Edward and David were having their own good time together. They were not troubling much about distinctions in clothes, once Edward had solved the mystery of how to wear pyjamas, but they were trying to compress every incident of the twelve and thirteen years of their lives into the few hours given them to talk. David, like his older sisters, had come to China too late to pick up Chinese from a nurse and had been sent to a school where conversation in Chinese was discouraged, for fear of the undesirable things the pupils might learn, so China, except in a superficial way, was undiscovered territory. He could not keep out of his speech the arrogance which foreign children assumed toward native life.
"Do you mean to say you live all the time with nothing but Chinese?" he asked. "Don't you ever have anybody to play with?"
"Why, of course, I have lots of people to play with; our family is bigger than yours."
"But only Chinese. That can't be much fun. What do you do? How do you pass the time?"
"Oh, we're always busy. We make poems and draw pictures."
"For play?" David interrupted incredulously.
"Yes, it's lots of fun."
David could not hide his contempt.
"I don't see any fun there. The boys would laugh at me if I wrote poems. They'd call me a 'softy.' We leave things like that to the girls. Don't you play any games, any real games, I mean?"
"Yes, we play chess—"
"Chess, you play chess?"
"Nancy and I are always playing it."
"Pooh, that's an old man's game. It takes a year to make a move. Do you play cricket?"
"Oh, yes, I play cricket," said Edward, relying too confidently on the limited instruction from his father.
At last they had come to a subject David could appreciate. He pounced on Edward for details as to the positions he played, whether he bowled and how he bowled, what was his average as a batsman, who were his team, questions Edward answered so vaguely as to appear, in David's eyes, as anything but skillful fraud. Still he must make allowances for Edward's lamentable training.
"Your idea of cricket isn't what we call cricket," he said magnanimously, and he bewildered his guest to some lengths by his highly technical exposition of the game. "Where do you go to school?" he asked, after this tedious diversion.
"We have school at home."
"Oh—what form are you in?"
Edward did not know what he meant.
"Where have you got to in arithmetic?" explained David, trying to gauge Edward's progress by his own. "Can you do compound interest? I can, and we've finished South America in geography,—take up Africa next term,—and in Latin we're on the fifth declension. You've begun Latin, haven't you?"
Edward had to confess that these were beyond his range.
"All my work's in Chinese except the English lessons father gives us. We have read the Four Books—"
"The Four Books?" exclaimed David, seizing the first tangible clue to Edward's education. "What are the Four Books? Are they readers?"
Edward was speechless. He could not cope with a mind which had never heard of the Four Books. Yet he could not make capital of his own superior knowledge, as David had been doing, because there was a haughtiness in the latter's manner which made him feel that acquaintance with the Four Books was a thing to be ashamed of.
In the same overbearing way David explored every nook of Edward's life.
"Your father is English, isn't he?" he asked.
"He was English," admitted Edward, too subdued by now to resent the question.
"But why does he live like a Chinese? Why doesn't he live like an Englishman?"
"I don't know," answered Edward, never really conscious before to-night that his mode of living was abnormal. "I suppose he likes it better."
"I know," said David. "It's so that he can have all those wives. In England that wouldn't be allowed."
"Wouldn't it? Why not?"
"No, he would have to go to prison if he did that. We can only have one wife."
"But don't the rich people have several wives?"
"No, everybody's just the same. And one wife's enough anyway."
Edward mused on a society so curious that rich and poor should be just the same.
"Well, I'm going to have lots of wives," he said, with his first show of defiance, "and I'm going to have fifty children."
David's jaw dropped. He felt it useless to argue against an ambition so monstrous.
"Mother will give us the dickens if we don't go to sleep," he said, and blew out the lamp.
The family rose early. The slight estrangement between the two boys had been composed by Edward's tales of the Tatar hunting park; in the congenial topic of leopards the boys found mutual interest and Edward restored himself in David's eyes by describing his bow and his feats of archery.
From the first daylight the girls had resumed talking. They put their questions more discreetly, being of a better age to appreciate Nancy's history. But they were more curious than their brother about the domestic intricacies of Timothy Herrick's life and on the glamorous subject of concubines relished every detail they could extract from Nancy's willing lips. The guest was amused at the importance they attached to such commonplace matters.
"But what will you do?" came at last the inevitable question. "Surely you won't marry a Chinese."
"I don't know," said Nancy; "my father hasn't decided. I'm not engaged yet."
"Your father!" the two girls shouted in concert; "are you going to let your father decide?"
"Yes, certainly," replied Nancy, looking at them in surprise, "who else should decide?"
"But suppose he wants you to marry a Chinese?"
Nancy saw nothing extraordinary in this.
"I have to marry the man my father chooses."
"Well, I think it's shameful," protested Elizabeth. "You are too pretty, Nancy, to be thrown away like that. You ought to choose your own husband. Suppose he should have some more wives; would you like that?"
"No," Nancy admitted.
"Could you stop him from having more wives?"
"No."
"Do you want to marry a Chinese?"
"No," said Nancy for the third time, "I don't want to marry anyone. I want to be a nun."
This was a greater blow than anything she had said.
"A nun?" echoed Elizabeth in dismay, "a Catholic nun?"
Nancy did not know what she meant by a Catholic nun. Surely there was only one kind of nun.
"I want to be a nun and live in a temple far away in the mountains," she said.
"You mean a Buddhist nun? You want to live in a temple and worship those ugly idols?"
David had not been more astounded by Edward's wish to have fifty children, while Nancy realized, seeing the amazed faces of her friends, that here lurked between West and East some quicksands of misunderstanding such as with the best will in the world they could not cross. Her desire to be a nun was too slightly defined to be defended in competent speech.
Helen and Elizabeth recognized her difficulty. They were fearful of trespassing on courtesy and did not push their indignation more outspokenly—it was safer to turn for diversion to the mechanical incidents of getting dressed, Nancy's tub-bath, her initiation into the use of a sponge, the manicuring of her nails—but the girl had become in their eyes a tragic heroine whom they were impulsively determined to save.
Mrs. Ferris shared the concern of her daughters and looked compassionately at the two children, whom she felt she had no right to send back to such a travesty of a home. She confided her indignation to Nasmith, thought something ought to be done: it was shameful condemning such a nice, well-behaved boy, such a pretty, really beautiful girl, to live with that immoral old man. He must have kidnapped them; they surely could not be his children—and their mother dead too! How she would have suffered if she had known! Wasn't there a law to prevent such a disgrace? Ronald ought to inquire of the British legation and get Edward and Nancy into safe hands before they were utterly ruined.
