For a long time Herrick sat in quiet, like a figure in meditation.
The drowsiness of the afternoon seemed to have pervaded his spirit,
the strange stillness now reigning over the house after all the
laughter that had gone before. Three or four times the man took up
his brushes, tapered the hairs to a slender point, then replaced the
brass caps and put back the pens idly into their stand. At last he
called for Nancy, made her sit down, and asked her to tell the whole
story of yesterday's adventure. The perfidy of the monks angered him.
"I shall raze their temple to its foundations," he exclaimed, "and
drive them forth homeless like the wolves they are!" But one knew,
in listening to him, these words would never be fulfilled.
He was particular that Nancy should be explicit about all she had
done, all she had said, at the home of the Ferrises.
"So they dressed you in foreign clothes," he remarked. "I should
like to have seen you; I should like to have known whether my girl is
really Chinese. Did you like it? Would you rather wear Western
clothes than your own? Shall I have them made for you?"
"Oh no," protested the girl, "they were not comfortable. I like my
own clothes better."
"And the food--the taste was not pleasant, eh?"
"I couldn't eat it."
"Naturally. Yet those are small matters."
Nancy paused at last in her tale.
"Have you told me everything?" her father asked searchingly. Nancy
could not meet the careful scrutiny of his eyes. "Perhaps not quite
all," he suggested. "Western girls have romantic thoughts in their
heads. Surely they must have asked some questions about marriage."
"They did," admitted his daughter.
Herrick insisted on every detail of a conversation so vital. Nancy
was confused, but she told him everything.
"Our ways do seem shocking to them," he observed. "What did you
think of Mrs. Ferris?"
The girl was glowing in the terms she used.
"And the two girls--what were their names, Helen, Elizabeth?--did you
find them really congenial?"
Nancy was even more positive.
"You might not like them so well if you saw more of them," argued her
father. "Suppose you were asked to live with them for a month, would
you enjoy that?"
The proposal was too momentous to be answered offhand.
"Would Edward go too?" asked the girl.
"Oh, don't put too much weight on my words. I am only stating an
imaginary case."
"I should be lonely without Edward."
"Pooh, you wouldn't miss Edward; you would have lots of
companionship. There are the two men, Mr. Beresford and Mr. Nasmith,
they would be like older brothers to you."
"How could I have anything to do with them?" said Nancy, surprised by
the seeming indelicacy of her father's statement.
"Ah, you are an innocent child, Nancy, you don't know much about the
world. In the West the men and women all live together like that.
They don't consider it improper. Perhaps it's a better way than
ours. I should like you to see for yourself; your experience has
been very, very limited, my child. Were you afraid of these men?"
Nancy did not notice how subtly her father had shifted from innocuous
generalities to a very particular question.
"Oh no, I was not afraid of them. They were very kind and helped us
so much."
Herrick smiled.
"Yes," he resumed, "they did impress me as quite kind and gentle in
their manners, especially Mr. Beresford; he seemed a very clever
young man and talked in a most entertaining manner. I am not so sure
about the other, what was his name--Mr.--er, Mr.--"
"Nasmith," volunteered Nancy rather overpromptly.
"That's right, Nasmith, Mr. Nasmith. Mr. Nasmith, I thought, was a
little stupid; he didn't say much."
Nancy took the bait instantly.
"Oh no, he's not stupid," she averred, "not at all stupid. He is
really kinder, more thoughtful, than Mr. Beresford."
"Oh," said Herrick, after a pause, "and since when have daughters
known more than their fathers?"
Nancy was properly confounded. Her cheeks grew red with
embarrassment, but Herrick's sternness consisted in words alone. He
had got the hint he wished and could afford to smile at his own
reproof, for the wisdom of a father sometimes compassed facts his
daughter had not even guessed, facts she lacked the experience to
acknowledge.
Nancy went away much puzzled. She had thought, from some of her
father's questions, that he actually intended sending her to visit
the Ferrises. In the first lonely reaction to the excitement she had
been enjoying, excitement so unexampled in her tranquil life, she
wished with all her heart he would let her go so that she might laugh
and talk and share her world of new impressions with Elizabeth and
Helen. The house still echoed to their voices, the rooms were still
haunted by their eager merry faces. Edward was no comfort to her
just now. Life had suddenly become drab.
She went to her room, bolted the door, lay face down on the bed and
abandoned her overladen heart to a spell of frantic weeping.
