any one being the wiser outside my
own household. At one word from me you would be taken and crucified
beside the pagoda, and left there until the carrion birds came and
plucked your vitals out, and your eyes, and no one would suspect, or,
if they suspected, dare make a move. Your people at your Government
House! They could do nothing. My Government would dare do nothing,
_even if they wished to_, for in an hour I could pull half China
tumbling down about their ears. By the way, your father is a ruined
man to-day. His ships are sinking, his credit gone. In China we punish
parents for their children’s sin--and our gods have punished Robert
Gregory for yours and for his own: his own sin in having begotten
such a _thing_ as you, and his daily sin of impertinence to my
countrymen. Well, my virtuous young English gentleman, our interview
is drawing to its close. What is it that you wish to say--if your
quivering nerves will let you speak?”

“If”--Basil Gregory spoke humbly enough now--“if you would grant me one
favor.”

Wu Li Chang laughed aloud. “Optimist!” he sneered. “Well?”

“That--that before anything”--his voice shook, and the words were not
very clear--“anything happens to me, you will let me write a letter to
my mother.”

“To your mother?” Wu said softly. But his triumph leapt in his veins.

“To my mother! I--I _beg_ you that one thing. It would not mention
this place or your name, of course”--Wu laughed--“but,” the tortured
man went on, “but if you would see that it reached her----” There was a
sob in his voice.

“And--so you would like to write to your mother?”

“Oh!” Basil Gregory cried, “double the torture you have planned, but
let me write to my mother.”

“This is very interesting,” the mandarin said, sitting down again.
“Very interesting--very. As for the torture I am preparing for you, I
shall not increase it, because it cannot be increased. Largest cannot
be enlarged. To the utmost one cannot add. So,” he laughed softly, “you
wish very much to write to your mother--a virtuous lady who bore a son
in wedlock!”

Basil Gregory dropped his head. He could no longer meet the eyes of the
father of Nang Ping.

“I suppose you would scarcely credit,” the Chinese voice went on
softly, “that my consideration for you had gone even beyond that? Would
you like--not to write to your mother--but to _see_ her?”

“See her!”

“Because you shall.”

“See her!” Basil cried, trembling as he had not trembled before. “Oh!
Mr. Wu!”

“Yes,” Wu said slowly (and it says something of him and of his race
that it did not occur to the other to doubt him--nor would have
occurred to any one), “you shall. And you shall see her soon. You may
even go home with her this very evening and sail for Europe next week.
It is quite possible.” He spoke with quiet emphasis.

“Mr. Wu!” the blanched face was twitching hideously, “oh! I would do
anything!” The frightened eyes leapt and burned. Gregory’s revulsion
was terrible--the great revulsion of reprieve, or nightmare torture
past and gone, the revulsion of a starving man at sudden meat and
plenty, of one dying of thirst who finds a brimming mountain-pool cool
to his reach, of the mother who from hours of agony slips towards sleep
with the warm velvet of her baby snuggled to her breast. He took one
eager step forward, and so far the men beside him let him go, and Ah
Sing made no sign. “If you would give me your daughter----” he said
earnestly, but at a look from Wu he paused.

“Give you my daughter?” Wu Li Chang said terribly. He rose and crossed
to Gregory and stood before him--very near. “I have no daughter,” he
said gravely, and his meaning was unmistakable, “to give you or any
man!”

The pinioned man recoiled with a sob. “Oh! my God!” he cried under his
breath. And he knew himself for the murderer of a girl who had given
him--all--and a child. And his own soul rose against him, and cursed
him, and called him “Cur!”




CHAPTER XXXIII

A CHINESE TEACHING


There was terrible silence between them. Great puffs of sweet smell
came in at the window where the headheavy wistaria hung and the lemon
verbena crowded at its gnarled roots, and bursts of sweet sound from
birds singing in the sun.

They looked at each other, weighing each the other--the man who had
given Nang Ping life and the man who had given her shame.

They each had given her death: one in guilt, one in love.

Basil Gregory looked into Wu’s eyes and could not look
away--fascinated, horror-held.

Wu looked his fill, then turned away and went slowly to the shrine.

Again he put the pungent votive powders to the flame, and all the room
quivered with deeply opalescent lights, and the odors of the garden
were as naught.

The mandarin bent his head to the tablet, and walked away from the
shrine, speaking in a changed tone--quite lightly.

“But I was speaking of your mother. I am expecting her here.”

“Expecting her! Here?”

“Here,” the Chinese repeated, standing close to Basil, eyeing him
narrowly.

“Then they know----” Basil began, but could not finish.

“No”--Wu smiled faintly--“they do not know. She is coming here, your
mother, as my guest--to learn, amongst other things, the truth about
you!”

“If you could spare me that!” Basil said hoarsely. “We have been more
like brother and sister,” he pleaded.

Wu took it up as a cue, and on it began, with a little leer, the
hideous part he had planned to play. “Yes, she is very young----”

“Tell my father, if you will----”

“Your father?” Wu said sharply.

“Yes, tell _him_, but----”

“I have nothing to do with your father!” Wu Li Chang said sternly, each
word an emphasis.

“But you said----”

“I said that your mother was coming here. She is coming--alone. She is
a devoted mother. I am going to test her devotion.”

Again there was a pause--while the horror sank in. Basil Gregory did
not grasp it at first, and could not grasp it very quickly. But it
crept into his soul little by little, and while its agony seized and
strangled him, Wu stood and watched him intently, Wu with the panther
light of intensest hatred in his half-closed eyes.

“You--you fiend!” The Englishwoman’s son screamed it, writhing.

Ah Sing slid a little nearer him. The two guarding moved on his either
side a little closer. But neither on their faces nor on Ah Sing’s was
there the slightest expression or any sign of interest.

“Why?” Wu laughed as he spoke. “Other countries, other ways! In
China a daughter often sacrifices herself for a father, a son for
his mother--to the utmost. You--English--reverse it, and the mother
sacrifices herself for her son.”

“You fiend of hell!” And with a yell of torment the Englishman sprang
almost too quick for the vigilants beside him. He wrenched one pinioned
hand free and swung it up mightily. But Ah Sing--still with an
expressionless face--leaned across the table, leaned between the blow
and Wu Li Chang.

And almost as Gregory sprang the other servants seized and held
him--they, too, with indifferent, blank faces. They would have shown
far more interest sweeping wistaria leaves from the graveled paths,
far, far more watching a quail fight.

“An eye for an eye!” the mandarin cried fiercely. “A tooth for a tooth.
_That is what you teach us, you Christian gentlemen!_ And,” he
hissed, from enfoamed, protruding lips, “Woman for woman! _We’ll
teach you that!_”

Basil Gregory hid his face in his hand and buried it on his shoulder.

For a space Wu Li Chang stood looking grimly at the foreigner. He did
not mean to see him again. Then he spoke emphatically to Ah Sing--in
Chinese--and at each sentence of the master’s Ah Sing bowed his head
with an earnestness that was a promise that each word of Wu Li Chang’s
should be obeyed strictly and minutely.

“Ah Sing,” the mandarin said, rising slowly and taking the beater from
where it hung beside the gong. He said something slowly, and then
struck once on the great brazen disk, gave a further direction, and
struck the gong twice. And Basil Gregory uncovered his eyes, lifted his
head limply and stood watching and listening, agonized, fascinated.
When Wu had finished his orders Ah Sing bowed still lower than he had
done before, and then went slowly from the room, but not by the door
through which they had brought Basil into it.

Wu turned to the Englishman. “You do not understand our barbaric
tongue. I have been telling my servants that when they next hear me
strike upon that gong they may release you to come here. You will
find your mother here. It will be a tremendous meeting. Back to the
pagoda! To-morrow it will be destroyed. Back to the pagoda, and wait
there, thinking of my daughter, and listen for the gong to sound--for
when it strikes you will know that you are free. These doors and all
the gates of my garden will be reopened then, and you will be free to
go--wherever you will--with her.”

“With her?” Basil Gregory gasped, bewildered and dazed.

“Yes,” Wu Li Chang told him with a curt smile, “for with my striking
of this gong your debt will be fully discharged. Your mother will have
paid it.”

Gregory made one supreme, straining effort to get at Wu. “You monster!”
he sobbed, “you monster of hell!”

“Quite so,” the Chinese said calmly. “Western logic is an unfathomable
mystery. You dishonored my daughter,” he began fiercely, and then broke
off abruptly. He’d waste no more words on this English thing. He’d
punish--strike to the quick, flay to the raw nerve--but not wrangle
with his condemned. “The sound of that gong will ring in your ears as
long as you live. Go where you will, you will hear it. Go where you
will, you will see, waking and sleeping, a pagoda by a lotus lake,
while you live; and when you die, you will feel the vengeance of a Wu.
Never again will you look upon your mother’s face without seeing too
the dead face of Wu Nang Ping--and mine.”

“Oh!” Basil moaned imploringly, “you can’t--you can’t do this awful
thing.”

“Take him away,” the mandarin said in his own tongue.

Basil Gregory understood the tone, though not the words. Dumb with
terror, he scarcely resisted as the two servants dragged him through
the door.

Wu Li Chang stood motionless. He heard the bolts shut. He heard the
footsteps die away. But still he did not move.

He was thinking of Nang Ping--not as he had seen her last, not as he
had known her for years now, but of Nang Ping, a laughing, imperious
baby. And then he thought of that other, dearer baby--the baby he had
married in Pekin--and a great, silent sob shook him roughly as he
stood.




CHAPTER XXXIV

ALONE IN CHINA


“The lady has arrived,” Ah Sing said with an obeisance, and speaking,
of course, as he always did to his master, in Chinese; “she is coming
through the honorable garden.”

“Show her in.” Ah Sing went out again, leaving open the wide sliding
doors through which he had come. And Wu, too, went from the room,
lifting his hands high in symbol to the altar as he passed it. He left
the room through its fourth door and closed it close behind him. He had
gone into his sleeping-room.

In a few moments Ah Sing returned, bowing at the threshold for Mrs.
Gregory to enter. She came in eagerly, Ah Wong close at her heel.
Absorbed as the mother was in her own exquisite anxiety and in the
paramount errand that had brought her here, still she was struck with
the distinction and the character of the room; and at any time less
engrossed it would have delighted and absorbed her. She had seen many
rich interiors in Europe, and not a little of colonial extravagance
in home decoration, but she had not seen such luxury as this. And the
quiet taste of the place, for some reason, surprised her, but not more
than its spotless cleanliness did.

Ah Sing watched the English lady with inscrutable eyes as she moved a
little curiously about the room; and to Ah Wong, watching him, it was
significant that for this once his scrutiny was open, almost frank.
And as he passed from the room, the two Chinese servants interchanged a
long, grave look. Ah Sing closed the door behind him.

“How stifling it is here!” Mrs. Gregory said, unfastening her cloak and
drawing off her gloves. “I wonder where my hostess has gone off to. How
very droll of her! Ah Wong”--putting her hand a moment on the other’s
arm--“I’m glad I have you with me!” The amah took the cloak and the
gloves; put the gloves in the cloak, the cloak over her arm. And after
a moment Mrs. Gregory moved wearily across the room.

Ah Wong looked hurriedly about the room--searchingly. She gave a little
quick breath when she saw the one high window. Without a sound she went
to Mrs. Gregory and touched her arm. Florence turned questioningly, and
Ah Wong pointed eloquently up to the high orifice; then, watching first
one door and then another, she moved a carved bench a little nearer the
window--without a sound--while the mistress stood and watched her half
curious, half amused. Again the amah pointed--this time from bench to
window, and from the window to the bench. She thrust her hand into her
dress, clutching at something hidden there, and bent her face close
to her mistress’s ear. But her own ear caught an almost imperceptible
sound, and when Wu came from his bedroom Ah Wong was standing some
distance from her lady, stolid but bored, her empty hands folded in
front of her, idly.

The mandarin stood just inside the door, gravely watching. He did not
speak. His face was very calm, priestly even.

Florence Gregory felt his presence, and turned with eager, welcoming
eyes. But when she saw him she recoiled a little, with a slight breath
of surprise. This morning in Hong Kong Wu had only half seemed to her
un-English. Here, in his own house, and clad as she had never seen any
one--stiff, gorgeous robes, tiny fan of ivory and silk, a mandarin’s
necklace of cornelian beads--he was intensely Chinese, barbarian,
unknown, and she felt very far from home.

Wu made the motion of salutation with his fan--it is so the Chinese
“bow”--before he said reverentially, “This is indeed an honor--none the
less felt because it was expected.”

