The answer was of such importance that Herrick neglected Kuei-lien in
his effort to find it. Herrick's wrath had gathered for a great
outburst; and then Nancy, by kneeling, by her sign of reverence for
his position if not for the man, had dissipated all the heaped-up
vapors of anger. They had passed like summer lightning. The man
grew sunny again.
Not for months had he shown such friendliness for his children. He
took them walking, busied them collecting flowers, led them up the
heights of the opposite ravine to see the desolate beacon tower.
Nancy did not talk much on these excursions. Her spirit was not yet
at ease; the rebellious impulses, however, sought outlet in the
unusual exercise. They spent themselves, for the present, on the
hills which taxed her legs and revealed to her eyes so many novelties
of sight. Edward, on the other hand, prattled continuously, amusing
his father by his voluble excitement over every strange blossom and
his certainty that every cave contained a leopard or a tiger.
"Ah, there's English in you, my lad," said the father wistfully, "you
ought to be playing cricket."
"What is cricket?" asked the boy, instantly curious.
"I'll show you," said Herrick, beaming from indulgent memories of his
own youth. After searching out a clear place, he constructed
implements as primitive as they were ingenious, a pitch of mountain
turf cleared of boulders, pine twigs for stumps, and cones for bails
so insecurely perched that the afternoon breeze put up the best of
the bowling. Edward combined the conflicting duties of bats-man and
wicket-keeper while his father hurled large cones down the pitch and
Nancy, stationed in the slips, invariably fumbled the rare ball
Edward lifted in her direction.
So absorbed were the players in their very rudimentary game that an
unexpected cry of "Well hit, sir," burst upon them like a
thunderbolt. Edward's desired tiger could not have startled them
more thoroughly.
Nancy turned to run, but she saw her brother gazing with wide eyes
and open mouth till her own fear could not keep her from seeking with
half-averted face the object of his astonishment. She saw two men
walking toward her father. They were not Chinese; that she knew
instantly, for they wore strange white helmets and shirts open at the
throat and short khaki trousers and thick foreign boots. They
carried knapsacks and strange black boxes such as Nancy, in her
inexperience, did not recognize as cameras. Each of them swung a
stout cane. Could they be bandits, Nancy wondered, her heart beating
in alarm; they looked extremely fierce. Then she realized by a flash
of insight that she was seeing the spectacle she had looked forward
to--the spectacle of foreigners from the mythical lands of the West.
"Wait a minute," called out one of the two men, removing his hat
courteously and exposing a shock of blond hair, "wanchee take
picture, allee same photograph."
He had not realized that the three people he was approaching were not
Chinese. Excited by observing what unmistakably was a wicket, crude
though it might be, he thought he had stumbled upon some prototype of
his own national game being played by the aborigines of the mountains.
"Perhaps it's been played since the days of Yao and Shun," he told
his companion; "nothing ever changes in China. Some dear old lady
may find a new proof that we're all descended from the Ten Lost
Tribes. I certainly mustn't miss this picture. Think how well it
would look in 'Leaves from an Archaeologist's Notebook' or, at the
worst, 'A Nomad W.G. Scores a Boundary.'"
"Well, he's not a nomad nor a W.G. and I'm not sure he's even playing
cricket," said the other; "but don't let small scruples interfere
with your picture."
"I won't," said the first, who was considering how he might approach
the game unobserved till Edward, catching a cone in mid-flight and
thwacking it back into the ravine, provoked his shout of "Well hit,
sir." Nothing was left except to walk forward openly in the hope
that the three strangely assorted players might prove amenable to his
wish. So he shouted emphatically in the direction of Herrick's
portly figure, trying to check visible symptoms of retreat. "Just a
minute, wanchee take picture, wanchee take picture, one minute can
do."
"Oh, do you?" inquired Herrick with the dryest of accents. "And to
whom am I indebted for your acquaintance?"
The man stopped abruptly, while Herrick used the chance to muster off
his children. Without further words he went coldly by, as though he
were passing two strangers in the crowds of Regent Street, and the
two children, excited by this encounter, were too much afraid of
their father to give the men another glance.
"Well, what do you make of that?" asked the astonished intruder of
his companion.
"You were right in one point, at least," said the latter, "it was
cricket. But I don't think the knowledge is going to help any dear
old lady's theory of the Lost Tribes. That was certainly a stony
British stare."
"And a stony British retort. What on earth do you suppose he was
doing here masquerading in Chinese clothes? And the girl and boy
too? They must have been English; they weren't Chinese. An
uncommonly handsome girl at that. If I hadn't been paralyzed by the
old gentleman's answer, I should have taken a picture to prove we
weren't dreaming. They might at least have stopped, and not run away
in this barbarous fashion."
"Yes, but what an uncommon pair of fools we must have seemed,
shouting pidgin English at them! No wonder they were crusty."
Nancy and Edward knew the time was not opportune for questioning
their father. But when they were home again and safe in their own
quarter, their tongues seethed with comments on this meeting.
Kuei-lien and the old amah joined in the discussion and were able to
supply more details about the men, who were members of a party, it
seemed, that was occupying a large bungalow in one of the valleys
some distance beyond. It was a settlement, in fact, to which
foreigners came in the summer. There were women too, said the nurse,
and girls dressed in foreign clothes; "just like your mother," she
continued, "but oh no, not so beautiful, and not such splendid
clothes."
She went into rapt ecstasies on the subject of Nancy's mother, how
she looked when the Admiral came, and what she said, and the way she
wore her jewels, till Nancy, who had listened to these discursions
many times and knew that the garrulous record always veered round to
distasteful details of her own infancy, how she had given her bottle
to the dog or used the Consul's top-hat for a lavatory, cut the nurse
short by asking how she could get a glimpse of these Western girls.
