“Our daughter.” The English father bit his lip. He was convinced that to press the quarrel further with this opponent would be to press to his own defeat. But he restrained himself with heroism. To see Hilda’s photograph in Wu’s Chinese hand, Wu’s Chinese eyes on Hilda’s face, maddened him. Twenty Europeans had lifted the picture from his desk, held it so, and commented on it admiringly—and her father had been highly pleased. Wu merely bowed and replaced it quietly, face towards Gregory—and Gregory itched to throttle him.
If Robert Gregory had known of his son’s spoiling of the Chinese girl—a girl of gentler birth and softer rearing than Hilda’s—he would not have considered Basil’s crime unforgivably heinous. “Damned foolish!” would have been his stricture. But that this Chinese man—a father too, as he knew, and, for all he knew, as clean-lived and as nice-minded as himself—had held Hilda’s portrait in his hand, and look at it quietly, seemed to Gregory hideous, and his gorge rose at it.
Wu Li Chang read the other clearly, and, quite indifferent alike to the man and to his narrow folly, he stiffened coldly, for he knew what Robert Gregory did not, and he was thinking of Nang Ping as he had looked down upon her last, heaped and stricken in final expiation on his floor.
But, both through an instinct of breeding and through utter indifference, he made no comment on the picture, either in flattery or in admiration, as he replaced it. But he bent his head congratulatory toward the other and said: “Ah! yes. Miss Gregory reminds me—slightly—of some one I have known. Probably an English lady—I met years ago when I lived in England. I regretted not being at home when Mrs. Gregory and your daughter so honored my poor garden—and my daughter.”
He did not admire Hilda’s picture, and it was far too much trouble to pretend an appreciation he did not feel. And he thought her dress, or lack of it, disgusting, precisely as he had thought the décolletage of “honorable” (and entirely “honest”) English ladies abominable when he had been a boy at Portland Place. And his Chinese taste (good or bad) would never have put a picture of Nang Ping in his offices, where casual callers and mere business acquaintances might scrutinize and comment on it. He had killed his girl—this man sitting easily there; calm and imperturbable—not a week since, and neither waking nor sleeping had he regretted it—not even for an instant. But a scented bead that he had found beneath her robe, when they had lifted up what had been his only child, lay now secure in an inner pocket. He could feel it where it lay.
“On a friendly footing, Mr. Gregory?” Wu took up the broken thread. “You Westerners are truly magnanimous. ‘Friendship’ is usually actuated either by hope of gain or by—fear.”
“Don’t you trifle with me, Mister Wu,” Gregory said hotly, rising and beginning to pace up and down the long room—an ugly and determined look hardening on his face—“I’ll have no more of this beating about the bush. To begin with,”—controlling himself a little better: there was so much at stake—“to begin with, Mr. Wu, the mysterious disappearance of my son is only one of the long series of unexplained disasters that have recently fallen on me, and concerning which I want an explanation.”
“Then why not seek it from those who can enlighten you?”
“There’s no one more capable of doing that than yourself,” the Englishman said, swinging round on the Chinese fiercely. “What’s behind it all, Mr. Wu? What’s the game you are playing at? Why have you devoted your sinister attentions to me and mine? What have we done to start you on this career of kidnapping—of ship-scuttling—of incendiarism, among the coolies out there—and all the rest of it?”
Wu looked at his watch, put it back in his pocket, picked up his hat, and rose deliberately. “Mr. Gregory,” he said coldly, “my time is of a certain value. Time is money, you Westerners say. Well, I never waste time—although I am never in a hurry. You will excuse me if I wish you a very good afternoon.”