The autumn festival dawned, but its rejoicings were only an incident, compared with the greater day hurrying upon its heels. Nancy said quiet farewell to the full moon, climbing once again into her comfortable old pine tree to watch its splendor as the moon mounted. She turned a grave face to its light; it was not only a symbol of her sex, of her womanliness, the symbol which she had learned to revere from childhood, but it was bound by deeper ties to the inmost thoughts of her heart, so deeply bound that she almost looked for a miracle to be done in her behalf and this crowning moon of her life never to wane from its completed beauty. But it waned.
The rest was a dull trance in which the days went by, scarcely counted. Night after night the moon decreased; the girl's spirits fell. She kept tryst each evening with its rising until it rose too late to be awaited. Then the darkness frightened her.
In fear she gave herself up to the will of her stepmother and submitted without words to being taught the ceremonies of her wedding, to being set up like a doll for the fitting of the bridal garments. Despite Kuei-lien's laughing advice, she remained remote and aloof, the seething bustle of the household eddying unheeded round her body, which was the only part that her eyes gave them the feeling they could claim. Where her thoughts were no one could tell, no one indeed had the curiosity to search out except Kuei-lien, whose spirit of irony was amused by the puzzle of the silent girl.
The bridal furniture had been got ready. Three days before the wedding it was sent off.
Great show was made of the chairs and tables for the bridal chamber, the chairs with their carved arms and round panels of gray Yunnan marble, but, most sumptuous of all, the bridal bed, hung so heavily with curtains of scarlet satin that the wealth of embroidery led the eyes astray from the pictures inlaid in the woodwork and even from the silver chains which drew the curtains aside. Kuei-lien's tongue was rife with jests about this bed and its heap of satin quilts. Nancy hid her burning cheeks for shame at the concubine's unsparing frankness.
"Pooh, that's nothing to be afraid of," declared Kuei-lien. "You can be mistress there, even if you are the bride. Your husband will be more frightened than you to be shut up with a strange woman, and a foreigner at that, behind those happy curtains. They will fill him full of wine to make him brave. He's only a boy, nothing to shrink from or blush about. Marriage is marriage and a bridal bed is a bridal bed; it is foolish pretending to be so delicate about things that have to be. You are lucky to have rich curtains and plenty of warm quilts and one place where your mother-in-law can't trouble you. You don't have to make your bed your profession like me."
Kuei-lien's bitter moods, her uneasy habit of thinking too deeply, made her singularly outspoken, but Nancy refused to listen further. Her only peace was to be carried on as in a dream. She could not bear to stare at her fate set forth in these visible pictures.
The bedstead, the chairs, the boxes all went their festive way to her new home, where soothsayers ensured the fortunate placing of the bed. Her father's house was draped with red, the walls were hung with scarlet banners on which "joy" was repeated in huge characters of gilt, characters written double to amplify the luck of the occasion. The courtyards were roofed with red bunting and the first chrysanthemums of the season banked high against the walls. Into the nightly feasting Nancy did not intrude, and her father did not appear, did not trust himself to see Nancy. He was ill, feeble, uncomforted by the bustle which echoed even into his silent room.
For the last evening a great feast was prepared and though only the women of the household and their kinsfolk took part, Herrick having no outside guests to invite, they made the most of their one great chance to be merry over an event which promised no good fortune to any of their number. It was the t'ai-t'ai's affair, this wedding, but that was no reason for declining the baked meats of their enemy's bounty. So they were quite cheerful and quite eager to see the girl who had lived with them, so aloof and yet so intimate, clothed at last in her bridal garments.
In her last afternoon the t'ai-t'ai came to Nancy's room to tell her stepdaughter it was time. Everything was prepared. She now needed only to put up her hair and put on her dress for the ceremonial farewell to her own family and then retire to the night's vigil of weeping and vain efforts at sleep, weeping and sleeping both rigidly prescribed by custom, before the bridal chair was heralded by trumpets in the morning. Kuei-lien came in behind the t'ai-t'ai; Li-an and a maid followed her. They had brought the clothes which the bride was now formally to try on to make sure that all was ready for the morrow.
Nancy rose without comment and was as quiet as a puppet in their hands, raising her arms or turning her head at their bidding. A square of red carpet was laid on the floor for her to stand upon. Slowly and with great deliberation Kuei-lien and her helpers proceeded to their work, the dignity of the season making them linger over each detail. The girl was divested of her own garments, bathed and scented, and the cotton of her former undergarments replaced by linen on which symbols of good luck had been embroidered in cross-stitch. The t'ai-t'ai exclaimed upon the pity of Nancy's unbound feet and deplored the new custom of large feet, which would ruin China, she vowed, but Kuei-lien defended new fashions at the expense of old, while the girl who was the subject of their debate gave no signs of listening, but allowed her body to be assessed without reply. Sometimes she watched the fingers that were busy with her; for the most part she kept her fixed gaze upon the carpet. A panel of cloth was tied with strings round her waist and hung by a silver chain from her neck. Stockings of scarlet silk were pulled up to her knees. She stepped unresistingly into the undermost pair of long pantaloons and let the tunic that matched them be slipped softly down her arms. Then, at the precise minute the soothsayers had set, began the unbraiding of her thick hair, the sign that she was to be a maiden no more; slowly it was soaked with resin, pulled across her head till it matched the smoothness of enamel, and gathered in a lustrous clump at the back, a clump into which Kuei-lien thrust blade-like pins of soft gold. The fringe of down round her forehead would not be pulled out till she came to her new home.
The concubine and her helpers stood back to admire the change they had made. Then over the face of the bride they dusted clouds of powder, and brushed it half away again before they softened the spectral white with an artfully applied surface of rouge. Nancy seemed to cease breathing while they reddened her lips; she closed her eyes while they penciled the graceful arch of the brows. Her face had become like the mask of a tragic figure, something removed from life, yet deeply instilled with the most pitiful passions of life, austere and delicate, sombre and youthful, possessed of a beauty which a day could destroy, yet which promised in its singularly immobile pose to live forever, an unforgettable memory. Nancy had lost her personality; she had become a symbol. The age-old traditions of the bridal took her out of common places and common scenes, they invested her with sadness and fear, made her too holy to be touched, too lovely to be worshiped, set upon her face the pathetic seal of flowers at their blossoming.
Even the scoffing spirit of Kuei-lien was awed by her handiwork. With a caressing touch the concubine proceeded to her task, helping Nancy into the voluminous scarlet folds of her skirt, fastening the gold buttons of her scarlet tunic, slipping bangles over her wrists and setting gently on her glossy hair the headdress of pearls. There now remained only the veil of red silk to be placed over her face before she entered the chair. For the rest, Nancy was the bride complete, and Kuei-lien, in an unwonted mood of reverence, could not resist bowing before the brilliant vision.
Dusk had come. Hours had gone by. Nancy came forth, assisted by Kuei-lien, to take farewell of the family among whom she had lived so long and so happily. The all-provident t'ai-t'ai had made ready an altar with a bright new tablet to Nancy's unrecorded ancestors. In the first grayness of twilight the red candles glowed in their pewter sticks, the incense went up in faint spirals, the courtyard was redolent of burning sandalwood. The women stood round, hushed by a spirit of awe close to tears, when the bride bowed gravely in front of the glittering tablet, separating herself by this simple act from the host of spirits whose name she had borne. With the same trance-like dignity Nancy bowed to the t'ai-t'ai. Then she let herself be led to her father, who was too ill, too sad to receive her worship before the eyes of the feasters. The door was opened and she was allowed to go in alone. She stood motionless before her father.
