rrect, germane, and pleasant to the Azure Dragon
and the White Tiger, whose occult currents, male and female, run
throughout Nature. For any or all of these reasons, the town was
delivered. The pestilence vanished, as though it had come but to grant
Monsieur Jolivet his silence, and to add a few score uncounted living
wretches to the dark, mighty, imponderable host of ancestors.

The relief, after dragging days of uncertainty, came to Rudolph like a
sea-breeze to a stoker. To escape and survive,--the bare experience
seemed to him at first an act of merit, the deed of a veteran. The
interim had been packed with incongruity. There had been a dinner with
Kempner, solemn, full of patriotism and philosophy; a drunken dinner at
Teppich's; another, and a worse, at Nesbit's; and the banquet of a
native merchant, which began at four o'clock on melon-seeds, tea, black
yearling eggs, and a hot towel, and ended at three in the morning on
rice-brandy and betel served by unreal women with chalked faces and
vermilion-spotted lips, simpering and melancholy. By day, there was
work, or now and then a lesson with Dr. Earle's teacher, a little aged
Chinaman of intricate, refined, and plaintive courtesy. Under his
guidance Rudolph learned rapidly, taking to study as a prodigal might
take to drink. And with increasing knowledge came increasing
tranquillity; as when he found that the hideous cry, startling him at
every dawn, was the signal not for massacre, but buffalo-milk.

Then, too, came the mild excitement of moving into his own house, the
Portuguese nunnery. Through its desolate, lime-coated spaces, his meagre
belongings were scattered all too easily; but the new servants, their
words and ways, not only kept his hands full, but gave strange food for
thought. The silent evenings, timed by the plash of a frog in a pool, a
cry from the river, or the sing-song of a "boy" improvising some endless
ballad below-stairs; drowsy noons above the little courtyard, bare and
peaceful as a jail; homesick moments at the window, when beyond the
stunted orangery, at sunset, the river was struck amazingly from bronze
to indigo, or at dawn flashed from pearl-gray to flowing brass;--all
these, and nights between sleep and waking, when fancy peopled the
echoing chambers with the visionary lives, now ended, of meek, brown
sisters from Goa or Macao, gave to Rudolph intimations, vague, profound,
and gravely happy, as of some former existence almost recaptured.