Nancy was glad to get into her cart, even to be thriftily crowded among three women servants and a suffocating mass of baggage. She had not enjoyed the ring of staring eyes which had surveyed her nor the coarse guesses of the people as to her history, guesses loudly and impudently debated with many rustic guffaws over the joke of a foreigner reduced to Chinese clothes and the whims of a Chinese master.
All day long the carts moved slowly forward, lumbering in ruts, shaking the teeth of their passengers on miles of chipped highway, ploughing deep through sand. Nancy was acutely mindful of other mule-cart journeys, the rides to the Western Hills, when Edward and Kuei-lien had been her comrades and each new turn of the road had tempted their eyes to objects of joyful interest. She was scornful of the ignorant maids squashed into this unpleasant contact, closed her eyes to avoid seeing their puffy faces; their few monosyllables were like a parody of human speech. They wheezed and grunted and reeked of garlic till Nancy wondered why she could not withdraw all her senses, as she had withdrawn her sense of sight, and shut herself from these clownish wenches like a mussel in its shell.
Shortly before dark the carts lurched down the sunken streets of Paoling. It was like all the other villages they had passed, dusty and poor. Dikes of baked mud served for walls. Two policemen lounged at the gate as though the place were not worth their vain offer of protection. Mud and gray tile and leafless trees, streets without shops, worn into deep trenches, people clothed in rags so dirty that the very patches were blended to a greasy uniformity of color—not an item relieved the drab scene. And the home of her husband, Nancy found, was a consistent part of its surroundings. It was filthy, musty, and cold, a huge ramshackle place replete with tottering chairs and tables, its stone floors overlaid with grime, its courtyards heaped with dung. Only rats and spiders seemed fit to inhabit such a place and Nancy's heart became chill with dismay when she thought of dragging out her life in this cheerless hole.
In a panic of sheer terror she was taken to greet Ming-te's grandmother, the matriarch of the clan, the old lady whose temper she had heard discussed with lively fear during the month she had been married. She shrank from being led to something more terrible than any of the evil things she had seen. Her nerves were so unstrung by the weariness and misery, the depressing finish of the day, that she was ready to shriek. She halted stock-still in a room ill lit by native wicks.
"Kneel," chided the voice of her mother-in-law.
Nancy knelt and kowtowed three times before the august personage to whose face she had not yet presumed to raise her eyes. She waited, prostrate on the floor.
"Lift her, you fools," cried a voice that showed by its testiness it was used to being obeyed. "Can't you see she is worn with weariness?"
The other women hastened to help Nancy to her feet. The girl looked wonderingly at the little old woman who sat muffled in quilted satin on the k'ang. From a face crossed and transcrossed with wrinkles burned eyes whose haughtiness spoke an older and a finer generation than the women to whom Nancy had been subjected. Her mother-in-law's were dog's eyes compared with them. Nancy lost her fear. The eyes brought memories of her father. They seemed to pierce, with their sadness, their cynical discontent, the very mysteries of life.
"Come here, my child," said the old woman gently. "Come and sit with me and tell me how you are. I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."
In the first relief that followed this kindly greeting, Nancy nearly broke down. Tears welled to her eyes, do what she would to hold them back. She could not help sobbing, but the old woman stroked her hands as though she knew the misery pent up in the heart of this alien bride.
"My husband and your father were friends," she said, "and I am glad that his daughter has become my granddaughter. But it's hard, isn't it?"
She gave a little chuckle, seeming to appreciate her own experiences as a bride in years which only a handful of bent gray figures like herself still lived to remember. Nancy could have lived as long without forgetting this reception by the wise old woman whose harsh tongue she had been taught to dread. It came with such sudden, blinding beauty at the end of a comfortless journey, at the end of four suffering weeks in which her spirit had been tortured nearly to the limits of its endurance!
Nancy would have suffered much from the women, from her mother-in-law and from her stepmother—for the latter visited on the daughter her anger over the justice of Timothy Herrick's will—and even at the hands of lesser people, who took their pattern from this spiteful pair, but she had hoped for some measure of sympathy, some pity, even if there could not be love, from the youthful stranger, Ming-te, who had been given the rights of a husband over her life.
In this she was disappointed. Ming-te felt that there was no one with a grievance comparable to his own. His parents, however much they might dislike this foreigner in the family, had invited her by their own choice. But he had been given no choice.
Like most youths of his modern day, he detested being bound by an early marriage even to a girl of his own race; he detested being set to breed heirs for the pleasure of his parents. He envied the new laxities of Shanghai and Peking, the parody of Western freedom carried on under the guise of choosing one's wife for one's self. He was eager to push aside convention, to realize republican liberty by bursting all restraint; he was a student, member of a class bound by no laws of right or reason, to whom all things ought to be allowed in the pursuit of knowledge; yet just when his imagination had begun to run riot over the thought of embracing slim girl students to the mutual advancement of their studies, when he was becoming conscious of his own sacred importance as the hope of China and the flower of creation, he had been put under restraint like his forefathers, suddenly, brutally married, his hopes dashed. And his sacrifice had been unmentionably worse than theirs; he, the heir of the ages, had amounted to so little in the eyes of his elders that they had flung him a foreigner for a bride!
So Ming-te, the handsome, spoiled idol of his parents, took his marriage in bad grace and vented his spleen on Nancy. He did not take the trouble to see whether here might not be the ideal comrade of whom he had prated so freely in the safe company of his friends; he had made up his mind to dislike the girl long before he set eyes upon her. The disgrace of his bridal night, his sheepishness, the mockery of his family, of which he still heard the echoes, were an added score to be wiped out. And because he could not avenge himself on her mind he tried to avenge himself on her body, for at heart he was afraid of Nancy; at heart he realized her contempt for his shallowness and conceit; he seemed to see her eyes despising him as a weakling, a petulant small boy, till she challenged him to ecstasies of cruelty to prove that he was indeed her master.
Nancy had learned many undreamed-of things during this month, but nothing more dumbfounding than the fact that real sorrow is an experience without appeal; it has no glamour, no romance. It is like a headache which goes on forever. She wondered at the vernal innocent person she had been, blithely offering herself for a life of torture, as though it were no more than one of those tempestuous black tragedies of childhood which last for an hour, then ripple peacefully away like bird notes after a storm. It seemed so splendid to sacrifice herself, against the protests of Ronald and his nieces and Edward and Kuei-lien and even her father himself; she had been thrilled by her own daring even when her heart was cold with the prospect, so that, while she entered the bridal chair sad and afraid, longing to cling to everything she was forsaking, some small part of her could not forbear standing aside to gloat over the picturesque courage of her deed.