But the early breakfast had been finished. There was no excuse for delay. The sorrow of parting was eased by the decision of the twins that they must escort Nancy home and David's prompt statement that he would do the same duty by Edward. The impressionable Patricia was convinced only with difficulty that the road was too long; she wept as though she were parting from lifelong friends. To the inexpressible astonishment of Edward and Nancy, Mrs. Ferris gathered each of them into her motherly arms and kissed them. Would they all expect to do this, Nancy asked herself? Why did nice people have such barbarous customs? She might kiss Helen and Elizabeth, if she saw they were disappointed, but she never could kiss Mr. Beresford and Mr. Nasmith. The prospect called up bitter memories and turned her thoughts in fear to contemplating the anger which her father would visit upon their truancy.
The walk, begun with the care-free abandon of a picnic, grew more and more depressing, despite the merry companionship of the girls, Beresford's comic remarks, and Nasmith's quiet understanding reserve, in which Nancy put more trust than she knew. Nancy endeavored to give in a light-hearted vein the promises the twins were trying to exact, that she should come and see them again, that they might call upon her, that they should do long walks together and write many letters.
"Yes," agreed Nancy, "if my father will let me."
She put so much inflection upon this conditional clause that the girls knew by instinct she was withholding more than she offered.
"You mean he might not let you?" exclaimed Helen tragically.
"Perhaps," Nancy confessed. "I don't know. He does not like us to go out."
"We're going to see you anyway, no matter what he says," was Elizabeth's indignant rejoinder.
Nancy smiled. She hoped they might, but she dared not encourage them. She would not let them even climb the final path to her home.
"My father doesn't see many people," she explained. "He might not like it; and if he got angry he would take us back to Peking."
Nasmith saw her point and insisted that his nieces and nephew wait while he and Beresford accompanied their guests to the house. Nancy wanted to leave all of them there, but the two men evinced a complete determination not to forsake the children one step short of their home door so she did not waste time in futile dissuasion. She did not escape from the twins, however, without embraces and kisses, a strange affectionate demonstration she schooled herself to endure, but she was glad to notice that Elizabeth and Helen made no such advances toward Edward. Plainly there were limits to the custom.
Long before the returning prodigals had reached the door, they were seen. The nurse came hobbling out to meet them and overwhelmed her foster children with tears and affectionate exclamations, making them appreciate guiltily the panic their absence had produced.
"Your father," cried the amah, "ai ya, he was like a madman! Every one of us he had out searching, even me with my poor feet; and he would not rest; he sent us out again and again and he himself walked tens of li before your messenger came and eased our hearts. Eh, we were glad! But that was late at night. I cannot tell you how we suffered before that man came. Your father wanted to give him five dollars. But that was not wise; it was too much. I paid him a thousand cash and he was very happy."
The amah scarcely noticed Nasmith and Beresford at first, so torrential was the greeting poured upon her two children. But when the party had reached the door and were under the smiling eyes of the servants, she grew calmer. A flutter of old remembered occasions restored her dignity at the welcome sight of these foreigners. Perhaps here was a husband for Nancy. The foreign gentlemen must come in and have tea and cakes; those were the Great Man's orders.
They were not the Great Man's orders, but the amah knew what was necessary to the moment and she was determined the Western gentlemen who had brought back her treasures should not depart with poor memories of the Herrick hospitality. So she seated them formally in the guestroom, hurried Nancy and Edward to their rooms where Kuei-lien was waiting excitedly to question them; and then informed the father of his guests. To her intense relief the Great Man sent a message inviting the two visitors to his own room.
Nasmith and Beresford scarcely could veil their curiosity at sight of the elderly gentleman, wearing Chinese clothes with dignity, who received them in his sunny room above the ravine. Herrick's gravity of bearing showed him at his best in this first interview after so many years with men of his own race. One forgot the sensual chapters of his story and remembered only the scholar, the background of shelves and books seemed so fitting, and the writing materials on his desk, the ink-stone, the brushes, the open volume, the sheaf of bamboo papers, even accessories like the pot of tea and the water pipe belonged to a man who was actively concentrated upon study.
"You will excuse any defects of hospitality," Herrick began, not choosing to remember that he had met these men before. "I have been a long time a stranger to your ways. I understand that you have saved my children from a great danger. It was very good of you. I should not have liked harm to come to these two children of mine—they are nice children," he added, as though speaking to himself. "And I must thank you a great deal for walking so far this morning to bring them safely home and your sister for giving them a place to stay. It was very good, very good."
Despite his composure, Herrick was showing signs of embarrassment. He seemed to be commenting rather sadly upon his own words, repeating his thoughts in a stumbling manner which grew pathetic and stirred the sympathy of the two men who were listening.
Nasmith hurried to relieve the old man—he was looking much older than his years—by disclaiming credit for anything but a fortunate and timely arrival. He extolled the presence of mind Nancy and Edward had shown. As to their staying overnight with his sister, that was too great a pleasure to be thanked for.
"Were they a trouble?" asked the father. "Did they behave well?"
"They were what they clearly have been taught to be—a lady and a gentleman. I should be proud if my nieces and nephew could conduct themselves in a Chinese home as your children conducted themselves in ours."
The father smiled with pleasure.
"They are nice children," he insisted.
Then another thought occurred to him.
"You have nieces and nephews?" he asked. "Did Nancy and Edward meet them?"
Nasmith related at length his observations upon the friendship struck up between his family and their two guests; he saw how wistfully the father relished even the lesser details, nodding here and there at incidents which pleased him, repeatedly jerking out the word, "Good." He wanted to know the names of these nephews and nieces, their ages, their schooling. When he heard that they were waiting in the path below, he would not hear of their going home unwelcomed.
"No," he said, "they must not. It is near noon. They will be hungry. I will send for them—I will send Nancy herself."
The daughter came in some surprise at being summoned before the two men had gone. She remained standing at the door, not presuming of course to scan the face of her father, though she wondered if she were to be scolded before strangers.
"Nancy," said Herrick in English, "you have left three of our guests waiting outside. That is not right. We do not pay our debts in this fashion. You will go down and welcome your friends and bring them to your rooms. And tell amah, as you go, that the cook must prepare nine bowls."
The man meditated with amusement upon the shock his command had given.
"Yes," he said, "she is glad. Her eyes showed it. Ah, my friends, it had to come, it had to come. I could not keep them from making friends with their own people. I am not sorry it happened this way."
Nancy, after she had left the room, could scarcely believe that she had heard aright. To have her escapade condoned in this manner exceeded her wildest hopes. She was still dazed as she repeated her father's instructions to the amah.
"Hai, I knew it, I knew it," cried the old woman joyfully. "He is changing at last. The sight of men of his own race has made him homesick. Soon we shall all go to England, and every afternoon you will wear new dresses and go to garden parties."
