"Well, I'm late in the race," he thought to himself. "I can't complain." So, at Helen's command, he was tactfully alert to every chance of helping what he supposed, in his simple way, were lovers.
"You are the pilgrims," he called, "you must brave the thorny places of the wilderness. Young Edward and I will hold our trusty bows in reserve. If you chance upon peril, give three piercing cries,—you'd better make them two shorts and a long so we won't be led astray on other adventure and fail you in your need,—three piercing shrieks, and we'll tumble to your assistance."
Laughingly Ronald took up his post of guide, with Nancy halfway between him and the twins, while Beresford kept his two young cubs in leash by the sheer interest of his talk, and hallooed cheerfully to Mrs. Ferris to make sure that she and her mountain chair were still pursuing.
"Though fa-int, yet pursuing, we go on our way,"
he would hum, and then break off, reproaching himself with a grimace for such irreverent use of a hymn. Meanwhile the twins, satisfied with the arrangement of the party, slowly widened the interval between themselves and Nancy, very cautiously, of course, not too quickly nor too far, lest the girl suspect, yet far enough so that her walking and talking with Ronald could become the habit of the day.
"Well, here's the grove," said Ronald, at last. Nancy had been taught to call him by his name, "the communism of the family," he had assured her. "Now what shall we do?"
They waited for the party to draw up.
"I smell water," exclaimed Mrs. Ferris.
"There is a stream in a ravine close by," offered Beresford, who had explored these mountains inch by inch with his friend.
"Splendid, just the place we need for tiffin. Tiffin before temples, my dears."
They arrived at the edge of the ravine and slipped down the gravelly path to the rocks below.
"There must be swimming somewhere," said Elizabeth, prying round. Soon shouts and splashing told the story of her success. She and Helen came back, gay and dishevelled, their wet swimming suits under their arms, pulled up Beresford, who had been soberly showing Edward and David how to make whistles from the pliant twigs of the trees, and gayly the family sat down to a meal which had been spread with the usual elegance. They lingered a long time over the coffee, while the men smoked pipes and outdid each other with the stories they told.
"Well, I'm going to sleep," said Mrs. Ferris, finally. "You had better show Nancy her temple, Ronald, before it's too late."
"Will you come and see it?" the man asked.
Something in the eagerness of his voice made her hesitate, but after a long pause she said yes. He got up silently and she followed, while the rest sat watching, with no word to say, for they were wondering in their hearts what the issue would be.
The afternoon was hot and oppressive; a haze was veiling the sun. The pines stood like trees of an enchanted wood. Not a branch moved. The silver trunks glistened in the heat. Nancy was dumb and uneasy as though the sultry weather were laying its spell upon her as it veiled the sun. She knew this was no ordinary chance, this walk, and waited fearfully for Ronald to speak, to break the quiet which lay so heavy upon her breast.
"We are pilgrims, Nancy," he said. "I wish I knew what is to be the end of our pilgrimage."
But he left off talking riddles. A look in the girl's face warned him that the time was not ripe. It was easier to relieve the tense atmosphere with light-hearted mention of that day a year ago when he and Beresford had been walking this selfsame path without thought of the adventure they were to meet. He pointed out the place where Edward had run into them, pictured the monks stopping foolishly a few paces away. He was almost as amusing as Beresford in his way of telling the story, but he had seen more deeply than his friend the tragedy they foiled, so that his words never quite lost the graver tones of a scene which he remembered almost as much with pain as with joy.
"Well, here's your temple," he said at last.
Nancy looked with a slight shock of panic, but the red walls were harmless enough, almost pitiful and desolate, under a sky that was growing gray.
They stopped for a moment before entering. Inside, the temple seemed dark and musty. The monks were asleep. Ronald had to shout before one of them appeared, startled by visitors he had not expected. Nancy recognized him,—he was the younger of the two priests who had welcomed Edward and herself,—but, to her surprise, he gave her only a blank stare. Her Western dress was effectual disguise. Quickly he brought tea and, pulling off the lid of a round black box, gave them handfuls of melon seeds, dried jujubes, cakes of powdered rice. The tea was too hot; Ronald was restless. He got up and studied the musty gods and turned to Nancy, who had too many evil memories of the place to trust her friend out of sight.
"Shall we look at your prison?" he asked.
"No!" protested the girl.
"It is a worse prison you are going to," he commented dryly, "far worse. Why don't you show the same fear for the future that you show for the harmless memory of the past? I saved you from one. Ah, Nancy, why won't you let me save you from the other?"
She looked past him at the gods on their lotus blossoms, and made no answer. Ronald watched her, noted the masses of dark hair piled low round her forehead, the tranced stare of her eyes, the slow curve of her throat, arms half bare, hands far too smooth and supple for the rough-grained table on which they were stretched.
"You were not meant for prison, Nancy," he said gently.
But the appeal of his words was frustrated by the entrance of the monk. Every moment the girl expected his yellow-toothed confederate to appear.
"I can't talk here," she said. "This place hurts me. It chokes me."
The man, however, was unwilling to leave the cobwebbed hall. An unbelievable superstition held him here because this had been the place they had named for their pilgrimage. He felt the influence of the dusky temple fighting his battle in Nancy's heart.
"Don't you see?" he cried in a low voice. "Doesn't this place show you what I mean? Nancy, Nancy, you say it hurts you, chokes you. What chokes you? Just the memory of a danger long ago. What is that compared with the marriage you are facing? A laugh and a smile. If you can't bear to think in this mouldy, decaying place because the walls stifle you with torturing thoughts, what are you going to do when you have no friend, no protection, when life really begins to choke and to hurt—when they lock you into a red chair and send you away to be the slave of strangers?"
"I will stop doing. I will stop thinking," answered Nancy simply, as though deed and thought could be laid away like garments too rich for the everyday wear of life.
"No, Nancy," Ronald demurred, shaking his head, "you will never be able to stop thinking and, worse yet, to stop feeling."
The priest, finding his company unwanted, had withdrawn softly to the next hall and was watching his guests curiously through a crack in the door.
"You can never stop feeling," Ronald persisted.
"You are a Westerner," said Nancy bravely; "you don't understand our customs."
"I understand this much, Nancy, that you don't want to be married in this cruel way any more than you want to die."
In fact he thought she would rather die, but he did not like to say this openly, lest he put the thought into her head.
"One has to marry," the girl remarked calmly.
"Yes, but there are two ways of marrying. You have chosen the wrong one."
"Chosen!" she said indignantly. "I haven't chosen anything. I can't stop the winter from coming, can I? How can I stop being married? When it's time to be married, I'm married."
"You're only arguing to hide your own fear. You know as well as I do that this whole business is ghastly and wrong."
"What should I do?" she asked, vexed by the truth of his words.
"You should break the engagement, tell your father you won't consider it."
"And bring shame to my father."
"Better shame for him than for you. After all, it would only be an artificial shame for him, a short-lived one at that; for you it would be all too real—and lifelong."
Nancy stood up, tired of hearing things she knew too well.