But she had been wakened too unmercifully from her dream; her vanity, so excusable, so childishly serious, broken by a punishment out of all justice to what it deserved. Her days of shyness were passing. She was putting off the bride to put on the shrew—in that hard-mouthed family no other role was safe—when her regrets for the folly of her sacrifice suddenly dissolved and her heart swelled with pride, with thankfulness, because she had kept faith with an old lady she had never met, who greeted her in the twilight of a gray day, saying, "I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."
The t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law were more surprised than Nancy. They were dismayed. What the old t'ai-t'ai said, she meant; she had come to an age when she did not trouble to hide her thoughts of other people, but ruled her clan, as the last of the oldest generation, with an unsparing frankness such as made them quail. Hers was a witty, biting tongue which she found life too short to think of bridling; she did not like her daughter, still less her daughter-in-law, thought none too highly of her sons, and, as for her grandchildren, she called them a litter of gaping puppies. Her mind was a catalogue of their faults; she could make the best of them wince with a single sharply prodding phrase, for there was nothing ridiculous that any of them had done, and wished with all his heart to forget, that she could not recall when the occasion suited her. Grown men writhed for a pretext to get beyond earshot of her chuckle.
Yet she did not welcome Nancy kindly—as the t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law concluded—merely to annoy them. Her instinct, which always was extravagantly right, had told her that Nancy would be a friend. She did not care whether Ming-te had a wife or not, but she longed for someone young, someone talented and pretty, to whom she could talk and be kind. Her own family bored her. She yawned when she thought of them. They were a small, petty-minded generation, while her memory dwelt upon the large days of the past. Her loyalty was all to the past, to her husband and his father, to the family in its time of splendor, before its name had been dragged in the dust by a progeny that forsook their books and squabbled over cash like beggars fighting in the street. So she had ruled them with a testy loneliness, glad to be alive only because she knew they would be glad if she were dead.
Her first glimpse of Nancy satisfied the keen-sighted old tyrant. She drew the pale girl to her side like a child.
"It's a long time since I've seen anyone really young," she said, "young and wise together as they used to be. Now we have a republic; men don't trouble about wisdom and they think they can rule the eighteen provinces before they have left off their mother's milk. You have read books, I have heard, and can write poems. Your father would see to that. He knew our customs. He was one of us."
She could be tactful when she chose; in her questions about the death of Nancy's father she soothed rather than irritated the quick feelings of the daughter.
"To die on the day of your wedding, ai, that was a strange thing. I have lived many years, but I have never heard the like. That was a proof that he loved you, my child. You must remember such a father. And you have a brother, too; where is he?"
Nancy told the story of Edward's friends.
"So you have Western friends. How did you come to make them?"
Paragraph by paragraph she drew from Nancy's lips the tale of how they had met and visited the Ferrises. The old lady enjoyed the freshness of the girl's story. She wanted most exact details of how these foreigners lived.
"It must have surprised them to see one of their own blood living in the fashion of a Chinese. Did you like their ways?"
"Sometimes," Nancy admitted.
"Do you like our ways better?"
Nancy was surprised at the question and reluctant to answer.
"Perhaps—sometimes," suggested the old grandmother, answering herself, and turned to laugh at the shadow of the smile Nancy could not hide.
"Don't be afraid of me," she said, patting the girl's hand from pleasure at her own jest. "I shall be your father and your mother from this time forth—hm-m, just like a magistrate, remember. You can tell your troubles to me as freely as you please and, even if the walls have ears, they won't dare speak till I let them."
Her words lulled Nancy into a pleasing warmth of security. She forgot her weariness, the despair with which she had risen this very morning to start on a hopeless journey, for the old t'ai-t'ai's words were spoken with the authority of one who could promise peace when she wished and protection to those she liked. And she really liked Nancy.
"Your Western friends," she resumed, "they must have been appalled by your marrying a Chinese. Did they try to dissuade you?"
"Yes, they did try."
"Ah, of course, they wouldn't understand. And perhaps they were right. You may go back to them some day; who knows?"
"Oh no, I shall never go back to them," Nancy protested, dreading lest the woman should doubt her loyalty to the promise she had made.
"Young people, my daughter, should never use the word 'never.' When you are as old as I am and have to think soberly of the spring winds as not just a chance to fly kites, then 'never' means something; ah, it means too much. There is so much happiness I shall never know again, so many faces I shall never see. But you, with your handful of years, there is no 'never' for you. You thought to-day you would never smile again. You had heard of me, hadn't you, and trembled to meet a bad-tempered old grandmother; don't deny it—I saw it in your face when they made you kneel. I shall not be bad-tempered to you, child. We old people like to have flowers about us. I shall be selfish of your company and most surely will begrudge you to others. And will you be sorry? Aha, I don't think you will. Your father must have taught you wisely for you remind me of children as they used to be when I was young. I am tired of being waited on by servant maids or by people who wonder when I'm going to die. Why should I die just to make fools more comfortable in their folly! No, I shall not be bad-tempered to you, because you are the first person I have had round me for years who really wished me to live. But I'm not going to share you."
How firm were her intentions was soon shown, for Nancy's mother-in-law came in to say, in a voice too carefully matter-of-fact, that if the old t'ai-t'ai had been gracious to say all she wished to the 'hsi-fu,' they hoped she would give her permission to withdraw, for there was much work to be done and her room to be set right.
"And whose work, indeed, is she to do, if not mine?" asked the old t'ai-t'ai. "Her room we can discuss later, but to-night her room will be here."
"Oh, but that would not be convenient," faintly protested the younger woman; "we must not separate the bride from her husband. My mother speaks this out of her kind heart, but surely it would make my mother uncomfortable."
"It will be entirely convenient," snapped the dowager.
"Very well, that is only what we wished to be sure of," said Ming-te's mother hastily, "we wanted to make sure of your comfort."
Yet the next day she was still so far from being satisfied of the old t'ai-t'ai's comfort that she asked her sister-in-law to intercede and to get Nancy out of the old lady's clutches before it was too late. Hai t'ai-t'ai, Nancy's step-mother, was more than ready to try, for she knew that while the old lady lived, if they did not make a stand quickly, Nancy would be lost to their control. She had a portion of her mother's independence and did not cringe in the august presence as her sister-in-law was apt to do. Waiting a chance when Nancy was absent, she went boldly into the den.
"You have come to ask after my health, have you?" inquired her mother brusquely. "My health is excellent, this morning. It has done me great good to meet someone new.
"We are so glad that the foreign hsi-fu meets with your favor," lied the daughter cheerfully. "I thought of your comfort when I began to arrange the match."
"Did you? Well, you thought most intelligently, so intelligently that I have decided to keep her as my companion, to give her the room next to mine."