Prophecy, on the amah's part, could be as endless as reminiscence. Nancy escaped on the second part of her errand and brought her friends, who were waiting restively, up the steep path to the house. It was her turn to play hostess, and she played the part with unmeasured happiness, not even regretting the lack of gramophone and piano, when she saw how instantly Helen and Elizabeth were absorbed in every curious detail of the house. Particularly were they entranced by Kuei-lien, who welcomed them at her radiant best.
"Is she really a concubine?" asked Elizabeth in awe. "She is such a dear, and prettier than a picture," a compliment well earned by Kuei-lien's unerring skill in the colors she chose to combine, jacket and trousers of a slatish tan piped with magenta brocade.
Back and forth between them Nancy translated flattering remarks. The servants stood gaping. The old nurse ran hither and thither, like a bemuddled hen, cackling interminable yet disjointed recollections to any and all who even seemed to listen. The nine bowls were got at last on to the table, despite the confusion which prevailed, and Nancy was made amends for her awkwardness with knife and fork by the merrily clumsy way her guests wielded chopsticks.
"I believe you arranged this deliberately to have your revenge," said Helen, surveying the havoc they had wreaked on pork balls and bean curd.
Herrick himself came to view this unprecedented party. Nancy, Edward, Kuei-lien, all rose at his entry. The others followed, while the elderly man insisted upon shaking hands with his three visitors.
"Eat, my children," he said; "don't stand any more. It does an old man good to see so many young faces."
"Why do they have to grow up?" he kept repeating, when he had gone back to Nasmith and Beresford. "Why do they have to grow up? Children are the only good thing in this world. Excuse my curiosity. I have learned Chinese ways, you know—you are not married, are you?"
They were not.
"Of course; I forgot. You Englishmen don't marry so young. I suppose you are not thirty? Only twenty-four? Each of you. Ah, that's a promising age—and a difficult age, too. Well, we'd all of us risk the difficulties, would we not?"
His inquiries went further. He extracted their names, told them his own, apologized for having none but Chinese cards to offer in return for their own. So they were teaching in a Government technical school; did they like it? With insinuating persistence he found out their opinions of China. He read them a little homily on the classics, translated lyrics from the glorious T'ang poetry, grew genial and discursive, giving rein to his love of the mountains and trees and falling streams and unfading children, always children,—ah, why could they not take the immortality of the sun they played in?—and he ended before their wondering eyes by writing them each a pair of scrolls in large symmetrical characters, the characters to which he had given thirty years of his life. He translated them:—
"The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon for the moon;The moon following from the east tenderly displays the reflectionof the sun."
"That has an interpretation," he said, smiling, as he. handed a pair to Nasmith, "but I won't read the legend for you. You must learn to read it for yourself. And this too has its interpretation," he said, before translating Beresford's scroll:—
"Mirth becomes the time of danger;Sadness suits the time of love."
"Now," he said, "I have puzzled you like the old Delphic oracle,—wasn't it?—but I have written only what I see with my own eyes. If my interpretations do not come true, it will be for one reason: it will be because I am unable to control what shall be written on my own scrolls."
"An extraordinary man," Beresford commented, after good-byes had been said.
"And a most unhappy one," added his friend. "I don't think he will invite us again."
For a long time Herrick sat in quiet, like a figure in meditation. The drowsiness of the afternoon seemed to have pervaded his spirit, the strange stillness now reigning over the house after all the laughter that had gone before. Three or four times the man took up his brushes, tapered the hairs to a slender point, then replaced the brass caps and put back the pens idly into their stand. At last he called for Nancy, made her sit down, and asked her to tell the whole story of yesterday's adventure. The perfidy of the monks angered him.
"I shall raze their temple to its foundations," he exclaimed, "and drive them forth homeless like the wolves they are!" But one knew, in listening to him, these words would never be fulfilled.
He was particular that Nancy should be explicit about all she had done, all she had said, at the home of the Ferrises.
"So they dressed you in foreign clothes," he remarked. "I should like to have seen you; I should like to have known whether my girl is really Chinese. Did you like it? Would you rather wear Western clothes than your own? Shall I have them made for you?"
"Oh no," protested the girl, "they were not comfortable. I like my own clothes better."
"And the food—the taste was not pleasant, eh?"
"I couldn't eat it."
"Naturally. Yet those are small matters."
Nancy paused at last in her tale.
"Have you told me everything?" her father asked searchingly. Nancy could not meet the careful scrutiny of his eyes. "Perhaps not quite all," he suggested. "Western girls have romantic thoughts in their heads. Surely they must have asked some questions about marriage."
"They did," admitted his daughter.
Herrick insisted on every detail of a conversation so vital. Nancy was confused, but she told him everything.
"Our ways do seem shocking to them," he observed. "What did you think of Mrs. Ferris?"
The girl was glowing in the terms she used.
"And the two girls—what were their names, Helen, Elizabeth?—did you find them really congenial?"
Nancy was even more positive.
"You might not like them so well if you saw more of them," argued her father. "Suppose you were asked to live with them for a month, would you enjoy that?"
The proposal was too momentous to be answered offhand.
"Would Edward go too?" asked the girl.
"Oh, don't put too much weight on my words. I am only stating an imaginary case."
"I should be lonely without Edward."
"Pooh, you wouldn't miss Edward; you would have lots of companionship. There are the two men, Mr. Beresford and Mr. Nasmith, they would be like older brothers to you."
"How could I have anything to do with them?" said Nancy, surprised by the seeming indelicacy of her father's statement.
"Ah, you are an innocent child, Nancy, you don't know much about the world. In the West the men and women all live together like that. They don't consider it improper. Perhaps it's a better way than ours. I should like you to see for yourself; your experience has been very, very limited, my child. Were you afraid of these men?"
Nancy did not notice how subtly her father had shifted from innocuous generalities to a very particular question.
"Oh no, I was not afraid of them. They were very kind and helped us so much."
Herrick smiled.
"Yes," he resumed, "they did impress me as quite kind and gentle in their manners, especially Mr. Beresford; he seemed a very clever young man and talked in a most entertaining manner. I am not so sure about the other, what was his name—Mr.—er, Mr.—"
"Nasmith," volunteered Nancy rather overpromptly.
"That's right, Nasmith, Mr. Nasmith. Mr. Nasmith, I thought, was a little stupid; he didn't say much."
Nancy took the bait instantly.
"Oh no, he's not stupid," she averred, "not at all stupid. He is really kinder, more thoughtful, than Mr. Beresford."
"Oh," said Herrick, after a pause, "and since when have daughters known more than their fathers?"
Nancy was properly confounded. Her cheeks grew red with embarrassment, but Herrick's sternness consisted in words alone. He had got the hint he wished and could afford to smile at his own reproof, for the wisdom of a father sometimes compassed facts his daughter had not even guessed, facts she lacked the experience to acknowledge.