"You are kind," she said, "and it's very simple according to your ways, but these are things that can't be mended by talk."
"Wait," commanded the man, "I haven't even begun to say what I intended. I am not trying to mend a bad matter by talk. There is a better way. I know your father wanted you to marry me, else why should he have offered me the engagement? It was only annoyance, pride, injured vanity, whatever you choose to call it, that made him arrange this other hapless engagement. He has gained nothing by it, not even the terms he tried to exact from me. He has managed to keep you only one of the four years he stipulated. Do you think he is happy over this business into which he has drifted so helplessly? He is no happier than you or I. Ah, Nancy, why can't you see it, why can't you see that worry is killing him—worry over what is to become of you? If you wish to save his life, you must disobey him; you must not go back; you must stay and marry me."
By now Nancy had grown used to this habit of frank speech. Ronald's pregnant ending was outweighed by his accusation that she was killing her father.
"I must go," she said. "I can't think of these things here."
She wanted swift motion to keep time with the wheeling circles of her brain.
"But you cannot go now," cried her lover, suddenly conscious that he had been stamping out his words to the rumbling accompaniment of thunder. There was a bright flash, an ear-shattering explosion; the two stood speechless, stunned, certain the temple had been struck. Then Ronald laughed nervously; he could hear the rain sweeping toward them through the trees; nearer and nearer it came, like the menacing roar of a great wind, till it hissed through the branches and burst upon the tiles of the temple roof with an awful noise, more deafening than the clatter of stones. Lightning seethed round the temple, illuminating the darkest corner with incessant brilliance as bolt after bolt flared down the sides of the mountains; thunder and rain were mixed in an inseparable welter of sound.
"You can't go now," Ronald shouted; "we must wait until the storm has passed on."
He went back and stirred up the frightened monk to bring them more tea. Nancy was sitting with her arms stretched across the table, her hands clenched, her eyes intent upon ghosts she could not see, ghosts of herself and Ronald and her father. Ronald's speech was so terribly plausible, it matched her father's unforgettable couplet—the sun and the moon; the words came back to torment the one paltry bit of peace she had cherished, the peace of obeying her father. She tried to put Ronald out of the debate, to exclude the charm which had been working silent mischief in her heart. She wanted to think entirely of her father, to please him, to save him; the failure of her labored attempts for his safety, the battle she had done against Kuei-lien's schemes, made her look carefully, gravely, at the bewildering implications of Ronald's undreamed-of project, that by defying her father she could make him happy.
The tumult of the storm relieved her of speech. She sat and stared, and let her tea grow cold. The lightning flashed less frequently, but the rain held and the temple was steeped in unnatural darkness, a perilous gloom which oppressed her with hatred of the place. Again, a second time, it had become her prison. Surely there was nothing but mischief in store for the pilgrims who paid their vows here.
"The rain is stopping," Ronald reminded. "Have you any answer to make?"
"I have no answer," Nancy replied.
"Are you going to put all my words aside without a thought?" asked the man in despair.
"I have thought—I have thought many times; but I must go back. My father let me come here; he trusted me. If I did not go back, it would be shame and evil to him. How can I dare to break his promise?"
"Don't you understand, don't you see, Nancy? Must I go over it all again! He doesn't want this marriage. It is only his stubbornness, his obstinacy that makes him cling to it. I showed you his own words, the scrolls he wrote for me; he told me that these were the truth and that the best part of my life would come when I found out the meaning for myself. If they were the truth, then your marriage is false and your father is false to himself, false to his own heart's desire in allowing it. It will kill him; remember that—it will kill him."
Ronald saw that his earnestness had made a deep impression; he hurried to strengthen his advantage.
"And now, Nancy," he went on, "I have read his words, his scrolls, read them for myself, and I know that he was right, that the best part of my life will come not only from understanding them but from realizing their meaning in actual life. You don't belong to the East, Nancy, you belong to the West whence you came; it is my happiness to take you back to the West of your birth. That is my lot and my destiny because I know in my heart I love you. I have been learning this through all the troubled months of the past year. I love you, Nancy; my claim upon you is greater than your father's; it is the claim to which he appointed me. His claim is passing, his life is nearly run. He will die, but we must live."
The girl listened to him in breathless quiet. Tumult, agitation, had frozen her muscles so that her face in the dim light showed neither anger nor joy, merely a ghostly whiteness, an unblinking passivity like the gilded immobile calm of the gods.
"I don't understand," said the girl after a long silence. "You should tell these things to my father, not to me."
"No," protested the man, "it is time to tell them to you, to make you understand. You are not blind, Nancy, you have been with us, you know something of the life I wish to offer you. No hiding away in an ignorant village, no father-in-law and mother-in-law and a whole courtyard of mangy relations tyrannizing over you, but your own home, friends to visit and be visited, and a husband who will love and reverence your slightest wish. Ah, Nancy, how can I tell you these things, how can I make you know that I love you, that life won't be life for me if I cannot have you?"
"These things should not be said to me," said Nancy, her voice burdened with pain. "You are late, late! Why do you say such things when you know it is useless, when you know my father has promised and I have promised? I have no power. I cannot call back spoken words, my spoken words."
"Then you do not love me," said Ronald, in a low, discouraged voice.
"I don't know," faltered the girl, unable to say the one phrase which would have quelled his importunity, unable to accept him, unable to give him up. "I don't understand this—this love."
"You are fighting against your own heart," said Ronald. "You are making the mistake which has tortured your father for years. Give me an answer, Nancy. This is no time for holding to foolish promises; it is no time for dainty, meticulous points of honor. Your father's life rests in your hands. You will hurt him if you don't go back; you will kill him if you do. I don't mind your sacrificing me,—I do mind, of course, but we'll not stop to argue over it,—but will you sacrifice your father? Will you sacrifice yourself?"
Nancy's composure was shaken. She was exhausted by the strain of arguing against everything she desired. Ronald was trying to persuade her to things whereof she longed only too ardently to be persuaded. She was worn out by the thankless irony of defending her own worst interests. She could not deny that she loved Ronald; she could not confess that she did; her heart was in a fever of eagerness to put into his masterful hands the knotted strings of her life, but her will, even when half convinced, balked at an act which, however surely it might lead to her father's ultimate welfare, would be desertion and disloyalty to his trust.
The rain had stopped. There was only the sound of water dripping from the trees to remind her that they must join the others, discover how they had fared in the deluge.
"I cannot say yes, Ronald," she announced in unthinkably clear tones, "and I cannot say no. I don't know what to say. You called this a pilgrimage. Then I am a pilgrim and I shall get my answer as the pilgrims do."
She stood up, pushed back her stool with a clatter which brought the listening monk to the door.
"Get me some incense," she commanded.
