“O Great Sir, if you could but see her you would understand that she is richer than wealth itself; it you could but hear her you would understand how my desires are as spring freshets surging against Time’s wintry constraint——”
“Ah?” The Viceroy uttered this with a great depth of feeling.
“Yes, yes,” went on the mandarin hurriedly, never lifting his eyes from the floor, “Fate, the Judge, decreed it, and Fate, the Jailor, pulled me into it. As I was passing along a mountain path, suddenly from out of the tea-shrubs came sweeter music than the song of the phœnix—the Song of Fate. My escort stopped and I was unable to make them amble onward. I can now understand how the flute of Liang Kiang stole away the courage of eight thousand men. My escort stood breathless while in vain I blustered and threatened. I was obliged to send a horseman to find out the source of the song and I found the phœnix-singer to be a girl living in the valley. My escort became mutinous, then like a gleam of sunlight shafted through a black rebellious storm flashed the thought of gain for Your Excellency—a musician rarer than any in the Middle Kingdom—and it determined me to go down in the glade.
“When the girl’s father learned that I was Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, he told me confidentially—confidentially, that is the way it was—that his daughter lingered in the outer room tearful to see the hem of my robe. So I admitted her thinking that I might be of great service to Your Excellency. When she bowed down before me she trembled with delight——”
“What was her appearance?” demanded the Viceroy, interrupting the mandarin’s breathless monologue.
“O Great Sir, if I had all the wisdom of nine times the Nine Classics I could not describe her. She is not beautiful in the manner of the women of Hangchau. Her big eyes are round like those of oxen, but charged with most unoxen fires. She does not dainty along with golden lilied feet as the women here, but ankled as the kin deer and winged as the wild pheasant, she derides the very rocks and mountains. Her cheeks of almond flower the jealous sun has lacquered over with ruddy gold and her pouting lips are so pent full of ruby blood that they would turn the honestest man into a thief if he could but perform the subtle theft of gaining them.
“And yet, Great Sir, I do not know whether you would have called her beautiful or not before I conquered her, for she had somewhat of the devil in her.”
“You conquered her?” demanded the Viceroy, eying him doubtfully.
“Yes,” replied the mandarin, scowling proudly into the tree tops. “I conquered her, but not more by my personality than by stratagem for, as Your Excellency well knows, I am not unskilled in that contentious art.”
“So you captured her?” queried the Viceroy again, somewhat sarcastically.