Mrs. Gregory laughed a little nervously, but somewhat reassured by his
voice, as he had intended her to be. “You startled me, Mr. Wu,” she
said. “I hardly expected----”

“This dress?” he said pleasantly. “It is put on in your honor. To
have received you in my Chinese home in other than Chinese garb would
have been a rudeness--and so, impossible. Hong Kong is your Queen’s
now, even its city’s legal name--though custom-ridden tongues still
stubbornly say ‘Hong Kong’--and there, where I am but a business man
among business men, I dress as Europeans do. I find it more convenient.
And a long residence in Europe makes it easy. But this is China. You
are indeed in China now, madame--as truly in China as if you were
within the vermilion walls of the great imperial palace or in evil
Hwangchukki. The Kowloon territory ceded to England in 1860 ends a
yard beyond my gates. My kinswoman seems remiss to you, I fear,” he
continued. “But pray dismiss the thought. She has gone to give an
order for your entertainment and to assume her best robes in your
honor--robes she may not wear to the gate.”

“Oh! but she was very splendid, and I thought how beautifully
dressed.” The mandarin fluttered his fan in grateful acknowledgment.
“And your daughter? I hope Miss Wu is well?”

Wu Li Chang bowed--his head as well as his fan this time.

“And now, Mr. Wu”--she could wait no longer, and as she spoke she moved
a few steps towards him--“what news?”

“Good,” Wu said assuringly. “So that it does not need to travel fast,”
he added suavely, moving to the table, motioning her deferentially to a
seat beyond it.

“Ah! thank God!” She was tremulous with the intensity of her relief,
for she had feared the worst. It’s a sorry trick that mother-hearts
have. “And thank you, Mr. Wu,” she added earnestly, with a pretty,
friendly gesture that was very womanly and very English. But she was
too restless, and too anxious still for details, to take at once the
seat Wu again indicated. And she moved about the room a little, hoping
Wu would volunteer more, and a little at a loss what to say next if he
did not of his own accord immediately slake in full the burning torment
of her anxiety. “Ah Wong, take my scarf,” she said, unwinding it. It
was light and lacy, but even it seemed to stifle her. Ah Wong came for
the gauze, and backed away again, standing immovable, uninterested, by
the door.

Mrs. Gregory waited, a little pantingly, but Wu said nothing. She
looked round the room, not at its treasures, but looking for her own
next words, piteously afraid of blundering, unable to be patient.

Wu Li Chang did not misunderstand, but he pretended to, and said in a
pleased voice, “You find my modest treasures interesting?”

“Very,” she forced herself to lie. She had heard a great deal of
Oriental deliberateness, and she was heroically determined to commit no
social solecism, give this man no smallest affront. “Oh! very.” If he
wished his possessions admired by her, admired by her they should be,
and to his vanity’s content, cost her heart the delay what it might.
“I had no idea----” she nerved herself to begin, but stopped abruptly,
embarrassed and at a loss.

“That a Chinese house could be so civilized a place?” Wu quizzed
good-naturedly.

Really, she must do better than this. She _would not_ give
offense. “Not only civilized,” she said, contriving a slight laugh--it
was an awkward one--“but refined to the last degree.”

There was very fine sarcasm and some contempt in the little bow he
gave her--not a Chinese bow--but his voice was sincere and almost
pleading. “My dear Mrs. Gregory,” he began, “there is not so very much
difference between the East and West, after all. Perhaps we in the
East have a finer sense of art; certainly we care more for nature. But
we _all_ have the same desires--ambitions--the same passions,
hate, revenge--and love!” There was honey in the slow, well-bred
voice now--honey and something else. It jarred on the Englishwoman,
and she turned with a slightly uncomfortable look. Instantly his tone
changed to one entirely courteous still, but ordinary and commonplace.
“Will you not be seated?” he said simply. “Or shall I describe some
of my ornaments? You look about you as if you were good enough to be
interested in my Chinese bric-à-brac.”

“Yes--do--do,” she stammered desperately; “that--that wonderful thing
there? That gorgeous-looking duck!”

“Ah!” Wu said, “that is a very precious treasure. Our Chinese potters,
as probably you know, are very fond of reproducing members of the
animal kingdom.”

“I have never seen a finer piece of that kind of pottery in my life,”
Mrs. Gregory said with almost breathless enthusiasm, gazing at the
curio with eyes that scarcely saw it and fumbling her rings.

Wu Li Chang smiled. “And it is a very sacred object,” he said.

“Oh?” she asked.

“It is a mandarin duck,” Wu told her significantly. “And the mandarin
duck with us, you know, is the emblem of conjugal fidelity!” He ended
with a strange, low, sinister laugh. It was slight and very low, but
it affected Florence Gregory weirdly. To cover up her own disconcerted
inquietude she moved--at random--to one of the magnificent carved cedar
columns beside the altar (Wu watching her with a grinning face) and
pointed to the weapon hanging there. “And that sword up there?”

“That?” Wu laughed, and at the sound Ah Wong’s blood curdled in her
breast; “yes, that’s an interesting thing. It has rather a curious
history.”

Her procrastinated anxiety for her son, her thwarted hunger to see him,
were unnerving her, and she was growing anxious on her own account,
though that she scarcely realized and in no way could have explained.

“Oh?” she forced herself to say. But she said it lamely, and she could
say no more.

Apparently Wu noticed nothing amiss. “Perhaps rather a gruesome one,”
he said with a note of apology.

“Oh!” his guest said with a shudder; “well, then, don’t tell me! At the
moment I don’t quite feel----”

“Then,” Wu interrupted her quickly, solicitously, even, “I will spare
you its story,” but added more crisply, “for the present, at any rate.”

He moved easily about the room and proceeded in the most leisurely way
to point out his treasures. “This,” he said, lifting a bowl from its
place in one of the cabinets and bringing it to her, “will interest you
very much. This is one of the famous dragon bowls--one of the first
three ever made.”

“Indeed,” she said, “how very interesting!” But she could not hide her
torture or her indifference.

Wu smiled cruelly into the priceless dragon bowl, and carried it back
to its shelf even more slowly than he had brought it. “Up here”--he
pointed to over one door--“I have what your English collectors call
a three-border plate. I have a set of six. Up there”--he pointed to
the top of another cabinet--“is another with five borders. It is
almost unique. Li Hung Chang has one, Her Imperial Majesty the Dowager
Empress has one, but they are very, very rare. And this”--indicating
another bowl conspicuously placed on a carved ebony stand of its own
on a malachite pedestal--malachite carved into coarse but exquisite
lace--“is a Shangsi bowl. There are several in the house. Each one is
worth something like two thousand pounds.” He took it in his hands and
turned it about very, very slowly, now this way, now that, gloating
over it as if he’d never be done. The woman could have screamed; and,
in spite of her, a heavy sigh escaped. But Wu seemed not to hear it.
He returned the Shangsi to its stand at last and crossed the room to
a larger stand, and, laying down his fan, which he had held till now,
took up a sea-green vase, beautifully molded, enormously glazed. “You
must look at this, dear Mrs. Gregory,” he told her cordially, “you
must look at this well. This is a particularly fine piece--this sea
green glaze, Mrs. Gregory--one of the earliest productions of the
ceramic art.”

Her face was twitching now with nervousness. He seemed to notice her
perturbation for the first time, and said contritely, “But I fear I
weary you with my treasures,” and carried the glaze back, very, very
slowly, and put it down.

“No--no,” she said hastily, “no, Mr. Wu, not that--not that at all. But
I have come here with only one object----”

“With two, dear lady,” he interrupted her gently; “you forget Madame
Sing.”

“Indeed, oh, no--I--I did not mean that, forgive me--but my boy--his
safety--to see him--my mind is full of that----” The mandarin smiled
indulgently and took up his fan again. “I should like to come again, if
I may, some other time--when we are older friends”--she was pleading
now--“I should like to come again and spend hours examining all
your wonderful treasures--if you will let me. I hope you will. But
now--now--I have only one thought in my mind. I can have but the one.”
Her voice trembled pitifully.

Wu Li Chang smiled indulgently. “I have been waiting, Mrs. Gregory,” he
said explanatorily, “for you to dismiss your servant.”

Ah Wong fixed her eyes on her mistress, entreaty and misery in their
narrow depths.

Mrs. Gregory looked at Wu in startled astonishment. “Dismiss her--Ah
Wong? Do you mean send her away?”

“Only out of the room,” the mandarin said carelessly. “She can wait in
the courtyard.”

“But--but I couldn’t possibly do that,” the visitor stammered. She was
frightened now, and knew that she was.

“Nevertheless,” Wu returned, in a tone he had not used before, “I fear
I must insist.”

Their eyes met. The Chinese eyes of the man, inscrutable, the English
eyes of the woman, appealing, terrorized. And Ah Wong half thrust a
hand in her bosom, then dropped it back quickly to her side.

“But, Mr. Wu,” Mrs. Gregory faltered, “it is such an extraordinary
request to make--under the circumstances.”

“Not in the least,” Wu said smoothly--and he seemed somewhat amused.
“Do you in England usually bring your servants into the drawing-rooms
of your friends?”

“No-o. No,” she admitted lamely, “but--that seems different, somehow. I
think, under the circumstances--and Madame Sing----”

Sing Kung Yah’s remissness as a hostess received no further comment
from her kinsman. But he said emphatically, “I could not possibly
offend the spirits of my ancestors by sitting down in the room with
your servant.”

“Your ancestors, Mr. Wu! What on earth have they to do with a matter of
modern propriety?”

“I said I should offend them,” the mandarin replied with ominous
quietude.

“Well then,” the Englishwoman retorted, just a shade contemptuously,
“they must be very thin-skinned.”

“Mrs. Gregory!” Wu Li Chang said so sternly that she turned and looked
at him alarmed, “this afternoon your husband grievously offended me by
certain disrespectful allusions to my ancestors. He knew better--or he
should have done. You do not, for you are unacquainted with China.
So you must pardon me if I point out to you that in China we pay the
memory of our ancestors the deepest respect.”

“Oh!” she said unhappily, “I’m sorry--I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t offend
you for the world.”

“Then will you kindly send your servant away?” Wu put his words in the
sequence of a question, but there was neither interrogation nor request
in his voice: it was cold, imperative and final.

The Englishwoman hesitated miserably. She was thoroughly alarmed now.
“But,” she begged (for it was supplication--open, not implied), “Mr.
Wu, I--I hope that I shall myself be going soon.”

Wu took no notice of what she said, and, for the time no further notice
of Florence Gregory. He clapped his hands sharply, and at their sound
Ah Sing stood in the doorway.

“Analiaotang,” the mandarin said quietly. The frightened Englishwoman
understood no Chinese. But Wu’s tone--quiet as it was--said unmistakably,
“Take her away.”

Ah Sing moved quietly on Ah Wong, and she, looking pathetically at her
mistress, backed as slowly as she dared through the open door, from the
room. But at the threshold she paused, glanced for an instant up at the
high window, looked her mistress squarely in the eyes, bowed her head
and was gone.

And Mrs. Gregory had returned her amah’s signal, look for look.

It was two women against one man; and one of those women was Chinese.




CHAPTER XXXV

THE STORY OF THE SWORD


“You--you shouldn’t have done that,” Mrs. Gregory faltered as the door
closed again behind Ah Sing. “She is very devoted to me,” she added
feebly.

“No doubt,” the mandarin answered tersely. “But I fancy my authority is
even more powerful than her devotion.”

The woman’s uneasiness was growing rapidly. “I don’t think I ought to
have come,” she said, looking about her nervously. “But now,” with an
effort to speak ordinarily and to assume an unconcern she no longer
felt, “Mr. Wu, what is the news?”

“Oh! pray, Mrs. Gregory,” the Chinese begged, all the blandness in his
voice again, “do not let so trifling an incident disturb you in the
least.”

A sudden throb of Chinese music came from the garden, and at the first
note a change crept into his face. It was such music--but softly
thrummed, almost timid--as he and Wu Lu had heard together on their
first hours alone in Sze-chuan. Chinese music is strange to European
ears; they rarely learn to hear it for what it is. It is not discord.
It is not crude. At its best it is the pulse of passion turned into
sound. No other music is so passionate, no other music so provocative.
And this was Chinese music at its best. Wu laid down his fan softly,
and stood listening, his head thrust a little towards the sound. Mrs.
Gregory listened too for a moment, startled; then, in a spasm of
nervous tension, she covered her ears with her hands.

Wu took a step towards her. “Do you not find the music agreeable?” he
asked her in a creamy voice.

“No,” she almost sobbed, “it is horrible! Horrible! I--I can’t bear
it--as I feel now.” And she sank down miserably on a stool and leaned a
little against the table.

Wu smiled--a cruel, relentless smile. But he moved to the low, wide
window, pushed back the opaque slide, and called out abruptly,
“Changhoopoh.” The music stopped instantly.

“Oh, thank you!” the woman cried.

“I am sorry it distressed you,” he said in an odd voice; “perhaps these
notes----”

“They jarred on me dreadfully,” she sighed.

“It is a pity,” the mandarin told her, “for the music was in your
honor.”

