The Maiden on the Road

Scholar Wang was walking home one evening when the road curved through a thin wood of poplars, and among their grey shadows he came upon a woman sitting alone upon a weathered stone.

She was young, perhaps seventeen, and she wept into her sleeve as though her heart would break. Wang paused, being a man who could not pass a creature in distress without a word, however late the hour.

At first she would not look up. When at last she raised her face, the thin light of the risen moon fell across features so fine and quiet that Wang forgot to ask himself why he trusted her.

She told him, in a voice that came and went, that she was a girl from a harsh household, and that her masters had resolved to sell her to a man old enough to be her grandfather. She had run away that very afternoon, and the road had swallowed her.

Her sorrow was so plainly written that Wang believed every word of it. He was a scholar of no great means, living in a quiet house behind his father's gate, and his own wife had been these months bedridden. His house had rooms enough, and silence enough.

I can hide you, he heard himself say, before he had thought the matter through. Come to my lodging. No one will trouble you there, and you may rest until you know what is to become of you.

She rose at once, as though she had been waiting all her short life for exactly those words, and followed him without another question. Wang told himself he was being kind, and kindness was a thing his mother had praised above all other virtues.

He led her past the family gate and down a winding path to a small study that stood apart from the rest of the house, a little garden room he used for his books and his nights of study. It was private, which was why he chose it, and that privacy felt, just then, like the only thing that mattered.

He told his household that a distant cousin had come to stay, traveling south to relations he had never met. The servants, busy with the sick wife, asked no questions. The girl had no trunk; she carried nothing but the clothes she stood in, and even these seemed too fine for a runaway.

For several days the woman kept to her room, and Wang brought her what she needed, and spoke to her in the gentle tone one uses for a frightened bird. She asked for nothing, and thanked him with lowered eyes and a small, obedient smile.

He began to look forward to the hours he spent with her more than he had looked forward to anything in years. He would sit across from her and read aloud, and she would listen with her hands folded, and the room seemed warmer than it had any right to be.

He did not yet know that the thing he had taken in from the poplar road had no name, and no family, and no sorrow of its own to weep for. It had only a hunger, and a face it had not yet finished painting, and all the patience in the world.

The days that followed were the happiest of Wang's quiet life, and that, in the end, was the first and truest warning he was ever given. Beauty that arrives too easily at a lonely door is rarely what it pretends to be.