Timothy Herrick stared as though his mind scarcely could believe what his eyes saw. He seemed struggling to realize that this vision of scarlet and gold was his daughter, come at last to say good-bye. For the first time in the long tedium of the day's events, Nancy lifted up her eyes. She paid her whole debt of loyalty with that one look and then, behind the tragic splendor of her dress, behind the loveliness of brocades that outshone the blood-red lustre of flames, her spirit seemed to withdraw, as though she had said good-bye. Nancy became only a memory in the sight of her father.
The man trembled with a great moan of despair, scarlet and gold blinded his eyes; suddenly, with a cry that rasped in his throat, Herrick threw himself forward, buried his head in his arms, and so lay still amid the vain litter of his desk.
Nancy waited for him to speak, quite forgetting it was her time to kneel and bow. Finally, when the silence seemed hopeless, when the clock had ticked away many empty minutes, and still with no sign from her father, she realized that someone was leading her away again, that Kuei-lien was leading her back to her own room. She had left the presence of her father without the kindness of one last word. There had been so much to say, so much she wanted to tell him; yet her heart had been sapped of emotion till the girl was not even sorry for this wordless parting.
Only one thing could have wakened her spirit, and this she did not know. She had been too tired to see that not she, but her father, had been the first to go out from his home.
Into her own room the noise of the feasters could not penetrate. The red candles burned with a steady gleam.
"I think I shall take this room when you are gone," said Kuei-lien; "it is quieter than mine."
There was a light tap on the door.
"I must leave you now," announced the concubine, in the same teasing voice; "it is time for you to weep. You must weep, you know. All brides are supposed to weep. Your ancestors will be angry if they see you showing no signs of sadness at leaving them. We shall all measure your affection for us by the noise you make. Your father will be listening with a watch in his hand. But, however much you wail, don't spoil your dress. I shall be back soon to undress you so that it will be fresh for the morning."
The tap on the door was repeated. Kuei-lien stepped gingerly round the red carpet and went softly out of the room. To her surprise she found the t'ai-t'ai waiting outside. Despite the dim light she could see deep agitation in the woman's face; she followed without any sound into her own room. The t'ai-t'ai looked to make sure the door was fastened; her attention was strained as though she suspected the walls of bending down to catch her words.
"The Great Man is dead," she said in a voice almost too low for Kuei-lien to hear.
"What!" exclaimed the girl. "Dead? It can't be. It is not true. How can he be dead? We have only just come from his room."
"I found him dead. He was lying with his head across his desk."
Kuei-lien considered the sentence for a moment.
"Yes, so he was," she admitted.
"I could not move him," went on the t'ai-t'ai. "His life must have gone out like that." She clicked her tongue. "I knew he was dead when I touched him. Ah, what a time to die, what a time to die!"
This last exclamation brought back to Kuei-lien the needs of the moment. The possibilities of her own future were too immense to be considered now; they were like disordered fragments strewn across the floor of her brain, baffling her as to how to begin sorting them, and so there was respite from her own peril diverting her thoughts to the problem of Nancy's wedding. That at least was less disturbing than the prospect of what might happen to her.
"Well, I suppose this must postpone the marriage," she said, trying to see what was in the mind of her mistress; "at least it delays it for the hundred days, doesn't it?"
"But we can't postpone the marriage," moaned the woman; "the money hasn't been paid."
"The money hasn't been paid?" asked Kuei-lien incredulously. "But we shall have no face at all if we go on with a wedding when the master is dead in the house. That would be impossible. We are not coolies. What would men say?"
"We must go on with it," persisted the t'ai-t'ai. Then she grew more secretive. "No one knows he is dead, unless it be Nancy. He must have died while she was there. What was she doing when you went in?"
"Just standing there, looking at her feet."
"You were outside all the time?"
"Yes."
"What did you hear? Did the girl do anything or say anything?"
"She did nothing, I am sure of that. She just stood, waiting for him to speak. She might have stood all night; she's like that. She didn't know he never would speak again. Finally I grew tired and pushed the door open. And there he was, with his head on the table"—Kuei-lien could not help shivering at the memory—"and she was staring at the floor. I couldn't see any more use in her doing that—ai, it was more useless than I thought! I took her hand and brought her out again."
"Then she can't have guessed that he was dead," exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai with a gasp of relief. "She surely would have cried out. She can't have guessed, she certainly can't have guessed. You must go back to her and see that she doesn't get some crazy impulse, some crazy notion of running back to her father's room to say good-bye. I am never sure of what she may do next. It is never safe to trust her. If she doesn't know, then we are all right. What good would it do to tell her now? She will learn quickly enough."
"Yes, she will—poor child," Kuei-lien said.
"It's no use telling anyone till she's safely away in her chair. I have locked his door. What time does she go?"
"At seven; the chair will be here about six."
"Good. It's only for a night. After she's gone it won't matter if we find out that the Great Man is dead. It will be too late to stop the wedding. But it mustn't be known to-night. That would just make matters difficult for all of us and wouldn't do him any good. Aren't we carrying out his own wishes? And who knows what that girl might do if we postponed the wedding? With her father gone, there's not a soul in the house can control that stubborn will of hers. You go back to her and I'll see that he isn't disturbed."
"They would have to make a lot of noise to disturb him now," Kuei-lien said.
She found Nancy sitting stiffly, gazing with dry eyes at the candles.
"Haven't you wept?" she asked, with a gesture of playful reproof. "Ah, but never mind, Nancy, you will weep!"
The bride still persisted in silence.
"Come, Nancy," Kuei-lien urged, "you must talk; you must say something. I haven't heard you say a word to-day. What are you thinking about?"
"I am not thinking," answered Nancy.
"What a perfect nun you would make," laughed the concubine. "I wish I could stop thinking. But it's no use, my dear, practising these nunnery manners for the bridal bed. And even if you don't want to think, you ought to talk. There is nothing better than talk when your heart is in pain. Lots of talk, never mind what it's about, as long as it keeps your mind from thinking. I have had to talk for years, Nancy. I have had to make myself talk. You will too. You are only just beginning to know what life is."
Kuei-lien was treating herself richly to her own medicine. In the last few weeks her manner toward Nancy had been growing increasingly kinder till she found herself bearing Nancy's pain with her own. To-night, in this still room, the secret that lay between herself and the girl she was tending overpowered her veins with a surging pity so that she chattered desperately to hold back the recurring treacherous need to break down and weep.
With an understanding gentleness she removed one by one Nancy's brilliant garments while the girl submitted as obediently as a child. Nancy's splendor slipped from her like autumn leaves blown down by a wind, leaving her white and solitary and helpless.
"You are beautiful, Nancy," said Kuei-lien, unconsciously echoing Elizabeth's tribute of long ago. Yet she could not resist teasing the girl.
"Your husband will have to do this for you to-morrow night. They will make him drunk, I expect, to give him courage. But his hands won't be so gentle as mine. Yes, Nancy, you will miss even me."
