Transcriber's Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE VERMILION PENCIL

THE VERMILION PENCIL
A ROMANCE OF CHINA

BY

HOMER LEA

NEW YORK

THE McCLURE COMPANY

MCMVIII

Copyright, 1908, by The McClure Company

Published, March, 1908

Copyright, 1906, by Homer Lea

All rights reserved

To

My Father and to Fred Phillips

This Book is Dedicated

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE TYPHOON

From the city of Yingching an old road runs northwestward to the mountains of Loh Fou—that indescribable mass of grandeur and mystery, in whose gorges unnumbered monasteries slumber, from whose peaks and cliffs temples gaze benignly down through the somnolent shadows upon the thoughtful progeny of Panku—the World-Chiseller. This slab-worn road, after it leaves the suburbs clustering around the East Gate of Yingching, follows right-obliquely across the rice-fields to the foot of the White Cloud Hills.

To the residents of Yingching these hills have always been a source of delight, and for uncounted ages multitudes have crowded at sunset the towers and pavilions of the city walls to watch their glens and slopes become veiled in a filtering of delicate shades—lilac, amethyst and violet, until, through a deep of purple, they vanish into night—a fluttering of gorgeous shadows.

Up over these hills the old road climbs laboriously until it disappears through a gorge of its own wearing. After crossing the southern slope it winds through deeply wooded ravines in whose alcoves Buddhist and Taoist monasteries sleep away the fretful ages of man, forming retreats for scholars, who come from Yingching, to escape in their brook-splashed groves the clatter and nagging of men.

This ancient highway struggles on through the White Cloud Hills, mutilated, uncertain; past the great monastery of Kingtai below the southern summits; past reproachful ruins in whose crumbling shadows solitary monks remain to propitiate the spirits of those that once dwelt in their cloisters; past the Silvery Rush Brook whose foam the banished statesman, Su Tungpa, compared, some centuries ago, to human greatness. Crawling, halting along its deep-worn way the old road gropes through gorges, over mountains, across torrents and under the splash of cataracts until it reaches the green, undulating plains of Tsang Tsing. Thence it goes straight through canebrakes, past villages and tombs, under orchards of lichee, past ruins hid beneath creepers and cities old and new.

Below the market-town of Chingkwo the ancient way crosses the Lung Mun River, and, entering the mountains of Loh Fou, is untangled into a hundred strand-like paths leading to monasteries that are hidden among the shadows of every gorge, and to temples hung on the shelves of cliffs. One path goes to the Monastery of Fa-Shau, in its deep pit of shrubs and lanwhui; another climbs up among boulders and cataracts to the Temple of Wa-Shau, thence three thousand feet higher to the Royal Monastery of Putwan, while yet another threading path goes on a thousand feet above where the Temple of the Moon clings to a mountain peak and whither companies of chanting bonzes go from the monasteries below to offer up prayers when the harvest moon is full.

The antiquity of this old road extends back beyond the records of men, but it is known that, centuries after its trace had been deeply scarred through the White Cloud Hills and across the plains of Tsang Tsing, it was made into a king’s highway and paved with granite blocks, eight feet long, two feet broad and often a foot in thickness. Yet the long bare tread has not only eroded them away, but hills have been worn down and cañons have been made by these century streams of men’s feet, treading to and fro and dwelling by it for so long that their comings and goings are unknown. For babes were born on this way and reared by its trace long before the she-wolf suckled Silvia’s twins on the old road by the Tiber’s bank. And like the road of Cenis, it has been traversed by armies of different ages; it has resounded with their triumphant march; it has echoed with the furtive footfall of their flight; the pageants of Emperors have passed over it—and long files of sighing beggars.

One September afternoon on this old road, past the ruins of Kingtai and near the southern summits of the White Cloud Hills, were seen neither porters nor farmers nor beggars nor the retinues of mandarins. The road was deserted other than by two men climbing slowly to the summit.

The sultry heat of the afternoon was choking, and at short intervals the men halted to gain their breath and wipe the perspiration from their faces. An oppressive, nervous lassitude weighed down the air; neither from bush nor tree, from hillside nor glen, was to be seen or heard a living creature.

The two men, approaching the top of the White Cloud Hills, were as silent as their surroundings, and, until they reached the summit, when the Valley of the Chu Kiang and the City of Yingching lay below them, they appeared as unconscious of each other’s presence as they were apparently oblivious to their surroundings. But when they came to the bare mountain top, the manner of the older man changed; anxiously he scanned the sky, the horizon, the fields and the river below them as if to find in the wide estuary of the Chu Kiang some cause for alarm.

Nothing could have been more peaceful or beautiful. The sky was cloudless, the horizon faintly hazy, while the slanting rays of the sun cast a golden sheen upon the great river and the rice-fields that extended from it to the hills. These fields, in different shades of green and brown, interlaced with canals, were like a great shimmering, silken quilt stitched together by threads of gold. Far eastward, on the left, they merged into banana plantations, orchards of olive and lichee; westward they ended at the edge of the eastern suburbs of Yingching.

The city, seen from the summit where the two men stood, appeared a vast expanse of reddish roofs, shaded here and there by groves of banians. A great old wall encircled the old city, but dimmed by distance, its broken merlons were not seen nor the ravages of war, nor the erosions of a thousand years, nor the veiling draperies of maiden-hair fern that hung from the chipped interstices. These huge, aged and lichen-warted walls loomed up black, impregnable. Outside of them the eastern suburbs could be seen extending from under the East Gate obliquely in direction of and along the bank of the river, while the western and southern suburbs were hidden by them. Above the city, on the heights where climbed the northern wall, rose the Great Sea-Guarding Tower. Just south of it, within the walls, was the wooded peak of Yueshan surrounded with the clustering courts and temples of the Goddess of Mercy—that many-handed Goddess, who is so great in pity and compassion, saving from misery and from woe, and who is ever listening to the cries that come up from the world. Below the Temples, near by, in the centre of the city, two pagodas pierce the sky, one round and tapering, the other octagonal. Geomancers squinting up at them, say that this city is like a junk; that these two pagodas are her masts and the broad, five-storied tower on the north wall her stern sheets, and that the city is thus sailing southward, toward the island of Honan, which lies on the other side of the river, or beyond where rice-fields shimmer and the sky-line is serrated by low, ragged hills.

Here and there over the estuary of the Chu Kiang in the midst of their paddy-fields and orchards, lay walled towns and villages, half hidden under banians, while on the distant river bank, directly opposite the two men, the Lob pagodas point skyward, like great fingers, and on their left the pagodas of Wampoa and the Golden Lotus pierce the sky.

It was the peace, the dumb, inanimate peace of this scene that alarmed the older man. The river, usually teeming with a vast number and diversity of craft, was deserted other than now and then when a boat crept furtively along its southern bank. The fields were without men or oxen; the city and all the tree-veiled villages, which were scattered about among the fields, were silent, and a thin blue haze hung motionless over them.

For some time the two men looked down upon the delightful yet ominous panorama spread out beneath them; the older man troubled and uneasy, but the youth affected in no way, neither by the beauty nor the dumbness of it.

When they began to descend the elder left the old road sloping gradually along the hills toward the city, and led the way down by a steep path that, on reaching the level, meandered along the paddy banks in the direction of the river. But before they came to the river’s high embankment the sun had set, and as they turned westward along the top of the bank the older man suddenly stopped. Directly over the part of the horizon where the sun had disappeared hung a great halo, the under part of which gleamed red, the top was shrouded in black while between scintillated iridescent colours; below the black lay a cold mottled grey and above the red glowed a pink like the cheek of a young girl.

For some moments these colours hung distinctly over the misty horizon then commingled—the corpse-grey with the cheek of the maiden—and over all, the pall of black. The halo became ashen; wavered—vanished.

As the youth started to go the older man placed a detaining hand on his shoulder and pointed toward the sky-line where but a moment before the halo had hung.

Presently from where the sun had sunk were seen spreading enormous rays of light. Upward they unfolded, stretching finger-like, clear across the sky until they dipped their tips below the eastern horizon. At first these great fingers shone red as though dyed with blood, then vermilion, changing gradually through all the gold shades to an orange-saffron. When the finger-rays burned red, the intervening spaces were violet; when saffron, the sky was a pale green.

The youth watched dreamily these fingers tremble, coruscate, and change.

“It is God’s benediction,” he murmured.

“Or the Devil’s,” growled the other.

The two men waited until the great crepuscular rays, changing every instant their gorgeous colourings, had disappeared, leaving a red diffused light blotting the western sky, while a faint spectral mist crept along the eastern horizon. Troubled, the older man watched this whitish haze creeping along until it covered the eastern sky, then he hastened toward the city and the youth followed meditatively after him.

When they reached the edge of the suburbs they found all the field workers, women and oxen passively huddled about their mud-walled dwellings. Boatmen had drawn up their sampans and fishing craft high upon the bank. And in the doorways frightened faces peered uneasily down the river while everywhere rustled that restlessness, a fretfulness that is known by its silence. The children alone made their accustomed noises. Nothing could disconcert them. They played tag with Death and cried:

“You are it!”

As the two men entered the suburbs these children were in the midst of that bubbling, which marks the end of a day’s play. They were having unusual sport.

Along the coast of Southern China, among the many warnings that foretell the iron whirlwind’s approach none is more peculiar than the actions of dragon-flies, which seem to seek the companionship of men. They swarm into villages, fasten themselves on every projection, even lighting on the heads and shoulders of the inhabitants. Children, regardless of what they portend, seize upon them, and tying strings to their long abdomens, turn them loose amid laughter and cries. It was this easy conquest of the myriad-eyed monsters that aroused their wild mirth as the men approached.

The mothers of these gamins were burning incense-sticks in stone basins beside their doorways, and sometimes strips of red paper on which were written prayers. In the sampans and fishing boats, women were also making propitiatory offerings—the boat’s prow serving as an altar. In one place on the river bank, a party of old leathery boatwomen chattered garrulously over a stone slab on which were placed a row of bowls containing rice, fowls, sweets and wine. Near by stood a large paper boat and a basket of miniature boats. One of these old women took two pieces of wood shaped like an half pear and engraved with a number of characters. These she tossed into the air so that they fell before the stone slab. Five times were the symbols cast, then the old women launched the bright-hued paper-boat and set fire to the basket of small boats. The smoke ascended in a straight, unwavering column.

Standing by the water’s edge, the older man continued to look intently down the river; neither noticing the children at play nor the prayers ascending from the thresholds, nor the offerings of the boatwomen to the gods of the winds and waters.

Suddenly a breathless expectancy fell upon those that were waiting and upon those that were sending their prayers heavenward in fragrant smoke.

Far away, somewhere to the east and south, came a gentle murmur. At this sound some crowded into their houses; others came forth. Only the children did not heed this murmur, which at times became a moan to cease a sigh. The people on the water front and along the eastern rim of the suburbs peered over the rice-fields toward Lung Mun and down the river to where it broadened out into a vast expanse of yellow waters. What they saw filled them with terror.

Across the eastern horizon opened an enormous crack. Many looked into it for an instant then ran and hid themselves in their hovels while those that remained shuddered. This abyss into which they looked commenced several degrees above the horizon; the bottom black, the top ashen; the river, bearing on its mighty current the boatwomen’s fragile offering, disappeared into it.

The crack widened. Awestricken, the people crowded together on the suburb’s edge and water front to watch it open.

The thin blue stems of sandalwood smoke, ascending from each doorway shrine, wavered.

The sky became overcast.

Suddenly the crowd swayed: backward, forward, backward, then scrambling, vanished—a drop of rain had fallen.

For a moment there was twilight, which was ghastly—then night, which was impenetrable.

A gust blew in from the sea and it was like a blast from a furnace. This sirocco that came from the ocean was the first breath of the typhoon.

The elder seizing his companion by the arm pulled him along the narrow streets toward the city. In the blackness they could see nothing but the dying embers of sandalwood dully glowing in spectral clusters by each threshold. These red, weird eyes peering out into the darkness blinked and grinned joyously. They were friendly with the hot wind and the harder it blew and the more they winked the more they coaxed the two men along the tunnel-like streets.

Suddenly the wind ceased and rain began to fall slowly in great drops. One by one the lights of the doorways went out. By their glow it had been possible to distinguish the alignment of the houses, but now what lay before them was cavernous. They were in a black labyrinth of winding streets: some leading into the river, while in the floors of others were wells; some extended a few feet, then ended. Familiar as the older man was with these suburbs, he stumbled along uncertain; the youth lagged. Both were stifling, for the scorching wind had started again with increasing severity, causing them to cover their faces with their silken sleeves.

There are winds that freeze, winds that burn, winds that tear and cut, but this wind that precedes the typhoon, chokes. It fills a man’s nostrils with so much burning air that he gasps for breath; he staggers, sometimes blood oozes from the eyes and ears, he strikes at the wind, claws the air, starts to run, stumbles and falls to the earth. Skeletons have been found with skulls clasped round in bony arms—strangled by this breath of the iron whirlwind.

The older man, aroused to the danger, stopped, and pounding on a door begged for admittance. There was no answer, and they crouched together on the threshold.

Presently the wind began to hesitate, to ebb, then it became quiet. But as they hurried along the black street a sound like a cough fell upon their ears, distant, piteous, wind-torn. They listened, and what they heard was terrible—the muttering of a typhoon.

Perhaps if the howl of a hell were known, the muttering of the typhoon, though dulled by distance, might be compared to it. As the Great Wind approaches this muttering grows louder and louder until it becomes a gigantic gibber; when at hand, the heavens are filled with multitudinous screams, howls, laughter, moans, and shrieks—a stir of sounds that is frightful.

The outer whirlwind now seized the men. Sometimes they were picked up by its clutching fingers and hurled forward; again they tried to move and could not; reaching out to see what opposed them they felt nothing; turning a corner they were often thrown against a wall and glued there as flies.

They had made but a short way in their struggle when the blackness began to lighten and become livid. Everywhere shone a ghastly glimmer, which was more impenetrable than the black night. With this light the wind and rain increased in violence.

Suddenly out of the livid blackness a flame darted: for a moment there was silent hesitancy, then the heavens burst into a conflagration. The typhoon was upon them. Floods now fell from burning clouds and tongues of fire spat out torrents.

In time, the thick mud walls of the surrounding houses began to collapse, undermined by the water tearing along the narrow streets. Sometimes a wall fell outward and the lightning showed terrified families crouching upon the floor; when it flared again there was often only a pile of brick, a heap of shattered tiles.

Thus they were driven from the shelter of one doorway to another and as the houses began to fall more frequently, they were kept in the middle of the streets breasting the storm with that strength remained to them.

The older man, dragging the youth along by the arm, struggled in the direction of the great city wall under whose sheltering corners they could alone find safety. But to get out of this suburban labyrinth was difficult, doubtful, since its windings were becoming more choked and impassable by the debris of falling houses. Sometimes they made their way forward only to find the street blocked and themselves exposed to the full swish of the storm. They retreated, but eventually their rear was also choked with houses that had fallen after they had passed and which formed just such a barricade as had turned them back. Hemmed in with houses falling first on one side, then on the other, they stumbled backward and forward in a continually narrowing space. At any moment an overhanging wall might crash into the street and then it would be empty.

No one can hope to wholly describe a typhoon, that great wind, which is to the cyclone of the American plains what the tornado is to a little whirlwind adrift down a dusty road. Slaughter as well as destruction marks its path, for the typhoon is made up of flames and floods as it is of winds, and what escapes death or ruin from its cyclonic breath is devoured by its fires or swept away by its torrents. No one hopes in a typhoon, and men flee but a little way from it.

Nothing is more frightful than this iron whirlwind, nothing more wonderful. It has the cunning brutality of the inanimate and its treachery; the bloodthirstiness of some gigantic beast, the grandeur of God. It is horrible, yet sublime.

This monster of nature is born somewhere out of the huge womb of the South Pacific, upon whose bosom it strays aimlessly and recklessly about, romping, wrestling, growing, until it gets into a temper and buffets its mother, the sea. Becoming cyclopean, it spits at heaven—petulant it departs.

Like a loosened monster it allows itself every liberty, and wanders with the greatest ease in any path. It sucks up the sea and snatches lightning from the clouds; it fills its belly with floods and its breast with fire. Headlong it falls upon every obstacle; ships become as dust motes in its breath. It devours towns and babies with the same ease, the same glee. It laughs and screeches simultaneously. It is full of joy and rage at the same time and its joy is the more terrible. Sometimes it gets into traps and difficulties from which it can scarcely extricate itself; then it becomes frantic, shrieks, lingers and mutilates.

But in spite of all this gyratory brutality, this iron-toothed monarch of all winds cannot ravage far from the sea, though in its blind rage it never hesitates. Falling upon the coast it hurls ships into rice fields or upon hillsides; the sea front it covers with wrecks; fishing fleets are crunched into splinters and towns are strewn about as picked bones.

So the two struggled feebly against this monster backward and forward in the midst of falling houses, until finally, bruised and bleeding, they tottered into an open court surrounded by high massive walls. Near the centre of the court stood a low crucifix, a tub, and two black stones. Against the windward wall was built an open shed, and into this beyond the crucifix they tottered and lay exhausted, while the typhoon raged and destroyed around them. The lightning burned steadily and the noises, which once muttered and cried about them, were lost in the terrifying grind of the iron wind; a wind that picked up great logs like rice straws, and sometimes sent rice straws with such force that they pierced wood as steel needles—a wind that in its antics screamed, and in its butchery laughed.

The two men under the shed lay still, apparently oblivious to the storm wrack until the older man rose to his knees and began to feel around for his companion. Beside him, lit by the lurid glare from without, were a number of headless corpses, and among these lay the youth.

“Where are we?” he asked meditatively when the older man had aroused him.

“In the Execution Grounds.”

“What are these?”

“Corpses.”

“Ah! their souls may now be with God.”

“Or in Hell.”

The storm was abating; the moans and cries from the heavens ceased; the lightning grew less violent. Suddenly all became an absolute calm and the men crept out from among the corpses under the shed.

A faint, uncertain light glimmered in the darkness above them; enormous black masses of clouds could be seen rolling close to the earth, but directly overhead was a circle of clear sky, darkly blue, and almost in its very centre shone a star of marvellous brilliancy. The youth gazed up at it in gratitude.

“It is the Eye of God.”

The elder also regarded the star, but said nothing.

“Let us go,” said the youth, “the storm has ended.”

“Not while the Eye of God is in the heavens.”

For some time they stood still and silent, watching the low black clouds roll around the clear circle of sky.

“What is that?” asked the youth thoughtfully, pointing to the low crucifix, the tub and the black stones showing dimly under the pale light that came from the Eye of God overhead.

“Lingchee,” growled the older man; “on that an adulteress salutes the world and passes on.”

