The girl laughed softly. “Then let it be no longer secret!” she purred contentedly, warmly willing to make his people hers, their ways her ways. “You shall tell them!” she said brightly, laying her little hands palm down on his.
“Oh! but, Nang Ping,” Basil began miserably. But Nang would have none of that. She nestled to him closer still. “Basil,” she interrupted, “if our love were not secret, but married love, and I flew away with you before my honorable father came back, then would thy honorable mother like me in her house?—if I did that—for love make brave for everything?”
Gregory was almost choking. But he controlled himself: that was the least he could do for her now. “Dear child!” he said huskily, and then he kissed her. There was tenderness in his kiss, and passion and bitter remorse. She felt the passion and the tenderness. He broke from her gently and moved away, standing looking down moodily at the darkening lotus flowers, distressed, all his light-hearted happiness of idle, selfish weeks gone, gone forever. “Oh, Nang Ping!” presently he said ruefully, “it would be better if you had never met me,” and he moved restlessly still a little farther away.
But still she would not understand. She rose and went to him, and put her little arms about him again. “No,” she said with tender, caressing emphasis, “because I am happy.” And then she added—for it was growing dark, something that lay warm on her heart to say—that must be said soon now, “Basil’s honorable mother would like me then, if—if I gave a son to worship at the grave of thy ancestors!”
Gregory recoiled a little from the girl’s gentle, clinging arms—recoiled with a startled cry: the world-old cry of man confronted for the first time with very self; the cry of man hoist at last with his own petard. But pity, too, for her, as yet so free from pity for herself, welled up in him (he was not all bad—who is?), and he controlled himself again for her sake. It was difficult, but even so it was not much to do in return for what she had done for him. And it was the only return that he could make, or would, the giving her some gentleness of treatment even in the crash of his own dismay. He came back, and caught her elbows in his hands, and held her from him so—at arm’s length. “Nang Ping,” he tried to say it lightly, “what amazing ideas you get into your head!”
“No,” she said stoutly, “not so! Listen! All the women in China make one big prayer in the temples to the goddess Kwan-Yin”—he released her arms, letting his fall at his sides helplessly, his fingers clenched in his palms—“a prayer to her to bring them a son!”
Her lover turned away, distressed, tormented.
“Oh!” he said brokenly, “what a fool I’ve been!” It is almost the oldest of the man-cries, almost as old as “I love you” and “I take you for my own.”
Nang Ping ran to him, crying, “Oh! how I love you, Basil! I want to fill my hands with happiness to pour it at your feet. Do you know how my mother died? She died when she bore me to her lord my father. And I would gladly die so, only the child must be a son, to worship at your grave and to teach his sons and his sons’ sons to worship so.” The pretty, delicate creature clung to him in an ecstasy of devotion, all her fresh womanhood dedicated to him, and then she laughed softly, pressed her hands together in a lightened mood. “Oh! I would gather the dew from the cherry blossoms to bathe me in its scent, to make me more beautiful to thee!” And this, too, was an old, old cry, as old as woman-sex.
“You see me, Lord Bassanio, where I stand,