For that moment, Rudolph could have struck down the one sure friend he had in China.

CHAPTER VII

IPHIGENIA

“Don’t chop off a hen’s head with a battle-axe.”  Heywood, still with a malicious, friendly quirk at the corners of his mouth, held in his fretful pony.  Rudolph stood bending a whip viciously.  They two had fetched a compass about the town, and now in the twilight were parting before the nunnery gate.  “A tiff’s the last thing I’d want with you.  The lady, in confidence, is not worth—­”

“I do not wish,” declared Rudolph, trembling,—­“I do not wish you to say those things, so!”

“Right!” laughed the other, and his pony wheeled at the word.  “I’ll give you one month—­no:  you’re such a good, thorough little chap, it will take longer—­two months, to change your mind.  Only”—­he looked down at Rudolph with a comic, elderly air—­“let me observe, our yellow people have that rather neat proverb.  A hen’s head, dear chap,—­not with a battle-axe!  No.  Hot weather’s coming, too.  No sorrows of Werther, now, over such”—­He laughed again.  “Don’t scowl, I’ll be good.  I won’t say it.  You’ll supply the word, in two months!”

He let the pony have his way, and was off in a clatter.  Lonely, fuming with resentment, Rudolph stared after him.  What could he know, this airy, unfeeling meddler, so free with his advice and innuendo?  Let him go, then, let him canter away.  He had seen quickly, guessed with a diabolic shrewdness, yet would remain on the surface, always, of a mystery so violent and so profound.  The young man stalked into his vacant nunnery in a rage, a dismal pomp of emotion:  reason telling him that a friend had spoken sense, imagination clothing him in the sceptred pall of tragedy.

Yet one of these unwelcome words had stuck:  he was Werther, it was true—­a man who came too late.  Another word was soon fulfilled; for the hot weather came, sudden, tropical, ferocious.  Without gradation, the vernal days and languid noons were gone in a twinkling.  The change came like another act of a play.  One morning—­though the dawn stirred cool and fragrant as all dawns before—­the “boy” laid out Rudolph’s white tunic, slipped in the shining buttons, smeared pipe-clay on his heaviest helmet; and Rudolph, looking from his window, saw that on the river, by the same instinct, boatmen were stretching up their bamboo awnings.  Breakfast was hardly ended, before river, and convex field, and huddling red tiles of the town, lay under a blurred, quivering distortion.  The day flamed.  At night, against a glow of fiery umber, the western hills broke sharp and thin as sheet-iron, while below them rose in flooding mirage a bright strip of magical water.