For a long time both looked meditatively yet intently at the low crucifix, the tub and the black stones beside it.

“They tie her naked upon it,” growled the elder, more to himself than to the youth, “and then cut her into pieces. The first three cuts are called the strokes of mercy, and are no doubt dedicated to the many-handed goddess. The first stroke the executioner draws his knife across the brow and a fold of skin drops over the eyes, which is merciful, for it shuts out the sneering faces around her.”

The elder, looking up, saw that the Eye of God no longer shone in the heavens. Above and around them fell unfathomable darkness.

“Then the ears are cut off, which is also merciful, for jeers are no longer heard.”

A wolfish giggle came from the abyss about them; a drop of rain fell and their wet garments flapped heavily.

“Her tongue is cut out next,” continued the growl in the darkness, “and this is the crowning stroke of mercy, for it stops her piteous cries.”

Again came an interrupting roar, low and sullen. The typhoon was near at hand but the older man raised his voice above the distant roar.

“Then they cut off her breast, where——”

Gnashing, grinding, the iron-toothed wind fell again upon the hapless suburbs, revolving in the opposite direction. It is what sailors call the return storm, when its cyclonic revolutions are reversed and the typhoon returns to complete its devastation. Going, the typhoon is a monster; returning, it is in addition, a maniac. What it has failed to destroy, it returns to mangle. The terrible winds now came from the northwest through the open side of the court, and the two men were no longer protected. The shed that had sheltered them was shattered by the first returning blast. Helpless and bleeding they were hurled together with the headless corpses into a corner of the court, making altogether a hideous pile but wherein the cadavers protected them from the debris that was hurled into the corner. It often happens that in these storms the dead succour the living.

The typhoon continued to shriek and to laugh triumphantly in the black and fiery abyss overhead. It was as if hell had been turned upside down and out of its vast chasm its green fires were being poured and all those bruised noises that are said to resound there.

The typhoon was making its departure, which is not less terrible than its coming. Screaming, hovering and hastening it makes its retreat; mangling what it has heretofore destroyed. In time it weakens and begins to linger, then exhausted it hesitates, stops, and whispers. Frenzied, it again wanders uncontrollably about; revolving always in the same circle and moving whimsically hither and thither until its strength is gradually expended. Quivering, shuddering, whimpering, it at last disappears again into the mother sea—a prodigal returned.

BOOK I. A WOMAN

CHAPTER ONE
IN THE VALLEY OF THE FOUNTAIN

Just south of where the Yangtse River empties into the ocean lies the Province of the Winding Stream—venerable and beautiful, with a history written back almost to that long hour when the world was yet supposed to be unmade by the hand of God—a nebulous vapour adrift in the night.

This province is one vast park of alternating hills and valleys, where peaks, cascades, and woodlands intervene in a fascinating confusion; where walled cities and temples rise majestically on all sides; where canals and watercourses, alive with boats, form a silvery network among fragrant hills and tree-hid hamlets, making it altogether just such a land as the imagination conceives belonging alone to the sunlit East.

This province is like an endless garden; whereever the eye reaches is seen not only a luxuriant vegetation but one that has been tended and reared by man for his uses. Patches of pink orchard blossoms alternate with grey thickets of mulberry; clumps of feathery bamboo flutter as plumes by the edges of rice fields; plane trees with their snowy blossoms alternate with orchards of pumelo, while along the lower hills, forming wide and densely shaded tracts, spread groves of silvery olive and lichee with delicate pink leaves and strawberry-like fruit.

Throughout all of these hills and orchards wind rivers, brooks, and canals, over-spanned at short intervals by high curved bridges of stone. Under their arches innumerable boats glide from dawn until night. In some places the country is covered with tea plantations, and from each willow-whipped cottage rises the fragrant breath of burning tea. Here and there on hills thick with cypress and pine are seen the carved gleaming roofs of temples, while on the paths leading to them every crag and turn has its miniature pagodas and grottoes. Again, the hills in many places are covered with groves of oil-bearing camelias, whose graceful shape and dark green foliage add an indescribable charm to the landscape.

But Che Kiang is not more famous for the charm of its countryside than it is for the beauty of the women, who dwell among its hills and valleys, working in the midst of their tea shrubs, rearing cocoons, spinning silk; and are no more thought of than the azaleas that brighten the hillsides or the purple lanwhui that scatters its perfume on the bosom of the careless passing winds. In the Tien Mu Mountains, toward the southwestern part of the province, these women have a peculiar hauteur and independence of their own, a vivacity and laughter, which is found nowhere else in China.

It was among these mountains and forests of the Tien Mu Shan that that tireless spider, Fate, set to weaving one of its innumerable webs of invisible strands: a net fragile yet terrible. Unseen or half seen, a spirit-glint in the azure heavens, it is a barrier through which and from which the little man-fly never breaks.

So the spider webbed in the Valley of the Fountain, and before this net is finally torn and shattered by the bluster of Time there shall be found in it those that did not know of its weaving.

One spring morning, probably about the same hour when a melancholy Breton and an unknown priest were setting out from the Mission of Yingching upon their errands of mercy, a mandarin’s retinue moved slowly along the Tien Mu Mountains and before the night mists had entirely cleared away the path brought them to the upper heights of a small glade, known as the Valley of the Fountain. Around this vale the rugged, broken mountains were clothed in trees of various sorts. The bright golden leaves of the camphor and amber mingled with the purple foliage of the tallow, while over these rose the deep soft green of pine and arbor vitae.

As the sun rose and sent its broadening beams down into the purple Valley of the Fountain the lower mountain sides became a gorgeous mass of red and yellow azaleas; on every hill-bank whereever the eye could reach spread a flower mantle of dazzling brightness. From the valley came the fragrance of tea; from the ravines, the breath of lilies and lanwhui.

As the retinue moved slowly down the tortuous path there rose from a thicket of tea shrubs on a round slope to the right an outburst of song not unlike that of the mocking bird in its sweet intensity and freedom but vibrant with the melody of human passion. And, as this wild song rose with supreme impulse and passion above the tea thicket, the mandarin’s retinue stopped.

Never was an auditorium more suitable to song than this amphitheatre of flower-packed hills that surrounded the Valley of the Fountain. The sun’s rays were just stealing through a purple haze and turning the dew, which lay heavy upon the flowers into myriads of opals; the murmur of ravine-hidden cascades, the chorus of bird-song in the still-aired morning, all seemed but part of the song that rose from the tea thicket. This tempestuous outburst made the hills ring with its echoes, calling, scorning, pleading, threatening; now bubbling like the wood-warbler with cadences of silvery notes; now rising, exultant as the night-lark, to the ear of heaven; triumphant, declamatory, beseeching, full of defiance, of mockery and laughter until at last it ceased, dying away among the neighbouring gorges, as soft as a kiss.

“What was that?” demanded the mandarin excitedly, putting his head out of the sedan.

“That is Ma Shue’s daughter,” said several voices at once, “the girl with a tongue of a hundred spirits.”

“On with you and stop your chattering,” cried the mandarin.

Ma Shue, the old farmer of the Valley, stood watching from the door of his rice-thatched cottage the procession winding down the mountain path.

“Where is she?” demanded the mandarin, stepping hastily from his chair.

“How greatly honoured is my poor and miserable abode,” murmured the old farmer, bowing repeatedly.

“Where is she?” demanded the mandarin again, as he peeped about the corners of the cottage and through the open door.

“I am ashamed to set before your honourable self the wretched food we live upon,” apologised the old man as he followed at the heels of the mandarin.

“Go get her,” commanded the mandarin impatiently as he peered into the cottage.

“Yes, yes,” murmured the farmer hastily, “but for the poor our food is not sufficient; how can it be tasted by——”

“What are you talking about, old coxcomb? Have you not a daughter?”

“Alas, Great Sir, it is true, I have been unfortunate——”

“Go get her at once, at once,” interrupted the mandarin excitedly.

“How can I, how can I?” asked the old man, bowing with trepidation.

“How can you?” mocked the mandarin scornfully. “How can you? Because I ordered it. I, Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.” And Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, scowling with dignity, stepped back and folded his hands majestically on his stomach.

When the farmer returned he bowed mutely before the mandarin.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I told her; yes, yes,” cried Ma Shue, “she is coming.”

“When?”

“She said,” and the old farmer looked uneasily at the feet of the mandarin, “she said——”

“Well?”

“When she got ready——”

It was a long time before a soft patter was heard in an adjoining room whence came low, amused laughter; then a light flutter of garments, and the tea-farmer’s daughter entered. Casting a hasty glance at the mandarin she turned her back on him with a haughty but almost imperceptible toss of her head.

For some moments the mandarin looked at her in astonishment, yet with intense satisfaction.

“Maid.”

“Man.”

The mandarin started, his eyes opened to the utmost of their narrow width and he glared at the old man shivering in his chair.

“Did I not hear you singing this morning?” he demanded severely.

“Your knowledge should be greater than mine,” she replied coldly.

“Were you singing?”

“I am always singing.”

“Were you not in a tea-thicket?”

“I should be at my work now.”

“Then it is settled. I heard you singing. You see I am quick in my judgment as well as sagacious. Will you sing for me?”

“Sing for you?” she repeated in soft, amazed tones. “Sing for you? Why?”

“I am Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank——”

“I never sing for mandarins,” she interrupted decisively.

“What?”

“My song,” she replied in cold, careless tones, “is for the birds and tea-pickers of the Valley, but not for wolves or tigers of the Yamen.”

The mandarin became rigid; the old father’s pipe fell from his hand and the daughter, casting a fleeting glance at him continued, her voice becoming suddenly gentle and humble:

“But your coming down into our valley is as the turning of raindrops into pearls.”

The mandarin’s countenance beamed with pleasure.

“By my Fifth Button,” he exclaimed, “I believe you could be taught something.”

“I am afraid it is impossible,” she murmured contritely.

“Never! You allow these rustics——” and Ho Ling glared his challenge around the room.

“Yes,” she continued meditatively as she turned her head slightly toward him, “a shrub may appear lofty in the desert and a tea-plant among the tea-plants is not small but,” she looked at him out of the corner of her eye, “I am only a fragile weed in the shadow of the luxuriant pine.”

“Yes, it is true,” he replied, settling back in his chair with supreme satisfaction. “It is true. I am Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.”

The farmer’s daughter with unconscious coquettishness turned her head slightly toward him so the rose brown of her cheek and her full lustrous eye were visible.

Suddenly, in the midst of the mandarin’s self-contemplation, a chime of laughter pealed through the room. Tossing her head, the child of the Tien Mu Mountains glanced roguishly at the astounded mandarin and darted laughing through the doorway. Again and again came the birdlike notes, until in the distance they ceased in a silvery echo.

“Call her!” shouted the mandarin, rushing to the door.

The old man bowed excitedly.

“Call her! Get her!” cried the mandarin, turning fiercely on the old farmer.

“What can I do?” he mumbled pathetically. “She is gone. You do not understand, she moves as the kin deer, she is as wild as the pheasant.”

The mandarin returned to the doorway and remained for a long time in moody silence. Presently he turned to the farmer.

“Let it be known that Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, will depart.”

And the old man skipped gleefully from the room.

CHAPTER TWO
THE VICEROY

Hangchau, the capital of Che Kiang, rests haughtily upon its hills in full view of the ocean. Its granite walls, more than thirty miles in circumference, higher than a four-storied building and wide enough on top for four vehicles to drive abreast, extend north from the river Tsien toward a vast plain that stretches out an unending garden threaded with a thousand strands of silvery waterways. South of the city along the blue waters of the bay is another mighty garden spotted with clumps of trees, covered with luxuriant crops and villages nestling in groves of feathery bamboo; westward is the lake of Si Hu, and beyond, a wide amphitheatre of wooded hills and mountains.

Hangchau, like Che Kiang, has an antiquity of its own and though it stands to-day one of the world’s great cities, so it has stood for innumerable ages, more or less, in the manner Marco Polo saw it in the thirteenth century, “pre-eminent to all other cities in the world in point of grandeur and beauty as well as from its abundant delights.”

In that uncertain antique age when Babylon rested securely within its hundred-mile wall pierced by eighty brazen gates; when the massive town of Troy frowned down upon the troubled waters of the Xanthus, and Darius peered anxiously from Persepolis across the plains of Merdueth, even then was Hangchau a city. And now while Babylon is but a mud-mound on the willow-fringed banks of the Euphrates, Troy a myth, and jackals come forth when the moon is high to howl where once kings commanded—yet Hangchau lives, thrives, and is great.

Another wonder of Hangchau other than its antiquity and greatness is the Lake of Si Hu, a lake transparent as a diamond, its brilliant surface gleaming and fluttering amongst dark green hills for many miles in irregular circuit. On the north, west, and southwest rise picturesque mountains whose slopes along the lake’s edge are laid out in groves and gardens, beautiful though fantastic; having here and there temples, palaces and pagodas, while numbers of fanciful stone bridges are thrown across the arms that reach out among the hills. About over the waters great numbers of barges gaily decorated, sail to and fro, the passengers dining, smoking and enjoying the breezes which blow down from the higher mountains, as well as the gay scenes, the whimsical gardens, palaces, pagodas, and overhanging groves.

This lake, so like a jewel in its brilliancy, is studded with innumerable islands adorned with palaces and temples and on one of the larger islands, near the north shore, is a viceregal palace used as a suburban dwelling by the Viceroy of Chukiang.

One spring afternoon, when the pink petals lay strewn about, the Viceroy sat in the sun on a marble terrace thoughtfully munching his melon seeds, occasionally throwing one to the goldfish and turtles that crowded toward the terrace bank, snuffling, flopping but impatient to be fed. On a high ebony table beside his pipe and tea bowl lay a package of papers and at intervals the Viceroy re-perused some part of their contents, then placidly resumed his melon seeds, gazing over the lake to the hills bright in their spring foliage, to the slopes pink with blossoms, to the lake’s edge, fringed with the feathery bamboo. The shadow of a wutung tree slowly creeping across the terrace passed over the table and, hiding his bare grey head from the warm rays of the spring sun, aroused him from his meditation; again he looked over the papers then raised his hand.

In a moment Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, came from an adjoining pavilion and bowed before him.

“I have read these reports,” said the Viceroy gruffly, decisively tapping the package of papers. “They are guilty, and to-morrow shall die.”

The mandarin bowed.

“Justice,” continued the Viceroy, “is an excellent thing—when not delayed; to put off the punishment of the guilty is to destroy the dignity of the state—a procrastinating Justice is the buffoon of the populace. Do you understand?” And squinting his eyes, the Viceroy surveyed inquisitively the mandarin, who bowed repeatedly, uneasily.

“You were one day late.”

The mandarin continued bowing.

“Well!” demanded the Viceroy, impatiently tapping the papers that were spread upon his knees.

“I stopped——”

“Yes?” interrupted the Viceroy.

“I could not get——”

“Eh?”

The mandarin bowed fervidly.

“Where did you stop?”

“In the Heavenly Mountains,” he answered furtively.

“In the mountains?”

The Viceroy uttered these three words weighingly.

“That is—in a little valley—a very little valley.”

“Ah,” and for a moment the Viceroy looked at him in silence. “What valley?”

The mandarin became sallow. “My poor memory——”

“I will call your escort.”

“When I think of it,” put in the mandarin hastily and with trepidation, “the name comes to me—it is the Valley of a Fountain.”

“Why?”

“Great Sir,” answered the mandarin with an excited burst of confidence, “I am to marry the daughter of this valley.”

“Ah?” A sympathetic inquisitiveness was in the Viceroy’s voice. “I suppose you will now want a leave of absence?”

The mandarin’s face became suffused with joy. Nothing could have prevented him from bowing repeatedly.

“Well,” commanded the Viceroy impatiently, “this only daughter, is she well dowered?”

“Great Sir, I do not know; I do not care!” he cried excitedly.

“What!” demanded the Viceroy, peering at him in amazement.

“O Great Sir, if you could but see her you would understand that she is richer than wealth itself; it you could but hear her you would understand how my desires are as spring freshets surging against Time’s wintry constraint——”

“Ah?” The Viceroy uttered this with a great depth of feeling.

“Yes, yes,” went on the mandarin hurriedly, never lifting his eyes from the floor, “Fate, the Judge, decreed it, and Fate, the Jailor, pulled me into it. As I was passing along a mountain path, suddenly from out of the tea-shrubs came sweeter music than the song of the phœnix—the Song of Fate. My escort stopped and I was unable to make them amble onward. I can now understand how the flute of Liang Kiang stole away the courage of eight thousand men. My escort stood breathless while in vain I blustered and threatened. I was obliged to send a horseman to find out the source of the song and I found the phœnix-singer to be a girl living in the valley. My escort became mutinous, then like a gleam of sunlight shafted through a black rebellious storm flashed the thought of gain for Your Excellency—a musician rarer than any in the Middle Kingdom—and it determined me to go down in the glade.

“When the girl’s father learned that I was Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank, he told me confidentially—confidentially, that is the way it was—that his daughter lingered in the outer room tearful to see the hem of my robe. So I admitted her thinking that I might be of great service to Your Excellency. When she bowed down before me she trembled with delight——”

“What was her appearance?” demanded the Viceroy, interrupting the mandarin’s breathless monologue.

“O Great Sir, if I had all the wisdom of nine times the Nine Classics I could not describe her. She is not beautiful in the manner of the women of Hangchau. Her big eyes are round like those of oxen, but charged with most unoxen fires. She does not dainty along with golden lilied feet as the women here, but ankled as the kin deer and winged as the wild pheasant, she derides the very rocks and mountains. Her cheeks of almond flower the jealous sun has lacquered over with ruddy gold and her pouting lips are so pent full of ruby blood that they would turn the honestest man into a thief if he could but perform the subtle theft of gaining them.

“And yet, Great Sir, I do not know whether you would have called her beautiful or not before I conquered her, for she had somewhat of the devil in her.”

“You conquered her?” demanded the Viceroy, eying him doubtfully.

“Yes,” replied the mandarin, scowling proudly into the tree tops. “I conquered her, but not more by my personality than by stratagem for, as Your Excellency well knows, I am not unskilled in that contentious art.”

“So you captured her?” queried the Viceroy again, somewhat sarcastically.

“Yes, she came haughtily into my presence——”

“And kissed the hem of your robe?” interrupted the Viceroy.

“Exactly, exactly, a figure of speech; I have renamed her humility—haughtiness. But in continuation, when she beheld me and heard me speak in fluent familiarity the wisdom of the ancients, her rebellious, warring heart sent at once through every dainty vein its bold scouts that for themselves did redly dare the combat. Her eyes became a perfect arsenal and the arched bow of her lips shot from some inexhaustible quiver shafts divinely smeared with a poppy that would lull into dreams the most valorously inclined defence.

