CHAPTER ONE
PRO DEO ET ECCLESIA

It is not a matter to wonder at that the Mission of Yingching was founded during the latter part of the sixteenth century,—an age known elsewhere for its deception and cajolery,—but it is remarkable that M. Ricci should remain the greatest of its bishops though more than three centuries have gone by.

From the beginning of that eventful day when the Viceroy granted him permission to build a little house where he might forget his hours in prayer and study, until he had laid secure the foundations of this Mission, which even Time and innumerable vicissitudes have not destroyed, the life of Ricci was passed more brilliantly than any of his successors. While most of them have faithfully continued his policy, they have done so only with that crudity that is to be expected from the efforts of mediocre men when they seek to emulate the schemes of master minds.

The successes of the bishop had been many; the fruition of his schemes was continuous and like the orange tree there mingled promiscuously together the sprouting bud, the bloom, and the golden fruit. Yet numerous as had been his victories they were all overshadowed by one failure—the securing of a foothold within the walls of Yingching. Many had been the schemes carefully planned toward this end, only, through some fatality, to fail. But the bishop smiled and was hopeful, for no one knew better than he that in the march of ill-fortune there are to be found points of attack called opportunities, which assailed at the right moment end in victory; one must watch and wait; when there is seen a gap or point of weakness, fall upon it—perhaps to be repulsed, perhaps to succeed. So the bishop waited and watched as ill-fortune in a lazy, long column filed by. Often he had made the attack and failed but he was not disheartened nor did his failures ever alter the serenity that men noted on his brow, a serenity that was conspicuous.

One day—which might be called the beginning day of this history—the bishop was seated in his study with a peasant woman kneeling before him, and on his lips played or twitched that peculiar, unfathomable smile which someone once said was the shadowy echo of a scheme’s contented laughter.

“Yes,” the bishop repeated musingly, “you will secrete yourself, listening to all that is said, seeing all that is done, and report to me each day. You must undertake to gain her confidence as much as possible and do nothing that may cause her displeasure.”

The bishop, tapping the tips of his fingers together, settled back in his chair and smiled, one might almost say, rapturously.

“Since this matter is arranged, you may go,” he said, leaning forward and looking down at the woman that knelt at his feet. “But remember,” he continued with gentle firmness, firmness that left no doubt, “that you are first the servant of God and afterwards the maid of Tai Lin’s wife. Never, as you value your soul, neglect to report to me all that is said and done each day between the priest and this wife. Go and obey!”

A hesitant knock aroused the bishop from his musings. The Breton priest, entering softly, knelt down and received his blessing then rising, stood dreamily waiting.

For some time the bishop sat rubbing with both forefingers his high, narrow nose. And as he contemplated the handsome, sad Breton a satisfied smile passed across his covered lips.

“I have new duties for you,” he said presently in soft, thoughtful tones. “Tai Lin, the former Viceroy of Chekiang, has asked for a tutor to instruct his young wife, and I have selected you.”

The Breton made no sign that he heard.

“Do you understand what that means?” demanded the bishop with purring severity as he leaned forward, pressing his bony knuckles against the sides of his knees. “God has intrusted you with its accomplishment, and there must be no failure in tasks imposed by Him.

“Tai Lin is one of the richest men in this province,” he continued meditatively, as he leaned back in his chair and struck stiffly together the tips of his bloodless fingers. “Some say his wealth is limitless; this to a degree is true, for I know that he alone owns the great Erh-tung mines of white copper in Yunnan; the camphor groves of Si Kiang belong to him; the jade mines of Yu-Shan, and those boundless forests of teak that lie between the Me Kong and Song Ho rivers; besides—there is his great park in the heart of Yingching.”

For some moments the bishop sat silent, his eyes half closed, his fingers motionless.

“Yes, that magnificent park, that wonderful park—— But this young wife, have you heard of her?” he demanded, suddenly sitting up.

Again the Breton looked at him questioningly.

“She was a tea-farmer’s daughter, beautiful, it is said, as a wild animal, and though permitted to run wild among the hills and woodlands she acquired some learning the reputation of which, no doubt, spread among the neighbouring villages and finally reached the ears of Tai Lin, then Viceroy of Chekiang. The beauty of this woman must be of some subtle, tireless kind if we are to believe in rumour and the influence she has over Tai Lin seems to prove it. He is less than a child in her hands. He does not seem to have any desire that is not hers nor any pleasure or thought in life that does not, in some manner, revolve about her.

“Strange, strange, that a woman with no other power than fleeting beauty or the skim of learning should rule so absolutely a man accustomed to be despot over tens of millions. It is said that within a month after she entered the palace at Hangchau her influence was felt in all directions. Tai Ling was a Confucian when he married this tea-farmer’s daughter, a ridiculer of all religions, yet she caused him to rebuild the Buddhist Temples of Yoh Miao and Ting Tzy; found hospitals and schools; send caravans loaded with food to the starving in Kwangsi and Shensi. She does whatever she pleases with him. This man to whom the Emperor has given the title of Great, is a nonentity; he amounts to nothing; the wife is everything. What could be more fortunate?”

Again the bishop relapsed into silence, while the eyes of the Breton looked meditatively along the book shelves behind him.

“Such are the ways of God, and nothing is more beautiful than His compassion in so deeply instilling in the heart of woman—even against her own acts—religion’s spirit, causing her to yield to the agency of His ministers and become an instrument in their hands for the salvation of mankind! Thus this very creature that caused man’s fall and the desolation of God’s garden, becomes an aid in his redemption. That villainous curiosity that caused her to spy around among the leaves of the Forbidden Tree still forces her into the thick foliage of her husband’s thoughts; while that insatiable appetite that made her devour the apple that led to earth, still insatiable, causes her to hunger for that fruit that shall again unlock the Gates of Heaven. And just as she tempted man forth from Paradise by the deliciousness of desire, so shall she lead him back.

“If she alone can persuade him to build temples, found hospitals and give aid to the starving, how beneficent will prove her labours under proper tutelage! If she can cause Buddhist monasteries to be built she can erect Roman cathedrals; if she can scatter money broadcast among these hungry heathen, she can fill the coffers of our Mission. But beyond all of this there is something else.”

The bishop suddenly ceased speaking and his black, cavitous eyes closed as he tilted back his head.

“You know,” he resumed thoughtfully, “how our predecessors have laboured without success to gain a foothold within the walls of the city and how we have followed in their footsteps. Now, at last, the Eye of God looks down upon us: this opportunity allowed by Him must not be neglected. You must spare no effort nor fail to use any means to save her soul; to accomplish this end whatever means are employed, God will sanction. Exaltibimus te, Domine.”

For a long time the bishop gazed steadily at the Breton, and the deep silence was only broken by the cracking of his knuckles as he pulled one finger after another.

Presently he lay back in his high ebony chair, and a dim ray of light shafted in from the high-barred casement rested upon his pallid face: his thin, tight lips parted in a smile, while his hands, whitish and long, clasped to his breast an ivory cross imaged with the Christ.

The Breton waited, with eyes lowered dreamily before him.

A few days after the Breton had received his instructions from the bishop he was summoned to the palace of Tai Lin, thence peremptorily to an apartment belonging to his Excellency’s wife, the tea-farmer’s daughter. This room, with its alternate slabs of rose and white marble, its walls hung with curtains of crimson silk embroidered down the centre in characters of gold; its beams and pillars lacquered a dark red and overcast by a tracery of golden filigree, was filled with an amber light that a sun ray shooting through a shell-latticed window diffused among its shadows.

The Breton had stood for some time beside one of the pillars, waiting without restlessness or impatience the coming of his scholar, when unconsciously he raised his head and looked expectantly toward the carved screen-work—a mass of gold and sang-de-boeuf lacquer—that reached to both sides of the room and from the ceiling to the marble floor.

Suddenly a chime of music, which was laughter, filled the room, bringing a flush to his face. The first chime no sooner died away than came another and another; never in his life before had there fallen about him such sounds—like music laughing, or laughter from a bird’s throat. Had that been heard in his native land, it would have been honoured with a shrine. The melancholy peasants rising from their knees before its sanctuary would have said, “Is it not true that Bretagne is under the Eye of God? Over yonder the Devil is buried beneath Mont St. Michel and now the Virgin is heard to laugh.”

So the eyes of the Breton, propped open wide with wonder, stared at the screen. But not another sound was heard until the wife said softly:

“Priest, come—sit here.”

For an instant he hesitated, then went over to the screen and sat down in a chair of teak and mother-of-pearl, which had been placed beside it. He heard a trembling silken rustle, then the room was again filled with the music of the wife’s laughter.

“Why, priest,” she exclaimed in the midst of her merriment, “your eyes are really blue! Who would ever have thought such a thing! Blue! Isn’t that strange!” she added wonderingly.

The Breton bowed his head, but made no answer.

“Look up!” she commanded.

He raised his eyes to the crevices near his head.

“Priest,” said the wife presently, her voice still gentle with wonder, “if your eyes were not so soft, I would say they were sapphires; were they not so strangely bright, I would say they were as the sky when the moon loiters behind the mountains. So these are the eyes of devils——”

The Breton took no notice of her comments.

“And you are the priest,” she drawled presently.

“Yes,” he answered softly, “a priest of God.”

“And what have you come to teach me, priest?” she inquired, mockery and laughter trembling in her demure tones.

“As the bishop has ordered.”

“Indeed!” she commented disdainfully. “And what did he order?”

“To save your soul,” replied the Breton reverently, “for the glory——”

The laughter of the wife interrupted him.

“And he sent you to do it?”

“Yes,” he apologised, “the bishop has sent me.”

“How thoughtful of him! No doubt you will succeed!”

“Yes, God will be here,” he answered simply.

“Why did not the bishop send someone else?”

“I do not know.”

“You did not ask to come?”

“No.”

“Indeed! If he asked you to go elsewhere to-morrow, would you go?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, very well. I may not want you any more. I am not at all firm in my desire, and you are so young. My last teacher, who had had the learning of seventy winters, said the ignorance of youth was really pitiable, especially in men. No; I don’t think you will do,” she commented with candour, “not at all.”

The Breton gazed dreamily through the half-opened shell-latticed window, and only the restless hopping and chirp of the thrushes in the golden bamboo cages broke the silence, or sometimes a dulled sound, which was the noise of the surrounding city in its labour.

“Priest,” her voice came from just above him, and as he turned his head, a ring set with a large pear-shaped pearl dropped from the crevices into his lap. He looked up and tried to speak. His lips moved, but that was all, for just overhead a little pink finger tip clung to the edge of the crevices.

“Oh, you need not thank me,” she exclaimed coldly, “that ring is not for you. It is for your bishop, who wishes to save my soul.”

“Yes, he wishes it,” the Breton answered thoughtfully, as he fingered the ring in his lap.

“And you?”

“I shall pray for you.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, I will teach you,” he added gently, oblivious of her mockery.

“What?”

“To love God and——”

“How monotonous you are, priest,” she interrupted impatiently.

“No,” he answered, looking gravely up to the crevices, “to love God is not monotonous; to pray to Him is happiness.”

“I suppose you pray all the time?” she asked with mock compassion.

“Yes; ad Jesum crucifixion.”

“I never heard of Him,” she commented lightly.

“Our Lord, who was crucified.”

“Indeed! And what had He been doing?”

“He died to save men.”

“How useless!” she sighed.

“From the crucifix came the cross; from torture, salvation.”

“Dreadful! And you pray to Him?”

“Yes; to Jesus crucified,” he answered softly.

“Let me hear you,” she commanded unconcernedly as though thinking of other things.

The Breton, bowing his head, began in a low monotonous tone. “Eu, amantissime Jesu, qui sponsae sanguinum mihi esse voluisti ad pedes tuos prosternor, ut meum in te amorem debitamque gratitudinem contester. Sed quid rependam tibi mi Jesu——”

After the first few words of the Breton’s prayer the wife began to laugh, at first softly to herself, but as the Breton continued, her merriment increased until the music peals of her laughter stopped him completely.

“What a noise you are making!” she exclaimed. “I never heard such sounds!” And she fell again to laughing. “You must not mind my laughter,” she said, breathless, “I cannot help it. You never laugh?” she inquired when her merriment had subsided.

“No.”

“I did not think so. I laugh all the time. But then you are a priest,” she added consolingly. “Are you going to finish your prayer?”

The Breton looked hesitantly at the screen, then resumed his prayer. “Mi Jesu, qui usque in finem dilexisti me? Manibus ac pedibus imo et cordi tuo inscripsisti me, magno sane et conspicuo charactere. Quis mihi hoc tribuat ut sicut tu me, ita et ego te cordi meo inscriptum circumferam. O Jesu——”

“No,” interrupted the wife meditatively, “I would not say that your hands were disagreeable to look at. My honourable husband told me that the hands of foreigners were speckled and covered with red hairs like the wood spider—just think of it! But I should say that your hands are—you can put on that ring, if you wish.”

The Breton did not touch the pearl in his lap.

“I said you could put on that ring,” she enjoined imperiously. “No, on the other hand; yes—— Now, go on with your prayer.”

And once more the Breton began his prayer to the crucified Christ.

“O Jesus quam profuso mi charitatis effectu complexus es qui non tantum manus et pedes, verum et opulentissimum pectus mihi operiri voluisti, ut inexhausto bonorum coelestium affluentia desiderium meum expleas——”

“And priest,” his Excellency’s wife again interrupted with the same meditative interest, “I would not say that it is annoying, either, to look at your face. Do you know,” she added naÏvely, “that I was almost afraid to see you? I did not know what you would look like. My honourable husband has been telling me of the English, who have a wad of red hair on each cheek; isn’t that frightful?” And she laughed softly to herself, merrily as a child.

“You never even smile, do you?”

He made no answer.

“I do not think so; your face is too sad. And I suppose,” she sighed deprecatingly, “that it comes from all this dull praying.”

The Breton was looking sorrowfully across the room to the sunlit shells, opalescent in the latticed windows.

“Are you going to finish your prayer?” she asked with mock wonder.

