Wu had collected in princely fashion during his years in Europe. There was a Venetian harp, a German grand piano, and an English organ in an adjacent music-room. And in this, the smaller of his own reception rooms, there were several European treasures. Unlike most Chinese rooms, this was carpeted, not with one of the beautiful native carpets, but with a great mat of silk and mellow splendor—Constantinople was the poorer since Wu had purchased it.
It was an octagonal room—perhaps the only one in China—and when all the sliding panels were closed its only ventilation came from a small window or opening high up against the ceiling. The panels were made to slide back or up, and out of sight; each was in the center of one of the apartment’s eight walls, and cut into about half of the wall’s width. The widest panel was open wide, and through it Wu could see his garden, with all its pretty architecture of pagoda, bridge, pavilion and “tinkly temple bells,” all its lush and flush of flowers, all its affected labyrinth of yellow path and costly forests of dwarf trees, and, beyond the garden, the bay, terraced Hong Kong, the imperial Chinese sky.
The room was furnished in ebony, as costly and as carved as ebony could be made. There were no chairs, but several stools. A stool stood on each side of the moderately-sized square table, behind which stood the most noticeable article in the room—the huge bronze gong, swinging in a frame of chiselled ebony lace and silver and onyx, which no hand but the mandarin’s ever struck.
There were several cabinets, Chinese masterpieces, holding china and bric-à-brac, chiefly Chinese and all priceless.
Chinese antiquities of every description were on the walls and on narrow tables against the walls—bronze from Soochow, porcelain from Kintêching, cornelians from Luchow cut into gods and reptiles, jades from the quarries of Central Asia, bowls, weapons, vases, statues, armor, a piece of Satsuma that Yeddo could not match.
There were two scrolls inscribed with lofty sentiments Tze-Shi herself had brushed one, and Kwang-Hsu had given it to Wu with his yellow-jacket. Aside from its imperial association it was very beautiful—even a European could see that, and Bradley had spent much covetous time gazing on it—for in all China, where the cult of “handwriting” is an obsession, no one has ever written more beautifully than her majesty. The other said in the original Arabic, “Es-salam aleika.” (John Bradley had another verse from the same Sura over his bed.)
And, as in Nang Ping’s room, there was just one picture—this one a bird perched on a spray of azalea painted by Ting Yüch’uan.
Wu prostrated himself before the altar which proclaimed the owner’s importance. He had come here to do worse than butchery, but to do it as a priest—to sacrifice to his gods and to his ancestors, to scourge in their service a woman who had never injured him or them, as much as to scourge a man who had; but he had vocation in his heart rather than personal vengeance—and such is Chinese justice.
Fantastic—is it not?—the Chinese code that ennobles and flagellates the dead ancestors and the living kindred in punishment of the raw present sin! And yet, even for it, there is a poor, feeble something to be said. We dig down into the earth and uproot the diseased tree, burn it all, search out and burn, too, its suckers and its saplings lest all our orchard suffer worm-breeding blight.
From an alabaster box, gold-lined, he took a handful of yellow powder, dribbled it into the tiny saucer of sacred oil burning before the tablet, and as the pungent blue flames hissed up, prostrated himself again, and knelt for a long time—in prayer.