When he rose Ah Sing had entered, and stood waiting to say, “Your honorable instructions have been obeyed.”
“Good,” Wu said grimly, throwing more powder, from a different box, on to the votive oil. A thin smoke curled up, thickening as it rose into perfumed clouds that broke in waves of jade hues until all the room was a glow of green.
“Bring him now!” the mandarin said, seating himself beside the table and waiting with an expressionless face.
Ah Sing said something to a servant waiting outside the door through which he had come, and presently feet came along the passage. They were bringing Basil Gregory to Wu Li Chang.
They had not met or exchanged a message since Wu had bent and gathered up Nang Ping where she had swooned at Basil’s feet. Since then no slightest message from the outer world had reached the prisoner in the pagoda. Wu’s servants had brought him food, and, on the second night, even a rug; but not once had they spoken to him or appeared to hear what he said to them.
The hours in the pagoda had marked him. And—why not? Those other hours there had marked Nang Ping down to doom. The man does not go scot-free. Never! That is immemorial fallacy. Nature would be full-moon mad if that were so—and nature is very wise and sane, as wise as she is old. The partners foot the bill both—always. Nang Ping had paid her share. Now he was paying his.
He looked ill and haggard, and his wrists were bound together. Two Chinese servants stood guarding him, close on either side. Almost at the threshold Ah Sing halted the three.
Basil Gregory had no doubt that he was about to die and little hope that he would not be tortured first. And the horrors of Chinese tortures lose little hideousness in the telling at English clubs in China. Basil was abjectly tormented.
The mandarin sat and studied his prisoner curiously. His lip curled, and his soul. What had his daughter, bred for centuries from China’s best and finest, descended from Wu Sankwei and from the two supreme Sages, and who might well have made an Imperial marriage, seen in this? He had known such slight men by the dozens and twenties at Oxford, scant-minded, uncultured, clad like popinjays; and for this—this English nothing, this manling thing too slight for Wu Li Chang’s hate, almost unworth his crushing—she had made the father that had adored and cherished her grandsire to a mongrel of shame. The pain at Wu Li Chang’s heart was greater and gnawed sharper than that at Basil Gregory’s. The Chinese was the bigger man, and paid the bigger penalty.
And Nang Ping had died for this: degraded herself beneath Chinese forgiveness, beyond pity, for this: disgraced him, her father, and the great ancestry of a thousand years for this! This!—and she might have been the bride of a man!—loved as he had loved her mother, cherished as he had cherished Wu Lu—and the mother of sons, honorable, love-begotten Chinese sons!