He turned his head and looked steadily up to the crevices.

“You do not wish it,” he said sadly.

“I do!” she exclaimed, petulantly slapping the screen.

“Salve, O benedictum vulnus lateris tui mi Jesu! Salve, O fons amoris, O thesaure inaestimabilis, O requies animae meae ausimne benignissime Jesu.”

As the Breton uttered these lines, he turned his eyes once more toward the crevices whence she spoke.

“Ad sacram hanc aram ad hoc sanctum sanctorum, accidere ardens que amore cor turum.”

“Do you know,” she interrupted, a subdued tremor in her voice, “I don’t believe that devils have such eyes. They are like the ocean. I was on the sea once when I came here from Hangchau and I watched the waters. I noticed the sea, though always blue, the blue changed. Sometimes shadows swift or faltering crept into it, and oh, how sad it was! Suddenly these dark waters would become light. I never saw such brightness. The sea smiled and—don’t, please don’t look at me.”

While the weeks and then months that followed the Breton’s advent into the palace of Tai Lin were as widely different to the past years of his life as is sunlight to sorrow, yet in themselves these weeks varied but little.

Unseen and impregnable behind her great screen the tea-farmer’s daughter usurped all the liberties of her childhood. She mocked his learning, derided his God, then whispered—which was another way of caressing; and when the Breton looked up, injured yet forgiving, to the crevices above his head, she filled the room with the music peals of her laughter, sometimes coldly derisive, again like a rapturous song dropped from a heaven unconjectured by the Breton priest.

In the beginning only two men in the Mission noticed that a lingering uncertainty had come into his actions; a greater dreaminess into his preoccupation and a brightness into his melancholy eyes. As weeks went on he became more hurried and restless, so that even a vagueness came at times into his prayers. This was apparent to many, but they attributed it to Breton eccentricity, and they would have been confirmed in this belief had they watched him leave the Mission in haste, then after passing through the Great Southern Gate, go forward reluctantly. When he reached the park entrance he often passed it, wandered about, or sought refuge in the Tower of the Water Clock, where dripped, dripped, dripped those relentless drops meditatively from their age-worn jars of granite.

In the late afternoons when the lessons were over and the wife had dismissed him in silence, or scornfully or with laughter, he left the park only to move unconcernedly through the streets, apparently seeing nothing; not even hearing the multitudinous cries and noises that resounded about him. He was drifted along like flotsam in their currents and carried around through their endless windings until, as flotsam, he was tossed up on the threshold of the Mission gates.

At first these street currents brought him back to the Mission more or less quickly. But as time hastened on they began to take him further and wider in their drift or leave him stranded momentarily or longer in some temple grounds, or on the river’s bank, until at last sundown did not find him at the Mission and after a while dusk crept in before him.

One night he sat on the edge of the cloister outside of his door. His eyes were half closed, a faint upward curl fluttered in the corners of his mouth, a fulness pouted his lower lip. He had been sitting thus for a long time when the Unknown priest came and stood looking down at him steadfastly, weighted with intuition—a gaze to be avoided.

Presently he began to talk aloud to himself.

“It has come.”

“Spontaneous?”

“Yes.”

“Fungoid?”

“No; it takes a night to produce a mushroom and only a minute to shrivel it. An instant produces this or a mountain. Ages can not alter it. I know of no name unless it be called volcanic; an upheaval, a something from the depths; made up of scoria that destroys but is itself indestructible.”

“What are you doing?” he growled.

The Breton looked up.

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Are you praying?”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking,” the Breton answered softly.

“A bad trick,” he grumbled as he went on, leaving the Breton alone in the night.

It was in this manner that these two priests, who had for so long a time been inseparable, drew unconsciously away from each other. One dreamed and the other remembered: two extremes, which look alike and which effectually hid from the other priests the parting of their ways. For instead of a single silence—which had been mutual—came one both double and divergent. Two such silences cannot drift together. Nothing is more selfish than self communion.

But as the Breton drew off more and more to himself he did so so unconsciously that his affection for the Unknown was in no way diminished but was simply put away in one of those inner chambers of the heart until—as was destined—it was brought forth again unaltered or changed.

The Unknown priest now went on his journeys alone, and soon drifted back to that solitary, stern seclusiveness in which he had lived before the Breton came. Again he left the Mission for weeks at a time, and the Breton no more noticed his comings and goings than did the others that dwelt in the Mission. Both priests were busy; one dreamed; the other succoured; two things hard to wear out or become threadbare.

The lessons of the wife began about an hour after midday and continued until she left the Breton alone, waiting by the screen. This she did peremptorily, moodily, in laughter, in silence, in mockery. She cajoled him when it was her humour, reprimanded and laughed at him. She questioned, then derided his answers. She wondered and scorned—like a child pouting with hauteur. Yet in the midst of all this the Breton could not or did not care to distinguish one mood from another, for as music is music, regardless of what it expresses, so were the mood tones that came from behind the screen, and in time no amount of scorn or laughter or derision could alter this music.

“What a people you are, priest,” she chided, “to practise benevolence for Heaven’s payment! Don’t you know that men are fools that try to make themselves the creditors of Heaven?”

She lowered her voice to a pleading whisper: “How can you do such a thing?”

The Breton looked up; contrition flashed across his face and instantly the rooms were filled with triumphant laughter.

But while her mockery, her commands, and derision affected him in no way, there were words, however, which were spoken in such inexplainable, whispering tones that they remained with him always. And after he came to enter the park before the hour of midday the memory of these words were so vividly recurrent in the song and solitude of the park that every sunbeam sent them scintillating through his revery. The memory of one word—and he was hid in the cloud of its thought.

As when a rapid rushes down over a cliff and a white cloud rises from the gorge without any will or substance of its own, so did the sudden tumbled memory of her half-whispered words cause to rise and permeate his whole consciousness, a mist-cloud through which passed an iridescence more beautiful, more brilliant than the rainbow in the gorge.

And when the pealing rose from the meadow—a song shot toward heaven—the Breton stopped, held his breath, so near was its song like her laughter or her chiding. Thus each day he drifted rather than wandered about the park as he waited for that hour when once more he should be seated beside the screen. This sombre Breton, moving half-restlessly, half-contentedly among the groves of flowery tamarix and wutung, among orchards of bloomed almonds and lichee; along hillsides terraced in orange and pomegranate; beside iris-circled ponds and down outstretching streams, moved in a sort of a radiance, not incomparable to a bubble adrift. For as a bubble reflects whatever surrounds it, whether upon the banks, upon the stream, or clouds immeasurable overhead, illuminating with inward mysterious brightness their lights, shades, colours, and perspectives, so his nature as of other men took on the forms and colouring of his surroundings and like a bubble tinctured them with a radiance that came from within himself.

Heretofore the Breton’s impressionable, melancholy nature had, as a bubble in the gloom of a caÑon, whirled round and round in sombre eddies. There had been no sunlight since the dim glimmer of his childhood—and all that had been reflected in him whirling along through the cloistered dusk had been a shadow—devoid of change as well as of brightness. But now, as a bubble in the sunlight iridescent with a myriad hues, he drifted along, his happiness modified and yet illumined by the melancholy of a race that has known so little of sunshine and so much of Breton gloom. In this park there was not a flower but whose brightness was reflected within him; every nodding blade of grass, the water-fowls’ gay plumage, the heavens, the mist clouds adrift like himself in the tranquil air; the double brightness of sun in sky and stream. And from within himself, from the very depths of his sombrous nature, shone forth that something, which man has yet to name, and subtly tinctured each image with rainbow tints.

In this manner—not uncommon in life—had the Breton been precipitated from the cloisters; not into the world’s wild meadow, but into Tai Lin’s park. This had all happened so suddenly, so completely, that it was as impossible for him to remember the time when this sunlight had not surrounded him as it was to conjecture that inevitable hour when setting, he would again be in darkness; not the shadow of the past, but the darkness of one that had known the sun.

The languorous flash of the Breton’s eye spoke frankly, even insistently of this change—for the tongue cannot wag one’s thoughts more carelessly than are the eyes loquacious of the heart’s secrets—and one day the Unknown, as if exasperated by his indifference, took roughly hold of his shoulder and demanded:

“What is the matter with you?”

The Breton looked at him wonderingly.

“Do you know that for two months you have not said a word? I doubt if you have prayed. You no longer go with me. What are you dreaming about?”

“I do not know,” answered the Breton absently.

As weeks vanished, or rather seemingly blended into an hour, which had just past, the wife of Tai Lin laughed somewhat less at him, an hesitancy sometimes came into her mockery; impatience fluttered at times in her manner, and silences began to creep in more frequently. In these moments of stillness, when only the sensuous crinkle of silk was heard, the caressing tremor of the fan or the soft pulse tap, tap, of her foot, the Breton leaned forward on the table.

Along the waterfront of the southern suburbs, which were penned in between the walls of the city and the river, ran a wide wooden bund that extended for some distance over the water.

The street of the Sombre Heavens leaving the city through the Great Southern Gate debouches almost into the middle of it, at which place it has the appearance of a narrow field, so wide is it, and so dense and multitudinous are the suburbs that crouch beneath the old south walls of Yingching, with its towers and frown of a thousand years.

Just across the river, with its myriads of quarrelling boats, is the Monastery of Wa-lam-tze, where five hundred monks with their fowls doze and blink in alcoved groves or in halls that are of marble. Opposite the western end whirls the black pool of Pakngotam, fathomless at this place, but connected subterraneously with distant points. A pig thrown into it will be found at Ko-Chao, two hundred and fifty miles away, where it boils up in the hollow of three hills. It is also connected with Chukow, two hundred and eighty miles distant, and comes up for the last time at Shukwan among the marshes on the borders of the southern sea. Beyond Pakngotam is the monastery Tai Tung, where the earth holds a mysterious abyss that is a source of terror and confidence, for the noxious fumes and vapours that rise out of it—as from the cleft in the Temple of Phytia—presage tempests on land and sea. When a storm approaches, even at a great distance, a thick lurid mist rolls out of this Dragon’s mouth and covers the groves of the Monastery. It is believed that these vapours are forced out by the violent beatings of the earth’s pulse, that are no other than the subterranean streams of Pakngotam. These pulsations are caused in distant places by the storms’ weight forcing the vapours through the veins of the earth to the Dragon’s mouth, where they are spit forth as warning of the tempest’s approach. Thus this gigantic barometer portrays not only the commiseration and sublimity of the gods, but their watchfulness over the old city of Yingching.

During low water the bund at the foot of the Street of the Sombre Heavens is used for the execution of criminals, although there is a Court of Execution not far from the southeast corner of the city walls. But this portion of the bund, so wide and prominent, is almost always used, especially when it is desired to make a greater display of official grandeur and the Law’s vermilion majesty.

The Breton in leaving the park of Tai Lin usually passed out of the city by the Great Southern Gate, and following the Street of the Sombre Heavens came nearly every evening to this part of the bund, where he loitered instead of continuing on his way to the Mission. Eventually the bund loafers became accustomed to his tall form standing at evening motionless on the bund’s very edge, his garments blown by the river’s wind, and his eyes dreamily lowered on the floods rolling at his feet.

Men passing him commented:

“Scholar.”

“He is wasting his time.”

“He thinks,” said one.

“A fool,” replied another.

“He is a wise man,” growled a misanthrope.

“Why?”

“He is thinking of jumping into bed.”

“He dreams,” said a boat-woman.

“About what?” demanded a slipper boat-girl with bated breath.

“Who knows, Alinn, when the dreamer does not!”

One late afternoon as the sun hung red in the purple mist, which rises from the rice fields beyond Honam, the Breton was dreaming as usual on the bund’s edge when a sampan gondoliered by a boat-girl glided to a landing stair not far from him. Under the bamboo awning sat a foreigner talking eagerly to her as she moved easily and gracefully her ponderous oar. The boat passed under the bund. Presently the foreigner mounted the landing stage, but at the top of the stairs stopped perplexed and uncertain, then pattered hastily over to the edge.

“Hi! Cumsha! Hi!” he cried, frantically shaking his umbrella at the slipper boat as it started on its way across the river.

The boat trembled momentarily in the dark mighty currents, then turned slowly around and approached that part of the bund where the stranger stood beside the Breton.

“I know you,” he commented, as he glanced quickly up at the Breton, “but look at that,” and he pointed to the girl as she moved with so much grace her slender craft. “A water nymph, sir, in blue pantlets! I am the Reverend Tobias Hook, and I tell you, my young friend, there is not another like her from Wampoa to Wu-Chau; she is a vision of triple dimples, and when you see them you will ooze with envy. What an ideal for a convert! How admirable she will be around the house! I have cumsha for you, my little lost lamb,” he chirped as the girl steadied her boat in the currents below them.

“Throw it down,” she answered in a matter-of-fact way.

“My poor lamb, will you not answer?”

“What?”

“What I spiritually beseeched of you in the boat.”

“I forget.”

“Will you not receive what I offered?”

“I am afraid.”

“Think of what you will have.”

“I would rather have that cumsha.”

“Think! think what you will have,” he repeated ecstatically.

“This is my sampan; I live on the river because I was born here and will die here.”

“Come with me,” he held out his hands.

“Throw that cumsha or I will go.”

As she started to swing her great oar the stranger threw a few coppers into the boat and, leaning on his umbrella, watched her cross the river, his eyes dancing as they followed her lithe body swaying in rhythmic motion to the movement of the great oar. Finally, when she was lost to sight among the other craft, he turned to the Breton, shaking his head solemnly.

“Ah me,” he sighed. “I was just in time; another day—who knows—it might have been too late.... It is going to be contentious. I see it, I hear it, I know it; but let it come, I will out-Solomon Solomon with the keen edge of my diplomacy, and mark you, the infant of my desire will not be severed.”

For some moments the Reverend Tobias Hook balanced himself, now on his heels, now on his toes.

