Ah Sing and perhaps half a dozen other servants moved about on padded, noiseless feet, preparing Miss Wu’s tea-table with all its picturesque paraphernalia of elaborate teakwood stools and benches, lacquer sweetmeat-cabinets, glazed porcelain tea-bowls as thin as gauze and painted by master craftsmen, trays of candied fruit, and several delicacies of which Florence Gregory did not know the name and could not guess the nature.
“So,” she said, surprised to find how comfortable a stone bench could be, “Mr. Wu was at Oxford. How interesting! I wonder when. I knew a Chinese gentleman—a student there—when I was quite a girl. We lived at Oxford, my father and I. I forget his name. I have the saddest memory, especially for names, and it could not have been your father whom I knew, for I distinctly remember hearing, the year after I was married—or some time about then—that my friend was dead, killed in a climbing accident somewhere on the Alps. He was a fine sportsman.”
“Many Chinese gentlemen are sent to Oxford, I have heard my honorable father say,” Nang Ping rejoined. “The Japanese go more to Cambridge.”
“Yes—and yet,” Mrs. Gregory said musingly, but more interested in watching the servants than she was in her talk with this rather wooden and very painted-faced child of the East, “your name—‘Wu,’ I mean—has seemed familiar to me from the first, and now I seem to remember that the man I knew at Oxford had a surname rather like that—or even that. How odd!”
“There are many Wus in China,” the girl said. “It is a most large clan. All our clans are very large. We are, you know, so old.”
“Wu.” The English woman said it slowly, as if trying to send, on the sound of it, her peccant memory back to some forgotten hour.
“Oh! it is a most general name. It means Military. I do not know why, for,” she added almost hastily, “we have had no soldiers in our family—everything almost but that. All Chinese names mean something, but of most of them—they are so old—the meaning is lost in the mists of far, far back, uncounted years before history was written or kept in record. And perhaps I ought to have remembered that one Wu was a soldier once. Wu Sankwei defended Ningyuan against T’ientsung when the Manchus first overran China. But that was, oh! so many years ago, and since then none of my honorable ancestors have been soldiers—or at least very few,” she added, with a sudden blush beneath her paint, too honest to conceal from Basil’s mother, who was also her guest, her military forbears, descent from whom she felt to be a bitter disgrace, though she knew, as every educated Chinese must, that in all China’s long history there are few greater names than that of Wu Sankwei, the defender of Ningyuan. “‘Li’ is the name in China the most common and perhaps the most proud. It is our ‘Smith’ name. And we are very proud of it, because many of its men have been great and noble, and because their honorable wives have borne them many children. Scarcely the census-takers can count the Lis. My honorable mother was a Li before my honorable father married her to be Mrs. Wu. They were cousins, but more than a century away—‘twenty times removed,’ as you would call it in your English. The honorable Li Hung Chang’s our distant kinsman, my honorable kinsman on both sides. My own honorable father has ‘Li’ blood on the side of distaff; his honorable name is Wu Li Chang. We are Chinese, we of our house, but now in some of our blood we are Manchu too.”
Mrs. Gregory smiled up at the girl. “Will you not sit here too?” And Nang Ping bowed and curled up on the other end of the big seat.
Ah Wong opened her mistress’s parasol and brought it, and Mrs. Gregory took it with a grateful “Ah!” “We have enjoyed ourselves so much in your wonderful country, Miss Wu,” she went on; “we are quite sorry our time here is drawing to a close. You know—but I forgot, you know nothing of us, of course—well, we are going soon, going home.”
“All of you go?” Nang Ping knew that they all were to go, but she could not resist the self-inflicted pain of hearing it again.