“Ah, it would have done Your Excellency a world of good if you could but have seen how her eyes, her lips, and even the shy little dimples, which hid in her cheeks and chin, contended as jealous allies, each first to make a breach in the hitherto impregnable fortress of my heart.

“But like a wise general, I simulated dismay, abandoned my outer works, and retreated to the keep. Straightway the jealous allies scaled the walls. I opened the inner gates and they, surcharged and petulant with fancied victory, rushed in. There was a momentary struggle, then she yielded, and now remains a willing captive in the very donjon of my heart.”

For some time the Viceroy eyed the mandarin in a manner unappreciative and in no way to his liking.

“Ho Ling!”

The mandarin started violently.

“You are still an ass.”

CHAPTER THREE
THE WIFE

As Destiny fated it, the Viceroy himself married, that summer, the daughter of the tea-farmer and not Ho Ling, Mandarin of the Fifth Rank.

More than a year had passed since the Viceroy had married this farmer’s daughter from the Valley of the Fountain, which extraordinary event had been duly commented upon by the gentry of Hangchau and had been forgotten. But with the Viceroy it was different. Though many months had mysteriously vanished he was still an uneasy bridegroom unable in any degree to resume that tranquil state he had enjoyed years before.

“Tranquillity of the spirits,” said a guest one day, “is the culmination of a scholar’s life; it is the essence of propriety; the golden mean between the heart and the mind.”

“Undoubtedly, undoubtedly,” replied the Viceroy gruffly, “but there is no happiness in it.”

So the Viceroy, while by no means tranquil, was happy. And though a year had rushed hastily away, he still paced restlessly back and forth before a richly carved screen; waiting, frowning, biting his under lip.

Suddenly stopping in his impatient pacing, he clapped his hands and an old woman timidly entered.

“Is she coming?” he demanded in a voice of mingled anxiety and doubt.

“Great Sir, she will be here in just——”

“Get out! I will not tolerate this any longer; not another——”

A soft, tinkling laugh from behind the screen caused him to turn, startled, uneasy; a gentle rustle and the tea-farmer’s daughter entered.

The deer-like freedom of her home was altered; she came slowly into the room with graceful but restrained hauteur. Her rich, brown skin was now white as an almond petal; in her cheeks wavered a transparent pink but her lips were as red as ever and her eyes shone with the same liquid brightness.

Bowing, she said mockingly, “Most impatient and ungentle Great Sir, you are angry at my delay?”

“No, no, just bothersome dispatches——”

“Indeed! then I shall leave you to consider them in peace.” Tossing her head she turned to leave the room.

“Just a moment! Just a moment!” cried the Viceroy hastily. She stopped with her back to him. “I have a necklace of pearls.”

“Yes?” she inquired carelessly.

“You wish it?”

She could hear the pearls trickling through his fingers.

“Ah, do you not admire it?”

“I have not seen it,” she answered curtly.

“I am seated on the divan here.”

“I am standing by the door.”

“Are you not going to take these pearls?”

“Are you not going to bring them to me?”

The Viceroy got up, hesitated, then came and stood beside her. She held out her hand and he wrapped the necklace around her palm and wrist, while a childish happiness dimpled her cheeks as she admired and fondled the gold-strung baubles from the sea.

“They would be most beautiful,” she said, looking up at him with a smile that brought a flush to his face, “did not the jewelled kindness that suggested them dim their brilliancy.”

“Eh? Yes, yes,” his Excellency bowed. “Pearls are a very worthy jewel—unfortunate——women have not their attributes——”

“What are they?” she demanded, throwing back her head.

“Why, why, Time’s incrustations——”

“Yes?” she inquired, with such a mocking chill in her voice that it caused him to lower his eyes. “Yes,” she repeated, walking over to a table where an inkstone lay, “it is quite true that what Time adds yearly to the pearl, it steals from a woman’s cheek but,” she put the pearls in the wet ink and with the tip of her tiny forefinger rubbed them around and around until they were but a blackened mass, “you see,” she continued naïvely, “that they are alike in a way.”

“Isn’t it strange?” she murmured, still rubbing her little finger tip among the blackened jewels. “Isn’t it strange?”

The Viceroy stood immovable, while a network of purple veins began to spread across his face.

The wife’s hands rested for a moment on his shoulders, then seizing his ears, pulled him down into a chair.

“You are not angry?” she said consolingly.

The Viceroy looked up at her reproachfully.

“I know it was very wrong,” she said with contrition.

He eyed her questioningly.

“Do you think,” she frowned and her tones became threatening, “that my father did not teach me gratitude?”

“Yes, yes,” answered the Viceroy hastily. “Yes; economy is a woman’s highest virtue——”

“Economy in what?” she demanded, straightening up and looking down at him coldly.

He moved restlessly and tried to say something.

“Money!” she repeated with scorn. “I knew you would say that! Money! Oyah! A pool of filth where men are defiled and drowned—bah!” She stamped her little foot fretfully, and threw the pearls on the floor.

“Would you let wealth all run away?” he asked pathetically.

“Does not a running stream irrigate more fields than a pond? Is there not more purity in a brook than in a stagnant pool?”

His Excellency sighed deeply.

“Why don’t you learn other economy?” She leaned over him, pouting her red lips like a teasing child. “Why don’t you be economical of punishments, wasteful of mercy, and treat greed as a rogue? Because, my husband,” and taking hold of his ears, she tilted his head back, “I think whoever is a miser in punishments and a spendthrift of compassion, not only hoards up inestimable treasure, but practises the economy of heaven.”

“That is true,” mumbled the Viceroy, thickly, “very——”

“It is not!” she interrupted, letting go his ears and stamping her foot.

“Not true?”

“It never happens.”

“That is so,” replied the Viceroy in a relieved tone.

“It is not!”

“What——”

“Because you could make it so if you wished.” Speaking these words in half whispering tender tones, she again took hold of his ears and looked down into his eyes, serious, begging.

“Will you promise me not to have any more prisoners beheaded this week?”

“Again!”

“Will you promise?” she pulled harder on his ears.

“But—but——”

“Promise!”

“Yes.”

“And you will send away that thin, wicked lictor?”

“Eh? Yes, yes; he is a rogue.”

“And you will rebuild the hospital at Ho Yong?”

“No, no; a waste of money.”

“You won’t?” she pulled his ears again. “Not even for me?” Her red lips parted and her breath blew warm upon his cheek.

The viceroy moved restlessly, hopelessly.

Her lips, just touching his ear, whispered, “Only that one little promise, my husband.”

A tremor passed through the Viceroy’s great frame.

“Yes,” he muttered in a thick voice, lifting his hands to clasp her to him but in that instant she stood beyond his reach, her face flushed and dimpled with smiles.

Distant she stood, looking at him, smiling, blushing, mocking; then taking his fat face between her little hands she tilted it back, laughing softly a laugh like the low notes of a wood-warbler.

He raised his hands.

She frowned.

His hands fell and her smiles came again.

BOOK II—TWO UNKNOWNS

CHAPTER ONE
THE YOUNGER

It is necessary to go back some years prior to the time of the typhoon through whose swirl of devastation two priests from the French Mission of Yingching had struggled and survived, in order that by some knowledge of their past, though it is extremely meagre, a better understanding may be had of the events concerning which this book is written.

Whether the brilliant crepuscular rays from the western sky, the darkness with its labyrinthian uncertainty, the mangling crunch of the wind, the conflagration of the heavens, the crucifix, chaos, then the calm sun of noonday are only symbolic of these priests’ lives, or has in it a more material prognostication of their future, cannot be judged until the last words have been written.

Concerning the early life of these two priests nothing is known of the old man and but little of the youth prior to the time with which this book deals, although it is said that the younger priest came from Bretagne, first from an old ruin called the Château Carhaix-sur-Mer, then from a monastery at St. Pol de Leon, which knowledge is important in explaining his melancholy seclusiveness, his endless meditation: for this melancholy silence of the Bretons comes with their land, a gift of the Sorrow of God.

The Château Carhaix-sur-Mer in which this Breton priest spent his childhood stands on the edge of a ravine that runs through a moorland lying between a stretch of woods and the cliffs. The town of Lanilis is south of it; Plouzevede and Lesneven are to the eastward, while Plouneur-Trez is north.

The sea along this coast is safest when it frowns and most dangerous when it smiles.

It has been likened to a woman.

From the Château he was taken to a Jesuit monastery and college in St. Pol de Leon, a town of monasteries and nunneries and churches, which, like itself, are the patchwork of different ages. From almost its very beginning until now the cobbled streets of this old town have been filled with monks and priests, while bevies of white-hooded nuns have flitted silently through its shadows as pigeons on the roof-tops and in their comings and goings have left no trace of their passage. Thus this grey old town, with its slumbers, its periodical bustle at Pardons and its endless decay, exists as those who dwell in it—but to mourn and to pray.

In the moss-cowled monastery, where only the chanting of monks was heard or other sounds equally solemn, the sombreness of the Breton was changed to a gentler melancholy and the Spirit of Christ is said to have so deeply affected him that when he departed from the monastery for the Mission in China, an old monk, kneeling in the shadows of the gateway asked his blessing, saying:

“I discern a martyr.”

The Mission of Yingching is not without its history and its antiquity. China has always been a tempting field for missionary effort and from the time the spirit of proselyting first took hold of men there has been no nation that has not at some time or other sent into this old land their priests and missionaries, their apostles and martyrs.

Christianity is not very old in any part of the world, as far as the age of the world goes, but it is far older in China than most people believe; older there, in fact, than in any other part of the world outside the cradle of its infancy.

During those years so momentous to the Roman Church, when her monks, penetrating through the gloomy forests of Europe, sought the conversion of the Goths and the Vandals, the old Bavarians and Alemanni, there were at that time in China more Christians than in all these sombre woods. And while the monks with those devout females, Bertha of Kent, and Clotilda, Queen of the Franks, were bringing over by intrigue their recalcitrant lords to a quasi-Christianity, the Nestorian Fathers in Asia were gaining through education their tens of thousands of adherents. When Columban, the Irish monk of Banchor, with Boniface, the English monk from Devon, were labouring among the Saxons and Goths, cutting down their sacred oaks, overturning their altars and at last securing the crown of martyrdom at the hands of our exasperated forefathers, the Nestorians were building schools and founding colleges, so that toward the end of the eighth century there were in China more Christians than to-day dwell in the whole of Asia.

But when ambition and lust of power crept into the aims of the Nestorians their influence began to decline; when they made education secondary and intrigue the first element in conversion faith in them was destroyed; their power crumbled; their beliefs vanished and now all that is left of their multitudinous congregations is, in the ancient city of Singanfu, a pillar of stone.

Though the Mission of Yingching was founded more than three hundred years ago the present site or compound dates back only to the middle of the nineteenth century when, after the city ex-muros had been destroyed by the bombardment of French gunboats, the Catholic Church took possession of a large tract of land in the western suburbs, which was afterwards divided into two portions; an enclosed tract in which is the Mission, containing nearly eleven acres and an open space some six hundred feet in width between the southern wall of the compound and the river. This vacant tract had been part of the land seized by the Church after the bombardment, but owing to the strenuous and persistent opposition of the Chinese provincial authorities as well as the inhabitants of the city to the Church acquiring such a large piece of land in the populous western suburbs, a compromise was finally agreed upon whereby the Church was confirmed in its title to eleven acres, while the Chinese were to retain ownership to the tract between the Mission and the river but were not to erect buildings upon it or to prevent in any way the Mission from enjoying the cool winds of the river or having free access to their boats. So this tract of land remained an open field in the midst of a crowded population.

The Mission is surrounded by a wall some fifteen feet in height, having two gates. The main entrance placed on the north while from the south wall a gate opens into the field, through which entered those coming from the river. Buildings accommodating several hundred native communicants, schools, quarters, and other establishments necessary to a Mission are arranged in quadrangles, these quadrangles in turn forming a large semi-quadrangle paralleling the enclosing walls other than on the north side, which gave the quadrangles as a whole the form of the letter E, the bishop’s residence forming the centre stroke while between it and the north gate stands a chapel, solitary and massive.

The quadrangles are one-storied, constructed of blue pressed brick, covered by dark tiles. Around the sides and between each run pillared cloisters. The intervening courts and spaces are planted with shrubs and flowers, while vines and ivy cling to the pillars of the cloisters sometimes covering the wide-spreading eaves.

The chapel that stands just within the north gate is built entirely of dark granite in the early Visigothic manner of architecture, when that type had not yet freed itself from Roman construction. It is a parallelogram with perfectly plain exterior. The only windows are along the sides, narrow and high, with a bar of iron running lengthwise through the centre. Looking at this chapel from the side it resembles a prison, while the front, with low vaulted doors is as cold and forbidding as a tomb. It in no way has the appearance of a Catholic church; neither plain nor flying buttresses, neither pinnacles nor porches, nor niches. It is without ornamentation; about it is not a line but what is sombre and desolate. Within, the chapel is not less gloomy than it is without. The central nave, tunnel-vaulted, is always dim with shadows, while the two side aisles, separated from the central nave by a row of dark lacquered pillars, are low, tomby. In the semicircular apse, groined and dim, is an altar of blackwood, its front ornamented with two dragons coiled in contention and having over their open mouths a cross with golden rays—symbolic of the Mission itself and its aspiration.

To this Mission, some ten years before the Breton priest had left the Monastery of St. Pol de Leon, a stranger came, dropping down like a wild bird in its flight. No one knew from what place he had come, hence they spoke of him always as the Unknown. The bishop treated him with deference.

This stranger lived alone in the southwest quadrangle next to the outer wall, dwelling there for two years in complete seclusion. After that he went out labouring as a priest among the people. But it was said that while he was scrupulous in the performance of his religious duties yet he was never known to make a convert. When any of his fellow-priests attempted to ask him a question he raised his eyebrows and they became hushed. No one was ever known to ask him twice. He seldom spoke and when he did, he growled or commanded; when he acted, his actions were final. He wandered everywhere, driven hither and thither by an unrest of his own. He knew the city intimately and the labyrinths of its suburbs; the fields adjoining and the villages beyond the fields. He would be gone a fortnight, return to the Mission for a day or two and then go away for a month. Where he had been no one dared to inquire and only on one occasion were his acts known.

The village of Sam Ma is distant from Yingching about thirty-five miles by boat and almost twenty by paths across the rice-fields and hills. During one fifth moon cholera broke out in this village, and in the midst of the epidemic the Unknown appeared. He assumed command over the village; segregated, doctored, punished, rewarded, beat, buried. In the beginning the villagers obeyed because they feared him; in the end, they were obedient because they worshipped him. But when the epidemic was over and the elders went to his house to express their gratitude, they found it empty.

Nevertheless, the inhabitants of Sam Ma still perpetuate the memory of this Unknown man in their customary manner. And if any traveller, reading these lines, should go to their village, which is situated on the river of the Falling Brook he will find on a wooded knoll just without the walls, a shrine standing next to the Temple of the Goddess of Mercy. Within this shrine on an ebony altar covered with a gold-embroidered mantle is a tablet before which burns a taper by day and night. This tablet bears a name and beside it these words:

“He looked upon the people as he would on a man that is wounded; he looked for the path of righteousness as if he could not see it.”

Such is all that has been discovered concerning this mysterious man and it was into this environment that the Breton priest came from the Monastery of St. Pol de Leon. It is said that at once this gloomy man and the youth found out each other in a way, not unlike that reciprocal attraction wherein the tempest finds on the sea’s calm bosom rest and lightning finds fire in the hearts of rocks.

Henceforth, the older man ceased to disappear or even leave the Mission unless accompanied by the Breton. They studied together, travelled together, enduring hardships and dangers. It was noted that while one loved and growled, the other loved and was silent; for whole days they uttered not a word and it was this mutual taciturnity, which is the surest sign of love between men, that made an unbreakable strand in the net that Fate was in due time to cast and to draw in.

BOOK III. THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER ONE
PRO DEO ET ECCLESIA

It is not a matter to wonder at that the Mission of Yingching was founded during the latter part of the sixteenth century,—an age known elsewhere for its deception and cajolery,—but it is remarkable that M. Ricci should remain the greatest of its bishops though more than three centuries have gone by.

From the beginning of that eventful day when the Viceroy granted him permission to build a little house where he might forget his hours in prayer and study, until he had laid secure the foundations of this Mission, which even Time and innumerable vicissitudes have not destroyed, the life of Ricci was passed more brilliantly than any of his successors. While most of them have faithfully continued his policy, they have done so only with that crudity that is to be expected from the efforts of mediocre men when they seek to emulate the schemes of master minds.

The successes of the bishop had been many; the fruition of his schemes was continuous and like the orange tree there mingled promiscuously together the sprouting bud, the bloom, and the golden fruit. Yet numerous as had been his victories they were all overshadowed by one failure—the securing of a foothold within the walls of Yingching. Many had been the schemes carefully planned toward this end, only, through some fatality, to fail. But the bishop smiled and was hopeful, for no one knew better than he that in the march of ill-fortune there are to be found points of attack called opportunities, which assailed at the right moment end in victory; one must watch and wait; when there is seen a gap or point of weakness, fall upon it—perhaps to be repulsed, perhaps to succeed. So the bishop waited and watched as ill-fortune in a lazy, long column filed by. Often he had made the attack and failed but he was not disheartened nor did his failures ever alter the serenity that men noted on his brow, a serenity that was conspicuous.

One day—which might be called the beginning day of this history—the bishop was seated in his study with a peasant woman kneeling before him, and on his lips played or twitched that peculiar, unfathomable smile which someone once said was the shadowy echo of a scheme’s contented laughter.

“Yes,” the bishop repeated musingly, “you will secrete yourself, listening to all that is said, seeing all that is done, and report to me each day. You must undertake to gain her confidence as much as possible and do nothing that may cause her displeasure.”

The bishop, tapping the tips of his fingers together, settled back in his chair and smiled, one might almost say, rapturously.

“Since this matter is arranged, you may go,” he said, leaning forward and looking down at the woman that knelt at his feet. “But remember,” he continued with gentle firmness, firmness that left no doubt, “that you are first the servant of God and afterwards the maid of Tai Lin’s wife. Never, as you value your soul, neglect to report to me all that is said and done each day between the priest and this wife. Go and obey!”

A hesitant knock aroused the bishop from his musings. The Breton priest, entering softly, knelt down and received his blessing then rising, stood dreamily waiting.

For some time the bishop sat rubbing with both forefingers his high, narrow nose. And as he contemplated the handsome, sad Breton a satisfied smile passed across his covered lips.

“I have new duties for you,” he said presently in soft, thoughtful tones. “Tai Lin, the former Viceroy of Chekiang, has asked for a tutor to instruct his young wife, and I have selected you.”

The Breton made no sign that he heard.

