“I will send for her,” he said now, slowly. “I will give her into your keeping. At my command she will go.”
“No, Your Excellency, I have already sent word to her to prepare herself for the journey. Again you must forgive me. Time presses. It remains only to collect the paintings. You must have those, at the least. We start now in a very few moments. I have found here, a prisoner in your palace, the master of a junk that lies at the river bank, and have taken it upon myself to detain him further. He will convey us to Shanghai. It is now but a few hours before dawn. Hostile soldiers stand impatient at the outermost gate, eager to heap shame upon you and all that is yours. You must change your clothing—the dress of a servant would be best.”
He waited, standing very still.
“You will forgive indecision in a man of my years,” began the viceroy. After a moment he began again: “The world has turned upside down, Griggsby Doane.”
“You will come?”
The viceroy sighed. Trembling fingers reached out to gather the papers.
“I will come.” he said.
Adrift in unreality, fighting off from moment to moment the drowsy sense that these strange events were but a blur of dreams in which nothing could be true, nothing could matter, Rocky found himself at work in a dim room, taking down in great handfuls from shelves scrolls of silk wound on rods of ivory and putting them in lacquered boxes. Mr. Doane was there, and the servant, and a second servant of lower class, in ragged trousers and with his queue tied about his head. Still another Chinese appeared, shortly, in blue gown and sleeveless short jacket; an older man who looked, in the flickering faint light of the single lantern, curiously like the viceroy himself. The first servant disappeared and returned with the short poles of bamboo used everywhere in China in carrying burdens over the shoulder, and with cords and squares of heavy cotton cloth.
Every bit of woodwork that his hands touched in moving about, Rocky found to be intricately carved and gilded and inlaid with smooth lacquer. And dimly, crowded about the walls, he half saw, half sensed, innumerable vases, small and large, with rounding surfaces of cream-colored crackle and blood-red and blue-and-white and green which threw back the moving light like a softly changing kaleidoscope. And there were screens that gave out, from their profound shadows, the glint of gold.
They packed the boxes together, wrapped the large and heavy cubes in the squares of cloth and lashed them to hang from the bamboo poles. Four of them, then, Mr. Doane, Rocky himself and the servants, each balanced a pole over his shoulders and lifted the bulky cubes. The old man, who surely, now, was the viceroy, carried a European hand-bag. There were other parcels.... They made their way along a nearly dark corridor and out into the moonlight. Here, in a porch, stood four silent figures—Dixie Carmichael he distinguished first; then Hui Fei, wearing a short coat and women's trousers and a loose cloak. Her hair was parted and lay smoothly on her pretty head, glistening in the moonlight.... And the little princess was there, clinging to the hand of her sister and rubbing her eyes. They moved silently on, all together, following a path that wound among shrubbery, over an arching bridge to a gate.