In a household where every trivial accident was snatched at by the jaded inmates as meat for hours of excited gossip, an event so unparalleled as the visit of three foreigners was bound to stir Herrick's cloistered family to throbbing ecstasies of curiosity.
Herrick in his own time gave away the secret. He called the t'ai-t'ai and told her the terms of his will. There was a glint of malice in his eyes when he saw that her imperturbable countenance, well controlled though it usually was, could not hide consternation at this unwelcome news. He took pleasure in extolling the fairness of his scheme, in hauling out one by one, like a magician extracting rabbits from a hat, the advantages of a plan in which he knew too well and too keenly the dazed woman could see no shadow of advantage.
When she had been given the precedence of her station, a full twenty-four hours to meditate upon the abominable Western rectitude of this will, the British justice which was the last outlandish gesture of the Timothy Herrick who had ceased to be, he called up the other wives in turn and told them what their share was to be and, in great detail, how they were to get it.
None, of course, was satisfied, none but was sure this unknown executor would rifle the estate with amiable peculations of his own,—why shouldn't he?—yet the three subordinate wives who filled the gap between the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien had less cause to grumble, because they knew their shares were safer in the hands of a stranger than left to the charity of the t'ai-t'ai. This worthy woman gaped for words to vent her disgruntled spleen.
"The older he grows, the madder he gets," she told Kuei-lien. "Who would have thought, after all these years, after the careful management I have exercised in his house, that he would turn from me, his wife, and put this extravagant trust in a stranger? It's these beastly children he's concerned for; they disturb his mind and put these queer notions into his head."
"Oh, we're no worse off than we were before," said Kuei-lien. "I can still get money from him in the old way—"
"If his daughter doesn't interfere."
"We must see that she doesn't interfere."
The t'ai-t'ai accepted this advice with a snort. But there was food for thought in the words. She must take pains to see that Nancy did not enjoy the liberty she had enjoyed all too freely in the past.
"You do your part and I'll do mine," she said finally.
Kuei-lien was called upon soon for hers. Herrick, sitting dejectedly in his room, felt himself at the loose ends of patience with life. The future was settled. He could enjoy his desires without constraint. He sent for his concubine. He was fingering his check book when she entered.
"You have been very clever," he said, "far more clever than these other women of my household, I see. My affection, I notice, has paid you well in the last few months."
Kuei-lien smiled, not troubling to deny the greed he had uncovered.
"Cleverness is always costly," she remarked.
"Yes, you are right, it should be."
The man wrote a check larger than any of his previous rewards; he read the sum before her eyes.
"It is unsigned, you observe," he explained. "Now show me if you are clever enough to win my signature to this piece of paper."
This was temptation the concubine relished. She led the man through every extreme of her sensual imagination, but even when beguiled into amorous confusion by her beauty she found him obstinate in paying the price of her victory, as though he had locked the gate to his treasure, locked the gate and discarded the key. Kuei-lien fell back upon the last resource of her trade. She provoked him to cruelty. She stood the sting of the lash across her naked shoulders, smiling grimly, biting her lips to keep from crying out in pain, quivering but not shrinking from each fresh agony of his fury, till the time came when he fell, sobbing like a baby, on his couch, exhausted in spirit, ashamed of the mordant brutality which would have been accounted vile from a beast. It was easy, in his repentant mood, to secure the signature of the check.
While the ordeal was livid in her memory, the girl bargained her stripes against the cupidity of the t'ai-t'ai, refusing downright to face more of this abuse till she had got her share of the gains greatly increased.
The t'ai-t'ai needed to keep her husband occupied, since she was trying, for the first time in years, to win some control over Nancy. In the interests of her own family, the family to which the girl was betrothed, she had specious excuses of duty for overseeing the occupations of the girl. She dismissed Nancy's teacher; what time was there, she asked, for further frivolities of study in a girl who had learned already too much for her own and her husband's good? To her surprise, Nancy submitted without complaint, submitted so gracefully that the t'ai-t'ai suspected some darkly cherished plot and went further in her exactions, shortening the hours of Nancy's play in the garden, setting her heavy tasks of sewing upon her bridal garments.
Nancy was unbelievably docile. She was not reconciled to the t'ai-t'ai's show of authority, which came with a bad grace after the many years she had been left to go her own willful path. But the t'ai-t'ai for the moment was too powerful and she was doing, after all, only what Nancy recognized she had a right to do, making the girl a meet and seemly wife for her nephew. The marriage lurked inescapably in front of her; Nancy had neither thought nor plan of evading her engagement. It was no use making enemies of the family to which she must go, the family to which the t'ai-t'ai, though she had left it, still seemed more closely related than to Herrick's improvised house. Meekly Nancy bent her face over the scarlet satin of her bridal gown and meditated all the gloomy, curious, fearful, teasing thoughts which the mere color of the garments stirred in her virgin mind.
Her old nurse was not so complaisant. Her grumbles lost their discreetness; their echoes were heard throughout the house. Kuei-lien warned her mistress.
"That's the old jade from whom Nancy gets her mischievous ideas," she remarked. "She did her best to break up the engagement to your nephew."
"You mean you and she did your best, don't you?" sniffed the woman. "Still, you are right; the children have grown up. Why should they need a nurse?"
This was not a new thought. But now the desperation of the t'ai-t'ai heaped fuel upon her courage. With Herrick growing day by day more helpless in the arms of his concubine, more childish, more easily and pitifully led like a bear with a ring through his snout, the woman believed the time at last had come for settling old scores and writing off her balance of revenge.
The chance came when the cold winds blew for weeks and filtering dust of spring, sweeping in clouds from the plains of Kansu and the crumbling deserts of Gobi, choked the house, suffocated ears and eyes and nostrils and throats with fine sand, and reduced everyone's temper to that inflammable point where quarrels leap up from a spark. Nancy did fumbling work on her bridal skirt. The t'ai-t'ai rebuked her with harsh words. The child threw aside deference to her stepmother and responded as angrily. But her flare of indignation paled before the great blaze of wrath which suddenly burst from the lips of the amah, who had interposed in the dispute and been unable to quench her long-stifled embers of hatred.
For all the pent-up enmity of the past she now found words and, with no care who should hear her, she denounced Nancy's tyrant with long sentences of withering invective. The whole household rushed to hear; the other wives stood round with gaping mouths, secretly gloating over the t'ai-t'ai's discomfiture. Even Herrick could not remain deaf to such noise and was forced irritably to inquire the reason for this disturbance. In her frenzy the nurse was like a poetess, singing out her unforgivable abuse in a rhythmical chant which her victim was powerless to quell. Every line was jerked short with a taunt, as though the infuriated woman defied the world to contradict her words. The taunts stung like little leaden pellets on the end of a whiplash. Nancy, standing cold and white in dismay, expected to see these venomous syllables cut marks of blood across the face of her stepmother.