Nancy went away much puzzled. She had thought, from some of her father's questions, that he actually intended sending her to visit the Ferrises. In the first lonely reaction to the excitement she had been enjoying, excitement so unexampled in her tranquil life, she wished with all her heart he would let her go so that she might laugh and talk and share her world of new impressions with Elizabeth and Helen. The house still echoed to their voices, the rooms were still haunted by their eager merry faces. Edward was no comfort to her just now. Life had suddenly become drab.
She went to her room, bolted the door, lay face down on the bed and abandoned her overladen heart to a spell of frantic weeping.
Herrick too had done a thing he seldom did: he had gone walking alone. He also felt the depression which pervaded the house. He had got a glimpse of Edward, sitting woebegone in the courtyard, trying, with the half-hearted need of doing something, to fashion a new bow. The sight was too much. Here was another problem forced upon him. He had been thinking so exclusively of Nancy, whose case was so urgent, that he had forgotten poor Edward for the moment, forgotten that his was another difficult future to provide. The man could not sit at home any longer. He had to walk off his mood by stubborn climbing, climbing which did not end till he had scaled the old beacon tower and seated himself heavily in a bastion that overlooked leagues of mountain.
Here he had no choice but to think. He saw only vaguely the lucent glory of the scene, the still evening sunshine, the imperturbable towers of the distance; even the far, far-away golden palace roofs of Peking vexed him because they spoke of the peace he had been seeking these many years whereas his mind had been betrayed into nothing but ugly turmoil.
Herrick pictured the might-have-beens of the past. Suppose he had sent his children home, as he knew he ought to have done when he first discarded his kinship with the West; what would they have been now? Would the benevolence of uncles and aunts have compensated for the loss of their father? Yes, perhaps it might have compensated them; they would have grown up ignorant of the parent whom their elders would refer to in bated, pitying terms as a man gone wrong. It might have compensated them; but how could it have made up to him for the loss of his two children?
He wished he could have seen Nancy in a Western frock as the Ferris girls had clothed her. Then he might have judged for himself whether she was to be preferred to the grave maiden whom the East had trained. By now she would have spent twelve years in the peace of an English garden. She would be making the daily round of her flowers, the primroses and foxgloves and hollyhocks he could fancy her tending, and playing tennis on the cropped lawn, or reading lazily in a basket chair, dreaming of the seaside and dances and picnics. And Edward would be home for the holidays, speaking the amazing idiom of a schoolboy. It was a pleasant picture, Herrick admitted, rather sentimental perhaps, and, except when he was homesick, a little insipid; but the one element of the scene which stuck in his mind was that in this scene he could take no part. He certainly did not wish to be doddering round with a cane or listening to his relatives as they discussed the vicar's Whitsunday sermon and the prospects of the county show or the perennially banal topic of Farmer George's rheumatism. It seemed really a merit not to have condemned Nancy and Edward to this.
No, it was not the past of which Herrick was jealous, but the future, the future which threatened to tear away his children. The father discerned the enmity of fate in the chance that, after his long-maintained watchfulness, suddenly had given Nancy and Edward friends from the West. He hated these friends, hated the attraction which would undo all his careful work, breathing life into the stolid wood-block people of their English readers, restoring to the girl and the boy a living tongue for one he wished them to think of as dead. He was jealous of Helen and Elizabeth, jealous of Mrs. Ferris and Beresford, but above all things jealous of the quiet Nasmith, in whose destiny he perceived some occult link with Nancy's itself.
"I will not give them up," he said vehemently. "After training them all these years, after giving them something better and finer than anything they could have got in England, what a fool I should be to turn them over to the first blond strangers they meet. It would be a waste, nothing more than a waste. Nasmith and the rest of them can hang before I'll let Nancy or Edward see them again. I won't destroy my own work."
Having made this decision, which decided nothing, Herrick gave it immediate effect. He ordered his children for their safety's sake not to go out of the temple enclosure. He said nothing more about Nancy's visiting the Ferrises. He was mastered by the need to forget all these urgent problems. He called for wine, called for his opium pipe, called for Kuei-lien.
She went to him with a happy smile on her face for she had been waiting a long, long time to hear this summons. With the instinctive genius of the wanton she lured the man to new frenzies of love, taunted him, by a modesty artfully affected, into committing new blissful indignities, glamorous outrages, in which her master tried to stifle the soul as well as the body of his slave and succeeded only in stifling his own. Then she sat naked on the floor before his couch, her hair raveled but her eyes cool, and lighted the lamp and heated the first of the little pellets which were to induce days of passionate stupor. He dozed; he dreamed; the sickly smoke filled the room.
Kuei-lien picked up her scattered garments. She was still smiling.
For a full week Herrick lived behind closed doors. It was a long devastating bout, and it was a hatefully dull week for Nancy and Edward. Recent liberty made their present confinement wear all the more heavily. Romantic memories of Elizabeth and Helen and David made the lonely children captious and cross with one another. They had no zest for books; the sun kept eternally shining; it called them away to the mountain tops. Edward fumed because he could get no practice with his newly made bow; Nancy sat on the platform above the ravine, musing as to who should rescue her from her boredom, and more and more she wondered who could rescue her from fear. For fear was beating at the gates of her courage.
In this narrow temple of the Western Hills Herrick's absence weighed like sultry heat upon the atmosphere of the household, quieting the tongue of the amah and the vociferous exchanges of the servants. Kuei-lien came and went with the preoccupation of a nurse waiting upon a sick man. But the fact Nancy saw and the fact she despised was that the preoccupation was a happy one. At last, one day Nancy could stand it no more.
"I want to see my father," she said.
Kuei-lien looked at her with surprise. The sneer on her lips almost faded before the resolute dignity of the girl. For the first time the all-conquering audacity of the concubine was checked; Kuei-lien began to feel misgivings about this stubborn child, misgivings and a little fear, because she could not meet Nancy's obstinacy with her usual effective mockery.
"I want to see my father," the girl repeated.
"But you can't see him," Kuei-lien said. "He is busy. He would call for you if he wished to see you."
"Ask him if I may see him."
"Oh, I can ask him, but I know what his answer will be."
Kuei-lien went away much disturbed.
"I have had the most absurd request from Nancy," she told her master, who was lying heavily on his couch. "She wants to see you. She told me she must see you."
"Very well, tell her to come," said Herrick.
Kuei-lien could not believe the report of her own ears.
"You want her to come?" she asked. "I told her you were too busy to see her."
"What right have you to speak for your master?" the man shouted. "Go and tell her to come."
Kuei-lien had no course but to go.
"You have made a pretty mess of things," she warned Nancy. "Your father is furiously angry at your asking to see him. He said, Yes, you should see him, and ordered me to make you come."
