XVI
The Heart of the Pagan
As a matter of fact," said young Holt, "I was coming up to your place if I had not seen you. We are most desperately short of men this harvest, and my father thought that perhaps you could lend him one or two until you started cutting your oats."
Andrew Garstang, senior, the burly, shrewd, independent yeoman of Stonecroft Farm, leaning over one of his field gates, looked at Andrew Garstang, junior, who stood in the road by his horse's side. Both were amused so much that half a minute passed before either made reply.
"Why, Harold," said the younger Andrew, "where do you think I've been to get my horse in this state? Scouring the whole countryside for five blessed hours trying to pick up a few tramps or dead-beats to make shift with ourselves."
"And what have you done?" asked Harold with interest.
"Got hungry, that's all. And now I'm going up to have my tea. You may as well come with us, Harold."
"I should much like to," said Harold, with every appearance of sincerity, "but I must go somewhere else, if only to make a decent show."
The two Garstangs had already turned away, when along the road a strange and unfamiliar figure was seen approaching.
"What outlandish kind of foreigner is that, now?" demanded the farmer, staring down the road.
"A gipsy?" suggested his son, as the stranger got nearer. "I saw some of their vans down Sprostock way."
"Why, I do believe," exclaimed Harold suddenly, "it's an infernal Chinee! What on earth can one of those reptiles be doing in Overbury?"
It was a speculation that might well excite curiosity. Yen Sung himself could have supplied a very meagre outline of his journeyings, and even that he would have thought it prudent to withhold in the face of every inducement, not including actual torture. The beginning of the story would have gone back more than a single year, and as far as the township of Lien Ning, on the banks of the Pei-kiang. It would have exhibited a wide range of Oriental nature and disclosed a little jealousy, some high-handed official tyranny, bloodshed, a fixed belief in the virtue of revenge and in the inexorable demands of the spirits of the dead, more bloodshed, the insidious implication of the Triad League, and the final outcome of a tribal feud. It involved Yen Sung—whose interest in the original cause of the strife was of the slightest—and by wave after wave of development it finally cast him, under a new name and with a highly fictitious account of himself, among his countrymen in Limehouse. His object was to lose all association with the past, and doubtless he might have succeeded had not another family matter requiring adjustment (not in the remotest degree connected with Yen Sung) called for the assassination of an amiable Shanghai merchant, in London on business. The Chinese abroad have the strongest objection to invoking the assistance of the police, possibly as a result of their experience of the official classes at home, so that the remains of the Shanghai gentleman were sent back to his family in a crate bearing a label "Photographic Accessories. To be opened only in a ruby light. Perishable," and went through in the most correct manner. But, as the merchant was a person of some importance, an informal tribune considered the case, and discreet inquiries about the new-comer Yen Sung were set afoot with the object of ascertaining whether he was sufficiently friendless to be suffocated quietly and sent on in a second crate by the next boat as a peace offering to the outraged relations at Shanghai. A casual act of charity towards a poor countryman, on Yen Sung's part, was the means of saving him. The decision of the committee went against him, but before anything could be done a little block of wood, shaped into the semblance of a miniature coffin and bearing his own name, appeared miraculously in the fold of his sleeve as he walked along the Causeway. Before the incident took place Yen Sung's expression was that of a person who gazes into futurity in a contemplation of the Confucian Analects. Without varying a single line of his preoccupation, without apparently withdrawing his eyes and mind from a sublime engrossment in the Beyond, Yen Sung saw the symbol, read the name, and perfectly understood the warning. He continued to saunter on; presently he was out of the district which he knew, but Confucius and the North-West appeared to draw him on. By evening he had passed through Watford, and when night fell he entered a wood and slept there. The next morning he resumed his journey without a word of inquiry about the route, believing that in a blind and unreasoning course lay his only hope. But, sparely as he lived, the little money he had was soon exhausted, and he found himself face to face with the necessity of seeking some unfamiliar employment.