A scene like this could not be excused. The result was what the old nurse had foreseen and tried with such patience to guard against during every provocation of the last few months: she was called before Herrick, his wife standing vindictively at his side, and told the cruel, farcical pretexts proper to the decencies of the occasion. The children had outgrown a nurse. She deserved a rest after these many years of faithful service, service Herrick was glad to reward with a gift which would keep her in comfort to the end of her years. The man knew in his heart he was pronouncing a dastardly sentence. His voice faltered when he referred to the better reward the old woman would find in the hearts of his children. But it was a just sentence. He would not be moved when the amah threw herself at his feet and begged with tears to remain. The demonstrative scene vexed him. He hated scenes. The more the stricken woman pleaded, the more stubbornly his will hardened. He turned away and left her weeping uselessly.
Yet, terrible as her grief had been, not till Nancy and Edward learned her punishment did it reach its climax. The two children heard the news as though the world had crumbled round them. They were losing the only mother they knew, for there had been not a day of their lives but began and ended with the cheerful gossip of their nurse. Edward was dazed by a whimpering unbelief, while Nancy went to intercede with her father. But he was tired of the subject, conscious that he had been less than fair, so he curtly told her to mind her own affairs and for the last time to stop interfering with the counsels of her elders.
In her despair the wretched girl sought the t'ai-t'ai, from whom she could not remember having ever asked sympathy or help. She was too proud to beg or to weep; this was not her way.
"It was my fault, not amah's," she said. "Won't you punish me? I provoked the trouble. I was undutiful, hot-headed. I deserve to be punished, not an old woman who has been a servant so long that she has forgotten her place. She will never do this again, I can promise you."
"I am not punishing anyone," said the t'ai-t'ai with her blandest accents. "The quarrel—pooh, I've forgotten that. We all lose our tempers at times. I'm not punishing your amah. Why should I wish to punish an old and loyal servant? This is your father's decision, a decision he made long ago. How can you call it a punishment to reward a faithful servant by letting her spend the rest of her life in peace and quiet? Is there any one of us who wouldn't rejoice at such punishment?"
"But if she doesn't want peace and quiet, why force these blessings upon her?"
"She may not desire peace and quiet; we do," replied the t'ai-t'ai unwarily.
"Then it is a punishment."
The woman was vexed by Nancy's persistence.
"You are too young to concern yourself with things you don't understand."
"But I do understand this," Nancy insisted; "you are punishing her because she does not wish to go. You are punishing her for my fault. I want to be punished."
"You want to be punished, do you? And what do you consider a suitable punishment? Would you go and tell your father you wish to be married this year, not to wait three more years? Would you do this so that your stupid old amah can wear out her bones working when she might be at home, growing fat in ease and idleness?"
The t'ai-t'ai phrased her proposal in terms of contemptuous absurdity, as though to say she had no hope of its being accepted. She watched the girl narrowly, enjoying the look of dismay which crossed her face and more than a little surprised that Nancy should take the offer seriously.
"Is this a punishment?" she asked.
"You mean do I consider marriage to my nephew a punishment?" said the stepmother, for once talking openly to Nancy as she never would have talked to one of her own race. "Would I have made the match if I thought of it so? I am not used to these newfangled manners. When I was married, my mother didn't speak of it to me or ask me what I wished. Her wisdom was enough. But your father has new ideas, perhaps they are foreign ideas, and so we promised you should have these four years at home because he thought you wanted them. So there we are, bound by a promise. And my mother is growing old and feeble; she wants to see her grandson married; she keeps reproaching my brother for his promise, saying she cannot live another three years, she cannot wait so long. What am I to do? If you told your father you were ready to be married, he might release us from this promise. Then there would be happiness for all of us."
The t'ai-t'ai grew embarrassed by the unexpected lengths of her recital and was not her usual cool self. The unlooked-for event of Nancy's even seeming to hesitate over this proposal had shaken the woman out of her suavity. Nancy too might have been confused by hearing her marriage and even her future husband so freely mentioned by that most correct of all persons, the t'ai-t'ai, but this breach of impropriety dwindled to inconsequence beside the choice she felt bound to make.
"If I tell my father this, will the amah remain?"
"I will see that she does remain. I promise you that, although it will not be easy, now that your father has decided she shall go."
"And suppose I tell my father this, what does it mean? Does it mean that I must be married this year, that I cannot wait three more, even two more, years?"
"I can't answer for what it may mean to your father. You know his mind as well as I do. It may mean nothing to him. He makes his own laws. He may choose to wait, he may choose to hasten your wedding, he may choose anything. How can I see into his brain?"
The t'ai-t'ai showed by a gesture that she had long ago given up fathoming the vagaries of her husband's will.
Nancy pondered the matter. More than deep affection for the amah stirred her heart. She was seized by an unconscionable longing for sacrifice, a desire to do something heroic, to end the tedious apathy of waiting and fearing which had sapped her spirit in recent months. The suspense and the slowly encroaching tyranny of her stepmother were becoming unbearable. She wanted courage to drag out day after day of this dreary monotonous life, knowing too well it was only a joyless postponement of the sacrifice she must at last make. Her books had been taken away from her, her play, her English lessons, the companionship of her father; now they were taking away the nurse who had been like a mother. What was life worth under these conditions? What happiness did her respite of four years promise? How could the misery of the future be worse than the misery of the present?
Nancy, like most children, could not appreciate the immense distance of years which still lay ahead, time enough to make the sorrows of her teens seem slight reason for tears. Her sadness of the moment loomed eternal. The girl was swept by a gust of despair when she thought of her own plight and heard the frightening echoes of her father's debasement, the father whose sordid state she could only guess because every effort she made to be of help only estranged him further. She was in a mood to be desperate. If she did no good to herself, her consent, however rash it might be, had at least this merit in the good it was doing for the nurse she loved so well.
"Yes," she said, glad to feel she was active again, "I will do as you wish: I will tell my father, as soon as he sends for me, that I wish to be married this year. But you must do your part of the bargain."
"You can depend upon me for that," answered the t'ai-t'ai, taken aback, even after Nancy's long silence, by this sudden pleasant sequel to a proposal offered wholly at random. She had never dreamed that Nancy would comply. Truly, these foreigners were unsearchable. Nancy's one bitter satisfaction from the scene was in noting the t'ai-t'ai's bewilderment, the t'ai-t'ai's sense of being baffled, even in her moment of triumph, by the simplicity of the girl who had promised on point-blank request what she herself had been preparing months of subtle intrigue to effect.
"You must prepare the way," Nancy added, "if you want me to speak to my father. I cannot go to him outright and say I wish to be married. I am not so shameless as that."
"It isn't shameless for foreigners to discuss these things," the t'ai-t'ai reassured her. "Nothing is shameless for foreigners."
"I am not a foreigner," Nancy answered sharply.
The t'ai-t'ai was equal to the task. Although she had not expected Nancy's compliance, for weeks she had been drumming into Herrick's ears, through Kuei-lien's insinuating lips, the thought that Nancy ought to be wedded. The father, at first, had listened humorously as though he read the jest of Kuei-lien's envy. But insistence had forced the notion into his brain. He began to argue it with himself and then with his concubine.