One by one she took out the frail sticks from the packet he brought, and round the temple she went, lighting a stick before each god and thrusting it deep into the ashes of the porcelain burner before she did obeisance with clasped hands held stiff in front of her. The eighteen Lo-han she worshiped, Kuan-yin and the gods of the four mountains, at the back, and then returned to the main hall to kneel prostrate before the three lotus-throned Buddhas. Ronald looked on with amazement and dismay at the outrageously incongruous picture of this foreign girl in Western clothes performing an act so unnatural to her appearance. The sight did violence to his imagination, this vision of Nancy with knees pressed upon a dirty prayer-mat of straw, the lace edges of her skirts draggled in the mire, her hair tumbling over her shoulders as she bowed before these pitiless, imperturbable gods. Yet he was too much fascinated by the weirdness of the scene to think of intervening.
The priest had been surprised, too; he had recognized the girl at the first sound of her vigorous Chinese speech. This time Nancy had the upper hand; she gave her commands quickly and clearly so that he was only too prompt to obey. He stood by the bell while she chanted her appeal to the gods, a strange petition that they should tell her whether she ought to obey or disobey her father. Three times she bowed, three times he struck deep full-toned reverberations from his bell. With the last note Nancy seized a round bamboo box from the table in front of her; she shook it and threw the bamboo counters to the floor. The gods must tell her which was right, to go back to her father or not to go back, to yield to the scarlet chair and to Chou Ming-te for her husband or to remain and marry Ronald.
The bamboo counters fell with curved sides uppermost. "No," the gods told her, "you are not to go back."
But the girl could not break her trust even for the gods.
"This is an evil place," she said, turning calmly to Ronald. "I know now that I cannot do what you wish. I must go back as I promised."
Ronald followed her dumbly through the dripping trees. Inwardly he cursed the superstition that could pin a great choice upon the chance fall of two bamboo counters. He was too bitter to speak, bitter over this childish, futile end to their pilgrimage. He was almost ready to despise Nancy.
He never guessed that the gods had been on his side—that the girl had thrown over their advice, thrown over his, thrown over her own.
They found the rest of the family where they had left them. A cave to which the storm had driven them had saved the picnickers from the worst of the downpour although the swift rise of the stream had threatened for a few anxious minutes to engulf them. Ronald saw by their faces, however, that their concern had not been over their own plight, but over his; he read their unspoken queries about the outcome of his suit. He had never confided in them and could not confide now.
"We were delayed in the temple till the rain passed over," he explained. The words were enough to show that he had failed. Nancy had a look of proud reserve with which none of them dared meddle.
The picnic ended with drooping spirits; that this was the last hung heavy on the minds of all, the last and too late. Dinner was no merrier. The unspoken failure of the afternoon hushed the usually careless talk. Only Edward and David, who were not imaginative, chattered on in their heroic style, enlarging their remarks to fit the silence which was offered them.
"Ronald, you are a bungler," scolded Elizabeth, when she had a chance of catching her uncle alone.
"A bungler?" echoed the man.
"Yes, a bungler! Don't you suppose we know your secret? We had counted on you, for the honor of the family, to save Nancy."
Ronald gave a wan smile.
"Since you know so much," he said, "how would you save Nancy?"
"Marry her, stupid! Haven't we all been doing everything we could to help you? Why on earth do you suppose we let you go chasing off to that temple by yourselves? Just think of all the trouble we had, reining in David and that impetuous young brother of hers. I am ashamed of you, thoroughly ashamed of you."
Ronald was used to the stormings of his niece,
"It's not nearly so simple as you think, my dear Betty," he laughed, "even with your all-powerful help. Nancy is already engaged and if she thinks two engagements are a complication, what am I to do?"
"What are you to do? What does any man with any pluck do? What does her engagement amount to—you know what it is—to a Chinese! Are you going to sit idle-handed and see her thrown away like that?"
"I haven't sat idle-handed, but when Nancy proves a peculiarly stubborn young lady,—like some other persons I know but won't mention,—that's the end of it. I could hardly follow the precedent of our friends, the monks, and kidnap her."
"Well, kidnapping would be better than letting her go back to that horrible marriage."
"Ah, Betty, I wish the man luck who tries to kidnap you!"
"I suppose I shall have to propose for you," said Elizabeth with a sigh.
"Propose by all means; but don't imagine I have lost Nancy for lack of proposing."
"I can fancy the way you would propose. Drew it up as a brief, no doubt, with preamble, articles one, two, three, and four, and half a dozen 'whereases.' If it had only been Beresford instead of you we might have had some hope of success."
"Unfortunately it wasn't Beresford," said Ronald, and walked away.
Elizabeth had no mind to acquiesce in Ronald's surrender, and throughout a dreary evening, in which the spirit had left the forms of their amusements vacant, her brain was busy with arguments for beating down Nancy's obstinacy.
"This can't really be your last night here," she said, when bedtime had come and she and Helen and Nancy were in the privacy of their own room. "We won't allow it."
"I must go back to my father first," Nancy answered in a firm voice. "I must ask him if I can stay longer."
"Oh yes, I know what that means. It means you won't come back. Honestly, Nancy, doesn't it?"
"Perhaps it does," the other girl admitted.
"And it means you will have to marry that Chinese."
Nancy was startled. The fact of her engagement had always lurked between them, but had never been mentioned. She had hoped this last night might pass without its being mentioned. But the fiery Elizabeth was tired of evasions.
"Doesn't it?" she challenged.
"Yes," Nancy confessed.
"Why?" asked her relentless questioner.
"Because it has been arranged."
"Did you arrange it?"
"No, my father arranged it; that's our custom."
"And are you going to let yourself be handed over to an ugly Chinaman you have never seen just because of your father's whim?"
Helen thought the question a little harshly put and opened her mouth to repeat her sister's words more gently, but Elizabeth frowned her into silence. Nancy's face was white, but the girl was still sufficiently mistress of her lips to answer with an even-toned composure:—
"It is our custom, you see—"
"It is not our custom, and you are one of us, Nancy. It is an unthinkable, disgraceful thing! It is bad enough that you should have had all the best years of your life stolen from you because of your father's selfishness in bringing you up like a Chinese, but to be handed over to a greasy mandarin or coolie or whatever he is, that is more than you have any business to allow. You've got to do something to bring the man to his senses."
"My father is my father," said Nancy, a little stiffly.
"You're going too far, Betty," protested Helen, and then turned to Nancy.
"Don't be offended," she begged. "That's just Betty's way of expressing herself. She's not trying to be insulting. I've known her since she was born, so you must believe me. We are not criticizing your father; he has his ideas and we have ours, but he is old and you are young, and he has lived by himself so long that he probably doesn't know quite what is fair to you. You see you aren't truly Chinese, Nancy; anybody could know that by looking at you. But he has been living so long with his Chinese books and all that,"—gracefully she included the concubines in the "all that,"—"as to have forgotten that you aren't Chinese."
Nancy was mollified, but Elizabeth, once aroused, did not like apologies being made for her own frankness.
"He might at least have tried to find an English husband for you," she declared.
"He did try," said Nancy, enjoying the sensation of her statement.
"He did try? When?" both sisters cried in unison.
"Last year, but—" Nancy added, with a faint spice of malice, "I was—rejected."
