He determined to rule and to serve with and through the established tongs, and himself to establish others, because he saw clearly that so he could serve best, and with the surest, tightest grip.
While he waited for the girl to come with noise and cavalcade, he stayed at home and in the neighborhood of home; but every day odd messengers came and went, quiet, unobtrusive men. Often Wu was closeted for hours with some shabby-looking coolie, footsore and travel-torn. Wu was seeking and making affiliation with tong after tong. He was sowing seed all over vast China.
But he found time, or took it, to oversee every item of the bridal preparation. So lavish had been his orders on his first home-coming, and so well had they been obeyed, that further preparation might have been dispensed with—only a Chinese mind could have detected blemish or contrived improvement or addition. Wu’s mind was very Chinese. Thirteen years in banishment had not discolored it in the least. Everything that Lu would touch, every place that she would see, was in some way or detail given additional beauty or comfort. In her garden he lavished a wealth of care. The very flowers seemed to respond to his urging, as things much more inanimate than flowers do respond to such a master will as that of Wu. Wu Lu’s garden foamed and glowed with bud, perfume and flower, until even in China there could scarcely have been another spot so roseate or so full of rapture.
There was a pagoda of course, a bridge, a lotus lake, a sun-dial and a forest of tiny dwarf trees.
The pagoda had eleven storeys. Each storey’s projecting roof had eight corners, and from each corner Wu had hung a bell of precious blue porcelain, silver lined, silver clappered. The slightest breeze that came must set one or more of the delicate things a-ringing, and by a costly and ingenious device each motion of a bell threw down on the garden not only music, but sweet, aromatic smell—a different odor, as a different note, from each bell.
That was the last thing Wu could find to do.
And then they gave him his wife. They brought her to him through the gloaming one balmy autumn eve, sitting hidden in her flowery chair, carried through the paifang which he had regilded and newly crimsoned in her honor and in that of his never-to-be-forgotten great-grandmother.
She came in greatest state, and much of the glittering ceremonial they had enacted fourteen years ago they re-enacted now; and all that necessarily had been omitted before because of her tender days, and of the marriage having been (irregularly) celebrated at her home in lieu of his, was scrupulously performed now.
At the house door he bent and lifted her from her chair, which the bearers had put down on the ground. She shrank back on her cushions into the farthest corner when he drew the curtains aside, and when he reached to touch her she panted delicately like some frightened pigeon. He could not see her, even when he held her in his arms, for she was shrouded from crown to toe in her voluminous veil of crimson gauze. There had been no difficulty about her wearing it this time. She knew all the niceties of her important rôle, of which she had been so outrageously ignorant before, and performed them to a Chinese perfection. He saw only a red-wrapped bundle—it felt soft and tender to his gentle grip—with an under-gleam of jewels and gold, and the iridescent glitter of the strings of many-colored beads hanging from her crown thickly over her face. And no one else saw even that much, for when the chair had been laid at his feet the bearers and all her retinue and his had turned away and stood backs to the chair.
He carried her in, holding her over a dish of smoking charcoal at the threshold, that all ill-luck might be for ever fumed away from her.