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? Wasanyprice 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—youwillset 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 humanbeing, 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 tormentshe 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, halfin 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 handsoutstretched 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. Thatknowledge 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.