A light burst suddenly upon Elizabeth's eyes.
"Do you mean to say he asked Ronald?" she demanded.
"Yes."
This Western game of frankness had its triumphs even in defeat, Nancy was able to observe during the pause which ensued.
"Well, I am—yes, I am damned!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "There's no other word for it. I see it now, and that's why we have had to put up with his hangdog looks all these months. I suppose he submitted a whole code of regulations and provisos, didn't he, and your father was not willing to accept? That's just what he would do."
"I don't know what he did do," said Nancy, shifting to the defense of her lover. "Perhaps my father had his own code of regulations and provisos, if that's what you call them."
"And he never said a word to us," Elizabeth continued. "Oh, why are men so stupid?"
"He is not stupid," said Nancy; "he didn't understand our customs."
"Did he tell you about this?"
"Yes."
"And now, as usual, he's a year too late. He'll be a year too late for his funeral. Look here, Nancy," she asked, with a disconcerting change of tactics, "do you love Ronald?"
A whisper of warning came from Helen.
"Yes, I know it's a beastly question, but you do love him, don't you, Nancy? Of course you can't expect us to reverence our own uncle. We shall have to be foolish over someone else's uncle. We will spare you the mention of all Ronald's endearing little faults if you'll just say you love him."
Her pleasantries saved Nancy the embarrassment of an immediate reply. Her eyes, the sudden rush of blood to her cheeks, might have seemed to give her answer, but the girl's tongue took refuge in the same answer it had given Ronald himself.
"I don't understand this love."
"That's nonsense," vowed Elizabeth; "you know if you love him—and you do love him. It's no use denying it. You daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't."
Nancy evaded the challenge. She did not speak.
"Yes, you do love Ronald," cried her accuser in triumph. "Don't try to hide your face, Nancy dear; I know the symptoms. Now you can't go back."
She spoke as if the matter had been decided and nothing remained except to give Nancy to her lover. But Nancy was not so easily beaten down. She looked quite calmly into the eyes of the friend whom a minute ago she had been afraid to face.
"I love my father," she said, "and I must go back."
Elizabeth gave a gesture of vexation at the stupid way people insisted upon tangling their own happiness. For a moment she was speechless, leaving argument to her less overbearing sister.
"But it isn't as if you were going back to your father," insisted Helen, "not for more than a few weeks. You are going to a husband whom you don't love, whom you have never seen. That is not right, Nancy, not right for you, not right for Ronald, because you do love him and you know it. You are going back just to please an old man, and not to please him for long."
"I am going back to please my father. I want to please him. I don't care how long it is."
"But if he has made a mistake—"
"My father doesn't make mistakes."
"Oh, doesn't he?" snorted Elizabeth, unable to keep out of the debate longer. "What has he been doing all these years but make mistakes? And now he is too selfish, he isn't man enough, to save his daughter from the mess he has made. He has ruined his own life and isn't happy till he has ruined yours."
Nancy's eyes flashed with anger.
"I am going now," she said. "I won't stay in your house and hear such words. My father is right. Everything he does is right. I am not a foreigner. I hate your ways, I hate your ugly clothes, all your talk about love! My father is not selfish, he is not selfish! I won't listen to you. I am going home."
She clutched wildly at her dress. In her passion she was ready to tear off the despised garments. Then suddenly the sense of her own helplessness overwhelmed her and she knew that she had insulted these, almost her only friends in the world. The experiences of the day had been too great for her sorely tried nerves. She had fought against all she desired until there was no strength for battle left in her veins. She was standing, unable to move, wondering where she could go, how she could carry out her frantic threats of flight, when the instantly contrite Elizabeth threw her arms across the shoulders of the distracted girl.
"I was a beast, Nancy," she confessed; "do forgive me, do forget everything I said. I didn't mean to spoil your last evening here, but you seem to belong so much to us that I couldn't bear not to say what I could."
Helen too was plying her with penitent words.
Nancy's anger dissolved under their kindness. Their love touched her heart to the quick. She could not control herself longer; her pride, her anger, her remorse, were swept away in tears. She tried to struggle through a few incoherent phrases, but the tide of weeping drowned speech, drowned thoughts, drowned everything except a devastating pity which convulsed her breast with great heaving sobs and set her weeping again and again after the wells of her eyes had seemed eternally drained of tears.
There was no more the girls could say. They could only let her weep away the bitterness of her heart.
When she got up at the first glimmer of dawn and put on again her Chinese clothes, they did not stop her, for they knew quite well she had not slept and must find her bed wearisome after the vigil of the night. She would be better breathing the cool air of the morning. They let her go alone to purge her brain in the dew and the sunshine of the hills.
"I will be back," Nancy told them, "but I want to walk. I shall feel better; then I can sleep in the chair all the way home."
She hurried round the upper paths of the settlement, passing houses which were heavy with slumber. The morning was still; the sun had not come up over the plains to waken the dragon flies into humming life. Nancy was trying to walk herself out of the desperate mood in which nothing she did seemed worth any pain. She had gained some satisfaction, when she was angry, from the heroism of returning to her father, which of course was only another way of saying to the marriage he had ordained. But now she was not angry, only sad. Her heroism was only like a memory of last night's acting lingering in the stale air, amid the litter and refuse of a stage, the morning after a great tragedy. The actors have gone, the theatre is given up to charwomen. So Nancy's heart was given up to dustpans and brooms. The anguish upon which she had wracked her spirit lay strewn across the floor of her soul like crumpled flowers. It was bad enough to be sacrificing so much that she loved to the demands of duty, but it was worse not to believe in the sacrifice.
In this mood Ronald overtook her.
"I am going back to my father," she announced, as though he had been following the debate in her mind and might try to prolong fruitless argument and score many profitless points.
"I don't doubt it," said Ronald, smiling gravely. "I don't doubt that you are going back. I didn't come to plague you with my efforts at persuasion. I wanted just one last walk with you, Nancy, to be at peace and happy because you are with me. I am wiser than I was yesterday, and I know you would have agreed if you could. So we'll let it rest at that, shall we?"
They walked quietly, enjoying the little things that caught their eyes, the brilliant touches of an early summer morning, "my namesake, the sun,"—as Ronald grimly remarked,—which came up from a saffron bed of clouds, far across the plains beyond Peking. Nancy was glad Ronald had found her. There was an unforced merriment to his talk which cheered her vexed mind. Her doubts vanished like the mist. He was well named "the sun," for his steadfast courtesy in defeat shed light on the misty passes of her will and helped her to see the rightness of the instinct which was taking her back to her father. The mountains had lost their vagueness of surface; the sun was etching the deep shadows of each ravine.
"Well, it is time we went back," said Ronald, after they had walked a long way and seen the sun leap high above the plains. "I am glad we had this walk, Nancy, because I didn't trust myself to say good-bye to you down there. I haven't given you up, you know; I will never do that, for I hope against hope that your father's prediction may yet come true."
He stopped for a moment.
