CHAPTER XX
What Wu Did in Proof of Love
WU, when he had laid Nang Ping on her mats and covered her, went to his library, and sat thinking through the night.
When he had lifted her, he had not glanced at the Englishman, nor had he even looked in the direction of prison or prisoner since. The servants had their orders. Those orders would be obeyed. With Basil Gregory, Wu had nothing more to do—yet.
All night long he scarcely moved by so much as the drumming of finger or toe, by so much as the quiver of a lash. None of Nang Ping’s restlessness was shared by him. He was beyond restlessness. His agony was absolute. Mothers suffer acutely when daughters “fall”—good mothers and bad. But such mothers’ sorrow can never equal the red torment of fatherhood so punished. Nature holds stricter justice between sex and sex than she is credited. And such partiality and unfair favoritism as he does show now and then is given, as is the gross favoritism of man-made laws constantly (in Europe and in Asia), to women.
Analyze what law of life you will, and the resultant conclusion will have something to testify of Chinese wiseness. The punishment of a crime never falls solely upon the direct miscreant. Blood and love must pay their debt. And the Chinese legal code which allows and decrees that kindred shall suffer (even to capital punishment) for a kinsman’s crime is less fantastic and less fatuous than it seems to Western minds.
Basil Gregory and Nang Ping had sinned. Wu and Florence Gregory were to be punished with them. And because Nature forgives man less than she forgives woman, the sharper, surer punishment was to fall on the father and the son.
Compared with one year in Wu’s life, the joy Nang Ping had stolen in the garden was but “as water unto wine.” And, suffering now to her sharp young utmost, she was suffering less than he.
When day came he rose, as Nang Ping did, and went to the window. Her room was on the one higher floor; his looked almost level with the garden—his own garden. For he too had his own private pleasance, taboo to all, unless expressly bidden there. And Wu rarely gave that permission, even to Nang Ping. That bit of garden was his outer solitude, and this room was his indoor privacy. It was here and there he kept alone.
No race prizes privacy more, more realizes its value, conserves and guards it with more dignity and skill, or with so much. A people of interminable clans, knit together and interdependent as is no other people, yet it is with the Chinese people, both Mongol and Tartar, that individuality has its fullest rights, its surest safety.
Towards noon he bathed, put on again his plain dark robes, went into the great hall and ate a little rice. He had work ahead, much work, and he intended to do it well. He had no more time for thought, nor need. His thinking was done. His years of selfishness were past. He no longer saw or felt “a divided duty.” He was China’s now—Wu the mandarin. Each hour should be full. He would serve assiduously and relentlessly, not with brooding thought, but with action piled on action.
At dusk he smote upon the gong hanging in the smaller audience hall, an apartment half of state and half of intimacy.
Nang Ping heard the deep notes reverberate through the house—she had been listening for the sound all day—and rose to her feet before they died away. She was standing ready at her door when her father’s message came, and she followed the servant, for herself relieved that her waiting was done, for herself feeling little else, but miserable for Wu. He had been tender to her always, and she had loved him with an absorbing love, until the Englishman had come to kiss her face, dislocate her life and change her soul.
She went in steadily and alone, bent in obeisance three times, and then stood before her father quietly, her hands folded meekly at her breast, her eyes patient and sorrowful, but not afraid.
And she was not afraid. Basil was dead by now—she made no doubt of that; the spoiler of Wu’s daughter could not have lived in Wu’s vengeance for a day. There was no more to fear for Basil. For him the worst had come, and was done. For herself fear had no place in her now. Her father would not torture her—that she knew. But she thought that she should scarcely have winced if he had. A slight, slip of a girl, slim as willow in her scant dull robe, she came of a race whose women had hung themselves more than once to honor a husband’s obsequies; and one—a queen—had burned to her death, lighting beside the imperial grave her own funeral pile of teak- and sandal-woods, oil-and-perfume drenched, Nang Ping was not afraid.
Wu met her eyes, and she met his; and his were not unkind.
