“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.