"Ah, Nancy," he said, turning to the girl, "it's so hard, even now, to say good-bye to you."
She looked at him, frightened by the thought of never seeing him again, afraid of his never knowing that she did love him. Impossible wishes were in her heart, impossible words on her tongue, for it seemed so wrong that she should be offering herself only next month to a stranger and parting without a word of endearment for the friend, the lover, who filled the vivid horizon of this morning walk. This Western life and Western speech had been playing havoc with all Nancy's conventions. She was on the point of confessing her love for Ronald, a disastrous confession which could only complicate the unhappiness of their friendship, for she had not changed and would not change her intention of going back to her father as she had said.
"Well, we might as well be done with it," exclaimed Ronald. "It's no time for making speeches, is it? You know how I feel, Nancy. I am not good at disguising my feelings, but I do hope that, whatever comes of all this mixup, you will be happy. That, after all, is the important thing."
Nancy looked away as though her eyes were intent upon the sunlit boldness of the slope. She was too well schooled to betray emotion in the ordinary ways, by nervous play of the hands, by shifting of the feet, but the tense posture of her body suggested to observant eyes the strain she was meeting; Ronald's eyes were too observant to be at ease in watching her. The man turned away. The steadily mounting splendor of the sun gave him courage.
"A priceless pair of fools we are," he said, suddenly, "a priceless pair of fools, mooning like this on such a splendid morning. They'll be wondering if we're never coming to breakfast. Good-bye, Nancy."
He took her hand and held it a moment. The girl thanked him with a grateful look for this brusque loyalty. For the last most difficult time she was able, by his help, to subdue the protesting voices of her blood.
"Good-bye, Ronald," she said quietly.
And so their parting was accomplished.
Nancy and Edward made a very different return from their homecoming of a year before. The girl would not hear of her friends walking with her; farewells were so painful that she wished to be finished with them, whatever the cost to her feelings, and get what peace she could from the dull melancholy of the journey in her chair. There was not much peace in the slow procession over the hills. Her eyes burned from weariness, her mind scanned discontentedly every word she had spoken in the three crises of the past twenty-four hours, yet suggested no better words in their place.
Almost to her surprise, her father looked better and stronger than he had seemed for months. He greeted his returned children with his old hearty affection. Nancy had feared to find him again in bondage to Kuei-lien; if she had found the fogs of that evil spell clouding the household, the daughter might well have turned her chair round, given up the fight for her father, gone back to Ronald.
But the great joy of her father in welcoming his children made Nancy ashamed of these treacherous thoughts. She read in his face his own sacrifice, the self-control which had kept him from forgetting his loneliness of a fortnight by exploiting his passion for the concubine. His restraint had been more than human. Only his love for his daughter, the wish not to mar her last days by any shadow of unhappiness, had held the man back from the delectable oblivion in Kuei-lien's beauty. He had spent many hours in his study, had written characters and read dry books and taken Li-an for long prattling walks, all the time wondering what Nancy was doing, hoping that she would not return, that she would yield to the persuasions he had foreseen, yet counting off one by one the days of her visit and dreading the one first act of disloyalty which might keep her with the friends and lover from the West.
When the chairs were announced he did not know which was uppermost, sorrow or joy, as he hastened to greet the wanderers. It was not his fault that Nancy had come back. The chance had been hers to escape. It was not his fault that they must fulfill the bond they had made. It was fate. One cannot fight against the ordinances of fate. He could only make the most of Nancy's last days at home.
But Kuei-lien and Li-an saved the return from being desolate. They were so full of questions that they awoke echoes of laughter in the household. They embarked Edward upon long tales and they set even the woebegone amah bragging till she forgot the dreariness of being back again in recounting the glories of the Ferris establishment, glories, she let her hearers distinctly understand, such as she had been bred to appreciate. When she descanted upon the cleanliness of the Ferris family, the unashamed use of soap and water, the delicacy which did not tolerate dust and cobwebs even in corners where they could not be seen, the splendor of the dinner table set with linen and silver and shining glasses, the manners and dress of the children, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the pantry, it was only a step to her memories of Nancy's mother and of stories she got new zest, fresh energy, to tell for the hundredth time.
Nancy also lost part of her sadness in satisfying Kuei-lien's curiosity about everything that had happened during her stay—about everything except the things which mattered. She was clearer than her fulsome old nurse in describing the picnics and games and swimming parties and rebuilding before Kuei-lien's eyes every last detail of the costumes she had worn. Clothes intrigued the concubine; they were a harmless topic for Nancy to enlarge upon, indeed, kept her mind from graver regrets, so that Kuei-lien became quite enchanted by extraordinary surmises as to why the foreigner wasted good embroidery on her chemise and hid satin ribbons where they could not be seen, and cumbered herself, even at home, with the superfluity of a skirt.
As a practical demonstration, Nancy consented to wear a dress which Helen and Elizabeth between them had given her.
"It's our gift of remembrance," Helen had said.
"And who knows if the time won't come when you will want to give up being Chinese," added Elizabeth. "You will always have this ready."
Kuei-lien and Li-an led Nancy out, made her walk up and down the path behind the temple, while they clapped and laughed their applause at her unwonted appearance. So excited were they that they never heard Herrick approach, did not even guess his presence till he had stood for some minutes dumbly watching his daughter. When they saw him they turned suddenly quiet. Herrick gave a little helpless toss of his head, then he called Nancy to his room.
"Sit down," he said, looking wonderingly at this stranger of a daughter whom he felt—so curiously changed was she by her Western garments—he had never known before.
"I have been wondering," he began rather deliberately, "why you asked to be married earlier. The more I think of it, the less I understand it. What were you hiding from me?"
Nancy groped vainly for the faintest suggestion of an answer, but she could find no word to say. She sat mutely and helplessly on the edge of her uncomfortable chair.
"Were you hiding anything from me?" the man pursued.
"I don't know how to tell my reasons," said Nancy finally.
"Ah, Nancy, you are a mystery to me. I don't understand a tenth of you. I feel as though I had lost you. Did you want to be married?"
The question was like an appeal for reassurance on the part of her father, as if he wanted some support from the girl to resist his own doubts. Nancy did her gallant best to comfort him.
"Yes," she replied.
"I wish I could believe you," he sighed, only half convinced.
The ten days with his children away, his unexpected fortitude in denying to his nerves Kuei-lien's lethal comfort, had been a sacrifice he would have been wiser never to have made. There had been too much time to think. And Herrick had reached the state of body where thought was a uselessly distracting exertion. So long as his will shirked the strain of mending what was not past cure, Nancy's marriage, which had seemed such a reasonable match when it was four safe years away, had become a sinister dream he could not thrust from him. The sight of Nancy in her Western clothes made the pain unbearable. He tried to convince himself that he was not offering her up on the altar of his folly.
"Do you really want to be married?" he asked next, not content with her previous answer. "Do you understand what it means? You are so young. Time goes so fast."
"And if I don't want to be married," asked the girl, with a look of curious insight into the hesitations of his heart, "if I don't want to be married, will it make any difference?"