"Why should I make my daughter unhappy for your amusement?" he protested.
And now Kuei-lien was able to say, "It is her own wish."
"It is, is it?" scoffed the father. "Very well, we shall see."
He summoned his daughter.
"Nancy," he said, "you know perhaps that when I arranged your betrothal I did this on condition that you should not be married till you were twenty. I wanted you to enjoy the last few years of your childhood in the freedom your mother had. And I did not choose to deprive myself too soon of your companionship. I haven't had so much of your companionship as I looked for, but—well, we won't go into that. My illness has upset matters. But now Kuei-lien astonishes me by saying you don't want this freedom, that you are tired of your father's home and wish to be married. Never mind the delicacy or indelicacy of the question, but just tell me frankly, is this true?"
"It is true," answered the girl, speaking quickly lest time to think alter her reply. She needed more than her old amah's reprieve, so suddenly given, so unbelievingly accepted, to hold her steady to the promise she had made; she needed new symptoms of the willful spirit which urged her to risk her life's happiness all on the prospect of change. The symptoms were not to be depended on; they might fail. She used them while they lasted, and said, "It is true."
"You mean you wish to be married, you would rather be married than to wait?"
"Yes."
Seldom had Herrick imagined his heart torn as by this terse reply. He took it as a mark of Nancy's immense ingratitude. Had he not been vexing himself cruelly over her future, picturing the sorrow, the loneliness and homesickness which even the best-laid plans must bring to pass, desperately trying to convince himself that he had done only right in betrothing the child; and now she was stretching out her hands for what seemed in her eyes to be only a glittering toy. He was saddened, disappointed. He had never thought Nancy could be so fickle. His vanity was hurt. He had never believed his daughter, the object of long-drawn-out concern and anguish, could so quickly, almost flippantly, resign the father who had loved her.
Her own self, as he remembered her from tender moments of a summer gone by, cried out against the words she had spoken. She had wanted, so she once said, to remain "like this forever—forever." Now she denied these words. She had no feeling, no affection. She was shallow, inconstant, humbugged by one whim to-day, by another gaudy whim to-morrow, no better than the tattling women round her. Well, it showed the folly of being anxious about the sorrows of other people, even of one's own children. "I am at least rid of this worry," thought the man in his anger.
"Just as you please," he said coldly. "If you wish to be married, married you shall be—and soon."
Nancy now became the least important personage in the household. She was the centre, it was true, round which the preparations of the t'ai-t'ai were grouped, but she had discarded her personality when she surrendered this last right to hold her destiny an arm's length away. Now she was merely the prop on which to hang scarlet bridal garments. The old impersonal traditions of the past, which weighted and stiffened all that had to do with so human and pathetic an act as the sending a maiden out from the home of her father, hung heavily from her slight shoulders. The rite, promising so welcome a break into the monotony of the women's quarters, filled every mind, but there remained little thought or sympathy for the girl who was the cause of it all.
The t'ai-t'ai had given her husband no time to change his mind. She had sent the news at once to her brother, urging upon him haste in choosing the festive date. This the family of the bridegroom were prompt to do. They called in the fortune-tellers once more and, with their sage advice, settled upon a day, the twenty-fifth of the eighth moon, soon after the autumn festival, a date practical besides auspicious, because the bills for this expensive event need not be met till the New Year.
Nancy heard the news quietly and regarded the preparations going forward as though they belonged not to herself but to another. The amah, whom she had saved, took her reprieve with stolid surprise. She thanked the t'ai-t'ai and said nothing more. She seemed thoroughly cowed by the narrowness of her escape and was more discreet than she had ever been, taking care to leave Nancy alone lest she appear to interfere with the cherished schemes of the t'ai-t'ai. Yet she did much thinking. She was not blind to the mystery of the change in her fortunes, but quick enough to connect it with the openly mooted rumor that Nancy herself, incredible though it was, had asked to have the day of her wedding hastened. She thought and brooded, but there was no one to whom she could appeal.
Nancy was silent. Her father showed signs of renewed illness; he grew haggard and lean, took no care for any company except Kuei-lien's, abused her in spells of morbid cruelty and then fell back, terrified and choking, a prey to the attacks of heart disease which were recurring more and more often. The man had given up hope of living much longer.
"I will enjoy myself while I last," he vowed.
Kuei-lien was both his passion and his doom. He was jealous of every moment she spent out of his sight. He planned, in his more evil moments, to kill his concubine before he died so that she should not have the satisfaction of practising upon others the wiles she had practised upon him. He hated her and adored her, and for hours satiated his hunger for the receding beauty of life by the sight of her clad in the most splendid garments he could command, stiff golden brocades, satins dyed to match the dissolving gray of the eastern sky at dawn, lustrous fabrics surpassed by the cool skin of the girl, fabrics forgotten when Herrick looked at the poignant loveliness of her face, features of a candid delicacy on which the lust and greed of the world seemed to have written no trace. She sang the old haunting songs of the farmer and the fisherman and the scholar and the hermit in his mountains, verse after verse, with an artlessness which was incomparable art, the pathetic innocence of a child. There were times when Herrick's gloomy room was lit up by the splendor of Kuei-lien's beauty, when the concubine herself, great in the austere perfection of her presence, was not great enough to vie with the golden illusion she created.
Often the pain of these supreme illusions drove the man into frenzy; at other times it quieted his heart, as though there were nothing more to be satisfied with in life. His spirit grew numb. Caught by Kuei-lien's enchantment, he nodded his head, fell drowsily asleep, thinking what bliss it would be never to wake, but to stay lulled through eternity by the vision he had seen. Yet he always woke, and always from disturbed dreams in which Nancy unaccountably had taken the place of Kuei-lien and reproached him with a slow smile on her lips. She kept jerking him back to life, jerking him back when all his senses were slow and his eyes ready for sleep.
"There will be no peace till she is married," he said, "and I wonder if I shall have peace then."
On the impulse of a moment he decided to atone to his children for the neglect of a year. They should have one more summer in the hills.
"She shall have one more happy summer and be free as the wind," he said.
Against the violent protests of the t'ai-t'ai, he stuck to his plan, but as a sop to his wife he added Li-an to the party, and off to the Western Hills he went. Kuei-lien, Nancy, Edward, the amah, they all went along, rubbing their eyes to see the willows still hanging low over the ditches, the two camels grazing where they grazed twelve months ago,—they seemed hardly to have moved in the seasons which had intervened,—and to gaze, with the rapture bred of imprisonment within walls, upon the vast, gentle color of the mountains.
While their chairs toiled over the hills, Kuei-lien sang fragments of old songs; her voice was tender as the evening light. Much though the bitterness which had grown between them, Nancy could not help loving the other girl in this hour of sunset because there came forth from her tones that sadness of the human lot which was common to them both.
"The falling sun glows upon crumpled mountains,Making every ridge gold, every deep valley amethyst;The bamboos fling plumed heads like spray at the foot of the cliffs;Vainly their waves sweep round the crimson walls of the temple;Up the slope winds the path;Peasants, balancing great loads, sing as they climb.Ah, their songs are all of heaviness and burdens."
