The mandarin Wu was said to be the most powerful man in China—at least in this part of China. Surely he could help them to find Basil. And he was a kind man—his girl had said so. And his near kinswoman—the aunt who had been on a visit at a Taoist nunnery or something when they were in Kowloon—had called and brought a garden full of flowers. That call should be returned, post-haste. Perhaps she could help, the woman who had left the flowers and the absurd red card; and the girl, the little girl who had given them tea, she could help, too, to persuade the all-powerful mandarin, if it needed much to persuade him; of course she could and she would; of course she would—she had had the kindest eyes and a soft, girlish mouth. How she, his mother, wished that Basil might have shown little Miss Wu just a little more attention—not too much, of course; that might have alarmed or even offended a Chinese girl—you never could tell about such oddities; but if only he’d shown a little less—yes—a good deal less cold indifference—indifference so cold that it had been almost a rudeness—and girls felt such things, and resented them too—even Chinese girls, probably. Of course, she, his mother, rejoiced in the niceness of her boy, and that he was not as other young Englishmen were in China—some of them—but manly Aryan self-respect was one thing, and an almost brutal display of racial superiority and masculine indifference was quite another. She wished indeed, that he had treated the only child of the great Wu less cavalierly, for his manner to the pretty Chinese creature had been very cavalier—Chinese, but a girl for all that. Still, his fault was in his favor, and it was no part of a mother’s office to forget that. Basil was innately and intrinsically—and she believed irradicately—nice. Thank God for it! He had been a little wild at school—the best boys always were (repeating to herself the foolish old threadbare paternal fallacy); a trifle lax at Oxford too—but, her son and always nice!
There was nothing cavalier about the way in which Ah Wong carried her fragrant burden through the hotel corridors. Her manner to the honorable flowers grown in the garden of the jade-like mandarin, and gathered by noble, jeweled hands, was conspicuously obsequious.
But when she had placed them in a cool, dark room, sacred to an adjunct of her lady’s toilet, and into which Robert Gregory never came, nor the hotel servants, her manner changed. She put them down abruptly, fastened the doors (there were two) feverishly and securely, and gestured angrily towards the gleaming golden basket of bloom, with a use of arms and fingers strangely identical with the motions with which the Neapolitan peasant averts the evil eye. Then she ran one matting-blind up, letting such breeze as there was blow across the flowers and out of the room through the window.
She even knelt down by the big basket, and with a guttural groan sniffed—not at the blossoms, but at the stems, and at the gilded wicker-work. But if there was some insidious poison hidden in the gift, to kill or disfigure whoever smelt or touched, Ah Wong could not detect it.
But how could she? Why should she hope to pit her wit against the wit of Wu?
Next, the woman got a sharp bamboo, and, kneeling down again, prodded cautiously but thoroughly among the leaves and stems and the depths of moss. She trembled as she worked, for she was prodding for some small poison-snake or asp, and was terribly afraid; but because another woman had treated her decently for a whole year, and kindly more than once, she worked on until convinced that nothing that crawled or stung was hidden in the glowing gift.
Then she unlocked one door and made several hurried journeys into the adjacent sleeping-room, carrying a small tub, a spirit-lamp, a box, a manicure set, a dozen sundries, and arranging them as best she could, first locking the dressing-room door from the bedroom side and hiding the key in her bosom.
The flowers seemed innocent enough, but Ah Wong would die before her English lady should touch them or inhale their breath.
Ah Wong was absurdly wrong—if devotion can ever be absurd; the flowers were exactly what they seemed. Wu Li Chang was no crude bungler. When he unsheathed his knife the knife would cut, but it would leave no trace of Wu.
Of the tragedy that had been enacted at Kowloon Ah Wong knew exactly nothing; but she suspected almost all, and the details of her suspicion were uncannily accurate. She was Chinese.