This was the very question Herrick wished she had not put. It required such a definite answer. To say "yes," to say that the marriage could be prevented at this eleventh hour, meant an act Herrick did not have the courage to perform so abruptly. The issue would be nothing less than throwing over the past thirteen years of his life. After so grave a breach of custom as the deliberate insult to the t'ai-t'ai's family in stopping a marriage on the verge of consummation, Chinese life would be impossible to him. The memory of Nancy's perjured troth would haunt the rest of his days. His only recourse would be to return to the West he had disowned. For his own sake, Herrick dreaded the thought; for Nancy's sake, Herrick groped for the strength of will to make the detestable change. But Nancy gave him no help. She did not weep, she did not shake his heart with sobs for pity, she did not stimulate the sapped vigor of his courage. At the moment when his heart cried to his daughter, by the sight of her uncontrolled weakness, by terror, misery, any violent agony of passion, to make him be brave, she would only put this candid question, which had to be answered so definitely by yes or no.
"I'm afraid it can't make any difference," he admitted after a fearful pause, "things have gone so far."
"Because I don't really wish to be married at all," said Nancy perversely.
Her father's raising a question which he himself now confessed was not the least likely to have any practical bearing upon her fate stirred up a sudden gust of anger, till she was unready to leave him the comfort of thinking she was happy. But Herrick, far from accusing himself of any fault, saw merely a freshly irritating symptom of the waywardness which had vexed him several times in the past.
"Why must you say that now?" he demanded. "How can I ever satisfy you when you ask for a thing at one time and then, when it is too late, tell me you don't want it?"
"It doesn't make any difference, anyway," said Nancy. "I was just answering your question."
"It does make a difference, a tremendous difference," the father cried. "Do you want me to throw over this engagement, to tell the t'ai-t'ai you won't marry her nephew, to bring everlasting disgrace on our heads?"
"No, we can't do that," replied Nancy, not permitting herself time to toy with the notion.
"It would mean the end of our life in China," added Herrick.
"Yes, it would."
"And taking you and Edward home to England. Would you like that?"
"I don't want to go to England. I want to stay here."
"So you see how impossible it would be to change."
"Quite impossible," Nancy agreed.
Herrick looked at the girl narrowly. He wondered if she were mocking him.
"What did the Ferrises think of your marriage?" he asked with a disconcerting shift in the direction of his words. "They didn't like it, I suppose?"
"Yes, they didn't like it."
"Did they want you to be a foreigner? Did they ask you to stay with them?"
"Yes."
"Did they tell you that your father was a fool, that he was ruining your life by his selfish schemes?"
"No," said Nancy, her loyalty shocked by the question.
"Then they were not as good friends as I had hoped they might be," said the father bitterly. "Ah, never mind me," he continued, ashamed of the puzzled dismay he had brought to Nancy's eyes. "I am saying stupid things. I can't help it when I don't feel well. Your marriage will be quite all right, my child. Of course you don't want to be married. What maiden does? But it's nothing to worry about. It's not like going among foreigners and having to learn new ways. The Ferrises have seen you only as a foreigner, just as you are now, and a pretty English girl you do make, Nancy; even I have to admit that."
Suddenly the picture of his daughter in Western clothes overpowered him; the mere mention of her appearance opened the floodgates of his despair, released a torrent of memories which rose higher and higher in his brain till they threatened to drown out his life with their unprisonable anguish. Herrick stood up like a man in great wrath; the veins of his forehead were swollen, his eyes ablaze with the violence of this unexpected temper.
"Go away, Nancy," he ordered, "go and change those wretched things! You have bewitched me with this masquerade. How can I decide anything, give my right mind to anything, when you sit mocking Me with the very clothes you wear?"
By a gesture he seemed to sweep the frightened girl out of his sight.
Only slowly, in the quiet of his room, did his muscles relax and his heart cease pounding. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His hand was shaking.
"Why must I do these things?" he sighed. "It was not her fault."
His harshness had filled the house with silence. He rang his bell and to his surprise Kuei-lien appeared.
"Is there anyone alive in this cursed place?" he asked. "Can't you sing or shout or do something to make a noise? Where have Edward and Li-an gone? Have they lost their tongues?"
"You have frightened them all," said Kuei-lien, with an amused smile. "You shouldn't speak so crossly to your daughter. She is weeping. Her heart is not at peace."
"I don't need you to tell me that," Herrick retorted. Then his voice softened. "Where is she?" he asked.
"In her room, naturally," was the tart rejoinder of the concubine. "Did you think she was so happy that she would be out on the hills catching butterflies?"
"I will go and see her," said the father.
"Good, we'll all weep together."
Herrick paid no attention to this last impudence but strode across the courtyard to the room where his daughter was draining the bitterness of reaction which had overflowed her heart after the sore tests she had been forced to meet in such quick succession these last two days. Even in her bewilderment she had obeyed her father's wish and was dressed again in Chinese clothes. The discarded Western finery lay in a pathetic heap upon the floor.
"Nancy," said the father, putting his hand gently on her shoulder, "I am sorry. I did not mean to speak so angrily to you. I did not want to make you so unhappy."
Not for years had he said such words as these. Long ago he had lost the habit of making an apology. He had played the part of the all-sufficing tyrant who does not expect his acts to be questioned. But Nancy's distress, the sight of her wish to please him even by unreasonable obedience, struck deep beneath every artifice of manner, making him utter his words of contrition as genuinely as though he had not laid aside such language thirteen years back. At the sound of his voice Nancy pulled herself up and faced him with tear-stained eyes. She did not know how to answer her father's strange words.
"You are not to blame for making me angry," the father went on, carried beyond measure along the path of genuineness by the sorrow Nancy's face revealed, "it was my fault. I could not bear that glimpse of you in the Western dress you ought to have been wearing all your life. It reminded me too unspeakably of how I have cheated you. It made me realize how I have robbed your mother's daughter, Nancy, merely to follow selfish dreams of my own. All these years, my child—they have been a mistake, and I can never make them up to you."
The girl was still speechless, her grief forgotten in this immense unveiling of her father's heart.
"But I can stop one thing," he vowed, "I can make up one mistake, I can stop the folly of this marriage. You are young and I am old. You have your whole life before you. I have—nothing. It doesn't matter what becomes of me. I am going back to Peking to-morrow to tell the t'ai-t'ai that I am done with these schemes—my heart was never in them—I am not going to sacrifice my only daughter—for you are the only daughter I have been able to care about—I am not going to sacrifice my only daughter just to pile up the ruins of my own wasted life. After that—well, it doesn't matter what comes after that. I suppose I can dodder along in a frock coat and a silk hat till you find the one man who will love you better and care for you. Then one old man less in the world won't matter."
