AFTERWARDS
As she passed from the house into the garden, moving crazily on--not
knowing why, how or where--the frenzied mother met her son coming
blindly toward the door, his arms still trussed at his sides.
Neither could speak.
But a Chinese woman, coming to them stealthily through the gloaming,
spoke as she reached them. “Clome, me tlake,” she said.
And almost literally she did take them, one on either side of her, each
touched by her hand, impelled by her will.
“No talk,” she whispered sternly.
But she need not have said it. Neither of them had word or voice.
They met no one. They heard nothing--except once the far-off trilling
of a nightingale, telling the day good-by.
For such was the quality of Wu Li Chang. He had commanded the servants
to their quarters, on the other side of the estate, when they should
have undone the doors and gates.
But Ah Wong did not slacken her anxious pace, or let them slacken
theirs, until the shore was almost reached.
Then, just before they were within sight of the waiting boat and of
the boatmen’s eyes, she stopped and untied Basil’s arms. It was not
easy work, although she had a knife. And Mrs. Gregory could give no
help.
They stumbled into the boat as best they could, but not without aiding
hands, the mother and son. Ah Wong scrambled in nimbly. And at a word
from her the watermen lifted their poles--and they had left Kowloon.
They leaned against each other, the English mother and her boy, as the
small craft crossed the bay, but not a word was spoken by either of
them or to either of them. They huddled together dumb with relief and
with exhaustion, and almost numb with the horror they had known.
Unobtrusive, stolid, commonplace in manner as in her humble amah garb,
Ah Wong directed and enforced everything.
Ten million stars came out and specked with diamond dust the grave,
blue sky. The moon came up and rippled with silver and with gold the
rippling water. And before the night-flowers of Kowloon had ceased
to lave their faces with the fragrance which was “good-night,” the
fragrance of the night-flowers of Hong Kong Island rushed out to them
and buffeted them with sweetness.
The world was very placid. The night was radiant. The night was very
still. And the smiling indifference of the night was cruel. At least,
the English woman felt it so. Basil felt nothing. Ah Wong was scheming.
She disembarked them. She paid the boatmen. She tidied her mistress,
and tidied Basil as best she could. She got them up the Peak, and she
smuggled them into the hotel at last, almost unobserved.
“Too tlired talk to-night,” she told Hilda imperatively. And she said
it as imperatively to Robert Gregory himself when he hurried in from
the office in answer to Hilda’s telephoned good news.
It was Ah Wong who sent the news of Basil Gregory’s safe return
spreading like wildest fire through gossipy Hong Kong--not only the
news of the return but the detailed story of his absence. It was a very
pretty story, and beautifully simple: nothing more out of the common
than a slightly sprained ankle and an undelivered chit. The chit had
been entrusted to one vellee bad coolie man--needless to say, a victim
of the opium habit of which one hears so much in books on China and
sees so absurdly little in China itself. Some believed the story--as
started by Ah Wong--some did not. But it might have been true (a merit
such fabrications often lack) and it served, although one cynic at the
English Club said of it that it reminded him of the curate’s celebrated
egg, “quite good in parts.”
And John Bradley wondered.
But the next day the Gregorys and their affairs were well-nigh
forgotten in the greater flare of news that flamed from the mainland.
Mr. Wu was dead, and so was his daughter, an only child. She had died
suddenly, and the shock had killed him--his heart, you know--fatty
degeneration, probably--all those rich Chinamen over-eat.
Again, some believed the story as it was told, and more did not. But
Wu had died on the mainland, not on English soil, and it was no one’s
business in Hong Kong.
John Bradley’s face grew very stern when he heard that Wu Li Chang
had “become a guest on high,” and he went at once to Kowloon. And,
almost to his surprise, Ah Sing admitted him. The mandarin would have
commanded it so, Ah Sing thought.
Bradley learnt nothing on the mainland. He saw his dead friend, and
prayed an English prayer beside him, kneeling down between him and a
grinning, long, red-tongued Chinese god. That was all.
When he reached his own bungalow, he went into his tiny study, locked
its door, and knelt again--at the _prie-Dieu_ that stood against
the wall between the little silver crucifix and an engraving of a
tender, sorrowful face beneath a crown of thorns.
