The empty boats arrived in due course at Kanchow, when the letter was faithfully delivered, and this being the last communication that would be received from her husband prior to his return, Mrs Chin resigned herself to many weeks of dreary loneliness.
Weeks lengthened into months, and the waiting woman began to feel anxious as to the well-being of her lord.
The stifling, burning summer came and went, and still there was neither sign nor tidings of the absent one.
Inquiries made of passing junks, to the crews of many of which Chin was well-known, ever elicited the invariable reply that nothing had been seen or heard of him.
Autumn and winter still brought no tidings, and the poor, saddened woman yielded to the conviction that some disaster had overtaken her husband and that she would see him no more.
Early Chinese marriages are almost invariably arranged by the parents, the young folks, even if old enough, having no voice in the matter. Later on, plurality of wives, though far from universal, is also quite common and of good repute.
The lower orders generally have only one wife, not being able to afford more, although as soon as a man commences to prosper and rise in the social scale his first thought is to procure by contract or by purchase an additional helpmeet, who, however, ranks far below the first or No. 1 wife. Similarly No. 2 ranks before No. 3, and so on. Four or five wives is a common number in well-to-do households, though one old friend of mine, since dead, had taken to himself sixteen.
Husbands regard the marriage tie as binding on them chiefly with regard to the material well-being of the family, whereas the honour of the family rests on the wife's steadfastness in maintaining sacred the nuptial vow, any detected laxity in this respect being visited on her with remorseless punishment both by her libidinous husband and by the whole of his clan. Widows seldom marry again, it being the duty and pride of a virtuous woman to remain faithful to the memory of her dead husband. Throughout the whole length and breadth of China memorial arches to widows who have been faithful to their troth till death are to be seen in almost every village.
Mrs Chin may have been, and probably was, attached to her husband with that fanatical single-mindedness which belongs to women of the East. She may have considered it her bounden duty only. Whether love or duty furnished the motive I cannot tell, but after making all possible inquiries to no purpose she determined to set out herself and search for traces of the missing one. The shop and her belongings were sold to provide money for the way, and the poor woman, forsaking all and carrying the child strapped to her shoulders, turned with a bitter heart from her former prosperous home to face the world on her well-nigh hopeless quest. Of her wanderings I could get no record, and she would probably, with Oriental inscrutability, have refused to even talk about them, but wherever else they may have led her, in the bitter winter of 1893 she was twenty miles up-river from Hukow at the open port of Kiukiang and alone, her child having perished by the way, begging food and prosecuting her inquiries. Chance led her to shelter for a night in the ruined but beautiful pagoda which stands high above the river on the cliff outside the city wall. To the old Buddhist hermit in possession she told her oft-repeated tale, only once again to receive the usual negative reply.
In the morning, however, as she was moving off on her daily trudge, the hermit appeared, and after the customary Buddhistic salutation, "O me tor foo,"[3] had been exchanged, he remarked that during the night it recurred to him that about eighteen moons had passed since he found the dead body of a man cast up naked on the opposite beach, and that following the rule of his order for acquiring merit he had carefully and reverently buried it.