The three men stood curiously at the gate as he approached. A foreigner might have been excused if, in search of authority, he had addressed the dapper Harold or the man who bestrode a horse; but it was the elder Garstang whom Yen Sung saluted with grave courtesy.
"I seek one," he said, with an air of perfect self-possession, "bearing the illustrious name Ga-tang. A wayfarer, following the sun, spoke of the rider upon a horse who offered a just reward to all who would labour in his fields."
Surprise held them for a moment, but it was plain beyond all mistake that this strange being was offering his services as a harvester.
"I don't think that it's work you would care about, unless you've been used to it," said Garstang doubtfully, his conservative ideas of the fixed order of things not quite at ease.
"Try," replied Yen Sung laconically. "Not work honourably, not pay honourably."
"I am giving half-a-crown a day, overtime, and bagging," remarked Garstang technically.
"It is sufficient," replied Yen Sung with the dignity of a Mandarin of the Sapphire Button. Why should he admit to these barbarians that he had not the remotest idea of what any of the three inducements comprised?
"But, Mr. Garstang," interposed Harold, "surely you are not going to engage him?"
"Yea," replied Garstang, regarding the young man with his shrewd, placid gaze. "May as well, Harold. We can't pick and choose now."
"But just think what sort of a man you are bringing into the neighbourhood, sir," urged Harold. "One of the most degraded race on the face of the earth—a pagan and an idol worshipper."
Garstang opened his eyes in gentle surprise. He was a staunch Churchman, but it was not the custom—to state the case mildly—to carry religious tests into the harvest-field. Nor, unless innuendo missed its mark, did Holt, senior, invariably regulate his business during the last six days of the week by the sentiments to which he gave open profession on the first.
"I mean," continued Harold, "that, being a heathen, he will have no ideas of right and wrong. A friend who has been in Australia tells me that they are the most treacherous, bloodthirsty, and revengeful creatures in existence—more like animals, in fact. I hope that you understand me, sir, when I say that you are really taking very grave risks."
"They eat birds' nests, don't they?" remarked the younger Andrew with a well-meaning effort to include himself in the conversation.
"They eat anything that is filthy," said Harold, with elegant disdain. "Rats and mice and cattle that have died of disease."
So far this frank exposition of his national qualities had been carried on within Yen Sung's hearing, despite the fact that he could probably understand at least the essentials of every sentence, although nothing animate could have more successfully preserved an expression of absolute vacuity. But now Harold stepped nearer to the Garstangs, and in spite of the contemptuous intensity of his tone nothing could be heard of his words beyond an occasional disconnected phrase. ". . . really too hortible to . . . dozens of cases . . . and then murdered . . . rather commit suicide . . . for Miss Edith's sake . . . You cannot warn . . ."
"What is that about 'Miss Edith'?"
The three men turned quickly at the voice. A very fair young girl, not rustic, but wearing the grace and freedom that spring from the English soil, had approached unseen by the field path and stood smiling by the gate.
"The proverb has no terrors for you, Miss Edith," said Harold with easy gallantry. "You need never fear hearing ill of yourself."
"I was not listening," she replied; "but I did hear my name."
"The simple fact," volunteered Harold lightly, "is that a very undesirable alien wanted to be taken on for harvesting, and I was endeavouring to persuade your father to harden his naturally benevolent heart. Is her exacting ladyship satisfied?"
"But what have I to do with it?" she persisted.
"I was merely reminding your father of the many valuable articles lying about which might excite the cupidity of a covetous stranger."
She laughed, still unsatisfied; but another step brought her to the gate, and then the patient figure of the awaiting Celestial fell upon her surprised gaze and drove every other thought from her mind. With a curiosity quite free from shyness or alarm she approached Yen Sung with a friendly smile, as one who seeks to make a strange guest feel more at home.
"Do you speak English?" she asked.