“Do you understand what that means?” demanded the bishop with purring severity as he leaned forward, pressing his bony knuckles against the sides of his knees. “God has intrusted you with its accomplishment, and there must be no failure in tasks imposed by Him.

“Tai Lin is one of the richest men in this province,” he continued meditatively, as he leaned back in his chair and struck stiffly together the tips of his bloodless fingers. “Some say his wealth is limitless; this to a degree is true, for I know that he alone owns the great Erh-tung mines of white copper in Yunnan; the camphor groves of Si Kiang belong to him; the jade mines of Yu-Shan, and those boundless forests of teak that lie between the Me Kong and Song Ho rivers; besides—there is his great park in the heart of Yingching.”

For some moments the bishop sat silent, his eyes half closed, his fingers motionless.

“Yes, that magnificent park, that wonderful park—— But this young wife, have you heard of her?” he demanded, suddenly sitting up.

Again the Breton looked at him questioningly.

“She was a tea-farmer’s daughter, beautiful, it is said, as a wild animal, and though permitted to run wild among the hills and woodlands she acquired some learning the reputation of which, no doubt, spread among the neighbouring villages and finally reached the ears of Tai Lin, then Viceroy of Chekiang. The beauty of this woman must be of some subtle, tireless kind if we are to believe in rumour and the influence she has over Tai Lin seems to prove it. He is less than a child in her hands. He does not seem to have any desire that is not hers nor any pleasure or thought in life that does not, in some manner, revolve about her.

“Strange, strange, that a woman with no other power than fleeting beauty or the skim of learning should rule so absolutely a man accustomed to be despot over tens of millions. It is said that within a month after she entered the palace at Hangchau her influence was felt in all directions. Tai Ling was a Confucian when he married this tea-farmer’s daughter, a ridiculer of all religions, yet she caused him to rebuild the Buddhist Temples of Yoh Miao and Ting Tzy; found hospitals and schools; send caravans loaded with food to the starving in Kwangsi and Shensi. She does whatever she pleases with him. This man to whom the Emperor has given the title of Great, is a nonentity; he amounts to nothing; the wife is everything. What could be more fortunate?”

Again the bishop relapsed into silence, while the eyes of the Breton looked meditatively along the book shelves behind him.

“Such are the ways of God, and nothing is more beautiful than His compassion in so deeply instilling in the heart of woman—even against her own acts—religion’s spirit, causing her to yield to the agency of His ministers and become an instrument in their hands for the salvation of mankind! Thus this very creature that caused man’s fall and the desolation of God’s garden, becomes an aid in his redemption. That villainous curiosity that caused her to spy around among the leaves of the Forbidden Tree still forces her into the thick foliage of her husband’s thoughts; while that insatiable appetite that made her devour the apple that led to earth, still insatiable, causes her to hunger for that fruit that shall again unlock the Gates of Heaven. And just as she tempted man forth from Paradise by the deliciousness of desire, so shall she lead him back.

“If she alone can persuade him to build temples, found hospitals and give aid to the starving, how beneficent will prove her labours under proper tutelage! If she can cause Buddhist monasteries to be built she can erect Roman cathedrals; if she can scatter money broadcast among these hungry heathen, she can fill the coffers of our Mission. But beyond all of this there is something else.”

The bishop suddenly ceased speaking and his black, cavitous eyes closed as he tilted back his head.

“You know,” he resumed thoughtfully, “how our predecessors have laboured without success to gain a foothold within the walls of the city and how we have followed in their footsteps. Now, at last, the Eye of God looks down upon us: this opportunity allowed by Him must not be neglected. You must spare no effort nor fail to use any means to save her soul; to accomplish this end whatever means are employed, God will sanction. Exaltibimus te, Domine.”

For a long time the bishop gazed steadily at the Breton, and the deep silence was only broken by the cracking of his knuckles as he pulled one finger after another.

Presently he lay back in his high ebony chair, and a dim ray of light shafted in from the high-barred casement rested upon his pallid face: his thin, tight lips parted in a smile, while his hands, whitish and long, clasped to his breast an ivory cross imaged with the Christ.

The Breton waited, with eyes lowered dreamily before him.

CHAPTER TWO
THE SCHOLAR

A few days after the Breton had received his instructions from the bishop he was summoned to the palace of Tai Lin, thence peremptorily to an apartment belonging to his Excellency’s wife, the tea-farmer’s daughter. This room, with its alternate slabs of rose and white marble, its walls hung with curtains of crimson silk embroidered down the centre in characters of gold; its beams and pillars lacquered a dark red and overcast by a tracery of golden filigree, was filled with an amber light that a sun ray shooting through a shell-latticed window diffused among its shadows.

The Breton had stood for some time beside one of the pillars, waiting without restlessness or impatience the coming of his scholar, when unconsciously he raised his head and looked expectantly toward the carved screen-work—a mass of gold and sang-de-bœuf lacquer—that reached to both sides of the room and from the ceiling to the marble floor.

Suddenly a chime of music, which was laughter, filled the room, bringing a flush to his face. The first chime no sooner died away than came another and another; never in his life before had there fallen about him such sounds—like music laughing, or laughter from a bird’s throat. Had that been heard in his native land, it would have been honoured with a shrine. The melancholy peasants rising from their knees before its sanctuary would have said, “Is it not true that Bretagne is under the Eye of God? Over yonder the Devil is buried beneath Mont St. Michel and now the Virgin is heard to laugh.”

So the eyes of the Breton, propped open wide with wonder, stared at the screen. But not another sound was heard until the wife said softly:

“Priest, come—sit here.”

For an instant he hesitated, then went over to the screen and sat down in a chair of teak and mother-of-pearl, which had been placed beside it. He heard a trembling silken rustle, then the room was again filled with the music of the wife’s laughter.

“Why, priest,” she exclaimed in the midst of her merriment, “your eyes are really blue! Who would ever have thought such a thing! Blue! Isn’t that strange!” she added wonderingly.

The Breton bowed his head, but made no answer.

“Look up!” she commanded.

He raised his eyes to the crevices near his head.

“Priest,” said the wife presently, her voice still gentle with wonder, “if your eyes were not so soft, I would say they were sapphires; were they not so strangely bright, I would say they were as the sky when the moon loiters behind the mountains. So these are the eyes of devils——”

The Breton took no notice of her comments.

“And you are the priest,” she drawled presently.

“Yes,” he answered softly, “a priest of God.”

“And what have you come to teach me, priest?” she inquired, mockery and laughter trembling in her demure tones.

“As the bishop has ordered.”

“Indeed!” she commented disdainfully. “And what did he order?”

“To save your soul,” replied the Breton reverently, “for the glory——”

The laughter of the wife interrupted him.

“And he sent you to do it?”

“Yes,” he apologised, “the bishop has sent me.”

“How thoughtful of him! No doubt you will succeed!”

“Yes, God will be here,” he answered simply.

“Why did not the bishop send someone else?”

“I do not know.”

“You did not ask to come?”

“No.”

“Indeed! If he asked you to go elsewhere to-morrow, would you go?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, very well. I may not want you any more. I am not at all firm in my desire, and you are so young. My last teacher, who had had the learning of seventy winters, said the ignorance of youth was really pitiable, especially in men. No; I don’t think you will do,” she commented with candour, “not at all.”

The Breton gazed dreamily through the half-opened shell-latticed window, and only the restless hopping and chirp of the thrushes in the golden bamboo cages broke the silence, or sometimes a dulled sound, which was the noise of the surrounding city in its labour.

“Priest,” her voice came from just above him, and as he turned his head, a ring set with a large pear-shaped pearl dropped from the crevices into his lap. He looked up and tried to speak. His lips moved, but that was all, for just overhead a little pink finger tip clung to the edge of the crevices.

“Oh, you need not thank me,” she exclaimed coldly, “that ring is not for you. It is for your bishop, who wishes to save my soul.”

“Yes, he wishes it,” the Breton answered thoughtfully, as he fingered the ring in his lap.

“And you?”

“I shall pray for you.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, I will teach you,” he added gently, oblivious of her mockery.

“What?”

“To love God and——”

“How monotonous you are, priest,” she interrupted impatiently.

“No,” he answered, looking gravely up to the crevices, “to love God is not monotonous; to pray to Him is happiness.”

“I suppose you pray all the time?” she asked with mock compassion.

“Yes; ad Jesum crucifixion.”

“I never heard of Him,” she commented lightly.

“Our Lord, who was crucified.”

“Indeed! And what had He been doing?”

“He died to save men.”

“How useless!” she sighed.

“From the crucifix came the cross; from torture, salvation.”

“Dreadful! And you pray to Him?”

“Yes; to Jesus crucified,” he answered softly.

“Let me hear you,” she commanded unconcernedly as though thinking of other things.

The Breton, bowing his head, began in a low monotonous tone. “Eu, amantissime Jesu, qui sponsae sanguinum mihi esse voluisti ad pedes tuos prosternor, ut meum in te amorem debitamque gratitudinem contester. Sed quid rependam tibi mi Jesu——”

After the first few words of the Breton’s prayer the wife began to laugh, at first softly to herself, but as the Breton continued, her merriment increased until the music peals of her laughter stopped him completely.

“What a noise you are making!” she exclaimed. “I never heard such sounds!” And she fell again to laughing. “You must not mind my laughter,” she said, breathless, “I cannot help it. You never laugh?” she inquired when her merriment had subsided.

“No.”

“I did not think so. I laugh all the time. But then you are a priest,” she added consolingly. “Are you going to finish your prayer?”

The Breton looked hesitantly at the screen, then resumed his prayer. “Mi Jesu, qui usque in finem dilexisti me? Manibus ac pedibus imo et cordi tuo inscripsisti me, magno sane et conspicuo charactere. Quis mihi hoc tribuat ut sicut tu me, ita et ego te cordi meo inscriptum circumferam. O Jesu——”

“No,” interrupted the wife meditatively, “I would not say that your hands were disagreeable to look at. My honourable husband told me that the hands of foreigners were speckled and covered with red hairs like the wood spider—just think of it! But I should say that your hands are—you can put on that ring, if you wish.”

The Breton did not touch the pearl in his lap.

“I said you could put on that ring,” she enjoined imperiously. “No, on the other hand; yes—— Now, go on with your prayer.”

And once more the Breton began his prayer to the crucified Christ.

“O Jesus quam profuso mi charitatis effectu complexus es qui non tantum manus et pedes, verum et opulentissimum pectus mihi operiri voluisti, ut inexhausto bonorum coelestium affluentia desiderium meum expleas——”

“And priest,” his Excellency’s wife again interrupted with the same meditative interest, “I would not say that it is annoying, either, to look at your face. Do you know,” she added naïvely, “that I was almost afraid to see you? I did not know what you would look like. My honourable husband has been telling me of the English, who have a wad of red hair on each cheek; isn’t that frightful?” And she laughed softly to herself, merrily as a child.

“You never even smile, do you?”

He made no answer.

“I do not think so; your face is too sad. And I suppose,” she sighed deprecatingly, “that it comes from all this dull praying.”

The Breton was looking sorrowfully across the room to the sunlit shells, opalescent in the latticed windows.

“Are you going to finish your prayer?” she asked with mock wonder.

He turned his head and looked steadily up to the crevices.

“You do not wish it,” he said sadly.

“I do!” she exclaimed, petulantly slapping the screen.

“Salve, O benedictum vulnus lateris tui mi Jesu! Salve, O fons amoris, O thesaure inaestimabilis, O requies animae meae ausimne benignissime Jesu.”

As the Breton uttered these lines, he turned his eyes once more toward the crevices whence she spoke.

“Ad sacram hanc aram ad hoc sanctum sanctorum, accidere ardens que amore cor turum.”

“Do you know,” she interrupted, a subdued tremor in her voice, “I don’t believe that devils have such eyes. They are like the ocean. I was on the sea once when I came here from Hangchau and I watched the waters. I noticed the sea, though always blue, the blue changed. Sometimes shadows swift or faltering crept into it, and oh, how sad it was! Suddenly these dark waters would become light. I never saw such brightness. The sea smiled and—don’t, please don’t look at me.”

CHAPTER THREE
HOMO! MUTATO!

While the weeks and then months that followed the Breton’s advent into the palace of Tai Lin were as widely different to the past years of his life as is sunlight to sorrow, yet in themselves these weeks varied but little.

Unseen and impregnable behind her great screen the tea-farmer’s daughter usurped all the liberties of her childhood. She mocked his learning, derided his God, then whispered—which was another way of caressing; and when the Breton looked up, injured yet forgiving, to the crevices above his head, she filled the room with the music peals of her laughter, sometimes coldly derisive, again like a rapturous song dropped from a heaven unconjectured by the Breton priest.

In the beginning only two men in the Mission noticed that a lingering uncertainty had come into his actions; a greater dreaminess into his preoccupation and a brightness into his melancholy eyes. As weeks went on he became more hurried and restless, so that even a vagueness came at times into his prayers. This was apparent to many, but they attributed it to Breton eccentricity, and they would have been confirmed in this belief had they watched him leave the Mission in haste, then after passing through the Great Southern Gate, go forward reluctantly. When he reached the park entrance he often passed it, wandered about, or sought refuge in the Tower of the Water Clock, where dripped, dripped, dripped those relentless drops meditatively from their age-worn jars of granite.

In the late afternoons when the lessons were over and the wife had dismissed him in silence, or scornfully or with laughter, he left the park only to move unconcernedly through the streets, apparently seeing nothing; not even hearing the multitudinous cries and noises that resounded about him. He was drifted along like flotsam in their currents and carried around through their endless windings until, as flotsam, he was tossed up on the threshold of the Mission gates.

At first these street currents brought him back to the Mission more or less quickly. But as time hastened on they began to take him further and wider in their drift or leave him stranded momentarily or longer in some temple grounds, or on the river’s bank, until at last sundown did not find him at the Mission and after a while dusk crept in before him.

One night he sat on the edge of the cloister outside of his door. His eyes were half closed, a faint upward curl fluttered in the corners of his mouth, a fulness pouted his lower lip. He had been sitting thus for a long time when the Unknown priest came and stood looking down at him steadfastly, weighted with intuition—a gaze to be avoided.

Presently he began to talk aloud to himself.

“It has come.”

“Spontaneous?”

“Yes.”

“Fungoid?”

“No; it takes a night to produce a mushroom and only a minute to shrivel it. An instant produces this or a mountain. Ages can not alter it. I know of no name unless it be called volcanic; an upheaval, a something from the depths; made up of scoria that destroys but is itself indestructible.”

“What are you doing?” he growled.

The Breton looked up.

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Are you praying?”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” the Breton answered softly.

“A bad trick,” he grumbled as he went on, leaving the Breton alone in the night.

It was in this manner that these two priests, who had for so long a time been inseparable, drew unconsciously away from each other. One dreamed and the other remembered: two extremes, which look alike and which effectually hid from the other priests the parting of their ways. For instead of a single silence—which had been mutual—came one both double and divergent. Two such silences cannot drift together. Nothing is more selfish than self communion.

But as the Breton drew off more and more to himself he did so so unconsciously that his affection for the Unknown was in no way diminished but was simply put away in one of those inner chambers of the heart until—as was destined—it was brought forth again unaltered or changed.

The Unknown priest now went on his journeys alone, and soon drifted back to that solitary, stern seclusiveness in which he had lived before the Breton came. Again he left the Mission for weeks at a time, and the Breton no more noticed his comings and goings than did the others that dwelt in the Mission. Both priests were busy; one dreamed; the other succoured; two things hard to wear out or become threadbare.

The lessons of the wife began about an hour after midday and continued until she left the Breton alone, waiting by the screen. This she did peremptorily, moodily, in laughter, in silence, in mockery. She cajoled him when it was her humour, reprimanded and laughed at him. She questioned, then derided his answers. She wondered and scorned—like a child pouting with hauteur. Yet in the midst of all this the Breton could not or did not care to distinguish one mood from another, for as music is music, regardless of what it expresses, so were the mood tones that came from behind the screen, and in time no amount of scorn or laughter or derision could alter this music.

“What a people you are, priest,” she chided, “to practise benevolence for Heaven’s payment! Don’t you know that men are fools that try to make themselves the creditors of Heaven?”

She lowered her voice to a pleading whisper: “How can you do such a thing?”

The Breton looked up; contrition flashed across his face and instantly the rooms were filled with triumphant laughter.

But while her mockery, her commands, and derision affected him in no way, there were words, however, which were spoken in such inexplainable, whispering tones that they remained with him always. And after he came to enter the park before the hour of midday the memory of these words were so vividly recurrent in the song and solitude of the park that every sunbeam sent them scintillating through his revery. The memory of one word—and he was hid in the cloud of its thought.

As when a rapid rushes down over a cliff and a white cloud rises from the gorge without any will or substance of its own, so did the sudden tumbled memory of her half-whispered words cause to rise and permeate his whole consciousness, a mist-cloud through which passed an iridescence more beautiful, more brilliant than the rainbow in the gorge.

And when the pealing rose from the meadow—a song shot toward heaven—the Breton stopped, held his breath, so near was its song like her laughter or her chiding. Thus each day he drifted rather than wandered about the park as he waited for that hour when once more he should be seated beside the screen. This sombre Breton, moving half-restlessly, half-contentedly among the groves of flowery tamarix and wutung, among orchards of bloomed almonds and lichee; along hillsides terraced in orange and pomegranate; beside iris-circled ponds and down outstretching streams, moved in a sort of a radiance, not incomparable to a bubble adrift. For as a bubble reflects whatever surrounds it, whether upon the banks, upon the stream, or clouds immeasurable overhead, illuminating with inward mysterious brightness their lights, shades, colours, and perspectives, so his nature as of other men took on the forms and colouring of his surroundings and like a bubble tinctured them with a radiance that came from within himself.

Heretofore the Breton’s impressionable, melancholy nature had, as a bubble in the gloom of a cañon, whirled round and round in sombre eddies. There had been no sunlight since the dim glimmer of his childhood—and all that had been reflected in him whirling along through the cloistered dusk had been a shadow—devoid of change as well as of brightness. But now, as a bubble in the sunlight iridescent with a myriad hues, he drifted along, his happiness modified and yet illumined by the melancholy of a race that has known so little of sunshine and so much of Breton gloom. In this park there was not a flower but whose brightness was reflected within him; every nodding blade of grass, the water-fowls’ gay plumage, the heavens, the mist clouds adrift like himself in the tranquil air; the double brightness of sun in sky and stream. And from within himself, from the very depths of his sombrous nature, shone forth that something, which man has yet to name, and subtly tinctured each image with rainbow tints.

