He bathed, dressed in the garments of his country, took rice, spoke briefly to Ah Sing, then sent for Sing Kung Yah and coached that surprised and flustered lady in the part she was to play in the events of the afternoon. She was not a particularly skillful or astute coadjutor—indeed, for a Chinese woman, she was dull, inept and dense; but for seventeen years it had been her invariable habit to give him minute obedience, and the habit would stand her in good stead to-day. And, too, she had, of course, a Chinese memory—the most wonderful memory bestowed on any race. He had little fear of Sing Kung Yah, and, for that matter, the rôle he had assigned to her was but that of a well-dressed supernumerary with a few unimportant lines to speak. She was not essential to the movement of the piece, and her rôle might well enough have been “cut” from the cast, but with the evil seething at his heart all the native artist in him was aflame. He intended to carve his victims delicately—a dish for the gods. On the terrible altar of his hatred, yes, and of his just resentment, he would lay an English woman who had never wronged him and an English son who——. But he intended it all to be done as exquisitely as some finest ivory carving cut by a master Chinese hand.
When he had dismissed Sing Kung Yah he went into his study and waited.
It was the room in which perhaps he had lived most. It was here he studied; and in the many long hours of leisure which he always relentlessly kept for himself, Wu Li Chang was a devoted student. It was here he wrote; and Wu was an author of some distinction in the current literature of China—the land in which a genuine love of letters counts as nothing else does, a fine skill in literature is respected as no other human quality is. There were poems to his credit in the Imperial library at the pink-walled palace in Pekin, a book of philosophy, a comedy, and a history of the women of his house. And he contributed almost regularly to the Pekin Gazette and at long intervals to Le Journal Asiatique—in French, of course.
The hour-glass—he had turned it when Sing Kung Yah had left him—was running down; almost was run.
Wu rose, and stood looking out into his garden, saying good-night to it something as Nang Ping had said “good-by” to hers four mornings ago—saying good-night, for it would be dark when Mrs. Gregory left him.
He had no doubt that she would come.
He turned from the window, and walked gravely into the next room, where he intended—in less than an hour now—to receive his guest.
It was a curious room: Chinese, but with some differences from other Chinese rooms. For this man dared to tamper with custom when it suited his convenience, and to modify an architecture that had been unaltered almost since Kublai Khan ordered every grave in China to be plowed up remorselessly, and so made room for homes and crops for the living, till then out-crowded by the honorable dead.
This was a very beautiful room, and so richly furnished that its opulence must have been oppressive had it been less beautiful, its taste less distinguished.
Essentially and strikingly like Nang Ping’s room, unlike hers it was not so exclusively Chinese, and it was more nearly crowded. The Chinese—like all Orientals—are fantastic collectors, even of European flotsam and jetsam, though more discriminatingly so than the Turk, the Indian, or the Japanese. In the remotest yamên in Honan or Kwei Chau you may find a Dresden vase, a music-box from Geneva, a silver dish from Regent Street, and—most probably of all—half a dozen clocks, made anywhere from Newhaven, Connecticut to Novgorod, and all ticking away together, but quite independently, and all giving a different lie to the old dial in the sunny Chinese garden. (There were eighty-five clocks—and all “going”—in one of the Pekin throne-rooms.) But you are not apt to find, except in the poorer quarters of the treaty ports, the gimcrack chandeliers and tawdry vases, Europe-made, which will astonish and shame you in a palace in Patialla or Kashmere.