By one shrewd stroke the t'ai-t'ai had regained Kuei-lien's faltering
allegiance. She was very happy over the effects of her skill and
particularly pleased at her discernment in the choice of an agent.
The concubine had won more than she had lost in the admiration of her
mistress. Any ordinary girl, caught thieving, as the t'ai-t'ai
termed Kuei-lien's machinations, would have held stubbornly to her
story and forced a final violent exposure. It took genius to give
way before the inevitable. Kuei-lien had that uncommon genius. So
the new alliance thrived on a mutual respect and understanding.
Kuei-lien saw that for the present at least her fortune consisted in
loyalty to her mistress. She paid her dividends, as it were, by
skillfully teasing Herrick into health and out of it, never letting
him lose the need of her or grow sated, and inveigling him more and
more easily into the gifts of money which the man granted now almost
from force of habit. After the first marked change from the
robustness of his former days, there were few further signs of
decline. The man was sinking, but sinking imperceptibly. He ceased
to see much of his children: he would see them to-morrow,--so he told
himself day after day,--but each new morning there was the plea of
illness.
The truth was that Herrick was afraid of death, afraid to provoke
those terrible spasms of pain which he laid wrong-headedly enough to
worry over Nancy's affairs; he was satisfied to stop thinking and
surrender to the lulling security of the senses, to a desire for
Kuei-lien's presence, which overpowered every thought of duty, every
wish. So week by week his strength and his money drifted away; week
by week the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien buried their three fourths and
one fourth of his treasure.
They could not wholly conceal their secret. There were others too
intimately involved in the state of Herrick's health not to watch
jealously the spoils that Hai t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien were taking.
Nancy and Edward went their way in ignorance, but to the three other
concubines it was a matter of life and death. If Herrick died, they
would be the property of the t'ai-t'ai without a cent or a right of
their own. Time was slipping past. Herrick seemed to have forgotten
they existed; he never called for them. Even when the third and
fourth concubines bore sons in quick succession, Herrick did not
come. The t'ai-t'ai heaped presents upon this auspicious progeny,
gave great feasts for each of the babies at the end of their first
month, but the father did not appear. He was too ill. The second
wife read the message of this dissimulated kindness and knew
correctly that the more the mistress of the household showered them
with gifts, the greater wrong she was doing them behind their backs.
At last she saw no recourse except to appeal to Nancy. The English
children were the only ones who could demand access to Herrick. With
great caution the second wife discarded her old policy of holding
aloof from these Westerners, knowing that the t'ai-t'ai might be
alive to the first hints of an uncommon friendship. She bided her
time till she caught her enemies at a discreet distance, then she
came out frankly, volubly, with the whole story of what Nancy's
stepmother and fifth wife were managing.
"They are killing your father and robbing him, and they are going to
sell you to the t'ai-t'ai's nephew."
"But the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien are not friends," exclaimed Nancy,
taken aback by these sudden confidences. "Kuei-lien tried to prevent
my engagement--"
"Till she got her price. Now they are fond as thieves. Everybody
knows it. None of us is blind except your father. They keep him
sick so that they can wheedle money out of him. They will screw
thousands of taels out of him for your wedding--that will go to the
t'ai-t'ai's family, and you'll be married in a year."
"That can't be. It's arranged that I shall not be married for four
years."
"Four years, bah! Don't you think they can persuade a dying man into
hastening such a happy event?"
"Surely he is not dying!" she exclaimed in great agitation.
"He is dying," affirmed the woman; "his brain is nearly dead now; his
body will soon follow."
Nancy stared with immensely opened eyes as though she saw the whole
terrible scene before her. She had forgotten to sit down. Her hands
took a firmer grip on the chair behind which she stood.
"What shall we do?" she asked in a strangely quiet voice.
"We!" exclaimed the visitor. "We can do nothing. If the t'ai-t'ai
so much as heard that I had been to see you, off she would pack me
to-morrow. You have four friends, every one of us helpless. You
have two bitter enemies. It is just as much your battle as ours.
You can see your father; we cannot. If anyone is to do anything, it
must be you."
"Yes, you are right," said Nancy, remembering her encounter with
Kuei-lien in the Western Hills. "I will do something. And no one
shall know you asked me."
This interview gave an ultimate touch to the change which the
experiences of the last few months had wrought in Nancy. She
examined her chances of grief open-eyed, prepared to meet them with
the simplicity of courage which came natural to her steady heart.
The first step was to supplant Kuei-lien and the t'ai-t'ai in their
dominance over her father. She moved so swiftly that the two
conspirators were astonished to find the girl installed in her
father's room. Herrick, with pathetic docility, childlike in its
readiness to be pleased by trifles, surrendered himself wholly to the
mastery of a strong will.
Kuei-lien protested that Nancy would do injury to her father's
delicate health by so uncalled-for an intrusion.
"My father is ill," replied the daughter. "It would be wrong for me
to waste my time playing when he needs my help. It is time I took
some share in my duties instead of leaving all the hardship to you."
"But you have had no experience; you don't know how to take care of
him."
"I can learn. He will be glad of a change and so will you."
Kuei-lien knew Nancy's obstinacy too well to waste more time in
futile dispute. She hastened to tell the t'ai-t'ai the alarming turn
Nancy's action had caused.
"We can't separate them," she exclaimed. "The miserable girl has had
her bedding moved into a room next to the Great Man's and says she
will live there till he is well. What can we do?"
"We've got to get her married," said the t'ai-t'ai; "there will be no
peace till she's gone. Suppose he dies because of her folly; we
shall be left like beggars."
"But we can't get her married. She won't obey us. She will obey her
father, but she won't listen to us."