Nancy's quick sympathy rushed to raise her father from this unseemly abasement, to prove to him that he had not sacrificed her, that he had not done wrong, not made ruin of his life or of hers. How would he survive, she wondered, when all that he had delighted in was swept away? How could she ask him, at his time of life, to make these new beginnings for her? The blind love which had been too strong for Ronald's arguments, for the indignant persuasiveness of the twins, would not let her give way even before the appeal of her father himself; for she felt that he was pleading against himself. She had never known him outside the comforts of his Chinese home, the graceful amenities in which her own pride helped her to compass his. To make him an exile from these, from the spacious mode of living which she thought of as the very marrow of his bones, the tissue of his flesh, that was a fate she was not willing, cost what it might, to bring upon him. Her own dread of the West and its alien customs made her shrink still more sensitively from dragging her father out of the peace of a home which ought to be the shelter of his failing years.
"I would be unhappy all my life, if you did this," she said. "What right have I to hear my father saying such things? How can we break the promise we have made and not be ashamed forever after? No matter where you took me, my heart would not be at peace, for I should remember that my willfulness had destroyed my father's good name. 'Shall I follow the desires of my ears and eyes and bring my parents to disgrace?' Please don't remember my foolish words," she begged. "I don't want to go to the West among strangers. What do I know about foreign customs? My father gives too much weight to my mischievous idle words. I was only wearing foreign clothes to amuse Kuei-lien and Li-an. I will never wear them again. I did not mean to trouble my father or to make him think I was unhappy."
"Are you telling me the truth?" demanded Herrick, already alarmed by the largeness of the renunciation he had proposed.
"I am telling the truth," replied Nancy, with her eyes cast down.
"But you just said you didn't really want to be married."
There was a flush in her cheeks, a faint smile on her lips.
"What maiden ever really wanted to be married?" she asked. "If you offered me all the men in the world I should say the same thing." There was a pause. "I say many, many things," she went on softly, "and sometimes my words fight against each other. You have made me so happy, you have given me so many good things, that I could not but be sad to go out from the home of my father, even if I were called to the halls of the palace itself. But ah, my father, you know that your will is mine. The tree cannot be torn up to give light to the sapling. I am not so ignorant, not so self-willed, as not to know that 'to look upon obedience as right is the law for women.' I learned that long ago. In a thousand ten thousand of years I won't forget it."
Herrick was strangely moved by this grave eloquence from the lips of his child.
"You are wiser than you ought to be," he murmured; "there is not a man on this earth fit to marry you. I don't know whether I am brave or a coward in letting you go. You will miss me, Nancy, but oh, how I shall miss you! Sometimes I wish you weren't flesh and blood, but were like the rustling of the autumn leaves in the locust trees; then I could always have you and no one would envy me."
"The locust trees lose their leaves," said the girl quietly; the poem recurred again like a persistent undercurrent to her thoughts:—
"In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old—"
"Yes, they do," admitted Herrick; "we are foolish to take our little plans so seriously. It would be better if we were enjoying to-day instead of weeping over to-morrow. I have been weak, fickle, changeable, Nancy, and I have tried to blame you, tried to put the burden upon you. Here I have even been so irresolute as to hand over my will for you to direct. That was a thing no father should ask of his daughter. After all, what does it matter how much trust we put into our paltry schemes, what is the use of vexing ourselves, when the stars, whether we like it or not, decide our lives for us? You were right: autumn leaves do fall. I shan't remember you in them. I shall remember you in the stars, which give you your heart's quietness because you obey them. They don't change and grow old, they and the sun and the moon—"
"And the sun and the moon," echoed Nancy.
Then the world went black before her eyes.
The seventh moon waxed and waned in a succession of trivial days. The interest of the summer, so far as Nancy was concerned, had ended with her triple battle waged against Ronald and the twins and her father. Chatter with Kuei-lien, perfunctory excursions with a wary eye lest she blunder into Ronald, whom she did not trust herself to meet again, filled in the tale of days. There was but one high moment, the Feast of Souls, when she and Edward secretly sacrificed to the spirit-tablet of their mother. Theirs was a fervid little cult which had grown up unmentioned except between themselves, a worship of the alien mother whom only Nancy dimly remembered. It signalized the bond which had always kept them from feeling quite kin to the rest of their father's family, an aloofness of origin which centred naturally round the legend of their mother.
Guided by reticence quite unusual to the communal life of the household, they had never been willing to drag their secret into the open gossip of the courtyards, but kept up this worship as an act and a habit too sacred to be divulged, too far apart from the noisy ostentation of the sacrifices which the women from time to time offered. Their shrine was holy ground, and when they made their sober childish prayers before the gilded tablet, the boy and girl, so shyly, fondly devoted to each other, seemed orphans indeed, shut out from the world around them by their still tenser devotion to the mother who was little more than a memory and a shadow.
Their worship this year was also, on Nancy's part, a farewell. She was saying good-bye to the spirit of her mother, whom she would not be entitled to worship next summer when the festival of All Souls once more quickened love and regret for the dead. For she must give up her own forefathers, give up even her mother, when she went out from home to the strange halls of her husband. Thenceforth his ancestors would be hers, and in place of the dearly loved tablet which she and Edward had fashioned so loyally between themselves, she must bow her head before a row of cold names which were not even dead to her because they never had been alive.
With grave seriousness she bequeathed the trust to Edward, envying him his right to worship his mother undisturbed until the end of his days. So passed the Feast of Souls, and one by one the days of the ghostly seventh moon slipped away.
Tedious, Nancy found them, for she was very much alone. She dodged close talk with her father, an attitude for which he was grateful, because neither he nor his daughter wished to touch again upon matters which in an incomplete, unspoken way they had left settled. The father stayed drowsily with his books, slept and dozed through the afternoons, realizing with taciturn dismay the fact that he was old and that his thoughts were empty of comfort. He tried some walking, but his heart complained. Undue exercise taxed his strength, sent the blood to his head. One thing he had set his will not to do: to give way to Kuei-lien's enchantment—not till his daughter was married. This was a promise he had made silently with himself, a little way of being fair to Nancy, and he stuck heroically to his agreement, although there were moments when the vacancy of the books over which he nodded made this ascetic life almost too tiresome to be borne.
"I don't understand you, Nancy," Kuei-lien said more than once, enjoying the comfortable sleepiness of the afternoons in Nancy's room. Her fear of the t'ai-t'ai had been growing less and her sympathy with the betrothed girl more. "I am not so blind as you think I am. This marriage is your making; I can see that, but I can't see why."
"One has to be married," was Nancy's usual defense, when the subject was forced upon her mind.
"Yes, but why this particular marriage, when your father has given you so many opportunities to get out of it? You are not one of us, Nancy, even though you believe you are. Your father would have liked it best if you had stayed with your foreign friends."
Kuei-lien, from her talks with the amah, knew more than the girl dreamed of the pressure the Ferrises had brought to keep their guest. In idle moments she could not help toying with the last year's plan.
"That is finished," said Nancy decidedly.
"If I had been your father's daughter," laughed the concubine, "I should have managed things much better. Your father would give every cent he has promised the t'ai-t'ai to be rid of this match. Why don't you fall sick or cut off your hair so that you have to become a nun? Then you would save everybody's face. Even the t'ai-t'ai would be satisfied, if she got her money—"
"She will get her money, whatever it is, in the way we have promised," announced the girl.
