“And family history has repeated itself—so far.”
For some moments there was silence in the room—a silence far more poignant than any words—a silence chill and kindless as the voicelessness of death. Then Florence Gregory started up at the sounds of bolts withdrawn and of panels sliding in their grooves.
Wu rose too, carried the sword, and put it beside the gong. “It is growing dark,” he said.
CHAPTER XXXVI
In the Pagoda and on the Bench
SO long as he may live Basil Gregory will never understand how he lived through those hours in the pagoda—his last hours in the pagoda by the lotus lake. So long as he lives he must remember them, and shudder newly at each remembering—waiting again in torture and alone to hear the deep-throated damnation of Wu Li Chang’s gong telling him that—that he was branded forever, soul-scarred. Wu Li Chang had hit upon something that not even a man could forget.
How he got there he never knew. He remembered being taken to the mandarin, the terrible interview, the news of Nang Ping’s death, the demoniac threat of his mother’s ordeal and agony, but nothing of his return to the pagoda. For a time—he had no way of knowing how long or how brief—a merciful space of blank had been vouchsafed him. And the utmost fury need not have grudged him it. For, if the mother in the house suffered more than a death, the son in the pagoda, when consciousness crept back, suffered her sufferings multiplied. She was his mother, and he loved her. Always she had been very good to him. And he had been so proud of her. Could he ever feel quite that pride again? Her very sacrifice must smirch her in the eyes of the son for whom it was made, and whose crime it punished. Even his love for her must be a little tarnished, a little weaker, after the clang out of that brazen gong. Wu Li Chang had found a great revenge. His own honor had never burdened Basil Gregory; but his mother’s honor—ah! Or, for that matter, even Hilda’s, or his cousin May Gregory’s—for, like so many such men, Basil Gregory leaned his soul (such as he had) and his pride upon the women of his blood. To be virtuous vicariously is a positive talent with some men.
His mother! He writhed. His mother! He tore against the pagoda’s walls with his hands, all pinioned as they were—for his freed hand was bound again—until his knuckles bled. If such punishment as Wu had devised could be shown vividly, anticipatorily, to men about to stray, the gravest of the social problems must be so somewhat solved, the most stinging of the burning questions somewhat answered. If sons, light, selfish, weak, could expect such chastisement as Basil Gregory was enduring now, a famous commandment would be honored in observance an hundredfold, dishonored by breach miraculously less. A daughter’s shame—a sister’s—that scourges most men; a wife’s—oh! well, there are wives and wives, there are men and men, but a mother’s—ah! That touches all manhood on its quick. Brand the scarlet initial of adultery on his mother’s brow in punishment of him, and what son would commit the fault? Fewer!
From the sun—for there were spaces pierced in the elaborate stonework of the pagoda’s thick sides, and he could see through some of them—he thought that he must have escaped nearly an hour of the misery of consciousness.
Heaven knows the scene enacted in the smaller audience hall was exquisitely terrible enough; but the man alone in the pagoda pictured it ten times more terrible, more hideous, more stenched than it was. Made an artist in fiendishness by his love for his child, Wu was most fiendish, most exquisite, in his enmaddening deliberateness. He drew out the woman’s agony until the sinews of her soul seemed to crack and bleat. The hideous hour seemed an age to her. To Basil, waiting alone in the pagoda, the hour seemed ages piled on ages.