“My young friend,” he resumed with impressive solemnity, “reverence diplomacy primarily and late, for it is the right healing hand of our Maker. It alone diagnoses the depths and shallows of diseased contentions. With subtle pills it ruddies up a pale hope, or judiciously phialing out poppied words it bats the eye of envy. And when the distemper of ambition rolls up the pulse of those around you lay on the gentle fingers of diplomacy, pucker up the wise silent lips, and blinking, fashion out a cure. If, in due time, you should fall, as men have fallen from Adam down, into the fever and ague of marriage, you will need for your own health’s sake this physician’s calming dosage.

“Marriage, marriage,” he soliloquised bitterly, jamming the point of his umbrella viciously into the planks, “that, my young friend, is the act that strips us and leaves us naked of hope. Why did I marry? A question. Was I lonely? No. I was wallowing in youth. Was it greed? No, for it has further impoverished my poverty. Was it ambition? No, I tempt not what caused the fall of angels. Was it love? There is no need to ask that question. Nor is there any use to take the whole inventory of my mind. I did it—that is all.

“This thing and theory of the one woman, my young friend, is like a nettle found in the White Cloud Hills; it tickles sensationally at first, then leaves a rash burning the rest of life. In this nettle simile lies the substance of my whole contention. At the moment of discovery our vision is distorted so that we discern in this very nettle a rose, a lily, or what not so that it is pleasing to our fancy. We pluck, we pop the other eye, and before we know we begin to scratch.

“Moreover, in this rose and lily metaphor lies argument for another drift to the point we are getting at. We grant the one woman to be the perfect rose or lily; man ambling through the garden of womankind spies this choicest flower and plucks it—which is marriage—then for his temerity wanders the rest of life through this endless blooming garden with an herb whose hues are soon no hues, whose perfume has become an odour, and its sweets so galled that the very bees forsake it and hornets extract substance from it for their stings. Furthermore, my young friend, in your feeble youth, unstrengthened by the vicissitudes of matrimony, nor toiled, nor calloused by it, I warn you that the sweetness of one rose is soon blown. No cook can concoct a meal out of one dish, nor prayers nor Aladdins make one meal fill out the course of life. It is variety and abundance that peppers and adorns the monotony of this rutted earth. Ah, if our discretion would only come in youth and our follies in old age! What happiness! We would die from a surfeit of it.”

The Reverend Hook stepped closer to the Breton and laid his hand consolingly on his shoulder.

“My young friend, I have watched you for many weeks standing at dusk on this bund and holding dialogue with empty space, and I conceived the thoughts I have given birth to—that there is a woman in it, for nothing but female imaginings can make a man a companion to shadows and vapours, squeezing music out of noise and plastering the air thick with visions.

“Now mark me, I do not complain of lathering in this fragrant soap that so cleanses our minds of sorrow, but let lather be lather; temporarily it laves us in joy but in the One love—no! no! with it comes only moody agitations of the heart. You try to crib on nature and deceive yourself into believing that the lily cannot lose its whiteness, nor the rose its perfume. Ah, my young dreamer, if you had Mrs. Hook for one week—that is all!

“But let us be cheerful, retrospect your thoughts back to that little dimpled darling in blue pantlets! Could anything be finer? She is curried to my taste, sir, and when chutneyed with a little strife—what a morsel! What a dish!... If I can clasp her once, just once, mark you, she will wail for the love of me.”

The Reverend Tobias Hook became meditative at this pleasing thought. He folded his hands on the head of his umbrella and gazed abstractedly down into the sombre flowing waters that the Chinese call the Pearl River; not, however, because pearls are found in its silty bed, but pearls are euphemistic of tears. This is the River of Tears, dark in sunlight, melancholy and sullen at dusk, and at midnight a dark flood that mourns. There is an immense terribleness about it and its sorrow; robbing, feeding, contemplating, nursing, and in due time devouring the innumerable millions it has reared. The giving of man to this River of his tears and his dead has been without end, as long as they have dwelt on its banks it has been so, yet they conceal this fact from themselves by calling its dark flood the River of Pearls, by giving gods to its depths; to its banks, temples and pagodas.

Suddenly the Reverend Tobias Hook was aroused from his sweet musings by the falling of dusk.

“I must hasten!” he exclaimed abruptly; “to-morrow I will come back. I want to talk to you about the Treasure hidden in the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, and that, sir, is worth dreaming about. But I cannot stay.” He shook his head dolefully and looked furtively over his shoulder.

“Mrs. Hook is at the Willow Gate this very moment watching for me, and when she sees my rolling, sensuous gait, my pouted under lip and high-distempered cheek she will cluck, sir, she will cluck with rage.”

“Do you know what is the matter with you?” demanded the Unknown gruffly as he stopped the Breton hastening out of the Mission Gate.

The priest looked up.

“You are happy,” the Unknown grumbled.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I do not know.”

“What do you think?”

“I think it is from God.”

While the Breton did not perceive it, the wife had in a way become less wilful, though her moods were yet as the river’s wind; her words as changeful as the mocking-bird’s song; her impetuosity as uncertain as those strange storms that come down through the gorges of Kai Fong. One moment sweetly naÏve as a child, the next abrupt and full of cold scorn; she still chided, still coaxed and scolded, though sometimes her words caressed. She questioned and derided as in the past, and still brought doubt into his sensitive eyes only to laugh it away.

The fact is, however, that in the rapid rush of time, the wife laughed less, and in no such manner as she did during the first weeks of his tutorship; then it was part of her always, and he heard it even in her most impatient moments. She welcomed him with it; mocked and scorned with its music, and when he departed its petulant echoes ceased at no time in his heart.

So as months passed and the eyes of the Breton lost their melancholy shadows, there crept imperceptibly into the wife’s laughter a softened, doubtful tingle. It was as though the sadness, which went out from his eyes, was finding its way into her laugh.

“Will you never finish that book?” she complained.

“You do not like it?” He looked up hastily, a shadow in his eyes.

“No!” she answered sharply.

“I have two other books,” he suggested, not turning his eyes away from the crevices.

“No!” she cried impatiently, “not another book!”

“What shall I teach you?” he asked softly.

“I do not know,” she mused vaguely; “but it’s something! something!”

“And you do not know?” His eyes became suddenly bright.

“No.”

“Then it is from God.”

“Please don’t pray,” she pleaded.

“You do not——”

“I know—but it is so tiresome,” she interrupted plaintively. “Priest,” she whispered.

He looked up.

“I know, I know,” her whisper was constrained. “Do you?”

He shook his head.

“Do you wish to?”

He could scarcely hear and did not at all understand, so he made no answer and the questioning in his eyes did not change.

“Rest your ear here,” she whispered, putting her little finger through the crevice.

He hesitated for a moment, then in the manner of a boy pressed his ear tightly to the crevice. For a moment there was perfect stillness, then a hurried, alarmed fluttering of silk.

Presently far from the screen he heard the wife strike her hands softly, nervously together.

“You must go,” she cried, her voice trembling. “Please don’t stand there.”

But before the Breton left that afternoon the dusk of a monsoon storm had darkened the rooms and as he passed through the park masses of clouds as black as the night-sea rushed along across the sky like enormous billows frothed with a grey foam. The narrow streets were filled with hurrying men; shopkeepers were putting up shutters, and barring doors; hucksters ceased their cries; itinerant barbers, money-changers, and fortune-tellers were hastily, silently departing. Sentries left their posts; mothers screamed after wayward brats; beggars sought the shelter of temples, and the chant of the blind was still.

The Breton, instead of returning to the Mission, went as swiftly as possible through the tortuous streets to the East Gate, thence made his way toward their outer edge, where a small Catholic community lived, almost buried under the tumbled side of this vast, old brick-heap—a plastered chip from the Rock of St. Peter.

The streets were now deserted. Here and there people stood in their doorways and watched him pass. Fowls hovered by threshold and children, still devilish, scurried hither and thither—storm-tempters and scorners.

When the Breton reached the edge of the suburbs he turned southward and hastened along the embankment of an old canal; to the right was the city; on his left the fields, and beyond darkness.

There came the rumble-boom of distant thunder.

It was twilight.

No one could be seen; no sounds were heard. Upon the earth rested that vasty stillness which belongs to dusk when dusk is the forepart of a storm. Night birds, day beasts, men, insects, all were sheltered. It was night.

The Breton hastened on.

As he drew near to the Catholic community, a flame of lightning burst out of the blackness; a terrific thunder-crash followed; then again impenetrable gloom was around him. But that flash, as though it were the torch of God thrust out of heaven, illumed for one brief second a dismal scene.

Before him on the bank of the old canal stood a man with head bowed upon his bosom, his hands hanging loosely to his side while the wild night-wind whipped thin garments about his body. At the man’s feet cowered a woman holding a baby to her breast, and, crouching over it, sought to ward off the storm. Two small children clung to his legs. This group did not speak, nor move, nor sob.

The Breton approached them.

“Why are you out in this storm?” he asked gently.

“It welcomes us,” the man growled carelessly.

“Where is your house?”

“It is here.”

“Your beds?”

“We do not sleep.”

“Your food?”

“We do not eat.”

“Who sent you here?”

“Fate.”

“It cannot protect you.”

“Who can protect whom Fate deserts?”

“But the storm——”

“Bah! the storm will come and go with its good and ruin. Fate remains unaltered.”

“Let me shelter you.”

“Where?”

“I am a Christian and near are my friends.”

“You are my enemy,” the man replied with the same nonchalance.

“Your enemy?”

“Leave us.”

“I cannot.”

“You wish the eyes of my children?”

“I wish to help you.”

“You do?”

“Yes.”

“Kill us.”

“Will you not go?”

“Owls consort with owls; finches with finches.”

“My wish is to help you.”

“To-day you took away my house and gave it to Chun Ping, who is a Christian, a river-pirate, a buyer and seller of stolen goods. You know this, the mandarins know this, but you work together, you do these villainies together—weak governments and powerful gods sleep in the same bed.

“How many years have I sweated that I might have that little house? What man can say I am not honest? That I did not give alms to the blind and cash to the gods in the Temple? Did I not intend to save money that my sons could study and take the Examinations? Now—it is all gone.

“Chun Ping wanted my house; he went with your priests and said it was his. The priests said it was his house. I went to the Yamen and showed them my red deed and white deed. They said, ‘It is your house; give us money and we will protect you.’ I gave them all my money. They gave my house to Chun Ping. They said, ‘We dare not offend these Christians; they have gunboats in the river. Go away.’ To-night your priests came and put me out.”

The Breton made no answer.

When the lightning flashed again it showed two men standing silently over the woman and children.

The black breakers of the storm-sea overhead began to fall amid the crash and boom of thunder.

The children were terror-stricken; the mother sobbed and cooed. The priest stared out into the night toward the Catholic community.

The storm grew worse and the still group bowed under it. The teeth of the little children chattered, but they did not cry nor speak. The mother had ceased her sobs and no longer cooed to her baby.

“We must go!” said the Breton, and he took up one of the children; the man picked up the other and a cage in which fluttered a bedraggled bird. They started off and the mother with her baby hugged tightly to her breast, followed.

The Breton, leading the way, went up to the door of a house and knocked.

No answer.

He went to another.

“Who knocks?” demanded a man from within.

“We are caught in the storm.”

“Who are you?”

The priest turned to the man behind him.

“Tsang.”

“It is the family of Tsang.”

There came no response. He knocked on the door again, but it was useless. So they went on, in the reek of rain and wind-blasts, from house to house.

Suddenly the man Tsang stopped. He beat violently on a door.

“What do you want?” growled a rough voice from within.

“My house!”

“Who are you?”

“I am Tsang.”

“You are a rat.”

“I am an honest man. Give me my house.”

“Give me your wife. I am cold.”

“Christian!”

“The eyes of your brats are worth two taels. Their spleen is useless.”

“I will raise a mob and destroy you.”

“The Christian gunboats in the river will tear you into rags.”

“You have destroyed your ancestral tablets.”

“I cooked to-night’s rice with yours.”

“You may deceive men, but you cannot close the eye of Fate. You will yet be cut into a thousand pieces.”

“Bah! The Law is a rusty knife, my Church is a new cannon. They dare not question me.”

“By the Temple of the One God, you have a shop to receive stolen goods.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You stole the jade-tablets from the Ancestral Hall of Ho.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You were aboard the pirate junk that killed thirty people near the Lob pagoda on the fifth day of the last moon.”

“I am a Christian.”

“You stole the daughter of the Widow Chin and sold her to a whoremonger.”

“You had none old enough.”

“You cannot escape. Fate will overtake you though the Yamen runners fail.”

The priest took the man’s arm and dragged him away.

They trudged on, whither? This thought did not occur to any of them. They now forgot the wind and the waters that flowed underfoot. To the man Tsang this raging of the elements seemed a natural portion of his ruin. He became part of this environment of wrath and was contented in it. The storm was companionable. This tempest and the man held converse, which was friendly.

The Breton led the way while the mother trudged on behind. This woman hardly knew that she was turned out of doors and was wandering about in the night through a wreck of waters. What did she care for these rending winds; this night vomit of heaven; these red forks of fire or blare of thunder?

Her babe suckled.

So they went on in single file until suddenly the little boy on the Breton’s shoulder began to cry, which was next best to the stopping of the storm.

The Breton turned to the man.

“Where can we find shelter for your wife and babies?”

“In to-morrow.”

“But to-night?”

“Let us go to the river.”

“Why?”

“We can drown.”

“When men fear death less than poverty, should they not be held in contempt?”

“It is true.”

“We must find protection.”

“Let us go to your Mission.”

“You hate Christians.”

“I despise them!”

“We cannot.”

“Then let us go to the Temple of the Five Gods. It stands to reason that five gods have more compassion than one.”

The man now led the way. The woman still followed, falling behind like a tired dog, and like a dog she made no complaint. Often they stopped and, halting, waited for her; when she caught up, this mother would give a long whistling sigh and sink down in the mud.

“Come,” said the man, “we must hasten or the Temple will be overcrowded.”

“With whom?” asked the Breton.

“With rags and lice.”

“What?”

“Yes, the temples in the Middle Kingdom are now only the refuge of beggars—as in your country they are filled with plotters.”

