BOOK IV. THE NEMESIS OF FATE
CHAPTER ONE
THE WANDERER
With thoughtful, tireless touch, the Unknown nursed the Breton through the fever that had fastened upon him the night he had cast aside the wife of Tai Lin and had brutally left her lying unconscious on the floor in the dusk of that evening when she had so trustingly laid upon his bosom and had given over to him her love and her life and her honour. Sleepless, the Unknown had nursed him as he struggled to hurl himself into the river that still flowed coaxingly at his feet. Sleepless he had knelt beside him when he lay in a stupor, his face pallid and covered with a cold sweat; sleepless he had listened to him muttering in slow, indistinct utterance, insistent as the dripping of the Water Clock, “I have sinned; I have sinned; I have sinned.”
The Unknown had roughly driven the other priests from the Breton’s chamber on the day they had brought him from the river’s bank, even after he became convalescent and was moved out into the shadowy cloisters, the Unknown still watched sternly and silently over him, so that during those reluctant days of the Breton’s recovery, neither the priests nor the communicants, continually coming and going, heard this silence broken nor knew the cause of the Breton’s sickness. They glanced compassionately at his fever-worn figure, motionless other than his fingers, which were ever nervously creasing, smoothing, caressing a fold in his robe. They noticed that his eyes looked endlessly somewhere, and that a stony calmness, like a veil, clung to his face. But their glances, as they passed and repassed, were ever as thoughtless as they were momentary. It was not for them to conjecture the struggle waging in the still form before them; that unseen volcanic combat was hidden by illimitable distance.
When the Breton was able to leave the Mission he accompanied the Unknown once more on his visitations through the city. These visits took them to that part of Yingching lying north of the Examination Grounds, and when they returned to the Mission they made a short cut through these ancient tourney grounds where multitudes have, during these thousand years contended and lost and won as Fate has willed. Going out by the South Gate they turn westward into the short Street of the Martial Dragon, at the end of which stands the Tower of the Water Clock, where this time-gnawed clepsydra of Yingching drips, drips, drips, the minutes of unnumbered years.
How often the Breton had come to this comforting tower to dream in the shadows of its imperturbable calm, happier than any in the bottomless pool of millions, that swirled around him, the Unknown did not know. But as he passed the winding stairs, the Breton stopped, looked up, and drew his hand across his eyes.
“Come, my son, we must go on,” said the Unknown, gently taking him by the arm.
The Breton looked dully at him for a moment, then seizing his hand pressed it convulsively to his heart.
“No, no, my father,” he cried, bursting into sobs. “I cannot go.”
So it came about in this manner that each day the Unknown left the Breton at the Stairs of the Water Clock and hastened on his way alone to the Great Peace Gate, and it was never until night that the Breton came silently to his chamber.
Once when they came to the Tower of the Water Clock, they stopped as usual but the Unknown stood for a long time gazing intently, questioningly at the Breton, then suddenly he put his arms around him, pressed him fervently to his heart, kissing him repeatedly on both cheeks, while tears streamed down the seams in his face.
“My son,” he cried brokenly, “my son,” and he wept as only an old man can.
“Yes,” he said finally, his voice again calm, “I leave you, my son, to God.”
He kissed the Breton again and hastened toward the Great Peace Gate.
For some moments the Breton stood by the winding stairs of the Water Tower, then walked hastily south, winding, turning, doubling, twisting through a maze of narrow alleys until he came to the Street of Pearls. Once on this thoroughfare he hastened on until he came near to where the street ended at the granite Gate of Tai Lin’s park. Without hesitation he turned into an open guardhouse recessed on the right of the street and leaning against one of the pillars fixed his gaze upon the gateway, as immovable as the pillar itself—which was of stone.
The hour of dusk was falling. Shopkeepers came out of their stores and looked in vain for a customer. Reluctantly they took in their wares and put up their shutters. The itinerant booths were gotten ready and were being taken home on the backs of their owners.
On the side of the street opposite the guardhouse and nearer the Gateway a fortune-teller stopped suddenly in his packing and beckoned mysteriously to his neighbour, a cook.
“Again!” he whispered hoarsely in the cook’s ear.
“Again? Again? What again? Rice——”
“Did I not prognosticate?”
“Pork——”
“Look! Again he is there!” and the fortune-teller whirled the cook around and, half crouching, pointed cautiously to the guardhouse.
“So he is! So he is!” cried the cook.
“Did I not foretell it? Master cook, did I not prognosticate?”
“Yes, that is a fact,” answered the cook doubtfully.
“Cook,” continued the fortune-teller in mystic-triumphant tones, “I see everything, hear everything, know everything. Now, master cook, let me do you a good turn; it will only cost——”
“But,” suddenly exclaimed the cook, brightening, “he has been there in that fashion toward night-cooking for nearly two full moons.”
“Certainly, certainly, but would he have been there if it had not been for my prognostications?”
“That may be, that may be,” answered the cook, scratching his head.
“Master cook, let me prognosticate you. It will only cost——”
“No,” interrupted the cook abruptly. “But,” he hesitated, “I don’t like that influence every day just at my night-cooking.”
“It is very bad,” interjected the fortune-teller, shaking his head ruefully. “I would not be you for all the cash of Ho.”
“What is it?” demanded the cook hastily. “Tell me, master, tell me.”
The fortune-teller jumped back dramatically and threw up his hands. “I am overwhelmed,” he cried in lofty injured tones, “dumb, speechless, a dying phœnix.”
The cook scratched his head and looked sheepishly at him.
“Master cook,” the fortune-teller continued in the same severe voice, “you pretend to be a merchant, and yet you are unable to distinguish great profits from a fly’s head. Is it not known among honourable merchants that just scales and full measures injure no man? I am pained! Goodbye, master cook.” The fortune-teller began to wrap up his paraphernalia.
The cook scratched his head.
“Master cook, I leave you with a pitying heart—farewell.”
“What have I done? What have I done?” cried the cook, coming hastily to his side.
“What have you done!” repeated the fortune-teller scornfully. “What have you done but throw out the refuse, the burnt scraps, the very swill of your inquisitiveness to lure from me the peculiar gems of my knowledge—my pearly prognostications!”
“But what have I done?” exclaimed the cook perplexedly.
“Can you get rice without planting? Chickens without eggs? Heat without fire? Fire without fuel? Prognostications without incentives?” demanded the fortune-teller haughtily.
“But what threatens me? What threatens me?” cried the cook impatiently.
“Master cook,” said the fortune-teller, solemnly though relentingly, “I should be lenient with you; that you do not understand the incomprehensible is not your fault. You are a cook, I alone am the scholar. Cook, I pity you; to me only is apparent the disaster over-pending. I will aid you.”
“Do, master, do.”
“Before prognosticating, cook, I must have four rice-cakes, cooked well in oil, and two pieces of pork——”
“Too much! master fortune-teller, too much!” cried the cook, backing off in amazement.
“Cook, I salute thee! To-night empty your oil into the street; scatter your flour upon the night-winds—you will need them no more. Farewell, there comes a day when every tumour must be punctured. Listen now to my last prognostication: Do not waste your wife’s cash in mock-money. It will not avail you.” The fortune-teller moved slowly away.
“Master fortune-teller! Master fortune-teller!”
“What is it, unfortunate man?”
“I will give you one rice-cake and one piece of fat pork.”
“Does one grain of planted rice produce as much as four?”
“I am a poor man.”
“Must not the poor avert their fate as well as the rich?”
“I will give you two rice-cakes and one piece of lean pork.”
“You are indeed a poor man,” commented the fortune-teller sadly, “and unfortunate. Yes, my compassion pleads for you. I will prognosticate. Yes, for two cakes, two fat pieces of pork, and a bowl of kale.”
“Too much! Too much!” cried the cook desperately. “I will give you the cakes and the pork, no more! no more!”
For some moments the fortune-teller looked seriously up at the heavens.
“Let it be,” he finally mumbled with compassion, “but mark you, master cook, the depth of my benevolence!”
When the cook had provided him with rice-cakes and two squares of fat pork he squatted down upon his heels and munched contentedly, while the cook crouched by his side and waited. Now and then the fortune-teller would stretch his neck and peer mysteriously through the gathering twilight at the tall figure standing so still beside the stone pillar of the guardhouse, and the cook at the same time stretched his neck and peered fearfully through the shadows.
After the fortune-teller finished his cakes and pork he drew from his paraphernalia a small-bowled pipe. When he had taken a few puffs, he asked in a low voice:
“What do you see, cook?”
“He is still there,” answered the cook in a whisper.
“What else do you see?”
“He stares like a big-eyed owl.”
“What is an owl?”
“A bird of bad omen.”
“What else do you know?”
“That he never turns his round eyes away from the gate of Tai Lin.”
“What is a gateway?”
“It is the coming in and going out.”
“How do you write the characters Yen Wang?”
The cook moved closer to the fortune-teller. “Is it that?” he asked hoarsely.
“Did you not see him when he commenced to come many moons ago?”
“Yes, master, yes.”
“Was he not as stalwart as the young bullock of Heungshan?”
“Yes, master——”
“And now he is like a spectre, a troubled ghost whose Fêng Shui has been ruined.”
“It is true, master, it is true!”
“Have you not noticed,” continued the fortune-teller in tones that made the cook huddle closer to him, “that since he came you have drowsed and drowsed and been careless of your business?”
“It is true! It is true!”
“Have you not noticed that when his fingers twitch, men shun you?”
“Many men have passed me by, master, many have passed me by!”
“Have you not noticed when his bosom heaves out you have a sadness in your chest?”
“Yes, yes.”
“He has the appearance of a Western-sea man!”
“What!”
“A foreign devil. Have you seen his eyes? They are blue!”
“Blue? master, blue?”
“If he should look into your boiling oil, it would go up in flame; if he should look into your flour, it would frisk with weevils; if he should look into your meat, lo! there would be nothing but maggots, and if he should peer into your heart—I tremble.”
The cook crouched closer to him.
“Cook, how is the Idol of Yang Ssü made?”
“By three swings of the axe, master.”
“How is the Idol of Yen Wang made?”
“I know not, I know not.”
“It is carved by tears, cook, as rocks are cut by mountain’s rain. Its visage is of the terriblest sorrow; the height of heaven, the depth of the sea cannot encompass it.”
The fortune-teller leaned closer to the cook and whispered hoarsely in his ear: “He has the face of Yen Wang.”
“I feel that sadness! I feel that sadness!” cried the cook, pulling open the neck of his blouse.
The fortune-teller looked at him pityingly, then up at the darkening sky and remained contemplative for some time.
“Cook,” he said thoughtfully, “there are some things that are known and some things that are not. From the things that are known we learn concerning the things that are not, but this is the task of the wise. Now it is known that heaven is round and the earth square; that the stars are shining characters in the Book of Fate, and eclipses are dragon feasts. Moreover, it is known that when tigers plunge into the sea they become sharks, and sparrows falling into the water are changed into oysters. It is also known to those that are learned that it is the nature of water to run downward; the nature of fire to flame upward; the nature of wood to be either crooked or straight; the nature of metals to be pliable and subject to change. In addition to this, cook, it is known to scholars that there are five elements, five planets, five great mountain ranges on the earth, five seas, five senses, five musical tones, five kinds of coffins, five kinds of torture, five ways to die in, and five times in the last five minutes has the spectre in the guardhouse clenched his hands.
“Now, cook, what is known to us, especially wise, is that the clouds are dragons and the winds tigers; mind is the mother, matter the child. If the mother summons the child, will it dare disobey? Those that, like myself, can expel the spirit of death, must summon the spirits of the five elements, and who would conquer death must obtain the influence of the five planets. When this is done, Ying and Yang can be controlled; winds and clouds are gathered into the palm of the hand; mountains and hills torn up by the roots, while seas and rivers can be made to spring out of the ground.
“But, cook, to save you from Yen Wang, whose image now looks down upon you, who has been in your very presence for nearly two rounded moons, exceeds all of these things in wisdom and difficulty. There is only one thing, and it is by no means easy, even for me, to obtain—a golden elixir! Ordinarily the moon and planets and all the powerful lights in heaven must seven times seven repeat their footsteps; and the four seasons nine times complete their circuit. Then must this elixir be chastened in molten silver and burnt red with molten gold. But, cook, one draught will save you; three draughts will give you ten myriad of ages, and eight draughts will waft you beyond the sphere of sublunary things.”
“Do it, master,” muttered the cook huskily.
“It is well,” responded the fortune-teller solemnly. “And I shall see to it that this shall not cost you more than ten taels sycee——”
The cook sprang tragically to his feet, and forgetful of the image of Yen Wang the wrangling of cash began.
The Breton in the guardhouse awoke from his stupor. Reluctantly, silently, he went away and night came down upon the Street of Pearls.
CHAPTER TWO
WORD FROM THE UNKNOWN
What to man is the warring of a whole world of nations when his heart and soul wage their more terrible combat within him? What to him are the destruction of Empires and the annihilation of whole kingdoms of men when his own bosom resounds with mutilated cries? So it is that a monarch in his temporal power is subject more to this internal warring and brawling than to the sufferings of millions, and the spiritual pontiff is likewise forgetful of the penitential throngs and waxes gay or melancholy as this combat ebbs or surges tumultuously within him.
This battling between the heart and soul, flesh and spirit, conscience and desire, or what not, is the primæval combat of man. It is Cosmic. And while blood-letting is purely human, this other struggle has something of God in it—hence its terribleness.
For two months such a combat had been going on in the Breton and the terribleness of it had left its traces upon him. He was but the withered semblance of his former self. Feeble and meagre, he appeared to have but little of life left in him. Only when the alluring mind—the heart’s fickle ally—would come to his relief with pleasing, enticing thoughts did he betray any energy or affect interest in the affairs about him. Then he hastened to the guardhouse on the Street of Pearls, where he stood motionless until dusk, his hollow eyes staring through the portals into Tai Lin’s park. There he waited day after day to see those that lived where she lived, as if they could bring away with them some message from her unknown to themselves, but which he could decipher as soon as they came through the gateway.
Such are the strange conceits of hidden love, and such are the stratagems them employ. A familiar odour, sight, or sound are inexhaustible quarries out of which are hewn and polished with exquisite care blocks that go to build up endless palaces and castles of revery, wherein, in due time, are crowded a thousand airy happenings. There the unsubstantial mind brings to broken hearts echoed laughter, false mirrored scenes, and a myriad of fairy fantasies woven out of the unknown.
Down by his crucifix all night, or on the overhanging bank of the river the Breton fought against his heart and its desires, against the love that had come to him unknown and had taken him suddenly body and soul into its keeping, and which even in midst of his appeals to God burned and surged in every vein. So he struggled night after night, little dreaming that the combat was drawing to a close, and was to end—fortunate or otherwise—as each must determine for himself—in a manner that showed him that the hand of God was in it and it was done under His eye.
Dusk had already merged into darkness when the Breton, as usual, entered the cloisters on this night. The faint glimmer of stars that crept through the one high-barred window was lost in the shadows that lay within. He lit a candle, and folding his arms on the table buried his head in them. It was in this manner and at this hour that the dreams of the day began to forsake him. Sometimes his body quivered, and it may have been the trembling of a sob, but it was unuttered. Sometimes he raised his head and with dry, questioning eyes gazed long and intently at the crucifix hanging with its wounded Christ beside his pallet.
Midnight or after a person listening would have heard a smothered moan and might have seen a glimmer of tears in his eyes as they again sought beseechingly the crucifix on the wall. It was then that the day-dreams had utterly vanished, and only the pain of his sin lay hold of him. It was then that he left the table and threw himself down before the Christ in whose compassion sins are forgiven and the memory of them washed away.
So, on this night when he raised his eyes to the crucifix he discovered before him two sealed envelopes. On the larger was written, “Do not open for one year.” He broke the seal of the other and drew out a letter in the handwriting of the Unknown.
As the Breton read the first few lines a look of startled wonder came into his eyes, then pain mingled with anguish. He stopped reading and for some time sat gazing emptily before him into those dim places where truth is sought.
Presently he resumed reading the Unknown’s last words, and varying emotions of amazement and fear shot across his face. He looked wonderingly over to the crucifix as if to ask: “Do you know all this?” But as he continued reading his credulity vanished, and the lines of his lips drew hard and straight. Sometimes his fist involuntarily clenched, a flush burned in his pale, sunken cheeks; sparks of a hidden fire flashed from his blue-black eyes, blazed, died out, then burned with a steadier flame. Sometimes the veins in his forehead and over his temples stood out like whipcords. His breath came in even heavy pulsations.
The letter of the Unknown was drawing to an end. The Breton rose from his chair and bent over against the candle flame, as if with brighter light to fathom out the terror and the truth of those unread pages.
The last sheet fluttered from his hand.
Standing by the table his head gradually sank forward; his eyes closed, and into his face came a stony uncertain tension. Presently, like one awakening, he pressed his hand across his eyes, as if to arouse himself more surely to the scene before him. Then mechanically he gathered up the sheets of the Unknown’s letter and put them back in the envelope—all but the last sheet, which was afterwards found on the floor under the table, and on which were written these enigmatic words:
“My son, I cannot continue this category of sin. Day now breaks and I must be on my way—a way from which there is no returning at all, forever. You will look into what I have written, then—go away.
“What will come of all this I do not know, but these people will not submit forever. Why they have done so this long I do not understand, nor do I know what is going to happen except that in the chronology of such acts comes inevitably the century end of wrong and that awful number ‘Ninety-three.’ I see already the rim of a reign of terror, I hear noises that are the clamour of vengeance, I discover signs in the heavens and it is the judgment of God.
“To-night is the end! What melancholy forebodings this may bring to you, my son, will remain forever unknown to me. But I leave you, as is my duty—that you may grapple with this double-headed dragon that now assails you. Alone you must conquer or alone succumb. In the battles of the heart and soul there can be no allies.
“I have left you in the other envelope certain secrets, which you are not to discover until you have left this place, to return no more.”
The Breton continued standing by the table, staring emptily into those shadows out of which so often come forms real and terrible.
The candle burned low and flickered.
Into the dull eyes of the Breton a faint light was creeping, a light that was not a reflection, but itself a fire such as lurks in that inflammable tinder—a man’s passions.
