Confoveri gratia,
Quando—”
The Breton shuddered—he also had awakened.
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.