Her sympathy, however, would not let her prod the wound she had made. Kuei-lien's heart was sad, for Nancy's sake and her own. She began humming a little song as she worked:—
"Leaves like scarlet rain in the air,Leaves like scarlet dew on the ground,Wheeling to the earth with no sound,Leaving high branches gray and bare."
She took off Nancy's gay slippers with the whimsical thought that her hands were the destroying wind. But her tongue could not cease humming:—
"Yellow leaves strew down golden snow,Yellow leaves golden on the ground,Making hearts forlorn with their sound,Naked branches cold when they go."
"What shall I do when I don't have you to sing to, Nancy?" she asked, as she took off the bright bangles from the arms of the bride.
"You will have my father to sing to," Nancy answered.
"Yes, I shall have your father to sing to."
Kuei-lien almost wept. She tried hurriedly to hide her confusion in more words of her song:—
"Swift the summer sun in his day,Swift the autumn moon in her night,Slow the winter frost with its blight,Trampling golden leaves from its way."
She stood up to lift off Nancy's headdress of pearls. Then she put them on again, and stood back to admire their sinuous lustre against the dark hair of the girl.
"Ah, a bride can never be so beautiful to another as she is beautiful to herself," she sighed.
And yet, she thought, these jewels were the last sight Timothy Herrick had seen on earth. No wonder he covered his eyes so that he might take their loveliness with him into the grave. She covered her own eyes to keep back the tears.
"Gold youth, scarlet love, each must fade,Moon and stars cease shining in the night,Winter snows shall long glimmer white,Scarlet leaves and gold low are laid."
She went softly to the girl and lifted off the pearls like a crown.
"And now," she said, "you must sleep."
The noise of crackers broke into the first light of the day. Nancy woke, scarcely understanding where she was or that this was her bridal day. She had not expected to sleep. Kuei-lien had withdrawn, leaving her lying open-eyed on her bed. She had watched the tranquil candles which even now still flickered, low and gutted though they were. Her heart had been dumb with uneasiness. She could not drive from her mind the thought that she had something to say to her father and that now it was too late to say it. Three or four times she had been on the point of stealing through the quiet house to see him, to revive for the last time those moments of infinite tenderness when he had seemed to know, without her telling, every secret of her heart. But she was afraid, and, before she realized it, had fallen into a sleep so troubled that it was like being awake. Now came the burst of firecrackers and the weird sound of the pipes. Kuei-lien came bustling into the room.
"It is time to be up, Nancy," she called cheerfully, "the bridal chair has come."
Then with the help of Li-an and the maidservant began the solemn ritual they had made trial of yesterday, the clothing of the bride. But none of them could recapture yesterday's deep feeling. In the chill light the bride emerged, looking tired and sleepy, much too pale for the richness of her dress. She pretended to eat the breakfast which was offered her and waited calmly for the proper moment to cross the courtyard to the hall where the chair had been set. At last the t'ai-t'ai appeared with her niece, who had come to fetch the bride. The flutes began once again their unvarying tune. Men with sashes across the shoulders threw down squares of red carpet under her feet and picked them up again behind her as she walked slowly from her room to the great reception hall. Kuei-lien and the t'ai-t'ai's newly arrived niece supported her, each holding an arm. The air was blue with the smoke of the crackers.
The hallway seemed dim after the courtyard. The lanterns were swathed in red silk. The candles on the gleaming altar were choked with clouds of incense. Nancy was so dazed by the smoke and the noise that she did not see at first the chair with its trappings of gold and green and purple and blue heavily embroidered on the scarlet satin; she raised her eyes for one swift glance at its gorgeous canopy; became aware of the crowd admiring its splendor, the plumed phœnix on the crest, the painted images of children, tasseled flowers; she saw Edward's woebegone face, the bright skirts of the women, all mixed together by the trembling confusion of her eyes. Then the t'ai-t'ai advanced, holding out the long robe writhing with golden dragons.
"Isn't my father coming?" the girl suddenly asked.
She was anxious that his hands at least should put the veil over her face.
"He is not well enough to come," answered the t'ai-t'ai.
There was a guilty hesitation in the reply which caused Nancy to look long and carefully at her stepmother. For a moment she delayed, for a moment even pondered brushing aside all the futile ceremony in her mad wish to know what was wrong with her father. Then, as quickly, she silenced the words on her lips and held out her arms to let her body be vested with the heavy robe. There was an instant in which every heart seemed to stand still. Acting for Nancy's absent parents, the t'ai-t'ai fastened the long veil of red silk across the face of the bride. It was so thick that the girl could see nothing. Everyone stared in great quietness at the muffled figure, which swayed a little when the attendant women helped the bride step by step into her chair. She sat down, hidden away in darkness by the curtained windows. The doors were closed in front of her; their two sides joined together the severed character for happiness. There was a perceptible click as the lock was slipped into place, a bare instant before the fresh outburst of crackers, the tumult of horns and flutes, the loud weeping of the amah, the sound of Edward's crying, the ear-shattering din as the musicians and lantern-bearers formed their hectic procession, and the scarlet-girdled coolies struggled with their huge chair.
Nancy had come close to her threat to stop thinking, but she could not stop feeling, just as Ronald had predicted. She sat, stiff and listless, making no effort to lift the veil that cloaked her face. There would be nothing to see if she did. The windows were too securely shrouded, the doors too safely fastened. She kept no count of time, knowing the procession would thread many streets on the way to her new home, making the bravest show money would allow. Far ahead came the repeated explosion of crackers, almost incessantly the trumpets brayed, and the flutes kept up their monotonous lilting music. The girl could feel the hum of people round her and hear the noise of traffic in the streets brought to a momentary standstill by her passing. But she felt no glory, no exultation in this high moment of her life. Her body was cold with fear and her heart already sick from loneliness, weary of the ride yet dreading its finish, dreading her delivery like a well-selected piece of merchandise into the hands of strangers.
Just when her mind had been lulled into a state of throbbing blankness she realized that the roar of firecrackers had redoubled, the musicians were blowing themselves into an accelerated frenzy of noise; the pace of the coolies slackened. The chair was set down; the long poles were withdrawn. She felt men pick it up at the four corners, and she clung to the sides as they toiled with their load, jerking and pitching the unhappy bride across the threshold of her new home.
It was difficult for Nancy to collect her spirits in the great uproar of her arrival, but the heavy veil, hiding her face from all observers, helped the girl at least to look calm when the doors of the chair were unlocked and she was led stiffly across the room and seated on the bridal bed beside her husband. She gave herself entirely into the hands of her attendants. At their direction she knelt and bowed four times to the tablets of heaven and earth and then to her still invisible husband.
Now came the great moment, when, having been seated a second time beside Ming-te, she suffered him to lift the veil from her face. She felt rather than saw his anxiety, felt rather than saw the curiosity of the crowd gathered in the door, all breathless to see what the face of this foreign bride should be. There were reassuring exclamations of approval, loud whispers of admiration at her beauty, all bitter praise to the girl whose cheeks needed no paint to heighten their flushed color. In her bewildered trance Nancy hardly knew what was done next. She was too shamefaced to steal even a glance at her youthful husband, but received silently the gilded cups of wine with which she and Ming-te plighted their troth. She did not think of touching the food which was set before them or to make even the pretense of eating, but sat in mute embarrassment, catching just a glimpse of Ming-te's trembling hands as he helped himself to the nuptial cakes. The wedding was completed. She knew that she was irrevocably the wife of this unknown, still unseen stranger. She had no courage to lift her eyes to his.
