A great-great-aunt of the mandarin had been a noted mathematician. Another ancestress had invented an astronomical instrument still used in the great observatory at Pekin. On the distaff side the old man and the boy could prove descent from both the two great sages—descent in the male line from whom alone gives hereditary and titled nobility in China, except in such rare, Emperor-bestowed instances as that of Prince Kung. Wu Ching Yu and Wu Li Chang were descended through their mothers from Confucius and from Mencius. One foremother of theirs had written a book that still ranked high in Chinese classics, and one had worn the smallest shoes in all the eighteen provinces.

They had cause to be proud of their women, and to boast it intimately from generation to generation.

Li—perhaps in compliment for the tortoise—had given his son-in-law a tame trained bear and a skilled juggler, and Mrs. Li had presented Wu Ching Yu with two of her husband’s choicest concubines. The older mandarin had graciously appointed them attendants upon his granddaughter and to stay with her in Pekin. But the bear and the juggler were traveling with the home-returning Wus; and when the inevitable chess-board and its jeweled chessmen and the flagons of hot spiced wine were laid between Muir and the mandarin, Bruin—Kung Fo Lo was his name—danced and pranced in the firelight for the boy, who clapped his hands and shook with laughter; the heart of a man-child cannot be for ever sad for a baby-girl, known but two months and not able to crawl yet. But Wu Li Chang did not forget Wu Lu. He often wished that she might have come with them. He’d willingly have traded the dancing bear for her, with the juggler thrown in (he had two better jugglers at home); and for permission to forego the journey to Europe he would have given everything he had: his favorite Kweichow pony (a dwarfed survival from the fleet white Arabs that the Turkish horde of Genghis Khan brought into China), his best robes, the little gold pagoda that was his very own, everything except his cue, his ancestral tablets, and his grandfather’s love and approval—yes, everything, even his wife.

CHAPTER VI
Heart Ache

BUT it was summer again before he went. The mandarin was taken ill soon on their home-coming, and all through the cold northern winter only just lived. Death means little to the Chinese, but somehow, for all his relentlessness of purpose, for all his iron of will, the old man could not bring himself to part with the child while his megrim was sharp. With spring he grew better, and when the great tassels of the wistaria were plump and deeply purpled he sent the boy with his tutor to Hong Kong.

They took their parting in a room in which they had passed much of their close and pleasant companionship. James Muir understood that the old man avoided, both for himself and the lad, the strain of the parting, long drawn out, that the cross-country journey must have been. And Muir suspected also that the mandarin did not dare the bodily fatigue of such a journey, no matter how easily and luxuriously taken.

Muir was right. But chiefly, Wu chose to say good-by in their home—the home that had been theirs for generations and for centuries.

Except a few pagodas there is not an old building in China. The picturesque houses, with their pavilions and their triple roofs, flower-pot hung, curling and multicolored, spring up like mushrooms, and decay as soon. Houses last a few generations—perhaps. Great cities crumble, disappear, and every trace of them is obliterated in a brief century or two. The Chinese rebuild, or move on and build elsewhere, but they do not repair. Their style and scheme of architecture never alter. The tent-like roofs (or ship-prow survivals—have it as you will, for no one knows), painted as gayly as the roofs of Moscow, make all China tuliptinted, and looking from a hillside at a Chinese city is often oddly like looking down upon the Kremlin. It is very beautiful, and it looks old. But unlike the Muscovite city, it is all new.

But this house of Wu, where both the old man and his grandson had been born, was far older than a house in China often is. The Wus were a tenacious race, even in much that their countrymen usually let slide; and here, in these same buildings, or in others built on the same site, the Wus had made their stronghold and kept their state since before the great Venetian came to China to learn and to report her and her cause aright.