“Are there no robbers?” asked the mother feebly.

“No,” he replied consolingly. “Fate is impartial—our temples have only vermin; the beasts were reserved for this priest’s Church.”

Presently they reached the outer gates of the Temple of the Five Gods; it was ajar. They crossed the court, where the water reached high above their ankles, and ascending the granite steps hesitated on the threshold. They lingered, uncertain before the huge doorway, which looked like the entrance to some abyss, then the Breton stepped in, closely followed by the man and the woman.

The lightning’s glare lit up dimly, momentarily, the temple’s vast hall, where dark heaps of shadowy forms were huddled along the sides. At times these heaps shuddered, and from out of the depths of them came groans.

At the farther end of the temple’s hall, on a huge ebon altar, were the images of the Five Gods. And when the red flare of lightning inflamed their terrible eyes, these gods looked down upon the sprawling wreck of man and grinned.

Toward these monsters the Breton made his way, followed by the man Tsang and the mother. Close by the altar they found a vacant spot where they crouched, while the wind that came through the great entrance blew full upon them. The child in the Breton’s arms shook with cold, and taking off his robe, he wrapped it about the little thing.

The mother cooed and talked to her baby.

Presently they all nodded and slept—except the Breton and the Five Gods above him. The child’s chubby face rested softly, securely against his neck, and that indefinable murmur of its sleep gave him a strange thrill of comfort. In the slumber breathing of a child, as in the breath of solitudes, are awakened memories and thoughts, which altogether might be called the symphony of revery. And the Breton heard in the child’s sleeping sighs a voice, which vanquished the blackness of the night.

Without this refuge of the forsaken pounded the deafening chum of wind and rain and thunder. But the priest, crouching in front of the altar, listening to the echo of another voice, heard nothing. The gods looked down upon him and—smiled.

The monsoon, with its wrack and pain, passed away much in the manner as the man Tsang said it would; for the monsoon repletes more than it destroys, and the prayer that goes up for it is a great prayer.

“I was alone to suffer,” commented the outcast complacently, “but in the vomit of the monsoon Fate relented and the priest came.”

Just outside of the Bamboo Gate in the easterly part of the southern suburbs, close to where the alley of the Old Dog opens kennel-like into the Street of Ivory-workers, the Breton provided a home for Tsang’s family, and thither the street currents drifted him more often than he knew. The little Tsangs toddled out to meet him, climbed upon him, smeared his robe with rice and kale, kissed him, prodded his blue eyes, and cried when he went away. The man Tsang revered him and cautioned his neighbours that Fate had peculiarly redeemed this one priest out of the whole utterly damned tribe of them all.

“Why is it?” demanded one of his neighbours.

“How do I know!” answered Tsang indignantly. “Such things belong to Fate, and, neighbours, don’t woman Fate, don’t spy, don’t peep!”

While the Breton went every few days to Tsang’s hole in the Kennel of the Old Dog, yet he came always by evening to the bund where a certain murmur rising from the river softened the grind and crunch of the city’s toil. Some days, as on this day, which was the fourth of the fifth moon—other noises in addition to its murmurs came from it and the rasped, bruised milling of man was completely drowned in them. On this day the river revelled in the gaiety of those whom it fed, and all the careless joy, the wine, the froth, and ribbons of Yingching laughed there. Wherever the eye could reach were seen the tatters and tinsels of ten myriads silks swishing and fluttering in the river wind. The buildings along the bund pulled over their time-pocked and shrivelled forms robes of satin. Sea-going junks hovered above the river like gigantic butterflies, their great ribbed sails turned into gorgeous, trembling wings of silk. The flower-boats along the southern bank were voluptuous in silken wraps; their eaves ear-ringed with lanterns, while on their flower-clustered balconies crowded dainty pouting creatures, their music and laughter mingling with the joy of the day. Among these winged junks and flower-boats darted slender slipper craft like gay-breasted swallows, twittering, perking, and quivering in mid-currents.

Nothing can exceed the gaiety of this sombre river during the Festival of the Dragon boats; and when the Breton came to the bund on this day—which in Western chronology comes in June—he found it in a gay swelter of excitement. On this day were the races of the Dragon boats; and the cleared course, which extended from the west side of Pakngotam’s black pool to the Island of the Sea-Pearl, was lined with boat-loads of gesticulating spectators, howling and chattering as the Dragon craft rushed up and down stream, propelled by naked, sweating demons and urged on with cries, gongs, and flags.

But these unaccustomed pleasure sounds, emanating from a river that of itself mourned and was sombre, were lost upon the Breton as he stood over the bund’s edge dreaming, listening alone to the murmur underfoot. The rattle of hucksters, the scoldings and screechings of old boatwomen, the men’s voices nonchalantly cursing or chanting in falsetto tones the theatricals of the river, the splash of oars, burst of crackers, cries of children in their sports, the shrill songs of slipper boat-girls, the howl and clangour of the Dragon boats and the dull pandemonium that rose from the goals did not cause him to raise his head nor turn away from the yellow waters. It mattered in no way to him that the loom of life, always dully clangorous about this bund, wove upon this day a few bright strands through its warp of gloom. He did not look up nor make note of it, for he was no longer of its woof nor its warp nor the ravelled ends that fell by the loom.

Within the quiet places of the Breton’s love the world nor its noises could not penetrate. Only gentle thoughts made their way thither, invoking feelings deeper than themselves; thoughts veiled from the world and such that even he must fall into deep communing to lift apart their shadowy screen. He revelled in that fair region where there are no paths nor guideposts—the wilderness of meditation. With unuplifted eyes he paced on through groves where none had gone before him nor shall follow. Love danced ahead of him, thought ambled after. Now he stopped to listen to music; now to laughter that was more than music, now to chidings that were a little of both. Sometimes he lingered over a slumbering, sensuous rustle that drew down from heaven the inspiration of a dream.

So the Breton cared in no manner what the world might do around him, whether it toiled along—as it did ordinarily—on all fours, or rushed wildly exuberant into the morrow. Whatever it might be he had a region separate from it—a region where the running brooks of thought had no end of babbling, where the wind scattered its stars without number, and in its horizonless heaven the fairy tumbled clouds were imaged and tinctured with the iridescence of meditative love.

Thus the Breton lingered on the bund until dusk passed into night to scatter the noises around; then he came forth from the region of his dreams with the slight semblance of a smile on his lips and hastened to the Mission.

Often, however, he was awakened from midst of these dreams and ruthlessly snatched out of his heaven by no less a personage than his new acquaintance the Reverend Tobias Hook. Fortunately or otherwise, as it may prove to be—the Reverend Hook came often to the bund when the Breton was there. It was too evident that he did not come solely for recreation, or to breathe in that open spot the river’s wind, since he spent his time, either in extolling the charms of some new nymph he had discovered in the river or in the wilderness of Yingching and whose conversion he was about to undertake in spite of Mrs. Hook; or he expatiated without end concerning the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon, where Yu Ngao, the last of the Ming Emperors, sought refuge with his retinue and imperial treasure—to be seen not again by mankind.

At first the Reverend Hook was chilled by the dreamy indifference of the Breton, and it was only after he had found that silence was a part of the priest’s nature that he unloosed his endless chain of information and argument concerning these caverns from whose mysterious depths no man has even been known to return. The gaining of this knowledge had been one of his chief pursuits, a task he had found delightful with expectation, and he believed in due time would not be without its rewards.

From every source, from legends and histories, he had collected information concerning these caves, all of which he unfolded as he coaxed and argued, tilting himself on his heels and toes in his pleadings with the Breton to go with him to these Grottoes, where the Great Earth Dragon guards so zealously the melancholy secret of the Emperor.

The Breton listened but did not go, nor did he even make reply.

“And why not, sir, why not?” the Reverend Tobias Hook would demand shrilly, cocking himself on his toes.

The Breton did not answer.

Fate was yet to drive him thither.

This day the Reverend Hook came later than usual, and had not talked with the Breton long before he pulled a roll of papers from his coat pocket and began on his favourite subject—the treasure in the Dragon’s Grotto.

“Young sir,” he continued reprovingly, “you must undress your mind of any thought that I burrow for personal gain. Disillusionate yourself! I scorn, sir, that puffed Huckster, that old dealer, who bundles up men’s honour and upon the open market of the world traffics in their virtue. I am an antiquarian, sir, a subterraneous hunter.

“Of course,” he added in a modified tone, “it would be but right for me to adorn my sideboard with a few platters and pitchers of gold, a few jade vases and urns for my parlour; a reserve of pearls and emeralds to cool the hot distemper of my wife,—which, my young friend, cannot be too few,—for she falls into the most parboiled ecstatics not less than once a day. Sometimes in the very middle of the night a sudden thought pierces her in a tender spot and out she bounces; before I can disengage my eyelids from heavy sleep she has me stalled on the floor, rides me with her knees, and plays horse with my beard.

“Now, sir, you see the nakedness of my plans; if I can get hold of the jewels of Yu Ngao, I will be able to ransom myself from these frolics. Ah! if I can but coax her into skirts again I will flounce them with emeralds, and every time she weeps I will match each dewy tear with ten big pearls.

“No, no, my young friend, do not berate wealth, for though in youth it is a mill that grinds out follies, when youth is done it mills the rarest comforts.

“These papers,” and the Reverend Hook unrolled the papers he had been holding, “are maps and other information concerning the Grottos. This is the triple labour of years. I have screwed it out of legends and pulled it out of the deepest records.

“This map,” and he handed one of the sheets to the Breton, “is the route to the Grottos from Yingching. A scrutiny of this one, on the other hand, shows it to be a map of the path leading from the river to the true cavern under the falls. These other manuscripts are historical proofs; they defy refutation, and no man’s eyes but yours have or ever will discover them.

“I tell you, sir, the treasure of the whole Ming dynasty is there, hoarded in the earth’s dark cellars and misered there these hundreds of years by unchristian superstitions. Do you know that if all the Chinese in this country were hunting you in maddest frenzy you would be safe from them in the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon? They won’t go near it. But we, unburdened by such superstitions, can filch these jewels from the Old Dragon with impunity, with gaiety.

“Ah! what a treasure! Cry havoc, my young friend, to reservation, and let your mind’s eye romp through these dim-eyed caverns, where in great heaps lie the garniture of Empires. Plates of gold enough to feed two thousand three hundred and eight of royal blood, cups and bowls to match; pitchers and little saucers as numerous as the golden plaques that lay on the sky at night. Shields, swords, cuirasses studded with jewels. Priceless urns of jade, slop over, sir, with brimming measures of pearls; there are rubies that by comparison would jaundice the reddest blood, while emeralds are so thickly strewn about that they lay in wrinkled folds like moss-green carpets.

“Disport yourself among these hillocks of wealth that would make Croesus’ spirit mundane with envy. Dine from golden platters, splash in basins of silver, play hockey with emeralds, shower the gloom with handfuls of pearls, and with the big round rubies shoot a game of marbles——”

The Reverend Tobias Hook stopped suddenly and peered through the gloom, now ebbing imperceptibly into the quietude of night. The Dragon boats no longer scurried over the water, and the dwellers on the river had ceased their clamour. The yellow flood was becoming darkly sullen, impatient for that hour when man’s noisy hum would be silent.

For some time the Reverend Tobias Hook contemplated seriously the darkening of these waters, then with sudden resolution shoved the papers containing the maps and secrets of the Grotto of the Sleepless Dragon into the hands of the Breton, who took them unconcernedly, not even raising his eyes from the waters—now an abyss that muttered.

Soon afterwards the Reverend Hook went softly away, and in uncertain mind disappeared up the Street of the Sombre Heavens.

The Breton continued gazing down into the depths that whispered until night had settled about him, then he put into his bosom the little man’s terrible gift.

The laugh of the wife, like her song, had departed. No longer it pealed through the rooms—nor its echo. Her laugh was gone; slowly, imperceptibly had it vanished as music stolen away and smothered by the wind. But neither she nor the Breton knew that it was no more.

The wife of Tai Lin had become silent, musing, seclusive. She no longer contradicted her husband, nor laughed at him, nor mocked nor caressed him.

“She is outgrowing her childhood,” sighed Tai Lin to himself.

This wife of his, instead of sitting on a stool at his feet as she used to do, would remain for hours by the screen when she thought that none were about her but the thrushes in their bamboo cages overhead. By noon or by night, moved by sudden impulse, she would creep through the screen’s wicket into the outer apartment and, nestling in the chair that stood beside it, bury her face in her arms and cry softly to herself with that grief that is very old.

But she was not alone with her tears, nor with the thrushes complaining overhead—she was never alone. At all hours a maidservant hovered about her, and only when the Breton came did this servant retire behind an oval doorway that led from her mistress’ room to an open court. There she concealed herself and listened to the words between them; to their silences; to the going away of the wife’s laughter and the coming of her tears. After a time she began to shake her head, perplexedly, fatefully.

One day, as the wife sat in the outer apartment sobbing to herself, this maidservant stole up to her, and kneeling down by the table, asked gently:

“Why are you crying?”

The wife sobbed but made no reply.

“Why are you crying?” asked the maid again.

“Go away, Kim! Go away!” she cried brokenly. “You cannot understand—I do not know! Go away—please go away!”

The servant left her. But that night when she came to the bishop’s door she hesitated, picked the hem of her garment; turned away; came back, then knocked ruefully on the portal.

When the Breton came to the wife’s apartments he no longer stood on the threshold waiting for her salutation or expectant of her laughter. Crossing the room, naÏvely eager, he sat down in his chair and, looking up to certain crevices in the screen, remained silent with a smile in his eyes.

Day by day these silences grew longer. Without laughter, without converse, almost without movement, each sat close to the screen—so close that her red pouting finger tips were hardly over his head, and sometimes through the crevices just above them flashed a light, dark and lustrous.

In this manner it came about that Silence held them more and more beneath its velvet hand, although this stillness of theirs was not mute nor somnolent. At intervals it was broken by a question, a reprimand, a whisper; a word that caressed or a burst of scorn; only laughter came not again. Their conversations were no more than flashes; an ignition, an illumination.

