Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [65]
“I could still hear his harsh breathing and I remembered it was the same sound I had heard when my mother was dying. He was moaning, and I put my hands over my ears. I couldn’t just leave him there to die. I tried to lift the beam lying across his back but it wouldn’t move and then I knelt beside him and put my arms under his shoulders, trying to tug him out from under it. For a moment I thought I was succeeding, then suddenly the earth shook again and the beam slipped. There was a rumble and out of the corner of my eye I saw the chunk of falling masonry. Without thinking I jumped back and put my hands over my head to save myself, and instead it fell on Josh. I knelt beside him. I didn’t know what to do. He was as still as death. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at me.” She stared, trembling, at Lai Tsin, hardly daring to remember, then she said slowly, “That beautiful angel’s face was just a mass of blood and bone.”
Lai Tsin was silent. He made no effort to comfort her. He knew there were some things that could never be expiated by mere words, there were some burdens too terrible ever to be rid of and man was doomed to carry them with him to the grave.
“I couldn’t move,” she said in a voice like a sigh. “I waited beside him, his harsh breathing became slower and slower, smaller and smaller … and finally there was only silence and I knew he was dead. I pulled the blanket from the bed behind him and covered him with it. And then I walked away and left him alone in his tomb.
“I don’t remember how, but I found myself on the street. Only there was no street anymore, just rubble. There was the glow of many fires and people were running, but I did not know where. I followed them … someone helped me … they bandaged my head and gave me clothes. They took me to the hospital on a horse-cart, only the hospital was no longer there. There were so many people in the street, patients, doctors, nurses, so many people wounded and sick. I turned away. I knew I had to go home. I had to see what had happened. And in my heart I was wishing my father had died too.”
She looked bleakly at Lai Tsin. “I went home,” she said. “You were there. You saw what happened. I got my wish.”
He said gravely, “Little Sister, my heart bursts with compassion for you. But it was not your wish that killed your father and destroyed your home. Your father stole your youth from you and gave everything to his son. You did not kill him, nor did you kill your lover. It was fate. Now it is time, Little Sister, to become your own person. You must forget youth and passion and control your own fortune so that fate will not treat you so contemptuously. It is time to pick up your life strings and go on.”
Francie rubbed the tears from her eyes. She wrapped her arms around her knees, leaning forward, staring at him, really seeing him for the first time. Her savior was not a young man, though she could not have said his age. His oval face was delicately boned with deep, almond-set eyes, high cheekbones, and a wide, firm mouth. He was thin, with a look of deprivation, and an undefinable quality that had nothing to do with the shabbiness of his clothes nor how little money there was in his secret pocket. It was in his face; it had been passed down through generations and spoke of grinding hardship and endless sorrows and a depth of poverty she could not even begin to comprehend.
“You are very wise, Lai Tsin,” she said quietly. “As wise as the Mandarins.”
He bowed. “You must sleep now,” he said. “You must forget your bad memories, forget the blows that have befallen you. Sleep like the child, Little Sister, and tomorrow you shall begin life anew. You will not forget, but you will bear your burden without looking back.”
She lay obediently down beside the little boy and Lai Tsin placed a blanket carefully over them. And then he sat by the fire thinking for a long time of what he knew about Harmon Harrison. Then