"I am going without being forced," said Nancy with irritating self-possession. "You don't have to make me."
Kuei-lien, balked in her effort to frighten the girl, went ahead of her and opened the door of Herrick's bedroom. The shutters had been thrown wide to let in the late afternoon sun, but there had not been time to clear the mustiness of the place, the lurking odor of the drug, which clung to the bed curtains and to the implements laid ready on a table by Herrick's side.
Nancy evinced not a sign of disgust as she entered the room and stood waiting impassively for her father's first words. Yet she seemed out of place amid the disorder of the chamber, which was littered with signs of Kuei-lien's occupancy.
This was apparent to Herrick himself. Although the situation could not foster any illusion as to how he had been spending his days, the father nevertheless made the effort to greet his daughter with the ceremony proper between them. His orgy had burned itself out, but his face showed the strain of dissipation; his eyes were dull, there were haggard lines round the mouth, pouches of puffy flesh beneath his eyes. Nancy could not avoid glimpses of his unkempt fingers nor of the loose robe bound round his body.
"And what is it so important that you must ask permission to see me?" Herrick inquired, speaking in Chinese.
Nancy had her one sentence prepared. She uttered it in a low cool voice.
"I was afraid to leave my father so long alone with his enemy."
A pause, fraught with deep feeling, ensued upon these daring words.
"Is that all?" Herrick asked finally.
"Yes," admitted the girl, "that is all."
"Very well, you may go."
Nancy turned obediently and went out of the room. Even Kuei-lien had the decency to wait until the child was out of earshot before she gave vent to her mirth.
"Ha, ha, ha!" she laughed. "What a speech! Afraid to leave her father alone with his enemy. Whom does she mean? Does she mean me?"
Her amusement was not very convincing. It seemed forced, bolstered up by weak bravado.
"Yes, she means you," retorted her master, "she means you and she means all this mischievous rubbish."
With a sweep of his hand he brushed the glasses, the opium pipe, the little lamp, from the surface of the table. They fell with a crash to the floor.
"Don't be so wasteful," protested the concubine, more entertained by this flare of temper on Herrick's part than by Nancy's grim sentence. "What a shame to break all these things. You'll need them again."
"Yes, that is the beastly part of it," Herrick acknowledged, "I shall need them again—but not now—not now. And I don't need you either. You may go."
"Your eloquence is not so impressive as your daughter's," said Kuei-lien, as she retreated. Her indomitable capacity for being merry never deserted the girl, even at times of defeat.
Left to himself at last, Herrick began to repair the disorders of the past few days. He shaved, dressed himself neatly, returned to his books and his pens. But throughout the mechanical functions which helped to bring back self-respect, his mind was filled with the vision of Nancy's face, her impassive demeanor, in unreproaching contact with the signs of his own collapse. Again and again he mumbled the girl's words. It was a curiously saving trait in Herrick's character that he did not resent them.
"'Alone with his enemy,'" he kept saying, "How right she was, how just! Ah, but I must take care lest my enemy be her enemy too."
Then on a sudden came a frightening spasm of pain, the first in his life. Always Herrick had been well and robust, seldom ill for two days together; but now he gasped and choked, held his hand to his chest, thinking with ungovernable terror that he was going to die with all the loose strings of his life untied. After minutes that were years, the spell passed. He lay back white-faced in a chair, his forehead pouring sweat. He recognized the warning. His heart was affected. What use would there be in disguising the truth?
Herrick had no intention to consult a physician. Physicians had not saved his wife; they had never been of use to him. He knew the advice they would give: diet, self-control, no excitement. They had no cure for this complaint. Some people lived on for years, others were snuffed out in a night; what was bound to fall fell despite the advice of all the doctors in the world. After the gripping pain had relaxed—there was no room for any state except fear while it lasted—the man even treated the subject jauntily and swore he was as likely as any to round off his threescore and ten. But he could not do it peacefully if he left any room for grief to befall Nancy and Edward.
It was after this attack that Ronald Nasmith received a letter to which with surprise he saw Herrick's signature attached. The note was short, impersonal in its wording; the writer had business of importance he could not discuss on paper; he asked Mr. Nasmith to indulge the infirmities of an older man by paying him a visit; he also must request that his letter and the subject of the visit be treated as confidential.
Nasmith dispatched Beresford as acting-uncle on a picnic to some hot springs while he slipped away to see Herrick. His mind during the past few days had been much occupied with Herrick and the puzzle of the scrolls. He had been studying a riddle which instinct told him was full of personal import, a message that Herrick intended and wished him to decipher. Yet the answer evaded his closest research. It might seem easy to Herrick, schooled in these antithetical couplets by which the Chinese conveyed the many thoughts they did not care to lay bare on the surface; it was not clear to Nasmith, who burrowed through all his dictionaries and went to the length of asking help from his teacher. The dictionaries explained little and the teacher, although he exclaimed at once that the characters were the work of a master, offered explanations so involved that Nasmith, even though he understood less than half of what his teacher said, knew that this excess of commentary was merely the happy Chinese way of concealing ignorance: the teacher was groping for a clue, as Nasmith once before had caught him doing when the drowsy pedagogue had elaborated the most profound moral sentiments from what proved to be simply the Chinese transliteration of the name Australia. In the end, exhaustive study had not told as much as Herrick himself chose to reveal:—
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beaconfor the moon;The moon following from the east tenderly displays thereflection of the sun.
"I wonder if he will have expected me to master his riddle," thought Nasmith, as he set out upon his long walk.
Herrick received his guest in the same room as before. He was regaining the dominance of his nerves but there was, nevertheless, a stiffness of bearing which caused Nasmith to eye his host keenly, anxious for any hint of the business in hand, and to note marks of the upheaval through which the man had been passing. Something was wrong—business cares, worries about property, some trouble in which the man could not turn to Chinese friends for assistance. Perhaps Herrick wanted an executor or a witness to his will. No, that could not be the difficulty; he would have called for Beresford as well.
"I suppose you are mystified as to the reasons for my letter," Herrick began. "Did you read the scroll I wrote for you?"
"I tried to read it," Nasmith admitted.
"And failed. I am not surprised. It was the truth, and the truth is always far-fetched. I have, I am afraid, the Chinese faculty for talking in riddles and as to the inner meaning of those two sentences I prefer not to explain it, for the best part of your life will come when you find out the meaning for yourself—if you do."
"That is putting rather too great a strain on my curiosity, don't you think?"
"Perhaps. But I'm going to offer you the key to the puzzle and you can make the best of it as you choose."
Herrick fingered the lip of his teacup for a minute or two while Nasmith wondered if he had been summoned all this distance merely to hear more of such cryptic nonsense.
"Do you think my wits are wandering?" Herrick asked with disconcerting suddenness.