Sometimes the Breton would look up as if about to say something and the wife, breathless, would demand:

“What?”

He never spoke. Yet one day in the midst of their silence he lifted his eyes to the crevice, his lips moved, but only his eyes uttered.

Hastily the wife withdrew her fingers; there was a flutter of silk; constrained stillness.

“Oh, well,” she commented, turning back to the screen, “it doesn’t matter; if a man can’t get ivory from a rat’s mouth, how can a woman expect truth from a man’s?”

He turned away toward the windows.

In a few moments her fingers were again thrust redly through the crevices.

“Are you?” she whispered.

The Breton looked up.

Again there was silence.

“Do you know what it is?” she still whispered.

Once more he raised his eyes to the crevices above the finger-tips.

“It is a rain-drop, priest, iridescent—but trembling on the eaves’ edge.”

While these silences grew longer, they at the same time were drawing to an end. No stillness can last for long in this world so full of noises, and in time a second but greater restlessness lay hold of the wife. No longer petulant, she became irritable, and often impatiently moving her chair aside, she wandered about the room. And as time passed, this unrest of the wife increased until it came about that she could not sit for long beside the screen without getting up and moving uneasily, even wearily, about the room; now by a table, then back to the screen; her hands at one moment plucking flowers from their vases, in the next tossing the folds of the silken tapestries.

One day she suddenly drew her fingers from the crevices, started to cross the room, came back, and peremptorily ordered the Breton to go away and stay away.

“Go!” she commanded, stamping her foot.

The Breton looked up wonderingly and his eyes smiled.

Presently he heard her open the shell-latticed window, then all was still. The larks and thrushes from their swaying bamboo cages fluttered and chirped questioningly. For there are silences that make birds as well as women inquisitive. They cocked their heads, chirped, and looked down unapprovingly upon the priest.

“What! I thought you had gone!”

The Breton turned his eyes expectantly to the crevices just above his head.

“Are you not going?” she demanded coldly.

The Breton rose from his chair, uncertain, but the light in his eyes untroubled.

“Sit down!”

The stillness that followed was not broken until after the feathery shadows of the bamboo had crept across the translucent shells of the latticed windows. Then the wife, very close to him, whispered:

“Priest.”

The Breton did not move.

“Is not this screen a nuisance!” she cried irritably, and her voice would have been savage had it not been for the music of its tones.

The Breton neither answered nor turned his eyes away.

“Priest, shall I come out?”

He still looked up into the crevices.

“Shall I?”

A questioning light came into his eyes.

“Would it make you happy?” she whispered.

The light deepened.

“Well, I don’t!” she exclaimed scornfully. “At its best it is nothing; in its truth it is false. Such hopes men lay to gold and rubies in their mountain caskets: to the cloudy pearl in the jade depths of the sea. Sought; found; lost; forgotten; its gold, cloud—gold and its pearl moon-mist! How ridiculous!”

“Would you truly be happy?” Again her voice was without its impatience; again it trembled with tenderness.

A light in the eyes of the Breton answered.

The birds fluttered and beat their wings against the bars of their cages.

Evening was approaching. The cawing of the white-headed crows could now be heard contending for their roosts in the banians.

The light in the room mellowed, became a rose-saffron, while the wind of sundown blew in through an open window.

Suddenly the wicket in the screen was opened and the wife, leaning against the lintel, looked down at him.

With difficulty the Breton priest rose from his chair. A flush swept across his face, then pallor. He lifted his hand to the neck of his robe; a film came over his eyes.

For a moment the wife fluttered on the screen’s threshold, then came down and sat on a stool close by but with her back to him.

In the phenomena of national life there are certain conditions that force men into such a labyrinthine existence that they resemble, in their bore and burrow, the teredo. These terebrants—human and otherwise—exist to destroy; hence their dignity. Sometimes, like the hymenoptera, they destroy to soar.

The Terebration of mankind—always more or less terrible—has left its wrecks sticking desolately above the floods of Time in all parts of the world, and shall through all ages leave its wreckage. These human teredines, which have existed to a greater or less degree among all nations during every period of their duration, are known by many names. In the Latin countries they are called the Carbonari; in Russia, the Nihilists; Germany, the Socialists—a teredo degenerated into a tapeworm; Ireland, the Clan-na-gael; Greece, the Haeteria. In France there has always been a mess of wrigglers, known and unnamed; in the Balkans is another spew, which are allied to the necrophan, and China, the old and huge nation, has its swarm of teredo in labyrinths also old and huge like itself, and filled with unknown terror.

The Tien Tu Hin, unlike the teredines of Europe, is not nihilistic, anarchistic, or a tapeworm; but is regarded by some as next to the end of the world; by others as the millennium; yet, in truth, what will come out of its two hundred and forty years of boring is not known. Such things are not even conjectured in the depths of its endless labyrinths.

During all ages secret political organisations have had prolific progeny in China, and when a dynasty becomes rotten they attack it like an old pile in the sea. They gnaw into it; devour; eat upward or downward according to the tide. The result is a cyst full of worms. When a storm rises it vanishes or protrudes a stump at low tide.

Secret political societies in China like religions in the Occident, have their immaculate conceptions, stars, signs and noises; the product of which is a founder having the divinity of a god and the respect; who ascends high places to preach; who governs and plays at dumb-bells with the moon. An instance of this was Chang Kioh, immaculated some years subsequent to Christ and a disciple of Lao-Tze, who, also, was not only immaculately engendered, but was eighty years in gestation, born with a white beard, and during his senile infancy wrote in five thousand characters the religion of Taoism. This disciple formed the Yellow Turban Rebels and with them destroyed the Great Han dynasties.

MatrÊya, the Buddhist Messiah, has been immaculately foaled, rebelled, and beheaded a good many times in this old land, while the Taiping Rebellion, which started an half century ago and destroyed more than twenty millions, all came about because Hung Hsiu ChÜan was the younger brother of Jesus and received visitations from God.

But stranger things than teredines swarming out of divinity have destroyed dynasties in China. That of the Mongols, founded by Genghis Khan, was annihilated by a ditty of the children of Honan and Hupeh, who sang in childish treble:

During the year 1344, the One-Eyed Man of Stone was found at a place called Huanglingkuang by some labourers, who were repairing the banks of the Yellow River. The rebellions resulting ended in the expulsion of the Mongols and the establishment of the Ming dynasty by the Buddhist acolyte, Chu Yuan Chang.

Thus through all the ages of China—and they have been many—this terebration of man has ceased at no time. Yet the Tien Tu Hin, with more than a ten million swarm of human teredo, with more than all the wreckers that have gone before, is still silent. What will come out of it man not only does not know, but its immensity forbids conjecture. Among members it is called the Hung Kia, the Deluge Family; a family so vast and wide that it is beyond our comprehension; it exceeds anything ever conceived by man, and its labyrinths extend from Siberia to Siam—half of Europe could be lost in them. They crawl under oceans to the Straits Settlements; throughout the Malay Archipelago; the Philippines, India, Burma, Australia, the Pacific Islands, North, Central, and South America. This brotherhood of the Deluge Family, bound by the same oaths, actuated by the same principles and obedient to the same commands, has in its hidden recesses untold millions. While there have been directed against it the most terrible penal laws, they avail not nor reach down into the depths where it lives, travels, thrives, and year after year, in its endless labyrinths, becomes more dreaded, its murmur more terrible.

The terror about this society is its serenity and long quietude. Up to the present time it has hardly more than growled, but silently these two hundred and forty years it has been burrowing, burrowing.

A statesman in the reign of Kiuking said:

“The Empire rests on something like a volcano.”

Occasionally there have been sporadic outbreaks, and while some of them have been extensive enough to annihilate many European kingdoms, they are only thought of in the light of incidents, a source for anecdotes.

The hour of the Rebellion is not yet; but will come with a manifestation from Heaven. This may be a red star in the East, or when the Five Flags rise of their own accord from the earth, but more probably when the phoenix sing from the wutung, for at that hour the Man has been born, and on that day from all the fields of the Empire shall rise up those sown of the dragon’s teeth: then will the silence of Ages be broken, labyrinths uncoil, and a murmur come from depths so deep and unknown that even the world itself shall shrink with dread.

The Tien Tu Hin was founded about 1674, in the Province of Fokien, in the Putien District of the Fuchin Prefecture. Here, among the Chui Lien Hills, in a vale charming on account of its solitude, was situated the Buddhist monastery of Shaolintze, built by the priest Tahtsunye during the Tang dynasty of the seventh century. But a thousand years later the monks—whether forgetful or in accordance with the wishes of the Immortal Tah—spent their time in the study of the arts of war, eventually becoming so famous for their knowledge and ability that men came from all parts of the Empire to receive instruction.

In the reign of Kanghi, the tributary state of Silu threw off its allegiance and sent an army into China, defeating successively all Imperial forces brought against it. Edicts were posted throughout the Empire calling upon someone to free the country from the enemy. Chu Kiuntah, a student at the monastery, took the edict and hastened to the Vale of Shaolintze. After consultation the one hundred and twenty-eight monks offered their services.

The Emperor raised them all to the rank of general, conferred plenary powers upon them, and gave into their keeping a triangular iron seal engraved with four characters.

In three months the Prince of Silu sued for peace, and the monks returned to the capital in the midst of the triumphant songs of the populace, while the grateful monarch offered them any offices they might choose. They asked nothing other than permission to live in peaceful seclusion amongst their hills of Chui Lien.

Years passed, and there rose high in court—as in the courts of other nations—two ministers, Chenwangyao and Changchensui, who plotted for the seizure of the Empire, believing that it was well within their grasp if they could get rid of the monks of Shaolintze.

Accordingly they memoralised the Emperor, accusing the monks of treason; showing that since they destroyed the victorious army of Silu with ease, it would not be difficult for them to conquer China. They thus persuaded the Emperor that his domains might at any time be taken from him and begged to be allowed to destroy them secretly.

Receiving the Emperor’s sanction, the two ministers placed themselves at the head of the Imperial Guards and set out for Fokien. But after arriving in the Prefecture of Fuchui, they were unable to find the monastery hidden away among the Chui Lien Hills, and were about to turn back when they came upon the monk, Ma Eifuh.

Ma Eifuh ranked seventh in military skill among the monks, but to all accounts first in lechery, and owing to his hot passion for the wife and the daughter of Chu Kuintah, had been bambooed and expelled from the monastery. It was while wandering about, raging under this punishment and disgrace, that he came upon the Imperial Guards.

That night he led them to the monastery in the Vale of Shaolintze. Gunpowder was placed about its walls and exploded. One hundred and nine of the monks were instantly killed, but the surviving eighteen, still retaining possession of the triangular seal, escaped into a court and then crawling through a dog hole got clear of the burning buildings. Aided by a thick fog, which came suddenly down into the Vale, they passed the Guards and proceeded to the village of Huangchuen, where thirteen died. Hence comes one of the terrible sayings of the Deluge Family:

The five survivors, Tsai Tehchung, Tang Tahung, Ma Chaohing, Hu Tehti, and Li Shepkai, are now known as the Five Patriarchs. These five monks, having burned the bodies of their brothers, were proceeding to Chung Shawanken, in the Prefecture of Huenchuenfu, when suddenly—as the Jews in their flight from the army of Egypt—they found water in front of them and the Imperial Guards in their rear.

The immortal founder of the monastery, Tahtsuntze, seeing their danger, sent down two clouds, which changed into planks of copper and iron, forming a bridge over which the monks passed and safely reached the Temple of Kaochi.

After several days they continued on their way eastward, but before long learned that soldiers were again in pursuit, and thereupon they crossed over into Hukwang where they stayed for two weeks. Again narrowly escaping the Guards, the monks fled to the monastery of Pao Chu, where they remained a number of days overwhelmed with distress and despair.

But it was here that they met Chen Chinan, destined, as it seemed, by Heaven to become the founder of the Tien Tu Hin.

Chen Chinan, a member of the Hanlin Academy, had been President of the Board of Censors at the time when Chenwangyao and Changchensui memoralised the throne to destroy the monks, and had vigorously remonstrated with the Emperor. This remonstrance brought upon him the hatred of the two ministers that accused him as being a supporter of the monks. He was thereupon deprived of his office and expelled from court.

Having returned to his home in Hukwang, he was devoting himself to study when he met the monks as they were fleeing from the monastery of Pao Chu. Filled with compassion, he led them to his home, called the Grotto of the White Stork.

So now, when one member meets another and asks him whence he comes, the answer is: “From the White-Stork Grotto.”

After taking care of the monks in his home for several weeks, Chen Chinan took them to an extensive establishment called the Hunghauting,—the Red Flower Pavilion,—where they dwelt until one day, as they were sauntering along the banks of the beautiful Kungwei River, they spied a strange object floating in its current; this object brought about their departure.

Bringing the flotsam ashore, the monks found it to be a large stone tripod having two ears, such as are used in burning incense. On the bottom were engraved four large characters: Fan Tsing, Fuh Ming, Destroy Tsing, Restore Ming. Around these was a circle of smaller characters denoting its weight to be fifty-two catties and thirteen taels.

The monks carried this granite vessel to the top of a neighbouring hill, where they erected an altar of stones. They used guava twigs for candles and grass for incense, water instead of wine. As they prayed to Heaven that a Ming Emperor would avenge the crime of Shaolintze, the twigs and grass burst into flame. Seeing this the monks returned in great haste to the Red Flower Pavilion and told Chen Chinan what had happened.

For a long time this man, destined to some yet unknown end, remained in deep meditation.

“It is the will of Heaven,” he said presently, “that the dynasty of Tsing shall be destroyed.”

When the time came for the five monks to depart, Chen Chinan stood before them, and lifting his hands, spoke:

“Go forth, ye Five Patriarchs, to all quarters of the earth; over mountains and moorlands, across the great lakes and five seas. Transmit from man to man our secret words and signs. Be patient, and Heaven shall in its wisdom manifest the time for the assembling of the Deluge Family.”