"I believe you are holding the old woman to her bargain just to spite her," vowed Kuei-lien. "You know her whole family is afraid of the daughter-in-law they are getting. If it weren't that they had been bribed by your dowry, they would just as soon marry their priceless son to a fox-spirit. They will think it a miracle if you don't bear him four-legged sons; it will be a miracle with such a donkey for their father! What are you going to do when you go to them? Are you going to play handmaid to your father-in-law's water pipe and sew out your eyes on underwear that is greasy from your mother-in-law's unwashed body?"
Against her own conscience Nancy was amused by the racy way Kuei-lien dealt with topics that were held to be sacred. She knew quite well that the parents of her husband were not proper game for these irreverent shots, yet she relished every impudent hit at their expense. It was one way of settling scores for the travail these unknown personages had given her. She was in a mood, as Kuei-lien perceived, to be spiteful. And she was curious to get every chance inkling of what her life was to be.
"And when you meet them in the morning, will you invite their 'jade toes graciously to approach'? If you do, Nancy, if you jump to fill the teapot and wait up late to put your old grandmother to bed, you will be lost, you will be their slave for the rest of your days. I know these small-livered people. They will live to a hundred just for the pleasure of bullying you, just to let you dust out every wrinkle of their sagging faces. If you have a daughter, it will be your fault because she isn't a son; if you have a son, it will be your meanness of heart that kept him from being twins. Faugh! the stupidity of having babies so that other people can cackle as if they were the hen that dropped the egg! I don't hold with these old-fashioned notions. I am a new Chinese, newer than you with all your foreign blood. And heaven help you if you have a white-haired brat!"
She said these unspeakable things so wickedly that Nancy could not keep from laughing. The betrothed girl watched the scornful twist of the lips by which the concubine expressed more aptly even than by words her pouting contempt for the Chous and all their clan. Kuei-lien's odd turns of sarcasm were pleasant to hear. The warm afternoon imparted its sense of lazy security even from the family to which she was promised. Nancy gazed with easy pleasure at her own white knees as she sat, half clothed, on the bed. She clasped her arms tightly round them and rubbed the soft skin with her cheeks, feeling almost as lazily content with summer and sunlight as she used to be in her more careless child days.
"What did Mencius say?" demanded Kuei-lien, continuing her tirade. "'At the marriage of a young woman, her mother admonishes her, accompanying her to the door on her leaving, and cautioning her with these words: You're going to your home. You must be respectful; you must be careful; do not disobey your husband.' Hm-m, I suppose your worthy old teacher put circles next to those characters, didn't he? He would. And what did the father say to his son? He 'admonished' him. That was all. The Sage didn't explain that part of it. The Sage was a man. I don't believe in sages."
Nothing was sacred to Kuei-lien in her mocking moods. She had never let Herrick be sacred even to himself.
"I don't believe in sages. I don't believe in nuns. I don't believe in priests. I don't believe in gods. And I don't believe in being respectful to a husband. You haven't a mother, Nancy; I'll be your mother. I will admonish you, I will accompany you to the door when you leave, I will caution you. Yes, indeed, you are going to your home. Very well, let them know from the first that it is your home and that you are not grateful merely for a place near the k'ang, like the chickens that peck rice off the floor. Remember, you will have the family purse in your hands, but only because they'll want you to produce twice the money that's in it, find cash for your father-in-law's opium and your mother-in-law's mah-jongg debts, and board and lodging for their third and fourth and fifth cousins and for all the children they can squeeze without cost under your roof. Stop that from the beginning; be as niggardly as they would be in your place. They will hate you, anyway, because you're a foreigner and because you're different and because they'll think if only they could have been bribed into taking your money without your precious self they might have secured a Yang kuei-fei in your stead. So you might as well give them good reason for hating you and, better still, for fearing you. Then, when you've scolded them till their ears are like wax and made them shake in their slippers every time they see your shadow crossing the courtyard, they will be only too happy to let you go back to your father, to the moon if you wish; they will press upon you the need for a long vacation and, while you're safely out of the way, they will find another wife, a nice quiet-tempered girl, for your husband, who can bear a dozen children and choke the house with the dust from her broom and pick bugs with nimble finger nails from the seams of the quilt in which your illustrious parents-in-law have been pleased to sleep for four thousand sweaty nights."
Nancy held up her hands in protest, but Kuei-lien laughed at her qualms.
"You can do it so easily," she said; "they will expect nothing better from you because you are a foreigner. Anything you do will be only what they expected. If only you browbeat them from the beginning, before they have got breath enough to browbeat you, then you will have your own way. You can go back to your father's and stay for sixty years and they will not be sorry; they will bless the spirits of their ancestors for having delivered them after their own folly in bringing a devil and a termagant into their midst. Aren't my words true? You will be happy, they will be happy, your father will be happy; everyone will be happy except the unlucky girl who takes your place. You can trust them to take revenge on her for all the injuries they have suffered from you. I don't envy her the time she'll have of it. But that's not your fault. Better somebody else miserable than poor me: that's the way to look at the foolishness of this world."
Many letters had been coming from the t'ai-t'ai, urging her husband to bring Nancy back to Peking. There were so many things to be done: the bridal furniture had to be sent, the wedding dress cut, the gifts procured. But Herrick refused to budge till the time he had set. With the coming of the eighth moon he could no longer postpone the claims of his wife. He roused himself unwillingly from this torpor of indecision and packed his reluctant family back to Peking. He had waited upon fate as long as he could, but fate offered him no help.
With their arrival in Peking, the t'ai-t'ai took vigorous command of the household. The momentum of her energy carried everyone before her, most of all Nancy, who had no further time to hesitate and reflect. The ensuing days became almost a round of processions, for Herrick had allowed barely time enough for the festivities which had to be crowded into twenty-four days. The courtyards never seemed clear of the smoke of firecrackers, the neighbors were always being called to their doors by the lilt of wind instruments. First came the wedding cakes, and the satin for the bridal dress, and elaborate gifts, which the t'ai-t'ai took care to return more elaborately.
It had been necessary to transport her brother and the important members of his family to Peking, to take for them a house in the capital, since Herrick had stood out obstinately against sending his daughter to be married in the ancestral home of the bridegroom. The t'ai-t'ai grumbled, of course; she grudged the expense which she said her brother could not afford, she moaned about the insult to her old mother who was much too feeble to make the long journey to Peking to see her grandson married. But Herrick said never to mind the expense; he would see that they were not out of purse because of this accommodation. With so liberal a promise, the t'ai-t'ai decided she could meet his wishes and she took care not only that Herrick should pay for moving Nancy's husband to Peking but that many of the showy presents, which were paraded through the streets on their way to the home of the bride, were actually gifts from Herrick to himself. Her thrift preserved Nancy's dowry intact from all the corroding expense of the wedding.