“JUST WITH US”
Between breakfast and tiffin Florence Gregory sent for Basil, and he
went to her heavily. His feet were lead, his heart, his head; and his
hands grew very cold.
The interview was inevitable. They each knew that.
It would be difficult to say which dreaded it the more, or which
suffered more during it: probably the mother--both; for she was
guiltless and made of the finer clay.
It was simple--almost commonplace, the meeting and the short talk
between the weary woman and her son; as every interview of intense and
indeterminable human tragedy is apt to be. There are no fripperies in
true tragedy, but little romance, no poetry. The rocks of life are
hard and naked. Not even a stunted lichen can grow on such soilless
barrenness.
But this was a very different reckoning from that with his father,
jocund and magnificently indifferent to details. Basil realized, of
course, that settling up with his mother must be--very different.
She was dressed for going out, elaborately dressed; for she and Ah Wong
had decided that she must be seen about Hong Kong to-day, carefully
dressed and debonair.
She sat in a low chair beside her dressing-table, her long gloves and
her purse of gold mesh at her hand. And because her reputation, and
Basil’s, were at stake, she and Ah Wong between them had contrived to
banish the yesterday’s ravages from her face--almost.
Basil looked shockingly ill. Any eyes less self-satisfied than a Robert
Gregory’s must have seen it.
“You should go and lie down,” his mother greeted him.
“Yes, I must,” he nodded, “when you’ve done with me.”
Ah Wong went out and closed the door.
Florence Gregory waited then for him to begin. It was the first
unkindness she had ever done him. But she was very, very tired. And in
the sleepless watches of the night, she had seen clearly Wu Li Chang’s
point of view, and not altogether without some sharp, acrid conviction
that it had some justice on its side--rough, terrible, primeval,
barbaric, but still undeniable justice of a sort.
Mrs. Gregory waited for her son to speak, and he did not speak soon.
“Are you all right, Mother?” he said at last.
“I am very tired,” she told him.
“Yes--yes, of course you are. But----”
“Oh--yes,” she said gently, “I am all right.”
“Sure?”
“Yes, Basil!”
“Quite, Mother?” he persisted.
“Yes, Basil!” she told him again, with emphasis this time. And then
she smiled a little, very sadly, thinking how sardonic it was that he
should be standing there cross-examining her.
“Thank God!” he whispered fervently--all that was best in him welling
up in gratitude that his mother had escaped a more cruel wrong than he
had inflicted on murdered Nang. For Nang had loved him!
And then he shuddered sickly at the sudden thought that always his
mother would know that he had betrayed a girl to her death and worse,
a girl who had trusted him--that always his mother would be thinking
of it, condemning him--that all the clean sweetness of their old-time,
life-long intimacy was tainted--gone! Always his mother must feel
towards him regret--despisal. Could he ever wipe that out? Never.
Banish it or even dim it for a moment? Be “her boy” again, if but for
an hour?
He looked at her searchingly, and at his eyes she blanched. For she
read in them his fear, and knew its echo in her own heart. It would be
with them both--always; nothing could ever allay it: the estrangement
that was born to-day! She saw it all! She read it all--his soul, and
hers--and suffered as she had not suffered in the K’o-tang of Wu Li
Chang. And her soul quailed and grew very sick before the vengeance of
Wu, a greater vengeance and a more terrible even than he had planned.
We need never snatch at vengeance with our poor, feeble, fumbling
hands. God always repays. And sometimes it seems as if He, like the
Chinese, enforces vicarious atonement--daughters scourged for fathers,
mothers for sons, and even friend for friend. But sooner or later the
great ax of retribution always falls.
Basil Gregory saw the grief and the torture in his mother’s face. “Oh!
well, then,” he said, strolling to the window, and standing there
looking out across the bay--towards Kowloon--“that’s all right. They
say he’s dead--Wu--you’ve heard it?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I knew if it’s true.”
“It is true.”
He turned back to her quickly. “How do you know, Mother? Are you dead
sure?”
“I saw him die,” she said.
At that her boy came and knelt down and took her hands in his.
And she told him--just the bare facts of yesterday.
Nang Ping, or his own fault, was not mentioned between them, then or
ever. Florence Gregory uttered no reproach. She said none, and she
tried to look none. It is so that such women most reproach the men that
they have borne--and nursed.
She asked no details of his amour or of his capture and detention; and
he offered none.
And it was better so. The burden of their common memory was heavy
enough--a memory from which nothing could ever purge her soul or his.
“What will happen--about it all? He was a devil of a big man among the
Chinks,” Basil said anxiously when he spoke again.
“Yes, I know. What will happen? By the Chinese, you mean? Ah Wong
thinks nothing----”
“Ah Wong!” Basil said contemptuously.
“She saved my life--and yours----”
“By a Chinese trick.”
“It served,” Mrs. Gregory said gravely. “Ah Wong knows her people. And
she thinks nothing will be done--soon, if ever. And we will leave China
at once. I think your father’ll be glad to--he’s been anxious enough to
get back to float the new Company. But, if for any reason he wishes to
wait even a little, why, I must get Hilda to coax him to go at once.
You, at least, must go by the next boat.”
Basil nodded. “Yes, I’d like to catch the next comfortable boat.”
“We’ll all catch it, if we can,” his mother said emphatically.
“Is that all, Mother?” he asked her gently.
“All?” she was puzzled.
“All you want of me?”
“Oh! Yes, dear,” she said brightly.
“Then I believe I’ll go and lie down again. I’m jolly tired and jolly
weak.”
“Yes--do,” Florence said.
But at the door he turned back and came to her and took her in his arms.
“God bless you, Mother!” he whispered with his lips against her hair.
“God bless my boy!” she answered brokenly.
Then he kissed her passionately, and turned away sobbing.
“Wait a moment,” she said when he had smothered back his emotion and
had put his hand again on the door. “I did forget one thing. Make no
explanation--not to any one.”
“What about the governor?”
“Least of all to him. Your father will ask you not another question; he
has promised me.”
“I say, Mother,” Basil said, flushing painfully, “you are a bit of a
brick--aren’t you?”
“I am your mother, Basil,” she returned, smiling into his eyes.
“Remember, not one word to any human creature. Promise me. Let it rest
where it is forever--just with us.”
And there they left it--glad to be rid of it, as far as words went, but
knowing that, waking or sleeping, neither could ever be rid of it in
thought again. It was a poison cooked into their blood.
For years they did not speak of it again, except that Basil said when
she came to him later with a cup of tea--he had slept through tiffin,
and she would not have him called--“What about Ah Wong? She knows.”
His mother answered him proudly: “I trust Ah Wong. Ah Wong knows, of
course--part at least. But it will be always precisely as if she knew
nothing.”
Basil shrugged skeptically, sitting up among his pillows. And his
mother put the tray down and left him a little hurriedly. There is
little a woman finds harder to bear than a man’s ingratitude. Florence
Gregory was ashamed of her son.
She had tiffined early, and before tiffin and since she had been out
and about: shopping, paying calls, laughing, chatting, the brightest
woman in Hong Kong, the best dressed, and the most care-free. And
now she went out again, sitting radiant and chic in her smart chair,
carried wherever she would be most seen. She stayed a little at the
racquets court and at the cricket club. But she did not leave her
chair. She was too tired--almost at the end of her woman’s long tether.