In this manner—not uncommon in life—had the Breton been precipitated from the cloisters; not into the world’s wild meadow, but into Tai Lin’s park. This had all happened so suddenly, so completely, that it was as impossible for him to remember the time when this sunlight had not surrounded him as it was to conjecture that inevitable hour when setting, he would again be in darkness; not the shadow of the past, but the darkness of one that had known the sun.

The languorous flash of the Breton’s eye spoke frankly, even insistently of this change—for the tongue cannot wag one’s thoughts more carelessly than are the eyes loquacious of the heart’s secrets—and one day the Unknown, as if exasperated by his indifference, took roughly hold of his shoulder and demanded:

“What is the matter with you?”

The Breton looked at him wonderingly.

“Do you know that for two months you have not said a word? I doubt if you have prayed. You no longer go with me. What are you dreaming about?”

“I do not know,” answered the Breton absently.

As weeks vanished, or rather seemingly blended into an hour, which had just past, the wife of Tai Lin laughed somewhat less at him, an hesitancy sometimes came into her mockery; impatience fluttered at times in her manner, and silences began to creep in more frequently. In these moments of stillness, when only the sensuous crinkle of silk was heard, the caressing tremor of the fan or the soft pulse tap, tap, of her foot, the Breton leaned forward on the table.

CHAPTER FOUR
A DRAGON AND THE GROTTO

Along the waterfront of the southern suburbs, which were penned in between the walls of the city and the river, ran a wide wooden bund that extended for some distance over the water.

The street of the Sombre Heavens leaving the city through the Great Southern Gate debouches almost into the middle of it, at which place it has the appearance of a narrow field, so wide is it, and so dense and multitudinous are the suburbs that crouch beneath the old south walls of Yingching, with its towers and frown of a thousand years.

Just across the river, with its myriads of quarrelling boats, is the Monastery of Wa-lam-tze, where five hundred monks with their fowls doze and blink in alcoved groves or in halls that are of marble. Opposite the western end whirls the black pool of Pakngotam, fathomless at this place, but connected subterraneously with distant points. A pig thrown into it will be found at Ko-Chao, two hundred and fifty miles away, where it boils up in the hollow of three hills. It is also connected with Chukow, two hundred and eighty miles distant, and comes up for the last time at Shukwan among the marshes on the borders of the southern sea. Beyond Pakngotam is the monastery Tai Tung, where the earth holds a mysterious abyss that is a source of terror and confidence, for the noxious fumes and vapours that rise out of it—as from the cleft in the Temple of Phytia—presage tempests on land and sea. When a storm approaches, even at a great distance, a thick lurid mist rolls out of this Dragon’s mouth and covers the groves of the Monastery. It is believed that these vapours are forced out by the violent beatings of the earth’s pulse, that are no other than the subterranean streams of Pakngotam. These pulsations are caused in distant places by the storms’ weight forcing the vapours through the veins of the earth to the Dragon’s mouth, where they are spit forth as warning of the tempest’s approach. Thus this gigantic barometer portrays not only the commiseration and sublimity of the gods, but their watchfulness over the old city of Yingching.

During low water the bund at the foot of the Street of the Sombre Heavens is used for the execution of criminals, although there is a Court of Execution not far from the southeast corner of the city walls. But this portion of the bund, so wide and prominent, is almost always used, especially when it is desired to make a greater display of official grandeur and the Law’s vermilion majesty.

The Breton in leaving the park of Tai Lin usually passed out of the city by the Great Southern Gate, and following the Street of the Sombre Heavens came nearly every evening to this part of the bund, where he loitered instead of continuing on his way to the Mission. Eventually the bund loafers became accustomed to his tall form standing at evening motionless on the bund’s very edge, his garments blown by the river’s wind, and his eyes dreamily lowered on the floods rolling at his feet.

Men passing him commented:

“Scholar.”

“He is wasting his time.”

“He thinks,” said one.

“A fool,” replied another.

“He is a wise man,” growled a misanthrope.

“Why?”

“He is thinking of jumping into bed.”

“He dreams,” said a boat-woman.

“About what?” demanded a slipper boat-girl with bated breath.

“Who knows, Alinn, when the dreamer does not!”

One late afternoon as the sun hung red in the purple mist, which rises from the rice fields beyond Honam, the Breton was dreaming as usual on the bund’s edge when a sampan gondoliered by a boat-girl glided to a landing stair not far from him. Under the bamboo awning sat a foreigner talking eagerly to her as she moved easily and gracefully her ponderous oar. The boat passed under the bund. Presently the foreigner mounted the landing stage, but at the top of the stairs stopped perplexed and uncertain, then pattered hastily over to the edge.

“Hi! Cumsha! Hi!” he cried, frantically shaking his umbrella at the slipper boat as it started on its way across the river.

The boat trembled momentarily in the dark mighty currents, then turned slowly around and approached that part of the bund where the stranger stood beside the Breton.

“I know you,” he commented, as he glanced quickly up at the Breton, “but look at that,” and he pointed to the girl as she moved with so much grace her slender craft. “A water nymph, sir, in blue pantlets! I am the Reverend Tobias Hook, and I tell you, my young friend, there is not another like her from Wampoa to Wu-Chau; she is a vision of triple dimples, and when you see them you will ooze with envy. What an ideal for a convert! How admirable she will be around the house! I have cumsha for you, my little lost lamb,” he chirped as the girl steadied her boat in the currents below them.

“Throw it down,” she answered in a matter-of-fact way.

“My poor lamb, will you not answer?”

“What?”

“What I spiritually beseeched of you in the boat.”

“I forget.”

“Will you not receive what I offered?”

“I am afraid.”

“Think of what you will have.”

“I would rather have that cumsha.”

“Think! think what you will have,” he repeated ecstatically.

“This is my sampan; I live on the river because I was born here and will die here.”

“Come with me,” he held out his hands.

“Throw that cumsha or I will go.”

As she started to swing her great oar the stranger threw a few coppers into the boat and, leaning on his umbrella, watched her cross the river, his eyes dancing as they followed her lithe body swaying in rhythmic motion to the movement of the great oar. Finally, when she was lost to sight among the other craft, he turned to the Breton, shaking his head solemnly.

“Ah me,” he sighed. “I was just in time; another day—who knows—it might have been too late.... It is going to be contentious. I see it, I hear it, I know it; but let it come, I will out-Solomon Solomon with the keen edge of my diplomacy, and mark you, the infant of my desire will not be severed.”

For some moments the Reverend Tobias Hook balanced himself, now on his heels, now on his toes.

“My young friend,” he resumed with impressive solemnity, “reverence diplomacy primarily and late, for it is the right healing hand of our Maker. It alone diagnoses the depths and shallows of diseased contentions. With subtle pills it ruddies up a pale hope, or judiciously phialing out poppied words it bats the eye of envy. And when the distemper of ambition rolls up the pulse of those around you lay on the gentle fingers of diplomacy, pucker up the wise silent lips, and blinking, fashion out a cure. If, in due time, you should fall, as men have fallen from Adam down, into the fever and ague of marriage, you will need for your own health’s sake this physician’s calming dosage.

“Marriage, marriage,” he soliloquised bitterly, jamming the point of his umbrella viciously into the planks, “that, my young friend, is the act that strips us and leaves us naked of hope. Why did I marry? A question. Was I lonely? No. I was wallowing in youth. Was it greed? No, for it has further impoverished my poverty. Was it ambition? No, I tempt not what caused the fall of angels. Was it love? There is no need to ask that question. Nor is there any use to take the whole inventory of my mind. I did it—that is all.

“This thing and theory of the one woman, my young friend, is like a nettle found in the White Cloud Hills; it tickles sensationally at first, then leaves a rash burning the rest of life. In this nettle simile lies the substance of my whole contention. At the moment of discovery our vision is distorted so that we discern in this very nettle a rose, a lily, or what not so that it is pleasing to our fancy. We pluck, we pop the other eye, and before we know we begin to scratch.

“Moreover, in this rose and lily metaphor lies argument for another drift to the point we are getting at. We grant the one woman to be the perfect rose or lily; man ambling through the garden of womankind spies this choicest flower and plucks it—which is marriage—then for his temerity wanders the rest of life through this endless blooming garden with an herb whose hues are soon no hues, whose perfume has become an odour, and its sweets so galled that the very bees forsake it and hornets extract substance from it for their stings. Furthermore, my young friend, in your feeble youth, unstrengthened by the vicissitudes of matrimony, nor toiled, nor calloused by it, I warn you that the sweetness of one rose is soon blown. No cook can concoct a meal out of one dish, nor prayers nor Aladdins make one meal fill out the course of life. It is variety and abundance that peppers and adorns the monotony of this rutted earth. Ah, if our discretion would only come in youth and our follies in old age! What happiness! We would die from a surfeit of it.”

The Reverend Hook stepped closer to the Breton and laid his hand consolingly on his shoulder.

“My young friend, I have watched you for many weeks standing at dusk on this bund and holding dialogue with empty space, and I conceived the thoughts I have given birth to—that there is a woman in it, for nothing but female imaginings can make a man a companion to shadows and vapours, squeezing music out of noise and plastering the air thick with visions.

“Now mark me, I do not complain of lathering in this fragrant soap that so cleanses our minds of sorrow, but let lather be lather; temporarily it laves us in joy but in the One love—no! no! with it comes only moody agitations of the heart. You try to crib on nature and deceive yourself into believing that the lily cannot lose its whiteness, nor the rose its perfume. Ah, my young dreamer, if you had Mrs. Hook for one week—that is all!

“But let us be cheerful, retrospect your thoughts back to that little dimpled darling in blue pantlets! Could anything be finer? She is curried to my taste, sir, and when chutneyed with a little strife—what a morsel! What a dish!... If I can clasp her once, just once, mark you, she will wail for the love of me.”

The Reverend Tobias Hook became meditative at this pleasing thought. He folded his hands on the head of his umbrella and gazed abstractedly down into the sombre flowing waters that the Chinese call the Pearl River; not, however, because pearls are found in its silty bed, but pearls are euphemistic of tears. This is the River of Tears, dark in sunlight, melancholy and sullen at dusk, and at midnight a dark flood that mourns. There is an immense terribleness about it and its sorrow; robbing, feeding, contemplating, nursing, and in due time devouring the innumerable millions it has reared. The giving of man to this River of his tears and his dead has been without end, as long as they have dwelt on its banks it has been so, yet they conceal this fact from themselves by calling its dark flood the River of Pearls, by giving gods to its depths; to its banks, temples and pagodas.

Suddenly the Reverend Tobias Hook was aroused from his sweet musings by the falling of dusk.

“I must hasten!” he exclaimed abruptly; “to-morrow I will come back. I want to talk to you about the Treasure hidden in the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, and that, sir, is worth dreaming about. But I cannot stay.” He shook his head dolefully and looked furtively over his shoulder.

“Mrs. Hook is at the Willow Gate this very moment watching for me, and when she sees my rolling, sensuous gait, my pouted under lip and high-distempered cheek she will cluck, sir, she will cluck with rage.”

CHAPTER FIVE
THE MONSOON

“Do you know what is the matter with you?” demanded the Unknown gruffly as he stopped the Breton hastening out of the Mission Gate.

The priest looked up.

“You are happy,” the Unknown grumbled.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it is from God.”

While the Breton did not perceive it, the wife had in a way become less wilful, though her moods were yet as the river’s wind; her words as changeful as the mocking-bird’s song; her impetuosity as uncertain as those strange storms that come down through the gorges of Kai Fong. One moment sweetly naïve as a child, the next abrupt and full of cold scorn; she still chided, still coaxed and scolded, though sometimes her words caressed. She questioned and derided as in the past, and still brought doubt into his sensitive eyes only to laugh it away.

The fact is, however, that in the rapid rush of time, the wife laughed less, and in no such manner as she did during the first weeks of his tutorship; then it was part of her always, and he heard it even in her most impatient moments. She welcomed him with it; mocked and scorned with its music, and when he departed its petulant echoes ceased at no time in his heart.

So as months passed and the eyes of the Breton lost their melancholy shadows, there crept imperceptibly into the wife’s laughter a softened, doubtful tingle. It was as though the sadness, which went out from his eyes, was finding its way into her laugh.

“Will you never finish that book?” she complained.

“You do not like it?” He looked up hastily, a shadow in his eyes.

“No!” she answered sharply.

“I have two other books,” he suggested, not turning his eyes away from the crevices.

“No!” she cried impatiently, “not another book!”

“What shall I teach you?” he asked softly.

“I do not know,” she mused vaguely; “but it’s something! something!”

“And you do not know?” His eyes became suddenly bright.

“No.”

“Then it is from God.”

“Please don’t pray,” she pleaded.

“You do not——”

“I know—but it is so tiresome,” she interrupted plaintively. “Priest,” she whispered.

He looked up.

“I know, I know,” her whisper was constrained. “Do you?”

He shook his head.

“Do you wish to?”

He could scarcely hear and did not at all understand, so he made no answer and the questioning in his eyes did not change.

“Rest your ear here,” she whispered, putting her little finger through the crevice.

He hesitated for a moment, then in the manner of a boy pressed his ear tightly to the crevice. For a moment there was perfect stillness, then a hurried, alarmed fluttering of silk.

Presently far from the screen he heard the wife strike her hands softly, nervously together.

“You must go,” she cried, her voice trembling. “Please don’t stand there.”

But before the Breton left that afternoon the dusk of a monsoon storm had darkened the rooms and as he passed through the park masses of clouds as black as the night-sea rushed along across the sky like enormous billows frothed with a grey foam. The narrow streets were filled with hurrying men; shopkeepers were putting up shutters, and barring doors; hucksters ceased their cries; itinerant barbers, money-changers, and fortune-tellers were hastily, silently departing. Sentries left their posts; mothers screamed after wayward brats; beggars sought the shelter of temples, and the chant of the blind was still.

The Breton, instead of returning to the Mission, went as swiftly as possible through the tortuous streets to the East Gate, thence made his way toward their outer edge, where a small Catholic community lived, almost buried under the tumbled side of this vast, old brick-heap—a plastered chip from the Rock of St. Peter.

The streets were now deserted. Here and there people stood in their doorways and watched him pass. Fowls hovered by threshold and children, still devilish, scurried hither and thither—storm-tempters and scorners.

When the Breton reached the edge of the suburbs he turned southward and hastened along the embankment of an old canal; to the right was the city; on his left the fields, and beyond darkness.

There came the rumble-boom of distant thunder.

It was twilight.

No one could be seen; no sounds were heard. Upon the earth rested that vasty stillness which belongs to dusk when dusk is the forepart of a storm. Night birds, day beasts, men, insects, all were sheltered. It was night.

The Breton hastened on.

As he drew near to the Catholic community, a flame of lightning burst out of the blackness; a terrific thunder-crash followed; then again impenetrable gloom was around him. But that flash, as though it were the torch of God thrust out of heaven, illumed for one brief second a dismal scene.

Before him on the bank of the old canal stood a man with head bowed upon his bosom, his hands hanging loosely to his side while the wild night-wind whipped thin garments about his body. At the man’s feet cowered a woman holding a baby to her breast, and, crouching over it, sought to ward off the storm. Two small children clung to his legs. This group did not speak, nor move, nor sob.

The Breton approached them.

“Why are you out in this storm?” he asked gently.

“It welcomes us,” the man growled carelessly.

“Where is your house?”

“It is here.”

“Your beds?”

“We do not sleep.”

“Your food?”

“We do not eat.”

“Who sent you here?”

“Fate.”

“It cannot protect you.”

“Who can protect whom Fate deserts?”

“But the storm——”

“Bah! the storm will come and go with its good and ruin. Fate remains unaltered.”

“Let me shelter you.”

“Where?”

“I am a Christian and near are my friends.”

“You are my enemy,” the man replied with the same nonchalance.

“Your enemy?”

“Leave us.”

“I cannot.”

“You wish the eyes of my children?”

“I wish to help you.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Kill us.”

“Will you not go?”

“Owls consort with owls; finches with finches.”

“My wish is to help you.”

“To-day you took away my house and gave it to Chun Ping, who is a Christian, a river-pirate, a buyer and seller of stolen goods. You know this, the mandarins know this, but you work together, you do these villainies together—weak governments and powerful gods sleep in the same bed.

“How many years have I sweated that I might have that little house? What man can say I am not honest? That I did not give alms to the blind and cash to the gods in the Temple? Did I not intend to save money that my sons could study and take the Examinations? Now—it is all gone.

“Chun Ping wanted my house; he went with your priests and said it was his. The priests said it was his house. I went to the Yamen and showed them my red deed and white deed. They said, ‘It is your house; give us money and we will protect you.’ I gave them all my money. They gave my house to Chun Ping. They said, ‘We dare not offend these Christians; they have gunboats in the river. Go away.’ To-night your priests came and put me out.”

The Breton made no answer.

When the lightning flashed again it showed two men standing silently over the woman and children.

The black breakers of the storm-sea overhead began to fall amid the crash and boom of thunder.

The children were terror-stricken; the mother sobbed and cooed. The priest stared out into the night toward the Catholic community.

The storm grew worse and the still group bowed under it. The teeth of the little children chattered, but they did not cry nor speak. The mother had ceased her sobs and no longer cooed to her baby.

“We must go!” said the Breton, and he took up one of the children; the man picked up the other and a cage in which fluttered a bedraggled bird. They started off and the mother with her baby hugged tightly to her breast, followed.

The Breton, leading the way, went up to the door of a house and knocked.

No answer.

He went to another.

“Who knocks?” demanded a man from within.

“We are caught in the storm.”

“Who are you?”

The priest turned to the man behind him.

“Tsang.”

“It is the family of Tsang.”

There came no response. He knocked on the door again, but it was useless. So they went on, in the reek of rain and wind-blasts, from house to house.

Suddenly the man Tsang stopped. He beat violently on a door.

“What do you want?” growled a rough voice from within.

“My house!”

“Who are you?”

“I am Tsang.”

“You are a rat.”

“I am an honest man. Give me my house.”

“Give me your wife. I am cold.”

“Christian!”

“The eyes of your brats are worth two taels. Their spleen is useless.”

“I will raise a mob and destroy you.”

“The Christian gunboats in the river will tear you into rags.”

“You have destroyed your ancestral tablets.”

“I cooked to-night’s rice with yours.”

“You may deceive men, but you cannot close the eye of Fate. You will yet be cut into a thousand pieces.”

“Bah! The Law is a rusty knife, my Church is a new cannon. They dare not question me.”

“By the Temple of the One God, you have a shop to receive stolen goods.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You stole the jade-tablets from the Ancestral Hall of Ho.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You were aboard the pirate junk that killed thirty people near the Lob pagoda on the fifth day of the last moon.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You stole the daughter of the Widow Chin and sold her to a whoremonger.”

“You had none old enough.”

“You cannot escape. Fate will overtake you though the Yamen runners fail.”

The priest took the man’s arm and dragged him away.