Through a long day's ceremonies she bore her part with the same unbending dignity. But all the time, when she managed to be outwardly calm enough to worship alien ancestors; to bow down before the parents of the bridegroom; to stand beside her husband and, at the command of the master of ceremonies, to do an endless series of salutations to the many guests who had come; even in the moments when she was allowed to withdraw with attendants to her room, her real life went round and round in a whirl of tempestuous thoughts. The merrymaking, the feasting, the noise and excitement of savory dishes being served, of wine being drunk, wine being spilt, the loud shouts of men at their games, touched her so lightly that she did not observe a sudden change in the festivities, a momentary pause as though of hearts stricken with fear, words of whispered debate, before the renewal of the merriment in a defiant spirit which was not loud enough to drown the buzzing undertone of conversation in which the word "unlucky," "unlucky," was bandied to and fro. She missed the first news that her father was dead, and went tranquilly through the rites assigned to her without knowing her new loneliness.
The news had thrown the feasters into consternation, not because they had ever met or regretted Herrick, but because his untimely death was so bad an augury for this marriage. To die in the height of the merrymaking—they could not forgive him for that. There were those who deplored the strange match and thought he might have died early enough to postpone, even to prevent it; others thought he might have died later. But to die when his death could be neither hindrance nor help and with no result except to throw gloom upon the feast, that was unspeakably bad taste. To the dismayed family of the bridegroom the shock was still harder. They were angry at being balked even for a few days of the dowry which should by now have been paid, and were not nearly so sure as their kinswoman, the t'ai-t'ai, that Herrick had not cheated them by his death.
For the moment, however, they tried to put the best face on things and when the question arose as to whether the girl should be told, they decided to leave her ignorant till the morrow. Fate had been spiteful enough. It would never do to mar the auspices of the bridal bed by mentioning so unpropitious a word as death. The first hush of panic gave way to a delirium of mirth. Hosts and guests alike were determined to forget the grim shadow which had disturbed them, to put outside the gates of their memory the hideous demon who snatches souls from the living. More and more hot wine they poured into the cups. Voices yelled; hands were flung helter-skelter in the fury of "slippery fist," the wild game of guessing fingers and urging one another into a state of drunken hilarity. Everyone sought to pledge the bridegroom till the unfortunate youth scarcely could totter on his feet and saw lights and faces going round in giddy spirals. The young men who supported him did stout duty in his defense, discarding the wine cups little bigger than thimbles and calling for the more capacious teacups in which to measure staggering potations.
By evening time no one cared whether Herrick had died yesterday or to-day or a thousand years ago.
People from the streets had joined the guests in a clamorous entry into the bridal chamber, long before which time Nancy had been taken from the quieter feast of the women and prepared for the ordeal to which every Chinese bride must submit, when she stands the rude inspection of the crowd. This is always an occasion of ribald wit,—curiously allowed by the custom of years,—in which strangers do their best by the indelicacy of their remarks to disconcert and embarrass the "new woman." But the fact of Nancy's being a foreigner added spice to the event; it made the girl a natural victim of the worst pranks the crowd could concoct. And the freedom with which wine had flowed stirred men to pitiless depths of cruelty in torturing their prey. They teased the girl with unbridled lust of word and gesture such as would have revolted any of them in his right senses. During the three long hours of this orgy the husband of course remained discreetly absent,—he was in fact too sick to come,—while Nancy was compelled to stand beside the gaudy bed, submitting to every whim of her tormentors without a word of defense or even a sign that she was noticing their obscene spite, and with no attendant except an amah almost as much a stranger as the rest.
The men crowded round her in a mocking circle. They discussed every feature of her body with abominable frankness, pulled up her skirts, pinched her legs, examined the bangles on her arms, chucked her freely under the chin, tried to force wine between her teeth. The amah, whose business it was to play the buffoon and draw these attacks from her mistress by rollicking diversions, was too mean-spirited a creature to perform her part, and let Nancy suffer the full force of their lewdness unhindered. There was much laughter over the drunkenness of the bridegroom; he would be quite unable to share the bridal bed, the crowd boasted, and the most boisterous of them played fingers to see who should sleep with this handsome foreign devil in his place. The thought tickled their wits; they pulled out clothes from Nancy's boxes, dressed themselves in a mocking masquerade, threw themselves on the bed, amid howling applause, to portray an indecent drama of Nancy's modesty and Nancy's shame. Through it all she stood with half-averted face, eyes and cheeks ablaze, pretending neither to hear nor to see, knowing too well that the least sign of anger would draw down the redoubled hostility of her persecutors.
Yet, despite her outward passivity, the experience was burning deep marks upon her heart. She began to realize what she had protested against all her life, that she was in truth a foreigner. The pleasant manners of her father's household had deceived her too long. The little differences between herself and her father's wives had been too slight, too amiably adjusted, to make her know the cleavage of race that divided her own instincts from the instincts of the Chinese among whom she had been trained. She had beguiled herself with books, with romance and poetry, with the language which came by first impulse to her lips, but now she understood what a lie she had been living all these wasted years.
Late in the evening, long after Nancy's feelings had been outraged into a state of numbness, the coarse abuse of the bride brought signs of reaction. The befuddling effects of the wine were wearing off and some began to feel compassion for the girl who had borne so unflinchingly a measure of evil treatment which even they, with many memories of such bride-baiting, had never seen matched. Sympathies veered. Those who had held their tongues through the worst indignities now commenced to find them; their appetite for cruelty was sated. Yet the irony of the event was that these impulses of pity should deal the girl her sorest wound.
"Shame!" cried one man, hardier than the rest. "You are a coward to treat a girl so when her heart must be sorrowing for the death of her father."
The remark, uttered with such loud scorn, hushed the mob for a moment. In their sport many had forgotten Nancy's bereavement; some had never known of it. The fickle crowd responded to an instant's compunction. There ensued a brief but appalling silence, and when the sport was resumed it was never with the former heartiness. Little by little the throng began to dwindle. Guests and onlookers slipped away till only the more obstinate braves, hilarious intimates of the family, stayed to stipulate with the groomsmen a feast for the morrow as the price of their leaving husband and wife to a first night's undisturbed felicity.
But the outcry of Nancy's one defender, which was a quickly forgotten incident to the others, made the torture and coarseness of the evening trivial to the wretched girl learning for the first time that her father was dead. She turned strangely calm, strangely rational, as though she never had been so gravely alive, but her one mastering desire was to talk to someone about her father, to pour out her words, to make him live on the frantic accents of her tongue.
At last the room was quiet. The candles had been changed for those which should burn through the night. Nancy's mother-in-law appeared to speak a few formal phrases to the bride and to see that the attending women were doing their part properly in making her ready for bed. Then the bridegroom, amid fresh jesting on the part of his family, was led to the chamber. Nancy did not sit up to look at him, but waited till the others had withdrawn. She heard them tittering outside, but she paid no heed to other people, once the heavy doors had been shut. With slow scrutinizing gaze she stared at the youth who stood timidly beside the bed. It was the first time she had seen him.