The amah looked suspiciously at Kuei-lien, whom she did not trust.
"No, I'm afraid your father would not like it."
"Oh, I don't think he would mind, if you didn't boast about it,"
interposed Kuei-lien.
"You ask him," said the nurse, scenting danger for her children in
the affable assurances of the concubine.
Kuei-lien and Nancy had not been cordial since the affair of the
kiss. Kuei-lien had the long memory of her race, a memory quite
prepared to avenge insults on the third and fourth generation if no
earlier chance came, and she had not forgotten Nancy's slighting
words. The score, in fact, had been increased by the new kindliness
between Herrick and his children; this kindliness seemed to grow at
the cost of her own hold upon the father. Since her ascendancy began
this had been the first falling away of Herrick's affection.
The concubine, knowing too well the hazards of an old man's
fickleness, did not propose risking her mastery merely to indulge the
claims of two children. With all her bent for headstrong passion she
was a cool creature, resourceful, intelligent, able not only to
captivate the heart of her elderly husband by daring use of beauty,
but to calculate to a nicety the effects she meant to achieve. She
wished place, position, power, desirable ends toward which Herrick's
infatuation could assist. She knew the force of the proverb that
there is no fool like an old one and played cleverly on its truth,
that, when the time should come, when Herrick had gone and her friend
the t'ai-t'ai, then the despised fifth wife should be enjoying the
harvest she had sowed.
But the place of Nancy and Edward in the household economy had
puzzled her. They stood in the way of her success, for, like all
Westerners, they followed a disturbing logic of their own and did not
yield to the good old precedents of the Orient. She had not sat back
with arms folded, however, like the t'ai-t'ai, resigning the problem
to fate. Fate was indiscriminate as lightning in the way it struck,
a very clumsy agent for nice ends. Kuei-lien believed in the art of
directing fate, and now, after her study of Nancy and Edward, she had
come to one certainty--that they must be returned to the West whence
they had come.
She was glad, then, to hear of their encounter with two Englishmen.
Kuei-lien knew by hearsay the free and easy intercourse by which
Western men and maids fostered romance; what she had learned
considerably overshot the mark, allowing it to seem all the more
plausible that here was an easy way for disposing of Nancy. So she
renewed her friendliness with the girl, doing her best to laugh away
the morbid accident of the kiss. Their relations were never quite so
comfortable as before; but the child was young and excited by her
first glimpse of two strangers, and she was curious enough to hear
eagerly all that Kuei-lien suggested.
With Kuei-lien's encouragement it became a habit for Nancy and Edward
to go walking by themselves. No one had forbidden them. Several
days of rain and Herrick's annoyance at meeting impudent intruders
from his own country had interrupted the father's inclination to
stroll with his children. The nurse was busy managing the house;
because of her bound feet she could not have walked even had she
wished. So the brother and sister assumed tacit consent for little
excursions to the bottom of the ravine, whither Kuei-lien often went
with them. Very happy they were to lie on the sun-baked rocks, where
they could watch the dragon flies skim between the boulders and could
toss leaves into the limpid pools of the stream.
These were mere short flights, a testing of the wings. Kuei-lien
pretended much interest in the place where Nancy and Edward had met
their Englishmen and when she suggested going there she noticed the
flush of color which betrayed Nancy's own eagerness.
"Yes, there are beautiful flowers there," said the younger girl
quickly.
"Aha, my child," thought Kuei-lien, "it's not the flowers you will be
seeking."
There were flowers in great abundance, harebells, Michaelmas daisies,
campanula, single larkspur velvety indigo in color. Of all these
Nancy picked lavishly and then piled her blue spoils on the grass
where she knelt looking at them, a little sorry because she had
picked them and could never give back the radiant lives she had taken.
"What lots of flowers you have plucked," said Kuei-lien, smiling at
Nancy's thoughtfulness. "Are you glad?"
"No," said Nancy, "I am sad for them. They die so quickly."
"What does it matter? There will be hundreds more to-morrow."
"Yes, but not these."
"They give us happiness; isn't that enough?"
"I have picked too many," said Nancy; "one would have given me
happiness. Oh, my flowers, my flowers," she cried, "I am sorry
because I killed you! One would have given me happiness, yet I have
taken so many."
Impulsively she turned to Kuei-lien with a serious look in her dark
eyes.
"Is that all they live for, just to give us happiness?"
"Just to give us happiness," Kuei-lien echoed.
"Then to whom do we give happiness? What do we live for?"
"We are flowers, too," laughed the older girl, amused by the
soberness of Nancy's question. "We give happiness to men."
Her reply was not meant to be flippant, but from Kuei-lien's lips it
came too truthfully. It stirred in Nancy's newly informed, her
bitterly informed, heart a distaste for her womanly fortune.
She looked down the rugged valley, saw the mellow colors of the
hills, a distant gleam of the plain, all suffused through a patina of
golden sunshine, and a shadow troubled her youthful face at the
thought that she could not belong to these forever, that she could
not be like the yellow butterfly hovering above the flowers or like
the hawk Edward blithely was chasing, but must be cooped up amid the
tattle of women's quarters to give--the picture stuck in her
brain--to give happiness to men.
The unhurried tones of a bell sounded from some far recess of the
mountains. Instinctively Nancy bent her head to the ground. Three
times before her little heap of blossoms she touched her forehead to
the grass.
"Why are you doing that?" asked Kuei-lien in surprise.
"I am worshiping my flowers," said Nancy simply, "for I am going to
be a nun."