They trudged on, whither? This thought did not occur to any of them. They now forgot the wind and the waters that flowed underfoot. To the man Tsang this raging of the elements seemed a natural portion of his ruin. He became part of this environment of wrath and was contented in it. The storm was companionable. This tempest and the man held converse, which was friendly.

The Breton led the way while the mother trudged on behind. This woman hardly knew that she was turned out of doors and was wandering about in the night through a wreck of waters. What did she care for these rending winds; this night vomit of heaven; these red forks of fire or blare of thunder?

Her babe suckled.

So they went on in single file until suddenly the little boy on the Breton’s shoulder began to cry, which was next best to the stopping of the storm.

The Breton turned to the man.

“Where can we find shelter for your wife and babies?”

“In to-morrow.”

“But to-night?”

“Let us go to the river.”

“Why?”

“We can drown.”

“When men fear death less than poverty, should they not be held in contempt?”

“It is true.”

“We must find protection.”

“Let us go to your Mission.”

“You hate Christians.”

“I despise them!”

“We cannot.”

“Then let us go to the Temple of the Five Gods. It stands to reason that five gods have more compassion than one.”

The man now led the way. The woman still followed, falling behind like a tired dog, and like a dog she made no complaint. Often they stopped and, halting, waited for her; when she caught up, this mother would give a long whistling sigh and sink down in the mud.

“Come,” said the man, “we must hasten or the Temple will be overcrowded.”

“With whom?” asked the Breton.

“With rags and lice.”

“What?”

“Yes, the temples in the Middle Kingdom are now only the refuge of beggars—as in your country they are filled with plotters.”

“Are there no robbers?” asked the mother feebly.

“No,” he replied consolingly. “Fate is impartial—our temples have only vermin; the beasts were reserved for this priest’s Church.”

Presently they reached the outer gates of the Temple of the Five Gods; it was ajar. They crossed the court, where the water reached high above their ankles, and ascending the granite steps hesitated on the threshold. They lingered, uncertain before the huge doorway, which looked like the entrance to some abyss, then the Breton stepped in, closely followed by the man and the woman.

The lightning’s glare lit up dimly, momentarily, the temple’s vast hall, where dark heaps of shadowy forms were huddled along the sides. At times these heaps shuddered, and from out of the depths of them came groans.

At the farther end of the temple’s hall, on a huge ebon altar, were the images of the Five Gods. And when the red flare of lightning inflamed their terrible eyes, these gods looked down upon the sprawling wreck of man and grinned.

Toward these monsters the Breton made his way, followed by the man Tsang and the mother. Close by the altar they found a vacant spot where they crouched, while the wind that came through the great entrance blew full upon them. The child in the Breton’s arms shook with cold, and taking off his robe, he wrapped it about the little thing.

The mother cooed and talked to her baby.

Presently they all nodded and slept—except the Breton and the Five Gods above him. The child’s chubby face rested softly, securely against his neck, and that indefinable murmur of its sleep gave him a strange thrill of comfort. In the slumber breathing of a child, as in the breath of solitudes, are awakened memories and thoughts, which altogether might be called the symphony of revery. And the Breton heard in the child’s sleeping sighs a voice, which vanquished the blackness of the night.

Without this refuge of the forsaken pounded the deafening chum of wind and rain and thunder. But the priest, crouching in front of the altar, listening to the echo of another voice, heard nothing. The gods looked down upon him and—smiled.

CHAPTER SIX
A GIFT

The monsoon, with its wrack and pain, passed away much in the manner as the man Tsang said it would; for the monsoon repletes more than it destroys, and the prayer that goes up for it is a great prayer.

“I was alone to suffer,” commented the outcast complacently, “but in the vomit of the monsoon Fate relented and the priest came.”

Just outside of the Bamboo Gate in the easterly part of the southern suburbs, close to where the alley of the Old Dog opens kennel-like into the Street of Ivory-workers, the Breton provided a home for Tsang’s family, and thither the street currents drifted him more often than he knew. The little Tsangs toddled out to meet him, climbed upon him, smeared his robe with rice and kale, kissed him, prodded his blue eyes, and cried when he went away. The man Tsang revered him and cautioned his neighbours that Fate had peculiarly redeemed this one priest out of the whole utterly damned tribe of them all.

“Why is it?” demanded one of his neighbours.

“How do I know!” answered Tsang indignantly. “Such things belong to Fate, and, neighbours, don’t woman Fate, don’t spy, don’t peep!”

While the Breton went every few days to Tsang’s hole in the Kennel of the Old Dog, yet he came always by evening to the bund where a certain murmur rising from the river softened the grind and crunch of the city’s toil. Some days, as on this day, which was the fourth of the fifth moon—other noises in addition to its murmurs came from it and the rasped, bruised milling of man was completely drowned in them. On this day the river revelled in the gaiety of those whom it fed, and all the careless joy, the wine, the froth, and ribbons of Yingching laughed there. Wherever the eye could reach were seen the tatters and tinsels of ten myriads silks swishing and fluttering in the river wind. The buildings along the bund pulled over their time-pocked and shrivelled forms robes of satin. Sea-going junks hovered above the river like gigantic butterflies, their great ribbed sails turned into gorgeous, trembling wings of silk. The flower-boats along the southern bank were voluptuous in silken wraps; their eaves ear-ringed with lanterns, while on their flower-clustered balconies crowded dainty pouting creatures, their music and laughter mingling with the joy of the day. Among these winged junks and flower-boats darted slender slipper craft like gay-breasted swallows, twittering, perking, and quivering in mid-currents.

Nothing can exceed the gaiety of this sombre river during the Festival of the Dragon boats; and when the Breton came to the bund on this day—which in Western chronology comes in June—he found it in a gay swelter of excitement. On this day were the races of the Dragon boats; and the cleared course, which extended from the west side of Pakngotam’s black pool to the Island of the Sea-Pearl, was lined with boat-loads of gesticulating spectators, howling and chattering as the Dragon craft rushed up and down stream, propelled by naked, sweating demons and urged on with cries, gongs, and flags.

But these unaccustomed pleasure sounds, emanating from a river that of itself mourned and was sombre, were lost upon the Breton as he stood over the bund’s edge dreaming, listening alone to the murmur underfoot. The rattle of hucksters, the scoldings and screechings of old boatwomen, the men’s voices nonchalantly cursing or chanting in falsetto tones the theatricals of the river, the splash of oars, burst of crackers, cries of children in their sports, the shrill songs of slipper boat-girls, the howl and clangour of the Dragon boats and the dull pandemonium that rose from the goals did not cause him to raise his head nor turn away from the yellow waters. It mattered in no way to him that the loom of life, always dully clangorous about this bund, wove upon this day a few bright strands through its warp of gloom. He did not look up nor make note of it, for he was no longer of its woof nor its warp nor the ravelled ends that fell by the loom.

Within the quiet places of the Breton’s love the world nor its noises could not penetrate. Only gentle thoughts made their way thither, invoking feelings deeper than themselves; thoughts veiled from the world and such that even he must fall into deep communing to lift apart their shadowy screen. He revelled in that fair region where there are no paths nor guideposts—the wilderness of meditation. With unuplifted eyes he paced on through groves where none had gone before him nor shall follow. Love danced ahead of him, thought ambled after. Now he stopped to listen to music; now to laughter that was more than music, now to chidings that were a little of both. Sometimes he lingered over a slumbering, sensuous rustle that drew down from heaven the inspiration of a dream.

So the Breton cared in no manner what the world might do around him, whether it toiled along—as it did ordinarily—on all fours, or rushed wildly exuberant into the morrow. Whatever it might be he had a region separate from it—a region where the running brooks of thought had no end of babbling, where the wind scattered its stars without number, and in its horizonless heaven the fairy tumbled clouds were imaged and tinctured with the iridescence of meditative love.

Thus the Breton lingered on the bund until dusk passed into night to scatter the noises around; then he came forth from the region of his dreams with the slight semblance of a smile on his lips and hastened to the Mission.

Often, however, he was awakened from midst of these dreams and ruthlessly snatched out of his heaven by no less a personage than his new acquaintance the Reverend Tobias Hook. Fortunately or otherwise, as it may prove to be—the Reverend Hook came often to the bund when the Breton was there. It was too evident that he did not come solely for recreation, or to breathe in that open spot the river’s wind, since he spent his time, either in extolling the charms of some new nymph he had discovered in the river or in the wilderness of Yingching and whose conversion he was about to undertake in spite of Mrs. Hook; or he expatiated without end concerning the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, where Yu Ngao, the last of the Ming Emperors, sought refuge with his retinue and imperial treasure—to be seen not again by mankind.

At first the Reverend Hook was chilled by the dreamy indifference of the Breton, and it was only after he had found that silence was a part of the priest’s nature that he unloosed his endless chain of information and argument concerning these caverns from whose mysterious depths no man has even been known to return. The gaining of this knowledge had been one of his chief pursuits, a task he had found delightful with expectation, and he believed in due time would not be without its rewards.

From every source, from legends and histories, he had collected information concerning these caves, all of which he unfolded as he coaxed and argued, tilting himself on his heels and toes in his pleadings with the Breton to go with him to these Grottoes, where the Great Earth Dragon guards so zealously the melancholy secret of the Emperor.

The Breton listened but did not go, nor did he even make reply.

“And why not, sir, why not?” the Reverend Tobias Hook would demand shrilly, cocking himself on his toes.

The Breton did not answer.

Fate was yet to drive him thither.

This day the Reverend Hook came later than usual, and had not talked with the Breton long before he pulled a roll of papers from his coat pocket and began on his favourite subject—the treasure in the Dragon’s Grotto.

“Young sir,” he continued reprovingly, “you must undress your mind of any thought that I burrow for personal gain. Disillusionate yourself! I scorn, sir, that puffed Huckster, that old dealer, who bundles up men’s honour and upon the open market of the world traffics in their virtue. I am an antiquarian, sir, a subterraneous hunter.

“Of course,” he added in a modified tone, “it would be but right for me to adorn my sideboard with a few platters and pitchers of gold, a few jade vases and urns for my parlour; a reserve of pearls and emeralds to cool the hot distemper of my wife,—which, my young friend, cannot be too few,—for she falls into the most parboiled ecstatics not less than once a day. Sometimes in the very middle of the night a sudden thought pierces her in a tender spot and out she bounces; before I can disengage my eyelids from heavy sleep she has me stalled on the floor, rides me with her knees, and plays horse with my beard.

“Now, sir, you see the nakedness of my plans; if I can get hold of the jewels of Yu Ngao, I will be able to ransom myself from these frolics. Ah! if I can but coax her into skirts again I will flounce them with emeralds, and every time she weeps I will match each dewy tear with ten big pearls.

“No, no, my young friend, do not berate wealth, for though in youth it is a mill that grinds out follies, when youth is done it mills the rarest comforts.

“These papers,” and the Reverend Hook unrolled the papers he had been holding, “are maps and other information concerning the Grottos. This is the triple labour of years. I have screwed it out of legends and pulled it out of the deepest records.

“This map,” and he handed one of the sheets to the Breton, “is the route to the Grottos from Yingching. A scrutiny of this one, on the other hand, shows it to be a map of the path leading from the river to the true cavern under the falls. These other manuscripts are historical proofs; they defy refutation, and no man’s eyes but yours have or ever will discover them.

“I tell you, sir, the treasure of the whole Ming dynasty is there, hoarded in the earth’s dark cellars and misered there these hundreds of years by unchristian superstitions. Do you know that if all the Chinese in this country were hunting you in maddest frenzy you would be safe from them in the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon? They won’t go near it. But we, unburdened by such superstitions, can filch these jewels from the Old Dragon with impunity, with gaiety.

“Ah! what a treasure! Cry havoc, my young friend, to reservation, and let your mind’s eye romp through these dim-eyed caverns, where in great heaps lie the garniture of Empires. Plates of gold enough to feed two thousand three hundred and eight of royal blood, cups and bowls to match; pitchers and little saucers as numerous as the golden plaques that lay on the sky at night. Shields, swords, cuirasses studded with jewels. Priceless urns of jade, slop over, sir, with brimming measures of pearls; there are rubies that by comparison would jaundice the reddest blood, while emeralds are so thickly strewn about that they lay in wrinkled folds like moss-green carpets.

“Disport yourself among these hillocks of wealth that would make Croesus’ spirit mundane with envy. Dine from golden platters, splash in basins of silver, play hockey with emeralds, shower the gloom with handfuls of pearls, and with the big round rubies shoot a game of marbles——”

The Reverend Tobias Hook stopped suddenly and peered through the gloom, now ebbing imperceptibly into the quietude of night. The Dragon boats no longer scurried over the water, and the dwellers on the river had ceased their clamour. The yellow flood was becoming darkly sullen, impatient for that hour when man’s noisy hum would be silent.

For some time the Reverend Tobias Hook contemplated seriously the darkening of these waters, then with sudden resolution shoved the papers containing the maps and secrets of the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon into the hands of the Breton, who took them unconcernedly, not even raising his eyes from the waters—now an abyss that muttered.

Soon afterwards the Reverend Hook went softly away, and in uncertain mind disappeared up the Street of the Sombre Heavens.

The Breton continued gazing down into the depths that whispered until night had settled about him, then he put into his bosom the little man’s terrible gift.

CHAPTER SEVEN
DAWN

The laugh of the wife, like her song, had departed. No longer it pealed through the rooms—nor its echo. Her laugh was gone; slowly, imperceptibly had it vanished as music stolen away and smothered by the wind. But neither she nor the Breton knew that it was no more.

The wife of Tai Lin had become silent, musing, seclusive. She no longer contradicted her husband, nor laughed at him, nor mocked nor caressed him.

“She is outgrowing her childhood,” sighed Tai Lin to himself.

This wife of his, instead of sitting on a stool at his feet as she used to do, would remain for hours by the screen when she thought that none were about her but the thrushes in their bamboo cages overhead. By noon or by night, moved by sudden impulse, she would creep through the screen’s wicket into the outer apartment and, nestling in the chair that stood beside it, bury her face in her arms and cry softly to herself with that grief that is very old.

But she was not alone with her tears, nor with the thrushes complaining overhead—she was never alone. At all hours a maidservant hovered about her, and only when the Breton came did this servant retire behind an oval doorway that led from her mistress’ room to an open court. There she concealed herself and listened to the words between them; to their silences; to the going away of the wife’s laughter and the coming of her tears. After a time she began to shake her head, perplexedly, fatefully.

One day, as the wife sat in the outer apartment sobbing to herself, this maidservant stole up to her, and kneeling down by the table, asked gently:

“Why are you crying?”

The wife sobbed but made no reply.

“Why are you crying?” asked the maid again.

“Go away, Kim! Go away!” she cried brokenly. “You cannot understand—I do not know! Go away—please go away!”

The servant left her. But that night when she came to the bishop’s door she hesitated, picked the hem of her garment; turned away; came back, then knocked ruefully on the portal.

When the Breton came to the wife’s apartments he no longer stood on the threshold waiting for her salutation or expectant of her laughter. Crossing the room, naïvely eager, he sat down in his chair and, looking up to certain crevices in the screen, remained silent with a smile in his eyes.

Day by day these silences grew longer. Without laughter, without converse, almost without movement, each sat close to the screen—so close that her red pouting finger tips were hardly over his head, and sometimes through the crevices just above them flashed a light, dark and lustrous.

In this manner it came about that Silence held them more and more beneath its velvet hand, although this stillness of theirs was not mute nor somnolent. At intervals it was broken by a question, a reprimand, a whisper; a word that caressed or a burst of scorn; only laughter came not again. Their conversations were no more than flashes; an ignition, an illumination.

Sometimes the Breton would look up as if about to say something and the wife, breathless, would demand:

“What?”

He never spoke. Yet one day in the midst of their silence he lifted his eyes to the crevice, his lips moved, but only his eyes uttered.

Hastily the wife withdrew her fingers; there was a flutter of silk; constrained stillness.

“Oh, well,” she commented, turning back to the screen, “it doesn’t matter; if a man can’t get ivory from a rat’s mouth, how can a woman expect truth from a man’s?”

He turned away toward the windows.

In a few moments her fingers were again thrust redly through the crevices.

“Are you?” she whispered.

The Breton looked up.

Again there was silence.

“Do you know what it is?” she still whispered.

Once more he raised his eyes to the crevices above the finger-tips.

“It is a rain-drop, priest, iridescent—but trembling on the eaves’ edge.”

While these silences grew longer, they at the same time were drawing to an end. No stillness can last for long in this world so full of noises, and in time a second but greater restlessness lay hold of the wife. No longer petulant, she became irritable, and often impatiently moving her chair aside, she wandered about the room. And as time passed, this unrest of the wife increased until it came about that she could not sit for long beside the screen without getting up and moving uneasily, even wearily, about the room; now by a table, then back to the screen; her hands at one moment plucking flowers from their vases, in the next tossing the folds of the silken tapestries.

One day she suddenly drew her fingers from the crevices, started to cross the room, came back, and peremptorily ordered the Breton to go away and stay away.

“Go!” she commanded, stamping her foot.

The Breton looked up wonderingly and his eyes smiled.

Presently he heard her open the shell-latticed window, then all was still. The larks and thrushes from their swaying bamboo cages fluttered and chirped questioningly. For there are silences that make birds as well as women inquisitive. They cocked their heads, chirped, and looked down unapprovingly upon the priest.

“What! I thought you had gone!”

The Breton turned his eyes expectantly to the crevices just above his head.

“Are you not going?” she demanded coldly.

The Breton rose from his chair, uncertain, but the light in his eyes untroubled.

“Sit down!”

The stillness that followed was not broken until after the feathery shadows of the bamboo had crept across the translucent shells of the latticed windows. Then the wife, very close to him, whispered:

“Priest.”

The Breton did not move.

“Is not this screen a nuisance!” she cried irritably, and her voice would have been savage had it not been for the music of its tones.

The Breton neither answered nor turned his eyes away.

“Priest, shall I come out?”

He still looked up into the crevices.

“Shall I?”

A questioning light came into his eyes.

“Would it make you happy?” she whispered.

The light deepened.

“Well, I don’t!” she exclaimed scornfully. “At its best it is nothing; in its truth it is false. Such hopes men lay to gold and rubies in their mountain caskets: to the cloudy pearl in the jade depths of the sea. Sought; found; lost; forgotten; its gold, cloud—gold and its pearl moon-mist! How ridiculous!”

“Would you truly be happy?” Again her voice was without its impatience; again it trembled with tenderness.

A light in the eyes of the Breton answered.

The birds fluttered and beat their wings against the bars of their cages.

Evening was approaching. The cawing of the white-headed crows could now be heard contending for their roosts in the banians.

The light in the room mellowed, became a rose-saffron, while the wind of sundown blew in through an open window.