Ming-te had a face marked both by intelligence and by weakness. He was handsome, with quick bright eyes, a skin of singular clarity, a slightness of figure which made him seem younger than the girl he had married. His distaste for being confined in this embarrassing loneliness with his bride made him seem the weaker of the two, and Nancy knew by instinct that he was no match for her strong will. His family had overplayed their part in rousing his courage with wine; he was trembling from the effects of sickness, the nausea of unfamiliar drunkenness, and failed of confidence to meet Nancy's look.
"Is my father dead?" the girl suddenly asked him.
He stammered with surprise at the directness of this question.
"Yes," at last he nerved himself to admit.
"How long have you known it?"
"I—I have known it—I don't know when I knew it."
"And you let them do all these things when you knew my father was dead?"
The boy opposed a sullen reserve. He felt it was wrong that he should submit to scolding on the first night of his wedding, but he was glad for any excuse to talk. He was afraid of this outspoken foreigner. Nancy divined his thoughts.
"Did you wish to be married?" she asked. "Your parents made you, I suppose. You had to be here, didn't you? I didn't. I married to please my father."
There was pride in her voice, pride ill assorted with the humiliation she had suffered, with the sorrow her heart seemed not large enough to contain.
"I didn't please him. I killed him. I don't belong to you," she cried, with a sudden gust of bitterness that showed her shame had not been forgotten. "I don't belong to you. I married to make my father happy, and he isn't happy. You are only a schoolboy; you don't understand these things. I don't see you; I see my father. I don't even think of you; I think of him. They knew he was dead and yet they went on with this marriage. They deceived me and tricked me into coming here when I ought to be at home and weeping. They put up red candles and sent the red chair for me when they knew he was dead. They pulled you away from your books, did they, all because they were afraid they would lose the money my father promised? And so they forced you to marry a foreigner—how many taels was it?"
Ming-te stood like the schoolboy Nancy declared him to be. His attitude suggested dread of the ferule poised above his head.
"I am sorry for you," Nancy went on. "No luck will come out of this marriage." She looked at the huge gilt characters on the scarlet banners which lined the wall. "Hsi! Hsi! Hsi! Hsi!" she exclaimed, mocking their message of happiness. "Happiness everywhere, paper happiness. There is no happiness in your heart or mine, and you know it. Your own ancestors would cry out against the blasphemy. I would never have worshiped them to-day if I had known my father was dead. We have disgraced them. I thought your family were an honorable family, that they used to be officials, that they served the Emperor, yet they have shown themselves no better than small-livered coolies. Happiness!" she muttered again with intense passion. "What happiness can result from dishonoring the dead?"
Suddenly she forgot the awkward boy at her side. The aching freshness of her loss made her too miserable to defy him. She choked down a sob of despair, hiding her face in the gayly embroidered pillow.
"Oh, my father, my father, my father," she wailed, "why did you leave me, why did you leave me alone, why couldn't you stay with me! I want you!"
It was the first time her spirit had given way, the first time she had broken down through all the prolonged travail which had brought her so fearfully step by step to this unendurable moment. And as if to seize the advantage of her defeat, the door opened; her new parents appeared. They were white with anger at the tales of the eavesdroppers who had been listening to the events of the bridal chamber from outside and had heard Nancy upbraiding her irresolute master.
"You call yourself a man," scoffed the mother, seizing her son, "you a man, to be bullied by your wife on her bridal night, to let her devil of a tongue steal your courage? Small joy shall we have from such a yellow-mouthed milksop as you!"
She bundled him like a disobedient truant into bed, taunting him with her sarcasm, stinging him into hatred for the girl who had made him ridiculous, till he did not care whether he stifled her bruised body with his passion.
News of Herrick's death reached Ronald Nasmith almost as quickly as it reached the family of the dead man. The t'ai-t'ai was anxious to settle the business of his estate and lost no time in sending Edward, who could speak English, as her ambassador.
Ronald was at home when the boy came. He brought him into his own study, for he knew, after one glance at his face, the errand upon which he had come.
"My father is dead," said Edward, sitting stiffly on the edge of his chair. He could make no more than this simple statement.
"I thought he must be," Ronald answered, "but where is Nancy? Why didn't she come with you?"
He was afraid to hear the answer, but hear it he must.
"She is married. She was married yesterday."
Ronald toyed nervously with an ivory paper-cutter on his desk.
"Only yesterday," he said at last; "and when did your father die?"
"He died yesterday too."
"And who sent you to me?"
"The t'ai-t'ai."
"I understand."
He did understand much for which it was hopeless to seek words.
"This will be your home now," he told Edward, "your home till we can put you in a proper school. I promised your father that. You don't wish to live there, do you, now that your father has gone and Nancy has gone?"
"No," the boy answered bravely.
"Now I must see what I can do. Your father left me a lot of business to finish. But you must come with me and help me. I might not make myself clear and there will be a lot I shall need you to explain."
The boy accepted all that he said without question. Together they returned to the mourning household, which mocked the clear sunshine of the streets with its gloom. Ronald had unutterable thoughts as he entered the gate from which Nancy had gone out one day too soon in the loneliness of her scarlet chair. He could not bear to dwell upon this picture, but asked to see the body of her father and went with a sigh of weariness upon his lips into the room where with difficulty, with much labored unbending of stiff limbs, they had laid out the corpse. The boy was afraid to come in. Ronald stood by himself and looked at a face which made death terrible.
The women had taken up their burden of wailing when he entered the house; harshly the noise struck his ears, for in Herrick's quiet features he could find no answer to the riddle of why the dead man had lived only to come to this pitiless ending. His only satisfaction was to see that Herrick did not sleep peacefully, that he had not died content; the restless lines in Herrick's face told their own story.
The ill-fated time of his death had upset his unstable family. The women could not face this blow right on the heels of their excitement at Nancy's wedding. In their panic over what their future might be, they had neglected the first rites of the dead and were weeping uselessly, undecided what respect they should pay to the dead man whom, despite his years of pretension, they remembered only as a foreigner.
But the t'ai-t'ai was recovering her wits when Ronald asked for her.
"She wants," Edward explained, after the formalities of the meeting had been dealt with, "first of all to settle the business of Nancy's marriage. My father promised to give ten thousand taels when she went to her new family, but he died so quickly that he had no time to do this."
"Yes, I know," said Ronald, "he told me about it and that he expected to pay this himself. But I can't do anything yet."
The woman interrupted with a demand from Edward as to what he was saying. She seemed suspicious and unwilling to let him proceed more than two or three sentences without having his words explained. Edward was visibly embarrassed.
"She wants that money now because that was promised and Nancy's new parents will be angry if they don't get it. It is more important than anything else."
"They will get it," said Ronald, "but I can't do anything just now. I can't touch a cent till your father's will is proved."
Edward did not understand this last sentence, so Ronald expressed his meaning at greater length.
"You see," he said, "your father was an Englishman, not a Chinese, and subject to English law. Even though he lived in Chinese style and kept Chinese customs, that makes no difference. His death must be reported to the British minister and all his papers have to be inspected, and his will, which tells how he wishes his money divided, this must be read and allowed. Before this is done the bank will not recognize me as his trustee and will refuse to pay me any money, no matter how many checks I choose to write."
