Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/274

 found a great revenge. His own honor had never burdened Basil Gregory; but his mother's honor—ah! Or, for that matter, even Hilda's, or his cousin May Gregory's—for, like so many such men, Basil Gregory leaned his soul (such as he had) and his pride upon the women of his blood. To be virtuous vicariously is a positive talent with some men.

His mother! He writhed. His mother! He tore against the pagoda's walls with his hands, all pinioned as they were—for his freed hand was bound again—until his knuckles bled. If such punishment as Wu had devised could be shown vividly, anticipatorily, to men about to stray, the gravest of the social problems must be so somewhat solved, the most stinging of the burning questions somewhat answered. If sons, light, selfish, weak, could expect such chastisement as Basil Gregory was enduring now, a famous commandment would be honored in observance an hundredfold, dishonored by breach miraculously less. A daughter's shame—a sister's—that scourges most men; a wife's—oh! well, there are wives and wives, there are men and men, but a mother's—ah! That touches all manhood on its quick. Brand the scarlet initial of adultery on his mother's brow in punishment of him, and what son would commit the fault? Fewer!

From the sun—for there were spaces pierced in the elaborate stonework of the pagoda's thick sides, and he could see through some of them—he thought that he must have escaped nearly an hour of the misery of consciousness.

Heaven knows the scene enacted in the smaller audience hall was exquisitely terrible enough; but the man alone in the pagoda pictured it ten times more terrible, more hideous, more stenched than it was. Made an artist in fiendishness by his love for his child, Wu was