Nancy looked with pondering eyes upon the wild upper meadows; illuminated they seemed, not only by the sun but by the words of the song which went so close to their heart. With redoubled intensity came the longing to sink her spirit in these tranquil scenes, to make them her home where she might dwell with the flowers she had worshiped. Tears swept like rain across her face; she bowed her head and wept. There was no cure for the unhappiness she felt. She had plucked the flowers and tossed them aside; so men would deal with her.
"Being scoffed at as a fool, I bury the flowers,Yet know not who in other times will bury me;In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old;Flowers fall, men perish; both are known no more."
So she quoted the words of Tai-yü and dreamed that she too shared the fate of that pitiful heroine whom life had dowered with too burning a capacity for passion, too great and destroying joy in beauty.
This was not the way Herrick meant his daughter to begin her last free summer. The next morning, early, he sent for her, and in the room Nancy remembered so well, with the sun pouring blithely through the window, the rustle of trees, the noise of the brook at full traffic, sounds carried crisply on the air of a young vigorous day, amid these things which belonged more intimately to the room than its furniture, the father explained how careless of trouble he wished his daughter to be.
"This is our last summer together," he said, "and I have planned this summer for you. Perhaps I have been harsh at times, and not always fair; it is difficult to be fair when one is ill. I truly do not wish to lose you, Nancy, but—well, you know how things have happened. Nothing can happen but what the gods allow. We can't question fate. So let's enjoy ourselves as though no shadow hung over us. I want you to crowd a lifetime of happiness into these months, for it's no use disguising from you, my child, that you will have burdens in the future; happy though you may be, you will have burdens. I've scandalized your stepmother by bringing you here: she thinks you ought to be sitting at home sewing. But I don't want my daughter to spend her last months of childhood as a seamstress. This is your summer, Nancy, you are to be free as you wish. No one is to hinder you. I make no rules, impose no conditions. I only ask you to be happy, be the child that you ought to be at your time of life, and not give a moment's worry to what must come afterward."
He gave the silent girl a glance of affection which seemed to have taken twenty years from his age. The thinness which had come upon him of late enabled one to guess how fine his features once must have been.
"Come, Nancy," he said softly, "don't stay so solemn. Can't you give your father just one smile?"
In response to his begging Nancy's face lightened. Her eyes displayed such a look of perfect confidence that the father felt himself privileged never to forget what he had seen, for he had seen the mother herself given back to him for a brief moment from the region of shadows. The look spoke thoughts deeper than anything the girl knew or could frame in words: it spoke of a trust, an understanding, which would live between father and daughter, no matter what sorrows, no matter if death itself interposed. Separation would come, but never could they be truly separated. This was the loyalty Nancy offered. It was not entirely a smile; it had too much of the unearthly radiance of clouds which flame at dawn before a tempest; but it satisfied her father and filled his heart.
The days in the Western Hills were always to be associated with the singing of birds. In the first hours of the morning they began their blithe chattering; the maples and locusts rang with their notes, notes of many modes from the raucous shriek of the jay, the screech of the oriole, as he plunged recklessly like a yellow meteor into the leafy branches, through a gamut of whistling and twittering, of doves cooing and cuckoos never tiring of their two-syllabled speech, to the liquid trills of the myna, whose efforts were a challenge for the birds of the temple to emulate.
It was time for Edward and Li-an to tumble joyfully through the dewy grass and for Nancy to follow them when once the canaries were awake in their bamboo cages, swelling their throats to tell the animation of clear sunshine while the starlings with their split tongues discoursed the news of the day.
Nancy could not go wholly back to the past. Li-an was a more congenial playmate for Edward. The mountains were so new to her that she was willing to believe all the elaborate mysteries the boy invented and to do her part manfully in digging for treasure.
The atmosphere of the household was one of calm. Even Kuei-lien seemed to have no ends of her own to pursue and kept her master's affections in a tranquil key as though she herself wished some holidays after the hectic winter she had spent. The settlement of Nancy's fortunes gave every appearance of having wiped off the score between the two girls so that a friendliness of the old sort thrived; many a hot afternoon they spent together in comfortable abandon, content to discuss only those topics they could treat gayly.
Nancy made the most of her father's license and seldom was there favorable weather that she did not climb by narrow paths to the top of the ridge where she could fancy the whole wide world at her feet. She did not guess, though her instinct must have taken knowledge, that she might meet the friend who held his dark corner in her memory. Nasmith was not likely to return to the Western Hills without some effort to see whether Herrick's strange family were occupying their temple. He upbraided himself for folly, but it became more and more his habit to excuse himself from Beresford's too cheerful company and to lurk in the outskirts of the house where he had declined his chance with such justifiable weakness the year before. He tried to condone his curiosity on grounds of plausible interest, yet he felt always too much the spy to knock openly at the door, so that days passed before he knew the Herricks really had returned. This news he did not even dare tell his family, but he hovered like a discontented spirit on the hills above, straining his eyes for impossible glimpses of Nancy, and then, one afternoon, as he was bound to do, came upon her sitting in a pocket of rock high above the ravine. She did not hear him approach.
"Good afternoon, Nancy," he said, "it is a long, long time since the happy day when we met. You don't go roving any more to temples."
The girl gave him a startled glance. A look of momentary fear gleamed in her eyes. Gladness came next, and then misery. The wind had blown her hair in disarray over her forehead till it was like a veil behind which her thoughts seemed to hide. Nasmith longed to draw them out from their covert, to see whether they were happy thoughts, whether they dwelt with contentment on the betrothal by which they were bound. There was an instant when his senses laughed at control, when he felt it his duty and his right to carry off this girl in defiance of all pledged engagements; and had he realized what Nancy herself did not realize, that she sat there with the implicit hope of meeting him, he might for once have acted upon his senses; but she seemed so unapproachable, so cool, in the alien shape of her garments, the white grass-linen which clad her slender body, that the thought of loving her from nearer than a distance became sacrilege.
"I only come here," said Nancy, and smiled a little; "I don't go to temples any more."
"And you don't play cricket any more, I suppose?"
"Oh, no, I never learned cricket."
"And what do you do?" Nasmith inquired. "How do you pass the time?"
"I come here to read—Edward is noisy sometimes—and I like to see the mountains."
"Won't you ever come to see us again? My nieces ask about you and talk about you day after day."
"No, I can't do that now. My father would not like it."
"But he was very friendly last year and this spring he asked me to do some important business for him."
"Yes, but I am not so free as last year."
"Why?"
Nancy found this question hard to meet even in English; in Chinese she never would have dreamed of answering. But foreigners, she had understood, discussed these things without reticence.
"My father has promised me to be engaged, to be married."
"Yes, but that is four—or is it three—years away."
"No, I am to be married soon—in two months."
Nasmith looked at her in dazed unbelief.
"Your father said you were not to be married till you were twenty."