"Most imperfectly, honourable lady," he replied.
She started a little at the quaint form of address, but there could be no doubting the perfect courtesy of Yen Sung's manner.
"You have come a very long way," she continued. It was a strange, new thing for her to stand face to face with this queerly-clad wanderer. She would have liked to ask him many things about his far-off home.
"A dead leaf is easily carried by the wind," replied Yen Sung, who smiled also. It was a very faint smile, scarcely worth the name, but it was the first sign of the lighter emotion he had shown for many months.
"But you must have seen a great many wonderful places; and, of course, to us your own country is the most wonderful of all." His presence conjured up a thousand bright visions within her eager mind—of sun-flashing, burnished temples and graceful pagodas, rice fields greener than any English meadow in the spring, palm-dotted deserts, forests of bamboo, and azalea-covered hills; rivers and canals crowded with junks, sampans, and motley craft; stockaded towns, their fantastic streets filled with strange types or full of silent mystery beneath the moon. Doubtless the picture was quite unreal, but it was none the less fascinating, and the knowledge of it seemed all to be centred in Yen Sung.
To her remark, however, he only bowed acquiescently. Limited as his experience of English custom might be, he possessed both the quick intuition and the keen observation of his race, and he divined that the interest of this barbarian maiden would not be to his immediate advantage.
"I think that you are possibly under a misapprehension, Miss Garstang," suggested Harold, coming forward with an expression that was a little awry in its smiling effort. "This fellow is not an educated traveller who will be able to gratify your thirst for information, but a common tramp asking your father to take him on as a harvester—doubtless some seaman or stoker who has deserted from his ship and now anxious to keep out of the way."
"It must be very hard to be friendless in a foreign country and to have to ask for work among strangers," observed Edith sympathetically, pointedly addressing herself to Yen Sung; "but I am sure that you will have no more trouble, because my father never refuses work to anyone who really wants it. Then if you like to come up to the farm you can have some tea." She nodded to Harold quite graciously, reminded her father that it was nearly six o’clock, and disappeared along the field path.
"Well, Harold, it's no use; we can't help ourselves, you see," declared Garstang with an air of amused resignation which only half disguised an equally amused satisfaction.
"Oh, I don't mind," said Harold quickly; "only, knowing what I do, I thought it was my duty to warn you. I suppose you have a proverb applicable to the occasion, eh, Ah-John?"
"We have a saying, 'When the road bends we cannot see what lies before us,'" admitted Yen Sung indifferently.
"A very safe assertion to make, too," replied Harold, turning to resume his way; "but we can often guess, my pagan friend." He smiled frequently to himself on the journey, but it was not a pleasant smile, and a good many wayside flowers and overhanging boughs were prematurely cut off by his vindictive cane.
The following day marked the opening of the oat harvest, and Yen Sung took his place among the half-dozen men whose task consisted in tying up the sheaves and throwing them aside out of the path of the horses before the reaping machine made its round again. Garstang initiated him into all that there was to learn in the process—the peculiar knot by which the band is secured. "You may find it to be a bit ockard at first, but you'll soon pick it up," he remarked kindly; but with the fatal imitative genius of his countrymen Yen Sung had already picked it up and was reproducing the knot, even down to the minute and accidental detail of a tuft of broken ends protruding at a certain point. The farmer was turning away satisfied when a thought occurred to him. "By the way," he added, taking out his wage-book, "I don't think I have asked you your name yet."
"Claude!" replied Yen Sung with transparent simplicity. He had noticed the name over a shop window as he passed through the village, and he now adopted it as a pleasant little compliment to the neighbourhood.
"Any other?" asked the farmer, whose knowledge of the ways of the Central Kingdom was not extensive.
"Of the obscure house of Kiu," replied Yen Sung for no particular reason, and as Claude Kiu he remained in the annals of Stonecroft Farm.