“I’m sorry,” she faltered, twisting and untwisting her little
handkerchief--Wu was fanning himself again, slowly, contentedly--“not
to appreciate it more. You must please forgive me,” she pled, “but I
am so dreadfully overwrought.” She turned to him with a wan smile that
tried to be confident, but failed, and with a brave attempt to appear
at ease that was sadder than her tears would have been, “Now, Mr. Wu,
please tell me. Where is my son? What do you know about him? Oh! if you
only understood a mother’s anxiety!”

Wu Li Chang looked into her eyes with a narrow smile that was half
a taunt, half a caress. “Ah!” he said, laughing a little, “the old,
old mother-vanity. Why is it, I wonder, that motherhood lays claim to
all the love, all the tenderness, and to all the misery of parentage?
And it is so, world-wide. Our own women are so. But”--his voice grew
stern--“fathers feel too! Fathers love their young. Fathers dote,
brood, fear, suffer.” He ended with a slight, bitter laugh that was
a sneer and frightened the woman oddly, and then he added smoothly,
imperturbably, “I was about to say, Mrs. Gregory, that that music,
performed in your honor, is one of our classical love-songs.”

“Really,” she responded lamely. “Well, I hope your love-making is not
so----” She broke off, painfully at a loss, and turned her head away.

Wu, still standing, leaned towards her, resting his hands on the
table between them. “Not so--violent?” he suggested with a leer,
“Displeasing? Passionate? What was the word you were about to use, Mrs.
Gregory?” He almost whispered her name.

“Oh! Mr. Wu!” Florence exclaimed, rising hysterically--the torture
was telling on her cruelly now; the handkerchief was torn and
knotted--“please have mercy on a mother’s agony!”

Wu Li Chang bent down, across the table still, and laid a hand very
gently on hers. At his touch her self-control, already worn to a
thread, snapped, and she screamed violently. Wu moved his fingers
softly across her wrist, and smiled down at her amiably. “I’ll scream
the house down!” she gasped pantingly. Wu looked at her calmly, shook
his head deprecatingly, and folded his hands upon his arms beneath
his sleeves. Nothing answered her cry of terror--unless the absolute
stillness of the garden did, or its rich, penetrating perfume. “I’m
sorry,” she murmured distractedly, recognizing her mistake, and that to
show fear would both affront him and invite annoyance. “I didn’t mean
that,” she said, choking back a second scream; “I only mean that--oh!
I’m tortured by all this suspense.” In spite of her new resolve, a low
sob broke from her, and she huddled down upon the stool again, crying
like a tired and frightened child.

The man stood a moment watching her grimly. Her head was bowed and
she could not see his face. There was bitter determination on it,
remorselessness, but no desire. He moved slowly across the room and
closed and fastened the thick screen-slide of the window that looked
upon the garden. And now again, except for the high narrow window,
through which no one could look out or in, the room was shut and barred
from all the rest of the world.

They two were entirely alone.

The mandarin moved slowly back until he stood beside the woman. “Pray
compose yourself, dear lady,” he said very quietly. “That weakness was
unworthy of you, and hardly complimentary to your host.” He took her
hand quietly in his, and she made no remonstrance, made no attempt to
draw her hand away again. He put his other hand on her arm, and pushed
her gently down upon her seat, and released his hold.

“I’m so sorry,” the woman said brokenly, brushing her hand across her
eyes. “I--I am not myself. Please forgive me.” Wu flicked that aside
with a courteous gesture. “And now,” her voice was little more than a
whispered gasp, “Mr. Wu, please tell me----”

“I am about to do so. Patience!” Wu said silkenly. “In China things
move slowly. China is the tortoise of the world, not the hare. I was
going to tell you”--he spoke with a deliberation that was a torture in
itself.

“Yes?” she interrupted his vindictive procrastination feverishly.

“About that sword.” The mandarin pointed to where it hung.

Mrs. Gregory half smothered a moan.

“The sword with rather a gruesome history----”

“Oh! don’t, please, Mr. Wu,” she broke in, “please--I--I couldn’t bear
it now.”

“But, my dear Mrs. Gregory,” he persisted blandly, “good news will
keep. Time is not pressing. Besides, tea has not yet been brought in.”

“Tea!” she panted distractedly; “oh! Mr. Wu, you must please excuse me.”

“I beg _you_ to excuse _me_,” the Chinese corrected, a little
arrogantly. “For countless generations my ancestors have drunk tea at
this hour, and our tradition must be kept up. You have been long enough
in China to know, perhaps, that tea-drinking with us as a matter of
ceremony is an indispensable custom----”

“Yes, I do know that,” she said quickly, “but--I----”

“And so,” Wu continued pleasantly, “whilst we are waiting for tea I
will tell you the story of the sword.” And he moved as if to lift it
down.

With half-closed eyes, wearied with terror, Florence Gregory half
crouched against the table, prepared to listen. Her rings were cutting
into her hands. Her handkerchief lay at her feet, a ball of rag.
Suddenly Wu turned from the weapon, left it hanging in its place and
swung back to her; standing behind her, his hands on the table, almost
touching her, bending over her, he said, “By the way, Mrs. Gregory, you
must love your son very much.”

“Oh!” she told him, rising and turning to him with supplication in
voice and gesture, “I do.”

“Otherwise you would not be here?” the Chinese asked her calmly.

“Otherwise I should not be here,” she said a little proudly, stung for
the moment back to a sort of self-assertiveness.

“Alone,” he added with a horrid emphasis. “But a mother’s love is
capable of any sacrifice, is it not?”

“It is capable of _much_ sacrifice,” the woman returned, some
dignity lingering in her voice.

“If your son were in any peril, you would----”

“Oh!” the mother said sadly, “I would give--my very life.”

“Your life!” the mandarin exclaimed almost contemptuously. “In China
life is cheap. Is there nothing you value even more?”

“Why?” she asked feebly, at bay now, and putting up such poor fight as
she could for time, in the desperate hope that some outside help might
come--from Ah Wong or from somewhere. “Why, what can one value more
than life?”

“Let us rather say,” the Chinese insinuated, bending until his breath
fanned her cheek, “what can a woman value more than her own life--or
the life of her son?” He paused, not for a reply--he expected none--but
to watch the effect upon her of his poisoned words; to watch and gloat.
She, poor creature, no longer made any pretense. Her strength was gone:
worn away by the persistent drip, drip of his long, slow cruelty. She
looked about the room wildly, saw the face leering close to hers, and
shrank away shuddering. “When I have your attention, Mrs. Gregory,” Wu
said determinedly, but falling back a pace or two.

The entrapped woman summoned up all her courage. “You shall have it,
Mr. Wu,” she said steadily, rising, “from the moment you tell me what I
came to hear.”

“If you will be seated again,” the mandarin said suavely, “I will
proceed to do so. But you must allow me to choose my own route.”

Florence Gregory looked at her tormentor squarely, then beseechingly.
She hesitated. And then she sank back listlessly on to the seat.

“And so,” the man continued, “I will commence with--the sword.”

Mrs. Gregory closed her aching eyes and caught her cold hands
together--and waited.

The mandarin moved, and spoke more and more deliberately. Slowness
could not be slower than his was now. He took down the sword--he
remembered how he had touched it last--his face was ice, his voice as
cold. “As I told you,” he began, standing in front of her, the sword
resting on its point, held between them, “it belonged to an ancestor of
mine who lived many generations ago, Wu Li Chang, whose name I bear.
Perhaps you would like to look at it more closely.” There was a note of
command in his voice, and the woman, obeying, lifted her head a little
and fixed her agonized eyes on the weapon he held, edge towards her.
“I will show it to you, and then restore it to its place. You see,
the blade is no longer keen----” But the point was. She saw neither.
“I keep it merely for its history.” He laid it on the table, laid it
between the Englishwoman and himself, as he might have laid a covenant
or some vital document of evidence, a terrible accusation, a great deed
of gift.

The torture of the merciless leisurely recital was telling on the woman
visibly. She had held a pistol stoically enough this morning. But when,
at a weary movement of her own, the lace in her sleeve caught in the
old sword’s hilt, she shuddered and shrank back. She made no pretense
of listening. She was “done,” for then at least; and of her diplomatic
courteousness not a shred was left. But yet she heard each word.

Wu sat down again, and the slow, cold voice went on evenly. “My
ancestor had only one child, a very beautiful daughter. He worshiped
her with more devotion than is common in China--for you know we do
not often (unless of pure Manchu blood) esteem daughters so highly as
sons. But he was an admirable man--a good neighbor, unselfish, upright,
charitable (and--is it not strange?--for all this was before the
missionaries came to China), a faithful husband--he was a very devoted
father. She was, in your Western phrase, the apple of his eye. Well,
one day when the time came for her marriage to a mandarin to whom she
was betrothed, her father discovered that she--that her marriage was
no longer possible.” Basil Gregory’s mother was listening now, not
listlessly. The ears of a mother’s soul are terribly acute. “He dragged
from her her lover’s name, and then, without a word of reproach or of
warning, he slew the being that he loved--with that sword.”

The English mother moaned. She understood.

“And after that, her lover too was slain; and not only he, but also his
sister, his mother, his entire family. My old sword has drunk deep,
Mrs. Gregory,” and he drew a finger lovingly along its blade.

“Don’t--don’t tell me any more,” Florence Gregory whispered.

Wu lifted the weapon and laid it across his knee--reverently. “I warned
you that it was rather a gruesome story,” he said gravely.

“Yes--well,” she stumbled, playing still for time, trying to think,
“thank Heaven we are more civilized to-day than--than anything so
horrible as that!”

Wu smiled. “Much more civilized, no doubt. Methods change; and since
I have had the advantage of a European education, if I found myself
in such a case, I would not adopt so bloodthirsty a revenge. Indeed
I think, if anything, my ancestors erred on the side of leniency.”
Wu Li Chang paused. Less light was coming through the one high window
now. Florence Gregory was well-nigh strangled by the beating of her
tortured, frightened heart. And almost Wu could hear its beat.

“He was robbed of honor,” he said sternly; “he took merely life
in exchange, whilst he might have taken--from the sister or the
mother--that which they would have held dearer than life. Are you
listening to me, Mrs. Gregory?” for she had buried her face in her
hands on the table where the sword had laid.

She lifted her head heavily--her face was ashen and lifeless--and
looked at him with stricken, agonized eyes.

“I have wearied you,” Wu said contritely. “Your husband would reproach
me--or your honorable son. My story was too long, and unpleasant in an
English lady’s ears. Yet I have said no word that does not bring me
nearer to my point. I, too, had a daughter----”

“Had!” the woman’s lips just breathed it.

“And family history has repeated itself--so far.”

For some moments there was silence in the room--a silence far
more poignant than any words--a silence chill and kindless as the
voicelessness of death. Then Florence Gregory started up at the sounds
of bolts withdrawn and of panels sliding in their grooves.

Wu rose too, carried the sword, and put it beside the gong. “It is
growing dark,” he said.




CHAPTER XXXVI

IN THE PAGODA AND ON THE BENCH


So long as he may live Basil Gregory will never understand how he
lived through those hours in the pagoda--his last hours in the pagoda
by the lotus lake. So long as he lives he must remember them, and
shudder newly at each remembering--waiting again in torture and alone
to hear the deep-throated damnation of Wu Li Chang’s gong telling him
that--that he was branded forever, soul-scarred. Wu Li Chang had hit
upon something that not even a man could forget.

How he got there he never knew. He remembered being taken to the
mandarin, the terrible interview, the news of Nang Ping’s death, the
demoniac threat of his mother’s ordeal and agony, but nothing of his
return to the pagoda. For a time--he had no way of knowing how long
or how brief--a merciful space of blank had been vouchsafed him. And
the utmost fury need not have grudged him it. For, if the mother in
the house suffered more than a death, the son in the pagoda, when
consciousness crept back, suffered her sufferings multiplied. She was
his mother, and he loved her. Always she had been very good to him. And
he had been so proud of her. Could he ever feel quite that pride again?
Her very sacrifice must smirch her in the eyes of the son for whom
it was made, and whose crime it punished. Even his love for her must
be a little tarnished, a little weaker, after the clang out of that
brazen gong. Wu Li Chang had found a great revenge. His own honor had
never burdened Basil Gregory; but his mother’s honor--ah! Or, for that
matter, even Hilda’s, or his cousin May Gregory’s--for, like so many
such men, Basil Gregory leaned his soul (such as he had) and his pride
upon the women of his blood. To be virtuous vicariously is a positive
talent with some men.

His mother! He writhed. His mother! He tore against the pagoda’s
walls with his hands, all pinioned as they were--for his freed hand
was bound again--until his knuckles bled. If such punishment as Wu
had devised could be shown vividly, anticipatorily, to men about to
stray, the gravest of the social problems must be so somewhat solved,
the most stinging of the burning questions somewhat answered. If sons,
light, selfish, weak, could expect such chastisement as Basil Gregory
was enduring now, a famous commandment would be honored in observance
an hundredfold, dishonored by breach miraculously less. A daughter’s
shame--a sister’s--that scourges most men; a wife’s--oh! well, there
are wives and wives, there are men and men, but a mother’s--ah! That
touches all manhood on its quick. Brand the scarlet initial of adultery
on his mother’s brow in punishment of him, and what son would commit
the fault? Fewer!

