He was to remember most vividly of all the first glimpse, through a notch in the hills, of the river. The viceroy paused at that point, and turning back from the shining picture before him, where the moonlight silvered the unruffled surface of the water, toward the home of his ancestors over the hill, spoke in a low but again musical voice a few lines in which even the American youth could detect the elusive vowel rhymes of a Chinese poem. And he saw that Mr. Doane stood by with the slightly bowed head of one who attends a religious ceremony. It was a moving scene. But could he have understood the words the boy would have been puzzled. For the poem--the _Surrendering_ of Po Chu-I. breathed resignation, humility, the negative philosophy so dear to Chinese tradition, but nothing of religion in the sense that he a Westerner, understood the word, nothing of mysticism or romantic illusion or childlike faith; rather a gentle recognition of the fact that life must go as it had come, unexplained, without tangible evidence of a personal hereafter; that, too, the individual is as nothing in the vast scheme of nature.
They were ferried out, shortly after this, to the great junk they had twice seen within the twenty-four hours, her smooth sides curving yellow in the moonlight, her decks now scraped and scrubbed clean, flowers blooming in porcelain pots about a charming gallery that extended high over the river astern. The crew, roused from slumber, came swarming out from under the low-spread mattings. The _laopan_ stepped nimbly to his post amidships on the poop. The heavy tracking ropes were hauled aboard, and the craft swung slowly off down the current.
Doane, with a lantern, escorted his excellency and Hui Fei, and the whimpering little princess, to the rooms below; then returned and with the same impersonal courtesy conducted Miss Carmichael down the steps. But at the door he indicated she stopped short; wavered a moment, lightly, on the balls of her feet. Then she accepted the lantern from him, bit her lip, and let fall the curtain without replying to his suggestion that she had better sleep if she could.
Alone there, she held up the lantern. The floor had been lately scrubbed; but, even so, she made out a faint broad stain in the wood. And a bed of clean matting was spread where she had left a grisly heap.