"Your companion, by all means," agreed Hai t'ai-t'ai, "but not too much your companion. We can never permit her to tire you with her prattle. She might become spoiled and think you were indulging her in liberties only fit for yourself. I have known her for many years and I speak the truth when I say she is difficult to control. She puts forward a good face at first, but she is an obstinate, self-willed child, not always obedient to her elders. Her training was sadly neglected because she was left to the charge of an indulgent old amah—"
"And you think her training will suffer at my hands, do you?" interrupted the old t'ai-t'ai with a laugh, "you fear that I will be another indulgent old amah to her?"
"Oh no, not at all, but we trembled to put the burden of her training in your hands."
"You are all very busy people. What is there for an old woman like myself to do? I shall be happy to take the burden of her training into my hands. When I weary of it, I have a tongue; I can tell you."
The daughter shrugged her shoulders. Nancy always had been a mischievous obstacle to her plans; and now, with her new ally, was more dangerous than ever. Her hands itched to beat the wench. But she went on in smooth tones:—
"We must be just to Ming-te."
"I am just to Ming-te."
"But he has had his bride only for a month. Is it right to leave the boy lonely without a mate for his bed? These things mean so much to the young. If he is lonely, he may go out to drink and to gamble with evil companions. He did not want to marry, yet for our sake he did even more: he married a foreigner to help his family. And now, when he is beginning to understand her excellent qualities—"
"Self-willed and obstinate," reminded the t'ai-t'ai.
"To understand her excellent qualities," continued the daughter, as though she had not heard the interruption, "and is beginning to appreciate her for his wife, you surely would not reward his unselfishness by taking her away and making her a stranger to him. What of the future of the family? How will they learn to live together in peace and harmony like—"
"Like a sparrow and a phœnix," suggested the mother wickedly. Hai t'ai-t'ai flushed in annoyance, but the dowager stopped her from speaking.
"How will they learn to live together in peace and harmony?" she echoed. "Ah, my daughter, you are old enough to answer that question, or must I answer it for you and say they never will learn. If you could have got fifteen thousand taels without this girl, would you have taken her? No, indeed not. But I would have taken her without a cash. So she belongs to me. She will never be of any use to this family because I am the only one who knows how to use her. And I am old—and I have no husband to give her. She will be safer with me. If Ming-te wants a bedfellow, get him one. You can afford to spend on him a little of the money he has earned. Buy him a nice, good-tempered, pretty wife; the country is full of them. He will be happy, you will be happy, and I shall have peace."
Nancy returned to find the formidable old t'ai-t'ai crowing over her triumph. To outwit her daughter was always tonic which put new life in her veins.
"Can you choose between your husband and me?" she asked, with her usual terrifying directness.
Nancy knew the time for a straight answer.
"I can choose," she replied.
"Bravely spoken," said the old lady in her glee, "you are too clever to be a mere bedfellow."
Nancy saw what was coming next but waited carefully so as not to miss her cue in this game of frank riddles.
"Have you seen your husband's room?"
"I have seen it."
"And what do you think of this room next to mine?"
The woman pointed to an open door. Nancy followed her indication and looked into a neat bare chamber, scoured cleaner than most of the apartments in this dilapidated house.
"The air is better here," she said smiling.
The lao t'ai-t'ai beamed with approval of her words.
"All said neatly in a phrase, as a scholar ought to say it," she thought to herself, "not a breath of complaint about her husband, not an undutiful syllable, and yet the whole story clear as the sun."
"Ai, my daughter," she said, "that is to be your room. Your wit would be wasted anywhere but here."
At the command of her mistress Nancy brought her things. She was astonished by the readiness of the other women to help her and not much daunted by their advice.
"My mother is an old woman," warned the stepmother, holding Nancy by her scowling voice, "and like all old women, much given to strong fancies. At the moment her fancy is for you and, because she may not live long, it is our natural duty to humor her. Your parents-in-law and your husband of course have agreed to this and we expect you to obey her in everything she asks and to make her comfortable, whatever the cost to yourself. But do not forget that an old woman's words are many and her memory is brief, and that while she may condescend to honor you as her companion and to say kind things to you, that gives you no excuse to be proud or to think that you are better than the rest of us. She is the head of the family; she can say what she chooses; but you are still the least of us, you have to wait your time of authority, like every person of your years, and if you let your head be turned by an old woman's flattery, then the day will come—and it may come soon—when you will have bitter lessons to learn at our hands and at the hands of your husband. I tell you this because you have been spoiled too much already; you have been indulged by your father and made a little god by a maudlin old nurse, and it would be a pity if the training we have started to give you had to be repeated with a stick merely because my worthy old mother cannot curb her passion for new faces."
Usually Nancy was cut to the quick by the malice of these speeches, but she could afford not to be angry with words which had no power to back them. There was the threat of the future indeed,—her parole hung upon the precarious life of the old dowager,—but a future threat was better than a present one. The bride was sufficiently grateful for her good fortune of the moment not to worry over her stepmother's brandished cudgel.
And for once the cudgel had been brandished more from habit than from active spite. Nancy's stepmother, in fact, had abundant reason to be content, for the old t'ai-t'ai out of her own lips had suggested a plan her daughter had been revolving in her mind, the purchase of a Chinese wife for Ming-te. She had half promised the youth a solace for his ill-sorted marriage, but it was a difficult subject to broach so soon after his wedding. Nancy might be obstinate and make trouble; the dowager, in a contrary mood, might block it. Herrick's widow was eager to inflict on the daughter the jealousy she had suffered from the father's roving desires; she planned further to help this concubine into Nancy's place till the real wife should become little better than a servant. And now, wonderfully enough, the old t'ai-t'ai, who had to be led so warily like a balky mule into every project, had blessed the scheme by proposing it from her own mouth. She was, in fact, saving her daughter much strain by breaking it to Nancy.
"I am borrowing you, heart and body, from your husband," she said; "we can quickly find a substitute for you."
"A substitute?" asked Nancy.
"Yes, a substitute to take your place by his side. If I steal you, it is only fair that he should be given another wife in your place."
"Then I don't have to go back to him?" inquired the girl with hope in her voice.
The old lady smiled.
"That was an unguarded question," she said. "I fear you are not properly disturbed at dividing your husband's affections with another. No, my child, while I live I think you will not have to go back to him. You must pray for me daily to the god of long life, for after I die—ah, we can't discuss that now. But don't you mind another bride for your husband?"
"I know that I am an unworthy match for your grandson."
"Pooh! You know nothing of the sort; don't trouble to speak in this grand manner to me. I didn't make my grandson and I am very humble about taking credit for his amiable qualities. If you had been a worthy match for Ming-te then you would never have been worthy to entertain me in my dotage. But you are still his wife and you need not efface yourself from this privilege. The new woman, whoever she may be, will be your servant as well as his and you must teach her to mind you from the first. These jades are often headstrong and they hide many a pleasant ambition under their black hair."