The candle, like the Breton’s faith, was sputtering, and presently this candle flickered and went out.
Night was ebbing away. Monotonously the watchman passed and repassed, his gong grumbling out the hours of night.
A grey ray stole in from the east; the hum of a new day grew great, and the breaking dawn with its echoes came into the silent room.
The Breton was kneeling before the crucifix that hung near his pallet. Daylight did not arouse him, nor the clamour of day. He was not praying, nor moving, nor dreaming. He was waiting, as men before him and since have waited, for the Christ to lift up his bowed head and speak to him from the pain of the crucifix. The Breton waited, and the solemn melody of chanting voices rose and fell, then—silence.
A sunbeam edged shyly through the window, lingered uncertain and—went away. Someone knocked at his door, but he did not turn from the cross, for he heard no sounds nor knew that it was midday.
Daylight grew dim, and the melancholy shadows of twilight hovered a few moments around his window, then it was again dark and the watchman’s gong measured out the hours of the night.
Once more dawn crept up from under the skirts of night and ushered in a new and memorable day for the Breton priest. He still knelt before the crucifix, but the deep lines of pain had vanished from his face; a calm, gentle serenity rested there, and when at last the sunbeam edged coyly, doubtfully, across the casement, he opened his eyes and they shone with a new, great joy.
When the sunbeam began to go he rose from the crucifix and put the envelopes into his robe. For some moments they lingered, then went away—this sunbeam and the Breton.
CHAPTER THREE
DAWN AGAIN
Without hesitation the Breton once again entered the Palace of Tai Lin, and went quickly through its halls and courts until he came to the apartments of his Excellency’s wife. For a moment he hesitated at the oval silken-draped doorway, then putting the curtains aside he stepped softly in.
By the screen, as if it had never been moved, stood his chair, beside it the high ebony table with its roseleaf marble top, and in front of it with her face toward the screen sat the wife, as she had sat many months before.
For a moment the Breton pressed back against the curved lintel, then went softly over and stood beside her. She did not move nor give any sign of recognition as the Breton approached, only her little hands folded in her lap pressed together more tightly, until her finger tips became darkly red. It is not known how long this silence lasted, for, though time may never cease, there are moments in the horologue of love, which are not counted.
“I have come back,” said the Breton finally in soft monotonous tones.
At the sound of his voice, the wife’s hands trembled and relaxed; a slight feverish flush diffused her face, but she gave no sign that she heard him.
“I have come back to you,” he repeated.
A tremor shot through her, and a faint flush darkened and spread to brow and to neck.
“I understand it all now,” he continued vaguely. “You remember when your hand touched my robe? At first I thought it was the hand of God, for it seemed as though I were in heaven. Then came another thought and I cast you aside. For this I have suffered. In every soft sound of night have I heard you fall again and again, without a cry, just a silken crash. Even God would not heed my prayers to drown that sound. In the day I beggared time before the Gateway. By night I prayed, did penance, and sleeplessly watched for the reluctant shadows of dawn, a dawn that punished me with a thousand memories; with the larks’ song a-fluttering from their bamboo cages; with flowers whose fragrance choked and whose colours burned my eyes; with laughter and the dreadful crinkling of silk. Again at night it was prayer and penance or pain, for the river murmured with the tones of your voice, and the stars stole their lights from your eyes and looked in reproachful pain down upon me.”
Presently the Breton took from the bosom of his robe the manuscripts left by the Unknown.
“Three days ago I found these secretly beside my crucifix”; and he looked dumbly at the envelopes he half extended toward her.
“He is gone,” he continued, a resigned softness creeping into the monotony of his voice, “and it was in this letter that he asked me to go away, for it was sin to remain. Of this I took counsel of God, and for two nights I prayed to our Christ on His crucifix, and to-day at dawn, God bade me go.”
“Did you know,” he asked with singular simplicity, “that I have come back to you?”
The wife moved slightly, and the light in her great eyes deepened.
“You have no husband, for husbands are searched out by God, as wives are sent by Him from heaven. On the second night before my crucifix all things became clear to me, and doubts were brushed aside. We will go to another country; to America, where all are free; to Australia, where all are forgotten, or to other lands where men are lost. We will be always together; I can look at you and you can put your hand upon my shoulder, and it will be as in heaven. We will live together forever, for whom God marries He never parts. I have planned how we shall leave the city,” he continued, his voice vibrant with eagerness. “You know no one can leave this city by night, but on the eve of the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters all of the city gates and ward gates will be open. You can leave the park by the western postern and I will meet you there the second hour after darkness. We will not go to Hongkong, for they would send ships and bring us back. We cannot remain in Yingching, for they would find us. We cannot go to another town in the Empire, for all of the magistrates in the Middle Kingdom will search for you. I have thought carefully of all this and have planned that when you come to the postern, I will meet you with a sedan; I will take you to the river, where I will have a river boat waiting, then we will go up the river to the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon. Men fear this Cavern of Yu Ngao, but there is no danger. I will go there first with Tsang and prepare it for you, and when you go we will take Tsang’s wife. We can stay there until people forget, then we will take a boat and go down the river by night until we come to the sea. At Pakhoi we will take a sea junk and go to Singapore, for there all the ships of the world meet.
“Will you go?”
The wife did not reply, so they remained motionless in silence, and time passed as it had passed with them before.
The sun slid slowly down the cloudless September heavens; the shadow of the feathery bamboo crept again into the chamber and gently slunk away; but when the rose-saffron of the afterglow flushed upward the western sky and diffused its soft light through the court, the wife left her stool and crossed over to the shell-latticed window, and as when the summer storm is past and the burdened lily tilts its gathered diamonds to the sun, so her tears, trembling on her cheeks, sparkled joyously in the amber light.
When the melancholy “coo-ee, coo-ee” of the argus-eyed pheasant sounded softly through the twilight, she came back from the window, her little hands clasped together, her eyes downcast. For several moments she stood shyly beside him, then looking up, said:
“I will go.”
For some time the Breton stood as if he had not heard, then kneeling, leaned forward until his head touched her robe. The wife lay her hand lightly upon his head, and for the first time there fell upon him that blessing, which, like mercy, has a double sanctity, and though its voice is unheard among the fretful noises of the world, yet its reverberations passing from a woman’s heart go on and on through vast distances and depths until its echoes cease in that uncertain chasm—a man’s breast.
“I knew you would come back,” she said presently, her voice quivering between laughter and sobs. “When I touched your robes and felt you tremble I knew that you loved me, and when you took hold of my wrists you do not know what happiness came over me. I felt as if you were going to pick me up and fly away forever to that heaven you have spoken of so often. Then—then you threw me to the floor.”
She felt the Breton shudder, and she reached down and took hold of his ears and tilted his head back. For a moment she looked into his eyes, then for the first time in many months the room echoed softly with her laughter.
“You must not look that way,” she cried roguishly as she twitched his ears. “Don’t you know that that was a most happy parting compared to the first time you went away, when you left me without a word, chained by torturing doubt? But this time you threw me to the floor, and then I knew that you loved me. I have not been unhappy, nor have I been joyful these many weeks, but I have been contented, and in the airy tapestry of my dreams have I embroidered ten thousand times just such a scene as this. Each day at that time, when you were accustomed to come, I sought my stool here beside the screen, waited, and now you have come as I knew you would.”
Impulsively she knelt down beside him and in the gathering dusk soon one figure could not be distinguished from the other.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE GROTTO OF THE SLEEPLESS DRAGON
Few spectacles are ever given for man to witness more melancholy than the dissolution of an ancient dynasty; an end inevitably tragic and often leaving its solemn sign, as did the dissipation of the Mings, forever upon the people.
For two centuries and a half had this family of the acolyte ruled over a wide portion of earth and then did it go out, tragically, but in a manner befitting a dynasty whose past had been so filled with greatness.
When Tongshing—the last of his race to rule from the Dragon Throne—found that the east gate of his capital was invested by besieging armies, he retraced his steps to the Palace and sounded the gong to summon his courtiers. None appeared. Then alone with the eunuch, Wen Chenan, the old monarch sought his favourite spot on Wansui Hill, and there beneath its solitary tree wrote this, his final protest:
“For seventeen years I have reigned from the Dragon Throne and now even rebels come to insult me in my capital. Evidently this is a punishment sent by Heaven. But I am not alone guilty. My ministers are worse than myself. They have ruined me by concealing the true condition of affairs.
“With what countenance shall I after death be able to appear before my forefathers? You, who have brought me to this unhappy end, take my body and hack it to pieces. I shall not protest. But spare my people and refrain from doing them injury.”
Then this old man, who was a monarch, hung himself on the solitary juniper tree.
After the Emperor’s death the Ming officials in the south of China crowned one kinsman after another as his successor, but each, oppressed by the curse of his race, died in a manner not less tragic than the melancholy end of Tongshing. In the course of this Imperial extinction the choice at last fell upon the Prince Yu Ngao, who was proclaimed Emperor in the old city of Yingching.
Shortly after Yu Ngao had been crowned the city was besieged by the Manchus and captured on the 26th of November, 1650, more than one-half million of its inhabitants perishing in the assault. It was supposed that upon this day the young Emperor also died, but such was not the case, for on the night before the final attack, the Emperor and three hundred of his most devoted followers, taking with them the Imperial treasure, escaped from the city by means of a water-gate situated between the Gate of Eternal Rest and the southwest corner of the city walls, through which a large canal runs from the river into the city.
It was the intention of the fugitives to make their way into Kwangsi and join the Ming forces in that Province; their flight being up the Chu Kiang to the North River, thence to the Lien Chau River and across the mountains into Kwangsi. But after the capture of the city, their escape being discovered, a large force set out in pursuit, the fugitives having but one day and two nights’ start. On arriving at the gorge of the Blind Boy, less than one-third the distance of their journey, they found themselves but a half day’s march ahead of their pursuers and feeling that the end had come they selected for their last stand a high shelf of rock in the mouth of the gorge.
From this point, looking up the cañon, there is seen with great distinctness on a perpendicular wall of rock about two hundred feet above the water, the “Blind Boy,” which gives the gorge its name. Looking at the image from this angle, the form, features and sad blind expression of the eyes is vividly seen. The Emperor with his little army standing upon this high shelf peering through the purple shadows of this great gorge perceived the image of the Blind Boy and as they looked—it is so related—the eyes opened and gazed benignly, Buddha-like, down upon them. Then as the eyes closed slowly and reluctantly a peasant appeared upon the shelf and prostrating himself before the Emperor begged to lead him to a place of safety. Receiving imperial sanction he took the force by a circuitous route above the gorge to a cavern whose secret recesses were apparently alone known to him.
Yu Ngao’s small regiment had scarcely arrived in the vicinity of the cavern when their tireless foe appeared. It was with difficulty that part of the men defended the approach until the Emperor and the remainder of his force, carrying the imperial treasure, retired in safety. Again and again the enemy attempted to capture the cavern but owing to the ease of its defence they were repulsed. After a number of months’ close watch they attacked again. This time there was no combat and they entered—entered to be seen no more.
Years passed and other forces went into the cavern, to return never. After this, during long intervals of time, adventurous persons have gone in to search for the great treasure, but none of them by man were ever seen again.
Thus the people call this the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon and—avoid it. They have surrounded it with a halo of mysticism and a semi-sacredness clings to it. The country around abounds with marvellous tales told of its dragon, which guards, sleepless and relentless, its treasure of gold and jade, of pearls and priceless rubies, until again the Mings shall come to their own.
The word holds no more wonderful scene than when after having ascended a fjord that opens into the North River, and upon whose jade-green waters the sun shines but a moment each day, a turn is made and this marvellous white precipice rises overhead sheer out of the water. Four caves are to be seen half-veiled with vines and from out of a great fissure a third way up the cliff falls a cataract in a broad, heavy sheet of glittering silver. When it strikes against the rocks, it then comes down like snow or is blown upward a veiling mist. These falls are broken four times by projecting shelves, the last drop being the longest. Just below the second shelf to the right of the falls and almost invisible from the stream are stone steps cut diagonally across the face of the cliff, beginning in some shrubs and disappearing under the falling waters, while above them hangs a rusted chain suspended in two long folds. Under this projecting shelf, hid by the veil of waters, entered by these stone steps and rusted chain, is the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon.
The formation of the cliff is a calciferous, conglomerate mass of fantastic beauty. The upper right hand side has the appearance of the façade of some vast age-eroded cathedral; serrated pinnacles and slender spires point skyward in irregular rising series. Here complete a flying buttress; there one half hid in ruins. In one place arches, in another cavernous recesses, that might have been windows; pillars, gargoyles and angels are scattered from top to bottom; while around each spire and buttress, arch and pillar, gargoyle and angel, twine crepe myrtle and festoons of vinnig, whose clusters of blossoms sweeten the air of the shadowed cañon.
These vines and cavities have become the homes of innumerable birds: doves, thrushes, cormorants and francolins, mimahs, kingfishers, owls, ospreys and eagles, while at dusk the hundred-footed fox and spirit-cat creep about its broken face, in and out of its columns and creepers.
One day these birds fluttered and screamed, the fox and spirit-cat peeped out of their dens for a boat had crept into their solitude and lingered in the emerald lake.
Presently two men got out of it, followed with difficulty the narrow, vine-covered path, crossed the stones and disappeared under the falling waters. All day the birds watched them go back and forth, bearing their loads into the cavern whence no man ever returns.
So the day passed and along toward the latter part of the afternoon one of the men went down to the boat and remained there, smoking peacefully. The other climbed up the face of the cliff until he reached a narrow shelf near the far end of the fissure from which the cataract burst. Bright little birds with blue wings and brown breasts, a-tilting on the vines, francolins perched on the crags or fluttering in circles, looked wonderingly at this man standing silently upon that perilous projection and gazing contentedly over the lower cliffs to the westward.
With the setting of the sun came the gorgeous afterglow of this latitude, burning the cloud banks above the purple-misted mountains with gold, alternating with amethyst and lilac and shafting over this solitude their exquisite hues and lavishing them unseen upon the man pressed against the cliff. At last a purple veil rose from the gorge: eagles and companies of ospreys soaring majestically above and below him now began to wheel, scream, poise, and dart. The spirit-cat and hundred-footed fox came to look at him, meditatively, fearlessly, knowingly, for it was dusk.
When the man clinging to the vines and the crags descended the birds returned to their accustomed roosts and night brooded gently over all.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROPITIATION OF THE GODS OF THE WATERS
Among the festivals of Southern China none is more popular than the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters, which takes place during the spring and autumn in villages and cities bordering on the Chu Kiang estuary and the wild ocean banks of the Southern Sea; for these cities and towns have their boats with fathers, husbands and sons scattered over many waters and depend for their sustenance as well as life upon the mercy of the Gods of the Deep.
Contrary to most festivals, this is a festivity of the night. Besides calls, feasting, and the usual merriment of such occasions, it is marked by the procession of the Dragon and an illumination of lanterns.
The Dragon, which is taken through the streets on this night, symbolises the Monarch of the Deep, and is from fifty to a hundred and fifty feet long. This monster, made of silk and covered with glittering scales of gilt is carried by men concealed within it. During the procession it goes through all of the evolutions of its kind; coiling, wriggling, creeping, gliding; every so often darting out its monstrous glaring head after a huge sea-pearl frisked teasingly in front of it. It draws up in rolls, moves in long silken undulations, squirms, twists, lolls, sometimes springing at the spectators. Preceding and following the Dragon are carried enormous models of fish: sharks, perch, whales, pompano, sea-eels, an endless number; gorgeous, gleaming, shaking in the sea of the night their fins and tails of fire.
But what is best in this Feast of the Night are its lanterns; nowhere are people so skilful in making these dainty ornaments of darkness as are the men of this land. Their variety of form, colouring, elegant carving and gilding exceed description; while the strange but delightful taste, the infinite pains and ingenuity that are exercised in their construction are beyond comparison. They are made from paper, silk, horn, glass, cloth, bamboo, and raffia. Their variety of shapes and decorations are without end; round, square, melon-shaped, gourd-shaped, melons squared, gourds squared, pentagoned, hexagoned, octagoned and all the other goneds; birds, beasts, official fans and umbrellas, flowers, fish, miniature pagodas, phœnixes, unicorns, and turtles; all the creatures of heaven and earth, of mythology and man’s creation, coloured, blazoned, gilded, tasselled, charactered, swaying and quivering. Such are the lights that swing in the night winds of the spring and autumn.
Some lanterns are no larger than goose eggs; some are like magnificent chandeliers, twenty feet in diameter, while others, as the Tsao-ma Kong, are even more elaborate.
The ingenuity exercised in the construction of this latter kind is almost incomprehensible. The inanimate lives. Currents of hot air generated by lights set innumerable figures in motion; vessels spread their sails and move slowly or rapidly over undulating seas; fields are ploughed by water-oxen and rice-planted; great concourses of people move by and horses race along with chariots; armies manœuvre and retreat; kings and princes with their retinues come and go; there are dances and theatrical performances, comedies and tragedies, while innumerable other scenes of life pass before the bewildered sight as transient and fleeting as life itself—vanishing when the candle sputters and goes out.
The day of the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters came at last, though youths, jugglers, thieves, gamins, a priest, a wife, and in fact a whole city had waited impatiently, almost angrily, for its coming. The morning of this autumn day dragged tediously along; noon came and the hours succeeding grew more expectant and breathless. Other than the occasional firing of a cracker and the whoop of urchins, the afternoon had remained silent. But as evening progressed merry sounds increased; jugglers, mountebanks and actors amused the crowds in every available space; gongs were beaten, music played and as darkness settled over the city lanterns began to glimmer from every projection, from ridge-poles, balconies and carved fantastic eaves. Windows oval, square, and oblong glowed with brilliancy, while fronts of houses, whimsically carved and emblazoned with signs of lacquer and gold, were ablaze with profusion of lanterns. In the throngs moving hither and thither each possessed some kind of a light; a silken, tasselled, emblazoned lantern, a shimmer of horn or flare of torch.
During the first hours of darkness the uproar of music, gongs, brat-whoops and crackers was incessant, but eventually, as the lanterns began to flicker and go out, the roar grew less and less.