"I changed that—I asked to be married earlier."
Nancy went on quite naturally from one confession to the next, talking frankly on the banned subject as though thirteen years of Chinese life had not forbidden fear. She liked the thrill of breaking such unwelcome news to the friend she trusted so oddly.
"You changed it! Do you like the thought of this marriage?"
"I don't know—I was tired of the house, tired of the women, tired of sewing."
"And do you think that there won't be a house and women and sewing after you are married?"
"They will be different."
It was pleasing to meet someone who thought of her part in the bargain that had been made.
"Different!" exclaimed Nasmith. "Ah, Nancy, it will be worse drudgery than anything you have known. You speak like a child. You don't know what you are saying. Do you think marriage is play?"
"I have to be married. My father said so."
"Do you know what your father did?" said the man, emboldened by his pity. "Do you know that your father offered to marry you to me?"
This was a question the girl was wholly unready to face. The swift progress of their conversation had carried her too far.
"And I refused," said Nasmith, determined to have it out, "I refused because he asked impossible terms. He wanted to keep you till you were twenty, would not let you go to school as I asked, would not let you be brought up with my nieces. I was a fool. I should have kept my claim upon you. You are not Chinese, Nancy, you have no right to be Chinese. And now you are to be thrown away because of my obstinacy and your father's blindness."
"You are not my father," said the girl indignantly; "he is not blind. I am Chinese. I am Chinese—I must go home. I talk too much."
She stood up. Anger and despair fought in her brain. She felt helpless before Nasmith's outspoken manners, a prey to her stupid frankness in encouraging him.
"Don't go," begged the man. "I suppose you think I am rude, but I had to speak out my mind. It is our Western way, you know. I keep forgetting you are not used to it. I can't keep quiet when I see anything as wicked as this marriage to which you are being sacrificed. If I went to your father to-day, don't you think he would hear me? If I told him to have his own way, to keep you where he pleased till you are twenty, couldn't we break this engagement?"
"We don't break engagements," the girl answered proudly. She turned cool, almost cold in her firmness, now that Nasmith had been betrayed into what she felt was a dishonorable weakness. "My father doesn't change and I don't change. We have promised."
"Fiddlesticks! Engagement is not marriage. It was your father's first wish, remember, that I should marry you."
"My father has told me his wish. I am engaged."
"Can you read this?" persisted the man, drawing from his pocketbook a copy of the scrolls Herrick had written. "This is what your father wrote. Can you read it?"
Nancy looked at the paper curiously.
"Did my father write this for you?" she asked.
"Yes, he wrote it for me last year, the day when we brought you home from my sister's house. He told me these characters had a meaning for me if I could understand them."
"They have a meaning," the girl admitted.
"What meaning?"
"You are the sun," she said.
"Of course; but who is the moon?" he demanded.
"I was the moon—then—last year."
"You are still the moon," he declared. "They were not written merely for last year."
Nancy did not answer him. The copied characters of the scroll had been like a glimpse into her father's mind. She had played so long with these riddles as to be profoundly moved by what she saw so clearly her father had meant to be prophecy. Great was her reverence for the written word. She was like the Chinese who will not allow even a scrap of printed paper to be trodden underfoot, like the governor who forbade newspapers to be used for wrapping parcels because this was treating characters shamefully, showing despite to the very means of the culture which sages and poets had labored to create. For scrolls her deference was superstitious. They were oracles, working out their own mystical fulfillment. Versed as she was in their subtlety, in their history, in the earth-shaking powers of a single well-written character, the byplay of allusion which had torn down dynasties or raised men to favor with the Son of Heaven, she looked with fear and bewilderment upon her father's message as though she were reading a mandate of the gods, for the scroll expressed her father's belief and his wish that she should be the wife of this stranger from the West.
"I am engaged," she repeated as though she were defying heaven. "We have promised!"
Nasmith saw this could not be argued further. More words only would make the girl stubborn, perhaps lose him the chance of seeing her again.
"Very well, we won't debate the matter," he said, "but do you think your father would let you come to stay for a few days with my sister—and your brother, of course? My nieces will never be satisfied to miss seeing you; if they heard I had met you, they would send me back for you. And this is not the request of a stranger, you know. After all, I am almost a guardian. You will come, won't you?"
"Why?"
Nancy was in a contrary mood.
"Why?" echoed Nasmith impatiently. "Why? I should not have thought you needed to ask that question. Does not your memory suggest reasons enough? After all, Nancy, you won't find friends so plentiful in this world that you can afford to neglect those you have."
"Perhaps Edward can come," she admitted, "but if I can come—I don't know. It is different for me because I am engaged."
"Will you ask your father?" Nasmith persisted.
"Yes, I will ask him," said Nancy; and away she went swiftly, like the quiet, swift descent of evening.
Nasmith did not try to follow, although it was high time for him to be swinging into his sturdy stride homeward. He felt as much amazed by the riddles as Nancy herself. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was only his second meeting with the girl—two meetings, and these a year apart. He could not account for the intense feeling which made him still loiter in this spot as though all that was real of her were lingering with him. He could not understand the attraction which held him. Was there real insight, after all, expressed in those words whose meaning with baffling enlightenment he now realized?
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon for the moon;The moon following from the east tenderly displays thereflection of the sun.
Or had these words, slowly maturing in his mind, worked their own desire for fulfillment? He loved these mountains the sun had painted in broad sweeping colors, to which night was hurrying to put in shadow. He regarded them tenderly; they seemed to breathe of Nancy, to sing of Nancy, with the old time-worn cadence of the land whose tongue she had learned. Ah, what a beacon he could light for her, what a splendid beacon he must set blazing! She could not, she should not, be lost to him!
So the serene glow of evening had helped him find himself, had made him resolute, had sent him home resolute, after a year of fighting shadows.
Nancy, in her own way, was tranquil. The habit of taking life as it came enabled her to speak simply to her father about this meeting with Nasmith and about his request. The father was still indulgent. He did not need to remind himself of his promise; this was Nancy's summer. He had screwed his will to its final pitch when he consented to the date of her marriage. Nothing more seemed to matter; nothing more was he willing to debate. Let life run as it chose.
"I see no harm in it," he said, dealing with Nasmith's invitation. "Mr. Nasmith is a man I trust and his family, so far as I met them, are delightful. The change will be good for you both. I will send a man the first thing in the morning to tell them you are coming, and by the afternoon the chairs can be ready for you to start. Amah of course must go. They're sure to have room for her."
In this matter-of-fact way Herrick granted the request as though it were business of no concern. Nancy was not so sure. She too could not rid her memory of the prophetic lines her father had written. The words had caught in her brain. She repeated them till she fell asleep and repeated them again in the morning when her spirit had become infected by Edward's growing excitement. With great ado the little procession set out, the amah waving more farewells than a traveler bound across the ocean. Nancy was not insensible of the bustle. She was both glad and afraid, timid and joyful, but she abandoned her body to the motion of the chair, lying back with eyes half closed, while the sun beat hot through the screened window. She was content to let her spirit be carried, like her limbs, with the inertia which leaves every directing impulse to destiny. "The sun—the moon; the moon—the sun—t'ai-yang, yueh-liang; yueh-liang—t'ai-yang," the words made their own drowsy refrain to the slogging pace of the coolies.