"I will not hinder her," said Nancy, a little sadly, though she was glad that her release from Ming-te promised for months, perhaps for years, to be so complete. She had no tender feelings for her husband, none but impulses of aversion and shame, and yet she was sad because already she seemed to see her father's splendid dream go toppling, and the Chinese marriage of his daughter fast becoming no marriage at all.
"That is not a shrewd policy in this family," observed the lao t'ai-t'ai; "you should always hinder everything. What will you do when I die?"
"I don't know what I shall do when you die. I shall not care much what I do."
"Ha, you are the only member of the family who has not laid plans for that grateful event. Even the pigs, I dare say, have disposed of the warmest parts of this chamber to rest their snouts. But never mind, we must plan that you shall not be the loser for helping me. You are staking more than you know on the choice you have made to-day."
The lao t'ai-t'ai left the subject with this vague promise. Nancy's trouble passed like a cloud; she trusted the power of her aged mistress to defend her from evil, recognizing the wisdom that drew from a fund of experience, to provide against hazards she herself saw but darkly, yet in the back of her mind still lurked a sense of pity because her marriage to Ming-te was being confessed a failure so quickly. She could not stamp out a smouldering jealousy when she saw her place being given to another and knew that her husband of a month remembered her costly sacrifice without one tender thought.
Soon the household was aflame with new plans. To take a concubine, of course, was not to take a wife. The same ceremonies could not be used: there could be no scarlet chair, no procession, no worship of heaven and earth. But everything short of full nuptial rites was proposed to give dignity to Ming-te's second wedding. Nancy could not move through the house without feeling that this, in the eyes of the family, was the real wedding and that they grudged her the few empty privileges of the wife, as though she had stolen them. On this bride they were putting their hopes, from her body they wanted Ming-te to beget sons, not from the foreigner, whose half-caste children could only be the living occasions for explanation and apology.
Hai t'ai-t'ai was as swift in forwarding this wedding as Nancy's, and, because there were no middlemen to be bargained with or gifts to be exchanged, she could soon promise the arrival of the bride whom she personally had chosen and fetched from Peking. On a sharp November day the girl arrived. The house was crowded to receive her, for all the members of the family, the neighbors, the friends, who had been unable to go up to the capital for Nancy's wedding, made the most of this second event and feasted loudly and joyfully at the expense of their hosts. Nancy stood quietly to receive the homage of her new servant. She said nothing at the feast and ate little, listening to the talk of those round her like the stranger she was. She could not help noticing how they held aloof as though they did not regard her as one of themselves. Their eyes were upon the newcomer who had displaced her, and Nancy looked too, admitting her pretty face, her dainty figure, the quick, frightened intelligence of her eyes, thinking so vividly of her own bridal day that she was ready to take the girl by the hands and call her sister.
But she failed of courage to do this. This girl, after all, was being received as a friend whereas she had been received as an enemy. The contrast was too bitter. Nancy sat out the feast to the end, she tried to abide the amusement of putting the bride to bed, lest they should hint that she was jealous, but she knew again, now that people neglected her, as she had learned with such a shock when they mocked her, that she was an alien and had no place among them. Everyone was so unfeignedly happy to-day. Ming-te did not need to be made drunk to desire his new bride. She had been cheated of this happiness. Her thought ran to her father's couplet about the sun and the moon; she had a sudden desperate longing for Ronald, for the gay, secure life of the Ferrises; she could not stand the tumult round her any longer, but fled to her dark room to hide her misery.
It might have been for hours that she wept before a hand touched her.
"Why do you care?" she heard a voice softly asking her.
Nancy looked round to see the lao t'ai-t'ai, black against the light from the next room. She stood up, ashamed to be caught weeping, remorseful at having neglected her mistress.
"Do you care?" asked the old lady.
"No," said Nancy.
"Hm-m, I didn't think you did."
The girl started to get out bedding for her mistress and help her prepare to sleep, but the woman stopped her.
"I am not ready to sleep," she said.
Her eyes burned with an unslumbering vitality Nancy had not seen before; everything they had looked upon in their seventy years seemed to be passing in review; they quickened with the pride of one who has held her own sway over time. Nancy stood spellbound before the dignity of this ancient woman who used to attend the Eastern Empress herself a whole fifty years ago; in satin and gold she was regal, but it was still her eyes which could not be forgotten, making Nancy believe there were no secrets she could not read, no mysteries she could not understand, when she brought to bear upon her own tear-blanched face the sympathy of one who has walked deep and richly through experience. From those far-off glittering days she seemed to look back at Nancy and to know why she had been weeping.
"Those tears were not for Ming-te," she said quietly.
"No, they were not for Ming-te," Nancy confessed.
"Why did your father wish to marry you to him? Were there no others? Or did he become tired?"
"He became tired," answered Nancy, scarcely knowing what she said.
"Ah, that is our weakness when we become old. We do grow tired of searching out the equal of our hopes. We have been doing it in vain for so many years that at last we think the search is useless—and then we make our mistakes. If your father had sat here to-day, he would have known that you do not belong here, not with these people."
"I belong nowhere," cried Nancy in despair.
"You don't belong with sheep and donkeys."
The old woman sat meditating. Then she smiled.
"I suppose there are sheep and donkeys the whole world over," she reflected. "Your father thought his own people were sheep and donkeys and I think mine. No, my child, you don't belong to them and you can't always belong to an old woman like me because I am old and you are young. Why were you weeping?"
"Because I was lonely and miserable," said Nancy, surprised by the abruptness of the question.
"Lonely, yes, of course, the wise are bound to be lonely. But you cannot be lonely yet. You are too young."
"I am not lonely with you," Nancy declared.
"Ha, my child, you have a way with the old. You flatter old bones like mine. But you are not yet twenty and I am seventy. I shall keep you with me; I cannot give you up. But when they carry me out to the hills there will be no place here for you. Don't you see what I have been doing?—what they have been doing too?—making it impossible for you to live here. I came here a stranger too, like yourself; ai, that was long ago. My home was in the south where it is warm and the bamboos foam up the mountain sides, but not here—" With a gesture she pictured the bleak Chihli plains, drab, leafless country which the north wind is in a desolate hurry to leave behind. "Not here—and I don't wish you to get used to the smell of horse-drench and the braying of asses. You might have got used to it, ah, that's the pity, but you never can now, for there is no place for you here. You will never be the head of this family. Ming-te has a new wife; she is your servant, yes, but the servant will become the mistress. They don't tell me that; they think I don't guess their plans; bah, they think I can live so long and be blind; but if they came to me and consulted me openly I would tell them that it is not their plan but mine."
She paused for a minute. Nancy groped for the meaning hid behind this roundabout speech.