Herrick too had done a thing he seldom did: he had gone walking
alone. He also felt the depression which pervaded the house. He had
got a glimpse of Edward, sitting woebegone in the courtyard, trying,
with the half-hearted need of doing something, to fashion a new bow.
The sight was too much. Here was another problem forced upon him.
He had been thinking so exclusively of Nancy, whose case was so
urgent, that he had forgotten poor Edward for the moment, forgotten
that his was another difficult future to provide. The man could not
sit at home any longer. He had to walk off his mood by stubborn
climbing, climbing which did not end till he had scaled the old
beacon tower and seated himself heavily in a bastion that overlooked
leagues of mountain.
Here he had no choice but to think. He saw only vaguely the lucent
glory of the scene, the still evening sunshine, the imperturbable
towers of the distance; even the far, far-away golden palace roofs of
Peking vexed him because they spoke of the peace he had been seeking
these many years whereas his mind had been betrayed into nothing but
ugly turmoil.
Herrick pictured the might-have-beens of the past. Suppose he had
sent his children home, as he knew he ought to have done when he
first discarded his kinship with the West; what would they have been
now? Would the benevolence of uncles and aunts have compensated for
the loss of their father? Yes, perhaps it might have compensated
them; they would have grown up ignorant of the parent whom their
elders would refer to in bated, pitying terms as a man gone wrong.
It might have compensated them; but how could it have made up to him
for the loss of his two children?
He wished he could have seen Nancy in a Western frock as the Ferris
girls had clothed her. Then he might have judged for himself whether
she was to be preferred to the grave maiden whom the East had
trained. By now she would have spent twelve years in the peace of an
English garden. She would be making the daily round of her flowers,
the primroses and foxgloves and hollyhocks he could fancy her
tending, and playing tennis on the cropped lawn, or reading lazily in
a basket chair, dreaming of the seaside and dances and picnics. And
Edward would be home for the holidays, speaking the amazing idiom of
a schoolboy. It was a pleasant picture, Herrick admitted, rather
sentimental perhaps, and, except when he was homesick, a little
insipid; but the one element of the scene which stuck in his mind was
that in this scene he could take no part. He certainly did not wish
to be doddering round with a cane or listening to his relatives as
they discussed the vicar's Whitsunday sermon and the prospects of the
county show or the perennially banal topic of Farmer George's
rheumatism. It seemed really a merit not to have condemned Nancy and
Edward to this.
No, it was not the past of which Herrick was jealous, but the future,
the future which threatened to tear away his children. The father
discerned the enmity of fate in the chance that, after his
long-maintained watchfulness, suddenly had given Nancy and Edward
friends from the West. He hated these friends, hated the attraction
which would undo all his careful work, breathing life into the stolid
wood-block people of their English readers, restoring to the girl and
the boy a living tongue for one he wished them to think of as dead.
He was jealous of Helen and Elizabeth, jealous of Mrs. Ferris and
Beresford, but above all things jealous of the quiet Nasmith, in
whose destiny he perceived some occult link with Nancy's itself.
"I will not give them up," he said vehemently. "After training them
all these years, after giving them something better and finer than
anything they could have got in England, what a fool I should be to
turn them over to the first blond strangers they meet. It would be a
waste, nothing more than a waste. Nasmith and the rest of them can
hang before I'll let Nancy or Edward see them again. I won't destroy
my own work."
Having made this decision, which decided nothing, Herrick gave it
immediate effect. He ordered his children for their safety's sake
not to go out of the temple enclosure. He said nothing more about
Nancy's visiting the Ferrises. He was mastered by the need to forget
all these urgent problems. He called for wine, called for his opium
pipe, called for Kuei-lien.
She went to him with a happy smile on her face for she had been
waiting a long, long time to hear this summons. With the instinctive
genius of the wanton she lured the man to new frenzies of love,
taunted him, by a modesty artfully affected, into committing new
blissful indignities, glamorous outrages, in which her master tried
to stifle the soul as well as the body of his slave and succeeded
only in stifling his own. Then she sat naked on the floor before his
couch, her hair raveled but her eyes cool, and lighted the lamp and
heated the first of the little pellets which were to induce days of
passionate stupor. He dozed; he dreamed; the sickly smoke filled the
room.
Kuei-lien picked up her scattered garments. She was still smiling.