The boy, still puzzled, did his best to explain these details to the t'ai-t'ai, but it was clear that she was not satisfied.
"She wants you to pay the ten thousand taels," Edward said, "then you can take it later from my father's money. She wants you please to do this—never mind about the other money; she can wait for that, but this money she must have, because Nancy's family will be very angry."
Ronald laughed.
"I haven't ten thousand taels," he declared, "or even half the sum—and am never likely to have. There is nothing else to be done. She will have to wait."
The t'ai-t'ai did not believe these statements. He was being polite. Of course he had ten thousand taels. What foreigner didn't have ten thousand taels? She returned again and again, in most tiresome pertinacity, to her request that Ronald pay this money at once, waving aside his most patient explanations as though she had never heard them. It was a strange thing, she remarked at last, that the wife of the dead man could not be trusted to dispose of his money: that a stranger had to be called in.
"But that's just the point," Ronald replied with much exasperation; "the t'ai-t'ai, whatever she may be in Chinese law, is no wife at all by English law. Mr. Herrick remained a British subject; he could not become Chinese legally, despite his wish to do so, and therefore, unless he married the t'ai-t'ai at the legation, which I very much doubt, she is no wife in English eyes. Just for that very reason he called me in to help, so that I could safeguard the interests of his family and see that they did not suffer through his death."
He succeeded at last, by Edward's faltering assistance, in driving these facts home. The t'ai-t'ai resigned herself to the existence of troublesome laws and to the more immediate point that her hopes of securing her money hung entirely on Mr. Nasmith's good offices. There would be no profit in making him angry.
"There is another thing," Ronald continued, when he saw that she was in a more amenable mood; "as a trustee, I feel especially responsible for Mr. Herrick's two English-born children. Of course I recognize that one of them, by her marriage, is now outside my control. But over Edward here I have been placed as guardian by the authority of his father. Naturally I expect him to come to my home, and I think when he does that you will understand that your responsibility for his future ceases."
The t'ai-t'ai had no objection to offer to this arrangement, which her husband some months before his death had explained to her. She certainly did not wish to be burdened with the problem of Edward.
"But to Nancy too," said Ronald, "I feel a sense of duty. I did not approve of her marriage and did my best to persuade her father against it. Personally I would have been willing, if he had died earlier, to offer the ten thousand taels just to set her free from what has always seemed to me an unjust engagement for a girl of her age. If my powers as trustee allowed of this,—I can't be certain, of course, that they did,—I would have taken this risk of disobeying her father's wishes. Well, it's too late to discuss that. Our ways, you see, and yours are different. A few years of Chinese education couldn't make Nancy a Chinese; I am sure of it. But she is married; that can't be mended; we have to make the best of it and I want to see that the best is made of it."
The t'ai-t'ai pricked up her ears at Edward's tactful translation of this speech. She wondered just what Ronald had in mind when he wished to see that the best was being made of Nancy's wedding. Ronald, however, explained himself further.
"I want to speak to Nancy herself," he said, "and have her own assurance that she is being well treated. I presume that she will be coming back to her father's house soon, won't she?"
"She has to stay three days with her husband," Edward took it upon himself to answer; "then the wedding will be finished and she can come here for a day. That is our custom. Even though our father is dead, they will not permit her to come before three days."
"And a nice home-coming it will be!" Ronald groaned. "A cheerful place to return to. Please tell the t'ai-t'ai that when Nancy returns I must be here to see her and speak to her. I don't know what the Chinese custom is in such a case, but this is absolutely necessary if I am to perform my duties as a trustee in a satisfactory manner."
Edward communicated this demand, to which the t'ai-t'ai gave a shrug of consent. There was nothing these foreigners appeared incapable of asking, but she was too wholly in the man's power. It was no time to quibble.
With this promise safely gained, Ronald told Edward to gather up his things. It was not healthy for the boy to stay a minute longer than necessary in a household where everyone's thoughts dwelt round the corpse of the dead master. Edward went to his work listlessly and came back sniffing and weeping after the woebegone task of dismantling the room he had occupied so long. Neither the sympathetic help of his amah cheered him nor the welcome of his new home, where David, awed by the distinction of one who had lost his father, tried cautiously to say the appropriate word. Edward wanted Nancy; his heart was hungering for her even when he thought he mourned for his father.
On the third day he went with his Uncle Ronald, as already he had been taught to call his guardian, to see the sister who had become a bride.
His own eagerness, if he had known it, did not exceed Ronald's. The intervening day had been a busy one. Ronald had been to the legation to have Herrick's will admitted to probate. He found friends who had known Herrick long ago and who were avid for every last detail of Herrick's story, but they could suggest no scheme for saving Nancy. It was a rotten business, they agreed with some emphasis, but a matter which could not be helped, for Nancy, by wedding a Chinese husband, had forfeited British protection. Ronald might use pressure, and they hoped he would, to get the girl away from her husband,—there was not one of them who expected the marriage to end in any way except drastic misery,—but he had no lawful right to divert any of Herrick's estate for the purpose. The estate, through remarkably clever investments, had once been close to a fortune, but recently Herrick's intemperate withdrawals had reduced it till it was barely enough to cover the terms of his will.
So Ronald went impatiently to meet Nancy, determined that if she gave him the slightest encouragement he would break all the laws of the land to rescue her. Early though he went, the bride had arrived before him and had given way to a frenzy of sorrow beside her father's coffin. She had not yet put on mourning, for the mother-in-law had deemed it an unlucky thing to interrupt the first festal days with any mark of sadness. So she had come, oddly enough, wearing a red skirt; but any suggestion of happiness had been erased by the stains of grief which made her eyes dull in their sunken pits and her skin a bloodless white.
It was the first chance Nancy had had to yield to her passionate misery: for three days she had struggled against tears, trying to preserve some semblance of joy in a family which paid no heed to the death of her father. The rites of the wedding were dragged out till she was on the point of fainting under the cruel burden. She felt no love for the husband who had been goaded into claiming her, and suffered bridal intimacies from one who became worse than a stranger in her eyes. Beneath his treatment she felt the hostility of a youth who had not desired this foreigner for his wife, and beneath the treatment she met from her new mother she felt the exasperation over delay in the payment of her dowry, disappointment taking unkind shapes because the woman had never forgiven herself for selling her son into what was likely to prove a bad bargain. For three days the family had been most deliberately merry, trying to face out their regrets in the sight of the world; they had been reckless of how they spent money, but thrifty of a single friendly word to the girl whose heart was breaking while she pretended to smile. At last they had let her go home to weep.
When Nancy, who had comforted herself before marriage with the hope of coming back to see her father, realized that he too had deserted her and that she had not won him a single day's peace by her sacrifice, she threw herself down beside his coffin and wept till her body seemed torn apart by her grief. Edward, who in his turn was ready to break down, understood the sudden need to control himself, so that when the time came he could comfort his sister in his affectionate boyish manner and bring her away to the room where Ronald was waiting.
Nancy was dazed at seeing Ronald. She did not seem to know why he was there. Her mind still lingered with her father. She had only perfunctory words to spare for the living, while Ronald could hardly check the temptation to carry her away by force, to carry her out of sight and sound of this baneful household. Everything he wanted to say froze on his lips. He had no heart to reproach the girl for persisting in the wedding she might have stopped. With her face marred by grief, he could not ask her if she were happy, if she were contented with her new home. The words would have mocked their own meaning.