From the sun--for there were spaces pierced in the elaborate stonework
of the pagoda’s thick sides, and he could see through some of them--he
thought that he must have escaped nearly an hour of the misery of
consciousness.

Heaven knows the scene enacted in the smaller audience hall was
exquisitely terrible enough; but the man alone in the pagoda pictured
it ten times more terrible, more hideous, more stenched than it was.
Made an artist in fiendishness by his love for his child, Wu was most
fiendish, most exquisite, in his enmaddening deliberateness. He drew
out the woman’s agony until the sinews of her soul seemed to crack and
bleat. The hideous hour seemed an age to her. To Basil, waiting alone
in the pagoda, the hour seemed ages piled on ages.

Alone? But no, he was not alone. This was Nang Ping’s pagoda. She had
given him “free” of it, and shared it with him. She shared it with him
still. A ghost--a girlish Chinese ghost--stood beside him and looked at
him adoringly, accusingly, with death and motherhood in her eyes. “Oh!
Nang Ping! Nang Ping! Forgive, forgive!” he cried, and hid his face on
his pinioned arm. Then he looked up with a cry--wide-eyed, for he had
seen his mother in the room he’d left, the room where the gong was,
and Wu--he saw his mother, and the Chinese moving towards her, and he
turned and cursed the girl-ghost at his side--the poor dishonored ghost
with a tiny nestling in her arms.

Angry at punishment self-entailed, to shift, or seek to shift, the
blame, or some part of it, upon shoulders other than our own, is a
common phase of human frailty. “The woman tempted me.” And so the fault
is really hers. Punish the temptress and let me go. “The woman tempted
me”: it is the oldest and the meanest of the complaints. But sadly
often it is true enough.

A man never had less cause to urge it, in self-extenuation, or even in
explanation, than Basil Gregory had. Nang Ping had never tempted him.
Even in the consummation of their loves, the heyday of her infatuation,
she had never wooed him. In their first acquaintance, contrived in part
by him, brought about in part by a fan of Low Soong’s, lost and found,
Nang Ping had been as shy and unassertive as a violet. She had never
tempted except with her own sweet reserve and the fragrant piquancy of
her picturesque novelty. And that she had not sought him, or, for some
time, allowed him advance, had been her chief charm for him. And on the
day that he had told her that he was returning to Europe, and at once,
leaving her to face their dilemma alone, she had uttered no reproach,
made no outcry--just a quiet expostulation abandoned as soon as made.
“You will not come back,” she had said quietly, and had gone from him
calmly, with dignity.

Never lover had less just cause to reproach mistress than he had to
reproach or blame Nang Ping. But for his mother’s sake, and, too,
perhaps, for his craven own, he did, and cursed the girl who had died
for him, as he raged futilely here in the pagoda, where he had taken,
and she had given, her all.

It is a big thing to be a manly man.

It is a tragedy to be a woman--except when it’s the very best of great
good luck.

       *       *       *       *       *

Very little of the good luck of life, very little of the joyousness of
womanhood, had ever been Ah Wong’s. All her life she had worked hard
for scant pay and no thanks. All her life she had yearned passionately
for companionship, and been lonely. From a brutal father she had
escaped to a brutal husband. Her children were dead, and had not
promised much while they lived. God knows, Mrs. Gregory had given her
little enough--almost nothing. And yet Mrs. Gregory had given her her
best time--the nearest approach to a “good time” she’d ever known. And
she was pathetically grateful to have had even so much of creature
comfort, such crumbs of kindness, so shabby and lukewarm a sipping
of the wine of life. The Englishwoman did not even know that she had
been kind to the amah. Indeed, Ah Wong had merely warmed her cramped
and frozen being in the careless overflow of a nature that, by happy
accident, was full of sunshine and brimmed with radiance.

Ah Wong was grateful, and Ah Wong was honest. She meant to repay. She
hated debt; almost all Chinese do. She had loyalty. She had grit. She
had Chinese wit. And she had the light wrist of her sex at subterfuge:
it is world-wide.

Ejected from the house, she sat down contentedly in the courtyard and
began to knit--an industry foreign to Chinese eyes. It brought curious
women of the household about her. She had intended that it should. They
brought her liangkao and melon seeds--for hospitality was the rule of
the house--and she ate all the liangkao and cracked all the melon seeds
while the other women chattered to her and to each other.

She said that she was very tired--her lady was a hard taskmistress.
She didn’t like the English. She was very tired, but she’d like to
see something of so beautiful a place, now that she was here, and she
tottered about a little wearily from treasure to treasure, but never
far from the house, from tiny forest trees a few inches high, in pots
the size of thimbles, to an evergreen that was a century old and that
had its widest branches cut into birds in full flight. She cried out in
ecstasy at a great dragon sprawling on the grass, a dragon of geraniums
and foliage plants. And presently she yawned and said that she was very
tired, and sat down heavily on a carved stone bench. After a little
she fell asleep, and the women giggled at her good-naturedly and left
her. The bench was not far from the window that high up looked into the
mandarin’s sitting-room.




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE FAN


“It is growing dark,” Wu said, as he put the sword down beside the gong.

Three other servants followed Ah Sing through the sliding door that he
had opened from the other side. Two were tea-bearers and the other a
servant of the lamps.

The tray of tea was laid on the table. The lamp-man moved about
the room, and a dozen dim lights broke out, like disks of radiant
alabaster, so dim, so beautiful, and so unexpectedly placed that their
shrouded brilliance made the wonderful room seem even eerier than
before.

The woman watched it all, inert and motionless. She felt, without
thinking about it--she was almost worn past thinking now--how more
than useless it would be to appeal to these wooden-faced Chinese, the
creatures and automatons of Wu Li Chang. And an instinct of dignity
that was very English held her from making to foreign servants a
prayer that would, she knew, be denied. She would make no exhibition
of a plight they would not pity or of an emotion that would not move
them--unless it moved them to mirth.

But when, their service done, the servants went out, soft-footed as
they had come, and after the door closed, bolts clanged, she realized
that she and Wu were again alone--the room locked--and she sprang up
and dashed to the door.

Wu watched her, smiling. “Come,” he said--almost as he might have
spoken to a restless child--“tea is served.”

And she turned, in obedience to his voice, and looked at him. “I
couldn’t, Mr. Wu,” she said with plaintive petulance, “I couldn’t
possibly.” The distress in her voice was more than the annoyance.

Wu ignored her words good-naturedly, and began pouring out the tea. “I
have sugar and cream, you see, quite in the Western way.”

“No--no, I couldn’t,” she reiterated impatiently, but coming back to
the table and watching the cups as he filled them. “Please tell me of
my son and let me go.”

For answer, the mandarin held out to her a cup of tea. “Pray take
this cup of tea, Mrs. Gregory,” he said with grave politeness. “Oh!
I understand,” he added with a slight, chill smile, when she paid no
attention to the cup he proffered her. He put it down. “You would
prefer to see me drink first.” With an inclination of his head to her,
he lifted his own cup and drained it at a draught. “So! perhaps that
will reassure you.” He put his cup down and refilled it. “Pray take the
tea,” he urged hospitably: “it will not only be refreshing--and your
lips look dry and parched--but it will also be a politeness to do so.”

She stood looking at him dully, and then sank slowly down on to a stool.

“Sugar--and--cream,” the mandarin said brightly. There was more of
Mayfair and of Oxford in tone and in manner than there was of Cathay.
And the anachronism was gruesome rather than droll, as he stood in his
mandarin’s robes fanning himself with his left hand (the sons of Han
are more nearly ambidextrous than they of any other race) and with his
right hand plying the silver sugar-tongs with slow dexterity. “So!” he
held out the perfected cup. “It is the choicest growth of the Empire,
Mrs. Gregory, sun-dried with the flowers of jasmine.”

She took the cup, and he took up his. Just as she was forcing herself
to drink--his own cup almost to his lip--he said with the same suave
manner, “Have you no curiosity, Mrs. Gregory, to learn the name”--a
poisonous change came in his voice--“of my daughter’s seducer?”

The Englishwoman put down her cup quickly, with a hand so unnerved and
trembling that it scarcely served to guide its small burden. She tried
to drop her eyes, but she couldn’t--he held them with his relentlessly.
“I don’t understand you,” she faltered. “Your--your manner is so
strange.”

Wu said nothing, but he smiled into her gaze coldly, and she rose with
a shudder. Wu smiled at her still, and with a sudden wild cry she
darted to the sliding doors and beat on them hysterically. But she
realized at once that they were locked and were strong. And she turned
around, at bay but hopeless, leaning her back against the door, and
faced Wu miserably, her smarting hands hanging limp at her sides.

Wu Li Chang unfolded his fan and began to churn the air towards his
face with it.

No European ever has understood what his fan means to a Chinese.
Probably no European ever will be able to understand that. With their
fans the Chinese hide emotion, express emotion, and, when it reaches
the danger point, give it vent. Often a Chinese man’s frail, tiny fan
is his safety valve. China’s greatest warriors have carried their
fans into battle. Criminals fan themselves on the execution ground.
Frightened Chinese girls, in the torment of first child-birth, fan
themselves. Wu was fanning himself in triumph. And he spoke to her
quickly, his voice ringing with triumph. “There are several ways into
this room, Mrs. Gregory, but only one way out.” The fan shut with an
ominous click--a rattle of ivory, a hiss and a rustle of silk. “It lies
by that door”--he pointed it with his fan--“which leads to _my own
inner chamber_.”

The woman smothered a scream, but she could not smother a groan.

Wu laughed. He took a step towards her. “Have you no desire to hear my
news of your son?” he asked softly. “Good news? I promised that you
should--I am here to keep my promise.” The terrible significance of his
words could not have been clearer, but he emphasized it hideously by
gliding still a little nearer to the stricken, appalled woman.

“Oh! don’t torture me,” she implored, moving away.

“He is well--comparatively. His hands have received a trifling
injury--quite trifling. But he is quite well”--nearing the woman
again--“and he is here.”

“Here?” she sobbed, “here?”

“Almost within sound of your voice”--still nearer.

“O my God! where?” she cried, looking about her frantically. The third
door caught her attention, and she ran to it weakly and beat against
it, crying, “Basil! Basil!”

“Do not be so impetuous, dear lady,” Wu said with insolent gentleness;
“I did not say he was there. And it is not good that he should hear
your voice, for the sound would only distress him.”

She looked at Wu questioningly, and he gave her the cruel explanation.
“You see, he is not at liberty to come until the right signal is given.
It lies with you whether that signal shall be given or not!” He was
very close to her now.

Wu Li Chang intended to use no physical force with this woman. He would
not grant her degradation even that poor loop-hole of excuse.

That she would yield, he had no doubt. And her own tortured soul knew
that it wavered now, and it was sick.

Wu laid his hand on her arm. And she scarcely shrank back, but drew
herself up, proud in her sorrow, and said slowly in his smiling face,
“You--you devil!”

“Harsh words will not help him, Mrs. Gregory,” the mandarin said. “Only
one thing can.” Face almost brushed face--they were so close.

She hid hers in her hands and sobbed in fear.

“I will leave you whilst you decide,” Wu said, and turned to the door
that was, he had told her, her only way “out.”

In a sudden frenzy and palsied with nausea, she dashed at the other
doors, sobbing, “Let me go!”--panting--“let me go, I tell you!”

Wu watched her a little before he said calmly, still smiling gravely,
“This door is the only door which remains unlocked. If you should
decide to enter it before I return, I should not be unresponsive to the
honor you will do me. If not, I shall return soon myself--to assist
you, if I may, to decide.”

“My husband knows that I have come here!” Mrs. Gregory cried defiantly.
“I told him!” (Wu smiled.) “He will be here at any moment, and
then----! Oh! I am not afraid of you!”

“Oh! I am glad of that!” Wu Li Chang said eagerly, “I desire only to
inspire trust--and confidence--and the tenderest sympathy! But I know
that your husband--that amiable, estimable Mr. Gregory--an odd, subtle
creature, but so lovable--does not know you are here. You have not the
remotest hope of seeing him--or you would not have told me! You would
have temporized--delayed--said nothing.”

“He _does_ know!” she stormed. “He may be here at any moment! And
if he is not admitted he will batter your gates and doors down!”

The mandarin laughed softly and shook his head at her indulgently.

“You scoundrel!” she told him, infuriated.

“Oh! I forgive your trying to deceive me, Mrs. Gregory,” Wu said
calmly; “it is only natural. Oh! that window,” he added, in answer to
an involuntary look toward it. “Yes, it leads out on to the courtyard
where your devoted servant is waiting; but the architect has placed it
so very high, and has made it so very small. Now”--he made her a little
bow--“I will leave you, but not for long.” And he passed through the
unlocked door and closed it behind him very gently.