The days and weeks passed by; all the harvesting was over, but Yen Sung still remained. Why, on his part, it might be hard to say, for he had enough money now to take him safely out of the country, and had he been a human being instead of a mere yellow man it would have to be written that at Stonecroft Farm he suffered much. The men early discovered that he never returned a blow, so, to confess the shameful truth, to prove their manliness or to impress their moral superiority, some frequently struck and kicked him. Dead mice and other carrion were thrown into his food as he ate, in exquisite drollery. Whenever Harold Holt visited the farm he never failed to drop upon good ground a few light-hearted suggestions for turning Yen Sung's eccentricities to humorous account. Garstang rather liked the impassive pagan, but there was much taking place that he could not see.
If he might be judged by his works, Yen Sung outshone all his associates in the Christian virtues. To the blow on the right cheek he turned the left; he was patient, industrious, long-suffering; he bore the burdens of others. Only, it should be recorded that in moments of solitude, especially after suffering an indignity, Yen Sung sometimes took a very bright knife from beneath his tunic and proceeded to whet it quietly and systematically upon his leather belt, although it was always keen enough to split a hair. This might have given some colour to Harold's warning were it not that the Oriental mind remains an insoluble riddle, and it would be as reasonable and more charitable to assume that Yen Sung's formidable blade was intended for no more desperate purpose than that of smoothing its owner's chin. There is even a more amiable possibility, for one morning about this time Edith Garstang found upon her plate at the breakfast-table a little box of wood and inlaid straw, which proved to contain a variety of figures carved with taste and untiring skill in bone and fruit stones, and one or two in ivory. There were mandarins in official robes; trees of gnarled, fantastic growth; tigers, elephants and serpents; a wonderful street scene, with stalls, merchants, beggars, a procession of priests, and all the details of a busy thoroughfare; a child-bride in her ornamental wedding-chair; and a number of fearsome objects which could only be accounted for as evil demons, though more probably in Yen Sung's mind they stood as the embodiment of beneficent spirits. It was a collection which must have occupied all his spare hours almost from the day of his arrival.
Edith was enchanted with the grace and delicacy of the pretty things, but Garstang remained thoughtfully silent, and when the story came to Harold's ears he vowed softly between smiling lips that Yen Sung should presently suffer somewhat for his presumption. The immediate settlement arrived at by Garstang was to take the box in one hand and a sovereign in the other, and to tell Yen Sung kindly but definitely that he must take back the toys or be paid with the money. It furnished fresh proof of the sordid nature of the Chinaman's instincts, for he took the coin without a word of protest, and when alone cheerfully added it to his secret store. Thenceforth he carved no more, occupying himself with the composition of sundry notices in his own tortuous language, which he afterwards fastened to the branches of the largest trees, or to buildings, and even cast into the streams. A local wit affected to regard these documents as Boxer proclamations; in reality they were invocations addressed to the tutelary spirit residing within the tree or building or stream committing "the most honourable sun-haired maiden" to its unceasing protection; recommending a benevolent interest in the general affairs of the "large-bodied earth-tiller Ga-tang"; and requesting as a personal favour to Yen Sung that the tree or building would fall upon, or the stream engulf, "the rat-lipped outcast whose polluted ancestral altar lies beyond the hill-top."
The "most honourable maiden" herself was never without a smile and a word of greeting for Yen Sung when she passed him at his work. She cross-examined him out of his polite dissimulation on the subject of food and obtained some small concessions to provide a simple fare more suited to his tastes. His oblique eyes took her up at the earliest possible point of vision, and, still intent upon his work, he continued to watch her stealthily until the last glimpse of her white dress was hidden from his sight; but by no interest or encouragement could he be induced to cease work during his working hours. Amused, half-piqued, and curious to learn, she was driven to approach him at a more convenient time, when, in the monotonous tone and passionless narration of his race, he told her all she asked. About himself he lied without the least consciousness of shame or ingratitude, painting for her benefit a purely imaginary picture of his home, his life, his kinspeople, and all that pertained to Yen Sung; but the picture, though individually deceptive, was typically correct, so that in time Edith Garstang in her remote English home began to raise a little of the veil of the mysterious land and even to find some slight foothold among the shifting complexities of the Celestial mind.