The park of Tai Lin rested in this sea of light and storm-din an island of solitude; dark, peaceful, lit only by the stars and the glimmer of surrounding lights, noised only by the roar without, and by the music of waters gurgling in their pools and rivulets, tumbling over rocks and tiny precipices; murmuring, soothing, slumbering.
Out into this solitude the wife crept during the second hour after darkness. She left the palace from a western court, known as the Court of Sunset. Turning to her right she skirted along the west granite terrace that overhung the lotus pond. Along this she hastened until she came to the steps leading down upon the lawn. Then she stopped, turned back and with her little hands clasped upon her bosom, gazed intently at the home she intended leaving forever. Trembling she went down from the terrace and crossed the lawn overspread with great banians and wutung trees. As she moved cautiously, hesitatingly along under their shadows every voice of night conspired to startle her; deer coming from out of their covert, a bird-sigh, the night-wind’s swish or a leaf falling at her feet caused her to shrink back or brought a smothered cry from her lips. It was a stealth full of fear to her, but she went bravely on though trembling, shuddering, sometimes ceasing to breathe. She came to the miniature hills on the west and hastened through them, past pagodas scattered on all sides; pagodas that clung to the edge of precipices and overhung her path like impending traps; others loomed up suddenly before her in the darkness of little gorges, while some as gigantic beasts watched her from clumps of trees. When she passed through the bamboo groves beyond the fluttering of startled birds caused her to fly with fear over their gravelled paths. From the bamboo groves she followed a little rivulet agurgle under an avenue of swishing willows and whenever a fish splashed in the waters she clung to the willows, trembling and uncertain. At the source of the stream in the miniature mountains of rock she turned to her left across a grassy starlit meadow, where the noise of revelry sounded plainly upon the night air. West of this meadow rose blackly before her the forest hiding the western wall. Peering into the forbidding shadows of its pines she hesitated, looked over the meadow so bright under the starlight and glimmer of surrounding sea of lanterns, then breathless, with an heavy hand upon her shoulder, she entered its gloomy precincts.
The wall surrounding the park on all sides was some twelve feet high, the top strewn with splintered glass imbedded in cement. The bottom being about three feet in thickness, caused the small iron-postern recessed close to the ground to be hardly noticeable even in daytime. So when the wife reached the wall and not coming directly upon the postern she did not know which way to turn. Groping along toward the southern end she went away from it, and when she crept back to where she left the wood, her breath came in little gasps. When she stopped she trembled so that she could scarcely stand.
Suddenly her hand went into a recess—it was the postern—not far from the wall’s north end. Taking a key from a purse hanging to her girdle she inserted it and then—sank down upon the ground and cried. She sobbed, shuddered and laughed; she smiled and cried at the same time. One listening could not have told whether it was laughter crying, or sobs laughing. There was no bitterness in her tears, no joy in her mirth. If asked, she could not have told whether she were gay or sad; whether she thought of the man waiting, waiting, restlessly just beyond the wall or an old man slumbering happily in the palace behind her. Finally she got up, turned the key, shoved open the postern, then sat down upon the threshold and should have cried again had not the Breton, waiting since the beginning of darkness nearby the gate, came and touched her shyly upon the shoulder. She looked up and in an instant her face was illumined with radiant smiles; the world around her with all of its terrors and dangers was now unseen, unheard. Reaching up her hand she rested it timidly upon his arm; looking up into his face she laughed, gently, doubtfully, yet reassuringly.
A short way down the street a sedan waited, and thither the Breton led her. The bearers, lifting the chair lightly on their shoulders, started off, the Breton on one side, the man Tsang on the other. They moved uncertainly through the narrow tortuous streets, some black and empty and along these they hastened. Others ablaze with lights were filled with slow-moving crowds and deafened by all the noises of this night and along these they moved with difficulty. Not far from the Magistracy of Kwanghoi they came to a street half-dim with flickering lanterns and in which were but few pedestrians. Being half-lighted and yet deserted gave the bearers an opportunity to increase their speed to the utmost, and even in passing right-angled streets they did not alter their gait.
Suddenly an official green-sedan followed by a retinue turned the corner. The men that should have preceded and announced its approach had, owing to the density of the crowds in an adjoining street, been forced back to its side. And in the collision, which was unavoidable, owing to the speed of the wife’s bearers, the green-sedan was overthrown, the head of its occupant striking the pavement through the side window.
Hardly a moment elapsed before the two sedans, their bearers and retinues were surrounded by a crowd of men and of boys. This crowd, deciphering the official name on the tablets borne by members of his retinue, at once began their abuse.
It was a wild scene. Around the sedan and official, who sat dazed on the pavement—a bundle of red satin and gold—huddled his frightened retinue with torches and trembling lanterns, while about them laughed and yelped and glowered this crowd of the night.
“Is it a man or a woman?” chirped an imp.
“It is a general!”
“What! He looks like a midwife.”
Everybody now began, heeding no one, listening to no one, but pouring forth that abuse that is heaped by all people upon masters cowed before the terror of numbers.
A Chinese mob is peculiar, though they are innocent of the fact. Just what it is going to do is uncertain; like sea-waves, it depends upon the way some little gust blows. Truculent, docile, smiling, sombre, gay, and destructive—such are they in almost as many minutes. At once childishly curious, peering, chattering, laughing; then taciturn, gloomy, defiant and over whom broods a scowl that is terrible. They never know just what is coming, whether it will be laughter or annihilation. They delight in this uncertainty and their victims cringe before it.
“I don’t believe it is a he.”
“What! don’t you see the Golden Lion on his breast?”
“Beasts often mount the breasts of women.”
“Do you know,” howled a voice authoritatively, “that more generals are killed by falling from sedans than in battle?”
“They are so fat.”
“And so soft.”
“Whoever noticed what things follow them?”
“Leeches!”
“Lice!”
“Sores!”
“Vermin!”
“Toads!”
“Offal!”
“Somebody help the woman-general up.”
“Dust his skirts.”
“Wipe off the spit.”
The officer rose with difficulty, purple, speechless. His retinue fell back terror-stricken, and the bearers of the wife’s sedan skipped nimbly away. His rage, however, only gave new impetus to the crowd’s joy. They yelped, groaned, sighed and begged piteously for someone to help the officer get mad.
“It is a known fact,” rose a howl above the rest, “that a general can never get in a rage.”
“Poke him!”
“Punch him!”
The crowd was getting dangerous. A silence fell upon it.
“Get the general his fan; he is going now.”
The danger passed and once more the crowd was full of amused wonder as the official glaring around, suddenly pounces upon the wife’s sedan. Encouraged and jeered on by the crowd’s boisterous hoots, he reached in and grabbed the wife by the arm, but as she rose out of her sedan his hand fell.
The crowd became as still as solitude itself—a silence of swaying lanterns and glare of torch. For a long time in this perfect stillness the mob looked breathlessly upon her, then there went over them a soft whispering sound that might have been a sigh. At this sound the officer, who had fallen back astonished, muttered so that those around him heard:
“Tai Lin’s wife.”
As he spoke she tossed her head disdainfully, reaching out her hand to the Breton, who stood bewildered beside her, taking hold of his arm and with calm, scornful hauteur shining in her eyes, she walked slowly past the officer. The mob fell back as she approached, leaving a lane through their centre, and at the end of this terrible passage of lights and faces Tsang joined them. Seizing the arm of the Breton he whispered:
“Hurry!”
A short distance down the street he led them into a doorway, passed up some steps along a black corridor; down other steps, into a court, across this through another passage, thence out into a street. As they gained this thoroughfare they heard a dull cry:
“A priest has stolen Tai Lin’s wife!”
“Kill him!”
“Close the gates!”
“We must run,” cried Tsang.
The Breton looked down at the wife and said, softly:
“I will carry you.”
Smilingly as a child she lifted her hands to him and he picked her up in his arms.
The two men ran with all their speed along this black alley of a street until Tsang suddenly disappeared through a doorway. The flight now lay through corridors like tunnels and courts like abysses. In the neighbouring streets they could hear dully the wild cries of their pursuers, mingled with crash of gongs, cymbals, blare of music and explosion of crackers. In leaving one labyrinth of corridors, tunnels, stairs, and pits they crossed narrow streets or continued along them for a short distance only again to disappear into depths, which would have been appalling had they not been welcome.
These by-streets that they crossed were mostly dark; even in those where lanterns swayed most of the lights had flickered or gone out. So that their flight was as through some strange and terrible cavern; strange because it consisted of doorways, passages, courts, cellars, stairs, and streets; brick, stone, mud, and sky; terrible because all of this had been dug out and piled up by man, the same wild ferocious beast who now hunted and bayed in the distance.
Fortunately the man Tsang had also spent his gamin days in this same monstrous labyrinth and he knew all of its intricacies, its short cuts and secrets, its pits, stinks, and tunnels.
“We may reach the Gate of Virtue before it closes—if Fate wills it,” he mumbled nonchalantly. “If not——” He did not finish. As they started to emerge from a doorway he stopped them.
“The Gate is near here. I will see if it is closed.”
The Breton did not reply nor move out of the doorway. The wife snuggled happily on his shoulder. Neither seemed to know that they were out in the night, pursued with hardly a chance to escape; to-night darkness and joy; to-morrow light and death.
The wild echoes of the chase drew nearer.
Sometimes the wife lifted her head slightly, only to nestle more tightly upon his shoulder, more closely against his neck. Had someone said, “Where are you?” the Breton could not have answered. And had Tsang not returned they would have remained under the doorway until awakened by the elbowing mobs of day.
“The Gate is closed. Such is Fate,” said a voice coming unconcernedly out of the darkness. “They are all closed,” the voice continues serenely. “Thus Fate lights. Who can escape? Who can escape? In a little while it will all be over. Hiyah!” and Tsang sat down on the threshold.
The smile did not go away from the Breton’s lips: the wife did not cease to nestle contentedly upon his shoulder.
Suddenly Tsang sprang to his feet, gave a few dramatic cavorts, and then shaking the Breton vigorously by the arm, cries:
“They will never think of the Water-gate. Such is Fate—come!”
Unhesitatingly the Breton followed, carrying his precious burden. Again their flight skirted a maze of lanterns still glowing in the principal streets, then stumbled along through bewildering labyrinths of blackness; beholding for an instant a starry thread of sky, then plunging underground.
They emerged upon a canal, which at their feet looked like an abyss, while in other parts it reflected charmingly the gay lanterns swaying from slipper boats; swinging, dangling rhythmically to the sinuous movements of the gondoliers.
“Sampan!” called Tsang in a matter-of-fact voice.
“Hi! Hi!” shouted several simultaneously.
“Three people to the Gardens.”
“That is a long way,” they commented.
“I could walk there in twenty minutes if it were land.”
“But it isn’t land,” they joyfully responded.
“How much?” he continued unconcernedly.
“I am busy and ought not to stop and waste my time talking,” answered one.
“I have an all night engagement,” added another.
“I was just going to moor my boat,” interjected a third, “but since you are in difficulty, I will stop and give you some advice.”
“How much?” repeated Tsang.
“This is our Great Feast night,” remarked one.
“That is so,” chimed in the other two.
From the distance came the inarticulate baying of men.
“How much?” reiterated Tsang wearily.
“Do you hear him ask how much?” cried one turning surprisedly to the others.
“How strange!” they commented.
“It was eight mace, but having a knowledge of benevolence, we have reduced it to seven mace three candareens,” added the first speaker.
“Do you think I am a fool or a hill-man?” demanded Tsang with scorn.
“How will you go to the Gardens?” they chorused derisively.
“We will not go,” he answered, moving back from the bank.
“I will be benevolent,” cried one, suddenly moving his boat past the others, “and take you for six mace, four——”
“Six mace, three candareens.”
“Six mace, two——” bellowed the third, trying to get his boat nearer.
Tsang paid no attention to them and the price was howled lower and lower.
“Five mace,” yelped the first, and without a word Tsang jumped into his boat. The Breton and the wife sat down in the middle of the sampan and drew over them the curved bamboo roof. As the boat shot out into the canal it was followed by a vituperative volley from the others.
Tsang stood by the boatman urging him on.
“There is a riot,” he whispered, “and all the gates have been closed except the Water-gate. But don’t think we are going to pay just to go there. Only when we——”
From distant streets came cries:
“Down with the Water-gate! Down with the Water-gate!”
The Breton and the wife sat in the darkness under the bamboo canopy. Neither had spoken nor ceased to smile. Never in their lives had they thought of anything so happy as this night journey.
The Water-gate loomed up before Tsang and the boatman; they could see the lanterns swaying on the eaves of its guardhouse. Plainly now came the cries:
“Down with the Water-gate!”
The pursuers were gaining.
Strenuously the boatman bent to his long oar; his breath came in hoarse gasps and the perspiration running from his face shone in the lantern’s light. The sinews in his arms and bared back swelled, knotted, quivered, strained. Tsang stood by reiterating that if he did not get through the gate he would not get to the Gardens, and how then would it be possible to get the five mace? So the boatman swayed back and forth the great oar with all his strength, and the sampan, trembling, shot sinuously forward.
The baying of men drew nearer, and as they darted under the bridge which spanned the canal in front of the Water-gate, they saw the guards running out of neighbouring towers and mount the ramparts.
The cavernous exit loomed before them. And as the quivering boat darted under the tower, they heard above them commands, cries, and the creaking of chains.
From a boat by night this exit of the Water-gate looks like a monstrous maw, and the portcullis outlined by the lights of the suburbs appear as its jagged, gigantic teeth. And these teeth Tsang and the boatman saw move above them and heard their grind. But under the bamboo canopy there were still smiles, smiles by no means lost in the blackness. These two were blissful under the very crunch of Fate’s teeth. As the boat glided forward under the impulse of its own momentum they were unconscious of a great splash just behind them and cries that the gate was down.
The boatman, panting, rested momentarily on his oar, then without a word continued along the dark, winding course until the river was reached. Here was a mass of boats, which seemed limitless, an interminable tangle and barrier. But as the sampan approached the gondolier shouted out his strange cries and a narrow lane parted to let his boat creep through, while unconcernedly he accepted the railing and scolding of the old boatwomen.
The sampan pushed out into the current of the great river and the gondolier turned its bow upstream.
“Cross over to the south bank,” commanded Tsang.
“The Gardens are on the north bank.”
“I have changed my mind. I wish to go to a friend’s boat.”
So they crossed the river, and the boatman, following Tsang’s directions, brought up beside a fair-sized river craft anchored in the outer ring of boats that lined the bank.
No sooner has the Breton and the wife seated themselves under the bamboo in their new boat, still smiling and silent, than Tsang raised the mat-sail and under the impetus of the river wind, their vessel moved along the westward against the Chu Kiang’s rolling, gloomy flood.
The river upon this night presented an appearance fantastic yet beautiful. Its population seemed greater than that of the city, for its whole surface was covered by a myriad of boats; some built as birds, some as fishes; others as houses richly ornamented and resplendent with carved and gilded work. On all of these strange craft moving restlessly about were hung unnumbered lanterns. As they passed in and out amongst each other these brilliant lights of every colour, fancy and shape, swaying, quivering, dancing, turned night’s gloom—which broods so cumbrously upon this river—into a fluttering, iridescent day, while from flower-boats, bazaars, and gondolas came incessant strains of music, the song and laughter of women.
Suddenly over the laughter of this night there fell upon the ears of Tsang, as he sat on the high poop with the tiller in his hand, a dull roar, a baying of multitudes that came from the city.
“Fate alone knows,” he muttered.
A turn southward and the lights vanished: in a short time the sounds of revelry and that growl from the city were heard no more. About, all was darkness other than here and there a light on the banks and stars shining kindly overhead. No voice was heard but the monologue of the river and occasionally the nasal song of a river-man whose wild and melancholy tones echoed from bank to bank.
Thus they journeyed on to the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon.
CHAPTER SIX
THE PROPITIATION OF THE GODS OF THE WATERS—Continued
In the southern suburbs, almost under the shadow of the city walls and midway between the Dragon Gate on the right and the Great Bamboo Gate on the left, once stood a Lodge of the Tien Tu Hin, generally known as the Guild Hall of the Merchants of Kiang, since it is the custom of merchants from the same locality to have their guilds where they meet for business and pleasure. So this custom, beneficial in more ways than one, was made to serve as an excuse—a protection to the children of the Deluge Family.
The buildings of the Lodge—or Guild Hall—were surrounded by an high wall having a granite gateway on the street parallel with the city walls connected the two thoroughfares that extended through the Gates of the Dragon and the Great Bamboo. Between the entrances and the buildings was a wide court paved with granite slabs, while a number of banian trees half hid in their foliage the many buildings of granite, glazed brick, and curved dragon eaves, separated by a series of courts and connected with corridors. The main entrance opposite the gateway was reached by a broad flight of steps flanked by two bronze lions. In the first buildings of this Guild Hall were reception and smoking rooms, libraries, offices, and other apartments necessary to such an association. But back of these, beyond another court, stood other buildings, windowless and forbidding, where unknown chambers held in their darkened recesses the secrets and terrors of the Tien Tu Hin.
As it happened the night of the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters fell on the night of initiation in this secret lodge on the street of Changsha. So just about the same hour when the wife was creeping fearfully through the still, dark park, others of mankind were slinking along through the shadows of the city walls and vanishing under the granite gate.
It was a strange gathering that slunk under the portals of that gloomy entrance: men in long silken robes, men in rags; merchants, thieves, sailors, scholars, artisans, soldiers, pirates. Men with soft white hands, pale faces and delicate in their courtesies, mingled brotherly with others almost black from storms and exposure; brawny, brusque, sombre, ferocious.
After the second hour of darkness had passed the outer gates were closed; and when the ponderous doors at the top of the Lion steps had been bolted, a gong sounded hoarsely from some unknown depths and before its deep echoes had ended this motley congregation of men standing about talking, smoking, disappeared, utterly vanished, so that there was not to be seen in all the Guild Hall man, rag, nor robe.
Presently the gong mumbled again; slowly, measuredly, five times this gong sounded, and as suddenly as they had vanished there sprang out of recesses, crevices and walls fecundate, a new race of men. When they disappeared they had had queues and shaven heads, now they came forth without them and about their crowns were turbans of red silk. A wild medley of satins and tatters had gone into the hidden places, but there came out an assembly all gorgeous in the antique robes of the Mings, so that it could not now be known who had come in rags, who in silks.
