“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.208 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 circumstances209 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 a210 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.”
211 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.
212 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,213 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.”
214 “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——”
215 “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——”
216 “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.”
217 “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,218 “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 have219 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!”
220