Analyze what law of life you will, and the resultant conclusion will have something to testify of Chinese wiseness. The punishment of a crime never falls solely upon the direct miscreant. Blood and love must pay their debt. And the Chinese legal code which allows and decrees that kindred shall suffer (even to capital punishment) for a kinsman’s crime is less fantastic and less fatuous than it seems to Western minds.
Basil Gregory and Nang Ping had sinned. Wu and Florence Gregory were to be punished with them. And because Nature forgives man less than she forgives woman, the sharper, surer punishment was to fall on the father and the son.
Compared with one year in Wu’s life, the joy Nang Ping had stolen in the garden was but “as water unto wine.” And, suffering now to her sharp young utmost, she was suffering less than he.
When day came he rose, as Nang Ping did, and went to the window. Her room was on the one higher floor; his looked almost level with the garden—his own garden. For he too had his own private pleasance, taboo to all, unless expressly bidden there. And Wu rarely gave that permission, even to Nang Ping. That bit of garden was his outer solitude, and this room was his indoor privacy. It was here and there he kept alone.
No race prizes privacy more, more realizes its value, conserves and guards it with more dignity and skill, or with so much. A people of interminable clans, knit together and interdependent as is no other people, yet it is with the Chinese people, both Mongol and Tartar, that individuality has its fullest rights, its surest safety.
Towards noon he bathed, put on again his plain dark robes, went into the great hall and ate a little rice. He had work ahead, much work, and he intended to do it well. He had no more time for thought, nor need. His thinking was done. His years of selfishness were past. He no longer saw or felt “a divided duty.” He was China’s now—Wu the mandarin. Each hour should be full. He would serve assiduously and relentlessly, not with brooding thought, but with action piled on action.
At dusk he smote upon the gong hanging in the smaller audience hall, an apartment half of state and half of intimacy.
Nang Ping heard the deep notes reverberate through the house—she had been listening for the sound all day—and rose to her feet before they died away. She was standing ready at her door when her father’s message came, and she followed the servant, for herself relieved that her waiting was done, for herself feeling little else, but miserable for Wu. He had been tender to her always, and she had loved him with an absorbing love, until the Englishman had come to kiss her face, dislocate her life and change her soul.
She went in steadily and alone, bent in obeisance three times, and then stood before her father quietly, her hands folded meekly at her breast, her eyes patient and sorrowful, but not afraid.
And she was not afraid. Basil was dead by now—she made no doubt of that; the spoiler of Wu’s daughter could not have lived in Wu’s vengeance for a day. There was no more to fear for Basil. For him the worst had come, and was done. For herself fear had no place in her now. Her father would not torture her—that she knew. But she thought that she should scarcely have winced if he had. A slight, slip of a girl, slim as willow in her scant dull robe, she came of a race whose women had hung themselves more than once to honor a husband’s obsequies; and one—a queen—had burned to her death, lighting beside the imperial grave her own funeral pile of teak- and sandal-woods, oil-and-perfume drenched, Nang Ping was not afraid.