Again cymbals crashed, and the assembly arranged itself by twos other than at the head, and there one man marched alone, preceded by guards carrying upright heavy double-edged swords. This man, who walked alone, was the Great Elder Brother—the Grand Master of the Lodge. Behind him followed the Incense Master and Instructor; then the Third Elder Brother and Champion, after whom came the General of the Van and the Red Club; these were followed by the Five Generals, the Tiger Generals, the Eight Guards, the Iron Soles and members.
Slowly, solemnly, in time with the dirge-like booming of gongs and crash of cymbals the procession moved out of the first buildings, along the corridors flanking the court and disappeared through an opening beyond. After passing through a number of chambers and corridors they came to an entrance before which stood guards with drawn swords. The Guards preceding the Great Elder Brother stood face to face before them and then silently exchanged swords. They now entered the first anteroom, at the far end of which was another guarded door. Again the same solemn transfer of swords was gone through with, and the procession passed on into the second anteroom where, as before, swords were passed and the Great Elder Brother led the way into the third anteroom, at the far end of which were two iron doors. As the guards pulled these back there opened before them a huge Hall of Shadows.
The appearance of this Hall was such as to inspire terror. Just beyond the doors, extending their whole width, stretched a fiery moat, out of which flames leaped and crackled; in its depths the heat glowed white and green. Across this burning ditch, through the middle of the doorway, was a bridge of two planks, one copper, the other iron—symbolic of the bridge thrown down by the Immortal Tahtsunye and by which the Five Patriarchs escaped from Shaolintze. Over this bridge hung an arch of pendent swords glowing and quivering with the heat that rose from the furnace below. The only lights in the Hall—unless the stars are numbered—were the ditch of fire and in the centre two iron racks, where blazed bundles of fagots and which gave an uncertain enormity to the shadows within. On the sides were cavernous openings, in the floor abysses. The ceiling other than over the fiery ditch and fagots, was also full of uncertain shadows. In the far left-hand corner, hardly perceptible in this glaring dust, glowed like a blinking eye a taper on the Shrine of the God of War. Opposite in the darkness of the right-hand corner beamed another eye on the Altar of the Goddess of Mercy. Then there was the taper of the God of Earth and five tapers on the Shrines of the Five Patriarchs.
In the centre of the hall but beyond the braziers of fagots stood the Great Shrine, flanked on the left by a representation of Kaochi Temple—where the Five Patriarchs met the founder of the Deluge Family, Chen Chinan, and on the right by a miniature nine-story pagoda. In front of the Great Shrine was a lesser altar on which were placed the symbols of the Tien Tu Hin: symbols that have been revered by countless millions for nearly two centuries and a half—symbols the world may dread. On the smaller altar lay a stone incense vessel engraved with four large characters, Fuh Tsing, Fa Ming. In the centre was a Peck of Rice known as Muyangfu, in which were stuck the flags of the Five Grand Sections of the Deluge Family and the banner of the Commander-in-chief. On one side was placed a Red Club, having a phœnix engraved on one end and a dragon on the other.
On each corner of the altar stood a dwarf Cedar and Pine tree, symbolical of fidelity in oaths. Between them, ranged alternately on each side of the Muyangfu, was a red lamp to discern the True from the False; a seven-starred broadsword indicating that by the sword the Manchus will succumb and the Mings be restored; a Rule by which men can measure their conduct; a Pair of Scales to weigh Ming against Tsing, the True against the Traitors; an Abacus to reckon the time for their destruction; a Mirror, as was handed down by Nu Wo, to show who are good and who are evil; a White Fan for calling together the members of the Deluge Family; a Pair of Scissors for ripping open the black clouds that obscure the Ming sky; and finally a huge double-edged sword by which the disobedient and traitorous are put to death. The roof in front of the shrine and between the braziers was open and the stars shone down into shadows filled with terror; into that silence where man broods.
Silently the procession entered this vast hall, which at one time had appeared to them all as a colossal deep of doom. The Great Elder Brother, the Incense Master and Instructor took their places before the Great Shrine, the other officers ranging themselves in order to the rear.
Solemnly the Grand Master lifted up the Peck of Rice called Muyangfu, and as he placed it on the Greater Shrine the officers behind him chanted their mystic verses. Then in the same manner he raised the Tripod, the Abacus, the Mirror, the Pine and Cedar trees, the Scales and Discerning Lamp, the White Fan and Cloud-Ripping Scissors. After all the symbols had been placed on the Great Altar, and the Incense Master had lighted the incense in the Stone Tripod and before each tablet of the Five Patriarchs, the whole assembly fell on their knees, chanting a requiem mysterious, known to none but them.
The Great Elder Brother now took his seat under the open space in the roof, so that the Eyes of Heaven could look down upon him and see that his acts were just. The Incense Master sat on his left; the Instructor on his right; then the Third Elder Brother on the left of the Incense Master; the Champion on the right of the Instructor; thus they arranged themselves: the General of the Van, the Red Club, the Five Generals and Tiger Generals, the Eight Guards and the Iron Soles, while at the end of the iron and copper bridge, under the arch of pendant swords, stood other guards. The whole assembly was arranged in the form of a crescent, the Great Elder Brother being in the centre, behind him the Great Shrine, on his right and left the braziers of fagots, before him the fiery moat; above—the stars of Heaven.
In the first anteroom waited the uninitiated, dressed in rough clothing, their queues unplaited and their shoes removed. The Guards stationed at the entrance of the second anteroom demanded of them why they came, and they replied that they understood soldiers were wanted and they came to enlist.
The Guards demanded who asked them to come, and they replied that they came on their own accord.
The sponsors of the candidates now led them into the second anteroom, where the guards demanded whence they came, and to which they replied: “From the East.” The names of their sponsors were taken and the Guards warned them that they would have dangers and hardships to endure; that the food they were to eat would be three parts rice and seven parts sand, to which they replied:
“Yu sha, king sha, wu sha king kiang”—“if there is sand we will farm it; if there is no sand, we will farm waves.”
In the third anteroom the Guards asked them this terrible conundrum:
“Which is harder, the sword or your necks?”
They answered: “Our necks.”
The jackets of the candidates were unbuttoned, their right arms and shoulders bared and five lighted tapers of incense placed in their hands.
The General of the Van advanced and conducted them, walking on their knees, to the inner door, where he addressed the Guards:
“Guards of the Inner Portal, inform the Incense Master that the General of the Van conducts recruits to join our army and swear brotherhood. They desire to take Deluge for their family name, and may it please the Incense Master to pray before the Shrine of the Five Patriarchs that they may gaze down upon us and approve.”
The Guards replied that the Five Patriarchs commanded Tien Yu Hung to enter.
The General of the Van passed through the Inner Portal, across the fiery moat and addressed the Incense Master, upon which ensued an endless, mystic dialogue, sometimes sounding like the chatter of children; sometimes like the ominous muttering of thunder. It was occult, inane, full of wonderful and dreadful meaning, cabalistic, ridiculous, terrifying—all depending upon who listened. The sizzling of a fuse is amusing to a child; to an old soldier—death.
The long mysterious debate was at last brought to a close by the Incense Master ordering the General of the Van to bring the candidates upon the bridge.
The doors were thrown open and the recruits led—still walking on their knees—through the entrance.
At the sight of the burning moat they drew back, cringing one upon another, but as the General of the Van advanced they shuffled after him, the tapers trembling in their hands. When their guide reached the other end of the bridge he stopped and they were obliged to remain crouching on the planks of copper and iron; below them a furnace, above an arch of swords shuddering in the heat waves, scintillating, threatening.
The Incense Master advanced toward them and, crossing his arms on his breast, uttered this prayer:
“O Imperial Heaven, O Sovereign Earth, Ye Spirits of Fire; Ye Spirits of Hills and Streams, and Land and Veins of the Earth: Ye Five Dragon Spirits of the Five Regions: Lin Ting, Lui Chia, Spirits Attendant, and all Ye Holy Spirits that wander through endless space, draw near to us, we entreat!
“Since Fuh created this Earth all has prospered, and what the Ancients knew they have given down to succeeding ages. This knowledge we have received, we are about to impart.
“Patriots now hang on the Bridge over Fires. They have come to swear to Ye, O Imperial Heaven, that they will live and die together. That they pledge brotherhood forever, considering sincerity the basis; kindness and righteousness the Ruling Principles; filial love and obedience above all.
“O Ye Five Spirits, throw down into the fire those that would to-night bring discord or treason into our midst. Let those that hang on the bridge know that no distinction of mine or thine can be allowed here.
“To-night we will kneel in front of the Incense Tripod and cleanse our hearts, mix our blood, swallow the mingled blood-drinking oath, and swear to live and die for our brotherhood—immutable as the hills and seas.
“Those that obey shall prosper; those that are disobedient shall perish. Those that assist their country in establishing Universal Peace shall be ennobled for a thousand ages; but those that are traitors shall die beneath the sword and their race become extinct.
“O Fuh Teh, Protector of the people and famed eternally for thy divine benevolence; and Ye, O Chung I, the ten thousand ages hero, the Recruiter and Commander of the valiant, we are now by order of the Five Patriarchs about to swear brotherhood in the blood-testing oath of our society. May Ye Gods in your wisdom and power make clear to these newcomers that it matters not what is their human relationship, all are born anew in the Deluge.
“Again, O Fuh Teh and Chung I, and all ye Intelligent and Discerning Gods, we humbly beseech you to look down upon us while we take the Thirty-six Oaths to manifest the truthfulness of our hearts.”
The candidates on the bridge, swaying back and forth, crouched and clung to one another. Panting for breath, great streams of perspiration ran from their faces and shoulders, their eyes bulged and rolled. Almost overcome by the heat and fumes that rose around them, each appeared about to topple off into the furnace.
The delay was not yet ended.
When the Incense Master ceased his prayer two Iron Soles stepped forward and received from him a scroll of yellow paper about six feet long by two broad, on which were written the Thirty-six Oaths. One of the Iron Soles knelt on his right knee and held one corner in his right hand, while the other knelt on his left knee and held the other corner with his left hand.
The Incense Master and members knelt.
During the silence that followed there penetrated into this chamber of fire and shadows a roar, rumbling, subsiding. Only the men on the bridge did not hear this ominous growl.
Slowly, sombrely, the Incense Master read off the Thirty-six Oaths—and their thirty-six sentences of death. This finished, came a period of silence, then the members rose and the Iron Soles stepped forward and helped the candidates from the bridge. Some were almost unconscious, others glared stupidly about them.
The Iron Soles, leading, supporting, dragged them to the Incense Vessel before the Shrine of the Five Patriarchs, where each, as soon as able, inserted an incense taper into the vessel and repeated as best he could five verses. Removing their tapers from the Incense Vessel they dipped them into a bowl of water standing next to the tripod and as they were being extinguished repeated:
“May my life go out like the fire of these incense tapers if I prove a traitor to my oath!”
The Thirty-six Oaths were then placed in the Incense Vessel; the Incense Master took the basin and, repeating a ritual, dashed it upon the floor, whereupon all of the members repeated in unison, sonorous, ominous:
“May such be the fate of traitors.”
The Incense Master set fire to the Oaths and as the flames crept up the scroll there came again, nearer, louder, that distant growl.
The Guards led the candidates beneath the opening through which shone the stars; a cock was brought, the head cut off, and its blood poured into the bowl in which the incense tapers had been extinguished. The Red Club now advanced, holding in one hand his huge weapon, in the other a flared, black blade. The two guards that preceded him seized one of the candidates and tore off his upper garments, leaving him naked to the waist.
The roar, now nearer, grumbled, muttered, then fell silent. But as the Red Club lifted his blade there came a terrific crash, followed by an overflow of wild noises such as man makes in his rage.
The knife hesitated.
The pent-up floods of the riot that had swollen to vast proportions after the cry had resounded over the city that Tai Lin’s wife had been stolen by priests, burst almost simultaneously through the three southern gates and dashing, seeping through the suburban streets, converged toward the Mission. These dark streams, with flaming wave crests, gurgling with snarls, yelps and threats; frothing, eddying, scowling, soon filled the street of Changsha. One stream had burst out of the Dragon Gate, another out of the gate of the Great Bamboo, and the overflow of these two torrents came together in front of Lodge of the Tien Tu Hin. The noise that rose when they came together was indescribable. It was a frightful splash of snarls and curses; a splatter of taunts and growls, while above all, distinguished by its persistency and vigour, rose a common howl:
“Kill the priests.”
When this uproar with its rage and strange silences fell upon the Children of the Deluge in their Chamber of Shadows, there was a general movement. Merchants became uneasy, fearful for their stores; thieves became desirous for plunder; soldiers to return to their posts; beggars to join the rabble; officials to their Yamens; pirates to their junks; silk robes to their mansions, but the rags would not return that night to their cellars.
The Great Elder Brother rose from his seat; Guards placed themselves in front of him; the Incense Master, the Instructor, followed by all others, took their places and the procession filed out over the bridge into the anteroom as solemnly and silently as it had entered.
The vast hall was empty. The fagots in the iron racks flamed, flickered, and went out. The fiery moat glowed white, green, lurid, then dark spots began to creep into it. After a while only the stars shone down into the Chamber of the World’s Dread.
The overflow from the Dragon Gate, being less than that from the Great Bamboo, was pushed back until there was a general commingling, then the whole rushed unresistingly downward toward the river and westward toward the Mission. Other torrents, chafing, foaming, hurled themselves against the walls of their narrow channels in mad endeavour to reach the river’s edge through the labyrinthine writhings of the suburban streets. Like floods restrained, it sometimes appeared as if they would overflow and surge straight down across the roof tops.
It was the rumble of these torrents just after they had burst through the city gates that the man Tsang had heard as he sat at the tiller. And had the wind not been strong or had there been no bend in the river, he would soon have heard a roar more ominous, more dreadful, as these torrents of howls poured into the basin surrounding the Mission.
The streets north and east of the Mission Compound were first filled, then on the west. And when all were overflowing, so that stragglers, trickling, seeping in, were being pushed back in the direction whence they came; these torrents churned, swirled, then surged out into the open space between the Mission and the river.
The Compound was surrounded, and the mob, as a sea, billowed and splashed against its walls. Like a great rock the Mission remained silent, with a gloomy hauteur, a scornful taciturnity, so that these waves only dashed against it to fall back upon themselves.
There were many similarities between this encircling flood of man with wave crests of flame and roar of tongues to a sea of waters. For this sea, girdling, eddying around the granite base of that gloomy parallelogram, ocean-like, broke and spattered. It had its froth and its depths, its calms and murmurs; its terrors; its tides and ebbs and billows. Sometimes its fire-crests, like those in the Bay of Tai Wan, moved forward in uneven undulations, then hurled against the granite barriers, flowed back and merged with another tide. Again these waves met in such a manner as to form whirlpools or a single force like a waterspout, only here a howl and flame-spout would drive its way ruthlessly through the waves and, lashing itself momentarily against the walls, subside and mingle with the rest. This sea had its evaporations and its residue; it accumulated, eroded and dissipated. But it howled where the ocean rumbled, snarled where it roared, and where the sea of waters murmured this flood talked to itself—a childish, terrible monologue.
Said one wave to another:
“What are you here for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you kill?”
“Yes.”
“What is the trouble?” asked another.
“That is what we are going to find out.”
“Isn’t it enough to know that this place must be destroyed?”
“That is true.”
“What else is there to do when these priests have stolen Tai Lin’s wife?”
“Neighbour, I tell you they have vanished. Is it in accordance with reason to believe that they would wait?”
Where this sea eddied around the southwest corner of the Mission, the tumult of one wave rose sonorously above the rest.
“O Ye Men of the Middle Kingdom,” roared this wave. “Ye who have trod its soil, breathed the air of its Imperial Heavens; ye who have eaten the herb of its fields and for a myriad ages have drunk the dew of its benevolence, how long are you going to let these sea-imps devour your women and children? How long are you going to let these Western devils who pretend to be priests deceive you? Skin them of their robes and you will find that they are bats and snakes, who smile but to devour.
“Did they not sneak into our Kingdom like night monsters—these proud priests of the Hungry God? Answer, ye doubters; ye women-men; ye disgraceful progeny of the Ancients. Whoever trembled before priests or gods until these pallid demons came? Did not then the peace-flower bloom in our gardens; the song of the phœnix make men’s hearts harmonious? Who now does not fear the breath of these priests? Do they not get fat on destruction? Do they not steal the wives of our Great Men? Destroy towns and cities? O ye black-haired men of Han! O ye——”
“Why doesn’t someone climb the wall?” demanded one wave of another.
“They have cauldrons inside and when one mounts the walls they take off the lids and the fumes cause——”
“How do you know?”
“Bah! It is easy to reason with a wise man, but to convince——”
“Throw stink-pots over the walls!”
“Get the pung-dongs!”
These cries were taken up and echoed on all sides.
In the middle of the open space between the Mission and the river—now filled by the mob—a band of Taoist monks had congregated, mingling their weird cries and clash of their cymbals with noises about them, and there rose above all the rest a plaintive falsetto shriek:
“Disasters come upon the Middle Kingdom.
Foreign devils disturb the country.
They urge the people to join their religion.
No Gods they venerate.
Their backs they turn on Heaven.
They teach men to debase their ancestors.
Human obligations they hate.
They force women to adultery.
These sea-imps are not the produce of mankind.
If you doubt this look at them carefully.
Their eyes are blue, like those of devils.
They look into the depths of the earth.
Their hair is red, which is the colour of hell.
They dry up the earth.
No rain falls.
The sky is parched.
This is because their blood-God is in the heavens.”
At regular intervals the other monks joined in, in high falsetto wail:
“Burn the yellow written prayers.
Light the incense tapers.
Invite the Gods and Genii from all the Grottoes.
The Gods will come forth from their caverns.
The Genii will come out of the mountains——”
Thus this sea surged, rolled, grumbled, tossed, debated. All howled at once, all talked at once, and at intervals silence came simultaneously over them all. This still stillness resembled that strange quiet that often comes in the midst of battle or storm; it might be called the scowl of decision, ominous, portentous.