“Will you tell me all?” Wu did not speak unkindly. And this was the first time he had couched command to her in interrogative.
“My honorable father,” the girl said sadly, “I will tell you nothing.”
The mandarin smiled. This was too grave a time for anger. And he had a bribe that he knew could be trusted to buy from her what he would, let the telling cost her what it might.
He had never bribed his child, not even with sugar-plums for her smiles when she was a babe. But he would bribe her now. Their old days were done, and with them some old principles of conduct. And their old relationship—spoiled now—was drawing to its close.
“You fear to injure the Englishman!” But even that he did not say roughly.
“My honorable father, not that. He is past beyond injury now; Nang Ping knows that.”
Again he smiled. But he only said, “You fear to implicate Low Soong?”
At that Nang Ping raised her eyes to his in entreaty.
“Have no fear. No punishment shall fall on her. She is not worth it. She shall be well dowered and honorably wed soon. She has dealt ill by me, and by you, her kinswoman, foully; but even so, I will not do her an injustice to you. She never betrayed you. In her first panic the slight, silly frog-thing fled—to save her own dishonest skin—but she came back but now, creeping to share your lot, and begging to speak with you. Do you care to see her?”
“I wish to see no one, O honorable sir.”
“I thought you would answer so. Be at rest for her. She shall fare well.” He did not add that he would keep his word. There was no need: Nang Ping knew it.
He called for lights, and when the red candles were lit and the sweet torches in their sconces until all the room flamed with light, and the noiseless servants had withdrawn to await his next command, whether it came in a moment or in a year, he began to speak again. And because he was Chinese, and because he still loved her well, his words were long.
“Sit. Listen. I am not blameless. I shall be blameless from this hour. My venerable, honorable grandfather, the sainted Wu Ching Yu, dedicated me to a great task. I have obeyed him for the most, fulfilled it in the main, but not with the single purpose such high duty claims. I loved your mother. That was most right. Less would have wronged her; and she was fragrant as the yellow musk, holy as the queen-star. But for one celestial year, at her plum-blossom side, I forgot my task; at least I let it wait, and sometimes I have let it wait for you. Not again shall I do so. Scarcely time for suitable penance will I allow myself. I am Wu, and the house of Wu shall be avenged. I shall live for that and for China. My venerable grandfather, three thousand times wise, did well to send me to England. And he bade me study Englishmen closely. But I did ill to take to myself too much of their custom. We have learned too much of Europe. It is well to learn of every nation, but to accept too much from inferior peoples is a hideous crime; and in that crime I have shared to China’s hurt—and yours. You are undone. China is threatened with the loss of all that has made her for thousands of years paramount and exquisite. Sometimes, alone at night, I have thought that I have heard the wind cry, and Heaven sob, and the parting knell of China toll. And I have thrown myself prostrate before our gods, and entreated that China—our China—may prove stronger than her enemies, stronger than her fools. But my soul aches. For I realize that change is in our air, from Canton to Pekin, from Ningpo to Tibet, and that any hour revolution may strike our mighty empire to the heart. The rebel, the missionary, the fanatic and the adventurer, the foe without and the dolt within, press her hard. Her plight is sore to-day. But China has held together longer than any other empire in history. We Chinese never forget, and we do not meekly forgive. Again and again we have seemed to accept innovations, have tried them, have found them unacceptable, and then we have discarded them once and forever. We are in peril now; but the end is not yet. Already the word passes over China, as a breath of summer over the head-heavy poppy fields, ‘Back to Confucius’! And I—I descended from that great sage—I, too, who love China as I did not love your mother—I, too, have betrayed China—and you! I have given you a freedom that was in itself a soil to a maiden. I ask your pardon. All night long I have asked your honorable mother’s, and the forgiveness of my most noble ancestors. You have been to me both son and daughter; the women of the Wus have often been so, and endowed in it with great merit. But in me it was a sin. But from this I shall be wholly China’s. This moon I perform a duty to our house—my last selfish rite. It done, I am my country’s, my people’s. I shall wed now, and give my honorable ancestors other sons, China men-Wus to be her rulers and her servants. That I have not done so before is my crime. I thought to adopt your husband, or if that might not be, he too highly ranked in his own great clan, one of your younger sons, that all I had might go to you and to one you had borne. I sinned to think it. Adoption is honorable, decreed of our sages, countenanced of our gods, but only for those to whom sons of their bodies are denied. A man should beget men, father his own heir.”