"Why were you weeping?" suddenly asked the old t'ai-t'ai, catching her quite off her guard. Nancy did not dare to reply because she knew too well why she had been weeping. The distant music, the fear of being left alone in this dreary household after the old t'ai-t'ai had died, revived the longing for Ronald's protection; just when the thought filled her heart the abrupt question trapped the girl. She blushed, as though her shrewd old protector had detected the wish itself.
"You too, my child, hide things from me," playfully scolded the lao t'ai-t'ai. Then she surprised the girl by another quick turn. "Did your father ever ask for you a husband of your own race? Ming-te was an afterthought, you know and I know. Come, you needn't be embarrassed; a person of my years can discuss these things. We make our own laws when we have lived long enough."
"How did you know what my father did?" exclaimed Nancy.
"You yourself have just told me," laughed the woman. She smoothed Nancy's hair with the gentle masterful hands which always radiated such warm feelings of safety, quelling doubt and uneasiness till the girl shut her eyes as if she were sinking asleep in a pleasant bed. "But I didn't need you to tell me," she continued, "for I knew your father's nature and I know yours. Your father was a better Chinese than most of us; he was a scholar; he was a gentleman; the old customs were at his finger tips. But he couldn't unmake himself and he couldn't unmake his daughter, and when you grew old enough to be married his heart must have lost much peace. He never wanted you to marry Ming-te. He had found and lost another husband for you."
"How did you know these things?" cried Nancy again.
"Didn't he?"
"Yes," confessed the girl.
"Aha, my daughter, now I do truly know why you were weeping. You obeyed your father when he didn't want you to obey him. I have heard your story and much more than you thought you were telling me with your lips. We old people can't sit on the k'ang all day watching the strange things men do without seeing many things they think they have hidden. But I have marveled at you. No daughter ever honored her father as you have done. Not a word of complaint, not an unmannerly sentence have you spoken, not a breath against Ming-te or these women who persecuted you. This would be a splendid family, a glorious family indeed, if it were fit for a daughter like you. But it isn't. You don't belong here. You and I should have been young together. Those were days when men understood. What does a republic make us? Sheep and donkeys! No, you don't belong here; and when I die I will send you where you do belong. Tell me about the husband your father first chose for you."
"I have told you," said Nancy, carried out of her embarrassment.
"Tell me what your father said of him."
Nancy, in her excitement, struggled to pull out a piece of paper which she wore like a talisman.
"This is what my father wrote for him," she explained.
The old lady took the paper as though she had expected it. She held it close to the smoking wick by her bed and read it twice or three times.
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon for themoon;The moon following from the east tenderly displays thereflection of the sun.
"Ah, my child," she said, after reading it slowly, "we should have burned incense before we dared to read this. We were wrong, wrong, to disobey these words. They are the mandate of heaven itself."
Nancy stood in a trance. From far through the house came the noise of laughter and music.
Kuei-Lien more than justified her connection with the Ferris household by the news she was able to bring. Not so long after Nancy herself, Ronald knew that Nancy's husband—he made a grimace every time he used the word—was to take a second wife. He was pleased. Any barrier between Nancy and Ming-te warmed his own hopes and, from the liberal store of gossip which Kuei-lien got from Paoling, it seemed that there were real barriers of distrust between the young couple. Nancy, he learned, had become the attendant of the old grandmother, "a terrible old woman," Kuei-lien volunteered. This was not such good news except that serfdom to the old t'ai-t'ai saved her from bondage to the rest of the family, for the old lady, declared Kuei-lien, was very jealous of those who waited upon her, kept them always in sight, always ready to obey her uncounted whims. Nancy would have few chances to see her husband. Ronald made Edward translate every phrase of Kuei-lien's voluble information, seeking what hints he could to guide his own course of action.
"How long will things go on like this?" he demanded.
Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders.
"I am not a fortune-teller," she said; "it will go on till the old t'ai-t'ai dies, at least."
"And if the old t'ai-t'ai dies?"
"Then she will be free to wait upon her mother-in-law."
Kuei-lien smiled, but Ronald saw what she told was likely.
"Do you think she is happy?" he asked.
"She must be very stupid to be happy in such a place. Hm-m," she grunted, "I know the family. Very quarrelsome they are and they will quarrel with her and make her a servant because they didn't want her. They only took her because of the money. They show they don't want her, else why should they get a new wife so soon? They want Chinese children. They will try to give this woman first place."
"Then what hope is there for Nancy?" Ronald inquired desperately.
"Oh, she can jump into a well. The wells at Paoling are quite salty, but they are deep."
Ronald was out of patience with Kuei-lien's grim humor.
"Couldn't she run away?" he suggested.
"Yes, she could run away, but they would soon follow. Where could she fly to? She has lived behind walls all her life; she doesn't know whether Peking is east, west, south, or north, and if she asked—ha, then she would be discovered. Chinese girls don't walk through the country asking their way to Peking."
Ronald was growing more and more restive under the restrictions of custom which kept him from seeing Nancy, although he knew no obstacle could stop him, were it not for the obstacles she herself would make. But he felt the need to move, to do something, no matter how useless it might be.
"I must go there," he said. "Are there any foreigners in Paoling?"
"Yes, there is a foreign doctor at the hospital. Perhaps there are others, but they cannot help you. The Chou family has nothing to do with missionaries. You would see the front gate; that is all. A beggar can see as much."
Nevertheless Ronald decided to go. Classes did not stop till January, but he found out the names of the foreigners who lived in this isolated town, got letters to them, and set out on the first of his holidays with no definite plan except that it was better to be moving than to sit at home with arms folded. The weather was bitterly cold. The miserable train depressed his spirits. But even that was luxury compared to the mule cart in which he jolted all day. The country was like a frozen desert; the cart slipped and plunged and nearly overturned in deep icy ruts. If he could get Nancy out of a land like this, Ronald vowed, never would he venture into it again.
The doctor and his wife, having been informed of his coming, were glad to welcome him. They thawed his stiff limbs before a great stove. His visit interested them the more because they had heard of a foreign woman hidden in one of the Chinese families of the town. The wife, especially, was sympathetic over every detail of Nancy's story. But neither of them could think of any way to see the girl.
"These places are barred to us," the doctor explained, "except when someone is very ill. Then, when the patient has been mauled and mishandled, plastered with dirty paper and stuck with infected needles, they call us in to undo the mischief of the Chinese doctors."
Just as if to give point to this remark, a servant came in with a card and a request that he come at once to attend a sick woman.
"Chou Hu-wei," mused the doctor, reading the card; he turned abruptly to Ronald. "There is witchcraft in this," he said, "this is the very same family you were seeking. I expect it's the old t'ai-t'ai herself—didn't you say it was she that the sister of your young friend was attached to? Yes, she must be the one. These January winds snuff out old lives. Ah, dear me, Paoling is not a place to grow old in."