Deep was the silence which had fallen over the deserted household. Herrick had not realized how much he would miss these children whom never before had he allowed to go away from their home. The sun shone vacantly on the temple; in the evening he walked with Kuei-lien in the moonless dark, passing the tomb of the monk and standing pensive on the little platform which overhung the ravine. He was like a lonely child, but afraid of something worse than the loss of Nancy and Edward, afraid of the solitariness of death, which seemed to threaten him from the deep shadows of the mountains.
Kuei-lien too felt the spell and did little to cheer him. The song she sang was sad, the old tragic tale from The Three Kingdoms of the first break in a brotherhood, which had become classic, the brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, wherein three heroes had stood gayly steadfast to each other through years of war, only to be separated by death at the last. She sang the story Herrick knew so well and loved for its sombre beauty: how Liu Pei, King of Shu, had wakened from troubled sleep to see the ghost of his blood-brother, Kuan Yü, not knowing it was a ghost, not knowing he had been slain.
A cold gust of wind blew in his chamber; the lamp flickered and became bright again. Liu Pei looked up and saw a man standing behind the lamp.
"What man are you that comes in the dead of night to my chamber?"
The man did not answer. Liu Pei, in alarm, got up to look. It was Kuan Yü who was hiding behind the shadow of the lamp.
Liu Pei exclaimed:—
"Ah, my brother, have you been well since we parted? You must have great reason to come thus in the depth of night. You and I are the same bone and flesh; why do you show this deference?"
Then Kuan Yü wept and said:—
"Brother, raise your armies and avenge me. Wipe my wrongs clean as snow."
He finished speaking. A cold wind arose. He had vanished. Suddenly Liu Pei awoke; and it was a dream.
Kuei-lien's voice made the tragedy seem real to her master—the terror of that awakening. She told how at the third watch Liu Pei sent for his minister, K'ung Ming, whose strategy and knowledge of the stars and unworldly faithfulness had won him this kingdom in the west. K'ung Ming tried to comfort him out of his fear, but when he had left the presence of the King he met a friend who told him that there were evil rumors abroad about the fate of Kuan Yü. Then K'ung Ming unburdened his heart.
"To-night I have seen a sign in the heaven," he confessed. "I saw a star fall over Chingchou and I know that Kuan Yü has met with evil there. But I am afraid of my master's grief and dare not tell him."
Even while the two were speaking a man suddenly came forth, caught hold of K'ung Ming's sleeve and said:—
"If there is evil news, why do you deceive me?"
K'ung Ming looked; it was Liu Pei.
"Why do you distress yourself over uncertain news?" he said. "Why let yourself be so unprofitably sad?"
Liu Pei answered:—
"I and Kuan Yü have sworn to live and die together. If he has fallen, how can I stand alone?"
Then, one by one, disturbing the peace of the night, came messengers.
"Kuan Yü is defeated."
"Kuan Yü is betrayed."
And, before it was light:—
"Kuan Yü is slain."
Liu Pei, when he heard it, gave one great cry and fell fainting to the ground.
Herrick listened as though these things had not happened centuries and centuries ago, as though the three men still whispered beneath the flickering torches of the palace. He saw the King cast down by his mighty grief to the cold stones of the pavement. It was as if Kuei-lien herself had sung away the Golden Age and its heroes. He turned to the girl; her face was almost luminous in the dark. His heart was too burdened for speech. She had sung away his own Golden Age, sung away his lustihood and strength.
"Why do you deceive me, ah, why do you deceive me, Kuei-lien?" he asked sadly, echoing Liu Pei's words with a meaning which the girl understood for a moment, but never understood again.
Long before this Nancy was happily asleep. Thoughts of sun and moon had gone glimmering before the joy of her welcome. Helen and Elizabeth and their uncle had come far along the road to meet the chairs of their guests and out they pulled Nancy and Edward for a gay walk home. It was so like their coming a year ago and so different, the same dusky winding down the mountain path to the settlement, the same bright lights and noise of music from a score of summer homes, the glimpse of the verandah through the trees with servants bustling to set knives and forks on the table. But Nancy came now without fear, like one who had her own place in this merry family. She welcomed Mrs. Ferris's arms and Mrs. Ferris's kisses and followed the chattering twins to the room she was to share with them.
Not even dinner could frighten her, nor her place of honor at Nasmith's right. She caught sight of the amah's face beaming through the door and infectious echoes of her laughter over being once more, after all these years, with people whose ways she understood. The old servant was holding forth princely gossip in the kitchen and the same light-hearted key prevailed in the conversation of the table, so that Nancy's eyes glowed and her lips broke into more smiles than they had shown for months. Hosts and guests, one and all, as if by unquestioned consent, had put away troubling thoughts and forgotten the sorrows of the morrow in the joys of the day. Beresford's quips were never more brilliant. Even Nasmith himself forgot his pain and was satisfied to have Nancy next to him, where he could watch glints of light from beneath her long eyelashes as she answered the amused irony of his sentences.
By common arrangement it was decided that Nancy and Edward must be English during the two weeks of their visit. Yet it was a surprise to the man who hardly dared admit himself her lover when he saw the girl in the morning. Elizabeth and Helen had repeated their magic and led out a maiden who, save for a little hesitating awkwardness, might have belonged to the West through all her seventeen years. Edward with his usual carelessness of clothes had slipped easily into shirt and trousers, but Nancy wore her dress of blue muslin with a deliberate grace which charmed the attention of those who watched her walk slowly forward. The curve of her throat had never had fair play behind the high collar of her Chinese jacket; her hair was gathered loosely from her forehead and bound round her head with just that effect of wind-blown negligence which the twins, who had shared between them the task of dressing their guest, delighted in as the conspicuous triumph of their labor. But the girl still moved stiffly, not quite sure of herself before Nasmith's approving glance, not quite sure of her bare arms and the tenuous clothing of her legs, a little frightened for the exiguous under fabrics into which they had made her step, not thoroughly certain the men could not read the secret of these dainty garments and how insecurely they seemed to cling to her shoulders. She kept her hands stiffly at her sides lest her skirts, by which she was embarrassed enough to expect any mischief, part company from the black silk stockings which overreached her knees.
Helen and Elizabeth laughed at her qualms. They could not believe that trousers seemed more modest to Nancy than the very ordinary rough-and-tumble dress in which they had clothed her. As they predicted, her shyness soon passed, her shyness before all except Nasmith. On him her eyes persisted in lingering, yet she always flushed when he turned to look at her. The enigma of the couplet her father had written still drew her fancy toward him while it made her as quickly anxious to hide. And Nasmith, much as he tried to be cool, could never disguise his interest in this pale stranger who for the breadth of a year had lived like an incessant trouble in his brain.