CHAPTER XXXVIII

THE GONG


Distracted, not knowing what she did, or why, like some wild thing
trapped and helpless, Florence Gregory looked about the room, searching
it with eyes almost too fright-blinded for sight. Again she tried
the doors--all but one. She made a desperate, useless effort to push
the window apart. “Basil!” she cried, “Basil!” Then she checked
herself. “No! I mustn’t do that! O God!” she moaned, turning to driven
humanity’s last great resort, “help me!”

She groped her way unsteadily across the room, and climbed with
trembling legs upon the bench and reached her hands up toward the
little window.

“No,” she sobbed in a whisper, “I can’t,” for she could not reach to
half the opening’s height. She looked about her stealthily, rose on her
very tiptoes, and called towards the window, “Ah Wong! Ah Wong! can
you hear me? Go quickly, for the love of Heaven! Fetch them! Help me,
Ah Wong! Help me! I am alone, Ah Wong--but he will be back--very soon.
Quick, amah, quick! Ah Wong, are you there?”

And then she waited.

Oh! that waiting.

There was no sound except the panting of her heart. From Wu’s
inner room nothing came but silence. The house and the garden were
midnight-still.

Ah!

Through the window came a sound so soft it scarcely grazed the silence.

Something fell, almost noiselessly, at her feet. She swooped upon it
with a smothered sob of thankfulness. It was her own scarf. Her hands
shook so she could scarcely unroll it for the message or the help it
hid. She knew it hid one or the other, or Ah Wong would not have thrown
it. Or was it only a signal that the other woman heard her? With her
eyes riveted in agony on Wu’s door, her heart beating almost to her
suffocation, her cold fingers worked distractedly at the matted gauze.
Yes--there was something there. Oh! Ah Wong! Ah Wong! It was something
hard and small.

She looked at the tiny phial wonderingly. But only for a moment. Then
she knew. And her white face grew whiter. The last drop of coward blood
dripped back from her quivering lips. Poison, of course! Must she?
Dared she? Could she? And Basil? The boy that she had borne--her son
and chum. Should she desert him so? Save her honor and leave him to
death and to long fiendish torture ten thousand times worse than death?
Was _any_ price too great, too hideous to pay for his rescue from
such burning hell? To so save herself at such cost to him, was not that
an even greater dishonor than the other? The woman began to whimper,
like some terrified child. And could she die? Could she face such
death? Here--all alone--in China? God hear her prayer!--she could not
think to word it. God have mercy! Life was sweet--the sun warm on the
grass. And there were cowslips in the meadows at home, and the lilacs
were wine-sweet, and the roses wine-red against the sun-drenched old
stone wall in the vicarage garden--in England.

She tottered, sobbing silently, across the room, clutching the phial in
her ice-cold hand.

England! At the thought of England she stiffened--proudly. She was
English--and a woman. English and a woman: the two proudest things
under Heaven. Basil must suffer. The body that had borne him must not,
even for him, be dishonored. The unalterable chastity of centuries
of gentle womanhood reasserted itself and claimed her--pure of soul,
pure of body--claimed her and made her proud and strong as it had the
English women of an earlier day who threw themselves rejoicing upon
the horns of the Roman cattle rather than yield themselves--English
women--to the lust of the Roman legionaries. As Abraham had prepared to
sacrifice Isaac--Abraham! Abraham was only a man, only a father. She
was a woman--she was a mother--and English!

With a smile as cold as any smile of Wu’s, and more superb than smile
ever ermined on the lip of man--she looked about for means: determined
now--yet hoping still against hope for escape. She would die. Oh yes!
she would die--here--now. But she hoped the stuff was not too bitter.
She drew out the cork and smelt the liquid. It had no smell. Or had
fright paralyzed her gift of smell? And all her senses? Her fingers
could scarcely feel the glass they clutched. And need she drink it yet?
Help might come. Surely Ah Wong had gone! But dared she wait? Wu would
be back. Hark! Was he coming? Did his door move? He must not see her
drink it. He would prevent her. But need she die quite yet?

She saw the cup of tea she had put down, and gave a little gasp of
hope: at such poor straws do we clutch!

Yes--yes--she’d pour the poison into her tea--and drink it, if she must!

The cup was full. She drank a little chokingly. That was enough. Room
now! She looked in terror at Wu’s door, then emptied the tiny phial
into her cup.

Wu’s cup did not occur to her--she was too distraught.

Shaking pitifully, she wound the scarf again about the little bottle
and dropped both into a satsuma vase.

She tottered gropingly back to her seat beside the table, the poisoned
cup close to her hand. “My God!” she whispered, not to herself, “if it
must come to that, give me strength.”

Until the door opened and Wu came in, she sat cowering, her eyes
riveted on her cup, her fingers knotting and unknotting in her lap, and
under the lace of her sleeve the costly jewel she had worn to pay honor
to Sing Kung Yah winked and danced.

She did not look up at the mandarin’s step, and for a space he stood
and studied her, hatred and contempt for Basil Gregory’s mother ugly
on his face, pity for his vicarious victim--and she a woman--in
his Chinese eyes. And in his heart there was self-pity too: his
sacrificial office was in no way to the liking of Wu Li Chang. He was
sacrificing to his ancestors and to his gods. But the flesh reeking
from his priestly knife, hissing in the fire, smoking on the altar of
his tremendous rage, was repugnant to his appetite, a stench in the
nostrils of this Chinese.

He wore now loosened garments of crimson crêpe--color and stuff an
Empress might don for her bridal. He carried no fan. It was laid away.
But on the hem of his gorgeous negligée a border of peacocks’ feathers
was embroidered, each plume the fine work of an artist.

“Well, chère madame!” he said softly, and then she looked up and saw
him and his relentless purpose, and shrank back with a little moan.

Wu smiled and drew nearer. “Do I now find favor in your eyes?” he
murmured wickedly--insinuation and masterly in his honeyed tone. “No?
Oh! unhappy Wu Li Chang! My heart bleeds, stabbed by your coldness,
you lovely and oh! so desired English creature, you fair, fair rose
of English womanhood. Ah! well--I have no vanity, luckily for me,
and so that is not hurt also, since it does not exist. One important
matter,” he said, almost at his side, drawing slowly nearer still, “I
did not mention. It is only fair that you should understand fully my
terms--only fair to say that your son knows that your sacrifice will
set him free----”

Florence Gregory rose to her feet. She searched his face. “You--you
_will_ set him free?”

Wu Li Chang bowed his head in promise. And she did not for one
instant doubt his word. It was her unconscious tribute paid to his
individuality--and, too, it was tribute of Christian Europe to heathen
China. Undeserved? That’s as you read history and the sorry story of
the treaty ports. Verdicts differ.

“That, of course, is understood--and pledged,” the mandarin said
quietly, “when--you--have paid--his debt.”

She shuddered sickly. Wu smiled, and then his choler broke a little
through its smooth veneer. “It is just payment I exact--no jot of
usury: virtue for virtue. I might have seized your daughter--for
myself, or to toss to one of my servants--but that could not have
been payment in full. You, you in your country, you of your race,
prize virginity above all else; we hold maternity to be the highest
expression of human being, and the most sacred. So, because he
took what should have been most sacred in the eyes of an English
gentleman--and he a guest, both in my daughter’s country and in
her home--I take what is, in my eyes, a higher, purer thing--and I
your host. And, too”--his voice hissed and quivered with hate--“the
degradation of his sister would not have afflicted him enough--he does
not love his sister with any great love. His love of you, his mother,
is the one quality of manhood in his abominable being. He would have
suffered at her shame and outlived the pain; yours he will remember
while he lives--and writhe. It will spoil his life, make every hour
of his life more bitter than any death, every inch of earth a burning
hell.” He paused and waited, and then--he slid behind the table, put
his arms about the palsied woman, and whispered, pointing to the other
room, his face brushing hers, “And now, dear lady, will you not come to
me?”

For an instant they two stood so--she paralyzed, unable to move.

Music high and sublimely sweet pierced through the shuttered window:
a nightingale was singing in Nang Ping’s garden, near the pagoda by
the lotus lake. Wu Li Chang had heard many nightingales, and from his
babyhood. Florence Gregory had heard but one before--once, long ago, in
England.

She wrenched away from Wu with a cry--of despair; and he let her go.

She sank on to her stool and took up her cup--she tried to do it
meaninglessly--and slowly raised it to her lips.

“Oh!” Wu told her tenderly, “my lips also are dry and parched with the
heat of my desire----”

But he had no desire of her. And even in her torment she knew it, and
that in the coldness of his intention lay the inflexibility of her
peril.

“I too would drink.” He lifted up his own cup. “Ah!” he exclaimed,
putting it quickly down again, “I see that you have sipped from your
cup--your lips have blessed its rim.” Standing behind her, he slipped
his hands slowly about her neck, took her cup in them, and lifted it
over her head, and faced her. “Let me also drink from the cup that has
touched your lovely lips.”

With a cruel look of mock love--to torment her even this little more,
and in no way because he suspected the contents of either cup--with a
slow look into her terror-dilating eyes, he slowly drained the cup. And
Florence Gregory watched him, motionless, horror-stricken--scarcely
realizing that he had given her her release--by a way it had not
occurred to her even to attempt.

“So,” Wu said, putting down the cup, “I have paid you the highest
compliment. For I do not like your sugar or your cream. Indeed, I
cannot imagine how any one can spoil the delicious beverage----” His
voice broke on the word. Something gurgled in his throat. “It was even
nastier than I thought,” he whispered hoarsely.

Suddenly he reeled. He staggered and caught at the table’s edge. Had
he gone drunk, he wondered, with the intoxication of his smothered,
inexorable rage? The room was spinning like a top plaything. His
head ached. He thought a vein must burst. The room was turning more
maddeningly now--like a dervish at the climax of his dance. And he was
spinning too--not with the room but in a counter-circle. He tottered to
a stool and sank on to it, his face horribly contorted with pain.

Mrs. Gregory moaned, half in fear for herself, half in horror at the
ugly agony from which she could not take her eyes. She moaned, and then
Wu knew.

He gripped the table with hands as contorted as his face, and leaned
towards her muttering in his own Chinese words of terrible imprecation
of her and hers. Curses and hatred beyond words even the most terrible
blazed from his dying eyes.

He was dying like a dog--outwitted by an Englishwoman. And then he
laughed, a laugh more terrible than the death-rattle already crackling
in his throat like spun glass burning or dry salt aflame: the damnéd
burning may laugh so. Dying like a pariah dog! He laughed with
glee--hell’s own mirth; for now the signal would never be given, the
Englishman would never go free. He would starve and rot in Nang Ping’s
pagoda. Did she realize that? Oh! for the strength to make her know it!
But only Chinese words would come to his thickening tongue or to his
reeling brain. Of all that he had learned or known of English, or of
the England where he had lived so long, nothing was left him--nothing
but his hate.

Was it for this--this death degraded and worse than alone, no son to
worship at his tomb--that Wu Ching Yu had banished him to exile and to
excruciating homesickness?

Where was the old sword? He would slay this foreign devil where she
stood. Who was she? Why was she here--here in the room with the tablets
of his ancestors? Who was she? Ah! he remembered now: she was the
mother-pig--the foul thing that had borne the seducer of Nang Ping!

With a hideous yell, with a supreme effort, he tottered to his feet and
lunged at her with his writhing hands outstretched like claws, his
feet fumbling beneath him.

She shrank back in terror, and raised her arm as if to ward off a blow.

And the jewel on her arm slipped down and flashed and blazed and
jangled on her wrist.

And Wu Li Chang knew it. His eyes were glazing now and setting in
death, but he knew her too. He remembered now--Oxford, the purgatory of
Portland Place, the country vicarage, an organ he’d given a church, an
English girl he had liked and befriended in a gentle, reverent way. And
this--_this_--was the reaping of the kindness and the tolerance he
had sown--in England!

Rage heroic and terrible convulsed and nerved him. With an effort
that almost tore the sinews of his passing soul asunder he turned and
looked--yes--there it was--he wanted it--he reached it--and with a
scream of fury he caught it up--the sword--and lunged again at the
woman cringing and panting there--he gained upon her--she screamed and
ran from him feebly--he followed--he lifted the great weapon and clove
the air--he struck out wildly with it again, and again cut only the air.

Twice they circled the room--she sobbing in terror, he blubbering with
rage and with the agony of death.

Ah! he had almost reached her. One more effort!--he knew it was his
last.

He raised the sword with both his hands, raised it above his head, and
struck.

It only missed her, and in missing her it struck the gong--once, then
twice.

At the tragedy of that miscarriage, life throbbed again through all
his tortured pores. Meaning to kill, he had saved. And he had released
the Englishman. That knowledge broke his heart--a mighty Chinese
heart--the great heart of the mandarin Wu Li Chang.