Fortunately for the Mission, this mob-thought, this contemplation of that turbulent flood, never lasted long enough to decide; some noise would disturb it, a whisper perhaps, but something, and tumultuous it wasted its force in surfy din.
Suddenly there burst above all its noise a deep boom from the river, followed by another and another. Like rockets or even meteors the cannon’s spittle traced its fire over the waters.
The French gunboats had opened fire.
The man-flood that filled the open field and that murmured and howled or was silent, whose wave-crests of flame surged and eddied around the Mission walls, suddenly became a maelstrom of darkness and wild cries. Shell after shell fell into this maelstrom, which, contrary to other whirlpools, was not concentric, but might be called multiple; wherever a shell exploded a minor whirlpool was formed, the outer circles of which were made up of the living, the inner of the wounded, the centre of the dead, the torn. Thus the whole open space was filled with frightful eddies; eddies that bumped into one another, contended, merged. Medusa-like they scattered themselves into a dozen whirlpools, then devouring one another formed a huge indistinguishable mass; struggling, shrinking, climbing, crawling, wriggling. Here and there blown asunder; torn, mutilated, sighing.
The mass of wrigglers grew less and less.
Several houses on the western side of the open space were set on fire by shells exploding in them, and as the flames shot skyward they cast a lurid light over all.
The firing ceased. There was nothing to shoot at other than when a wounded man would jump up, run a little way, then fall. Some of these men ran to the river and jumped in; some ran to the Mission Gates and knocked entreatingly; others ran toward the buildings in flame.
Several boats loaded with marines now put off from the warships and rowed heavily across the lighted waters. No one opposed their landing, but as they started across the open space they involuntarily drew back at the frightful spectacle that lay before them. Lit by the red glare of burning buildings the place was as one vast slaughter pen. The dead lay strewn about in bunches; headless, legless, gutless, soulless. Here one with muscles twitching in death’s agony, there one asleep. The eyes of some were glazed, others looked resignedly at the stars. Some sat erect, and as the marines approached laughed and—died.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WHITE LAMB AND YELLOW WOLF
A month after the night-flight and night-riot, which the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters had brought about, a defensive calm pervaded the Mission of Yingching and its immediate environs, although to the westward the noise of hammer and saw filled the air.
The fires that started from the bursting shells had swept westward to the street of the Golden Flower and north to Old River Street, where, owing to the greater width of these thoroughfares, as well as to the strenuous exertions on the part of the fire-fighters, the flames had been stopped, but only after an area almost an half-mile long and about an eighth of a mile in width had been completely gutted.
In a few days after that dreadful night, when the dead and mutilated had been removed from the open space and order had been restored throughout the suburbs, these people, as industrious ants, began to rebuild on the embers, amid ashes, their homes and stores and temples. Abroad over the black blot rose the garrulous noise of their labour; and over the debris, ash, and dead, creative life in its various phases hummed persistently. Men were coming and going, some carrying bricks, others chiselling granite blocks; some were whipsawing logs into floors, joists, beams, and doors, while others were putting together the piles of wood, brick and stone.
A kind of bitter happiness pervaded those building this new suburb in the midst of the old, and they chattered, cursed, railed. Hucksters with viands and sweetmeats passed and repassed; children played among the logs; soldiers moved back and forth; silent groups stood scowling along the waterfront, and among the brick-heaps and half-completed buildings troops of spectators came and went. Sometimes a lone being slunk along, looking vainly for some spot; if found—weep; if not—vanish.
At the northwest and northeast corners of the Mission Compound the marines had thrown barricades across the Old River Street and had mounted ordnance on each. Sentries patrolled these barricades as well as the whole circuit of the Mission Walls. On the river opposite the open space a French cruiser and gunboats still anchored; their cannon covering all approaches and even holding the city at their mercy.
One day about a month after the night-feast of the Gods and toward the third hour after sunrise, the sentries on the east barricade noticed a movement among the Chinese patrols stationed farther down Old River Street.
Presently a single sedan with four bearers and one attendant came swiftly toward the barricade. Near the redoubt the sedan stopped and the attendant cautiously advanced toward a sentry, holding before him an open card. The marine reached down his gun and the attendant stuck the card on the bayonet.
After some delay a squad of marines marched out of the north gate to the east barricade and, with these sailors acting as an escort, the sedan entered the redoubt and disappeared within the walls of the Mission. At the entrance it passed through double ranks of marines standing at present arms and was carried into the building to the rear of the sombre Visigothic chapel. When it was set down in the bishop’s own study, an old man, trembling, withered, tottered out of it.
The bishop came up to him and bowed.
“Your Excellency does me great honour. How will I ever be able to repay such kindness?”
Tai Lin made no reply. Aged and shrunk, without the strength of self-support, he sank into a chair beside a table and, leaning forward, buried his head in his arms.
The bishop sat down on the other side of the table and, lolling back in his chair, caressed his pallid hands, now and then cracking his knuckles.
Sometimes a tremor passed through the body of Tai Lin.
Sometimes the bishop bit his lips.
Tai Lin raised his head and looked piteously at him.
“I cannot find her.” Then the old man’s head sank again upon the table.
“It is very unfortunate,” communed the bishop in soft, sad tones. “Human frailty, alas, human frailty! When I sent the priest to be instructor to your wife, I thought him a noble, a virtuous man. It has broken my heart to find out that by being tempted he has lost his soul. What could be worse! I would rather the Mission be wholly destroyed than one soul lost. We came here to save souls, not to lose them. And now, in the opinion of your countrymen, all our benevolence, all our good deeds, our self-sacrifice, our prayers and labours are gone, utterly forgotten on account of this one evil act. You complain bitterly. You have lost a wife—God a soul.”
Silence again ensued. Several times the bishop cleared his throat as if to speak.
Tai Lin remained motionless.
“Did you ever think that—that—perhaps the priest was not wholly to blame?” asked the bishop with mild concern.
Tai Lin looked at him dully.
“Yes; you are right. She was not to blame.” He answered mechanically. “She could do no wrong.
“Once I gave her a little stool. She always sat on that at my feet. You do not know, but that is the way it was. She patted my hand—now, she is gone—all is gone.”
The old quavering head fell forward upon the table. Sometimes a tremor passed through his body, but no sound broke the silence.
The bishop picked his teeth, white, narrow teeth, set far apart. This was a sign of meditation.
“Did you ever see this ring?” he asked gently, as he placed on the table the pearl that the wife had given to the Breton.
Tai Lin raised his head, looked at the pearl and shuddered.
“I noticed,” continued the bishop sympathetically, “that he had this ring the very first day after his return from your wife. She made him promise not to part with it. I thought it might show a little—a very sudden—I may be wrong—but a woman’s passion.”
“My ring.” Tai Lin’s voice was almost inaudible in its calmness.
“Have you ever noticed any eagerness on her part for his coming?” asked the bishop with compassionate reluctance.
Tai Lin continued looking mutely at the ring.
“I did not know, but—I suspected it,” went on the bishop in the same pitying tones. “I noticed that when he was prevented from going to your palace she would send long letters to him—as bishop I read them. They were filled with tender endearments, the most passionate riotous words. It is difficult for me to speak of this. I hope I have not offended Your Excellency, for there is only one desire in my heart—the truth. To seek the truth and to live uprightly have been the two master wishes of my life. But, alas, how hard it is to discover truth! To do this one must pray to God. There is no other way. And since this terrible affair I have been continually on my knees. God has smiled. His smile has penetrated the darkness surrounding this mystery and all is now clear, but to understand, one must first understand women.
“It is strange the attributes men clothe women in: Some deceive themselves into looking upon her as an angel, when they ought to close their eyes and cry, Scat! Others make her a tantalising riddle, and spend their lives trying to solve it; a sweet enigma, which they do not try seriously to know, lest knowing they find out what they do not wish.
“Woman is not a riddle, she is not an angel, she is not an enigma. She is an animal—that is all.
“To understand a woman, study a feline. She has all their attributes. Like them she only ceases to want when satiated; when she desires, she does nothing else—like an animal she follows the scent of her wishes. A woman never rests except when asleep; she never sleeps unless her hungers have been satiated. Nothing is more alarming than a woman with one eye open; like animals, when they doze they think of to-morrow’s hunt. Women, as felines, have only three hungers: When these are allayed they are at peace; when not, they prowl—they cannot help it. Hunger and reason are always in conflict, but when reason is lacking there is no contention, no delay, and they hasten on the warm trail of their desires. There are no difficulties they will not surmount if the scent of the game is strong. Feline-like they are velvety-heeled, and we hear not their comings nor goings. One never suspects they have claws until they lacerate. They are not satisfied with one victim; they suck the heart’s blood, then sniff for another. Old age has not much blood—no, not very much.”
For some moments the bishop cracked his knuckles in silence; his cavitous eyes fixed keenly on the old, withered man before him, who still looked dumbly at the pearl on the table.
“Yes; they are best caged,” resumed the bishop in soft, meditative tones. “And yet those closely confined are most dangerous when given a little liberty. The breath of freedom—that insane folly—soon heats the blood and leads them to wild excesses. Had I not felt so sure of the priest’s virtue, I would not have permitted him to teach her and lay himself open to temptation. I did not think he would submit. But no risk is so great as to be lenient or careless with the caged. Open the bars and animals will go forth. Play with their claws and they will scratch. Tantalise their hungers and uncaged they will gorge. The wisest way is to teach them a few tricks—a very few, and when not performing keep them behind bars. Man’s greatest self-deception is to believe that they are tamed. No animal has ever yet been so gentled that it could be left to its own instincts. Nothing is more dangerous. How many keepers have been lacerated to death by this one act of careless confidence!
“But I do not know how she could have managed it,” the bishop’s tones became filled with deep concern. “Surely she was not so bold and immodest as to come from behind the screen?”
Tai Lin raised his eyes from the ring and looked startled, mutely about him.
The bishop wiped his lips, and behind the handkerchief a smile flickered.
“Yet there are worse things than her coming from behind the screen,” he continued compassionately. “If it had only stopped there, for the pride of beauty may have moved her unconsciously; impelled by nature she may have crept unseen to his side.
“This manner of movement is peculiar to women and—snakes.
“Did Your Excellency know that during the first month of the world’s birth these two met—a snake and a woman? Being unable to swallow each other, they made perpetual compact—to devour man.
“Since then they have possessed many attributes in common. Their tongues have the same forked rapidity; poison lurks in their kisses; death in their embraces. One-half of them is allurement, the other half desire. In gorgeous bedeckment they resemble flowers—men often mistake them for such. Their backs are beautiful with radiant colours, their bellies pallid. One coaxes what the other devours. Nothing can equal the subtlety of their movement! One never feels them until bitten; one never knows them until the heart has been clogged by their poison. Thinking them an innocent flower on account of their hues and beauty, one reaches out after them and finds—what Your Excellency has discovered.”
A shudder passed through the old man.
The bishop picked his teeth.
Time passed.
Tai Lin sat up; never taking his eyes away from the ring, he spoke, but as much to himself as to the bishop, feebly, piteously calm:
“I do not know why she did this.”
There are some silences that men hesitate to break; the silence of a tempest, the silence of an abyss, the silence of a broken heart.
The bishop made no attempt to answer or break the oppressive stillness that followed Tai Lin’s simple statement.
It was a long time before he spoke again, then his voice was quiet, but in his tardy speech lay decision not less terrible than it was calm.
“Yes; it is all over. I am glad you told me. She shall suffer. When you said they were animals you told the truth. I always believed that, but thought her different. I was not mistaken. She has been more a snake than beast. Your words have been learned, only there is no such poison in a snake’s mouth as in a woman’s heart.
“No; I do not ask you why you did not stop this crime when you saw its beginning, because I know you have made roguery holy to escape its responsibility and to enjoy its profits. You have your own protection, but she shall die.”
The bishop, who had been picking his teeth, leaned forward.
“She shall be lyngcheed,” added Tai Lin softly.
“But she may be a Christian,” interposed the bishop.
“Lyngcheed,” reiterated Tai Lin meditatively.
“She may be a Christian,” said the bishop again.
“Yes,” continued Tai Lin, heedless of the bishop’s words. “Yes, that is her punishment by the laws of the Empire.”
“But she may have become a Christian.”
“Yes; it is necessary that she shall die.”
“She is undoubtedly a Christian by this time,” interrupted the bishop decisively.
“What do I care if she is a Christian!” and Tai Lin rose up savagely, quaveringly before him.
“Well—you know,” and the bishop wrung caressingly his bony, bloodless hands, “Christians are entitled to our protection. Yes, yes, we could not permit you to——”
“She is my wife and by the law shall be punished.”
“Christians are not subject to your laws. They are under the protection of the Church. The Church does not recognise your pagan marriage. By becoming a Christian she is free and entitled to our protection——”
“I will hammer this Mission into dust!” and Tai Lin brought his trembling fist weakly down upon the table.
“There are three warships in the river,” commented the bishop softly.
“I will sink them!”
“There are battleships at Hong Kong; ten thousand troops at Saigon. A word from me and this city will be bombarded. A cable from me and ten thousand French troops will be landed. You know I speak the truth. Do you want to be held responsible for the death of a myriad multitude? Responsible for the loss of three kingdoms——
“How posterity would revile your name! How contemptuous will be held your descendants! Even then you cannot regain her.
“Beware! Beware!
“Disaster surely falls on him that opposes the Church, for it is God’s world-child; mankind and kingdoms its servants. Do not think that this child sleeps, curled up in a lotus-bud, or is drifting to a Nirvana. It is moving onward to Universal Power.”
The bishop leaned farther over the table; turning his head he looked up into the face of Tai Lin and, flushing from the intensity of his feelings, became ashen. His lips were parted, showing the long, narrow gleam of his teeth, while his jet eyes, set so deep in their sockets, glittered and had a speech of their own.
“You think, in this country,” he continued in a voice intense with feeling, “that the Church is the cat’s-paw of European nations; that they get missionaries killed to have an excuse for conquest? Bah! What are these nations? The Church’s hammer and tongs. The Church commands, they obey. You cannot injure a servant of God with impunity. You cannot oppose the Church without ruin. The Church of God must be the Spiritual Ruler of the world. It cares not who holds the few hours of temporal sway. Accept our Spiritual Dominance in peace and be your own rulers; attempt to destroy and you shall become the Servant of the World.
“You know that no army ever landed in this country that did not come at our wish and command. Why are all of these gunboats creeping up and down your rivers? Who are they to obey? Dare you punish a Christian without our leave? Has not the church placed them above your laws? And yet you come to me and threaten to destroy this Mission; kill this priest and lyngchee a Christian woman! What could be more ridiculous? How would you do it? Where would you begin and where would you end?”
After a moment of silence the bishop drew back in his chair. Gradually his ashen flush faded and he again became pallid.
Tai Lin stood motionless. Presently his head sank upon his bosom, but the frown on his withered face did not go away.
The silence was broken by the bishop, speaking compassionately.
“I am sorry for Your Excellency. You are a wronged man. When one is cast out by a father one can forget; when one is scorned by a son one can grieve and forgive, but when a man’s wife discards him he cannot forget, nor grieve nor forgive. He has been injured internally and abroad. His heart has been splintered; his name befouled; his thoughts and hopes, like green scum, are cast adrift; his children and children’s children are bastardised; he is alone in the profundity of his sorrow and yet conspicuous because of her sin.
“Most of our sins die with us, but the sins of such a woman live on. Like abhorrent weeds they have seeds, which by Time’s winds, are scattered abroad to tare the fields of men. Quick should be her cut-off. There is no law in this land wiser than the one that makes death the penalty of her crime. It is the same law that God himself gave to Moses, our Great Elder. I can understand the threefold reason why you should have her lyngcheed and sympathise with you.
“A man should be known before the world as just; the laws of the Empire should not be deceived; the stigma should be removed from your descendants, for if not, men will ever say there was baseness in your household and your whole progeny will be heralded as bastards. How can the wick of one’s memory be tended by those whom the world repudiates?”
The bishop leaned close to Tai Lin and lowering his voice spoke with greater intensity.
“Would you have me aid you?”
Tai Lin looked at him dully, incredulously.
The bishop tapped the table with his finger-tips.
“You called her Christian,” mumbled Tai Lin.
“Yes, yes; but you don’t understand. You were going to act against the Church, not with it.”
The bishop caressed his hands.
“Now if you and I could come to some agreement.”
“You?”
“Yes; whereby the Church withdraws its protection——”
“I agree,” cried Tai Lin. “Where is she! Where is she!”
“What will you agree to?”
“Anything,” cried Tai Lin hoarsely, groping feebly the table’s edge.
One by one the bishop pulled his fingers until the knuckles cracked in each, which he did only in moments of great pleasure.
“Will Your Excellency agree to deed your park to the Church if it withdraws its protection and sanctions her punishment?”
“No!” answered Tai Lin decisively.
“But if she is found and given over to you?” interposed the bishop eagerly.
Tai Lin did not answer for some time.
“No,” he said finally. “You will take my park and then squeal Christian! Christian! Christian! I know you rogues.”
The bishop picked his teeth. Once in a while he clacked his tongue, which was a sign of perplexity. Presently he smiled.
“We will draw up a contingent bond signed and attested to the effect that the park shall not become the property of the Church until the last stroke of the lyngchee.”
A purple pallor overspread the seams and wrinkles of Tai Lin’s face; his glowing eyes became vacuous.
The bishop moved uneasily.
Tai Lin fumbled at the throat of his robe.
Suddenly he bent over the table toward the bishop.
“The priest?”
The bishop rose and whispered for some time in his ear.
“Make the bond!” commanded Tai Lin huskily.
The bishop hastened from the room and when he returned he brought with him the commandant of the marines.
The bonds were drawn and signed.
Tai Lin rose. For a moment he stood looking thoughtfully at the ring on the table, then, without noticing the bows of the bishop, got into his sedan.
As he was being carried out of the Gateway he caused his bearers to stop, and, lifting the blind, looked back long and fixedly at the House of God.
