CHAPTER XXXII
“Cur!”
“NOTHING so pleasant”—and the perfect placidity of his voice was more cruel than any outburst could have been.
“Well,” the other said desperately, “but there’ll be a reckoning for all this—my father——”
“Not necessarily, my young seducer,” the Chinese said softly. “Your father I do not regard as a man at all formidable. I had a most interesting interview with him—to-day. And I formed a low opinion of his abilities. There is a positive hue and cry after you, of course—almost a paper-chase. The walls of Hong Kong city are plastered with your portrait, and even here, on the mainland, it is to be seen. It is a very nice portrait, too—the nice likeness of a nice English—gentleman—the portrait of a very handsome young—seducer.” Wu Li Chang was not quite his own master now. The storm was rising, threatening his own insolent calm. He rose and moved a little up and down the carpet—quietly but stealthily, as hungry-for-flesh and thirstily-dry-for-blood cats move through the jungle in the night.
His last word cut Basil Gregory. Wu was behaving like the yellow dog he was; but he—Basil—was not entirely blameless: he had said as much to himself, alone in the pagoda—that cursed pagoda. Oh, well!
“Your daughter loved me,” he began. And at a something manlier in his tone than Wu Li Chang had expected to hear, Wu paused still and met the English eyes squarely. “We are both young.” And after a pause, so throbbing that even the three automaton servants must have felt it beat, he added slowly, “Except that the two races don’t mingle, I would——”
“Marry her?” Wu interrupted haughtily.
“Yes,” Gregory replied, as if proclaiming a determination and a promise. “Yes—if she still wishes it.”
“A very interesting suggestion,” Wu sneered. “In your country, when a woman has been dishonored, marriage is called ‘making an honest woman of her.’ It is a quaint notion. To me it seems a nasty one—plastering some putrid sore with gold-leaf! Here we have other methods. To us a woman’s honor, once stained, no more can be clean again than the petals of a rose, torn and scattered by the storm, can be gathered back into their opening bud to perfume the dawn and glisten with its dew. If marriage, and with such as you, would redeem the honor of a ruined girl, what would redeem the honor of a father and a house so desecrated as mine? Nothing! And nothing is left me but to avenge. And I avenge it now.” He turned and confronted the trembling wretch with a look before which a braver and a less guilt-stained man might well have quailed, and each word curled and hissed from his mouth like a snake.
Basil moistened his lips, tried to speak, but failed.