"Nancy," he did at last summon courage to say, "it is no use weeping over the dead any more. It doesn't help them at all. If your father doesn't know, then your tears are wasted; if he does know, then he will be the more unhappy to see you so sad. The living are what we have to think of—you and Edward. If you want your father to have peace, wherever he has gone, you must help him not to worry over you. You must let him know that you have peace yourself. Edward he won't worry about because he asked me to take charge of him and so Edward has come to my sister's to live, but you every one of us will worry about till we are sure that you are well and happy. That's what you must tell me: you can speak as frankly as you choose; there is no one here who dares to interrupt, but I must know how I can help you."
"You can't help me," answered Nancy.
She was quieter now, but the hysterical stillness of her manner frightened Ronald.
"That is no answer," exclaimed Ronald.
He was annoyed by the girl's obstinacy, which she had inherited in too full measure from her father.
"You surely can be frank with me," he added, "because I may never again be in such a position to help you. You know that I have your father's estate to divide. As long as the money, which includes ten thousand taels which were to be paid at your wedding, as long as this remains in my hands I can make almost any terms you may wish with the t'ai-t'ai. But when it has been divided, then my power will be gone. Now do you regret your bargain? Are you sorry you kept to this marriage? Do tell me now, when I can help you."
He had realized Nancy's stubbornness; he had not measured her pride.
"My marriage is what I expected," she answered.
How could she tell him the shame of the last three days? How could she relate the scornful treatment of her new family? She might have told Kuei-lien; she had no words to speak of it to Ronald. She could not run to him like a weakling tired of her promise. To endure the mischances of her marriage was no more than keeping faith with her father's good name. She was a wife; that was the end of it. But Ronald seemed to read her thoughts.
"I don't know what your new home is like," he argued, "but I do know what you are like, and I can hardly imagine you happy under the conditions you will find there. Just now your sorrow for your father makes everything else seem of small account, but the time will come when the sharpness will wear off and you will have to think of the man you have married and the life you have adopted. For it is an adopted life; it is not natural to you. Now your father is dead, don't make a mistake of your loyalty to him and think you have to embrace years of misery merely to gratify his memory. That's not good enough. They don't want you—I can see that; they only want the money that was promised with you. Nothing would please them better than to get this money without the necessity of taking you. You are a foreigner and always will be a foreigner to them. Can't you come home with Edward and me, and I will promise, if I have to move heaven and earth, to get your marriage annulled."
"If they want my money, they have to take me," said Nancy stubbornly.
She was not doing justice to Ronald's proposal, while the man, in his turn, was far from seeing her marriage as she saw it. She could not appreciate how in his foreign eyes her marriage was no marriage, nor could he see how to her Chinese eyes it was a bond from which there was but one honorable escape for the wife, the extreme measure of suicide. Ronald had been reading deeply in the customs of the Chinese the better to understand Nancy's case, but he missed the essential fact of her attitude, the value she set by her good name. To have run away because she was displeased with her first three days of wedded life seemed an act of intolerable cowardice. Nancy's every thought was Chinese, more Chinese than Kuei-lien's: she had an inbred fear of disgrace, not only for her own sake but for her father's whose reputation rested helplessly in her care. So she met Ronald's most persuasive entreaties with the same blank answer. If she had grounds for quarreling with her husband or with his parents it was no business of an outsider to know of them.
At last Ronald despaired of moving her. He gave up the attempt. He was as sure as he was sure of his own love for the girl that she was unhappy in her new home and would grow week by week unhappier, but she was less responsive to his words now than before her marriage. He threw down his hands with a hopeless gesture, inwardly cursing the folly of Timothy Herrick, which was able to survive him in such fatuously obdurate wrong-headedness. Nancy's white, troubled face reminded him of his first glimpse of her in the temple. How much greater was her danger to-day than in that first perilous meeting. How much less he could help her. Unable to leave the girl without one sign of his deep overmastering passion, he crossed the room and kissed her gently on the forehead.
"I shall always love you, Nancy," he said.
Nancy trembled a little beneath the touch of his lips, but the kiss came so naturally that she had no time to be surprised and could only wonder long afterward at the trance which had held her silent under so strange a greeting, so strange a token of farewell.
Ronald did not see Nancy again until the day of Timothy Herrick's funeral. On that dreary day she was more remote than ever, wearing her headdress of white sackcloth and weeping loudly. Even Edward, who had thrown off many vestiges of his Chinese upbringing in the short time he had lived with the Ferrises, fell back disconcertingly into old habits and was as Chinese as Herrick's half-caste children when he had donned his coat of coarse bleached calico.
Ronald rightly insisted that as Herrick had lived so should he be buried, and he advised the t'ai-t'ai to spare none of the rites suitable to a mandarin of her husband's rank. He brought Beresford with him to the funeral. Beresford was intrigued by the many peculiar rites, but Ronald listened to it all with insufferable weariness and wondered if the priests were ever to be finished chanting their guttural prayers. Each stroke of bell and drum seemed to remove Nancy farther than ever from his hopes, tangling her spirit in an alien region from which she would never come out again. He saw nothing picturesque in the great scarlet catafalque put over Herrick's coffin, the silk umbrellas, the tables with their food for the dead, the spirit chair intricately wrapped in white muslin, the horrid crayon copy of Herrick's photograph, borne in a chair of its own, the bright silken copes of the priests, their contrast with the rags of the beggars, who carried white banners certifying to the merits of the dead, the green-clad coolies who labored with the weight of the coffin, the pervading smell of incense and burning sandalwood—these were all details which Ronald might have noted with an interested eye if he had not been oppressed by their meaning for Nancy. It was her tragedy that when those who loved her could bring the girl no comfort, she had to seek relief in this pitiless barbarity which seemed to sing her father's failure, his exile from his own people, his cheerless sojourn in the cold places of the dead.
All this Ronald heard in the weird music of the procession, as the coffin and its mourners moved slowly toward the gates of the city; he felt that the road Timothy Herrick was traveling, this same road there was no one to prevent his daughter from taking, despite all her lovable instincts for joy and for beauty—no one good enough to prevent her from following in her own desolate hour.
Beresford, however, thought the whole funeral very splendid. So much better, he declared, than being reminded of the skin-worms, and forced to linger in the sickly smell of a church which had been banked like a flower-seller's shop while bald-headed gentlemen trundled the coffin with exaggerated slowness up the aisle. He envied Herrick's escape from those absurd rites and from being consigned into eternity by the throaty reading of a curate in a starched surplice. This brilliant procession, winding with such an unrehearsed mixture of carelessness and dignity, did seem in his eyes to express more reasonably the tragic naturalness of death. Even Ronald, before they had reached Herrick's burial-place, began to feel himself haunted by the sobbing voice of the flutes and to know that this garish splendor was the ancient and simple way of keeping up man's courage before the mystery of death. It was a shock, on coming outside the city, to see the coffin stripped of its pall, the umbrellas and chairs sent back, as though the chief object of the parade had been not to honor the unseeing dead but to win honor from the populous streets of the city, yet the quiet which ensued induced meditations that were not unpleasing though they were sad. Autumn lay with warm sunshine on the land; sloping shafts of light made the dry grass glow; wide and blue was the sky. The only sound was the low-toned note of a gong which a priest rang from time to time as he walked in front of the coffin.