It was a continual matter for self-reproach to her that she did not bring about Yen Sung's conversion to a better faith; but, with surprise, she found an increasing difficulty in urging her own religion upon this courteous, high-minded pagan. She shrank from the shameful justice of the reproach in case Yen Sung should indicate the blasphemers, the Commandment-breakers, the thieves and the persecutors by whom he was surrounded and ask in a voice requiring no irony of tone, "Are these, too, Christians?"
In his own land Yen Sung burned joss-sticks to many deities, including one, blind and inexorable, whom we might call Destiny. Being at so great a distance from home, and therefore almost out of the sphere of influence of these deities, he had perhaps grown lax in his observances, or it may be that a supply of the proper worshipping materials was not obtainable in Overbury. Whatever the cause, this same Destiny determined to render Yen Sung a sharp account of her presence, he having no powerful beneficent deities to intervene, and the spirits of his ancestors presumably being all engaged in China. The visible outcome was that on a raw November afternoon two of the labourers returned to the house assisting Yen Sung, who walked very uncertainly between them.
It then appeared that there had been a very unfortunate accident. Six men in all were concerned, including Harold, who had walked across the field on his way up to the house, and there were five different and occasionally conflicting accounts, Yen Sung himself contributing nothing. The five Stonecroft men had been engaged in collecting, carting, and burning the dried potato-tops when Harold appeared. Someone had playfully thrown a potato (the accepted version), which Someone else caught and returned. Then Someone threw another, and in a minute a game was in progress, with all engaged except Yen Sung, who continued his duty of replenishing the fires. Unfortunately, Someone threw the potato in the direction of Yen Sung, and the Someone whose turn it was to catch it, with no eyes except for the missile, had run in and precipitated the unfortunate Chinaman into the heart of the fire. Everyone was sorry.
There chanced to be a decent room over a loose-box empty at that time, and here, on a pallet, Yen Sung was made as comfortable as possible. Harold himself rode for a doctor, and Everyone was much relieved to learn that although severely burned here and there Yen Sung was in no danger of dying. With the cloud of a possible inquest lifted a lighter vein prevailed. Harold declared that they need not have worried, as it was impossible to kill a Chinee—they all died natural deaths; and before night it came to be agreed that it was Yen Sung's own fault and the result of his persistent habit of getting into people's way.
He made an ideal patient. He never complained, and seemed to find no difficulty in remaining quiescent, bodily and mentally, for days together. He accepted the doctor as "benevolently intentioned," and did as he was told in spite of a little private incredulity as to the efficacy of remedies applied without incantations or even coloured lights.
Yen Sung celebrated the beginning of his third week in the loft by sitting up for the first time.
"But on no account must he go out yet," reiterated the doctor for the sixth time to Miss Garstang. "I sometimes wonder most poignantly whether it's the sublimest philosophy or merely a lacquered mask over absolute vacuity that the fellow wears. Does he understand?"
"Oh, yes; only he is very patient," replied Edith, who generally took the instructions. "I am sure he will do as you say."
"Well, Kiu, my friend," he continued, turning again to Yen Sung, "let the prosaic but sincere work of the barbarian medicine-man sink into your retentive Oriental mind. Although you are on the mend, you are for that reason to take all the more care. Shun the insidious delight of potato-top burning or any other outdoor exercise until I give you leave to stir. If you go out and get cold or wet you will most certainly join the spirits of your illustrious ancestors."
"It is as the all-seeing Buddha ordains," replied Yen Sung imperturbably, but he quite accepted the warning.
Edith accompanied the doctor to the yard and then returned to the loft.
