Imperial Woman by Buck Pearl S

Author:Buck, Pearl S.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-2146-2
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

The Empress Mother read this document a few days later as she sat in the winter garden of the Middle Sea Palace. She read it twice. Then most thoughtfully she considered what man this Gordon was, who could for so high a reason refuse vast treasure and great honor. For the first time it came into her mind that even among the Western barbarians there were men not savage, not cruel, not venal. There in the quiet garden, this thought shook her to the soul. If it were true that there could be good men among the enemy, then indeed she must still be afraid. If righteous, the white men were stronger than she reckoned, and she kept this fear hidden in her so long as she lived thereafter.

The Empress Mother held Tseng Kuo-fan in the city for many days while she pondered what reward he should have for his bravery and successes, for by now this imperious woman asked no advice of prince or minister, and at last she commanded that he be made Viceroy of the great northern province of Chihli, and that he live thereafter in the city of Tientsin. On the sixteenth day of the first moon of the new year, she presided at a Court banquet whose dishes were beyond reckoning, and while all feasted, Tseng Kuo-fan sat in the highest seat of honor and the court actors presented six famous plays. Only after all this merrymaking did the Empress Mother bid Tseng Kuo-fan to depart for Tientsin and there find peace.

Yet he had no peace, for sudden rioting burst out in that city against some French nuns. These nuns, who kept an orphanage, offered a reward of money to any who would bring them a child, and trouble then followed, for evildoers began to kidnap children to sell them to the nuns who received them without asking to whom they belonged, and would not give them up again when their parents came to claim them, since they were paid for.

The Empress Mother sent for Tseng Kuo-fan again.

“And why,” she inquired of him, “do these foreigners want Chinese children?”

“Majesty,” the learned man replied, “I believe, for myself, that they wish to make converts to their religion, but alas, the ignorant people of the streets are full of superstitions and they declare that the magic medicines of the foreigners are made from the eyes and hearts and livers of human beings, and it is for this that the nuns want the children.”

She had cried out in horror. “Can it be so!”

But he assured her, “I think it is not so. The nuns do often take the children of beggars already half dead on the streets, or they search for the newborn female infants of the very poor, whose parents expose them on the roadsides to die, and it is sure that most of such children cannot be saved, and yet the nuns take them and baptize them and count them as converts. Then such as die

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