CHAPTER XVII
The Signal of the Gong
AND then the breakdown came, and she sank down, weeping and distracted, on the long stone seat. Her father in Kowloon! Her father who was almost omniscient! How long had he been there? What had he learned?
Somewhere in the house a great gong sounded—seven slow beats, deep throated as the braying of some bloodhound, but low and soft at first, growing louder, then soft again, all musical, but almost uncannily significant. As the second note beat into the garden, Nang Ping roused herself, and sat up against the seat’s back, clutching at it desperately. She listened in fear that grew to anguish as note followed note. Only one hand ever struck that gong! As the brazened signal died away in the scented evening air, she sprang up and ran distracted on to the bridge, calling, “Basil! Basil!” thinking no longer of herself but only to save the lover who had spoiled her life. Women are like that in China—and in England.
He came at once, and she bent over the bridge to him and said, as he stood on the path he had come by, “You must go. My father! Go quickly!”
“Your father!”
“Go—go now! Quick!”
“But we’re safe here—for the moment.” He was glad of an excuse to leave her, and yet he wanted too to stay, to toy, if but for a moment, by the lotus lake where he had found the dalliance sweet that had proved fatal to poor Nang Ping.
“No, no!” she told him frantically. “Not safe. Safe nowhere. Never safe again. But most dangerous here. Go! Fly, Basil, fly! Before my father’s wrath falls on you, fly! Take the path by the Peacock Terrace and go.”
She had infected him now with her own breathless fear, but even so he hesitated an instant longer, for she had urged him to go; and when is not the man reluctant to go whom a woman forbids to stay?
“Celeste”—he called her by the name with which he had wooed her and never wooed in vain—“little flower, our happiness has been too great, too perfect. There must be some other way: there shall!”
“None! None!” the girl said solemnly.
“I love you, dear,” he whispered passionately.
“No,” Nang Ping said gently, “your love has flown away from me, and the nest of my heart is cold for always now.”
“It isn’t true,” he protested hotly. “It is not true.”
“Go!”
“I will come back to you.”
“No!” Nang Ping’s voice was soft and clear and tender as a flute. “Go. Go, and forget.”
“Then”—he lifted his hat and came towards her uncovered, his arms outstretched—“farewell, Celeste.”
But she turned and moved a little away, not even facing him again. She was afraid to trust those arms, a thousand times afraid to trust herself. “Farewell to life and love,” she said under her breath, smiling wanly but moving steadily towards the house.
With a cry—half remorse, half passion, and something too, just a little, of the brute, grim and primal, not to be baulked of his prey—Basil Gregory sprang after her to catch her in his arms. But before he reached her, just before, other arms caught him and held him in a vice.
Ah Sing had glided like some upright indigo-colored snake from the pagoda—“the pagoda by the lake”—and, springing seemingly from space, one from one direction, one from another, two of the gardeners, almost as quick as he, reached the Englishman almost as soon. Six arms pinioned him, without a word, without a sound. And there was no expression on the Chinese faces of the three—no hatred, no determination, not even interest.
But another man, a dark-robed figure, stood on the bridge, above them all, and slowly he smiled—a terrible smile.
Nang Ping had not heard the four Chinese—no one could have heard them. But she caught the slight sound of Basil’s desperate struggles—he was struggling too frantically to waste any of his strength on voluntary noise. She turned and ran to him, crying, “Oh, Basil!”—no matter who heard her now. The end had come, and Nang Ping knew it. She threw herself in front of him, thrust herself into the seething coil, to protect his body with hers, as far as she could.
With a supreme effort—or did that still figure on the bridge give a slight signal that Ah Sing caught?—perhaps both—for a moment Basil’s right arm was free. He whipped out his revolver. But with a touch of Ah Sing’s finger-tips—it looked an indifferent touch, and the servant’s eyes had not turned even for the smallest space of time from that quiet figure on the bridge—the English arm fell helpless at Gregory’s side, the revolver clattered down the stone step, and Basil, turning his head up in pain, saw the motionless looker-on.
“My God!” the boy cried. “Mr. Wu!”
Nang Ping turned slowly round, looked at her father as if entranced and dazed, then with a scream that cut through the hot air like the voice of a child that had been knifed and was dying, fell prostrate at the foot of the bridge, and lay moaning with her face on Basil Gregory’s shoe, her hands, with some last instinct to protect him, clasped about his silk-clad ankle.