"I am not sure of it," replied his guest, willing to be as provokingly frank. The older man laughed.
"I have been ill," he said, "but my wits are still here. I have wit enough to recognize an honest man; that is why I have asked you to come."
"Thank you; the compliment is enjoyed, even if it isn't deserved."
"How much patience would you have, to keep talking in this vein?"
"Not much more," Nasmith confessed.
"Ah, you will never become Chinese."
"I don't wish to."
"Good. You are thoroughly English, quite thoroughly English, aren't you? You wouldn't care to follow my example and become Chinese?"
"If you wish me to say what I think, I should say a life like yours was a waste, a shameful waste, not fair to yourself, Mr. Herrick, and especially not fair to your two children."
"You are honest, that is the important point. For your opinions, Mr. Nasmith, I don't care a snap of the finger. Opinions don't have half the influence we imagine. But you have touched the subject I have in mind. It is my children and what is fair to them that I am keeping in mind. I have been ill: without mincing matters I might just as well tell you I have very definite signs of heart trouble. You know what that means. It means that I might drop even while I am talking with you here. That is disquieting. I don't care to leave the future of my children dependent on the whims of this worn-out heart of mine."
"Why do you keep them in China? Why don't you take them home?"
"I have a home here and I am too old to change it, don't wish to change it, in fact. No, I didn't call you for advice, Mr. Nasmith; I am capable of giving myself all the advice you can suggest. If I wished to, I could put Nancy and Edward to school, but I don't wish to. Let's not argue about it, just say I am too selfish, too pig-headed, not willing at my time of life to lose the company of two delightful children. I want something more definite from you, something which will be a real provision for the future and not the making myself and my children miserable by shipping them off to school among strangers and foreigners—"
"You want, then—" interrupted Nasmith, anxious to stem Herrick's garrulous speech.
"I want to betroth my daughter Nancy to you."
Nasmith did not answer. The proposal was too unexpected to fit into any compartment of his mind. Room had first to be made for it, room provided with hesitation and an agitated heart. Nasmith did not deny that Nancy had occupied much of his thought, more than he openly allowed. He could not shake out of his memory the sight of the girl, poised tiptoe for flight, as she stood between the doors of the temple. He had been haunted by the picture, haunted by a crying sense of wrong in restoring the girl to a dangerous, tragic future. But Herrick's offer was too real. It was stern stuff to be built upon such vague foundations.
"Don't imagine I wanted to bring up this subject," said Herrick. "I don't wish to see Nancy married to you or to anyone else. I would hide her from every last one of you if I had the choice. You haven't got her, I tell you; you haven't got her yet. I may hide her despite you. Ah, if I only had the choice! This stupid heart of mine has taken the choice out of my hands."
"There is no need to be angry with me for weighing your own proposal," Nasmith said. "Your suggestion is no less a shock to me than it seems to be to yourself. But before going into my side of the matter, I think we must consider Nancy's side. Whatever my own inclinations may be—and I must confess they are not very definite—I would not consider your offer for a moment if I thought the arrangement would be distasteful to your daughter. What do you think she would say at being disposed of in this summary manner to a man who is practically a stranger?"
"It's not at all so dreadful as you imagine. Nancy's training all her life has led her to expect no other method of betrothal. Your haphazard Western fashion would seem scandalous to her. A father is more competent to choose a husband for his daughter than the girl herself; he knows the world, she doesn't. No doubt she has her fancies, but if she is betrothed to a man who is not utterly impossible it will not be hard to attach her fancies to the husband chosen for her."
"That may be so; I am not prepared to deny it, though it seems to me, in the main, a heartless business. But what about my share in the contract? I have not been educated to think your Chinese way is normal. Can I attach my fancies to a girl I have hardly known?"
"Is this merely a theoretical question or have you some practical plan in mind? I certainly feel no need to advertise the merits of my daughter. You have seen her and, if you are the man I take you for, you have understood her. Remember this: it was not by throwing dice or tossing a coin that I chose you instead of Beresford. He, I think, would have jumped at my offer—I should suspect anyone who jumped at so unusual an offer as mine."
"No, I am not putting a theoretical question; I have a most practical plan," said Nasmith.
"I know your plan; you want Nancy to live with your sister."
"Yes, and I want more than that. I want her sent to school with my nieces."
"You want me to undo the last twelve years of her training."
"Not at all. I am quite satisfied with her training, but if she is to be a Westerner it has to be given a more definite direction; it cannot continue on Chinese lines. There will not be much shock now; there would be tremendous shock a few years later."
"Yes, I was prepared for all these arguments," said Herrick, "and for a few more as well. By living with your sister, Nancy would come to know you better; you in turn would have a better acquaintance with her. Yes, I know all these arguments. And suppose, after this mutual acquaintance, you found your tastes growing farther and farther apart, what would you do to remedy the situation?"
"Break the engagement."
"No, that's not my notion of a betrothal. That simply transfers Nancy from my care, puts her at the mercy of all the accidents which may occur in your sister's home, possible jealousies or gossip or misunderstanding,—you know the things I mean,—and leaves her with the chance of a broken engagement at the end. Then what would she be fit for? Do you expect her to go out and capture a husband as your Western women do or come back to the Chinese life she has unlearned?"
"At least, it is better," protested Nasmith, "to discover uncongenial tastes before marriage than afterward."
"Not at all. After marriage you have made your bargain. You have no choice but to make your tastes congenial. Have you forgotten your old proverb about necessity? It's when people have the option of being uncongenial that they look for excuses to quarrel just to assert their freedom. If I sent Nancy to you in a red chair to-morrow, I haven't the slightest doubt that she would prove congenial. It would be your duty to see that she did."
"You don't really wish me to marry her now?" demanded Nasmith, somewhat disconcerted, "a girl of seventeen."
"A girl of sixteen," Herrick corrected. "No, indeed I don't wish you to marry her now. I don't wish to surrender her a day before she is twenty, that is, if my heart holds out. If I die, she goes to you at once and Edward with her—he will be suitably provided for. But while I live or until she is twenty Nancy remains with me."
"And you expect me to consent to betrothal on these terms?"
"I do."
"Don't you think it is rather one-sided?"
"It is one-sided," Herrick admitted, "but it appears more one-sided now than it will later. I am asking you to put inordinate trust in the judgment of an old man who has done some thinking about the both of you. I have put twelve years into what you might term an experiment. Nancy is the result, and if you think the result lovable—as I do—you will give some credit to the methods which achieved it. I want just four more years, four more years; the Nancy you see now will not bear comparison with the Nancy I am offering you as a bride. Ah, if my heart had not given out I shouldn't need to be begging you; you would be begging me. Nancy needs no excuses, sir, no apologies, but I—I need four years of security, four years of peace of mind, to complete my work and to keep the love of my children. It is only in your own interests that I am asking you to make a one-sided bargain."
