“That was a glorious, a most sumptuous feast, babah,” said Resident van Gulpendam a few days later to his friend Lim Yang Bing. “My eyes! didn’t you make the galley smoke!”
“Yes, kandjeng toean,” replied the opium farmer, with a smile of intensely gratified vanity. “Yes; but it has cost me a pretty little sum of money, why, in champagne alone, I have spent more than two thousand guilders, and quite another twelve hundred in Rhenish wine. The fireworks I had direct from Canton, and they have cost me three thousand at the very least.”
As he dwelt upon these details, the man was in the seventh heaven of delight.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
DISGRACEFUL OPPOSITION. TWO OPIUM COMPANIES BY THE EARS.
Nearly the whole of Santjoemeh had been keeping festival. It was, indeed, no everyday occurrence for the son of the rich opium farmer of the district to marry the daughter of an equally wealthy disciple of Mercury. At the union of so many millions the Dutch public could not but evince the liveliest interest—and it had done so.
We said: nearly the whole of Santjoemeh; for there were some who had not thought it incumbent upon them to grace the banquet and the ball with their presence. Van Beneden, Grashuis, van Rheijn, and Grenits, had allowed their ethnological curiosity to prevail so far as to induce them to go and witness the nuptial ceremony; but nothing could persuade them to attend the subsequent festivities. They had, on the contrary, determined, while the European population was crowding within Lim Yang Bing’s stately mansion in the Gang Pinggir, and the natives were swarming all around it, to pass a particularly quiet evening together at the house of their friend van Nerekool.
When they entered they found the young judge still seated at his study bending over his work by the light of a reading-lamp.
“Hallo!” cried one, “still at it?”