His nieces, however, for the first few days took command of their guest. They postponed talk of Nancy's marriage,—they could not bear to broach the subject nor to think of it,—and gave up the time to picnics and swimming parties and tennis. Nancy enjoyed the long walks, the start in the cool of the morning, the chattering climb to some far-off temple where the trees provided shade and the bushes, tangling among boulders, gave covert in which the girls swiftly stripped off their clothes and climbed into swimming suits for an hour's diving and splashing in a clear warm pool. Though she envied them, she never could quite be persuaded to join them. Edward emerged fearlessly and was soon out with the men, swimming like a young spaniel, but his sister allowed herself only once to be led charily to the brink of the pool. She enjoyed watching the others at sport, the glossy figures of the girls as they climbed dripping on to the rocks, the antics of Beresford, who swam under water and seized his shrieking victims by the ankles, Nasmith's supple strength, which helped him, without apparent effort, to outdistance the whole of them in the length of his dives and the swiftness of his stroke through the water.
Then came tiffin, spread on a white cloth beneath the pines. There was a fastidious vein in Mrs. Ferris's nature which would not let her dispense with what she called the decencies of life, so that these meals, to the scoffing amusement of her brother, never lacked the cloth and the dishes or the glittering silver—she would die from starvation rather than eat without them, Nasmith declared. Nancy heard the approving comment of the old amah, who was telling the other servants that it was just this way that the first Mrs. Herrick, the real Hai t'ai-t'ai, used to serve picnics in those palmy days when she reigned as first Lady of Amoy. Nancy tried hard and gravely to connect this actual link with the legend of her mother.
Luncheon was followed invariably by a long, drowsy nap. This Nancy liked best of all, for she could stretch herself luxuriously in the shade of the bushes and talk idly with Helen and Elizabeth till the sun, shining through the leaves, filled her veins with its warmth and beguiled her into sleep. The birds sang more lazily, the breeze barely stirred the pines, the water went deviating through the rocks with a silver tinkle, the heat glimmered before her half-shut eyes; she would wake to find it was tea time and the girls hastily combing their hair or tightening the garters round their stockings. Then she too would jump up, shake her dress free of pine needles, dash cold water into her face, and hurry to take her place beside the festive cloth.
At tea time the party was always at its gayest. The picnickers lay or sat cross-legged on the ground and watched the golden sparkle of the tea as it was poured into cup after cup. The steaming liquid refreshed their spirits, gave them appetite for sandwiches and dainty frosted cakes. Nancy was so happy that she did not think of herself as a stranger but fell easily into family ways and smiled at the family jokes, at the teasing of the twins and their changeable-mooded sister, Patricia, who was blossoming into a child of mercurially gay and serious fancies. Edward adapted himself even more quickly; he both teased and was teased, flinging off banter as he flung the spray from his forehead when he was swimming.
He could swagger and brag up to the last inch of David's schoolboy manner. But Nancy, though she was a laughing partner to all this jesting, never quite became fair target for their jokes. Her destiny lurked, unspoken of yet not unregarded, in her eyes.
Nevertheless, she was braver than the others in putting it out of mind, and no one could have told, from watching her walk blithely home, now talking with one, now with another of the party, that a heavy doom hung over her, a doom which made the unpredictable future of her companions seem play by comparison. It was apparent, of course, how the interests and affection of the whole family hovered round her, but then she was singularly lovely; her grave beauty had been made to attract interest and affection.
She was enjoying herself, wholly careless of the passing of time, only content that days like these should go on forever. She looked eagerly for the lights of the bungalow gleaming through the trees, then the bustle, the washing, the changing of clothes for dinner. Such was the magic of the twins, who rifled their wardrobe between them, that she would appear in delicate silks trailing halfway to her ankles, a circle of amber beads flashing their fire at her throat, a ribbon of ivory satin half lost in her black hair, but always the pensive look in her eyes, her lips, her whole bearing, which suggested passion and desire so many ages older than the transient fashions she graced.
Nasmith watched her with hungry eyes and it was only Nancy's absorption in her two friends which kept his secret from being guessed. Her attention, for the moment, was gladly filled by the commonplaces which were such a luxurious novelty to her. The gramophone, the games, the bedroom gossip which trespassed on their sleep still made every evening exciting.
On Sunday they took her to the little Anglican church. They expected the occasion to be a great moment in her life, but they overestimated her capacity for religious feeling. The experience was neither more nor less than the many strange practices to which her eyes were being opened. Nancy had heard of the Christians,—she had been reminded that their religion had been her mother's,—but she felt no violent curiosity about their ways. It seemed natural enough that the foreigners should have their own religion, and one god the more was additional security in time of trouble. She thought the altar with its cross seemly enough, so far as she thought of it at all, but she was puzzled by the complications and the uncomfortable formality of the service and wondered why the priest wore vestments of funereal white and black. To the sermon she could give no response, having, even where she understood the sentences, not the faintest clue to its topic.
She did not criticize; no doubt this queer round of prayers and hymns pleased the gods; there were so many ways of pleasing the gods. But her attention was mainly caught by the people who sat round her. The presence of so many foreigners frightened her; she did not like their peculiarities of dress, the untidy personal touches of fashion, the hats of the women with their meaningless flowers and fruits and vegetables, nor did she like the beards and moustaches of the men. Instinctively she drew closer to her friends; she understood them even though she resented the ease with which they joined in this alien worship, but as for the others, they were strangers, no kin of hers.
Her hosts were disappointed because she could give no coherent impressions of the service. Not that their religion was too serious a burden to themselves; but it went with the proper order of things, with the established decencies of life, that they should be called "Dearly beloved brethren" once a week, and the shallowness of their own spiritual education, the very small teaching their Church had given them, the easiness of the demands it imposed, made them squirm at the thought that Nancy, after all, was a heathen. They had never analyzed the term beyond the vague notion that she must worship idols—a really undignified thing to do. They were too ignorant of what they themselves believed to venture into a debate with the girl. So they looked at her with concern, hoping the service might have saved their pains by prompting godly instincts, and feeling chagrin over so blank a failure. They were well-meaning people; they felt the presence of a duty, a duty they were both too helpless and too nice to perform. For a few hours Nancy was lonely and longed to be back in her father's house.
But by Monday religion had been comfortably stowed away for another week and the very faint shadow of misunderstanding between Nancy and her hosts had been dispelled. She was up early, batting a tennis ball with provoking awkwardness, but happy because she and Nasmith beat every combination the family could muster against them. The exercise, the brisk morning air, the smiles and applause of her friends, made her know she was in favor again. The girls would have laughed if they had guessed yesterday's scruples: to think that of all their many differences they should quarrel about religion! A more intriguing subject dawned upon their minds. Nasmith's secret, his passion for Nancy, became suddenly plain to eyes that had been blind.
"I do believe Ronald's in love with Nancy," Helen blurted to her sister. In the first delicious shock of discovery they matched notes. The fact could not be doubted. Although no special indiscretion had betrayed the man, the tale of his gaze which followed Nancy's every movement had spoken too clearly.
