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.

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 phoenix—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 phoenix-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.”

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.