Between the elder Gregory’s relief at his son’s return and his
exultation at Wu’s death, the younger Gregory came off nearly scot-free
of paternal reprimand, and quite free of any real parental wrath.
“Where the very dickens have you been?” was the father’s greeting when
they met at breakfast. “A pretty state we’ve been in!--upsetting the
entire family--and me--and the business! You shall answer to me for
this, young man. Why the devil don’t you pass that toast?”
“I’ve--I’ve only been a short trip, pater, off the island,” Basil
replied, not greatly perturbed.
“I’ll short trip you!” the father said with beetling brows; and the
tone in which he laconically said, “More,” as he thrust his coffee cup
to Hilda was very fierce indeed, but he winked at her with just the
corner of his left eye; Basil was on his other side. And presently
Robert Gregory chuckled openly as he helped himself to marmalade. And
when he was leaving the table he slapped his boy on the back, but not
too roughly.
“Dead broke?” he demanded.
Basil was about to say, “No, indeed!” but he caught Ah Wong’s sudden
eye, and said instead, “Well, yes, I’m afraid I am rather.”
Robert Gregory chuckled again. “I’ve a damned good notion to send you
home in the steerage--jolly good idea; and while I’m thinking it over,
you’d better mind your P’s and your little Q’s. Show up at the office
about three, and I dare say I’ll be ass enough to find you a fiver.”
Hilda followed her father to the door. She always “saw him off.”
Ah Wong at the sideboard continued to select tit-bits for the tray she
was going to carry to her mistress’s room. She intended, by fair means
or by foul, to coax Florence Gregory to eat.
Basil pushed back his plate. He had been pretending to eat, but the
food was revolting.
He was longing to see his mother, and he was dreading it. They had not
spoken together yet.
He was terribly anxious to know if there were any truth in the report
of Wu’s death. Probably Ah Wong knew. He looked at her curiously as she
carried her tray away; but somehow he could not question her.
On the whole, he wished his mother would send for him and get it over.
This suspense was only a little less terrible than his suspense in the
pagoda had been.
But all Robert Gregory’s anxieties were laid. He reached the office in
high good humor. Government House confirmed the rumor of Wu’s death.
And Gregory felt assured that, his formidable (for the Chink had been
formidable) rival wiped out, the only heavy disasters that had ever
threatened his own almost monotonously successful business career would
disperse under his astute, firm management as summer clouds beneath the
sun, and that disaster would not menace him again.
And by the time he reached the club for lunch, he was quite too highly
pleased with himself and with his world, and more particularly with his
share in it, to keep up any longer even a pretended anger at his son.
He chuckled boastfully over “the usual sort of escapade,” and said
he’d “be glad to get the rascal home--back in sober old England”--“no
harm done”--“devil of a good time, no doubt; hadn’t got a yen, and only
had his allowance eight days ago, a quarterly allowance, and the Lord
Harry only knows how much he’s bled his mother!” “But, after all”--and
then he delivered himself of the amazing originality that “Boys will be
boys!”
If there are many men who like to be virtuous vicariously, there are a
few, even odder specimens of our wonderfully variegated humanity, who
like to sin--in one direction--by proxy. Robert Gregory, in the big
thing of life, was an exemplary husband. If Florence Gregory dwelt but
in the suburbs of his good pleasure, he lived--in the one sense--on
an island on to which no other woman ever put her foot. The Gregory
Steamship Company was his adored mistress and his wedded wife. But
Florence came next nearest to his warmth--and she had no human rival,
never had had or would have one. She knew this. Even a much duller
woman must have known it. And perhaps it had enabled her to hold up her
head and go smiling through some hard years of disillusion and chagrin.
But Robert Gregory had a very soft spot in his stupid heart for his
boy’s gallantries. Secretly he was not a little proud of them--of
course, they mustn’t go too far or cost too much--and of this last
escapade he almost boasted as he smoked his after-tiffin cigar--boasted
with an unctuous hint of reminiscent glee that insinuated--and was
meant to--that he’d been a bit gay “in the same old way” in his younger
days.
Which most emphatically he had not.