Then she pulled off the seal and poured out the wine; a thick amber liquid, so heavy that it poured like thick cream. Its bouquet filled the room with a faint, far-off odor of lotus flowers.
“Shall we drink now, Robert, or shall we wait until dinner is served?”
“Let us drink now,” I said, curious to taste this Eastern wine, with which I was not familiar.
“Amen!” said my wife, softly.
Then she spoke, rapidly and softly under her breath, a few Chinese words, or so I judged them to be, and we drank the wine. There was not a great deal in the flagon, and we drank it all before dinner was served.
As I sat at dinner a strange comfortable feeling gradually came over me. Distrust, fear, and apprehension died out of my mind, and my heart was light. My wife and I laughed and talked together as we had done in the days of our courtship. I was a different man.
After dinner we went into the music-room and she sang for me. Sang in a sweet low voice strange weird old songs of ancient China. Of the dragon banner floating in the sun, and the watch fires on the hills. Of old Tartar loves and hates. Of wrongs that never die, but pass on from age to age, from life to life, from death to death—unhasting, unending until the debt be paid.
I sat listening, dozing in a hazy mental languor, with the feeling foreign to me of late, that all was well with the world. I was peacefully happy, and my wife’s sweet voice crooned on. Bedtime, the going up to our bedroom, and what followed after is only a blurred memory.
I awoke, or seemed to awake (now that I am in this madhouse I do not really know) far into the night.
I awoke with a feeling of suffocation, a sensation of impending dissolution. I could not move, I could not speak. I had a sense of something indescribably evil, loathsome, blood-curdling, that was hanging over me, threatening my very life.