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.
242 “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.”
243 “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.
244 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.”
245 “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.
246