"I am going to Overbury now," she remarked after she had made up the fire and given a glance round the room. "Is there anything that you would like; anything that I could get you?"
Yen Sung shook his head. There was nothing that he required.
"I am going to buy my Christmas cards," she continued, lingering. "You know what Christmas is, Kiu?"
"The Season of Much Gladness," replied Yen Sung from his couch.
Two pitiful tears formed suddenly in Edith's eyes. "We say 'Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men,'" she said in a low voice.
"Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men," repeated the pagan. Fifty years ago, he was remembering, his father's house had been shelled to the ground by the navies of two most Christian nations at this same season of "Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Men" in order that equally Christian merchants might carry on a lucrative trade in poison with a nation that did not want it.
"You have perhaps read some part of the little book I brought?" she asked timidly after a moment's pause. On a table within his reach lay a copy of the New Testament.
"I have read somewhat of the words, honourable lady Edith," he replied, his usual impassiveness cloaking any feeling he might have either of interest or indifference.
She could venture no further. "I must go now," she announced, glancing at the window. "It is coming dark already."
It was, indeed, very dark, even for a December afternoon, and as she spoke a roll of distant thunder told the cause. Yen Sung glanced through the window also, and into his face there came an expression more indicative of emotion than anything he had yet betrayed.
"If it be permitted me to speak unasked, might not the venture of this journey be put off to a more auspicious day?" he said earnestly. "Very soon the rain will descend in torrents, the lightning will tear open the sky, and doubtful powers will then be able to launch their thunderbolts even against the most virtuous."
"I am not afraid of the thunder and lightning," replied Edith with a smile; "and as for the rain, see, I am well provided against it."
"But the omen—even as you declared your purpose the thunder spoke," he persisted. "Furthermore, by a most unpropitious chain of events, the road you must take lies to the north, while at this season the high heavens are situate directly in the south." Suddenly a look almost of terror came into his eyes. "Stay, most honourable," he gasped; "what day of your twelfth moon do you call this?"
"It is the eleventh day of the twelfth month—our December," she replied.
Yen Sung made a rapid calculation in his mind, converting the date into its equivalent in his own system of time. Twice, three times, he repeated the process in his anxiety, and then, as the unevadable fact was driven home to him, he leaned forward in trembling anxiety.
"You must not go forth to-day, lady Edith; you cannot go," he whispered fearfully. "It is a day of the blackest omen and the direst possibilities. It is the one day of an entire cycle of years when all the diverging lines of evil, from whatever cause arising, meet in one irresistible concentration. Demons, foul dragons, and the malevolent shadows of all the unworthy dead are abroad and supreme to-day, while the benevolent forces stand powerless. So far back as last New Year's Day a special Imperial edict went forth warning all that they should give no feast, go on no journey, nor engage in any new enterprise upon this most abandoned day. Even I, in the obscurity of this hidden chamber, would not have ventured to leave my couch to-day had I not most incapably forgotten. How then, shall you take a journey directly away from the high heavens and after the portent of the thunder?"
It was so real to him as he spoke—one who all his life had walked with evil spirits on the one side and good spirits on the other; surrounded by demons whose supposed prejudices had to be conformed to in every action—that Edith listened half in pity and half in despair. It would have seemed cruel to her to leave him abruptly in his real distress. With an inspiration a means occurred to her not only of reassuring him but even of turning the incident to good account.
"I am not afraid," she replied serenely, "for I carry a safeguard against which no power of evil can prevail." A little gold cross, plain save for the three initials which it bore, hung by a slender chain about her neck. She touched it as she spoke.