CHAPTER EIGHT
AND SO IT ENDED
After passing under the waterfall curtaining the doorway of the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, one apparently stands upon the edge of an abyss out of which come blasts of cold moist air and a stillness, which, in contrast to the splashing roar of the cataract, is appalling. The floor of the cavern slopes downward some ten degrees, and in the subdued rays filtered through the prisms of falling waters the nearby walls with their columns and pilasters cleave imperceptibly out of the dim light, white as the clearest marble. The floor is covered with a dust piled about like drifted snow and swept by the cave winds into hollows, ridges and crescents. Water dripping from stalactites trickles over corrugated pilasters, and farther down the incline runs in greater volume from their bases. This crystalline seepage has formed colossal cups, which in their endless overflow have made saucers, then platters and these, running out from each side of the cavern, overlap toward the centre. These accretions of calcareous ooze form more and more, as one advances, a series of overlaying crusts which, in the lower incline, become the roofs of abysses, resounding with an hollow rumble when stepped upon. Sometimes, like the covering of a tiger’s trap, they support one man, sometimes an hundred. These covered abysses—no other than the maw of the Sleepless Dragon—probably hold the bones and accoutrements of the Manchu regiments that pursued so relentlessly the youthful Emperor. In them also are the bones of treasure hunters, robbers, and nameless, numberless others for whom the Sleepless Dragon accounts not.
However, there came a day when the danger of the abysses was averted to those that entered and stopped long enough on the threshold to become accustomed to the soft, shadowless light that lay about them; or to those that impatiently lit their resinous torches, for there had been made in the snow-like drifts a distinct trail of footsteps which, passing and repassing, had trodden down the dust; and along this new path were marks such as one sees in winter where boughs have been dragged through the snow. This trail made of feet and boughs began where the mist from the waterfall floated and continued down the incline until it almost reached the edge of the first plate-like formation of calcareous deposits, then turned to the right and ran straight into the wall between two huge corrugated stalagmites. In a jagged recess almost behind the left-hand stalagmite was a narrow opening, the lower part of which was ragged, the upper chiselled and smooth. This exit, heading away from the concealed abysses, had in some ages past been made by man into a doorway.
Passing through this secret portal the passage is confined for some distance by narrow walls, and the low roof makes it necessary in places to crawl upon the knees. The tunnel ends by opening into a vast cavern similar to the one first entered; but on advancing the walls and ceilings grow invisible to the light of torches and it becomes like a vast field. Here and there brooks of crystal water gurgle dully as they trickle into a circular lake that fills the lower basin. When torches are held over the edge of this lake there streams upward out of the abysmal depths shoals of pallid, eyeless fishes.
From this subterranean field caverns, like highways, diverged in several directions. And one of them—fortunately or otherwise—led into what was once a little corner of Paradise, cast like a gleaming pearl into this damp cellar of earth. In the centre a fire of pine branches had once blazed and crackled cheerily, giving the shadows of the chamber the soft whiteness of a snow-drift, but where the light of the pine blaze fell it sparkled and glistened as though incrusted with jewels. In the sides of the cavern were numerous openings; at one end curved a half arch, in the other a hole that led to the underground field. From the dome jewelled stalactites ten to twenty feet in length hung pendant, while here and there rose great stalagmites like fluted pillars. The walls were hung with draperies falling in unbroken, graceful folds, now softly white as a swan’s breast, now a curtain sown thick with precious stone. Around the wall’s base cups had formed similar to those in the first cave, and were filled with transparent water. Pearly, diamonded furniture was crowded about. Thrones, pedestals, dais and couches draped lightly in gleaming folds, coruscating as though studded with all the jewels of Yu Ngao. In this cavern joyousness and laughter echoed.
The wife, like an uncaged lark of an hundred spirits, was Happiness itself; and when laughter was not on her lips her song found its way through the columned depths. To her birdlike notes, numberless echoes blended in perfect harmony as though some subterranean chorus had taken up her song and was sending it through the uttermost caverns as she had sent it into the hearts of men. Sometimes, after she had ceased, her words could be heard, echoing, echoing, echoing. These caverns and grottoes were reluctant to yield up their music, and slowly smothered or rather caressed their tones into silence as much as to dumbly signify that it was the first time an echo from heaven had drifted thither.
One day not long after they had taken up their abode in this pearl-shell, Tsang’s wife, smiling and chattering, bustled about the fire. Tsang sat on his heels and smoked contentedly by her side. While on a high couch of marble, the wife directed, commenting, sometimes with laughter, sometimes with the gayest mockery. The Breton sat at her feet, smiling at last and at all times, for since the night of the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters he had at no time ceased to do this.
Suddenly the wife’s laughter stopped and she knelt down beside him.
“What is the matter?” she demanded fearfully.
The Breton had laughed.
“Did you ever do that before?” Her demure anxiety and troubled looks brought another uncertain, low laugh from his lips.
“Tsi, did you hear him?” she demanded, turning to Tsang’s wife.
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
“Tsang, did you hear him?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Then she turned to him and said beseechingly.
“Do it again.”
In gayest hours, however, it seems that moments of sadness or foreboding must inevitably intrude, as sea-fogs slink in and envelop sunlit meadows. In such a manner one day there came into the song and laughter of the wife this uneasy unrest. She appeared trying to escape from something, but it overtook her and her song-laughter stopped.
She moved closely to the Breton.
“Why were you and Tsang gone so long to-day?”
“We were looking for the treasure of Yu N——”
“Treasure!” she interrupted indignantly, drawing away from him. “And I thought you different.” She drew farther away.
“I do not know why men care for nothing else,” she complained, half sorrowfully, half angrily. “From children to old age they think of nothing else. They go into war for it, and temples and jails and yamens; no mud can cover it, nor filth stick so closely but what they fondle it more than—than——”
The Breton reached out his hand toward her, but she drew back.
“You would rather——” Tears were creeping into her complaint.
“But, Your Excellency,” commented Tsang opportunely, “what can you do without money? Fate is the only thing on earth that cannot be marketed for it.”
She turned on him scornfully.
“Oyah! This whole Ming treasure cannot coax one lark to sing.”
“It could persuade kingdoms.”
“It cannot open a single night-closed lotus bud.”
“It could turn night into day.”
“It cannot stop a tear.”
“Some it could.”
“It cannot add one hour to life.”
“Life is spanned by its pleasures; the rich have three lives to the poor man’s one.”
“It cannot buy——” She hesitated and nervously picked the hem of her jacket.
“Why don’t you answer me?” she pleaded, turning to the Breton.
“Yes.”
“Will you never learn to talk?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“I would interrupt you.”
She leaned close to him and looked up forgivingly.
“I was not angry, but I don’t want you to go away and leave me for so long. I—I——”
“What is it?”
She turned her head away, then answered guiltily.
“I dreamed something that I cannot forget. If I only had not dreamed it,” she cried as she snuggled closer to him.
“It is nothing,” he added reassuringly.
“Yes; I know,” she answered, “that you will call this dream just some airy tapestry of sleep, strangely woven, perhaps, and hued, but still the gauzy slumber-work of my foolish mind, which in waking hours I should see plainly through; and yet—I cannot—won’t you let me tell it to you?”
She put her little hand in his and looked up imploringly, then nestling closer, she continued with naïve intentness:
“I know this dream came late in the night, because it was for hours and hours that I could not sleep. Fear’s tugging finger many times caused me to rise and peer into the shadow where you and Tsang were sleeping. It must have been after the third watch, when he builded the fire, that I dreamed. I know you will think this a very foolish dream.”
For a long time he looked into her upturned eyes; then putting her hand against his cheek, she turned his face away.
For some moments there was an hushed, uncertain silence, then suddenly she burst into tears, and throwing her arms about the neck of the Breton she clung passionately to him.
“Do not let dreams disturb Your Excellency,” commented Tsang. “What are they? Reflections in the Great River whereon we float. Now how can reflections stem the river or check the course of our craft?”
“Tsang!”
“Tsang!” said his wife, leading him aside, “do you know that was a very bad dream?”
“Boil your rice, Tsi, boil your rice! How can dreams affect the stringed puppets of Fate, squawking and crowing, thising and thating, squeaking out our long or short verse until Fate gets weary and snaps the string. Bah! What have we to do with this inane performance? Go pluck your fowl.”
“I know, Tsang, but I tell you that was a bad dream, a very bad dream, and nothing good will come of it.”
“You are always dreaming.”
“Yes, and——”
“What! those lice-familiar bonzes.”
“They told——”
“Bah!”
“Women’s tears are peculiarly like rain from heaven. Every so often in the strange azure of their being are gathered fleeting rifts of storm clouds, and when these are full swoln and all rays of sunshine hid, it takes but a small clap of thunder to bring on a storm, while a world of prayer and beseechment cannot stop its flood or drizzle—as the storm may be—until self-exhausted, then one word and, like the formula of God, there is light.”
“To-morrow,” said the Breton, “I will send Tsang to see if we can go away.”
“Will you?” Again her lips, upturned, quivered with joy, and her eyes, smiling through tears, shone like stars through mists.
“Tsi,” she cried, rising and clapping her hands, “we are going away from this dreadful place.”
“That dream may turn out all right after all,” answered Tsi, “but——”
“Oh, dreams are nothing,” interrupted the wife with merriment, “unless”—looking mockingly at the Breton—“they are mist clouds of yesterday blown across to-night’s darkened dome, or as Tsang says, ‘contorted images reflected in the river of Life.’ No, Tsi, we should not worry when scholars so wise have spoken,” and she bowed roguishly to the Breton as her laughter, charming and tender, fell gratefully upon their ears. So again happiness reigned within the Tomb of Yu Ngao.
The wife, the Breton, and the two peasants were gathered about the fire; the wife was helping Tsi prepare the meal, moving in rhythm to the song she was singing, while the Breton watched her with eyes round and bright.
“Come, rice is ready.” She beckoned imperiously to him, holding out her hand, but as he came to her side she drew up, tossing her head haughtily.
“Sit down!” Then seating herself beside him, she slipped for a fleeting moment one little hand into his.
“No, Tsang,” commented the wife mockingly, “I do not think you will make a good farmer, unless you do as I say. You are too wean-less from Fate. If your rice failed to grow, you would at once allot it to Fate, and on your doorstep smoke your pipe. Now, Tsang, you should inquire into the many reasons that prevent your rice from growing. On this river of yours, you drift and do not try to row.”
“Yes, Your Excellency, that is true. But to contend against Fate or to make rice grow would be to seek disaster. We cannot hasten what Fate has decreed must go slow, or retard that that by Fate is moved speedily. Fast or slow the River moves on, and whether we row with it or against it this boat of ours makes the same landing.”
“Why don’t you change boats, fateful man?”
“How can we, Your Excellency, when we are but luggage to be tossed hither and thither at the will of the Great Boatmaster? Sometimes he throws us into a junk, sometimes into a flower-boat; again we cling to a bit of wood.”
“How ridiculous!” she interrupted gaily. “Life is no such muddy stream; rather it is the expanse of heaven wherein we are birds of passage, and all that great width from horizon to horizon have we to flit in. All the heavens, Tsang, are ours, and we may mingle as we please with exuberant flights or, solitary, seek the reedy marsh. There is no restraint; eastward, westward, upward, or downward, whither we will so we may go. We may rise, singing like a lark to the very floor of heaven, or crouch in a hollow—an owl, but of the plumage of Fate, Tsang, we have our choice. Haven’t we?” and taking hold of the Breton’s ear she pulled his head toward her, looking fondly up into his eyes.
“But I am a good farmer,” said Tsi, gazing compassionately at her husband, “for I was raised in the paddy-fields of Hungshan.”
“On our farm, Tsi, we will not plant any rice, only tea-shrubs or mulberry trees, and among them azaleas and bushy camelias, where the chickens can hide their nests. How I love to hunt eggs and tend those little fuzzy chickens when they go peek, peek——”
“Listen!” said Tsi, springing to her feet.
They listened, and presently from some distant cave came a murmuring rumble.
“Tsang!”
“Sit down! What comes, comes, and that is the end of it.”
The Breton, on hearing these sounds, looked at the wife, paled, but did not move. Presently the rumble grew more distinct, and the Breton, without a word, left the chamber by the small hole in the end.
It was some time before he returned, and when he came into the circle of light a cry rang from the lips of the wife and, throwing herself on his breast, she clasped her arms about his neck.
Those few moments had altered the Breton. His face was stony and life seemed to have gone from him. When he spoke his tones were less speech than gloomy reverberations.
“They have found us.”
Tsang came up to him, holding in his hands a huge, double-edged sword of the Mings.
“Fate has overtaken me at last,” he commented contentedly. “Thus it ever is. It hauls men out of bed as well as devouring them on fields of battle. Who can hope to escape by panting up into lofty towers or sneaking into the earth’s rumbling guts? Bah! But I can save you and get vengeance for their stealing my house. This is a Ming sword. As they come through that narrow hole I will cut their heads off one by one. You can get out. I will give myself up to the magistrate and tell him that more than fourteen days ago you went down the Si Kiang into Tong King; you can go to Pakhoi then get a junk for Singapore. Let my wife get the babies and take them all with you.”
The Breton made no reply.
“Her Excellency?” the voice of Tsang pleaded.
He hesitated.
The wife unclasped her arms and, turning to Tsang, pointed into the darkened recesses.
“Go!” she faltered.
Stumbling, reluctant, the two peasants went into the darkness, then looking up into the Breton’s face she again put her little hands upon his breast. For a moment she wavered, then her eyes closed and softly as a flower whose stem is severed, she sank to the floor.
The Breton fell on his knees beside her and lifting her head to his breast brokenly endeavoured to coax back that consciousness which had left him alone in the depths of earth and dismay.
In the outer caverns the rumbling noises grew louder.
The fire smouldered though, and the red glow of the dying embers still lighted the two still forms.
One by one the embers darkened.
Suddenly a priest, followed by others, burst into the cavern and in a moment it was filled with their red-glaring torches.
The Breton did not move nor raise his head.
Holding their flaming knots overhead, the priests surrounded the two motionless figures on the cavern’s floor, but as they looked their clangour and jibes grew still, for that silencer, Grief, was amongst them.
Presently one of them stepped from out of the circle and rested his hand on the Breton’s shoulder.
“Come.”
CHAPTER NINE
JUDGMENT
While the penal laws of China are the old codes of the ancient world, their antiquity is not significant of their decay, and though some of them were in force on those days when the Rameses held their High Courts; when Moses judged from Sinai and Solon revised the Laws of Draco, they still deal out justice to mankind. While Egypt’s Empire is buried under a waste of ages and the marbles of Athens are the sarcophagus of its laws and their makers. The Children of God, no longer dwelling under their splintered Mont, are lawless and scattered abroad as small dust. Yet the old Code of China remains vigorous and pristine, exercising in the same lands their power over one-third the human race.
This Code, begun at that period the Occident regards almost as civilisation’s break of day, is not less than a Promethean performance, regardless of the fact as to whether it was proclaimed in the beginning of human institutions or at the present time. No example of man’s intellect is more remarkable. It not only has all the principles of modern legislature, but it has them tempered and strengthened by the experience of the fullest ages of man; it gives the right of pardon, the right of appeal, respect for individual liberty, and holds responsible magistrates charged with repression of crime. It is majestic in its plainness, its reasonableness, its consistency and moderation. Without incoherence, it calmly, concisely lays down laws for man’s conduct, and no European Code is at once so copious and consistent or is so free from intricacy, bigotry, and fiction as are these old laws of China.
Yet few penal codes portray so many apparently paradoxical principles of judicature; the unaccountable mixture of cruelty to prisoners, mingled with a paternal solicitude for the welfare and happiness of the people; with a constant fatherly effort to coax them into obedience and yet with the hand of cold rage punishing the guilty. But in this strange attitude is exhibited one of the basic principles of Chinese criminal law; by the rigour of its punishments it is intended that the law shall operate in terrorem, and the penalties laid down in the Code are almost always higher than the punishments intended to be inflicted. This is done, not only that the sovereign may exercise his mercy beyond the bonds of the law,—the commonness of which proving its beneficial effects,—but also that those tempted to commit crime are by the very terror of relentless punishment restrained in pathways of uprightness.
Let it be said, however, that in all its phases the Code of China—notwithstanding the terror of its punishments—shows a paternal solicitude for those over whom it lifts its terrible but not unkindly hand. Like a father it threatens and coaxes; like a mother it punishes and caresses. Thus the common name by which the people address magistrates is “Our Father and Mother.” With parental care this heavy Code endeavours to legislate for every possible contingency and exercise its power justly in all of the infinite shades of difference that grow out of human contention. It is minute yet concise, redundant but direct; it is restrictive, making the responsibility of officials such that they can be put to death for not enforcing the laws; and yet it permits magistrates many liberties provided they do not interfere with the ultimate execution of justice. Under this Code there are no juries to panel, there are no lawyers to delay the course of justice nor pervert it. The magistrate is judge, jury, and lawyer. He summons, questions, decides. Trials are open to the public and there is heard the testimony of witnesses; there it is considered and judgment rendered.
So the time came when this ancient Code was to render judgment upon the wife of Tai Lin; this same old code that had for almost innumerable generations punished and protected a vast portion of mankind; a code that they looked up to and reverenced, a code possessing for them awe and fear and gratitude, for they were the laws their fathers made untold ages ago, and as dutiful children they loved as they dreaded and shunned them. So the hour came when a lone magistrate empowered by the solemn authority of laws by time sanctioned was to render judgment upon her. There was to be no one to defend her, no one to prosecute her. It was simple; was she innocent or guilty? If guilty, were there extenuating circumstances? If the testimony showed that she was in most part innocent she should go free; if guilty, since her husband demanded it, she must die. If she denied her guilt she should be recommended to the sovereign for mercy. If she confessed, then must she be cut into a thousand pieces naked before the eyes of the multitude.
Under the first cold pallor of day, down before the Tablets of his forefathers in the Great Ancestral Hall, sat Tai Lin. All night and part of the day before had he been seated there with his face buried in his hands. Long and still had he waited for the breaking of this day and now when the pale, inevitable hour had come, mingling its wane light with the radiance of the tapers, he did not move.
Toward the second hour after sunrise the magistrate of Namhoi arrived, followed by the bishop and French Consul together with their retinues. They entered the Ancestral Hall. Tai Lin lifted his head heavily from the table and returned their salutations as they slowly crossed the hall and took their seats beside him. Along the left side sat the officials of the magistrate’s court; on the right the French Consul and priests of the Mission; all of which Tai Lin saw dully, then his head sank again upon the table.