Nasmith was moved by Herrick's earnestness, but he was not convinced. Nasmith paused.
"Then you refuse my terms," he said, at last, after allowing the effect of Herrick's passionate appeal to grow cold, "you will not let Nancy visit my sister, nor go to school with my nieces, not even if I bind myself to marry your daughter."
"I cannot accept such terms even if you bind yourself. I have considered them, Mr. Nasmith, considered them thoroughly, long before I sent for you. They are too great a price for any betrothal. I would rather take chances with my heart."
"Is it fair to take such chances, fair to leave a young girl without protection?" Nasmith was angry in his deliberate way. "What other alternative have you, if I refuse?"
Herrick smiled. He had his trump card to play.
"I have the alternative I have entertained from the beginning—until I met you, in fact, and thought I had found a man large-minded enough, generous enough to make it unnecessary. I have the alternative of marrying Nancy to a Chinese."
"You are trying to threaten me now," said Nasmith. "You chose the wrong man. I will not be threatened into betrothing myself to your daughter."
"Don't decide too hastily," said Herrick; "we'll have tiffin first."
"Thank you, but I have decided. There is no use wasting more time. You have my terms; I have yours. The situation is simple. Which one of us intends to change?"
"I don't," vowed Herrick.
"Neither do I."
With these words Nasmith picked up his helmet, bowed to his astonished host, and departed.
"I've made the attempt," said Herrick to himself, much piqued by the failure of tactics he had reckoned sure of success. "I have offered him the choice decently and fairly. If he thinks I am going to seek him out and get down on my knees, begging him to take a girl who is twice too good for him, he can wait till the Yellow River runs dry."
Some such hope had occurred to Nasmith. The knowledge that Nancy had been offered to him acted like sun and rain upon his memory of her, so that only now did he begin to realize how strong was the hold she had gained. Whatever the feeling might be, it disturbed him. In a fever of uneasiness most unusual to his orderly nature he awaited Herrick's next overture, waited till his impatience could be brooked no further. There was that last ever-disquieting threat. Would the father be fool enough or selfish or wrong-headed enough to carry it into effect? Nasmith even regretted his own judgment, his own conduct, right though he knew these had been. At last, unable to contain his distress, he walked the long road to Herrick's temple and found it vacant, with only a bleary-eyed caretaker to tell him Herrick had taken his family, son and daughter, concubine and nurse, back to Peking.
The departure had been as sudden, as arbitrary, as Herrick's few acts of decision usually were. The household had not recovered from the surprise of Nasmith's visit when orders came to pack. In the mysterious way by which news permeates a Chinese dwelling the subject of Herrick's conversation with his guest was common property while the two men were still debating it. Kuei-lien in great glee told Nancy that her engagement was being arranged. She was to be married to one of the light-haired men who had rescued her, the one with the little moustache under his nose. Nancy, who recognized Nasmith from Kuei-lien's mocking description, blushed a violent red and denied that any such transaction was in progress.
"Oh, yes it is," declared the concubine, "I know. They are discussing your presents right now. What a way to do it, with no middleman! But that's your foreign custom. Soon you'll be squeezing your waist into corsets and hiding your face with a white veil like a mourner. Poor Nancy, you won't have a red chair; foreigners never use them. They'll put you into a motor car and send you to a foreign worship hall where you'll have to kiss your husband and take his hand, so"—Nancy jerked free from Kuei-lien's provoking fingers,—"and then you'll use a knife and a fork and eat goat's meat till you smell like a Mongolian shepherd."
"I won't, I won't, I won't!" vowed Nancy, stamping her foot.
"Don't tease her," begged the nurse, beaming with smiles at the happy news; "you know it is not seemly to talk to a maiden about her future husband."
"Oh, it's quite all right by foreign custom. Your fiancé will come every day to see you; we shall all hide behind the door while you sit and talk and make love together."
"Yes, that is the custom," the amah admitted. "She will grow used to it. She ought to follow the practice of her ancestors."
Nancy, however, had not stayed to listen. She had slammed the doors of her room in their faces and flung herself across the bed, where in the semi-darkness she meditated upon a change she never for a moment doubted had been agreed to. It was while the nurse still triumphantly declaimed the fitness of Nancy's marrying an Englishman that Herrick appeared in the courtyard to deliver his curt message that they were to return to Peking on the morrow. The exultant words were frozen on the tongue of the amah. She had seen in Herrick's eyes the defeat of all her hopes.
Nancy and Edward were miserable at coming back to Peking. It was utterly dispiriting to be fenced by high walls in a garden that had shrunk: no wide views, no sound of tumbling streams, no walks across hills teeming with wild flowers—just the beat of paddles as the clothes were rinsed at the pond and the tedious gossip of women whose minds were confined like their bodies. The boy and girl relapsed into their old routine, took up again studies with their teacher, intermittent lessons with their father, the usual round of writing and reading, yet all with lassitude of spirit, with hearts aching for the hills.
Not even the Mid-autumn Festival, which because of the fewness of the Chinese holidays always had made such a stir in their lives, could wake the children from this lethargy. Nancy passed idly by the flowering cassia, the pride of her courtyard, and wholly forgot to thrust a sprig of the fragrant white blossoms into her hair. More from habit than from relish she ate her round moon cakes and climbed into the pine to see the largest moon of the year rise slowly from the east. She was homesick for her brief hours with Helen and Elizabeth and wrote them letters in English, long, affectionate letters which she could not send because she had no knowledge of where to send them. The exercise did bring some comfort; it seemed to provide some intercourse with her friends, and would have entertained them greatly, could the naïve, oddly phrased missives have found their destination.
Kuei-lien did not visit Nancy as she used to do. The words the daughter had spoken about her father's enemy were hard to forgive. She never pressed Nancy for their meaning because she always avoided unprofitable quarrels, but it became her policy to be cool to the girl, to snub her as one might snub a pert child. Much of the time she spent with the t'ai-t'ai, to whom she had related the tale of the summer. The t'ai-t'ai agreed unreservedly that Nancy and Edward were a problem; they ought to be sent back to the West. She offered no proposal, however, as to how they should be sent. The fact was that she was nursing plans of her own, plans which might not jump with Kuei-lien's humor.
She had gone to her husband, shortly after his return, and taxed him on the subject of her own daughter, Li-an. The girl was twelve. Ought they not to be choosing her a husband?
"Good God!" exclaimed Herrick in English, "have we got to find another?"
"My heart will have no peace till she is engaged," she said.
"But Li-an is only a babe in arms."
"She is twelve," the mother repeated.
"I hardly know the child. Bring her here. Let me talk to her."