It was the old t'ai-t'ai, the doctor found, and little chance of life he gave her. He read her case at the first glance and knew that the winds had done their work.
"Pneumonia—just what I feared," he said to himself.
The urgency of the case, the need of clearing out curious hangers-on and of getting ventilation to relieve the fumes of charcoal braziers so fully busied him that it was an hour before he could pause to notice the help he had been given by a foreign girl in Chinese clothes. The patient was as comfortable as she could be, lying sleepless but fully conscious, like one determined to die with her mind ruling to the last, not in the craven manner to let death sneak upon her when she was senseless. Nancy stood by her side, but with the same rigid control over her nerves.
"I expected to find you here," said the doctor. "Only to-day a visitor has come from Peking, a Mr. Nasmith—ah, you know him, I see; he is your brother's guardian. He came especially to find out whether you were well."
"What does he say?" asked the t'ai-t'ai, letting no movement escape her vigilant eyes, even in her pain, so that Nancy's start at Ronald's name gave her the hint that something weighty had been said.
"He says that the man whom my father first chose for my husband has come to Paoling," answered Nancy.
"Ah, it is fate," exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai. "I know now my time is finished. I will die. You must not wait for me, child. You must go back to him."
At these words Nancy's endurance crumpled.
"No, no, no," she cried, "you must not die! What can I do if you die? I don't want to go back. I want to stay with you. Don't let her die," she begged the doctor, forgetting, so excited she was, to speak English.
She fell down beside the bed and hid her face in her hands.
"I am not your sun, child," said the old woman softly; "you must not grieve for me. Of course I must die, but I shall take these words of yours with me; I shall not need any other sacrifice. They will burn money and houses and servants and weep on my grave till the sand has scoured the name from my stone, but I shall pay no attention to any of these; I shall always hear your words and smell them like burning sandalwood."
But Nancy would not be comforted. She jumped up again and faced the doctor with glowering eyes.
"You will not let her die, will you?" she demanded.
"Come, come, child, keep up your courage," said the doctor in his steadiest tones, "we won't talk of dying yet. You do your part and I will do mine."
He diverted her attention with many precautions about the care of the patient and about keeping the room free from intruders, while all the time the old t'ai-t'ai listened with a smile on her lips as though she deemed they were taking many needless pains.
"I have seen the girl you were looking for," he told Ronald, when he had come home again, "and you can set your heart at rest about one thing; she has not been ill-treated by the old t'ai-t'ai she is serving. I don't know what her relations with the rest of the family may be; I can guess that they have not been happy. But as to her feelings for the old t'ai-t'ai—well, I have been beside many deathbeds and I have never seen such an outburst of grief and love."
He detailed the scene exactly as it had happened before his eyes. Ronald was puzzled. He had heard such evil things about Nancy's aged mistress, such harsh pictures had been painted by Kuei-lien's vivid tongue, that he could not think of her as anything but an enemy.
"You say she told Nancy not to wait but to come to me?"
"That certainly was what I gathered. I have been twenty-five years in China; I don't often mistake words as clear as hers."
Ronald groaned.
"I wonder if she is going to sacrifice herself once more, just to please this old woman," he exclaimed.
The doctor had been moved by his impression of Nancy's love and also by the quiet dignity with which the sick woman bore her illness. He was a little out of patience with Ronald's remark, which sounded both hard and selfish.
"It seems foolish to you, no doubt," he said testily, "but more of her spirit would not be bad for the world. She knows her duty and is going to do it, no matter what you or I choose to say, and she thinks her old mistress is worth the sacrifice. For my part, I say more power to her arm. Pluck like that is not going to lose in the end."
"Yet the old t'ai-t'ai is going to die, isn't she?" asked Ronald.
"I should say, yes. She is very ill and pneumonia doesn't spare people at her age. But of course there is no certainty in these matters. Your friend might make her live—I have seen miracles like that before—if it were not for the fact that the old lady quite evidently thinks it is time to die and has made up her mind to die. The Chinese will do that, you know, when they grow old; sometimes their families suggest it to them because they have become feeble and a nuisance. That's a side of filial piety we don't hear advertised. But when they make up their minds to die, when they deliberately set themselves to give up the ghost,—I knew one old man who passed in ten days from sound health to the coffin,—when they do that, they are past praying for. I doubt if this old woman will live for all the doctors in the world. She seems to think she can help your friend by dying now."
"But if she dies, how will Nancy fare with the rest of the family?"
"Hm-m, I don't think she expects a very cordial time. Probably it will be spear against buckler, as the Chinese say."
"It was extraordinary," Ronald observed, beginning to pick up one by one the astonishing details of what the doctor had heard, "it was extraordinary that the t'ai-t'ai should have told Nancy to come to me."
"It was extraordinary indeed. I have never heard the like. For one of her position—in the husband's family, mind you—advising a hsi-fu to run away, that's absolutely without precedent. I don't understand it, however much she may like your friend Nancy. Of course her being a foreigner makes a big difference; the family is surely not keen on a foreign wife,—that second marriage, done so soon, proves that,—but they took her with their eyes open and they would not relish the poor compliment of her running away. Did her father, by the way, ask you first to be this girl's husband?"
"Yes," acknowledged Ronald.
"You didn't tell me that, you know. Were you engaged to her?"
"No."
"Well, your being here has become, for some reason, very important in the old t'ai-t'ai's eyes. Perhaps you can untangle it."
Ronald thought he could, though he did not trouble the doctor with his reasons, for the latter was ready for bed and said frankly that daylight solved more puzzles than lamplight. The t'ai-t'ai had made a curious remark about the sun. This gave the lover his cue; he lay awake nearly till daybreak going back and forth over scenes of the past: the importance Herrick ascribed to the scrolls he had written; Nancy's surprise when she saw them; the indication that the t'ai-t'ai knew of them. The sentences danced in his brain till he became afraid of them. Herrick must have trafficked with black art when he wrote those lines. They were always promising him Nancy, always withholding her.
At times he felt like copying the passive manners of the East and sitting, hands in lap, waiting for the prophecy, if prophecy it were, to fulfill itself, but his restless Western blood would not keep him still. The excitement of having Nancy so near, of almost having been given her by the unlooked-for command of the t'ai-t'ai, this was too urgent for sleep. Perhaps the old woman would die to-day, and Nancy would come. His fingers ached to pull away the curtain of these next few hours. He dared not hope too much. If that evil family hid her away again, he was ready to drag down their sagging house round their ears.
Hour after hour struck from the clock beneath his bedroom. He wondered whether Nancy were standing vigil over the dying woman whom he envied because she loved. If only he could keep vigil with her!