The magistrate raised his hand; there was a movement among those stationed in the lower part of the hall, but the prisoner did not respond to this silent command. And this court so strangely convened in the sanctuary of Tai Lin’s fathers, waited, frowned, and grew restless.
Suddenly in the midst of this increasing impatience a low involuntary ejaculation burst from the lips of the priests.
On the left side of the hall through an oval aperture, half hid by a silken curtain and illumined by a shaft of morning sunlight, stood the wife, so radiant, so beautiful, that those priests who had seen her only as dead in the red glaring dusk of their torches gaped incredulously. For a moment she fluttered in the sunlight, then stepped lightly, daintily into the Hall of the Dead. But on finding herself in the midst of men staring at her in silence, she stopped, her lustrous eyes widening in frightened wonder and clasping her hand upon her bosom she pressed back against the curved lintel.
The magistrate hesitated, frowned, then made the sign for her to come forward and kneel down before him, but she drew back, her great imploring eyes looking dumbly about her. Finally he raised his hand and the first clerk on the left rose and read the charges; namely, that she, the wife of the great man, Tai Lin, had, on the night of the Propitiation of the Gods of the Waters, stolen away with a foreign priest and had lived alone with him in the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon. As the clerk read the charge and its details she cast a hurried, appealing look around her and trembling, clutched the curtain for support.
The bishop raised his hand, at which sign a priest rose and testified how they had gone into the Great Cavern and in one of its darkened chambers came upon this woman and a priest. She was lying upon the floor with her head resting upon his breast. Tai Lin lifted his head and fastening his dull gaze on his wife devoured each detail of the priest’s recital, and as priest after priest testified how they came upon the guilty pair alone in that cavern’s most solitary chamber his face began to twitch and darken, while a glow came into his eyes.
Suddenly in the midst of a priest’s testimony he cried out, a choking strangled cry, a cry inarticulate and yet so vivid in its anguish that it sent a tremor through all those in that great room.
The wife straightened up, for a moment she wavered, then going swiftly over to him she fell on her knees before the table and resting her little fingers upon the edge looked up into his face.
“My husband, do not do that. You do not know how it hurt. No, no, you must not—I have done wrong. Do not be angry and cry out as you did. It was terrible for you to do that, because it is all over and I have suffered more than all these Yamen-men can lay upon me. Forgive me, my husband, send these men away. You do not know how they frighten me. Won’t you forgive me? You must not let these two wee moons of fault outweigh my years of love. Don’t you remember how I used to sit on the stool at your feet; and you let me pull your ears. Won’t you forgive me, my husband?
“No, no, you must not! He just came each day and went away. I do not know how it happened. At first I did not understand, then I tried to harden my heart, but each day when he returned my frozen resolution melted as the sun of the fourth moon melts the earth’s bosom and brings forth again the verdure of spring. I do not know how it all happened. But as a swimmer in the sea was my little heart in the blue deep of his eyes, and each day their tides overwhelmed my strength and bore me away on their flood.
“No, no, he did no wrong—his love was not other than the will-less tide that some light from heaven——”
Tai Lin brought his fist feebly down upon the table. He tried to speak. For a moment the tiny tips of the wife’s fingers clung to the table’s edge. Frightened, she looked up into his face convulsed with rage, then her fingers slipped and she fell sobbing beside the table.
The bishop leaned over and spoke to the magistrate.
“Do you confess your guilt?” he demanded.
There came no answer but her sobs.
“Did you not live with the priest in the Sleepless Dragon Cavern?” interrupted the magistrate.
Paying no attention to his question, she again lifted her hands to Tai Lin. For some time there was silence, then the bishop began to speak in a low, firm voice that would have been chilling had it not been tempered by a purring gentleness.
“This is very sad,” he commenced in tones full of pity, “but it is necessary that justice be done. This wife insists that she is innocent—someone must be guilty. If she is without sin the priest must have by force stolen her away and upon him punishment must fall. Since he is guilty, he shall die.”
As the bishop leaned back in his chair an approving murmur rose from all parts of the hall.
The wife’s sobs suddenly ceased. She no longer held her hands to Tai Lin. And forgetful of all those silent men around her she dumbly, beseechingly looked up into the bishop’s face.
“The guilty alone must die,” he repeated in the same gentle, decisive tones.
“No! No!”
“Yes; we must have justice,” he interrupted firmly, “for the knowledge of our uprightness is spread over all countries and the people look up to us for it.”
“Oh, why do you say that?” she cried, holding out her hands to him. “Is it not better to give mercy than to demand justice? I know you men of greatness love justice, but it is so deep, while mercy is like the heavens where every little act shines out as the light of a star and tinges the depths of whole regions! Oh, Great Sir, don’t be just and your fame will spread over all lands. Nothing is so wide as mercy. Wherever the skies cast their shadows, wherever stars shine, wherever dews fall from heaven, men will love you. Oh, do not hurt him—if you only knew——”
Tai Lin, listening to her sobbing appeal, again brought his fist down upon the table.
The bishop leaned forward and said gently:
“If he is guilty, he must die.”
She made no reply.
The loud ticking of the Consul’s watch reverberated through the silent hall.
The bishop watched her keenly and a frown came upon his pallid brow as her head sank lower and lower upon her bosom.
The ticking of the Consul’s watch was now drowned in the deep breathing of those about her.
Presently the wife raised her head and searched long and questioningly the eyes of the bishop; then slowly she rose to her feet and looked over the head of her judges, somewhere beyond the Great Golden Altar of the race of Tai. A calm and contented expression came into her face; the colour flowed back into her cheeks and a happy light filled her eyes.
“I am guilty,” she said demurely.
The thin lips of the bishop twitched, and he looked over at Tai Lin, who sat grasping the table’s edge with both hands, his mouth half open, his eyes dull.
“What! Do you confess?” demanded the magistrate.
“Yes,” she replied in low tones, still looking over their heads beyond the altar.
“You confess to all charges?”
“Yes.”
“Did you persuade the priest?” inquired the bishop mildly.
She looked at him in startled wonder, then again her head sank upon her bosom and only the bishop, her husband, and magistrate heard the scarcely audible answer.
“Yes.”
The hand of the bishop trembled as he held it before his lips; again he looked over at Tai Lin, who momentarily sat as one strangling, then rising, overturned the table before him and passed half down the hall. Suddenly he stopped, clutched at his throat, and would have fallen had not those near took hold of him and half carrying, dragged him from the hall of his fathers.
The magistrate turned to the bishop.
“Does he mean that?”
“Yes.”
“Then she shall be given the silken scarf that she may die in the seclusion of——”
“Is that according to his complaint? Is that in accordance with the law?”
“What! You would not——”
“Yes,” interrupted the bishop decisively.
“I cannot,” feebly muttered the magistrate.
“It is his demand—the law of the Empire! Dare you fail to enforce it?”
The quiet tone of this last question was ominous and the magistrate moved uneasily; he pondered the marble floor; sometimes he glanced sideways at the bishop and once, lifting his eye to the wife, shuddered. Then the bishop touched him firmly on the arm and, turning to the first secretary on his left, he lifted his hand and the clerk brought him the Vermilion Pencil.
“It is done.”
Again the lips of the bishop twitched.
“Remember,” he said, leaning over and whispering in the magistrate’s ear, “I hold you responsible for the carrying out of the law. Beware she does not die beforehand.”
The magistrate rose without replying and, followed by all of his retinue other than the first clerk, passed out of the hall. The bishop leaned back in his chair, pulled and cracked his long bony fingers until one of the priests came and spoke to him. A frown passed across his face, but he rose hastily, and, as he passed the wife she looked up, moving close to him.
“Will he be free?” she asked timidly.
The bishop lowered his head and, as he whispered, her eyes sparkled with joy. She clapped her little hands together and uttered a happy cry.
Then the bishop followed by his priests passed out of the hall.
The first clerk still continued writing, apparently oblivious to the beautiful woman, who, smiling to herself, still gazed over, somewhere beyond the Golden Tablets of Tai.
“Foolish woman, why did you confess?” he demanded brusquely.
“Oh, I did not know what else to do,” she answered lightly, turning her head to one side.
“No doubt,” he replied gruffly; “but it is not the first time a woman’s tongue has been the knife to lyngchee her body.”
“Indeed?” she inquired mockingly.
“Woman, why did you lie?” he continued harshly.
She turned away.
“Why did you lie?” he demanded again.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she interrupted with gay raillery. “Don’t you see that I but follow the ways of Nature, wherein the straightest trees are felled the soonest, and the cleanest wells are first drunk up; wherein the most innocent bird is quickest netted, and the tenderest flower is first plucked, that it for one fleeting instant might pleasure man’s nostril? Thus in such fashion, Mr. Clerk, must my uprightness be cut down; my good name and virtue drunk up; my innocence conquered and confined while the little flower of my life—plucked and cast aside—— Oh, well, I do not grieve,” she continued carelessly. “They can take me away from earth, but not from him. The silken scarf is for the neck. Whoever heard of it strangling the heart?”
“Unfortunate woman! Unfortunate woman!” interrupted the clerk, rising. “There is to be no silken scarf for you.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, startled.
“Woman, do you not know the law? You are to die naked before the multitude.”
Lifting her little hands to her temples she swayed and fell down before him.
“No, no,” she cried, clutching his robe. “They have all gone and left me but you, won’t you save me? No, no, don’t go,” she pleaded, holding on to his robe as he started to move away. “Talk with me. How can you leave? Listen! Why can I not have, in all this wide house of the world, just one little corner to die in?”
“I can do nothing,” he replied, his rough voice trembling. “You are to die by the lyngchee.”
Her eyes opened wide as she looked up at him, then she sank down, pallid on the floor in the Hall of the Dead.
CHAPTER TEN
A FRIEND
The law does not procrastinate in China; and the execution of the wife was fixed on the following afternoon. When the sun rose that day out of a fogless sea it proved to be one of those gentle winter mornings of the semi-tropics. In northern latitudes such mornings are often called the smile of spring, but in this land they are more than the birth from winter’s womb—they are an awakening on the bosom of summer and there pervades abroad an inexpressible atmosphere of compassion. On such mornings it is said that the tiger comes forth from his lair and in the sunned jungle glade lounges heedless of his quarry, so that neither men nor the most timid of jungle deer have fear of him, for the peace of the day has gone into his terrible heart and he purrs and purrs and purrs like a kitten on a woman’s lap.
In other lands, upon this same twenty-fourth day of winter, whole nations were meeting together around their Christmas hearths; their spirits also gentled by those feelings of domestic love and attachment, which they regard as hallowed; songs and laughter burst from their lips and happy with remembrance of months past, joyous with anticipation of those future, their carols were rising upon all sides, while with kindnesses and benevolence they sought to lift their hearts above earth and with the shepherds from their sheepfold, cry peace and good will unto all.
But the sunlight of this day as well as its spirit seemed to have shunned the Catholic Mission of Yingching. Within its Compound were neither songs nor laughter—only a brooding silence, while around the stern Visigothic Chapel ranged patrols of soldiers. Whether it had been a matter of policy with the bishop or whether it had been included in the agreement between Tai Lin and himself, is not known, but from the time the Breton was brought from the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon he had been confined in this gloomy chapel and surrounded by a battalion of Chinese troops.
About the fourth hour after the sun had passed the zenith and light rifts of fog were beginning to drift in from the sea, a man passed hastily through the south gate of the Mission Compound and emerged from the cloisters of the bishop’s dwelling. After searching with quick but penetrative glances the court surrounding the Chapel, he let his chin rest upon his bosom and, putting his hands behind his back walked slowly, thoughtfully, toward the Chapel.
At the circle of troops he was stopped.
“What!” he cried indignantly, with piping sternness.
The soldiers did not move and an officer came up.
“Command these men to stand aside. I am the bishop.”
The soldiers drew to one side and the officers bowed. In front of the Chapel door a sentry barred his passage, but at the command of the officer who had followed, the door was unbolted and the stranger passed within.
“Ha, ha, diplomacy! diplomacy!” he chuckled to himself as he stood blinking in the gloom of the low, vaulted vestibule. “Ha, ha,” and he pattered down the aisle toward the altar, crying in a shrill, gleeful voice:
“Well, well, let me coax you when they asked me to get off the bund; they never knew what I would do. To obey is to conquer; to smile is to be supreme as Mrs. Hook——”
The Breton rose from his seat on the altar steps, and resting his two hands on the shoulder of his visitor, looked down into his eyes.
The Reverend Hook wriggled, smiled furtively, and squirmed from under the Breton’s gaze.
“Well, here I am; diplomacy, mind you, diplomacy. Made up my mind to see you; see you I would—knew it would not be for long. I suppose you are next? But you know all about those caves and your knowledge must not be lost. That would never do. Heard you were more than a mile inside—my—my—— Now the first thing I want you to tell me——”
The Breton turned wearily away and sat down again on the steps of the altar.
“Am I hurting his feelings? Poor diplomacy, poor diplomacy,” muttered the Reverend Hook to himself.
“Well, I went down on the bund this morning,” he resumed cheerily, keeping his eye on the Breton. “It is all fenced except the waterside, and in the very spot—neither a foot more nor less—exactly where you used to stand—the very place where I gave you the maps to the Grotto—they have put up the crucifix. At the bottom are two black stones and a tub, but not a very big one. On the left, under a red silk canopy, are three chairs—don’t understand why there should be three. Just then a priest came along and said I had not been invited—think of that! French soldiers strutting up and down—French gunboats anchored along the waterfront. Now, I want to know who is doing this execution—Frenchmen or Chinese? You know I am a good friend of yours—or I would never have given you those secrets of the Dragon Grotto,—but I want to say that these Catholic priests are trying to run this country. I went over to our Consul. He just swore. He said if he were God—he is a blasphemous wretch—he would invent something new in hell for these priests. Kept getting madder and madder, then he grabbed me by the collar and threw me out of the door. That crazy Consul has the Mission-phobia—but he won’t last. He can’t mistreat an American Methodist missionary with impunity; let me coax you. What have I got to do with this business on the bund? I gave you the secrets of the Grotto, but how did I know that all this was going to happen?”
For some moments the Reverend Hook became contemplative, then he began to shake his head.
“Terrible, terrible, so young, so beautiful, so beautiful, so beautiful—and I will never see her, and all those others will. And they will take off her clothes. Oh, oh, oh.”
His breath and words failed him. He pattered back and forth before the altar in little restless strides.
The Breton sat bowed upon the altar steps.
“Why don’t those countries with gunboats stop it! Why don’t they stop it!” he cried shrilly, never ceasing his nervous patter, and casting hurried glances at the priest as he repassed the altar steps.
Suddenly he stopped.
“Why don’t you do something?”
The Breton raised his head.
“Why don’t you do something?” repeated the Reverend Hook in shriller tones.
“Do what?” asked the Breton wearily.
“Do what? Stop it! Stop it!”
The Breton looked at him.
“The execution!”
“I have nothing to do with it,” replied the Breton.
“What?” screeched the Reverend Hook, jumping back and throwing up his hands. “You have nothing to do with it?”
The Breton with a sigh bowed his head, while his visitor stood looking at him appalled.
Presently he began to walk back and forth, muttering aloud.
“I did not think it—how can he do it? Gave up everything for him—so beautiful, so beautiful. Thus they throw themselves away; always have done it, always will, all except Mrs. Hook. Now they are going to take off her clothes—before those Frenchmen—cut the skin of her beautiful brow and let it hang down over her eyes—eyes that made men tremble. Then they will cut off her little ears and pieces from her cheeks. Then her lips—and to think he has kissed them. Then her white arms—then her beautiful—beautiful—Oh! oh! oh! And he sleeps here, doubled up like a ground-hog!”
The Reverend Hook’s excitement overcame him, and weeping copiously he pattered over and stood in front of the priest. After several efforts he mumbled lugubriously.
“I am going, but I want to say that I didn’t think it.”
The Breton looked up.
“You are going?”
“And I want to say that I didn’t think it,” he sobbed.
“What?” asked the Breton drearily.
“That you would let them kill her.”
The Breton sat erect, his eyes searching. Then springing to his feet he seized his visitor and thrust him back to where the last glimmer of narrow sunlight fell upon his face.
“Don’t, don’t—at sunset they lyngchee——”
Sometimes there comes from the lips of men a cry that no one can describe, unless it be compared to that abandoned cry that is said to have come from a Crucifix some centuries ago, but which echoes yet at times from hearts of other men; so now there came such a cry from the lips of the Breton. He staggered back, and his hands clutching at his throat, tore open the bosom of his long black robe; he tottered against the altar and bent over it. Then it was that the Great Symbol of the Tien Tu Hin fell from his bared bosom and lay gleaming upon the outer folds of his robes, its terrible green jewel glistering in the dun shadows of the Chapel as the tiger’s eye glitters in the jungle’s dusk.
Suddenly the Breton drew himself up, and shaking his head and shoulders as a wounded animal, threw open the Chapel door; for a moment he stood under the vaulted entrance and the slanting rays of the sun fell on the Great Symbol.
The sentry looked up, hesitated, looked again at the glittering Eye, and dropped upon his knees. A patrol of soldiers started to rush forward, then stopped; awe and reverence overcast their features, for there, under the gloomy vestibule, in the red sunlight, calm and yet awful, stood their prisoner—upon his bosom the Eye of the Age’s Wrath.
As the Breton advanced toward them many fell upon their knees and struck their foreheads thrice upon the ground. An officer from one of the buildings in the rear shouted for the soldiers to seize him, but this command was no sooner heard than those kneeling rose, and marshalled themselves behind him. Other soldiers came with their guns and formed another line, and those that did not follow saw upon the faces of this guard, which constituted more than half of the battalion, the sternness of death. As the Breton moved toward the north gate, apparently oblivious to those that followed him, the soldiers dropped their queues over their right shoulders in a loop, then bringing the end around the neck, tied it in two loose slipknots to the loop—all of which is called the Sign of Shou. Carrying their guns in the left hand they held their right hands over their heads with the thumb pointing upward, and as they went out of the Mission gate there went up that terrible cry:
“Hung Shun Tien!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACTHANI
Early upon the day of the execution four French gunboats and a cruiser got up steam and moved slowly down the river toward the bund. The cruiser anchored opposite the place of execution with the gunboats on either side of it but nearer to the bund, so that the five vessels formed a cordon in shape of a semi-circle. From within this space all river craft were driven out and the guns of the warships trained across the empty waters upon the bund, where early in the morning guards of marines landed. On these warships the day wore slowly, tiresomely along, and it was not until lengthening shadows began to creep reluctantly across the river that they became enlivened with men clustering over their rigging and sides, laughing with jests.