Herrick's attention had in truth been so predominantly centred on Nancy and Edward that the second daughter came before her father like a stranger. There had never been the contact of English lessons to quicken his knowledge of this fast growing girl.
"Yes, she is pretty," he thought to himself, "and, thank heaven, Chinese."
Herrick examined the scholarship of his daughter, put many questions which she answered cleverly. Then the whim seized him to ask what he had asked of Nancy, to see how she would pass the test of bringing what she valued most. Li-an went at once to her mother and told her of Herrick's strange request.
"The most precious thing you have?" inquired the t'ai-t'ai. "What a thing to ask! We must think about it and make sure not to disappoint him. You might take a copy of Mencius, or the Four Books, or perhaps your ink-stone and brush. No, they won't do; I have a much better plan."
She extracted a photograph from her box.
"Take that," she said; "that will please him."
Herrick received the photograph and looked at it curiously. Then he frowned. The picture was one of himself taken years before, a portrait which revealed its subject in the stiff pose so dear to Chinese photographers: there were flower pots bestowed in harsh symmetry on either side of him, a drop painted to show trees and balustrades behind, and Herrick, glued to the chair, facing the camera with exasperated belligerency as though daring the lens to do its worst—which it did. The man had forgotten such a picture existed. In a moment of weakness he had given way before the entreaties of the t'ai-t'ai and consented to its being taken.
"Who put you up to bringing this atrocity?" he demanded. He tore the picture asunder and threw the pieces on the floor.
"Tell your mother," he said, "that it is rather early to be teaching her daughter to lie."
The t'ai-t'ai appeared, full of explanations, full of apologies. The child had been puzzled by her father's command, and was unhappy because she had nothing precious enough to take to her father.
"So I asked her whom she honored most. 'My father,' Li-an answered, 'of course I honor my father more than anybody.' I showed her the photograph merely to test her and instantly she begged me to let her have it. When I saw the happiness come over her face and how she valued it I suggested that this was the gift to bring to her father. I am sorry it displeased you, but there was no time to frame it suitably."
The excuse was so much more flagrant than the offense itself that the man could not keep back a burst of laughter.
"Not even from your lips can two lies cancel each other, my good lady," he remarked dryly in English. The t'ai-t'ai was a standard by which he could mark his growing absorption into Chinese life and realize how much deeper he still needed to sink himself before the waters covered his soul.
"I'm afraid your daughter is much too clever," he said, openly accepting Li-an's ill-advised act as a joke. "Fancy a child of twelve practising such artful wiles on her old father."
The mother's face beamed in relief.
"But we mustn't be in too great a hurry in choosing her a husband. We must make certain of a suitable man. Meantime I want your help in something far more pressing. You realize of course that Nancy is four years older than Li-an. We must make some arrangement for her; we can't delay it any longer. I thought for a time of marrying her to an Englishman, but now that I have been thinking about the matter I know that Nancy, though she is English-born, can never be at home in the West. She is Chinese by nature and training and speech, and Chinese she ought to remain; so now I am determined to find a Chinese husband for Nancy, and I want you to be matchmaker. Please don't annoy me by a statement of objections and difficulties; I know these as well as you. But there are a few points to keep in mind: first, I must see the man you suggest. I am not going to be put off with any dunderheads; I want the best. If I can't get the best there will be no engagement. Furthermore, the man must be of good family; he must be well educated, a man of scholarly tastes—and he must know no English, no English at all. I won't have a son-in-law sucking his breath and grinning at his own smartness as he gibbers 'Yes-s' and 'Alright.' Do you understand?"
The woman nodded.
"You may think I am asking the impossible in expecting such a paragon. Well, you know the proverb that what we value cheaply we sell cheaply. We don't need to apologize for Nancy and I will not have you setting about this task as though we were asking favors. Yet of course there will be a prejudice against the girl because of her foreign birth. That perhaps will frighten the conservative families, the very families we ought to look to for decent, obedient, scholarly boys. I am ready to make one concession to overcome the handicap of Nancy's having been born English; if I am satisfied with the man you choose, I will give Nancy a portion of ten thousand taels at her marriage; if I am very well satisfied, I might stretch the sum to fifteen thousand."
After this last offer, which outweighed all Herrick's other provisions, the t'ai-t'ai accepted her commission as matchmaker. She was admirably fitted for the post, since she came of good family herself, an excellent but impecunious family with many ramifications, many branches, all prolific of sons and daughters, all equally genteel, all equally poor. Within the confines of her own family the t'ai-t'ai knew she could find many candidates for Nancy's hand. She did not propose to look further.
Her father had been Herrick's teacher of Chinese. He was a gentleman of the old school, a scholar of distinction, benignant in his ways, a fountainhead of Chinese lore. The family had been broken by the disgrace of the patron, whom an arbitrary whim of the Empress Dowager had banished from court. Without exception every man of the family had been thrown out of official employment. Years of vain waiting for reinstatement had followed: they could not dig; to beg they were ashamed. Swiftly their fortune melted away till Herrick's future father-in-law broke with tradition by undertaking to instruct foreigners in the obscurities of the Mandarin tongue.
For a long time he was the only man of his extensive family who deigned to work. The others continued from day to day, living always on the edge of solvency, getting food and clothing by some mysterious means of which Chinese families are rarely so impoverished as to lose the secret; they had been rather contemptuous over the one member who stooped to teach foreign devils for a living, but they did not scruple to share in the profits of his abasement; they were outraged by his marrying a daughter to a foreign devil, but always borrowed a liberal part of the money the t'ai-t'ai brought home as her gift to the exchequer. They waited and taught their sons and grandsons to wait for the turn of affairs which might restore them to office, restore them to the emoluments of magistracies and deputy inspectorships. Waiting had become the family profession and was practised with all the assiduity of the Oriental who has known better times and feels sure that in some lucky cycle of the future, in the wheel which shifts dynasties and oligarchies and republics and chaos, fate again will provide better times to her patient servants. The t'ai-t'ai, surveying the case, decided that fifteen thousand taels would be an extremely useful addition to the family fortunes, the very harbinger of better times. There was more profit to be made out of Nancy than out of her own daughter Li-an, for Nancy, being no kin, could be married to a member of her prolific family, whereas Li-an's dowry would be swallowed by some other voracious clan. It would be foolish to let fifteen thousand taels slip out of her hands to the advantage of someone else. With so many nephews and cousins sitting idle at home, one surely could be sacrificed in the interests of the family, even to contract something so undesirable as a mixed marriage.
The t'ai-t'ai put the reins of the household into the hands of the nurse—she was always careful not to give power to a concubine—and after she had stipulated this and stipulated that, lest the old amah wax rich in her absence, she climbed into a mule cart and started lumbering along the dusty ruts of the road home.