"How splendid!" cried Elizabeth. "Why didn't we ever guess it before?"
It was a match so suitable, the girls both agreed, that it ought to have been promoted, even without the convincing proof of Ronald Nasmith's affection. Here was the one acceptable way of saving Nancy.
They rushed to their mother with the news.
"Ronald loves Nancy," they declared in concert. "We are sure of it."
"I know he does," said Mrs. Ferris quietly.
"But why didn't you tell us? We ought to have helped them. What pigs we've been, keeping Nancy all to ourselves!"
"It's Ronald's problem," smiled the mother. "He will have to manage it in his own way."
"But aren't you glad?"
"I am—very glad, if everything turns out well. But it won't be easy. Nancy is in a difficult position, and she is young."
"Everything must turn out well," vowed Elizabeth. "Do you think Nancy likes him?"
"Nancy is a very inexperienced child. How can she know what she likes?"
"She's older than we are," Helen protested.
Mrs. Ferris smiled again.
"You are only children yourselves."
"Pooh, mother," the daughter exclaimed, "don't talk stuff like that to us. You ought to know better. Even Pat wouldn't swallow such old-fashioned language. What do you really think about Nancy? Does she like Ronald?"
"I should not be surprised if she did," Mrs. Ferris conceded, with the amused, secretive look which convinced them that she was stating only half of what she had seen.
"Then we must help them."
"Don't be too impetuous, my dears. I should like Ronald to have Nancy, mind you; she is a very sweet girl. But she isn't free, you know, and unless Ronald is sure of getting her, it might make her miserable for life if she liked him too well. You know how she's been brought up and you know that her father has arranged for her to be married. We have to reckon with the father. And we have to reckon with her too—alas, she is a more obedient daughter than mine. Suppose she should come to love Ronald and then be forced into marriage with that Chinese—what would her life be?"
"But you don't really consider such a ghastly event possible!" cried Elizabeth, her eyes ablaze with indignation. "We've got to prevent it, and this is our chance."
"We have to consider it, whether we wish to or not," the mother answered. For the first time she did not smile. Her eyes were sad.
Despite this reluctant warning, the twins were convinced of their duty to further the match. By fair means or foul it had to be achieved. They were not afraid of Nancy's father nor did they weigh very seriously the fact of her engagement.
"He seemed a nice old man," said Helen, "and if he were likely to disapprove, why should he let Nancy visit us?"
What appalled the girls was the time they had lost, the five precious days in which they had done nothing to help Nancy and Ronald to an understanding. They must make immediate amends, use every occasion to leave the man and the girl to themselves. But occasions did not come so easily as they wished. The habit of even five days could not easily be broken. Nancy seemed to detect each effort at desertion and cling more nearly to her friends. They could not lead her bluntly to Nasmith and say, "There you are; love him." They could only steal away on this pretext and that, but these manufactured meetings left an atmosphere of constraint, so that the girl grew shy in the presence of her lover and seized her own chance to escape. And there was always Patricia or David or Edward in the way. Half an evening was consumed in luring them out of the room, for the younger children, suspicious of being beguiled out of some advantage, like a child enticed to bed when fun is brewing downstairs, held their places with maddening obstinacy.
"I declare," stormed Elizabeth, "marriages may be made in heaven, but I wish there was a little more help in making them on earth!"
The visit was almost at its end. The girls were in despair.
"We won't let you go home," they told Nancy. "You must have another week, at least. Surely your father won't mind."
"Perhaps he won't," she agreed, "but I must go back and ask him."
She was no more ready than they were to have her stay finished. Time had gone so swiftly. The first few days she had been careless of its passing, as though she had the leisure of years before her, but now each day was oppressed by the closer approach of the end. It would be the end to so many things, the end to her youth, to her freedom, her all too brief season of play. Nancy wished at times she had never known these friends; she would not have missed them so. Barely a month remained till her marriage. She looked at the moon shining through the trees. Even now it was at the first quarter. The next time she should see it thus, she would be back in Peking, the centre of odious preparation, half enslaved already, and before she could see it again she would be married, hidden in some brawling Chihli village where her mother-in-law might not give her time to watch the slow processions of the sky.
The praise of the twins had awakened a delight in her own beauty. She would stand slowly undressing before the mirror, extending her arms, admiring the rounded softness of her shoulders, the glint of light upon her long silk stockings. She reddened with shame and with fear at the thought of giving her body to the mercy of a stranger.
Not new thoughts were these, but for the first time intimately felt, and by contrast the quick comradeship which prevailed in the Ferris family made their home the treasure-house of all things desirable. Whatever she might predict of her future home, she knew it would not be like theirs. She dared less to think how different it might be. She wanted security. She wanted peace of soul. She wanted the grave trust of a man like Nasmith. She did not know that, with all her rapt joy in the company of the twins, her one desire from waking till sleeping was to appear lovely in his eyes. "I was the moon—I was—" she mused once or twice, and checked herself dreaming before the long mirror.
Nasmith too had come down from counting days to counting hours. A whole ten days with Nancy near—they had promised so much and been nothing but tantalization and sorrow. And now but one day lay before him. The conversation of the dinner table turned to his rescue of Nancy a year ago. Beresford revived the story with sundry mock-heroic touches, descanting upon the execution Edward had done with his bow till he made their intervention seem merely a belated attempt to save the lives of the monks.
"Shall we go back there, Nancy?" said Nasmith, half in play, half trying to veil the bitter seriousness of his eyes, "and see if we can remember it all? It was so long ago, it has begun to seem almost a joke."
His suggestion was taken up eagerly by the girls. They had not consented to thinking of the morrow as Nancy's last day among them; she must win her father's agreement to a longer visit; but, if last day it were, a slight trembling in Ronald's voice told them he would make the most of it. So early the next day they started with all the paraphernalia of these outings to make holiday high among the rocky shoulders of the mountains. The sun shone in broad waves of light down the grassy slopes; the paths were still wet with dew.
"Who shall lead the way?" Nasmith asked.
"You and Nancy, you must be the pilgrims," called out Beresford cheerily.
The twins had trusted him with their secret.
"Do you love Nancy?" Helen had demanded of him the night before. "Yes, of course I love Nancy," he had answered.
"Oh, don't be stupid," the girl retorted, stamping her foot. "Do youloveher?"
"I will, if you wish," Beresford answered gallantly.
"Well, I don't wish it. If you're really and truly sure you don't love her, I want you to keep David and Edward in hand when we go to the temple; find a tiger for them, even if you have to buy one—"
"Couldn't I be a tiger myself? I look well in stripes,—some have been ungracious enough to suggest my wearing them permanently,—and if you can give me some hint of how a tiger roars or whether a tiger does roar or merely sits on his hind feet and purrs,—I won't do that, mind you,—"
"I am not joking," Helen broke in. "I want you to keep the boys amused so that Ronald can have a chance."
"Right-o," he said, suddenly understanding. He was a little saddened, for the habit of seeing Nancy was growing on him.