She remembered seeing her father on the bridge. She remembered falling at Basil’s feet. She remembered nothing more—clearly. She thought she recalled, as from a dream, being carried from the garden and laid here. She thought it had been gently done. Whose arms had lifted and borne her? She thought that she had been laid on her bed; across the room her sleeping-mats were unrolled, and a light down coverlet was tossed across the hard little cylinder which was her pillow. Some one had laid her down to sleep. Who? And some one had brought her food and drink, for on a tray near the mats there were fresh fruit and a dish of wine.
Had she been awake when she crawled here to lay her sorrow at Kwanyin’s feet? Or had she thrown off the coverlet and crept across the floor in her sleep?
A nightlight burned dimly in an opalescent cup, and across the garden she could hear a cricket call and some big insect buzzing in the dark.
She tried to think, but she was too tired. She turned her face to the floor and laid so, prone before the painted graven figure which was the only succor left, the only semblance of woman’s companionship within her reach. Where was Low Soong? Had Low been caught too in the coil? If not, surely Low would come to her presently, if she could. What had they done to Basil? She clenched her hands together in supplication so frenzied that her nails cut into her palms and her rings tore her flesh. What would come now? Or, rather, when would it come, and how? She knew what was to come.
But she could think no more. She could suffer. That faculty was left her, but she could neither reason nor plan. And why should she? The end was absolute, and absolute the uselessness of thought.
Towards morning she found the little tinder-box, stuffed her pipe, and began to smoke. It was innocuous enough a drugging, but gave her growing nervousness something to do. Three or four whiffs empty those tiny pipes. To throw out the ash took a moment, to refill the bowl took another; the drawing on the stem killed a third—over and over again, and one of the terrible night hours had gone. And still the Chinese girl lay on her hard wood floor smoking mechanically, as in Europe a girl so placed might have crocheted, or a woman older but no less desperate have played patience, or tried to play.
When the first streaks of day came to sharpen the familiar outlines of the room and of its furnishings, and sharpen her sense of pain and peril, she threw the tiny silver pipe across the floor. It fell with a clatter on the arabesque of the hard inlaying.
This Kowloon house of Wu was a veritable treasure-house. Not an apartment in it (for the servants lived, and cooked even, outside) but held much that was priceless. And no other room had been plenished with such lavish tenderness as had this room of his one child.
The old bronze table that pedestalled and throned Kwanyin Ko had not its match in Europe, neither in palace nor museum, and Kwanyin Ko, herself looted from a palace six hundred years ago, was worth something fabulous: no dealer would have sold her for sixty thousand yen.
The lapis-lazuli peacock, so exquisitely carved that its feathers were fine and delicate as those of the big birds that strutted in the sunshine on the terrace beyond the lotus pond (and the emerald points that studded each feather thickly and the threads of gold and silver that just showed their threads of burnishing here and there were real) was worth its weight in rubies.