All the children clustered about the old woman and listened in breathless silence and fear. Their home was gone. They had nothing left.
Madame Wu smiled down on them. She understood with a tenderness wholly new to her what they were thinking.
“As for you, all of you, and you too, Old Sister, you are to come to my own house and live.”
A great sigh went over the children. They were safe. With the ease and confidence of childhood they accepted their new safety and immediately became excited.
“When — when—” they began to clamor.
“I think you should stay here with him until tomorrow,” she said. “Then we will all go to the grave together. But you will not come back here. You will come home with me.”
“Good heart,” the old woman sobbed, “kind good heart! He knows — be sure he knows!”
Madame Wu smiled without answering this. “Have you rice enough for their meals?” she asked. “They will need food today and tomorrow morning. Their noon meal they will have in my house.”
“He always kept a day’s food in the house,” the old woman sobbed. “At least one day’s food we always have.”
“Then tomorrow I will come back,” Madame Wu said.
She let the children press against her for a moment, knowing that they were accustomed to cluster about him and feel his bodily presence, and so they needed the same reassurance from her. Then she said gently, “Until tomorrow, my little ones,” and she left the house where his body lay dead and went out, a different creature from the woman she had been when she came in.
She went back to her own court and sat long alone with her changed self. She accepted André’s death. If he had lived there would most certainly have come the moment when she would have discovered that she loved him. There could then have been only one of two choices for her. She must have made excuses never to see him again, or she must have yielded up her soul to him and told him her love. This she knew would have parted them.
She sat awake and alone for hours that night, refusing to allow Ying to come in and put her to bed. She did not want to lie in a bed. She wanted to sit, alive, alert, alone, searching out the whole of her new knowledge. She loved a man, a foreigner, a stranger, a man who had never once put out his hand to touch hers, whose touch would have been unthinkable. She smiled into the darkness after a long time. The house was dark and silent about her, but beside her a candle burned, and her heart was speaking aloud.
“Had I put out my hand to you,” she said, “would you have been afraid of me?”
But she knew André was afraid of no one. There was that God of his. It occurred to Madame Wu that men’s gods were enemies to women. She felt jealousy for the first time in her life.
“We have no gods of our own,” she reflected.
But for women true gods were impossible. She pondered on the women she knew who worshiped gods. Little Sister Hsia was continually talking of her god. But then, Little Sister Hsia had nothing else to talk about, neither husband nor children, neither friends nor family. In this emptiness she had gone out and found for herself God. No, the only true test of woman was whether, having all else, as men did, they rejected all and went and found a god. The women whom she knew best and had known best in her whole life, not one of them had truly sought God. Not one, that is, in the way that André had done, when as a young man he had put aside the woman he loved and the wealth he might have had and the fame from his learning, and had simply given his life to God.
She paused in her musing to consider for a moment the woman whom André had loved in his youth and had put aside, loving loneliness better. Young she must have been and beautiful doubtless. She felt more jealousy, not that André had loved the woman, but because this unknown and long forgotten woman should have looked upon André when he was young and not yet a priest.
“I should like to have seen him when he was a young giant,” Madame Wu thought. She sat at perfect peace, in complete stillness, her hands folded one upon the other, and her rings gleaming softly on her fingers. Yes, André as a young man must have been a good sight for a woman. He was handsome even in his middle age, but young he must have been himself a god. Then she felt sorry for that woman whom he had rejected. Now she was married doubtless and perhaps she had many children, for women do not die because a man will not have them, but somewhere in her heart she still thought of André, with love or with hate. If she were a woman of little heart she would hate him, and if she were of great heart she had not blamed him and so she loved him still. Or perhaps she thought of him no more. It might be perhaps she was simply tired and past any feeling, as women can grow to be when their hearts and bodies have been too much used. It was the weakness of a woman that heart and body were knit together, warp and woof, and when the body was too much used the heart, too, became worn, unless it had love, such as she now felt toward André. Death had relieved her of his body. Had he lived they might have lost their souls in the snare of the flesh. She was surprised to feel at this moment a sudden rich flush of the blood into her vitals.
“I am a woman in spite of everything,” she thought with some amusement. Even the thought of André’s great body could cause this enrichment in her being. How dangerous to peace had he been before her in the flesh! She felt an impulse of gratitude toward those robbers of the Green Band who had removed such danger. Then, noticing through the door how exquisite the moonlight was upon her orchids, under the bamboos, she was contrite. It was cruel to be glad that André’s eyes were closed.
“It is not that I am glad you are dead,” she explained to him. “It is simply that you and I are both spared a great misery and so we can keep our great joy. Doubtless you know I love you.”
As she murmured these words she was conscious of his perfect understanding. Nothing less could have given her so instant a sense of complete comfort and cheerfulness. She knew that for André to have violated his priesthood would have caused him as much pain as her own were she to violate the duty she had to her family. They would have preached renunciation to each other, but in order to practice this, it would have been necessary for them never to meet. Now no renunciation was necessary. She could think of him as much as she liked and without danger.
“But of course I am changed,” she thought. She sat, still outwardly motionless, but wondering how she was changed. She did not know. She would have to discover herself. Her heart was changed. “I am a stranger now to myself,” she thought with some astonishment. “I do not know how I shall act or how I shall feel.”
For an hour after this discovery she sat in the same motionless pose. “I have no knowledge of how I shall act,” she thought. “The springs of my being are different. I shall no longer live out of duty but out of love.” This was her discovery of herself through love.
Again she felt the strange enrichment flow through her whole being, followed by serene content.
It was at this moment she thought of the instrument for stars. She had ordered it brought home with her, and now it was in the library. She went and lifted it out of its box with difficulty, for it was heavy, and she set it up on three folding legs she found also in the box. Then she peered through it at Heaven outside the door.
She expected instantly to see the shapes of stars and the moon in its path. To her disappointment, although the night was clear, she saw nothing. This way and that she tried, but Heaven was sealed to her, and with a sigh she put the instrument away again. She had not the knowledge for it. “It belongs only to him,” she thought. “I will bury it with him, together with the box of voices from the night.”