For a moment he stood very still, motionless but not quelled, silent,
superb in his defeat. And then he fell, and moved no more.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Florence Gregory looked about her--when she was able to--the doors
were open, and the wide window opened noiselessly from without. No one
had entered the room. They were quite alone, she and what had been Wu
Li Chang. And there was not a sound except the love-sick ecstasy of
a nightingale singing his devoted desire through the jasmine-scented
garden.

Very slowly, horror-stricken, watching him till the last, she crept
from the room, leaving it, by chance, through the door at which she had
entered it.

She had aged in that room.




CHAPTER XXXIX

AFTERWARDS


As she passed from the house into the garden, moving crazily on--not
knowing why, how or where--the frenzied mother met her son coming
blindly toward the door, his arms still trussed at his sides.

Neither could speak.

But a Chinese woman, coming to them stealthily through the gloaming,
spoke as she reached them. “Clome, me tlake,” she said.

And almost literally she did take them, one on either side of her, each
touched by her hand, impelled by her will.

“No talk,” she whispered sternly.

But she need not have said it. Neither of them had word or voice.

They met no one. They heard nothing--except once the far-off trilling
of a nightingale, telling the day good-by.

For such was the quality of Wu Li Chang. He had commanded the servants
to their quarters, on the other side of the estate, when they should
have undone the doors and gates.

But Ah Wong did not slacken her anxious pace, or let them slacken
theirs, until the shore was almost reached.

Then, just before they were within sight of the waiting boat and of
the boatmen’s eyes, she stopped and untied Basil’s arms. It was not
easy work, although she had a knife. And Mrs. Gregory could give no
help.

They stumbled into the boat as best they could, but not without aiding
hands, the mother and son. Ah Wong scrambled in nimbly. And at a word
from her the watermen lifted their poles--and they had left Kowloon.

They leaned against each other, the English mother and her boy, as the
small craft crossed the bay, but not a word was spoken by either of
them or to either of them. They huddled together dumb with relief and
with exhaustion, and almost numb with the horror they had known.

Unobtrusive, stolid, commonplace in manner as in her humble amah garb,
Ah Wong directed and enforced everything.

Ten million stars came out and specked with diamond dust the grave,
blue sky. The moon came up and rippled with silver and with gold the
rippling water. And before the night-flowers of Kowloon had ceased
to lave their faces with the fragrance which was “good-night,” the
fragrance of the night-flowers of Hong Kong Island rushed out to them
and buffeted them with sweetness.

The world was very placid. The night was radiant. The night was very
still. And the smiling indifference of the night was cruel. At least,
the English woman felt it so. Basil felt nothing. Ah Wong was scheming.

She disembarked them. She paid the boatmen. She tidied her mistress,
and tidied Basil as best she could. She got them up the Peak, and she
smuggled them into the hotel at last, almost unobserved.

“Too tlired talk to-night,” she told Hilda imperatively. And she said
it as imperatively to Robert Gregory himself when he hurried in from
the office in answer to Hilda’s telephoned good news.

It was Ah Wong who sent the news of Basil Gregory’s safe return
spreading like wildest fire through gossipy Hong Kong--not only the
news of the return but the detailed story of his absence. It was a very
pretty story, and beautifully simple: nothing more out of the common
than a slightly sprained ankle and an undelivered chit. The chit had
been entrusted to one vellee bad coolie man--needless to say, a victim
of the opium habit of which one hears so much in books on China and
sees so absurdly little in China itself. Some believed the story--as
started by Ah Wong--some did not. But it might have been true (a merit
such fabrications often lack) and it served, although one cynic at the
English Club said of it that it reminded him of the curate’s celebrated
egg, “quite good in parts.”

And John Bradley wondered.

But the next day the Gregorys and their affairs were well-nigh
forgotten in the greater flare of news that flamed from the mainland.
Mr. Wu was dead, and so was his daughter, an only child. She had died
suddenly, and the shock had killed him--his heart, you know--fatty
degeneration, probably--all those rich Chinamen over-eat.

Again, some believed the story as it was told, and more did not. But
Wu had died on the mainland, not on English soil, and it was no one’s
business in Hong Kong.

John Bradley’s face grew very stern when he heard that Wu Li Chang
had “become a guest on high,” and he went at once to Kowloon. And,
almost to his surprise, Ah Sing admitted him. The mandarin would have
commanded it so, Ah Sing thought.

Bradley learnt nothing on the mainland. He saw his dead friend, and
prayed an English prayer beside him, kneeling down between him and a
grinning, long, red-tongued Chinese god. That was all.

When he reached his own bungalow, he went into his tiny study, locked
its door, and knelt again--at the _prie-Dieu_ that stood against
the wall between the little silver crucifix and an engraving of a
tender, sorrowful face beneath a crown of thorns.

Between the elder Gregory’s relief at his son’s return and his
exultation at Wu’s death, the younger Gregory came off nearly scot-free
of paternal reprimand, and quite free of any real parental wrath.

“Where the very dickens have you been?” was the father’s greeting when
they met at breakfast. “A pretty state we’ve been in!--upsetting the
entire family--and me--and the business! You shall answer to me for
this, young man. Why the devil don’t you pass that toast?”

“I’ve--I’ve only been a short trip, pater, off the island,” Basil
replied, not greatly perturbed.

“I’ll short trip you!” the father said with beetling brows; and the
tone in which he laconically said, “More,” as he thrust his coffee cup
to Hilda was very fierce indeed, but he winked at her with just the
corner of his left eye; Basil was on his other side. And presently
Robert Gregory chuckled openly as he helped himself to marmalade. And
when he was leaving the table he slapped his boy on the back, but not
too roughly.

“Dead broke?” he demanded.

Basil was about to say, “No, indeed!” but he caught Ah Wong’s sudden
eye, and said instead, “Well, yes, I’m afraid I am rather.”

Robert Gregory chuckled again. “I’ve a damned good notion to send you
home in the steerage--jolly good idea; and while I’m thinking it over,
you’d better mind your P’s and your little Q’s. Show up at the office
about three, and I dare say I’ll be ass enough to find you a fiver.”

Hilda followed her father to the door. She always “saw him off.”

Ah Wong at the sideboard continued to select tit-bits for the tray she
was going to carry to her mistress’s room. She intended, by fair means
or by foul, to coax Florence Gregory to eat.

Basil pushed back his plate. He had been pretending to eat, but the
food was revolting.

He was longing to see his mother, and he was dreading it. They had not
spoken together yet.

He was terribly anxious to know if there were any truth in the report
of Wu’s death. Probably Ah Wong knew. He looked at her curiously as she
carried her tray away; but somehow he could not question her.

On the whole, he wished his mother would send for him and get it over.
This suspense was only a little less terrible than his suspense in the
pagoda had been.

But all Robert Gregory’s anxieties were laid. He reached the office in
high good humor. Government House confirmed the rumor of Wu’s death.
And Gregory felt assured that, his formidable (for the Chink had been
formidable) rival wiped out, the only heavy disasters that had ever
threatened his own almost monotonously successful business career would
disperse under his astute, firm management as summer clouds beneath the
sun, and that disaster would not menace him again.

And by the time he reached the club for lunch, he was quite too highly
pleased with himself and with his world, and more particularly with his
share in it, to keep up any longer even a pretended anger at his son.
He chuckled boastfully over “the usual sort of escapade,” and said
he’d “be glad to get the rascal home--back in sober old England”--“no
harm done”--“devil of a good time, no doubt; hadn’t got a yen, and only
had his allowance eight days ago, a quarterly allowance, and the Lord
Harry only knows how much he’s bled his mother!” “But, after all”--and
then he delivered himself of the amazing originality that “Boys will be
boys!”

If there are many men who like to be virtuous vicariously, there are a
few, even odder specimens of our wonderfully variegated humanity, who
like to sin--in one direction--by proxy. Robert Gregory, in the big
thing of life, was an exemplary husband. If Florence Gregory dwelt but
in the suburbs of his good pleasure, he lived--in the one sense--on
an island on to which no other woman ever put her foot. The Gregory
Steamship Company was his adored mistress and his wedded wife. But
Florence came next nearest to his warmth--and she had no human rival,
never had had or would have one. She knew this. Even a much duller
woman must have known it. And perhaps it had enabled her to hold up her
head and go smiling through some hard years of disillusion and chagrin.

But Robert Gregory had a very soft spot in his stupid heart for his
boy’s gallantries. Secretly he was not a little proud of them--of
course, they mustn’t go too far or cost too much--and of this last
escapade he almost boasted as he smoked his after-tiffin cigar--boasted
with an unctuous hint of reminiscent glee that insinuated--and was
meant to--that he’d been a bit gay “in the same old way” in his younger
days.

Which most emphatically he had not.




CHAPTER XL

A GUEST ON HIGH


And in the K’o-tang--the smaller audience hall--where he had died, Wu
Li Chang lay as he had fallen. For none had dared to disturb him for
a long time, unless he summoned them. And now, discovered by an early
sweeper whose duty it was to open the casements to the summer dawn,
he still lay undisturbed, and would lay so until the soothsayer had
determined to where the body should be lifted and just how.

He lay upon his back, his face lifted to the paneled and painted
ceiling.

Almost as Florence Gregory’s footsteps died from his house, a great
change swept his face. The contortions of poisoned death had left it
set and agonized. That passed away. He was smiling when they found
him, as even Nang Ping had never seen him smile. Only one had ever
seen that look upon his face. And she had only seen it once--in quite
the fullness of its beauty, the majesty of its declaration, all its
exquisite tenderness. A living man smiles so but once. Some men never
smile so--they have frittered its possibility away--some of them, and
some are small men, and it is not for them. It is a hall-mark.

It is a hall-mark, and now and again death stamps it caressingly and
regally upon some dead man’s face; and always he is a man who has put
up a fine good fight, and always it tells that there _is_ marriage
in Heaven.

Wu Lu had seen that smile--once--in Sze-chuan; and now, in that near
garden-place where she had waited for him all these years, he took her
in his arms and held her close; and she gave all herself to him again.
And he looked down and smiled at her, his bride.

Wu Li Chang lay dead on the K’o-tang floor, and his face was very
beautiful.




CHAPTER XLI

“JUST WITH US”


Between breakfast and tiffin Florence Gregory sent for Basil, and he
went to her heavily. His feet were lead, his heart, his head; and his
hands grew very cold.

The interview was inevitable. They each knew that.

It would be difficult to say which dreaded it the more, or which
suffered more during it: probably the mother--both; for she was
guiltless and made of the finer clay.

It was simple--almost commonplace, the meeting and the short talk
between the weary woman and her son; as every interview of intense and
indeterminable human tragedy is apt to be. There are no fripperies in
true tragedy, but little romance, no poetry. The rocks of life are
hard and naked. Not even a stunted lichen can grow on such soilless
barrenness.

But this was a very different reckoning from that with his father,
jocund and magnificently indifferent to details. Basil realized, of
course, that settling up with his mother must be--very different.

She was dressed for going out, elaborately dressed; for she and Ah Wong
had decided that she must be seen about Hong Kong to-day, carefully
dressed and debonair.

She sat in a low chair beside her dressing-table, her long gloves and
her purse of gold mesh at her hand. And because her reputation, and
Basil’s, were at stake, she and Ah Wong between them had contrived to
banish the yesterday’s ravages from her face--almost.

Basil looked shockingly ill. Any eyes less self-satisfied than a Robert
Gregory’s must have seen it.

“You should go and lie down,” his mother greeted him.

“Yes, I must,” he nodded, “when you’ve done with me.”

Ah Wong went out and closed the door.

Florence Gregory waited then for him to begin. It was the first
unkindness she had ever done him. But she was very, very tired. And in
the sleepless watches of the night, she had seen clearly Wu Li Chang’s
point of view, and not altogether without some sharp, acrid conviction
that it had some justice on its side--rough, terrible, primeval,
barbaric, but still undeniable justice of a sort.

Mrs. Gregory waited for her son to speak, and he did not speak soon.

“Are you all right, Mother?” he said at last.

“I am very tired,” she told him.

“Yes--yes, of course you are. But----”

“Oh--yes,” she said gently, “I am all right.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, Basil!”

“Quite, Mother?” he persisted.

“Yes, Basil!” she told him again, with emphasis this time. And then
she smiled a little, very sadly, thinking how sardonic it was that he
should be standing there cross-examining her.

“Thank God!” he whispered fervently--all that was best in him welling
up in gratitude that his mother had escaped a more cruel wrong than he
had inflicted on murdered Nang. For Nang had loved him!

And then he shuddered sickly at the sudden thought that always his
mother would know that he had betrayed a girl to her death and worse,
a girl who had trusted him--that always his mother would be thinking
of it, condemning him--that all the clean sweetness of their old-time,
life-long intimacy was tainted--gone! Always his mother must feel
towards him regret--despisal. Could he ever wipe that out? Never.
Banish it or even dim it for a moment? Be “her boy” again, if but for
an hour?