Ronald was moved by the loneliness of Herrick's burial-ground. It was so tranquil that he, too, half envied the dead man's privilege of sleeping quietly with all the scenes he had loved, the serene clarity of the Western Hills, the climbing palaces of Wan Shou Shan, the towers and golden roofs of Peking, compassing from the far distance the little circle of pine and cypress round the grave. Ronald's spirit was hushed by the stillness. The man looked idly at the four characters gilded on the end of Herrick's coffin: "Hai returns to the halls of spring," they said, and for the first time Ronald believed that there was immortality in lying here beneath the open spaces of heaven. A fresh outburst of wailing, the burning of paper money, and exploding of crackers could not touch the peace of a heart fortified by the strangely comforting thought that life was soon over.
The grave was ready at two, but the hour was even-numbered, unlucky; mourners and priests and workmen waited in little gossiping groups till the more fortunate hour of three, when the coffin was lowered into the grave with the lavish sunshine pouring down upon it as if to make amends for Herrick's last sight of day. Every clod that had been dug was thrown scrupulously upon the round mound of the grave. Edward knelt down and wept; Nancy wept and bowed her forehead to the ground; the women prostrated themselves, tearing their hair and their clothes. Ronald stood watching dumbly, but he got his moment of reward when Nancy rose, for she gave him one searching look, one glance of understanding and love, over which hovered the trembling flicker of a smile. She showed she had not forgotten his kiss; this was her answer. So completely, indeed, had Nancy seemed to belong to him throughout all the tedious hours of the funeral that Ronald remembered afterward, with some amazement, that among the gathering of the t'ai-t'ai's family, which followed the coffin, he had not knowingly set eyes upon or even thought of singling out Nancy's husband.
After Herrick had been buried, there was nothing to keep him from dividing what remained of his money. Ronald was anxious to be done with the task. He exacted but one promise, a promise from the t'ai-t'ai that when Nancy's first month of married life was complete and the girl, as custom allowed, was able to sleep a few nights under another roof than her husband's, she should come to his sister's home instead of the father's house she ought to have visited. This was reasonable, for Edward was the only kinsman left to her.
Herrick's pretentious household melted away. Each wife, when she received her money, took pains to put herself out of the t'ai-t'ai's reach. There was none of them that wished to be slave to that arrogant lady. With a contemptuous smile she watched them scatter. After they and their children and their bundles and bedding and their wrangling servants had gone, she gave up the lease of the house Herrick had occupied so long, sold what she could of his furniture, and betook herself to her brother's. Of the line her husband had been so ambitious to found, literally not even the name remained.
Ronald took care to obtain and note the t'ai-t'ai's address; Nancy's bridal month was so nearly finished that he could not govern his eagerness to have her come. The rest of Herrick's family he made no effort to trace. Except the amah, who of course remained with Edward, they might scatter to the winds for all he cared. But suddenly one evening when the Ferrises had finished dinner a hubbub in the kitchen woke them from the lethargy of worrying about Nancy, for Edward's presence among them had been a continual reminder of his sister's absence; they jumped up in alarm when the old nurse rushed gasping into the room, crying out, "They've gone, they've gone!" It took them some minutes to understand what she meant. Not till Kuei-lien appeared and rapidly poured out her story to Edward was the cause of the amah's excitement understood.
To their consternation they learned that the t'ai-t'ai had broken her promise. She had gone with her brother and his whole family back to their native town of Paoling. And Nancy, as naturally she must do, had gone with them. It was the last blow.
The other details of Kuei-lien's story were more interesting to Edward than to his discouraged guardian. The one fact which might have been of use, her coming from the same town as the t'ai-t'ai, was robbed of advantage because the girl did not dare nor intend to go home. If she had done so she would have been handed over to the t'ai-t'ai by her stupid and covetous family. She was the single one of Herrick's concubines whom his wife had tried to retain. Her parents were dependents of the Chou family, absolutely under their orders, while the t'ai-t'ai not only did not like losing a slave of Kuei-lien's beauty and cleverness but still more regretted letting her escape with the money she had gathered. Their separation had cost them a quarrel. The t'ai-t'ai had commanded the concubine to remain, had threatened to hold her boxes and to have the girl beaten. If Kuei-lien had been less bountiful in bribing the servants, she could not have got away. The t'ai-t'ai's stinginess had proved her safety.
So Kuei-lien, meditating new plans, lay low. She cultivated the friendship of the amah, husbanded the money she owned, while she looked for chances to get more. And because she maintained some slight connection with Pao-ling and might get them news of Nancy, the Ferrises were pleased to let her stay. They did not guess a tenth of her plans nor realize that she was using the shelter of their servant quarters to let it be known she was under foreign protection, that any offense offered to her would be visited upon the offender by the King and Parliament of Great Britain.
As for poor Nancy, the King and Parliament of Great Britain had lost interest in her. The secluded Chihli village of Paoling kept her as hidden from prying strangers as the fastnesses of Turkestan. Nancy had never been told of the promise that she should visit Edward in his new home. She was saved this disappointment. But she knew it was the last step away from her friends when her mother-in-law summoned her to pack and to get up long before dawn for the cold dark ride to the station. Long as she had lived in Peking, the city was a place strange and unfamiliar to the girl, yet she conceived a fondness even for the arches and walls she barely could descry in the darkness, for she felt she should never set eyes upon them again.
With the rest of her husband's family she bundled uncomfortably into a third-class carriage, squeezing herself so tightly between baskets and bedding that she sat as though cramped stiffly in a vise. Everyone spoke shrilly; the early hour, the bitterly frosty morning, had set their tempers on edge. No one was in a mood to enjoy the novelty of a railway ride. Nancy looked wearily at the dingy houses they passed, wondered if their occupants could be unhappier than she was; she saw in the distance the blue roofs of the Temple of Heaven, but paid no heed; if her legs had not been so stiff, her whole body aching from the need of movement, she might have gone to sleep counting the numbers of the telegraph poles. Her mind did go to sleep; her body persisted in staying painfully awake.
She was grateful to get off the train, grateful to shake her numb legs into life, pulling boxes and bales quickly out of the car. The t'ai-t'ai and her mother-in-law gave contradictory orders, they wrangled and shouted, pulling servants helter-skelter, scolding Nancy, scolding her husband; they were only one of many groups invoking heaven and hell in their panic lest the train should start before the last bundle had been rolled out of the window.
By a miracle they got themselves untangled and down to the platform, where the women sank breathless on rolls of bedding, waiting for a bargain to be struck with the mule-drivers. This was not quickly nor quietly done and Nancy, used to having these small matters arranged without her presence, despaired of its ever being done at all. To the mule-drivers and their opponents, however, the hiring of a cart was more heady business than speech in a public forum. Not till vulgar interest was diverted to Nancy, whose presence in this company became an eighth day's wonder, did the arguing parties see that their prominence of the moment had passed; they made the same bargain they could have made half an hour back. Chou hsien-sheng swore he was cheated, the drivers swore they were robbed, but the price they fixed had been the unchanging rate for a decade.