He said much more. It was his last indulgence of self, for even his stern resolve yearned over her, and his tortured heart delayed the parting with the girl. He spoke of her childhood and of his own. But of the high traditions of the women of its blood, upon which their great house was built as on an impregnable rock, he did not speak again. He spared her that—his only child, the first woman of her name to err in the degree that is not forgiven Chinese gentlewomen.
Presently he commanded again—and no question now—that she should tell him all, and commanding turned his screw.
“He is not dead,” he said. “He lives. He is unharmed.” Nang Ping swayed a little on her stool and caught at her knees with her hands. “Tell me all.”
“O honorable sir,” she sobbed, huddling at his feet, “I cannot.”
Wu smiled. “All! Omit nothing. You can save him so!”
Nang Ping started up, sitting bolt on her heels, and searched her father’s face with narrow eyes widened and piteous.
“All! And he shall live. Even, he shall go free!”
Nang Ping moaned, hung down her head, and began to speak, for she knew that Wu Li Chang would keep his word. And even this price of shame her discarded love would pay to save her man. Her words came with tortured breath—in gasps. But it was for Basil, and she kept her bond. She told of their first meeting and their last. She told it all—all but those utmost things that never have been told, and never can, and in China least of all.
Why Wu exacted it was hard to say. Perhaps he could not have told himself. If it tortured her, more it tortured him an hundred fold. And there was little of it in detail, nothing of it in essential, that he did not already know. Much of it he knew better and deeper than she did. Perhaps to hear it from her lips was no small part of a self-inflicted punishment he had decreed his scourge since he had been so lax a father—lax a father, and he Chinese! And she motherless!
He heard her in silence—without once a word of prompting or of interruption. And not once did she raise her head or look at him. If she had looked, her faltering words must have died. For his face twitched with convulsive pain again and again, and foam beaded white on his clenched lips.
There was a long silence when she had done, and neither moved.
At last he said, “Is there something you would ask of me, some message you would give?”
Nang Ping trembled violently. But the message her soul cried out to send she dared not speak; and if she had dared, surely she must have spared him it, for she was gentle, and he had always loved her well and shown her tenderness. When she could command herself a little, she said, falteringly, “If Low Soong might have a jewel or a robe—one, from me.”
“Of all that was not your mother’s or my mother’s, or any mothers’ of theirs, Low Soong shall choose all that she will. And I promise you that I will bear that frail no ill-will. It was not for her to guard what I, your father, failed to guard.”
Nang Ping tried to thank him, but she could only bow her head and lay it near his shoe. She dared not touch that shoe. It was an old, easy shoe. She had embroidered it when a child.
“The day grows warm,” Wu said presently, rising and bidding her rise. And when she stood before him, he laid his hand a moment on her shoulder and said softly, “Nang Ping!” for she was motherless, and very young, and he loved her still.
“The day grows warm. Go to the easement and tell me if the sun is on the tulip tree.” And as she moved away, without a sound he seized the great sword hanging beside the shrine and struck her once.
It was enough.
She scarcely moaned—just a soft quick sigh—and one smothered word.
Wu Li Chang caught the sigh but not the word. Surely Kwanyin Ko had granted something of Nang Ping’s prayer, and was merciful to Wu in that. For the Chinese girl had died speaking an English name.
He did not catch the word; but he saw something fall from her dress and roll towards the altar, and he rose and found it—a little scented bead.
And all night long, until the day broke over China, Wu sat motionless and alone in the room where he had played with her often in her baby days, taught her as a child, decorated her fresh young womanhood with gems and love: sat immovable and alone, while the heart’s blood of his only child clotted and crusted at his feet.