He looked at her searchingly, and at his eyes she blanched. For she
read in them his fear, and knew its echo in her own heart. It would be
with them both--always; nothing could ever allay it: the estrangement
that was born to-day! She saw it all! She read it all--his soul, and
hers--and suffered as she had not suffered in the K’o-tang of Wu Li
Chang. And her soul quailed and grew very sick before the vengeance of
Wu, a greater vengeance and a more terrible even than he had planned.

We need never snatch at vengeance with our poor, feeble, fumbling
hands. God always repays. And sometimes it seems as if He, like the
Chinese, enforces vicarious atonement--daughters scourged for fathers,
mothers for sons, and even friend for friend. But sooner or later the
great ax of retribution always falls.

Basil Gregory saw the grief and the torture in his mother’s face. “Oh!
well, then,” he said, strolling to the window, and standing there
looking out across the bay--towards Kowloon--“that’s all right. They
say he’s dead--Wu--you’ve heard it?”

“Yes.”

“I wish I knew if it’s true.”

“It is true.”

He turned back to her quickly. “How do you know, Mother? Are you dead
sure?”

“I saw him die,” she said.

At that her boy came and knelt down and took her hands in his.

And she told him--just the bare facts of yesterday.

Nang Ping, or his own fault, was not mentioned between them, then or
ever. Florence Gregory uttered no reproach. She said none, and she
tried to look none. It is so that such women most reproach the men that
they have borne--and nursed.

She asked no details of his amour or of his capture and detention; and
he offered none.

And it was better so. The burden of their common memory was heavy
enough--a memory from which nothing could ever purge her soul or his.

“What will happen--about it all? He was a devil of a big man among the
Chinks,” Basil said anxiously when he spoke again.

“Yes, I know. What will happen? By the Chinese, you mean? Ah Wong
thinks nothing----”

“Ah Wong!” Basil said contemptuously.

“She saved my life--and yours----”

“By a Chinese trick.”

“It served,” Mrs. Gregory said gravely. “Ah Wong knows her people. And
she thinks nothing will be done--soon, if ever. And we will leave China
at once. I think your father’ll be glad to--he’s been anxious enough to
get back to float the new Company. But, if for any reason he wishes to
wait even a little, why, I must get Hilda to coax him to go at once.
You, at least, must go by the next boat.”

Basil nodded. “Yes, I’d like to catch the next comfortable boat.”

“We’ll all catch it, if we can,” his mother said emphatically.

“Is that all, Mother?” he asked her gently.

“All?” she was puzzled.

“All you want of me?”

“Oh! Yes, dear,” she said brightly.

“Then I believe I’ll go and lie down again. I’m jolly tired and jolly
weak.”

“Yes--do,” Florence said.

But at the door he turned back and came to her and took her in his arms.

“God bless you, Mother!” he whispered with his lips against her hair.

“God bless my boy!” she answered brokenly.

Then he kissed her passionately, and turned away sobbing.

“Wait a moment,” she said when he had smothered back his emotion and
had put his hand again on the door. “I did forget one thing. Make no
explanation--not to any one.”

“What about the governor?”

“Least of all to him. Your father will ask you not another question; he
has promised me.”

“I say, Mother,” Basil said, flushing painfully, “you are a bit of a
brick--aren’t you?”

“I am your mother, Basil,” she returned, smiling into his eyes.
“Remember, not one word to any human creature. Promise me. Let it rest
where it is forever--just with us.”

And there they left it--glad to be rid of it, as far as words went, but
knowing that, waking or sleeping, neither could ever be rid of it in
thought again. It was a poison cooked into their blood.

For years they did not speak of it again, except that Basil said when
she came to him later with a cup of tea--he had slept through tiffin,
and she would not have him called--“What about Ah Wong? She knows.”

His mother answered him proudly: “I trust Ah Wong. Ah Wong knows, of
course--part at least. But it will be always precisely as if she knew
nothing.”

Basil shrugged skeptically, sitting up among his pillows. And his
mother put the tray down and left him a little hurriedly. There is
little a woman finds harder to bear than a man’s ingratitude. Florence
Gregory was ashamed of her son.

She had tiffined early, and before tiffin and since she had been out
and about: shopping, paying calls, laughing, chatting, the brightest
woman in Hong Kong, the best dressed, and the most care-free. And
now she went out again, sitting radiant and chic in her smart chair,
carried wherever she would be most seen. She stayed a little at the
racquets court and at the cricket club. But she did not leave her
chair. She was too tired--almost at the end of her woman’s long tether.




CHAPTER XLII

THE DUST OF CHINA FROM THEIR FEET


The Gregorys sailed from Hong Kong the next week, and half the Colony
saw them off. One means, of course, half the Europeans: the Chinese
don’t count--in China. But John Bradley did not see them off--nor
had he come to wish them good-by. Hilda was offended, and Basil was
grateful. (He could be grateful at times.) Except Florence, none of
them had seen the priest since the night Basil had consulted him. Mrs.
Gregory called upon him two days after her escape. She had sent a note
asking him to come to her at the hotel. He had replied asking if she
could, and kindly would, come to him instead; he knew she’d been out
continuously the day before. And she had gone at once.

Of Kowloon she had told him nothing: when she had enjoined silence on
Basil, she had meant silence; and she had no thought of breaking it
towards any one.

She had wished to see him before they left Hong Kong, she said, and
they were going home at once now.

Mrs. Gregory had a very sincere affection for John Bradley. If she had
been in Hilda’s shoes, she’d not have given him for a wilderness of Tom
Carrutherses, she thought. And in leaving Hong Kong she was leaving
behind her nothing that she regretted more than her talks with Bradley;
except Ah Wong. That was her great regret, for she was leaving Ah Wong.

The amah had refused to quit her country. Mrs. Gregory had pleaded at
last. Ah Wong would not budge. Hilda was indifferent, Mr. Gregory not
sorry, and Basil Gregory was meanly glad.

And John Bradley was glad, too, when he heard it, but not meanly. He
knew that the amah knew more than any other living person did of all
that had happened--far more than he knew or even suspected--and he was
sure that her presence with them in England would make for a blight
upon the entire Gregory family--a blight which all her devotion and all
her deft service could not counterbalance.

It was partly concerning Ah Wong that Mrs. Gregory had called. Would he
befriend the woman--her amah, perhaps he’d noticed her?--if he could
ever?

“Oh, yes!” he said, he “had noticed her, several times.” He did not
add how well he knew her, or how highly he valued her, or that he
had received her in this very room, and in the middle of the night,
not long ago. But he promised cordially to do any earthly thing
he ever could for the Chinese woman. It was a queer legacy for a
bachelor priest, he said, laughing, but all was fish that came to his
net--pastoral or otherwise--and he accepted Ah Wong heartily. She
should come into his service, if she would--potter about the bungalow,
sit hunched up on the verandah and sew, or play a guitar or a native
drum or something in the compound--and, if she declined his service,
still he’d try to contrive to look after her some other way. He’d keep
an eye on her, a friendly, helpful eye--if she’d let him--seriously he
would.

And he echoed fervently the amah’s entreaty that the Gregorys should
leave China at once--_at once_--let the order of their going be
what it would, the comforts or discomforts of the first outgoing boat
just what they might. Nothing mattered, absolutely nothing, except for
them to go--to go at once, and never to return.

“You’ll say good-by to them all for me?” he begged, “I--I may be called
away for a few days by any post. But please say my good-bys to them
all: your husband--and Basil--and to your daughter. And, Mrs. Gregory,
young Carruthers is staying here, you said. I’ll look him up as soon
as I know you’ve sailed, and I’ll look after him a bit, be a sort of
parson his-man-Friday, if the boy’ll let me.”

“Tom?--Tom’s a nice boy--I think,” Mrs. Gregory said a trifle
hesitantly.

“I think so too,” the priest said cordially.

She was going into the city when she left him, and he went almost to
the level with her, walking beside her chair.

“Remember,” he said at parting, “you’ll go at once. And you’ll none of
you come back--ever.”

“We will go at once,” she told him earnestly. “And we will not come
back.” But to that last there was a small reservation at the far
back of her mind. She thought it just possible that Hilda might come
back--some day. Not that Hilda particularly liked China; she did
not--she greatly preferred Kensington. But, if Holman thought well of
Tom Carruthers, it was probable that he--now that Basil was definitely
out of the Hong Kong running--might be permanently attached to that
branch, and ultimately its head.

And with one slight deviation, Mrs. Gregory kept the promise she made
John Bradley as he stood bare-headed beside her chair. For they did
sail--almost at once. And only one of them ever came back--Hilda.

The long voyage home differed in nothing from all other such voyages.
Not one voyage in ten thousand ever does differ from other voyages. It
is impossible. They made the same stops, the same changes, ate the same
food, had the same fellow passengers. Nothing short of pirates or a
shoal of ship-devouring Jonah’s whales could differentiate one P. & O.
passage from another.

But Hilda Gregory found this one a little dull at first, and was driven
in self-respect to appropriate the ship’s surgeon and two homing
subalterns.

For Basil and their mother were inseparable, and the father who
heretofore had been her faithful, if not too picturesque, knight lived
in the smoking-room, telling again and again the story of his cowing of
the great Chinese “I Am,” Wu Li Chang. Robert Gregory, never a wordless
man, had never talked so much in all his life.

It was impossible to pass the smoking-room door without catching some
such scrap of English masterpiece as: “I put him through it.” “The
damned nigger was only bluffing. Well, I damn well called his bluff!”
“... and that’s where a knowledge of the Chinaman comes in--an inside,
intelligent knowledge. They like to be thought clever, I tell you.
Don’t you see that it flattered him that I should think--_seem_
to think, of course--that he was a sort of Mister Know-All?--and he
was sly enough to play up to it. Oh! he was sly, I grant you that.
But no match for me; no real ability.” “Yes; as I told you, he hummed
and hawed a bit at first, until I simply turned him inside out, and
then I could see he knew nothing. It was only tickling his vanity to
let him imagine I thought he was a little local god. That’s why I
left him to Mrs. Gregory. I saw it was a mere waste of my time. And
it pleased her, and, too, it took her mind off the boy a bit. She was
fretting over him--the young dog!--until I thought she’d make herself
downright ill.” “Oh! we flatter these damned Chinamen too much in
thinking them so clever.” “Oh! if you know the way to manage Chinamen.
You should have seen the way I talked to that compradore. I frightened
the beggar--just as I’d frightened Wu the day before. He saw it was
a bit dangerous to play any games with me, by the Lord Harry, and so
he called off the strike. I scared him stiff. And I scared Wu half to
death, I can tell you.” “Oh, yes! he’s dead, right enough. No, I don’t
know how he died. Perhaps he was ordered to commit suicide. Well, I
had no objection, I can tell you. And I shan’t go into much black for
him.” “He always was a bit of a handful. Kept his school-masters busy.
But that did them good and him no harm. And they were well paid for it.
Boys will be boys, you know. Why, when I was his age....”

In the smoking-room other men came and went all day and a good bit of
the night, but Robert Gregory’s voice went on forever. And Mrs. Gregory
and Basil, walking up and down, grew careful to keep at the other end
of the big ship. For the smoking-room was near the front, and opened on
to both sides of the promenade deck.

Basil Gregory scarcely left his mother from Hong Kong to Liverpool.

As the great ship drew anchor, he drew her arm in his, and they stood
together so and watched Hong Kong until their sight had gone from it
quite. This was their passing from China, but not from tragedy, and the
woman knew it.

They did not speak of Wu Li Chang. They had spoken of him definitely
together for the last time. They did not speak at all as the island
faded slowly away from them. But they knew that to-day the mandarin’s
interminable funeral cortège started from Kowloon to Sze-chuan. For
they were taking the dead man to his old home--taking him tenderly
with shriek of fife and howl of drum, coffined almost as splendidly
as the Macedonian in his casket of gold. And no son followed Wu Li
Chang! But behind the mandarin’s coffin they carried, more meekly, a
simpler, smaller one. And Sing Kung Yah walked behind them both, almost
bare-footed, clad in coarse unbleached hemp. This was her last secular
function, if one may speak so of any human burial rite; for when at
last Wu Li Chang and Wu Nang Ping were laid beside their dead ancestors
in far-off Sze-chuan, Sing Kung Yah, if she lived so far--the road was
long and rough--would seek life-long sanctuary in the Taoist nunnery of
her abbess cousin.

As long as Anglo-Hong Kong’s eyes had been upon her, Mrs. Gregory had
borne herself bravely--gayly even. But she was breaking now, and with
each revolution of the ship’s great wheel she showed a little older,
a little more limp. “You’re looking downright washed out,” Gregory
told her; “high time we got you home.” Already she was no longer Basil
Gregory’s young and pretty mother. No passenger among them all mistook
her for his sister. She would never be so mistaken again. But he was
very tender of her, and offered her a daily atonement of constant
companionship and of those little tendings which mean so much more to a
woman than any great sacrifice or big climax of devotion ever can. (If
women are small in this, they are also exquisite by it.)