Chen Chinan then returned to his Grotto of the White Stork, while the Five Patriarchs went their separate ways to organise the Deluge in Five Grand Sections, and to prepare for their assembly.

More than two hundred and forty years have passed, yet their successors cease in no way this preparation.

The Deluge Family founded, this dreaded assembly of men above whose labyrinths a third of mankind waits to be redeemed by it or be drowned in it—a Deluge of blood: to hurl the world into war and bring out of it Universal Peace.

The Deluge Family—like other families—has acquired in the course of time peculiarities besides that of vastness.

In writing the members use superfluous or half characters in such a manner as to make what is written unreadable to the uninitiated. In speaking they have a vocabulary of their own.

In the language of the Hung Kia, fowls are known by numbers; a goose is six, a duck eight. Beef is called great vegetables, and a fish a tail-shaker or wave-borer. A dog is a mosquito and that insect a needle, while a mosquito curtain is a lantern. Wine is known as red or green water; oil as family harmony and water as three rivers. To ask a person to smoke tobacco is to request him to bite ginger. To smoke opium is biting clouds and the name of opium is clouds travelling. To ask persons to dine is inviting them to farm sand and waves. A teacup is called a lotus bud; a wine cup a lotus seed, and a plate, a lotus leaf. Chop-sticks are golden selectors and roast pork becomes golden brindle. In speaking of the Deluge Family, a Lodge is called the Red Flower Pavilion or the Pine and Cedar Grove. To join the Society is to enter the Circle or be Born. To hold a meeting is known as letting loose the horses. A member is called heung—fragrance or a hero. A non-member is a partridge or wind of a leper. A road is a thread, and to travel is walking the thread. Sometimes the meaning of their vocabulary is unaccountable. An Ancestral Hall is called a privy and a market Universal Peace. In this strange language a bed is a drying stage and to sleep is to dry. A sword is called silken crepe, and a dagger young lion. A cannon is a black dog, its report a dog’s bark, its powder a dog’s dung. A handkerchief is a white cloud, a fan the crescent moon. The ears are known as fair wind, and to cut them off is to lower the fair wind. Cutting off the head is called washing the face. The sea is the great sky, and to murder by drowning is to bathe; while to be drowned in the sea is to be lowered into the great sky.

The members have numerous ways of testing one another by arranging and handing tea-cups, tobacco pipes, and other articles.

One member may ask another why his nose bleeds, and he answers: “It is the Waters of the Deluge flowing out of their channels.” This terrible enigma is derived from a saying by Mencius, “And a Deluge shall overflow the country.”

A member may ask: “Why is your face yellow?” and is answered: “It is troubled for my country.” Or, “Why is your face red?” and answered: “I have been drinking wine in the Temple of War.”

“What do you hope for?”

“The Market of Universal Peace.”

The entire ritual is carried on in verse—a rhythm of terrors—while conversation between members is in poetic form. If a member is asked to rescue a brother it is done by placing a pot of tea with a single cup before him. Should he be unable to do anything with the commands he throws the tea away, but if able, he drinks, saying:

If a pot of tea and three cups are put before a member he is being asked to take part in a fight. If he consents he drinks the middle cup, repeating:

There are thirty-six arrangements of tea-cups, each signifying something different and each answerable with a verse. In the like manner the presence of an unknown brother is made manifest first by some secret sign, which he should answer, then by the repetition of a verse. Should a junk be attacked by pirates and the crew as well as pirates be members of the Deluge Family, the crew repeats:

Members sometimes teach their wives verses for emergencies, as in rebellions, and should an attempt be made to ravish her, she repeats:

Whenever a member needs assistance in a fight, he holds up the right hand with thumb, first, and second fingers expanded an equal distance apart, while the third and fourth fingers are closed; at the same time, the thumb and the first two fingers of the left hand are placed open on the right elbow. To call to battle is to hold the right hand over the head with the thumb pointing upwards. We know of nothing more terrifying than this pointing up of thumbs to Heaven.

When a fight is about to take place, the queue is looped over the right shoulder after having been brought around the neck and fastened in what is called the sign of Shou. A cry rises from those that have laid upon themselves this sign. It is not thunder, not a moan. It is the growl of Eternity, “Hung Shun Tien”—The Deluge obeys Heaven.

This vast Brotherhood is subject to twenty-one rules: Ten Prohibitions; Ten Punishable Offences. In addition there are thirty-six oaths bequeathed by the Five Patriarchs. Death is the inevitable punishment for those that break them.

Oath Seven reads: “If any brother is unable to escape you swear to assist him, no matter what are the consequences. If there are any that do not adhere to these feelings of kinship, let thunder annihilate them.”

Number Twenty reads: “If officials arrest a brother, his escape is most important. You swear to see to this. Those that refuse to give such aid shall die beneath ten thousand knives.”

The last of the Great Oaths is the Apocalypse of this Empire in its gloom. “All ye that enter the Deluge Family, scholars, husbandmen, merchants, industrious labourers, mechanics, Confucianists, Buddhists, Taoists, physicians, astrologers, geomancers, lictors, thieves, pirates, officials, executioners, and all others, swear loyalty above all things. Ye are the hands and feet of one body, obedient to the Head. Ye must bow down to the Five Seal-bearers and obey them. If any show duplicity or fail to exert themselves, let them die beneath ten thousand knives.”

Such is the Tien Tu Hin, the Association of Heaven and Earth: enormous, unseen; filled with terror and serenity; vast, invisible; its labyrinths endless as are the veins of the earth, and like the earth’s depths, asurge with molten lava; calm, portentous, peaceful, terrible; born to avenge a crime; fostered to destroy a dynasty; matured to establish Universal Peace.

By the hand of thoughtful Fate the Breton was led into its labyrinths and became part of it and of its terror.

The Brotherhood of Tien Tu Hin, swallowing in its deluge all degrees of mankind, likewise swallows now and then one of those nameless Europeans whom Fate has utterly cast adrift in those mysterious currents of the Orient Seas.

While not generally understood, yet it is true that most Occidentals, who by choice have drifted heretofore on Orient streams, have almost always been derelicts of some kind. Thither noble scions, criminals, priests, soldiers of fortune have drifted. Some have prospered and some in the wild surge of these seas have been wrecked and sunk.

The flotsam of humanity, like the drift of rivers, like the derelicts of the sea, is but wreckage of some sort hurried along in those irresistible currents that we call Fate. Each village has its little eddy where, round and round in quiet whirl, the neighbouring drift collects. Each country has its maelstrom, a black whirlpool where is collected the debris of human kind. This debris, starting at the top in wide circles, whirls round; swirling deeper and deeper until it disappears through that narrow abysmal funnel. These terrible vortices are never still and never without their debris. London is such a maelstrom, so is Paris, so is New York.

The world also has its colossal eddy, but they that drift upon the world’s currents are derelicts, not debris; it is true both are wreckage, but there is a wide difference between them. Debris is scum; derelicts are wrecks. Scum from scum arises; derelicts may be the wrecks of greatness. Debris is unnamed; the House of Orleans is a derelict, and its princes have died by the wash of the China Sea.

The seas are awash with derelicts of different kinds. Some, in due time, like the hulks of the old East Indiamen, become thrifty, incrustating themselves with spray gusts of silver, and furring themselves with the fur of their drift; a wealth clings to them and they become stranded by riches. They are found imbedded in all Oriental ports, and while they have formed a new environment, they still remain conspicuous.

Again these seas are adrift with derelicts that would succour; as when men float on the sea in an open boat suddenly behold with immeasurable joy a speck in the distance. It approaches, they board it, but only too often to find it hollow.

Derelicts most known are those that destroy. Deserted, forsaken, alone in this coaxing wilderness of waves, they drink deeply of their unrestraint and become master-derelicts of death; hurling themselves, areek with froth, on vessels they sink and on rocks which destroy.

In a fisherman’s hut near by the Bay of Tai Wan, a hovel mud-walled, windowless, rice-thatched, cluttered with poverty, dark and dismal, there lay dying a derelict of this latter kind.

The only brightness within the hut was a floating taper burning before the Ancestral Tablets and sending through the gloom its trembling, hesitant rays. This glimmering light that fell agleam on the tablets lit the faces and forms of three persons, two peasants and a foreigner. The stranger lay upon the only bed in the hut, and the peasants squatted beside him. A clot of blood was upon his bosom, and a red froth oozed from between his teeth, which the woman was wiping away with a wet cloth, while her husband kept his eyes fixed and reverent upon a Great Medallion suspended from the neck of the dying man, and glittering beside the wound in his breast.

This Symbol or Seal consisted of two parts: the outer being about four inches square, but quinquangular in shape and made from a rare green stone found only in the jungled mountains of Yunnan, resembling the green of a tiger’s eye; gleaming, glittering in the dusk. On each of the five corners was a raised gold character, and a golden rim ran around the edge. The second part consisted of a mottled bloodstone placed on the centre of the other, octagonal in shape, about an inch in diameter, and having on its high, rounded apex a gold trigram, the meaning of which is not less terrible than it is unknown. This blood-green stone with its glint of gold glittered with a light peculiarly significant, and the peasant’s eyes grew round as he watched it shudder on the breast of the dying man.

He whispered to his wife: “It is the Great Symbol.”

She drew back with an expression of terror.

“If they find him here, we will be beheaded!”

“Yes.”

“What shall we do?”

“Nurse him.”

The woman wiped the red froth from the man’s lips and the red clot from his bosom.

“If he dies?” the peasant woman whispered.

“We will bury him.”

“And that?” she pointed to the Great Symbol.

The man on the bed moved uneasily; his eyes opened, but he saw nothing.

“He is going to talk again in his own speech,” said the woman, moving cautiously away. “Find someone to understand,” she pleaded. “Who knows what he may say?—and perhaps he will tell what to do with that Eye.”

“I heard to-day that a foreigner was in the village.”

“One of these?”

“No; a priest from Yingching.”

The peasant buried his face in his arms, and for some time crouched on his heels. Afterward he went quietly out.

The woman fetched some clean water, and continued to bathe the man’s bosom and lips. She crooned to herself.

“I do not see why men do these things. If they would only plant their own rice this would not happen. I do not understand what crop they expect to get. When the rice-fields are burned how can there be any rice? When the mulberry bushes are cut down how can there be any worms? When the worms are dead who shall spin silk? They kill, kill, kill, and their killings they cannot eat. They bring home neither pigs nor fowl. Once I said to one of them, ‘Why do you kill?’ And he answered, ‘We are soldiers.’ Now I do not understand that.

“Poor man, and what will your wife say? To come across the Five Seas just to get stuck full of holes. Now who will carry back your bones? I do not know why you foreigners are such devils to fight and to pray. My husband belongs to the Deluge Family, but I will not let—— No, no, you must not get up. Poor man, poor man, I don’t suppose you will ever fight any more. If you had only spoken to your wife she could have told you that this would happen. When men don’t speak to their wives they get into trouble. I wish you did not have that Eye upon your breast. How terrible it is to be a great man; how sorry I am for their—— No, no, do not talk, you are getting blood all over my bed.”

The man, endeavouring to speak, had turned upon his side, and a quantity of blood spurted from his mouth. After that he rested easier, and the red froth ceased to ooze from between his teeth, though it still came from the wound in his side. This the woman continued to wipe away.

Suddenly he snapped his fingers imperiously.

“Cha——”

The woman hastily brought a bowl of tea and held it to his lips, but he could not drink.

Thus as she tended him the hours of night passed. She became restless, and sometimes left his side to peer into the darkness, where was heard only the swish of wing and splash of wild fowl.

There came a mumbling from the bed, then coughing, and another spurting of blood. As the woman washed his face he opened his eyes, bright with the delirium of death, and resting his hand upon her head he began to speak in gentle, piteous tones.

The woman, turning away, saw through the open door the approach of a bobbing lantern. She returned to the bed and threw a rough cloth over the wounded man, put a jar in front of the taper, and seating herself by the door waited.

The Breton priest entered, followed by the woman’s husband and several others. Without hesitation he crossed the room and sat down by the bed. The woman took the jar from in front of the taper, and as the priest drew the rough coverlet from the dying man the light fell upon the Great Symbol. The men that came with him gazed at it for a moment then bowed their heads thrice to the floor.

As the priest took hold of the man’s hand he opened his eyes to look at him and smiled. Then in a low, uncertain voice began a quatrain of college revelry. His eyes closed; he mumbled.

Suddenly he began to speak again. He pleaded and a woman’s name trembled on his lips.

The Breton turned away.

The derelict choked, spat blood upon the Breton, then lay still. Tears rolled down his cheeks, sometimes mingling with his blood to scintillate for an instant like rubies on the coarse cloth. This grief of his was more than bitter—it was the grief of the strong dying, a packing of pain into Eternity. He moaned and brought a pallor to the cheeks of the priest. He sighed and the pain of it was indescribable.

Presently he began to breathe hoarsely, then mumbling, speaking—the speech of his wild life. One moment in combat with Malay praus; hurtling through the water; repelling boarders; cursing, exultant, frenzied and the swish of the kris was in the air. Then followed commands, as when the typhoon is on sea, and in his quivering tones was the echo of the wind’s scream. Fights in the jungle—soft, creeping, peering, throttling. Then in the open, commands, curses, silence.

Suddenly, as he muttered the ritual of the Deluge Family—sombre and unrelenting, he rose up in bed with his hand over the dripping wound. As he fell the priest turned him gently upon his side, and taking the bowl of fresh water the woman brought him, bathed his face.

The dying man opened his eyes.

“Where am I?”

“In a hut near the village of Tai Po.”

“Who are you?”

“A priest.”

“A rogue like myself.”

“You are wounded.”

“I am dying.”

The derelict raised his head and looked sternly at the men in the room, who seeing him look at them, fell upon their knees, striking their heads thrice upon the floor.

“It is well.”

He studied the sad profile above him.

“Priest,” his voice was without its wildness, “priest, I am dying. It is what I have been trying to do for many years—by land and by sea——”

The pain of speaking became too great.

