Page:Mr. Wu (IA mrwumilnlouisejo00milniala).pdf/275

 most fiendish, most exquisite, in his enmaddening deliberateness. He drew out the woman's agony until the sinews of her soul seemed to crack and bleat. The hideous hour seemed an age to her. To Basil, waiting alone in the pagoda, the hour seemed ages piled on ages.

Alone? But no, he was not alone. This was Nang Ping's pagoda. She had given him "free" of it, and shared it with him. She shared it with him still. A ghost—a girlish Chinese ghost—stood beside him and looked at him adoringly, accusingly, with death and motherhood in her eyes. "Oh! Nang Ping! Nang Ping! Forgive, forgive!" he cried, and hid his face on his pinioned arm. Then he looked up with a cry—wide-eyed, for he had seen his mother in the room he'd left, the room where the gong was, and Wu—he saw his mother, and the Chinese moving towards her, and he turned and cursed the girl-ghost at his side—the poor dishonored ghost with a tiny nestling in her arms.

Angry at punishment self-entailed, to shift, or seek to shift, the blame, or some part of it, upon shoulders other than our own, is a common phase of human frailty. "The woman tempted me." And so the fault is really hers. Punish the temptress and let me go. "The woman tempted me": it is the oldest and the meanest of the complaints. But sadly often it is true enough.

A man never had less cause to urge it, in self-extenuation, or even in explanation, than Basil Gregory had. Nang Ping had never tempted him. Even in the consummation of their loves, the heyday of her infatuation, she had never wooed him. In their first acquaintance, contrived in part by him, brought about in part by a fan of Low Soong's, lost and found, Nang Ping had been as shy and unassertive as a violet. She had never tempted except with her own sweet reserve and the fragrant piquancy of her picturesque novelty. And that she had