They clung together pathetically. And, at the same time, each shrank
from the other a little, almost unconsciously, and quite in spite of
themselves. Their souls shrank; their hearts clung.

Basil sensed that she grieved over his crime, and, as he thought, out
of all proportion to its real seriousness, and that also she condemned
and despised it. He was far from self-absolution. His conscience was
not dead. But he resented her disapproval and the implied “charity” of
her careful considerateness and studied cheerfulness.

Her soul-withdrawal from him was more justified, and of more moment and
dignity than his from her. For once or twice she just glimpsed almost
an antagonism, a seed of hatred--born of his writhing conscience--that
was slowly cankering in his mind. That he should doubt the
all-forgiveness of her love grieved her sorely, but she recognized that
it certainly was involuntary, and probably was inevitable; but that,
even so, he presumed to arraign her at the judgment seat of his peccant
soul, blaming her that she could not forget, could not quite condone,
incensed her bitterly.

The grave secret that they shared, and that no one else now of their
world even suspected, linked them tightly--too tightly: the gyves hurt.
And while it linked it separated. They were closer together than they
had ever been before; closer than even a mother and son should be;
closer than any two human creatures should be. They violated, with the
hideousness of their mutual knowledge, each other’s utmost right of
privacy--the soul-privacy which God and nature command that with each
human entity shall be forever inviolable.

He suffered at her suffering. He brooded over her. He was very tender
of his mother. But between them, and in them mutually, a poison worked.
Their love was exquisite and human still; their companionship, and even
their sympathy, warm and sincere. But a slight cloud hung over them, a
cloud no bigger than a dead man’s hand. It grew a little darker every
day.




CHAPTER XLIII

ENGLISH WEDDING BELLS


Basil Gregory’s wedding day was warm and clear. June and England were
at their best.

It was a sweetly pretty wedding. Every one said so.

And the girlish bride was prettier than her wedding--prettier than
any mere picture could be; as pretty and as sweet as the June roses
she wore, and very like them: pink and white, delicate, fair-haired,
violet-eyed Alice Lee, the motherless daughter of the incumbent of the
old gray vicarage in which Basil Gregory’s mother had been born.

Homesick for the old days and the old ways, Florence Gregory had gone
to Oxfordshire soon after their return to England, hoping to bathe
and to heal her stained and torn spirit in the quiet of old places,
the ointment of pure memories. She had failed. But she had made fast
friends with her dead father’s successor, and had gone back to the
cordial hospice of her old home again and again in the three years
that had elapsed since she had come from China. A year ago Basil had
accompanied her, none too willingly, for a week-end, had stayed a
month; hence these wedding bells!

Florence Gregory was an old woman now, old and limp. Robert Gregory was
no longer proud of his wife. Her white hair was very beautiful, but he
resented it, and it rasped and angered him that she had prematurely
aged. He had married her, as he had loved her, for her buoyant good
looks, and he felt that he was defrauded by the change in her--a change
so marked that even his careless and ledger-bound eyes could not fail
to see it. And secretly his poor mundane spirit groaned aloud that
_his_ missus--the best-dressed woman in Hong Kong three years
ago, and every bit as smart as her clothes--had degenerated into a
frumpish nobody, looked older than he did, by the Lord Harry, and
without an ounce of snap in her or a word to say to any one. Greatly
to his credit, he had kept all this to himself loyally. He had never
spoken of it, not even hinted at it, to any one, beyond plaintive and
repeated entreaties to Hilda to help him find some way to buck Mother
up. He had never been unkind to his wife. He still bought flowers for
her--the bouquet she carried at their son’s wedding had cost five
guineas--and burdened her with gifts of jewelry almost inappropriate
to his means. And Mr. Gregory was growing very rich indeed. The wounds
that “Mr. Wu” had dealt his fortune had soon healed, and left no scar.
He was still a faithful husband. Such pride and consolation as a woman
may take from the continence that is chiefly the outcome of a husband’s
indifference to her sex and of his absorption in business and in self
were Mrs. Gregory’s. And in all their married life they had had but one
quarrel--a unique quarrel, as husbands and wives go. It had occurred
two years ago, and had been over a dressmaker’s bill.

Such quarrels are common? They are scarcely uncommon--certainly not
unique. But this was one with a difference. Mr. Gregory had always
seen and paid his wife’s dressmakers’ bills. It had been one of his
greatest pleasures. Madame Eloise had taken less pleasure in concocting
those princely accounts, and in receipting them, than Robert Gregory
had taken in writing the cheques that had discharged them. Two years
ago a quarterly account had come in in two figures. That was too much.
Gregory raged at his wife, and after an impatient word or two, she had
bit her lip, smiled and promised reform. And she had kept her word; for
she had seen his point of view and the justice of his complaint. But
the latest fashions no longer suited her. Still less did she now suit
them. Wu Li Chang and Basil Gregory had sapped her of the courage and
the carriage to wear smart gowns. Her _beauté de diable_ was quite
gone--she had left it in a Chinese K’o-tang; and the finer beauty that
had replaced it this husband had no eyes to see.

But Hilda saw, and between the mother and daughter had grown a
tenderness and a friendship that had not been theirs before. “Your
mouth is the most beautiful thing I ever saw, Mother,” the girl said
sometimes. And it was very beautiful, with an exquisite loveliness that
only the lips that have been steeped in hyssop can ever show.

Hilda was the only bridesmaid to-day. She had none of the bride’s soft
prettiness, and only a fair amount of the splendid good looks that
her own mother had lost. But she had gained in charm, in tact, in
womanliness, and, too, even in girlishness.

Her engagement to Tom Carruthers was broken. The breaking had grieved
her--at the time. The day Carruthers had sailed for England to claim
Hilda and to take her back to China, a Chinese girl had thrown herself
into Hong Kong harbor. Oddly, the story had reached England--oddly,
because such stories are so common. But this one had in some way
trickled across the world, and to Hilda. Hilda had probed it, and had
given Tom back his ring. It had not been a very black case, as such
things go. The Chinese girl was nobody’s daughter. Carruthers had never
deceived her, and had promised her nothing that he had not given. But
she had grown to care for him. O curse of womanhood!

And Hilda had a sturdy, wholesome instinct of virtue, a
matter-of-course as towards herself, relentless towards others, that
she had inherited from her mother, but not from her mother alone; and
she also had a quick, curt, businesslike method of dealing with the
facts and incidents of life that she had inherited solely from Robert
Gregory. She considered her engagement to Tom Carruthers a bad debt;
and she wrote it off with a steady hand. Basil was angry with her, and
had upbraided her. “Girls don’t understand such things!” he told her
petulantly. “But I thought you had more sense.”

“I understand myself,” she had retorted haughtily.

Needless to say, Carruthers also was angry, and shared his anger with
generous, masculine impartiality between Hilda Gregory and I Matt So.
Mrs. Gregory was glad. And it was she who mentioned the news (but not
its circumstance) in her next letter to Hong Kong. Hilda’s father was
indifferent. There was time enough for so rich a man’s daughter, and
the finest girl in England, by the Lord Harry, any day; and as for Tom,
she might do worse, of course, but, on the other hand, she might do a
long sight better.

It was not Basil’s old misdemeanor that had so broken his mother,
nor was it her experience in the K’o-tang of Wu Li Chang. It was the
estrangement that had grown between her and her son--an estrangement
that had become almost a bitterness. At times it was a bitterness.

A great secret shared between two, and inviolably kept by both, must be
either a great bond or a great alienation. The terrific secret shared
by Florence Gregory and her boy proved both. They never spoke of it.
But, for that, it burdened and haunted them the more.

So far as she blamed him for his old fault his mother had quite
forgiven Basil.

But he could not forgive her.

It cut her to the quick. But she could not blame Basil for it. And she
sorrowed for him, more than she did for herself, that she was powerless
to give him conviction of the good truth that her forgiveness was
“perfect and entire, wanting nothing,” her love unchanged.

And sometimes when the soul-poison scummed thickest in him, because of
it, Basil Gregory loved his mother a little less. The high place to
which sons in their souls set mothers carries a great price.

But this was not the worst between them. At times--and these were his
blackest--Basil Gregory wondered if, at the absolute last, his mother
would have failed him, would have refused to spare, at her supremest
cost, the life she had given him. Would she at the last hideous resort
have grudged him her all? Sometimes he thought that she would. And when
he thought so he blamed her. And for that blame, his mother, who read
his very soul, a little despised him, and she could not forgive it.

Wu Li Chang had wreaked a vengeance more terrible than he had planned.
For when in a mother’s soul there is something that she cannot forgive
the son she has borne and nursed and still loves, human tragedy has
reached its depth.




CHAPTER XLIV

THE SOUND OF A CHINESE GONG


It was a pretty wedding, and very simple. The Lees were simple English
gentlefolk.

It was a quiet ceremony, quietly performed. There was but little music;
no fife, no drum, no clang. The old organist played softly. (Neither
he nor Mrs. Gregory gave a thought to who had given the instrument;
and no one else there had ever known.) No incense burned. The English
sunshine, perfumed by the roses that grew about the village graves,
drifted softly through the old church windows and dappled on the
chancel floor and on the altar rails and on the organ’s pipes. And the
holy place was sweet with quiet harmony.

Even Robert Gregory, spruce and straight, wearing the whitest pair of
gloves, and almost tightest into which human hands were ever packed,
was content. He was glad to see Basil settled. The girl had no “dot,”
but she was pretty enough to eat; and his manliness was of a straight,
sturdy stuff, and held that a man should earn and provide for his wife,
by the Lord Harry, every time. And for once he was satisfied again with
Mrs. Gregory’s appearance. She looked fine in her gray and gold, and
the emeralds at her breast and pinning the scrap of bonnet on her white
curls were some style.

Hilda listened to the old service with a rapt, tender face. John
Bradley was coming home for six months of holiday next week. She had no
doubt that he’d come to see her mother.

Mrs. Gregory was not displeased. It was no part of her regret to
wish that Basil should live all his life wifeless and childless.
And the rift between her boy and her saved her the jealousy that
happier mothers must suffer when their first-born son weds. Sorry
recompense--but recompense.

Basil Gregory did not make a very brave bridegroom. But only his mother
noticed it. Most wedding-guests have little eye to spare for mere
bridegrooms. And there is something about the function so trying to
masculine sensitiveness that before now kings and heroes have carried
themselves a little craven at their happiest triumph.

Basil Gregory saw two girls beside him at God’s altar.

As he passed down the aisle with his wife’s shy hand on his arm, he
felt the touch of a smaller, tawnier hand. Its weight hurt him; it was
heavy with fabulous nail-protectors and with priceless rings. He was
madly in love with his wife, and, too, he was madly miserable, because
he knew now that they two would never be quite alone--neither by day
nor by night. His mother saw and knew. Just before they passed her he
stumbled a little, startled by the sound of a Chinese gong.

And a few hours later, in the still sweetness of the dark, it smote him
again.

Rest, Wu Li Chang! Be satisfied! The Englishman is punished. He has
broken his mother’s heart. Your curse is fulfilled. Basil Gregory heard
your gong cry out a soul’s damnation to-day above his wife’s “I will.”
So long as he lives he will hear it, a bitter, relentless knell. When
ginger is hottest in his mouth, when wine bubbles reddest in his cup,
when the English girl he loves lifts with tired, triumphant hands their
firstborn toward his arms, through the young mother’s misty smile
he will see Nang’s face, above the baby’s first cry he will hear the
throbbing note of a Chinese gong.

Rest! Sleep in your Sze-chuan grave! Your hideous vengeance is
complete, life-long, soul-deep. It is greater than even you could have
planned. Almost it is adequate.

  _“The great mountain must crumble,
    The strong beam must break,
    The wise man must wither away like a plant,”
    Confucius crooned as he died._


THE END




Transcriber’s Note:

Punctuation has been standardised while hyphenation has been retained
as it appears in the original publication. Changes have been made as
follows:

  Page 25
    The yamén was a bleak, empty place _changed to_
    The yamên was a bleak, empty place

  Page 52
    relations with the inumerable _changed to_
    relations with the innumerable

  Page 56
    made repeated obesiance and withdrew _changed to_
    made repeated obeisance and withdrew

  Page 101
    the blonde hair was marceled into _changed to_
    the blonde hair was marcelled into

  Page 126
    body with hers, as far as he could _changed to_
    body with hers, as far as she could

  Page 128
    At the Feet of Kwayin Ko _changed to_
    At the Feet of Kwanyin Ko

  Page 189
    ordinary English visting card _changed to_
    ordinary English visiting card

  Page 209
    Gregory asked dearily _changed to_
    Gregory asked drearily

  Page 255
    the mandarin said quiety _changed to_
    the mandarin said quietly

  Page 261
    of any sacrifice, it it not _changed to_
    of any sacrifice, is it not

  Page 273
    Almost wthin sound of your _changed to_
    Almost within sound of your

  Page 313
    Basil Grgory saw two girls _changed to_
    Basil Gregory saw two girls



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