Suddenly the wicket in the screen was opened and the wife, leaning against the lintel, looked down at him.

With difficulty the Breton priest rose from his chair. A flush swept across his face, then pallor. He lifted his hand to the neck of his robe; a film came over his eyes.

For a moment the wife fluttered on the screen’s threshold, then came down and sat on a stool close by but with her back to him.

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DELUGE FAMILY

In the phenomena of national life there are certain conditions that force men into such a labyrinthine existence that they resemble, in their bore and burrow, the teredo. These terebrants—human and otherwise—exist to destroy; hence their dignity. Sometimes, like the hymenoptera, they destroy to soar.

The Terebration of mankind—always more or less terrible—has left its wrecks sticking desolately above the floods of Time in all parts of the world, and shall through all ages leave its wreckage. These human teredines, which have existed to a greater or less degree among all nations during every period of their duration, are known by many names. In the Latin countries they are called the Carbonari; in Russia, the Nihilists; Germany, the Socialists—a teredo degenerated into a tapeworm; Ireland, the Clan-na-gael; Greece, the Haeteria. In France there has always been a mess of wrigglers, known and unnamed; in the Balkans is another spew, which are allied to the necrophan, and China, the old and huge nation, has its swarm of teredo in labyrinths also old and huge like itself, and filled with unknown terror.

The Tien Tu Hin, unlike the teredines of Europe, is not nihilistic, anarchistic, or a tapeworm; but is regarded by some as next to the end of the world; by others as the millennium; yet, in truth, what will come out of its two hundred and forty years of boring is not known. Such things are not even conjectured in the depths of its endless labyrinths.

During all ages secret political organisations have had prolific progeny in China, and when a dynasty becomes rotten they attack it like an old pile in the sea. They gnaw into it; devour; eat upward or downward according to the tide. The result is a cyst full of worms. When a storm rises it vanishes or protrudes a stump at low tide.

Secret political societies in China like religions in the Occident, have their immaculate conceptions, stars, signs and noises; the product of which is a founder having the divinity of a god and the respect; who ascends high places to preach; who governs and plays at dumb-bells with the moon. An instance of this was Chang Kioh, immaculated some years subsequent to Christ and a disciple of Lao-Tze, who, also, was not only immaculately engendered, but was eighty years in gestation, born with a white beard, and during his senile infancy wrote in five thousand characters the religion of Taoism. This disciple formed the Yellow Turban Rebels and with them destroyed the Great Han dynasties.

Matrêya, the Buddhist Messiah, has been immaculately foaled, rebelled, and beheaded a good many times in this old land, while the Taiping Rebellion, which started an half century ago and destroyed more than twenty millions, all came about because Hung Hsiu Chüan was the younger brother of Jesus and received visitations from God.

But stranger things than teredines swarming out of divinity have destroyed dynasties in China. That of the Mongols, founded by Genghis Khan, was annihilated by a ditty of the children of Honan and Hupeh, who sang in childish treble:

“Down will Mongol kings be thrown,

When moves the One-eyed Man of Stone”

During the year 1344, the One-Eyed Man of Stone was found at a place called Huanglingkuang by some labourers, who were repairing the banks of the Yellow River. The rebellions resulting ended in the expulsion of the Mongols and the establishment of the Ming dynasty by the Buddhist acolyte, Chu Yuan Chang.

Thus through all the ages of China—and they have been many—this terebration of man has ceased at no time. Yet the Tien Tu Hin, with more than a ten million swarm of human teredo, with more than all the wreckers that have gone before, is still silent. What will come out of it man not only does not know, but its immensity forbids conjecture. Among members it is called the Hung Kia, the Deluge Family; a family so vast and wide that it is beyond our comprehension; it exceeds anything ever conceived by man, and its labyrinths extend from Siberia to Siam—half of Europe could be lost in them. They crawl under oceans to the Straits Settlements; throughout the Malay Archipelago; the Philippines, India, Burma, Australia, the Pacific Islands, North, Central, and South America. This brotherhood of the Deluge Family, bound by the same oaths, actuated by the same principles and obedient to the same commands, has in its hidden recesses untold millions. While there have been directed against it the most terrible penal laws, they avail not nor reach down into the depths where it lives, travels, thrives, and year after year, in its endless labyrinths, becomes more dreaded, its murmur more terrible.

The terror about this society is its serenity and long quietude. Up to the present time it has hardly more than growled, but silently these two hundred and forty years it has been burrowing, burrowing.

A statesman in the reign of Kiuking said:

“The Empire rests on something like a volcano.”

Occasionally there have been sporadic outbreaks, and while some of them have been extensive enough to annihilate many European kingdoms, they are only thought of in the light of incidents, a source for anecdotes.

The hour of the Rebellion is not yet; but will come with a manifestation from Heaven. This may be a red star in the East, or when the Five Flags rise of their own accord from the earth, but more probably when the phœnix sing from the wutung, for at that hour the Man has been born, and on that day from all the fields of the Empire shall rise up those sown of the dragon’s teeth: then will the silence of Ages be broken, labyrinths uncoil, and a murmur come from depths so deep and unknown that even the world itself shall shrink with dread.

The Tien Tu Hin was founded about 1674, in the Province of Fokien, in the Putien District of the Fuchin Prefecture. Here, among the Chui Lien Hills, in a vale charming on account of its solitude, was situated the Buddhist monastery of Shaolintze, built by the priest Tahtsunye during the Tang dynasty of the seventh century. But a thousand years later the monks—whether forgetful or in accordance with the wishes of the Immortal Tah—spent their time in the study of the arts of war, eventually becoming so famous for their knowledge and ability that men came from all parts of the Empire to receive instruction.

In the reign of Kanghi, the tributary state of Silu threw off its allegiance and sent an army into China, defeating successively all Imperial forces brought against it. Edicts were posted throughout the Empire calling upon someone to free the country from the enemy. Chu Kiuntah, a student at the monastery, took the edict and hastened to the Vale of Shaolintze. After consultation the one hundred and twenty-eight monks offered their services.

The Emperor raised them all to the rank of general, conferred plenary powers upon them, and gave into their keeping a triangular iron seal engraved with four characters.

In three months the Prince of Silu sued for peace, and the monks returned to the capital in the midst of the triumphant songs of the populace, while the grateful monarch offered them any offices they might choose. They asked nothing other than permission to live in peaceful seclusion amongst their hills of Chui Lien.

Years passed, and there rose high in court—as in the courts of other nations—two ministers, Chenwangyao and Changchensui, who plotted for the seizure of the Empire, believing that it was well within their grasp if they could get rid of the monks of Shaolintze.

Accordingly they memoralised the Emperor, accusing the monks of treason; showing that since they destroyed the victorious army of Silu with ease, it would not be difficult for them to conquer China. They thus persuaded the Emperor that his domains might at any time be taken from him and begged to be allowed to destroy them secretly.

Receiving the Emperor’s sanction, the two ministers placed themselves at the head of the Imperial Guards and set out for Fokien. But after arriving in the Prefecture of Fuchui, they were unable to find the monastery hidden away among the Chui Lien Hills, and were about to turn back when they came upon the monk, Ma Eifuh.

Ma Eifuh ranked seventh in military skill among the monks, but to all accounts first in lechery, and owing to his hot passion for the wife and the daughter of Chu Kuintah, had been bambooed and expelled from the monastery. It was while wandering about, raging under this punishment and disgrace, that he came upon the Imperial Guards.

That night he led them to the monastery in the Vale of Shaolintze. Gunpowder was placed about its walls and exploded. One hundred and nine of the monks were instantly killed, but the surviving eighteen, still retaining possession of the triangular seal, escaped into a court and then crawling through a dog hole got clear of the burning buildings. Aided by a thick fog, which came suddenly down into the Vale, they passed the Guards and proceeded to the village of Huangchuen, where thirteen died. Hence comes one of the terrible sayings of the Deluge Family:

“On Huangchuen road they died,

And through a myriad years we abide,

They shall be avenged.”

The five survivors, Tsai Tehchung, Tang Tahung, Ma Chaohing, Hu Tehti, and Li Shepkai, are now known as the Five Patriarchs. These five monks, having burned the bodies of their brothers, were proceeding to Chung Shawanken, in the Prefecture of Huenchuenfu, when suddenly—as the Jews in their flight from the army of Egypt—they found water in front of them and the Imperial Guards in their rear.

The immortal founder of the monastery, Tahtsuntze, seeing their danger, sent down two clouds, which changed into planks of copper and iron, forming a bridge over which the monks passed and safely reached the Temple of Kaochi.

After several days they continued on their way eastward, but before long learned that soldiers were again in pursuit, and thereupon they crossed over into Hukwang where they stayed for two weeks. Again narrowly escaping the Guards, the monks fled to the monastery of Pao Chu, where they remained a number of days overwhelmed with distress and despair.

But it was here that they met Chen Chinan, destined, as it seemed, by Heaven to become the founder of the Tien Tu Hin.

Chen Chinan, a member of the Hanlin Academy, had been President of the Board of Censors at the time when Chenwangyao and Changchensui memoralised the throne to destroy the monks, and had vigorously remonstrated with the Emperor. This remonstrance brought upon him the hatred of the two ministers that accused him as being a supporter of the monks. He was thereupon deprived of his office and expelled from court.

Having returned to his home in Hukwang, he was devoting himself to study when he met the monks as they were fleeing from the monastery of Pao Chu. Filled with compassion, he led them to his home, called the Grotto of the White Stork.

So now, when one member meets another and asks him whence he comes, the answer is: “From the White-Stork Grotto.”

After taking care of the monks in his home for several weeks, Chen Chinan took them to an extensive establishment called the Hunghauting,—the Red Flower Pavilion,—where they dwelt until one day, as they were sauntering along the banks of the beautiful Kungwei River, they spied a strange object floating in its current; this object brought about their departure.

Bringing the flotsam ashore, the monks found it to be a large stone tripod having two ears, such as are used in burning incense. On the bottom were engraved four large characters: Fan Tsing, Fuh Ming, Destroy Tsing, Restore Ming. Around these was a circle of smaller characters denoting its weight to be fifty-two catties and thirteen taels.

The monks carried this granite vessel to the top of a neighbouring hill, where they erected an altar of stones. They used guava twigs for candles and grass for incense, water instead of wine. As they prayed to Heaven that a Ming Emperor would avenge the crime of Shaolintze, the twigs and grass burst into flame. Seeing this the monks returned in great haste to the Red Flower Pavilion and told Chen Chinan what had happened.

For a long time this man, destined to some yet unknown end, remained in deep meditation.

“It is the will of Heaven,” he said presently, “that the dynasty of Tsing shall be destroyed.”

When the time came for the five monks to depart, Chen Chinan stood before them, and lifting his hands, spoke:

“Go forth, ye Five Patriarchs, to all quarters of the earth; over mountains and moorlands, across the great lakes and five seas. Transmit from man to man our secret words and signs. Be patient, and Heaven shall in its wisdom manifest the time for the assembling of the Deluge Family.”

Chen Chinan then returned to his Grotto of the White Stork, while the Five Patriarchs went their separate ways to organise the Deluge in Five Grand Sections, and to prepare for their assembly.

More than two hundred and forty years have passed, yet their successors cease in no way this preparation.

The Deluge Family founded, this dreaded assembly of men above whose labyrinths a third of mankind waits to be redeemed by it or be drowned in it—a Deluge of blood: to hurl the world into war and bring out of it Universal Peace.

The Deluge Family—like other families—has acquired in the course of time peculiarities besides that of vastness.

In writing the members use superfluous or half characters in such a manner as to make what is written unreadable to the uninitiated. In speaking they have a vocabulary of their own.

In the language of the Hung Kia, fowls are known by numbers; a goose is six, a duck eight. Beef is called great vegetables, and a fish a tail-shaker or wave-borer. A dog is a mosquito and that insect a needle, while a mosquito curtain is a lantern. Wine is known as red or green water; oil as family harmony and water as three rivers. To ask a person to smoke tobacco is to request him to bite ginger. To smoke opium is biting clouds and the name of opium is clouds travelling. To ask persons to dine is inviting them to farm sand and waves. A teacup is called a lotus bud; a wine cup a lotus seed, and a plate, a lotus leaf. Chop-sticks are golden selectors and roast pork becomes golden brindle. In speaking of the Deluge Family, a Lodge is called the Red Flower Pavilion or the Pine and Cedar Grove. To join the Society is to enter the Circle or be Born. To hold a meeting is known as letting loose the horses. A member is called heung—fragrance or a hero. A non-member is a partridge or wind of a leper. A road is a thread, and to travel is walking the thread. Sometimes the meaning of their vocabulary is unaccountable. An Ancestral Hall is called a privy and a market Universal Peace. In this strange language a bed is a drying stage and to sleep is to dry. A sword is called silken crepe, and a dagger young lion. A cannon is a black dog, its report a dog’s bark, its powder a dog’s dung. A handkerchief is a white cloud, a fan the crescent moon. The ears are known as fair wind, and to cut them off is to lower the fair wind. Cutting off the head is called washing the face. The sea is the great sky, and to murder by drowning is to bathe; while to be drowned in the sea is to be lowered into the great sky.

The members have numerous ways of testing one another by arranging and handing tea-cups, tobacco pipes, and other articles.

One member may ask another why his nose bleeds, and he answers: “It is the Waters of the Deluge flowing out of their channels.” This terrible enigma is derived from a saying by Mencius, “And a Deluge shall overflow the country.”

A member may ask: “Why is your face yellow?” and is answered: “It is troubled for my country.” Or, “Why is your face red?” and answered: “I have been drinking wine in the Temple of War.”

“What do you hope for?”

“The Market of Universal Peace.”

The entire ritual is carried on in verse—a rhythm of terrors—while conversation between members is in poetic form. If a member is asked to rescue a brother it is done by placing a pot of tea with a single cup before him. Should he be unable to do anything with the commands he throws the tea away, but if able, he drinks, saying:

“A horseman comes with might and speed

To save his prince, alone, in need,

And with him comes the Age’s horde

To give the throne to our Ming Lord.”

If a pot of tea and three cups are put before a member he is being asked to take part in a fight. If he consents he drinks the middle cup, repeating:

“Lu, Kwang, and Chang in the garden swore,

To heed Duke Tsai’s commands no more,

And through all Ages let their fame,

Be upheld in Virtue’s name.”

There are thirty-six arrangements of tea-cups, each signifying something different and each answerable with a verse. In the like manner the presence of an unknown brother is made manifest first by some secret sign, which he should answer, then by the repetition of a verse. Should a junk be attacked by pirates and the crew as well as pirates be members of the Deluge Family, the crew repeats:

“Our mast is eyed with Deluge light,

And softly shines by day or night;

Men rob not one another

When in the Circle born a brother.”

Members sometimes teach their wives verses for emergencies, as in rebellions, and should an attempt be made to ravish her, she repeats:

“The sun shines redly in the East,

I wilt, a flower with fragrance ceased,

Fresher flowers beyond are found,

My husband to the Flood is bound.”

Whenever a member needs assistance in a fight, he holds up the right hand with thumb, first, and second fingers expanded an equal distance apart, while the third and fourth fingers are closed; at the same time, the thumb and the first two fingers of the left hand are placed open on the right elbow. To call to battle is to hold the right hand over the head with the thumb pointing upwards. We know of nothing more terrifying than this pointing up of thumbs to Heaven.

When a fight is about to take place, the queue is looped over the right shoulder after having been brought around the neck and fastened in what is called the sign of Shou. A cry rises from those that have laid upon themselves this sign. It is not thunder, not a moan. It is the growl of Eternity, “Hung Shun Tien”—The Deluge obeys Heaven.

This vast Brotherhood is subject to twenty-one rules: Ten Prohibitions; Ten Punishable Offences. In addition there are thirty-six oaths bequeathed by the Five Patriarchs. Death is the inevitable punishment for those that break them.

Oath Seven reads: “If any brother is unable to escape you swear to assist him, no matter what are the consequences. If there are any that do not adhere to these feelings of kinship, let thunder annihilate them.”

Number Twenty reads: “If officials arrest a brother, his escape is most important. You swear to see to this. Those that refuse to give such aid shall die beneath ten thousand knives.”

The last of the Great Oaths is the Apocalypse of this Empire in its gloom. “All ye that enter the Deluge Family, scholars, husbandmen, merchants, industrious labourers, mechanics, Confucianists, Buddhists, Taoists, physicians, astrologers, geomancers, lictors, thieves, pirates, officials, executioners, and all others, swear loyalty above all things. Ye are the hands and feet of one body, obedient to the Head. Ye must bow down to the Five Seal-bearers and obey them. If any show duplicity or fail to exert themselves, let them die beneath ten thousand knives.”

Such is the Tien Tu Hin, the Association of Heaven and Earth: enormous, unseen; filled with terror and serenity; vast, invisible; its labyrinths endless as are the veins of the earth, and like the earth’s depths, asurge with molten lava; calm, portentous, peaceful, terrible; born to avenge a crime; fostered to destroy a dynasty; matured to establish Universal Peace.

By the hand of thoughtful Fate the Breton was led into its labyrinths and became part of it and of its terror.

CHAPTER NINE
THE DERELICT

The Brotherhood of Tien Tu Hin, swallowing in its deluge all degrees of mankind, likewise swallows now and then one of those nameless Europeans whom Fate has utterly cast adrift in those mysterious currents of the Orient Seas.

While not generally understood, yet it is true that most Occidentals, who by choice have drifted heretofore on Orient streams, have almost always been derelicts of some kind. Thither noble scions, criminals, priests, soldiers of fortune have drifted. Some have prospered and some in the wild surge of these seas have been wrecked and sunk.

The flotsam of humanity, like the drift of rivers, like the derelicts of the sea, is but wreckage of some sort hurried along in those irresistible currents that we call Fate. Each village has its little eddy where, round and round in quiet whirl, the neighbouring drift collects. Each country has its maelstrom, a black whirlpool where is collected the debris of human kind. This debris, starting at the top in wide circles, whirls round; swirling deeper and deeper until it disappears through that narrow abysmal funnel. These terrible vortices are never still and never without their debris. London is such a maelstrom, so is Paris, so is New York.

The world also has its colossal eddy, but they that drift upon the world’s currents are derelicts, not debris; it is true both are wreckage, but there is a wide difference between them. Debris is scum; derelicts are wrecks. Scum from scum arises; derelicts may be the wrecks of greatness. Debris is unnamed; the House of Orleans is a derelict, and its princes have died by the wash of the China Sea.

The seas are awash with derelicts of different kinds. Some, in due time, like the hulks of the old East Indiamen, become thrifty, incrustating themselves with spray gusts of silver, and furring themselves with the fur of their drift; a wealth clings to them and they become stranded by riches. They are found imbedded in all Oriental ports, and while they have formed a new environment, they still remain conspicuous.