He fumbled with the chain around his neck, consisting of gold links each about an inch and a half in length, and made up of two dragons contending for a pearl.

The priest removed it, and the derelict, taking it in his hands, whispered:

“Closer!”

The Breton bent near to him, and the chain with the Great Seal of the Tien Tu Hin was hung around his neck.

“Never take it off,” the dying man whispered hoarsely. “I—I—command.” His eyes closed and the pallor of death came upon him.

The priest leaned close; all listened, for the speech of the derelict was precious.

His lips moved, and the Breton bending closer heard:

“Alice——”

And so he died.

The priest on his knees held his crucifix over the body of the derelict.

Hours passed, and still the Breton did not move. The stillness in the room was unbroken, and the men crouching upon the floor hardly breathed. The only sounds were the weird flight of wild fowl as they winged their way through the night.

A cock crowed.

Night was ending, and the priest, rising, stood before the men with the Great Symbol glittering on his breast. Thrice again the men struck their foreheads upon the earthen floor.

“At the break of day we will bury him.”

The men wrapped the body in a shroud of rough cloth, and when darkness began to give away to that cold grey dusk that, without being night nor day, is yet the sick pallor of Time, they went forth and followed along the embankment of the paddy-fields until they came to a low hillside close to the sea.

It was natural that this casket of the derelict should mould near the ocean’s wash, for on its turbulent stream he had been blown hither and thither, unknown, unseen, a wreck in its wayward currents. There had he drifted and fought and mourned—a sad and perhaps terrible soul. Well might the sea dirge to his spirit its eonic plaint—that melancholy chant of Eternity. And well was it that they should remain forever together, the living sorrow and the dead.

Low down on the hillside they dug his grave.

A rift of light, almost lurid, glowed just above the rim of swaying waters.

They put the derelict in his grave, and the priest, holding his crucifix above him, stood over the open tomb. Upon his upturned face shone the red light of morning, while a vaporous mist like streams of incense rose from the grave and broken earth around him. As the priest prayed the Great Symbol rose and fell upon his bosom with the rhythm of his silent prayer, quivering and afire in the red glare of heaven.

The men, seeing the Great Eye flashing redly, knelt down before the Breton and rested their foreheads upon the earth.

The prayer ended; then the priest sounded, terrifying in its majestic intonations, the awful Taps of the God of Wrath.

The Bay of Tai Wan, where the Breton had been for more than a month and upon whose shore he had buried the derelict, is a long distance down the coast southeast of Yingching, and is famous on account of the evil spoken of it. This bay and country has a bad name, which is due to God as well as to those that dwell on its wild wash.

The waters of the bay are not blue, but a reddish-brown, and are serrated with the fins of the spotted shark, which lurk in its depths; for the feed in this bay is sometimes abundant, not only when the gale is upon the sea, but more often when men come together. The mountains that surround the bay on the south, west, and north are not high, but they are sinister; their south slopes desolate; those on the north gloomy with thickets. The narrow valleys extending back from the bay are diked, terraced, and made into paddy-fields, or are walled and made into towns, armed, forbidding. The lowlands below them are also dammed from the sea tides, and in those places not suitable for rice are salt pans, where the sea is evaporated for its salt.

The men that live on the Bay of Tai Wan have no settled occupation. They are farmers when the time comes to sow rice and to harvest it; they are fishermen, who know the bed of the sea; smugglers in their peaceful moods, but pirates always, and months are few when their mountains do not resound with the noise of combat; when the brown surge of the bay is without loitering spars, or dead or wreckage.

The secrets of this turbulent place, the fights fought there; the deeds of valour; the hopes and the end of hopes—gone down in its depths are without number. To look upon its waters is to shudder; to live there is to fear neither God nor His judgment; to go there requires the courage of a child, so the bishop had sent the Breton.

The priest, leaving Yingching at daybreak, sent no word to the wife, but went away happy in that nameless credulity, which belongs ordinarily to neither man nor woman, but only to children or such as he. And yet the Breton was not to blame, for happiness was the cause of it. Many weeks had already passed since the wife had opened the wicket and had come down to sit beside him—weeks that had vanished with the brevity of a dream.

Each day she fluttered for a moment on the threshold, then came down and seated herself near him; but it always remained as the first day, a vision, a tremor, a silence. The wife sat with her back to him, and not often did the Breton dare to raise his eyes nor even glance furtively at the beautiful contour of her neck and shoulders, nor at the delicate bloom that crept back from her cheek. But sometimes there was a quick turning of her head, a flash of light—then he trembled.

The happiness of all this nearness, stillness, and flashes brought about no change in the outward demeanour of the Breton. There is but little difference in appearance of a torrent at half flood and nearly at full flood. Only the beginnings and what ensues from it are noticed. The flood was still rising, and when the Breton was sent by the bishop to the wild Bay of Tai Wan, he left as he had remained during the past weeks, dreaming, without smiles, joyous, silent.

The priest’s journey was distant, and his stay among these turbulent sea-dwellers had been long; but he had much to do to keep him busy; much to remember and dream about, which kept him happy.

The people had received him with scowls, suspicion, and threats. In the market place of Hsia Wan a rock thrown at him struck a boy hooting by his side. He dressed the wound. Crossing a narrow islet to the village of Yat Ho, his boat was purposely overturned; without a word of remonstrance or show of concern, he paid the boatman and went on his way. At midnight he passed through the tiger-infested woods of Foshui and Sanshu from Tai Po to the hut of the fisher. In this way it was not long before his dreaminess was construed into fearlessness and admired by those amphibious bandits of the bay. And whomever a Chinese pirate admires men should stand in awe of or look upon him as a child.

The Breton went about his duties without cessation except at dusk, and then, when those about him had ceased their labours, he would seek the solitude of the sea-bank as he had that of the river. It is doubtful if he perceived that instead of the great city with its lessening but varied noises there were behind him mountains down whose desolate sides came gloom instead of twilight, while the only sounds that rose from them were the bark of jackal and scream of night-bird. Not after the hour of sundown were to be heard at all the hard noises of labour, nor the wild mutter of these sea-dwellers in their daily life. When the evening guns had boomed from the walls of their villages and from their low long boats at anchorage had come the last roll of kettle-drum, the clash of cymbals, and burst of crackers, a deep silence brooded over all except cries from the mountains and the sea’s muffled splash.

As dusk deepens this Bay of Tai Wan takes on a terror of its own. By day its waters are a reddish-brown, and its wave-crests look like yellow floss; by night it is black, and its wave-crests flashes of fire. This strange phenomenon is due to the fact that the sea along this coast teems with phosphorescent protozoa, making it a red-brown by day, and when night falls there is seen in every movement of the waters a glint of green fire. Wave-crests moving shoreward are as an endless flight of monstrous fire-flies. Where the sea breaks on the wash and rocks the spray becomes a shower of green sparks, so that the shore-line burns with a cold, livid fire. Among the flame-crests are seen zig-zag lines—the fiery trace of shark fins. Sometimes a green coal glows in the blackness, a tortoise floating in the break of the sea; sometimes a swarm of flying fishes rise from the waves, their scales and membranous wings adrift with a green fire, and for a moment their flight is ghastly. Looking down the edge of a cliff the shallow sea is filled with monsters aflame. Man never witnessed a more horrible sight than the sea at Tai Wan by night. Nothing that moves escapes the clinging protozoa: fish darting through the blackness have every scale, spine, maw, and tooth covered with this ghastly glow; the hairy legs and bodies of sea-spiders, their protruding eyes and fangs glitter in frightful luminosity; gleaming snakes glance through the depths. Squids sometimes hide their fire-covered bodies in a black vomit, but crustacea, sea-toads, and larvÆ all burning in this livid fire wriggle about under the black waters.

It was over this sea that the Breton dreamed and was joyous; it was by this sea that he buried the derelict whose chain and Seal he wore under his robe—a promise to the dead, but in due time to be more precious to him than all the jewels that have bedecked men, and more powerful than Empires.

The Breton once more stood before the screen, eager, hesitant; straining his ears for the music of a silken rustle; his eyes for one pink finger-tip. He waited a long time, but heard nothing, nor saw even one little finger resting shyly in a crevice.

“What, you here?”

He raised his eyes joyously.

“Well?”

“I have come back,” his words were almost inaudible.

“Indeed!”

He looked down happily.

“How did you happen to return? Did I send for you?” The voice of the wife was cold, vibrant.

The Breton’s eyes wandered contentedly from crevice to crevice.

“Sit down!” she petulantly commanded.

There was silence.

“Where have you been?”

“To the Bay of Tai Wan.”

“Why did you go?”

The Breton, discovering in the crevice a little finger, did not answer.

“Oh, very well! I suppose you were glad. It must have been a great relief. I was getting tired.”

Heedlessly the Breton heard the stamp of her foot and contentedly waited, though no sound was heard but its restless, impatient tapping.

“Why did you go away?”

“I buried a man——”

“Did that take you all these weeks?”

“No—but——”

“Priest!” she interrupted impatiently, “don’t give me excuses! Those veiling rags under which men hide their scared swarm of sins! Bah!”

He looked happily expectant at the crevices just over his head.

“Oh, well, it is immaterial,” she continued coldly, carelessly; “you are only my instructor. Come and go when you please. I have sought your learning, not you.” Her foot tapped measuredly. “Learning satisfies every craving of the heart, man—nothing. Learning is steadfast; a friend, who coaxes away the weariness of hours, hueing dull days with treasures from forgotten time, a wealth from the ends of the earth. It has a hundred attributes; man—not one. It is a cloak for chilled age, a balm for pain, an ointment for misfortune, and man—Oyah!”

The Breton thumbed contentedly the leaves of his book.

Presently the tapping of her foot ceased. He heard the soft, sensual rustle of her garments, then the wicket opened.

The pink had gone out of the wife’s cheeks; her face was pallid and her long lustrous eyes looked larger yet from the darkness that was under them.

The Breton glanced furtively at her as she came down and sat with her back to him.

“I am——” he ventured, uncertain.

“Yes?” she drawled, turning her head slightly toward him.

“I have thought about it.”

“Indeed!”

“Have I——”

“Oh, yes,” she interrupted coldly, “your teaching has been quite delightful; so learned.”

“I was away a long time.”

“Yes?”

“I hastened back.”

“On account of my studies, I suppose?”

“Yes,” he apologised.

“How thoughtful of you!”

“I could not——”

“Oh—it did not matter. No doubt if it had not been for the lessons you would not have come.”

Something in her tone made him look furtively at the pale altered contour of her cheek.

“Of course not!” she exclaimed vexedly. “How could I ask such a thing! It would be very annoying were it not for the instruction!”

“I enjoy——”

“Oh, you do! Don’t you suppose I know that? Instruct! Instruct! Instruct! I am tired of it!”

“You——”

“No, I don’t!” she interrupted savagely. “What is the good of all this learning, all these black books? Who loves me any more for it? Does it add a dearer pink to my cheek?” She turned her face partly toward him and in her voice was a wave of pain. “Do you think it gives lustre to my eye or music to my words?” Her tones became mocking. “Do you really think it will puff away wrinkles? A cosmetic, a tire-woman, a——” She stamped her foot peevishly. “I tell you, priest, I will have no more of it, never!”

“Learning enlightens,” said the Breton aimlessly, “as a mirror——”

“Oyah! A mirror! So is a tub of water holding the image of the sun, but what warmth comes from that reflection? I would like you to tell me, priest, with all your learning, what there is substantial in a reflected image? What if learning were the painting of the world’s ocean acts, could fish dwell in its mock waters? And I would like to know if there is the fragrance of one rose in ten myriad miles of embroidered flowers?”

He did not reply, and again came the half-kindly truce of silence, but only half, for there was still the tapping of her foot. And how varied is that speech! What a world of meaning is in the tapping of a woman’s foot! So the Breton listened, wonderingly to the thoughts that came from the tap, tap, tap on the marble floor.

“Did you study?” he ventured hesitatingly.

“Oh, yes,” she responded with mock carelessness, “and I learned many things.”

“Yes,” she added bitterly, “many things; and in the first place, I learned that learning is like dragging the sea for the jewels of night. I also learned that a brilliant cloud is easily scattered and that the fairest sunrise fades the soonest. Moreover,” she continued with increasing bitterness, “I have learned that trees blown away by passing winds have more branches than——” She stopped. A tremor in her voice was mastering her. Again came the tapping of her foot: petulant, impatient, then slower, softer and more uncertain.

“But why should I grieve?” She communed to herself, her voice full of weariness, filled with the quiver of hopeless pain. “No one cares for me, no one ever thinks of me caged here forever in this cold, gilded chamber, while they move far and wide, gay travellers on the many rivers of life. Now and then one stops and with a small laugh drops a crumb between my bars and passes on. They loiter through the world’s flower-gardens, and I—sometimes there comes swiftly past a whiff of perfume. They drain deep the different wines of pleasure, while into my tiny cup, bar-fastened, is poured a few drops of water. They move abroad under the broad sunlight, and I—moveless in this wee shadow. They hear ever that great symphony, the world’s laugh, and I—no one ever laughs alone. Their cheeks are stained by the dews of an hundred skies, mine—by tears. They sleep that they might hasten the morrow, and I—to forget to-day. They weave and I untangle. Their threads are of a hundred hues, mine—one sad colour. Untangling! Untangling! And when will it all end? To-day is yesterday; yesterday as days gone; to-morrow—oh, if I only did not know! If I only——”

She burst into tears.

The Breton’s lips parted, his eyes grew round. Presently he began to realise that she was sobbing almost at his feet. His hands tightened their clasp on the arms of the chair and a pallor came into his face. It was difficult for him to recognise this bitter, passionate outburst in the very joy of his return. He never before had seen a woman sob, and during all of the months they had been together he had only known her in careless, exuberant happiness, a joyousness almost divine. Now crying so heart-brokenly before him, she appeared as someone else. Grief in her was more than paradoxical—it was laughter weeping, it was the sobbing of song.