Here was something that Yen Sung could fully understand; it appealed, naturally and convincingly, to one whose religion was steeped in idolatry, witchcraft and geomancy. Suspended about his neck there also hung a powerful charm, a square of parchment inscribed with mystic characters, drawn out by one of the most successful necromancers of the age. It was an infallible specific against leprosy and shipwreck, and, in token, Yen Sung had never contracted leprosy or been shipwrecked. If only he had provided himself with a similar protection against the perils of fire he would certainly have escaped his present plight; but one cannot foresee everything. A charm of universal potency excited his wonder and admiration. It did not occur to him that Edith might not be speaking quite literally—that her geometrical device was a symbol more efficacious when carried in the heart than when worn among the garments.
"Is there, indeed, no possible contingency against which this talisman might fail?" he asked, scarcely yet fully reassured.
"If I believe in its power and wear it faithfully there is nothing in the whole world that can harm me. Are you not satisfied, Kiu?"
"Your lips are incapable of guile, nor can alloy pass for gold before the touch of a pure heart," replied Yen Sung.
He watched her cross the yard; he marked the clang of the iron gate as she turned into the narrow lane beyond; then for five minutes he sat motionless—so unbreathingly still that not one of the grotesque idols in his far-off ancestral temple could have seemed more devoid of being.
A vivid flash of lightning recalled him from his thoughts and lit up the room with an electric brilliance for one moment. It brought out every detail as the sun had never done, and picked up in that short second, and seemed to fling it back to meet Yen's staring eyes, one bright object lying by the door. Then darkness.
In the overwhelming shock of the discovery Yen Sung's mind was momentarily eclipsed by a blow that stunned—a feeling of irreparable disaster that closed round his heart like a grasp of ice. He shook himself free, and, falling upon hands and knees, swiftly sought the spot. The half-light had returned after the darkness, sufficient, with face bent to the floor, for him to verify the worst. The little magic talisman that the most gracious lady Edith had wholly and implicitly relied upon to guard her on her perilous way lay beneath his eyes. And she had gone!
His mind, freed from its numbness, leapt now. She had gone forth, unconscious of her loss, into that most evil day when the unrestrained powers of darkness, loose from ten thousand unchained hells, would surround her in every form. She had gone out heralded by the most ill-destined omen from the skies. She had gone where her very direction cut her off from the slenderest possibility of relief.
At all cost she must be overtaken and the safeguard restored to her at once. Every second was precious, every step she took full of danger. He had no means of communicating with the house; the yard beneath his window was deserted. In spite of the honourable doctor's warning, Yen Sung himself must set in motion the means for her deliverance.
He moved quickly, feverishly, but with due caution, or he might utterly defeat his end; for who could say but that his unworthy touch might destroy the virtue of the charm or immediate death be the fruit of his presumption? A half-burned twig lay on his hearth; deftly, in spite of his bandaged hands, Yen Sung wound the chain about it; then, as fast as his weak limbs would carry him, he sought the house.
"See!" he exclaimed, bursting into the great kitchen where Edith's mother chanced to be engaged alone; "the fair one of your house has gone forth on a most perilous journey and the charm upon which she alone relied for protection has escaped her unperceived. Let a speedy messenger be sent before harm reaches her."
"Whatever are you doing out on a day like this?" exclaimed Mrs. Garstang without paying any attention to his excited words. She was a woman of sound practical common-sense, and had found it simpler in her dealings with Yen Sung to regard him as quite irresponsible. "After what the doctor said, too! Go back this very minute."
"But the charm?" he protested blankly. "The safeguard upon which the most kind of heart depends?"
"Oh, Edith's little cross?" she said without concern, noticing it for the first time. "Yes, I'll give it to her when she comes back. Now, do make haste, Kiu. Here, I'd better get Andrew to you."
She left the kitchen to call her husband, and in the impotence of his position a despair more hideous than before fell on Yen Sung.
Blind! Mad! He knew they were not cruel; some fatal obliquity of vision hid his view from them, their view from him; but was the gentlest and fairest to be sacrificed? He remembered the tone in which she had spoken of the power of the charm—the soft touch by which she had assured herself that it hung about her neck, and something that was the nearest to a sob that he had ever know strangled his breath.
