With a cruel look of mock love—to torment her even this little more, and in no way because he suspected the contents of either cup—with a slow look into her terror-dilating eyes, he slowly drained the cup. And Florence Gregory watched him, motionless, horror-stricken—scarcely realizing that he had given her her release—by a way it had not occurred to her even to attempt.
“So,” Wu said, putting down the cup, “I have paid you the highest compliment. For I do not like your sugar or your cream. Indeed, I cannot imagine how any one can spoil the delicious beverage——” His voice broke on the word. Something gurgled in his throat. “It was even nastier than I thought,” he whispered hoarsely.
Suddenly he reeled. He staggered and caught at the table’s edge. Had he gone drunk, he wondered, with the intoxication of his smothered, inexorable rage? The room was spinning like a top plaything. His head ached. He thought a vein must burst. The room was turning more maddeningly now—like a dervish at the climax of his dance. And he was spinning too—not with the room but in a counter-circle. He tottered to a stool and sank on to it, his face horribly contorted with pain.
Mrs. Gregory moaned, half in fear for herself, half in horror at the ugly agony from which she could not take her eyes. She moaned, and then Wu knew.
He gripped the table with hands as contorted as his face, and leaned towards her muttering in his own Chinese words of terrible imprecation of her and hers. Curses and hatred beyond words even the most terrible blazed from his dying eyes.
He was dying like a dog—outwitted by an Englishwoman. And then he laughed, a laugh more terrible than the death-rattle already crackling in his throat like spun glass burning or dry salt aflame: the damnéd burning may laugh so. Dying like a pariah dog! He laughed with glee—hell’s own mirth; for now the signal would never be given, the Englishman would never go free. He would starve and rot in Nang Ping’s pagoda. Did she realize that? Oh! for the strength to make her know it! But only Chinese words would come to his thickening tongue or to his reeling brain. Of all that he had learned or known of English, or of the England where he had lived so long, nothing was left him—nothing but his hate.
Was it for this—this death degraded and worse than alone, no son to worship at his tomb—that Wu Ching Yu had banished him to exile and to excruciating homesickness?
Where was the old sword? He would slay this foreign devil where she stood. Who was she? Why was she here—here in the room with the tablets of his ancestors? Who was she? Ah! he remembered now: she was the mother-pig—the foul thing that had borne the seducer of Nang Ping!
With a hideous yell, with a supreme effort, he tottered to his feet and lunged at her with his writhing hands outstretched like claws, his feet fumbling beneath him.
She shrank back in terror, and raised her arm as if to ward off a blow.