“I might merely wish to show her how foolish her husband has been in trying to bully and intimidate me instead of dealing with me reasonably. But also I have a message I have promised my daughter to deliver for her to your wife. Chancing to see Mrs. Gregory here reminds me of it, and it will be more convenient to me to deliver it here than to call at your hotel”—Gregory’s eyes blazed—“and possibly as agreeable to the lady. Also I have a message—but less important—from Madame Sing, my relative.” (Gregory grunted curtly.) “Ring!”
“Ring—yourself,” the Englishman at bay said sullenly.
“That is a liberty I would not dream of taking in another man’s office. You’ll ring”—the revolver’s barrel repointed insinuatingly. “You will ring now, Mr. Gregory.”
Robert Gregory pressed the bell push on his desk and leaned back heavily in his chair, with an unhappy sigh, defeated.
As Murray came in, Wu so moved his body that the clerk could not see the little pistol which still covered Gregory. “Murray,” his employer said wearily, “ask Mrs. Gregory to step this way a moment.” Then he began breathlessly, “Ce sacré Chinois me——”
But Wu interrupted with a contented laugh and, “Oh! this damned Chinaman understands French perfectly. And I’ve often heard Englishmen pronounce it very much as you do. You are a linguist too, Mr. Murray? E’um dom util—o dom das linguas—e de alto valar em cidades cosmopolitas!”
Poor Murray stood bewildered, quite uncertain what to do. And Wu turned pleasantly to Mr. Gregory with, “Please repeat your instructions, as Mr. Murray does not seem to understand quite.”
And Gregory said at once—broken, defeated—in a whipped tone his clerk had never heard from those thin lips before, “Please ask Mrs. Gregory to come here.”
And indeed the hard little man was broken and defeated, and he knew it. The Chinese duellist had made but little lunge, but with a gentleness more cruel than any storm, and a suave persistence that under such circumstances no mere European nerve could outfight, he had borne his opponent to the knees; slowly, deftly had worn him out. His method and his touch had been—almost consistently—velvet, but through the velvet of the fur that hid them, relentless claws had found and torn and jagged the English adversary.
Robert Gregory was down and out.