Twenty seconds later, from a bank behind the buildings, Yen Sung dropped stealthily into the narrow lane and began to run. One possible hope had flashed across his mind. In following the road to Overbury Edith would have to make a detour of half a mile in order to cross the River Aish by the bridge at Rockford; there was, indeed, no other way. By taking to the fields, wading the Aish, and striking the high-road at its nearest point, Yen Sung hoped just to intercept her.
He was under no delusion. To the plain warning of the doctor he added—or perhaps took them as intermingling in the scheme of destiny—the supernatural terrors of the day, and with dispassionate fatalism he bowed acquiescently. The extent of his hopes was that he might be permitted to reach his revered one before the vengeance of the furies caught him or his earthly powers failed. Under ordinary conditions the race was not a hopeless one—three fields, the river, and, beyond, a strip of meadow, lay between him and the high-road; but his heroic heart was chained to a slight and crippled frame. Already the rain, now descending in torrents, had soaked him to the skin and the sodden clay of the ploughed land hung in great clods about his feet. He beat his way through the hedges, but the thorns and brambles tore him through his thin clothes as though with hooks, and very soon he found with dismay that he could only stumble blindly forward with half-bent knees. All his life he had believed in demons, and now to justify his faith, they came in their legions to mock and thwart him. Some drove barbs into every tingling joint, tore his unhealed burns with their talons, or turned the beating rain that fell upon his face into alternate ice and fire. Others, riding on the wind like drifts of smoke, surrounded him in their endless circlings shrieking in his ears as they swept by. They made the earth heavy in his path, directed the rain into a denser volume where he was, knit the brambles together before him at each hedge, and impeded him in every way to an unending accompaniment of swirling, shrieking, riotous devilry. There were earth spirits, wind spirits, water spirits, fire spirits, and the outcast band. The accusing shadows of his ancestors walked by his side, desirous of arguing with him on many subjects, while the Great Dragon, floating above all, wrote unmoved with an iron pen upon a marble slate.
At the last hedge before the river he was blinded for the moment by a branch which slipped from his feeble grasp, and groping through he fell into a deep and thorny ditch. The myriads of spirits shrieked their mirth, and in his half-stunned confusion Yen Sung began painfully to climb back again up to the hedge through which he had just come. A little precious time was lost before he discovered his mistake and the fall had crippled him still further. The most gallant effort he could now call up was nothing but a shambling walk.
He reached the river, and would have stepped in, when the chain slipped from the twig upon which he had so far carried it, and fell into the grass. A few more steps and it would have been lost beneath the muddy waters of the Aish. At the cost of another delay he broke a willow branch and with a thread of linen from his hand he tied the cross to the thin end of the wand. Then using the butt to feel his way among the rock-strewn icy water, he stumbled to the other bank.
There was nothing now but the narrow strip of meadow, beyond which the highway marked his goal. Had his "high deities" determined to be kind? Perhaps; for suddenly the heavens opened above his head, the leaping flame caught the glittering emblem which he held aloft, and, without the knowledge of a failure—grotesque but for its climax—to mock his eyes, Yen Sung sank straightway to the ground and reached a farther goal.
••••••••••
There is very little to add to the story of his end.
The effect of lightning upon the object which it strikes is curious and diverse. Yen Sung supplied another instance of this purely scientific phenomenon, for when his body came to be unrobed, those who stood by were startled for the moment to see the perfect outline of a cross charged with three letters impressed with unmistakable clearness upon his breast.
At first it was intended that he should be buried in a secluded corner of the old churchyard at Overbury; but to many influential parishioners the thought of a pagan finding a resting-place within their hallowed "God's Acre" was repugnant. In the end a site deemed more suitable was found in a neighbouring cemetery, where he sleeps in an unconsecrated plot set apart for suicides and the unbaptised.
Hampton Hill, 1904.