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.