The tears of the wife did not ebb as tears often do but each sob seemed to gain greater force from the one gone before. Her face was half hid in her little hands, her wide sleeves had fallen away and her tears trickling down her bare arms fell two jewelled streams into her lap.

The Breton sat rigid in his chair watching her slight form shake with each convulsive sob but he said nothing, did nothing; not even his eyes moved.

At times her crying ceased; there was a moment of questioned silence, then her tears fell faster and despair crept into her sobs.

It was during one of these choked, silent hesitancies that the priest mumbled:

“Your husband loves you——”

She straightened up. Her hands still over her eyes and a sob trembling on her lips.

“Your husband loves you,” repeated the Breton monotonously. “Your husband——”

She stamped her foot and fell again to weeping.

The Breton moved uneasily. A tenseness came into the lines about his mouth.

“Your husband——”

“What do you know about love?” she demanded in the midst of her sobs.

And presently the priest said: “It is something from God.”

“Yes!” she drawled with mocking, scornful bitterness. “Indeed! Why, I thought it was just a violet thrown in a rocky waste; a sunbeam cast upon the cold sea; dew dropped into the desert; a bundle of burnt prayers tossed upon the wind; a—a——” She choked, turned her face away and again tears gathered on her lashes.

Presently she began to sob softly, full of pain.

“Don’t,” he whispered.

Her tears flowed faster.

“Don’t,” he begged again.

“You—don’t—care!” she sobbed.

The Breton did not reply.

“I—know—you don’t.”

The Breton’s lips moved, but he said nothing.

“You—you——”

“Don’t.”

“I wish—I were dead——”

“No!”

“And why shouldn’t I?” she demanded fiercely. “One is better dead than one’s heart strangled by this silken scarf. Why must one live forever on this desert, scanning each day the sky-line for what cannot come?”

She picked restlessly the folds of her robe, her tears falling upon her unrestful hands.

“You would not care,” she continued hopelessly. “You never even asked if I had been sick, and yet I come before you all white with troubled pallor——”

“You——”

“Oh, no!” she interrupted, scornfully, turning her head and glancing coldly at him. “I have been more than well and happy. Why—I have laughed and sung each hour of the day away; no bird in all the park has been gayer than I, and my cheeks? Oh, I whitened them; they became so ruddy. Oh, yes, how happy, how happy——”

She was looking at the Breton, pleading, tearful.

“Don’t you know,” she begged, “don’t you know that I have not laughed nor sung all these weeks? No caged bird ever—ever—I think you would have cared if you could have seen me cowering now in one corner, now in another; counting the moments for the coming of day, then longing for night. And oh, how ill I have been; now burning with fever, then cold, chilling. I did not know what had happened: one little thought parching my lips, making my heart shrink and draw high into my throat. A noise like a footfall would make it beat so painfully I could not breathe, and when I heard someone coming, I trembled all over. I grew feverish, then cold, a dimness would come over my eyes. All day and night I cried for tardy sleep—and when one begs for sleep is it not a wish for death? Oh, if you only knew,” she cried, striking the palms of her little hands passionately together. “If you only knew!” She rose from her stool and stood looking at him.

The Breton stood up, as she came close to him, her hands clasped on her breast, her eyes questioning, beseeching. He looked down at her for a moment, then raising his head, closed his eyes.

She stepped nearer, quivering, hesitant.

“Tell me you will not go away again.”

The Breton did not answer.

“Tell me,” she whispered, moving closer so that their robes touched and she felt him tremble.

Through the open windows came the grumble of the surrounding city. All else was still; the birds in the cages above them and the birds in the park without. Man was yet in the midst of his toil and Nature still somnolent in the afternoon heat.

“Promise me?” She lifted her clasped hands and rested them lightly on his bosom.

The thrushes in the bamboo cages above them began to flutter, and in the park the calling of pheasants was heard. With the breath of evening larks, pehlings, birds of a hundred spirits came forth from their hidings. The hum of the city grew less and less.

Neither had moved.

The shadow of the feathery bamboo that grew by the fish-pond without came softly in through the open shell-latticed window; furtively it crept across the floor, slowly it ascended the lacquered wall and—vanished.

After a while the sun’s rays were gone and a yellow light diffused through the room, burnished anew its golden fretwork. An orange-saffron glimmer lingered for a few moments, then came the fleeting rose blush of twilight, caressingly tinging the paled faces of the Breton and the wife standing so still and so silent in its parting light.

Gently as silken floss is wafted upward by a breath so the little hands of the wife stole from the Breton’s bosom to his shoulders.

And when the songs of the birds in the park had ceased; when only the quarrelling of the white-headed crows was heard; when the hum from the city had died away; when silence with dusk had closed around them the hands of the wife crept lightly around the Breton’s neck. Her lips parted, her eyes, tearful, yet happy, looked up into his face.

Dusk deepened.

Heavily the Breton lifted his hands, resting them gently but firmly upon her arms.

A joyous flush spread over her face and neck; her lips quivered as if to smile or burst into joyful tears; she laid her cheek lightly on his bosom. The Breton’s fingers closed around her wrists; trembling, with difficulty he took them from his shoulders.

Gently he put her away from him and as he crossed the room he heard a little moan, also the crinkling fall of silk.

The Breton went calmly out of the Hall of Guests and came unconcernedly down the Lion Steps into the Park as though without thought or in profound meditation. His head was thrown slightly back and his hands hung loosely by his side. Softly he went into the dusk as though watching the crows and herons still unsettled in the darkened domes of the great trees.

Dusk was deepening into night as he passed out the gateway and the streets were filled with their night streams of hurrying men. The stores had closed, street stalls were leaving. The seal cutter that sat near the gate and always welcomed him, had departed, as had his neighbour, the money-changer, who had gone before dusk with his strings of cash. A short way up the street a fussing cook stopped his grumbling to offer him a cake; a fortune teller peered momentarily into his face, then jumped dramatically to one side. Itinerant barbers, apothecaries, shoemakers, dentists, storytellers, geomancers, astrologers and book-sellers joked and reviled as he passed them in their packing-up and counting of the profits of the day. Beggars innumerable and hucksters with trays slung over their shoulders, with rattles and wailing whistles, jostled against him. Unresistingly, unconscious of these men and their noises, he was carried along in this dusk-stream through the tortuous channels of Yingching.

Sometimes with jest they brushed roughly against him, peered up into his face, only to draw hastily away with a look of silent fear. Sometimes a swiftly borne mandarin’s chair came by him and the attendants would thrust him brutally against the walls or into a corner. A line of singing bonzes, modulating their tones by the sound of wooden cymbals and mingling their melancholy chant with the evening noises carried him along with them.

In and through the twisting streets the monks took him until they vanished, and another crowd shoved him along through the night. Only here and there were lights in front of tea-houses, from which came jests and songs and the laughter tinkling of wine cups. In front of one of these several sedans had stopped and blocked the way. The crowd growled and cursed and surging forward, was forcing the Breton in front of them, when from one of the chairs a dainty singing-girl stepped out. This dusk crowd, at the sight of her, grew licentious in a moment and there rose a tumult of comments. The girl wavered, almost terror-stricken, at this mob of men. She peered around for a place to flee, but they were all around her and the way to the tea-house was closed. The wit of the crowd grew more violent when the girl, looking up, saw the Breton standing silently beside her. For a moment she hesitated, then lifted up her arms to him like a child seeking protection and rested them on his bosom. He looked down at her unconcernedly, while the crowd jeered as only a Chinese crowd can do and poured upon him and the little singing-girl clinging for protection their storm of lascivious wit.

Suddenly those that stood nearest the Breton saw him shudder, then sway, as if to fall. He staggered back among the crowd as one choking for a breath of fresh air; he forced his way through them, then moved listlessly along through the half-vacant street.

Again the dusk crowd caught up with him and hurried him along the Street of the Marble Portal, thence into the broad Avenue of Peace, which leads to the Gate of Eternal Rest, the last of the city gates to be closed. These men, who but a moment before had been aburst with jest, hastened silently on.

Down the street was heard the sound of wedding music—a bride happy and smiling was being carried with her trosseau to the home of the groom. The crowd was once more full of laughter and jest, for no people so love to mock the misfortunes or cajole the vanity of others as the people of this old land. None are more skilful in its use and abuse. They are at it during all hours and in all places where men or women congregate; in markets, streets, and temples, they hurl it from window to window; and on the boats in the river old women are perched on the high poops with no other purpose than to revile and abuse. Their fund is inexhaustible; they can rail most viciously at one another, foam with vituperations, then part as friendly as they met.

So once more the Breton, in the half stupor of his terrible sorrow, was forced to listen to lascivious and brutal jests hurled so relentlessly upon one perhaps as beautiful and—and——

The crowd forced the Breton against the wall. Flaring torches and swaying lanterns could now be seen winding toward them. The head of the procession came by—an old man bearing a large gold-brocaded umbrella, which he held over the bride as she entered and left the sedan. Behind him came men bearing great lanterns inscribed with propitiatory sentences: “May the phoenix sing harmoniously”—another way of wishing that the bride will give birth to a son. As the crowd deciphered these various illumined wishes, they commented upon them in sarcasm which cannot be uttered. The musicians who followed did their utmost to drown the abuse heaped upon them, as did the bearers of halberds, dragon heads, titular flags, and honorary tablets, denoting the honours and rank of the bride’s father, but there was no compassion in the crowd as they assailed with their vituperation these unfortunate symbols of human vanity.

Parties of young lads, fantastically dressed, tripped gaily by playing on drums and flutes, followed by bearers arrayed in red robes and burdened under many vermilion-lacquered boxes containing the bride’s trosseau. The contents of these boxes came in for a new outburst of lecherous jest. Men turned to one another and those nearest the Breton surrounded him and delivered grave conjectures as to what they contained—doubts that were brutal.

The bride approached, securely locked in her red and gold sedan, surrounded by quivering, silken lanterns. The acme of the crowd’s pleasure was now reached and their licentiousness ended in a final outburst. They jested upon everything appertaining to a bride or a woman, from the size of her feet to the possibilities of her extravagances. They took a maternal interest in her, and gravely advised her as to what to do upon this night. Nothing had been left unsaid when the wedding procession vanished in the darkness of the narrow streets.

Silent, even sombre, became the crowd as it hastened with the Breton toward the Gate of Eternal Rest under whose shadowy portals soldiers were drawn up preparatory to closing the gates for the night. The crowd hurried through and, once beyond the walls, vanished, dispersing almost instantly in the black labyrinth of the suburbs.

The Breton went on alone, his manner unchanged by the vanishing of those that had but a moment before elbowed and jostled him along through the streets. In and out, winding, turning, twisting through this black network, he threaded his way. Through narrow passages, up and down hollow worn stairs, under gloom-weighted portals, along the edges of canals and over bridges that spanned them, he went carelessly along, neither faltering nor stumbling.

When he came to the north entrance of the Mission Compound he stopped for the first time. He stood for a moment, unloosened the neck of his robe, then went slowly along the wall until he came to the northwest corner; turning, he followed the western side until he passed out into the open space lying between the Mission and the river. Again he hesitated for a moment, then crossed to the river’s overhanging bank where its black waters swirled straight down below his feet.

All around him brooded silent night. But from the flower-boats down the river came the faint echo of laughter and songs and music. From the sampans and junks anchored across the river came an occasional volley of crackers by which the simple boatman warned the devils of the night that he was still alert. Sometimes was heard from these rocking boats a child’s fretful cry. As night wore on the noises of revelry ceased. The boatmen and the night devils slept in peace and the children’s cries were hushed.

The world was asleep. No sounds were heard but what came from the river at the Breton’s feet, for when the insect hum of man was stilled and a nation of them slept on its banks this river communed aloud and to those that sought it there was peace, even enticement in its coaxing, as well as terror.

The Breton leaned perilously over this compassionate, sweet-voiced river upon which only the day before he had looked impatiently as he waited his cumbersome sea-junk to make headway against its flood. Eagerly had he watched for the first sight of the Sea-Guarding Tower on the north wall, then for the two slender pagodas, which are the city’s masts.

And this was the end.

At last he sought this river over whose bosom he had dreamed so long and so happily. But he had come to it now an outcast; a priest that had repudiated his God and defiled his sacred brotherhood; a man that had sinned—a man—yes—again he hears her fall; again he hears the little moan that broke from her lips; again he sees her lying as dead in the twilight. It is he that did this——

The Breton mechanically took off his rosary and crucifix and dropped them into the waters. He drew himself up, then hesitated. Presently his chin sank to his bosom and he stood motionless on the very brink of this strange River of Pearls, which has never been known to smile since mankind came to dwell on its banks, other than to those that sought it in the night, then a smile came from its murky depths and it was illumined with more delicate traceries than are reflected from the fretwork of heaven.

To those that are happy and look upon it in the sunlight, this melancholy river is forever sombrously brooding; its bosom is an abyss and its voice that of grief. But for those that seek it, repose is found there, and in its dreadful monologue contentedness, a paradox only understood by those whose hearts, as its bosom, are allow with tears. Those listening forget, and plans are not made with the sound of its voice in the ear. Innumerable have been the weary pilgrims that have questioned and have been pleased with its answer; more have sought than have fled from it and its voice has been the rarest of music to them; its bosom the kindest. Holding its arms open to him, entreating, enticing so gently, this dreadful yet kindly river flowed on by the Breton to the sea.

Night was passing. The golden-jetted horologue of Eternity turned slowly. No moon came up, but in endless succession rose the constellations. Majestically these bright markers of unending Time crossed the firmament and with infinite grandeur, ignorant of the riot of man, a pulse beat went through the universe.

Day approached.

A fog came up the river and the stars were seen no more. The Breton still stood erect upon the bank; his eyes peered into the waters below him; his hands still hung listlessly by his side.

Suddenly there rose from the Mission Compound, reverberant in the still air of dawn, those stately cadences, which are the chant of a world’s grief.

The priest tottered.

From across the river sounded the halloo of a boatman. This was echoed and re-echoed from different parts. The riverside had awakened.

The Breton shuddered—he also had awakened.