Thus it was left and Ling Sao told her husband what she had done, but he shook his head and was full of dolefulness.
“Do what you can, you women,” he said. “This is beyond a man. As for you, old woman, I know your power in mating two together — you could wed an eagle to a crow, I swear — but these are eagle and tiger and the one flies in heaven and the other walks on earth.”
“Leave it in my hands,” she said stoutly.
He sighed and gave it up to her.
… Now Lao San had not gone so straight as he pretended. Well he knew his father and mother and brother and sisters were all watching him and frightened by his temper, and so he made as if to go straight to the hills. But out of their sight he turned west and went toward the Mohammedan burial ground. When he came near he crept through the long new grass in the noiseless way hillmen learn from hill tigers, and he parted the tufted grasses and peered from between them. There he saw the woman he now loved so suddenly and powerfully. She stood at her mother’s grave, her head bowed, and her cloak wrapped about her, and he liked her the better that she did not kneel.
“She is very tall,” he thought, and he liked her tall. He liked the eagle beauty of her face, and the smooth amber of her skin, and her long hands holding her cloak together.
He was not a simple man such as his eldest brother was and even the second brother was more simple than he. The blood of his ancestors had brought up in him something that was very old. Once in the long past there had been another like him who had battled against an emperor and had all but won. So now when he looked at the woman he wanted it was no simple lust that he felt. He wanted her in many ways to fill out his own being in its lacks, and he was pleased to think her learned and different from himself, and because he knew his own worth, he was not afraid to let her be in some ways better than himself and besides he felt that in some ways she was like him, and he felt her like him in his deepest parts.
Thus he stood steadfastly watching her and not once did she look up or see him there. But that pleased him, too. He was young enough to think, “I do not want her to see me again until I am at my best. I will get new garments and put them on and I will buckle on my sword, and have my hair cut and oiled.”
So he stood, his eyes and mind full of her until she turned at last and with Wu Lien went toward Ling Tan’s house again. Behind her the young man gazed at her until he could not see her, and then he let the grasses come together and he made his way to the hills.
… Now Lao Er and Jade had not been there to see all that had happened, for Jade, as soon as Wu Lien had gone, had plucked her husband’s sleeve and led him down into the secret room. There she turned on him a face brimming with triumph.
“Do you see?” she asked him.
“See what?” he asked, not having knowledge of what she meant so much as the mote in a sunbeam.
“Why, that is she!” Jade cried.
“What she?” he asked again.
“Oh, you bone!” she wailed, “oh, you lump of mud under my feet! Why has heaven made even the best of men in the shape of a fool? She is the goddess, your brother’s goddess!”
His jaw fell down as he perceived her meaning. “But she is so high,” he said, “how will she ever look down on one of us? And besides, what is she to the enemy?”
Jade looked grave then. “What indeed?” she said, “I had not thought of that. You are not such a fool.”
Her woman’s mind ran along the ground like a sniffing hound. “But I doubt she cares for the enemy,” she said. “No woman thinks first of who rules and what is above, if she sees the man she wants at her side.”
“He is not at her side,” he said. “He is very far from her. And will he think her fit for him if she is with the enemy? Men are not like women there.”
“Now you are wrong,” she said. “Men think a woman so little worth, and they think themselves so strong, that it does not matter what their women are.”
He laughed. “Are you and I to quarrel because of men and women?”
But Jade would not laugh. “No, but here is a thing,” she said stubbornly.
“It is a thing which we cannot decide because a strange woman happens to look like a goddess in a temple,” he said.
So after a while they came up again, and he helped her tenderly to mount the ladder that led upward, for she expected her second child any day. When they came up Lao San had gone and they found that while they had been talking underground, here on the top of the earth what they had been saying was not possible had already taken place.
“But how bring these two together?” Jade asked.
It was the question none could answer.
… But Mayli went straight to her own rooms when she returned to the puppet palace, and she took off her cloak and folded it very carefully and she washed herself and brushed her hair, and then she sat before a small table and looked at herself long in the mirror. The morning had made her bold heart strangely soft. There was the visit to her mother’s grave, and her mind was stirred with things she could not remember, and yet she felt she did remember them. Her mother had died when she was born and yet this morning standing at that grave among the summer grasses, she felt she did remember a lovely face, wilful enough to say that she would not go with her husband, and yet so sweet that it made him glad to stay where she was. For her father had told her through her childhood of her mother, and she knew the love between them, and to her it had made love the best thing in the world to be had if it could be love like that.
Upon her softened heart was now imprinted a young man’s face. Whatever he was, ignorant or not, he was brave and exceedingly beautiful and there was power in him and she could feel it, and were these three not enough? She had never seen them put together before in one man. And yet how would it be possible for her to become a part of that house? Ling Tan’s house was more foreign to her than any foreigner’s. She had not entered one like it in her life, and there she could not live.
“We would have to go away,” she thought. “He would have to forsake them all and cleave only to me, and I would forsake all I have known and cleave only to him. Well, would we not then be equal? We could make our own world.”
But where could such a world be made? She rose, most restless, and walked about the room as though she were on wings.
In the old times, now never to return, what she dreamed would have been impossible. There would have been no place for two like them to make a world. That old world was made and shaped, fixed and firm, and they would have been outcast had they not belonged to it. But now the old world was gone, old laws were broken, old customs dead. The young could do as they liked and tradition was no more.
“We could go into the free land,” she thought, “anywhere we liked. Why should his power not be joined to mine? What I know I would tell him. What he knows he would tell me. Oh, how sick I am of learned, smooth men! How strong his hands were! He was wounded in battle. It was victory.”
She remembered every look of his face and the proud way he walked, and all that was distasteful to her was the family from which he sprang. They were too humble for him.
“He ought to leave them,” she thought. “Men like him are born by chance into lowly families. They belong to no one.”
So she mused, and when she went down to meet her host at dinner he found her silent.
“Have I made you angry?” he urged her. He had had a morning full of suffering, for his rulers had not spared him. “Do not you be angry,” he said, trying to laugh. “I need a little comfort. I have been told that I must catch the leader of those men who murdered the whole garrison yesterday. How can I do it?”
“How can you?” she repeated coldly. She saw within her heart that bold young face. “You cannot,” she said.