Again these seas are adrift with derelicts that would succour; as when men float on the sea in an open boat suddenly behold with immeasurable joy a speck in the distance. It approaches, they board it, but only too often to find it hollow.

Derelicts most known are those that destroy. Deserted, forsaken, alone in this coaxing wilderness of waves, they drink deeply of their unrestraint and become master-derelicts of death; hurling themselves, areek with froth, on vessels they sink and on rocks which destroy.

In a fisherman’s hut near by the Bay of Tai Wan, a hovel mud-walled, windowless, rice-thatched, cluttered with poverty, dark and dismal, there lay dying a derelict of this latter kind.

The only brightness within the hut was a floating taper burning before the Ancestral Tablets and sending through the gloom its trembling, hesitant rays. This glimmering light that fell agleam on the tablets lit the faces and forms of three persons, two peasants and a foreigner. The stranger lay upon the only bed in the hut, and the peasants squatted beside him. A clot of blood was upon his bosom, and a red froth oozed from between his teeth, which the woman was wiping away with a wet cloth, while her husband kept his eyes fixed and reverent upon a Great Medallion suspended from the neck of the dying man, and glittering beside the wound in his breast.

This Symbol or Seal consisted of two parts: the outer being about four inches square, but quinquangular in shape and made from a rare green stone found only in the jungled mountains of Yunnan, resembling the green of a tiger’s eye; gleaming, glittering in the dusk. On each of the five corners was a raised gold character, and a golden rim ran around the edge. The second part consisted of a mottled bloodstone placed on the centre of the other, octagonal in shape, about an inch in diameter, and having on its high, rounded apex a gold trigram, the meaning of which is not less terrible than it is unknown. This blood-green stone with its glint of gold glittered with a light peculiarly significant, and the peasant’s eyes grew round as he watched it shudder on the breast of the dying man.

He whispered to his wife: “It is the Great Symbol.”

She drew back with an expression of terror.

“If they find him here, we will be beheaded!”

“Yes.”

“What shall we do?”

“Nurse him.”

The woman wiped the red froth from the man’s lips and the red clot from his bosom.

“If he dies?” the peasant woman whispered.

“We will bury him.”

“And that?” she pointed to the Great Symbol.

The man on the bed moved uneasily; his eyes opened, but he saw nothing.

“He is going to talk again in his own speech,” said the woman, moving cautiously away. “Find someone to understand,” she pleaded. “Who knows what he may say?—and perhaps he will tell what to do with that Eye.”

“I heard to-day that a foreigner was in the village.”

“One of these?”

“No; a priest from Yingching.”

The peasant buried his face in his arms, and for some time crouched on his heels. Afterward he went quietly out.

The woman fetched some clean water, and continued to bathe the man’s bosom and lips. She crooned to herself.

“I do not see why men do these things. If they would only plant their own rice this would not happen. I do not understand what crop they expect to get. When the rice-fields are burned how can there be any rice? When the mulberry bushes are cut down how can there be any worms? When the worms are dead who shall spin silk? They kill, kill, kill, and their killings they cannot eat. They bring home neither pigs nor fowl. Once I said to one of them, ‘Why do you kill?’ And he answered, ‘We are soldiers.’ Now I do not understand that.

“Poor man, and what will your wife say? To come across the Five Seas just to get stuck full of holes. Now who will carry back your bones? I do not know why you foreigners are such devils to fight and to pray. My husband belongs to the Deluge Family, but I will not let—— No, no, you must not get up. Poor man, poor man, I don’t suppose you will ever fight any more. If you had only spoken to your wife she could have told you that this would happen. When men don’t speak to their wives they get into trouble. I wish you did not have that Eye upon your breast. How terrible it is to be a great man; how sorry I am for their—— No, no, do not talk, you are getting blood all over my bed.”

The man, endeavouring to speak, had turned upon his side, and a quantity of blood spurted from his mouth. After that he rested easier, and the red froth ceased to ooze from between his teeth, though it still came from the wound in his side. This the woman continued to wipe away.

Suddenly he snapped his fingers imperiously.

“Cha——”

The woman hastily brought a bowl of tea and held it to his lips, but he could not drink.

Thus as she tended him the hours of night passed. She became restless, and sometimes left his side to peer into the darkness, where was heard only the swish of wing and splash of wild fowl.

There came a mumbling from the bed, then coughing, and another spurting of blood. As the woman washed his face he opened his eyes, bright with the delirium of death, and resting his hand upon her head he began to speak in gentle, piteous tones.

The woman, turning away, saw through the open door the approach of a bobbing lantern. She returned to the bed and threw a rough cloth over the wounded man, put a jar in front of the taper, and seating herself by the door waited.

The Breton priest entered, followed by the woman’s husband and several others. Without hesitation he crossed the room and sat down by the bed. The woman took the jar from in front of the taper, and as the priest drew the rough coverlet from the dying man the light fell upon the Great Symbol. The men that came with him gazed at it for a moment then bowed their heads thrice to the floor.

As the priest took hold of the man’s hand he opened his eyes to look at him and smiled. Then in a low, uncertain voice began a quatrain of college revelry. His eyes closed; he mumbled.

Suddenly he began to speak again. He pleaded and a woman’s name trembled on his lips.

The Breton turned away.

The derelict choked, spat blood upon the Breton, then lay still. Tears rolled down his cheeks, sometimes mingling with his blood to scintillate for an instant like rubies on the coarse cloth. This grief of his was more than bitter—it was the grief of the strong dying, a packing of pain into Eternity. He moaned and brought a pallor to the cheeks of the priest. He sighed and the pain of it was indescribable.

Presently he began to breathe hoarsely, then mumbling, speaking—the speech of his wild life. One moment in combat with Malay praus; hurtling through the water; repelling boarders; cursing, exultant, frenzied and the swish of the kris was in the air. Then followed commands, as when the typhoon is on sea, and in his quivering tones was the echo of the wind’s scream. Fights in the jungle—soft, creeping, peering, throttling. Then in the open, commands, curses, silence.

Suddenly, as he muttered the ritual of the Deluge Family—sombre and unrelenting, he rose up in bed with his hand over the dripping wound. As he fell the priest turned him gently upon his side, and taking the bowl of fresh water the woman brought him, bathed his face.

The dying man opened his eyes.

“Where am I?”

“In a hut near the village of Tai Po.”

“Who are you?”

“A priest.”

“A rogue like myself.”

“You are wounded.”

“I am dying.”

The derelict raised his head and looked sternly at the men in the room, who seeing him look at them, fell upon their knees, striking their heads thrice upon the floor.

“It is well.”

He studied the sad profile above him.

“Priest,” his voice was without its wildness, “priest, I am dying. It is what I have been trying to do for many years—by land and by sea——”

The pain of speaking became too great.

He fumbled with the chain around his neck, consisting of gold links each about an inch and a half in length, and made up of two dragons contending for a pearl.

The priest removed it, and the derelict, taking it in his hands, whispered:

“Closer!”

The Breton bent near to him, and the chain with the Great Seal of the Tien Tu Hin was hung around his neck.

“Never take it off,” the dying man whispered hoarsely. “I—I—command.” His eyes closed and the pallor of death came upon him.

The priest leaned close; all listened, for the speech of the derelict was precious.

His lips moved, and the Breton bending closer heard:

“Alice——”

And so he died.

The priest on his knees held his crucifix over the body of the derelict.

Hours passed, and still the Breton did not move. The stillness in the room was unbroken, and the men crouching upon the floor hardly breathed. The only sounds were the weird flight of wild fowl as they winged their way through the night.

A cock crowed.

Night was ending, and the priest, rising, stood before the men with the Great Symbol glittering on his breast. Thrice again the men struck their foreheads upon the earthen floor.

“At the break of day we will bury him.”

The men wrapped the body in a shroud of rough cloth, and when darkness began to give away to that cold grey dusk that, without being night nor day, is yet the sick pallor of Time, they went forth and followed along the embankment of the paddy-fields until they came to a low hillside close to the sea.

It was natural that this casket of the derelict should mould near the ocean’s wash, for on its turbulent stream he had been blown hither and thither, unknown, unseen, a wreck in its wayward currents. There had he drifted and fought and mourned—a sad and perhaps terrible soul. Well might the sea dirge to his spirit its eonic plaint—that melancholy chant of Eternity. And well was it that they should remain forever together, the living sorrow and the dead.

Low down on the hillside they dug his grave.

A rift of light, almost lurid, glowed just above the rim of swaying waters.

They put the derelict in his grave, and the priest, holding his crucifix above him, stood over the open tomb. Upon his upturned face shone the red light of morning, while a vaporous mist like streams of incense rose from the grave and broken earth around him. As the priest prayed the Great Symbol rose and fell upon his bosom with the rhythm of his silent prayer, quivering and afire in the red glare of heaven.

The men, seeing the Great Eye flashing redly, knelt down before the Breton and rested their foreheads upon the earth.

The prayer ended; then the priest sounded, terrifying in its majestic intonations, the awful Taps of the God of Wrath.

“Dies Irae, dies illa

Solvet saeculum in favillâ

Teste David cum Sybilla.

“Lacrymosa dies illa

Dua refurget ex favillâ

Judicandus homo reus

Huic ergo parce Deus.”

CHAPTER TEN
TWILIGHT

The Bay of Tai Wan, where the Breton had been for more than a month and upon whose shore he had buried the derelict, is a long distance down the coast southeast of Yingching, and is famous on account of the evil spoken of it. This bay and country has a bad name, which is due to God as well as to those that dwell on its wild wash.

The waters of the bay are not blue, but a reddish-brown, and are serrated with the fins of the spotted shark, which lurk in its depths; for the feed in this bay is sometimes abundant, not only when the gale is upon the sea, but more often when men come together. The mountains that surround the bay on the south, west, and north are not high, but they are sinister; their south slopes desolate; those on the north gloomy with thickets. The narrow valleys extending back from the bay are diked, terraced, and made into paddy-fields, or are walled and made into towns, armed, forbidding. The lowlands below them are also dammed from the sea tides, and in those places not suitable for rice are salt pans, where the sea is evaporated for its salt.

The men that live on the Bay of Tai Wan have no settled occupation. They are farmers when the time comes to sow rice and to harvest it; they are fishermen, who know the bed of the sea; smugglers in their peaceful moods, but pirates always, and months are few when their mountains do not resound with the noise of combat; when the brown surge of the bay is without loitering spars, or dead or wreckage.

The secrets of this turbulent place, the fights fought there; the deeds of valour; the hopes and the end of hopes—gone down in its depths are without number. To look upon its waters is to shudder; to live there is to fear neither God nor His judgment; to go there requires the courage of a child, so the bishop had sent the Breton.

The priest, leaving Yingching at daybreak, sent no word to the wife, but went away happy in that nameless credulity, which belongs ordinarily to neither man nor woman, but only to children or such as he. And yet the Breton was not to blame, for happiness was the cause of it. Many weeks had already passed since the wife had opened the wicket and had come down to sit beside him—weeks that had vanished with the brevity of a dream.

Each day she fluttered for a moment on the threshold, then came down and seated herself near him; but it always remained as the first day, a vision, a tremor, a silence. The wife sat with her back to him, and not often did the Breton dare to raise his eyes nor even glance furtively at the beautiful contour of her neck and shoulders, nor at the delicate bloom that crept back from her cheek. But sometimes there was a quick turning of her head, a flash of light—then he trembled.

The happiness of all this nearness, stillness, and flashes brought about no change in the outward demeanour of the Breton. There is but little difference in appearance of a torrent at half flood and nearly at full flood. Only the beginnings and what ensues from it are noticed. The flood was still rising, and when the Breton was sent by the bishop to the wild Bay of Tai Wan, he left as he had remained during the past weeks, dreaming, without smiles, joyous, silent.

The priest’s journey was distant, and his stay among these turbulent sea-dwellers had been long; but he had much to do to keep him busy; much to remember and dream about, which kept him happy.

The people had received him with scowls, suspicion, and threats. In the market place of Hsia Wan a rock thrown at him struck a boy hooting by his side. He dressed the wound. Crossing a narrow islet to the village of Yat Ho, his boat was purposely overturned; without a word of remonstrance or show of concern, he paid the boatman and went on his way. At midnight he passed through the tiger-infested woods of Foshui and Sanshu from Tai Po to the hut of the fisher. In this way it was not long before his dreaminess was construed into fearlessness and admired by those amphibious bandits of the bay. And whomever a Chinese pirate admires men should stand in awe of or look upon him as a child.

The Breton went about his duties without cessation except at dusk, and then, when those about him had ceased their labours, he would seek the solitude of the sea-bank as he had that of the river. It is doubtful if he perceived that instead of the great city with its lessening but varied noises there were behind him mountains down whose desolate sides came gloom instead of twilight, while the only sounds that rose from them were the bark of jackal and scream of night-bird. Not after the hour of sundown were to be heard at all the hard noises of labour, nor the wild mutter of these sea-dwellers in their daily life. When the evening guns had boomed from the walls of their villages and from their low long boats at anchorage had come the last roll of kettle-drum, the clash of cymbals, and burst of crackers, a deep silence brooded over all except cries from the mountains and the sea’s muffled splash.

As dusk deepens this Bay of Tai Wan takes on a terror of its own. By day its waters are a reddish-brown, and its wave-crests look like yellow floss; by night it is black, and its wave-crests flashes of fire. This strange phenomenon is due to the fact that the sea along this coast teems with phosphorescent protozoa, making it a red-brown by day, and when night falls there is seen in every movement of the waters a glint of green fire. Wave-crests moving shoreward are as an endless flight of monstrous fire-flies. Where the sea breaks on the wash and rocks the spray becomes a shower of green sparks, so that the shore-line burns with a cold, livid fire. Among the flame-crests are seen zig-zag lines—the fiery trace of shark fins. Sometimes a green coal glows in the blackness, a tortoise floating in the break of the sea; sometimes a swarm of flying fishes rise from the waves, their scales and membranous wings adrift with a green fire, and for a moment their flight is ghastly. Looking down the edge of a cliff the shallow sea is filled with monsters aflame. Man never witnessed a more horrible sight than the sea at Tai Wan by night. Nothing that moves escapes the clinging protozoa: fish darting through the blackness have every scale, spine, maw, and tooth covered with this ghastly glow; the hairy legs and bodies of sea-spiders, their protruding eyes and fangs glitter in frightful luminosity; gleaming snakes glance through the depths. Squids sometimes hide their fire-covered bodies in a black vomit, but crustacea, sea-toads, and larvæ all burning in this livid fire wriggle about under the black waters.

It was over this sea that the Breton dreamed and was joyous; it was by this sea that he buried the derelict whose chain and Seal he wore under his robe—a promise to the dead, but in due time to be more precious to him than all the jewels that have bedecked men, and more powerful than Empires.

The Breton once more stood before the screen, eager, hesitant; straining his ears for the music of a silken rustle; his eyes for one pink finger-tip. He waited a long time, but heard nothing, nor saw even one little finger resting shyly in a crevice.

“What, you here?”

He raised his eyes joyously.

“Well?”

“I have come back,” his words were almost inaudible.

“Indeed!”

He looked down happily.

“How did you happen to return? Did I send for you?” The voice of the wife was cold, vibrant.

The Breton’s eyes wandered contentedly from crevice to crevice.

“Sit down!” she petulantly commanded.

There was silence.

“Where have you been?”

“To the Bay of Tai Wan.”

“Why did you go?”

The Breton, discovering in the crevice a little finger, did not answer.

“Oh, very well! I suppose you were glad. It must have been a great relief. I was getting tired.”

Heedlessly the Breton heard the stamp of her foot and contentedly waited, though no sound was heard but its restless, impatient tapping.

“Why did you go away?”

“I buried a man——”

“Did that take you all these weeks?”

“No—but——”

“Priest!” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t give me excuses! Those veiling rags under which men hide their scared swarm of sins! Bah!”

He looked happily expectant at the crevices just over his head.

“Oh, well, it is immaterial,” she continued coldly, carelessly; “you are only my instructor. Come and go when you please. I have sought your learning, not you.” Her foot tapped measuredly. “Learning satisfies every craving of the heart, man—nothing. Learning is steadfast; a friend, who coaxes away the weariness of hours, hueing dull days with treasures from forgotten time, a wealth from the ends of the earth. It has a hundred attributes; man—not one. It is a cloak for chilled age, a balm for pain, an ointment for misfortune, and man—Oyah!”

The Breton thumbed contentedly the leaves of his book.

Presently the tapping of her foot ceased. He heard the soft, sensual rustle of her garments, then the wicket opened.

The pink had gone out of the wife’s cheeks; her face was pallid and her long lustrous eyes looked larger yet from the darkness that was under them.

The Breton glanced furtively at her as she came down and sat with her back to him.

“I am——” he ventured, uncertain.

“Yes?” she drawled, turning her head slightly toward him.

“I have thought about it.”

“Indeed!”

“Have I——”

“Oh, yes,” she interrupted coldly, “your teaching has been quite delightful; so learned.”

“I was away a long time.”

“Yes?”

“I hastened back.”

“On account of my studies, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he apologised.

“How thoughtful of you!”

“I could not——”

“Oh—it did not matter. No doubt if it had not been for the lessons you would not have come.”

Something in her tone made him look furtively at the pale altered contour of her cheek.

“Of course not!” she exclaimed vexedly. “How could I ask such a thing! It would be very annoying were it not for the instruction!”

“I enjoy——”

“Oh, you do! Don’t you suppose I know that? Instruct! Instruct! Instruct! I am tired of it!”

“You——”

“No, I don’t!” she interrupted savagely. “What is the good of all this learning, all these black books? Who loves me any more for it? Does it add a dearer pink to my cheek?” She turned her face partly toward him and in her voice was a wave of pain. “Do you think it gives lustre to my eye or music to my words?” Her tones became mocking. “Do you really think it will puff away wrinkles? A cosmetic, a tire-woman, a——” She stamped her foot peevishly. “I tell you, priest, I will have no more of it, never!”

“Learning enlightens,” said the Breton aimlessly, “as a mirror——”

“Oyah! A mirror! So is a tub of water holding the image of the sun, but what warmth comes from that reflection? I would like you to tell me, priest, with all your learning, what there is substantial in a reflected image? What if learning were the painting of the world’s ocean acts, could fish dwell in its mock waters? And I would like to know if there is the fragrance of one rose in ten myriad miles of embroidered flowers?”

He did not reply, and again came the half-kindly truce of silence, but only half, for there was still the tapping of her foot. And how varied is that speech! What a world of meaning is in the tapping of a woman’s foot! So the Breton listened, wonderingly to the thoughts that came from the tap, tap, tap on the marble floor.