The strokes of the clock came too quickly for Ronald. They woke him each time just when he was drowsy, telling him that it was two, three, four, and he was not yet asleep. The clock struck more slowly for Nancy. She sat alone in the sick room; she was absolute mistress here; the orders of the doctor, the t'ai-t'ai's imperious will, which was as strong as ever in its effect upon the family, supported the girl in her right to keep the room clear.
"I want no snivelling humbugs in here," said the implacable old lady.
Apart from making polite inquiries, the others were glad to leave Nancy the burden of the sick chamber. She sat in quiet, broken only by the hard breathing of the patient, who was also awake. She was not tempted to doze. There were too many puzzles of her own to unravel. Her fortunes hung in the balance again, with the fortuitous coincidence of Ronald's arrival in Paoling and the t'ai-t'ai's sudden, withering illness. She wished Ronald had not come. She was afraid of the sign, connecting it, as did the old t'ai-t'ai herself, with her death. And she had wanted so grievously to be left, if only for a few months, in the peace which had come since her protector had extracted her secret of the sun and the moon.
She was in the mood which her father had surprised long ago when he asked his daughter to whom he should marry her and she shirked the question, saying that she did not wish to be married at all. She knew she belonged to Ronald, her heart spoke unhesitatingly in his defense, but she lacked courage to meet his claims; they promised so much trouble, so much stress and uneasiness, perhaps a catastrophe worse than the marriage which had seemed so certainly to destroy all hope. Because she cherished this hope given back to life again, she wanted to treat it tenderly, to nourish it in the quietness of her mind, to allow it months of rest and growth, not to expose it suddenly to the storms of decision, saying it must be settled now or never. She dreaded casting everything upon the chances of a day to know whether she must live or die. She had no heart to face Ronald now. And yet he had come, and her aged friend was dying.
The past weeks had been happier beyond measure. Nancy had had nothing further to conceal from the old t'ai-t'ai. They understood one another perfectly. The t'ai-t'ai, having decided that Herrick's scrolls were the will of heaven, never turned back from this belief.
"These things are ordained," she had declared; "we can't fight against them."
She had walked with Nancy in the dried remnants of a garden which was the only breathing space the Chou family could boast. The paths were weedy and overgrown, the pond shrunk to a few pailfuls of stale water, withered vines hung from a summer house which was too chilly for them to enter. But Nancy had memories of winter sunshine, warm when the wind did not blow, and of blue unclouded skies, and she never forgot the picture of this imperious old woman who never deigned to lean upon her gnarled red cane, but walked erect, letting the sun glow proudly upon her white hair and bring mellow lustre from her jacket, which was dyed the stain of crushed cherries. The t'ai-ta'i had been a gay, unbent figure on days like those; the shape of an irascible tyrant, which her family dreaded so cravenly, she seemed to have left within doors to stand guard against her return. Meantime she took her holiday to pour out for Nancy's ears all the wealth of experience she had stored in the long changing years of her life. In recounting days at court, days when her husband wore the Emperor's button in his hat, and the peacock's feather, when he presented himself for an audience at the mysterious morning hour of three, his coat dazzling with twisted dragons, with a border rainbow-colored to show sunlight foaming across waves of the sea, her eyes grew luminous as they often did when she looked on Nancy; she became almost tolerant of her successors and their failure.
"Heaven made them fools," she exclaimed, half pityingly. "They could only do what they had it in them to do."
Nancy had never interrupted those stories. Her taste was not spoiled, like the taste of too many Western children, by a surfeit of books and papers. She was hearing romance from the lips of one who had lived. Half shutting her eyes she let the sun draw bright patterns from her lashes and fancied herself strolling through the painted corridors of the lake palaces. Her childish fancy returned. She should have been born earlier. She should have been one of the maidens chosen for the Emperor. Then perhaps she could have won his love. Her heart relaxed into meditating upon imaginary pictures which never could have been true, but which were pleasant to think about, wound about her as they were by the golden haze of the old t'ai-t'ai's memories. But they made her slightly disdainful of the West, till even the home of the Ferrises seemed common-place compared with her dreams of a barge punted lazily through the flowering heads of the lotus or the indolence of sipping tea in a red pavilion beside a still pool.
"No, those times are gone," said the t'ai-t'ai with a sigh, "they won't return in our day. And you, my child, will never be one of the ladies of the Emperor." She smiled quietly at Nancy's conceit. "But you can still hold these things in your heart; you can paint them and make them into verses for your children. For you will have many children and you will teach them to love China."
Nancy flushed at the t'ai-t'ai's prediction and wondered whose these unborn children should be.
As for the old woman, she allowed no doubt of her meaning. She now kept no secrets from the girl and was almost savage in her frankness, unleashing her scorn for the degenerate crowd which cluttered the family gates.
"You will not stay here," she repeated, times without count, "you must not stay here. If you were one of their blood,"—the t'ai-t'ai, in the pronouns she used, spoke as if even she and her family were different races,—"if you were one of their blood, it would be harder; they wouldn't wish to let you go, and your old family wouldn't want you back; there would be lawsuits till the end of time. But this is so simple. You are foreign born; when once you have gone, they will not weep for you. They might stop you if they saw you going, but only for face; after you have gone they will say, 'Oh, she was nothing but a foreigner. What use was there keeping her here?'"
So imperative did she become that Nancy asked once in astonishment: "Do you wish me to leave you?"
"Ah no," laughed the old lady, "you know that was not my meaning. You are more nearly kin to me than the children of my own flesh. I could not bear to part with you now and spend the rest of my days among fools. But neither can I bear the thought that you should spend the rest of your days—so many more than mine—as a slave to fools. So we must plan, you and I, how you are to go when I die. Ha, it's lucky I am old and can see things clearly. Twenty years ago I should have loved you just as much, my child, but I should never have had boldness enough to counsel the wife of my grandson to escape. Now, when I come to die, I command you to go, or I shall not die peacefully."
"But you are not going to die for years and years," laughed Nancy.
"This is my seventy-third winter," said the old lady, startling her with one of those sudden burning looks which made her eyes blaze, "my seventy-third winter, and my last."
Weakly Nancy protested, but by this time she knew too well that the t'ai-t'ai did not predict idly; her words, like her own father's scroll, seemed to get themselves fulfilled. The thought had looked absurd when she saw how straight the old woman carried herself, but it lurked in the back passages of her brain and came forward many a time during the ensuing weeks when the t'ai-t'ai abruptly would shatter her desire to dwell secure in comfortable, comforting talks by saying, "I—I shall soon die." Nancy came to believe, in spite of herself, and to watch, with the fascination of one who has been bewitched, the first marks of death upon the face of her aged friend.