The Viceroy, to prevent the execution from precipitating a riot or collision with foreigners, had previously posted proclamations that no one should come forth from their homes or traverse the Street of the Sombre Heavens for seven blocks back from the bund; neither were they to be seen upon the waterfront for seven blocks east and west of the Street of the Sombre Heavens. So that, when the soft, mellow sunlight of this eventful day streamed down upon the deserted streets, bathing their unaccustomed solitude in a serene, peaceful warmth, it made these turbulent thoroughfares appear like village streets basking in spring sunshine.
About the third hour in the afternoon sedan chairs, soldiers, officers on horseback, and pedestrians began to come into the vacant Street of the Sombre Heavens, and soon the enclosed space on the bund became a scene not less brilliant than it was ominous. The crowd assembled there stood about in the form of a crescent blunted on the left horn and facing the river; petty mandarins in official gold-brocaded robes, red-coated soldiers, and French marines in white and blue, Manchus clothed in rich stuffs, and French officers, goldlaced and brilliant, formed in parts this bizarre horn, in whose centre stood a crucifix with black stones and tub beside it.
Over all brooded a silence.
About an hour before sunset a salute was fired from the cruiser, and two boats crossed the open waters. In their stems were the Bishop of Yingching and officers of the Fleet. As the boats approached the bund the marines were drawn up in double ranks, extending from the landing stage to the three ebony chairs under the silken canopy.
The bishop was first to ascend the ladder, and as he stepped upon the bund he drew himself up to his fullest stature, scrutinising those assembled before him; then with slow steps, with haughtiness, solitary and full of unmeasured pride, walked down the files of marines to the elevated platform beneath the canopy. For a fleeting moment he hesitated, then sat down in the middle chair. A group of French officers, glittering in gold lace, followed and took up their station to the right, while part of the marines drew off to one side of the gate, part on the other.
The sun was sinking.
The French officers gaily carried on their animated conversation. The bishop was silent. And the Chinese, in spite of their brilliant robes, were grave, uneasy; anxiously they cast their eyes at the sun slanting through the rigging of the warships, but not until it had sunk below the gun-platforms on the masts did the rolling boom of kettle-drum break the oppressive stillness. This was echoed from without by clash of cymbals and blare of trumpet; the marines presented arms and the Chinese troops drew up in order.
The magistrate approached.
When the flag-bearers and musicians came on the bund the spectators rose upon their tiptoes to see enter three stolid men dressed in flowing garments of the Ming dynasty, and from whose caps waved the golden pheasant’s long, slender plume. The first carried a huge beheading sword upright before him, glinting in the red rays of the sun. One of the others carried a small basket of knives—the cutting up knives, while about the neck of the third were suspended ropes and chains. These men went over and stood beside the crucifix. Behind the executioners had followed a half-dozen men carrying red, oblong boards attached to long handles and inscribed in golden characters; some denoting the magistrate’s honours and rank, others commanding the people to keep out of the way and be quiet. Two officers on horseback rode behind them, followed by three men, one bearing an official fan, another a crimson table to place before the magistrate, while the third bore a gold-embroidered umbrella of state. After these came men dressed in long red robes and black, conical hats, who were the “wolves and tigers” of the Yamen, and their passage was of crackling whips, the rattle and grind of chains; the clanking crunch of implements of torture. After them came men swinging censers, which left streams of fragrant smoke along the pathway, and half hid in these clouds of incense pattered two old men, receiving petitions from the people. The sedan of the magistrate now entered, followed by officers on horses and soldiers carrying arms and flags.
When the magistrate stepped out of his sedan under the canopy he started in unrestrained astonishment. The bishop, without rising, nodded his head in salutation. Slowly the magistrate went and sat down on the bishop’s left, and before him was placed the crimson-covered table; upon it the Vermilion Pencil.
The sun had sunk below the house tops of Honan.
The bishop frowned and glanced impatiently toward the gate.
Flecks of night fog scurrying along the sky were being tinged with the last rays of the sun, when a solitary sedan was borne swiftly, silently through the gate to the vacant chair under the red canopy.
Those that had known Tai Lin looked in horror at the shrunken, quavering old man, who now sat down on the bishop’s right—a shuddering of shrivelled skin.
“Is he alive?” whispered one man to another.
“Yes.”
“I doubt it.”
“Look at his eyes.”
They were like coals. The spectators were fascinated by them, and the terror of what was to happen crept upon all. Many furtively looked toward the gate; others turned away to the river; some watched the three executioners beside the crucifix; others looked at the bishop.
Suddenly there was a movement among the troops at the gateway as a sedan, mournful in blue and white and thickly surrounded by soldiers, was carried across the bund and silently put down in front of the magistrate. The soldiers filed to one side, the curtain was drawn and the wife stepped daintily out.
When her eyes rested upon the magistrate who had judged her she drew up to her full height, tossed back her head, while a flush darkened the delicate pallor of her cheeks.
The spectators surged forward, and as they looked upon her there went over them something like a great sigh.
The wife, turning away from the magistrate, perceived the bishop leaning forward in his chair. Instantly, as a shaft of sunlight, a rare, sweet smile dimpled her features, and in the joy of her gratitude she moved closer, spontaneously holding out her hands. But as she stepped toward him smiling so happily, so gratefully, the bishop became immovable, as one paralysed by fear. His thin, tight lips opened, his cavernous eyes grew dull, his face became chalky, then, with an effort, he shrunk back in his chair.
Tai Lin had never moved nor uttered a sound since he had taken his seat, but when the bishop recoiled from the tiny thankful hands of the wife, he was no longer hid from her, and she looked up into his burning eyes, into his face, where over the loose-hanging skin a myriad deep-crossed wrinkles charactered the pain and wrack of a strong man’s heart. For a moment her slender form swayed, she pressed her little hands together, then held them up to him; her lips parted, and falling before him she clasped his legs in her arms.
The straining ears of the spectators could hear no sound as they watched her body tremble with sobs; nor could they see any leniency creep into the face of Tai Lin as he leaned over and peered down at her.
Blindly she reached up her hand, and the crowd saw him shrink back, a sweat breaking out upon his face when, in her blind fumbling, she found one of his nerveless hands and drew it down to her cheek. Breathlessly, fearfully the spectators watched the flames in his eyes flicker and then—go out: they saw him reach down his other hand and rest it upon her head; his lips moved, but no one heard what he said unless——
The bishop straightened up in his chair, a scowl swept across his face, and touching the magistrate on the arm, spoke to him, with an imperious gesture toward the wife sobbing at the feet of Tai Lin.
The magistrate hesitated, then picked up the Vermilion Pencil. Slowly, weighingly, he lifted it, and two of the executioners sprang forward and, seizing the wife, dragged her over to the crucifix.
Tai Lin sat for a moment stupefied then, half-rising and uttering a cry, he held out his hands. Again a frown swept across the bishop’s face and leaning over he spoke to him in low, rapid tones. As he talked, now and then snapping his fingers, an uneasy movement began to ebb in the crowd. Presently Tai Lin’s head sank upon his bosom and the bishop, turning away, nodded to the magistrate. The Vermilion Pencil was again lifted from the crimson table. The executioners that had dragged the wife to the crucifix tore in twain her long outer robe and threw it aside. At this her tears and supplications ceased. Two spots burned redly in her cheeks.
Tai Lin bent forward, grasping the arms of his chair. Those spectators that once looked at him did not turn away nor look at the wife. The fascination of her beauty was less than that of his terror. They watched his eyes glow and burn in their sunken sockets until a dull film came over them. Yet no one in all that great crowd saw him breathe nor show any twitching signs of life. He looked to many like the carven image that is found in the Temple of Death.
The executioners ranged the black stones side by side so that there was a space of about three inches between them. They stood the wife against the crucifix, but in stretching out her arms found that the cross piece was low and in their haste they were a long time altering it. During these painful moments not a sound nor movement came from those crowded there.
Finally they tied her to the cross with thongs about her wrists and ankles and one that pressed into the soft delicate contour of her neck. Thus she stood looking somewhere over and beyond those assembled around, her great, mournful eyes filled with the light and shadows of other thoughts, but wholly oblivious to the terror about her and to the fear that brooded there.
The executioner stepped up to her and rested his hand upon the bosom of her silken jacket. But as he moved his hand to tear it off there came a choking cry.
Tai Lin had risen to his feet; heavily he lifted his hands and the spectators could see he was trying in vain to speak as one gasps in a nightmare. He shook his quavering head and a foam oozed out of the corners of his mouth. Then as the executioner again raised his hand, Tai Lin with stupendous effort held out his heavy arms to her. His face became purple, his lips black, and a bloody ooze seeped out of them. A tremor passed through his gaunt form. For a moment he stood still and erect, then his arms fell to his side and he sank down lifeless in his chair. A convulsive movement shot through the multitude, followed by breathless silence.
The wife waited with closed eyes for the brutal hand. She did not see Tai Lin rise from his chair; she did not hear his choked cry, nor know that he had fallen dead. Now and then a tear struggled out and lingered momentarily on her long lashes. These little salt globules were the only signs of life in her, and the eyes of some watched them trickle away drop by drop.
Presently men turned to look at one another, then a wave of consternation swept over the bund. They began to whisper. And it was in the midst of this terrified hum that the magistrate raised his hand in command of silence.
“The Great Man, Tai Lin, has saluted the World. He alone was the accuser. The prisoner is free.”
As the executioner cut the deep-sunk thongs away and the wife sank down unconscious at the foot of the crucifix, there rose a noise half a sigh, half a strange murmur, the voice of this multitude, a crowd of men that shrank, shivered, then surged forward to look at the dead man still in the chair and a slender body lying limp at the foot of the cross, beautiful even in the guise of death; necklaced with a ribbon of bruised flesh, braceletted with wristlets of angry red.
It was over this swaying, murmuring mob that the bishop rose and lifted his hand imperiously.
“How is it,” he cried in clear, ringing tones, “that a magistrate of the Middle Kingdom dares hush up a public crime? This guilty woman was taken in the midst of her sin. In trial she confessed her guilt and was condemned by the law and her husband’s command. Dare a magistrate act contrary to this? Dare he act contrary to the three hundred and eighty-first section of the Code? Let him beware!”
The bishop turned, and with his thin lips curling looked sternly down upon the astonished magistrate. Over the bund fell a stillness—the silence of suspense. The eyes of the spectators, propped widely open, did not look away from the pallid man towering above them—with his relentless gaze rivetted upon his fellow judge.
The magistrate moved uneasily in his chair. He looked at the warships riding sombrely at their anchorage, he contemplated the marines drawn up at the gateway and the chained, watchful cannon. He studied thoughtfully his Vermilion Pencil. Presently he raised his hand.
“Does the Eldest Son of the Great Man Tai Lin demand death?”
There came no answer.
“Does any member of the Tai family demand her death?”
Not a sound replied but the crowd’s deep breathing and a faint wavering hum from the city.
“Does any man of the Middle Kingdom demand the cutting into pieces of this woman?”
The multitude held its breath, straining to catch the slightest sound that might be the noise of a human voice. But they heard only the running waters sobbing below their feet and the last distant echo of the day’s work.
The magistrate lay down his Vermilion Pencil and looked triumphantly at the bishop, but his implacable gaze did not alter and the smile of the magistrate was lost.
“She is free.”
“Ah!” The bishop uttered this exclamation so softly that the magistrate alone heard and he looked furtively away.
“It is in accordance with the law,” he replied.
“Ah!”
“No one demands it.”
“Ah!”
“You are not a man of the Middle Kingdom.”
A slight smile curled the bishop’s thin lips as he drew a package from his robe and threw it down upon the table.
The magistrate carelessly, even with hauteur, opened it. As he read, a pallor came into his yellow face and his hand shook as though with palsy when he refolded the document. Again he turned his eyes toward the grim warships in the river; again to the calm, stern array of marines and their cannon unchained and alert.
He leaned over his table as one in a stupor.
Immovable the bishop towered over him, his lips tight drawn, his eye fixed.
The magistrate lifted the Vermilion Pencil.
The spectators had watched this conversation between the bishop and the magistrate without comprehending what had passed between them, but when they again saw the Vermilion Pencil rise slowly, when they saw the executioners lift up the still unconscious woman from the foot of the cross and revive her, a shudder passed through them. They swayed backward as from a sudden yawning of an abyss. They were shoved backward one over another until the bund around the crucifix was again clear.
The executioner, having revived the wife, bound her once more to the crucifix; again the thongs hid the red rings around her wrists and neck. Her eyes, still moist with tears, cast one fleeting, reproving look around her, full of injured, startled wonder.
Then the executioner with the beheading sword came and stood on the right of the crucifix; the one with the reviving sponge stood on the left, while in front of her was the other, his sleeves rolled up and by his side a small basket of knives. These men did not take their eyes away from the pencil of death, which again lay on the crimson cloth.
The Pencil moved.
Involuntarily the spectators turned away as they heard a cry of gentle protestation.
The executioner cut the left shoulder of her jacket, laying bare her arm and part of her bosom, which was not unlike ivory sheened with the pink of silk. She looked up into the face of her slayer, and those spectators that dared to raise their eyes saw his hand waver. Then the ascending Pencil stopped. The first stroke was now to be given.
When the Breton went out of the Mission gate followed by the Children of the Deluge, he turned east upon Old River Street and as he went along there rose at certain intervals that terrible cry, “Hung Shun Tien!” Men stopped in their labour at the sound of this, and when they saw the tall black-robed Breton with the Great Symbol gleaming on his bosom, when they saw the stern, armed array behind him holding overhead their right hands with thumbs pointing upward, they either drew back in consternation or put aside the implements of their labour and joined themselves to this body of sombre men. They asked no questions; they looked neither to the right nor to the left, but simply dropped their queues over their right shoulders in a loop and brought the end around the neck, tying it in the Sign of Shou. Then they held their right hands overhead and when the others cried out: “Hung Shun Tien!” so cried they.
In this manner beggars peeped out of their holes and joined them. Merchants came from their gilded shops and rolling up their silken robes took their places beside the beggars. Thieves crept out from their hidings and sentries left their stations. Hucksters put down their trays and scholars their brushes. Itinerant barbers, physicians, cooks, fortune-tellers, robbers, clerks, silk robes, and tatters; youths and tottering old men; from mansions and cellars and hovels and holes came the Children of the Deluge to follow the black-robed man upon whose bosom the Symbol rested.
As the Deluge burst through the labyrinthine windings of the suburbs in their race with death, the old men and those that were feeble, panting, and wheezing, dropped out, but new recruits took their places and the flood was swollen as it rushed along, so that before the head debouched into the Street of the Sombre Heavens, the rear could no longer hear the battle-cry of the van falling sonorous and terrible upon the silence of twilight.
The wife had closed her eyes, waiting for the stroke that would cause the drooping brow to close them forever. The executioner had raised his knife when there fell upon the silence of the bund a rumble, a roar, and then that cry of terror:
“Hung Shun Tien!”
While the marines endeavoured to get their cannon in position, the Chinese troops ran thither and thither, uttering cries of terror. The spectators separated into two parts, one panic-stricken while the other threw their queues over their right shoulders in the sign of Shou and echoed that terrible cry.
A deluge of men overflowed the whole bund, and marines, spectators, and soldiers were lost in it.
As though unconscious of this great flood of mankind aroused by him the Breton went through the way which the Eye gleaming sullenly on his bosom opened for him. And as he stepped out into the open space toward the crucifix, this now vast multitude became silent. Those that were near saw him draw his hand across his eyes; shaggily shake his head and shoulders, then go slowly over to the crucifix.
The executioners drew away as he approached, and two fell upon their knees obedient to the mandate of the Eye aglitter in the gathering gloom.
The Breton stood for a moment silently beside the crucifix.
“I have come,” he said softly.
A smile passed over the lips of the wife, but she did not open her eyes.
“I have come,” he repeated in the same soft, questioning tones.
Uncertain, fearful, her eyes opened. She looked at him and smiled. She looked at him again, and out over the bund echoed a cry so full of joy that the falling night seemed turned into the break of day, and the lark’s note quivered in the air. Some men in the multitude smiled foolishly and wiped away a tear, others laughed to choke a sob.
The Breton picked up the beheading sword at his feet, handling it as lightly as a knife. Without haste, seemingly oblivious to all about him, he cut the cords from her wrists. No one moved. They watched, fascinated, the great sword play delicately about her; cutting the cords of her ankles, severing the thongs about her wrists and neck.
The wife was free. Holding out her hands, she clasped them around his neck. He drew his black robe around her so that only her head was seen nestling beside the Great Symbol.
For some moments thus they stood—motionless beside the crucifix, while the army of the Deluge, gigantic and terrible, awaited his command.
The Breton hesitated.
Presently he began to move backwards toward the bund’s edge, carrying the wife in his left arm and still grasping in his right the executioner’s sword. Behind and below him called the old voice of the river—before him the old silence of man.
The Deluge pondered.
The crucifix held out its arms in the gloom; one to man and one to the river. The husband dead was unseen; the bishop crouching in his chair became a part of the approaching void of night and the bond of blood on the bund at his feet fluttered and in the night wind vanished.
The day was done.
Thoughtfully and for some time the Breton gazed at those before him, without anger or wonder or pain. Then he looked down in the face upturned to his, where eyes were full of laughter and delight, where lips smiled and murmured and caressed.
Her little hands tightened around his neck and drew his head down until their lips met.
Darkness was falling. The fog coming in from the sea scudded low down on the river and its veil was being drawn over multitude and water. All distant were hid in it other than upon the bund’s edge, where still stood a darkened figure.
Suddenly the Deluge began to move.
Night had fallen: from its shadows came only the crunch of that remorseless flood as it moved onward—back into those abysses whence it had come forth—the Night of Time, the Heart of Man.
THE END