“The day grows warm. Go to the easement and tell me if the sun is on the tulip tree.” And as she moved away, without a sound he seized the great sword hanging beside the shrine and struck her once.
It was enough.
She scarcely moaned—just a soft quick sigh—and one smothered word.
Wu Li Chang caught the sigh but not the word. Surely Kwanyin Ko had granted something of Nang Ping’s prayer, and was merciful to Wu in that. For the Chinese girl had died speaking an English name.
He did not catch the word; but he saw something fall from her dress and roll towards the altar, and he rose and found it—a little scented bead.
And all night long, until the day broke over China, Wu sat motionless and alone in the room where he had played with her often in her baby days, taught her as a child, decorated her fresh young womanhood with gems and love: sat immovable and alone, while the heart’s blood of his only child clotted and crusted at his feet.
CHAPTER XXI
A Conference
LORD MELBOURNE once said that “nobody has ever done a very foolish thing except for some great principle.” Well, it would be difficult to find the great principle underlying most of the very foolish things the average European does in Asia. As a nation we British are very wise in our conduct there. As a race we deal honorably with the Oriental peoples—when once we’ve conquered them—and honorable conduct is a high wisdom in itself, and from it we reap a fine reward—the respect of the Eastern races. But as individuals we perpetrate a long series of crass blunders, of petty daily idiocies, whose sum total is tragedy and sometimes threatens international holocaust. And it is the Englishwoman, not the Englishman, who is the worst offender. Our security in Asia is built up on Oriental respect and liking, and Mrs. Montmorency-Jones can do more in a day to undermine it than a Sir Harry Parkes can do in a month to build it. Insolence is her method; fair dealing is his.
The average British man in Asia learns little enough, Heaven knows! of the natives among whom he lives; the average British woman learns nothing. She does not decline to know the natives; no, indeed—she simply ignores them. Woman rules in Asia—and especially in China—as (if a woman may be allowed to hint it) she does almost everywhere. And Englishwomen living in Calcutta or Shanghai do English interests grave injury, by courting, winning (and meriting) the dislike of Indian and Chinese women. The Englishwoman does it not by any overt act or series of acts, but by a consistent supercilious contemptuousness of attitude. I am a memsahib. You do not exist. The secret societies—the tongs and the brotherhoods—are responsible for much of our Asiatic difficulties; our own women are responsible for more. If the Boxers made Pekin run red with European blood, some women of the European Legations did even more to bring down the trouble and to foment it.