"I am afraid of only one thing," said the t'ai-t'ai, "I am afraid of you. I am afraid that you will be too proud to escape when my time comes. So you must remember that it will be my express command then that you go. I am your father and mother now; you owe your obedience to me. I am the head of the family into which you have married; I take upon myself your duties to this family; when I go to my ancestors, I shall report to them what I have done and they will approve; we were not wont to be a small-livered people and we did not resist the will of heaven. Ah, my daughter, you have always obeyed, you have understood my wishes before I asked them. We cannot tamper with the mandate of heaven; your fate is your fate and you must accept it. You must go back, I say, to the husband your father first chose for you. You must bring him many sons to honor him and to honor you. Here you will be childless and forsaken. What comfort shall I have among the dead when I remember this? I will not eat of your sacrifices till you promise me this one thing. I will go like a starved spirit, I tell you, and be homeless and cold till you promise me. Will you promise me? Will you promise me? I demand it of you now because I know that I shall die."
Nancy had never seen the t'ai-t'ai so shaken by feeling. She felt she had trespassed upon a queen in one of those moments of human passion which a mere subject must pay with his life to witness.
"Yes," she whispered, falling down because she dared not look her mistress in the face, "I will promise you; I will go, but I cannot go till you are dead."
"That may be too late, my child."
"But I cannot go till you are dead—and oh, I don't want you to die."
"That may be too late."
"I cannot promise more than that," vowed Nancy, with a firmness that would not be denied.
The t'ai-t'ai stooped and lifted her up.
"No, of course you can't," she agreed, laughing gayly. "I know you can't. You can't help being yourself. But at least I have your promise that you will go after I am dead; you will not think yourself bound to linger here, wife and no wife, making yourself miserable and others spiteful. That is not any duty you owe to your father, or to me, or to Ming-te—he has a wife who is only waiting to take your title."
She paused for a moment and then burst out again in tones of indignation:—
"Ah, why can't other people see things clearly? I know my daughter and my daughter-in-law; I know every thought in their heads. They don't want you here and yet they won't want to let you go. They have a hundred imaginary scores to pay, scores against you, scores against me. They are angry even now because I protect you. They would pull down the family rather than forgo one item of the spite they ache to visit upon you. And why?—for no cause at all except their own greed. They gloat over the thought of humbling you and shaming you. They would have done it anyway because you will be helpless and in their power and because everything that goes wrong in their lives will be your fault. But they will be harsher now because I have taken you for my friend. They will remember every bit of honest advice I gave them and then they'll say, 'The old t'ai-t'ai said this and the old t'ai-t'ai said that, but the old t'ai-t'ai is dead; what shall we do? Ah, let's go and beat the foreign hsi-fu.'"
Nancy could not help laughing at the droll accuracy of this picture. It was such as Kuei-lien might have portrayed.
"Yes, you laugh," sniffed the old woman, having joined in the laugh herself, "but it is only because you see how lifelike are my words. You can fancy your p'o-p'o, after a good cry on my grave, after calling out, 'Venerable and sacred old mother, you have left your undutiful, ignorant daughter-in-law blinded with tears, unable to eat or to sleep from her grief for you; come back and let me grovel at your feet and make amends for my ten thousand unfilial sins.' You can see her coming home, saying, 'Heaven be praised, the old hag is dead.' Eh, she will make you eat with the pigs and sleep with the dogs. No, my child, if you will stay till I am dead you must be wary, you must be clever; there are foreigners in this place; go to them and go quickly, and remember what your father wrote for you. These women, pooh! they don't want you, yet they will try to keep you here so that they can spit on you till their lips shrivel round their yellow teeth."
Nancy did not enjoy these petulant storms and was glad when her mistress returned to sunnier moods.
The t'ai-t'ai did not take up the subject again. The next were days of unequaled calm. The weather was mild, as sometimes it will be in the deep of winter. A drowsy peace settled on the whole household after the excitement of the autumn. Nancy moved at ease through the house, often meeting the pretty, gentle girl who was so much more Ming-te's wife than she, and every time they met it was with a friendly greeting, every time with a pleasing deference on the part of the latest newcomer to the foreigner who in name was her mistress. Nancy's stepmother, her mother-in-law, both withheld their scoldings as if they were grateful to her for keeping the old t'ai-t'ai out of mischief; it seemed hard to believe they were storing venom against her. Ming-te Nancy never saw. He was busy with his studies. The father was away. The relatives, who had been a burden to the family chest, had taken their squabbling children home.
Nancy had unbroken leisure to read to the t'ai-t'ai, to listen to her, to match poems with her keen old mind. And many still afternoons they walked in the garden, enjoying sunshine so tranquil that Nancy lost all but the faintest shadow of dread that her friend might die. Death could not intrude upon this unclouded weather. She laughed at death and was willing to go on like this till she too was old, hearing the golden echo of famous times from the lips of a masterful, good-humored old woman.
Then came the wind and the dust hiding the sun, drifting through the frail protection of paper windows, laying floors and tables and chairs thick with sifted sand from the desert. Then came cold and snow and again the fierce voice of the north wind, its icy breath which no defense could keep out, numbing the faces and hands of those who tried to stand against it. People shivered and huddled on the k'ang to get what comfort they could from its warmth. The change fell so swiftly that Nancy could not shake herself all at once out of the calm which had been lulling her fears. And when she awoke it was only to outward amazement at the violence of a tempest such as she had never seen in Peking, such as she could not see except in these bleak villages of the Chihli plains, where the gales of half Asia rushed down unthwarted, trying to tear roofs from their walls, doors from their fastenings, courage from human hearts.
For a day the t'ai-t'ai must have complained of a chill before Nancy paid particular heed. She had been attentive, of course, from the first because, as the old woman had said, the girl outguessed every wish. But after a day when the chill had not begun to mend, but was growing worse, Nancy felt a doubt slip like ice through her veins. She remembered the t'ai-t'ai's prediction. In an instant she realized that death might already have stolen his march: that it was a treacherous little chill like this, so rapidly growing worse, which might end the old woman's seventy-three indomitable years. Fever, pain, coughing. Nancy was frightened by the remorseless haste they made, the way they tore down the strength of her mistress.
Backed by the wish of the sick woman, she forced the family to send for the foreign doctor, an act they were most reluctant to do, dismayed that the t'ai-t'ai at her age should turn from the tried ways of the Chinese physician. If she died the blame would not be theirs.
The foreign doctor had come. Nancy read in his face how little hope there was. And he had brought the news of Ronald's appearance in Paoling.
Her thoughts upside down, her mind confused, her heart afraid, Nancy sat through the long desolate hours of the night groping for the power to understand these fresh blows fate had dealt her. She had a promise to think of, and she wondered how she could keep it.