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 fourtimes 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 wasnot 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, withoutlooking, 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 indispensablefor 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 expectMiss 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 yetI 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 afaux 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 hadquite 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 hisbreath, 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.