"It's my own stupidity," moaned the t'ai-t'ai. "I should never have
allowed that old hag of a nurse to remain; I should have taught these
two young demons to obey me when they were young. She put these
conceited notions into their heads, taught them to lord it over us as
though we were dust for their feet to trample. You must persuade the
Great Man to hasten the wedding of his daughter; you must find some
way. Ah, if I can only get her locked into her red chair and safe in
my brother's house, I'll show them how to handle the vixen. She'll
be a tamed daughter-in-law if they follow my advice! A stick--that's
what the hussy needs, till she's glad to beat clothes at the pond and
clean my brother's pipes."
"Very entertaining thoughts," Kuei-lien scoffed, "but not very
helpful just now."
They were, in truth, far from helpful. Nancy had learned her lesson
and quarantined her father from his too solicitous concubine with the
coolness and resource of which she could thank Kuei-lien for teaching
her the trick. She would not be enticed from her father's door, and
day after day her excuse for this usurpation became greater because
it was undeniable that she was nursing the exhausted man slowly back
to strength.
At last the t'ai-t'ai had to intervene, an act she was most reluctant
to do, preferring always, as a politic woman, to remain in the
background. Nancy did not dare to stop her from an interview with
her father and retired when she saw that the wife wished to be alone
with her husband. For a long time the door remained shut. She could
hear the t'ai-t'ai talking indistinguishable sentences in a low rapid
voice. Occasionally a laugh was audible. As no immediate conclusion
to this talk seemed likely, Nancy took the chance to fetch some
clothes from her room. She was not gone many minutes. To her relief
she found the door still shut, and the conversation still continuing.
But after an hour the girl became restless. No answer was paid to
her knock. She tried the door; it was bolted. Not till she had
beaten upon the wooden panels for several minutes did anyone deign to
take notice. The door was pulled ajar; the girl saw to her amazement
the face of Kuei-lien.
"Your father is feeling better now," said the concubine, "and has
sent for me to take your place. He wants you to rest."
"But I don't wish to rest," protested Nancy, "and, if my father gives
orders, I take them from him, not from you."
Before Kuei-lien could stop her, she had pushed her way into the
room. In the few minutes she had been gone, not only the concubine
had been smuggled into the place, but the glasses, bottles, pipe, all
the vicious instruments she had been so wakeful to keep out of her
father's grasp. For the first time in her life she forgot her
father's presence in her rage at the duplicity practised by the
concubine.
"This is the way you look after a sick man, is it?" she cried. "Take
these things away."
Kuei-lien did not move.
"Have you lost all respect for your father?" she asked in the correct
tones of a schoolmistress chiding a naughty pupil. Then she turned
to Herrick on his couch. "Now you see what she's like," she said, as
if to justify some previous remarks. "Do you wonder that none of us
can do anything with her when she tries to rule even her father with
these haughty ways?"
"I am trying to make my father well. She is trying to make him ill,"
groaned Nancy, addressing her father in desperation. Kuei-lien
snorted in bitter amusement.
"What profit would there be for me in making him ill? Doesn't my
life depend upon his? Do I wish to be turned away like a penniless
beggar?"
"This has gone far enough," protested Herrick, rousing himself to the
distasteful duty of interference. "You are both wrong to quarrel in
this shameless way."
Nancy's self-possession had been too sorely tested in recent days.
She could not hold back tears of vexation at hearing her words
dismissed as a vulgar quarrel.
"Oh my father, they are killing you, killing you, and robbing you!"
she cried.
Kuei-lien scoffed.
"A nice imagination your daughter has," she said. "She has borrowed
too many novels from her old amah."
"Isn't it the truth?" demanded Nancy.
"Oh yes, of course it's the truth if you insist upon it. Your father
is so helpless, isn't he, that he must need his seventeen-year-old
daughter for a nurse to protect him!"
Herrick had grown more and more uncomfortable; this bickering was
compromising his dignity, making him a laughingstock.
"Now, now, Nancy," he said soothingly, "you are saying quite
unjustifiable things. Your feelings are carrying away your sense of
reason. Kuei-lien is right. I am not a child."
"Make her take those things away," Nancy persisted, determined upon
one last stubborn appeal. "She is only trying to harm you. I am--"
"Be still," her father interrupted curtly. "I have had enough of
this, do you understand? You have done your duty, you have taken
care of me when I was ill. But it is no part of your duty to advise
your father. Who has been teaching you such presumptuous manners?
If I need you again, I shall call for you; until I do so, I don't
want you coming here making these disgraceful scenes. I won't hear
of such ungovernable interference with my own will--and that from a
chit of a girl."
"Her boldness is becoming intolerable," commented Kuei-lien, as Nancy
silently withdrew. This was one word too many for Herrick's ruffled
temper.
"I wish you were as honest as she is," he said.
Nancy had won this much of a victory in blighting Kuei-lien's charms
for the moment. Deep irritation settled on Herrick at the thought of
this wordy brawl between concubine and daughter, a brawl they had
waged as though his presence, his judgment, did not matter. They had
treated him like a weakling. The irritation stung and rankled
because the man knew too well his own cowardice was at the bottom of
it, his cowardice and his vanity, which had kept him from supporting
Nancy in her appeal to his best instincts. Nancy had said wild
things, of course, but there was no doubt she believed all that she
had said and it was more than possible that these wild guesses passed
for truth in the women's quarters; Herrick had gained insight enough,
after his years of multiple weddedness, to know some of the jealous
currents that animated the course of life in his household. He did
not appreciate a tenth of the actual facts, but he was beginning to
see that his wives were not of one mind and that they were subject to
natural fears as to what might become of them and their children if
he died.
"I'll settle it once and for all," he decided, astonishing the
household by calling for his chair. In Peking sedan chairs were
becoming out-dated relics of the past; motor cars rushed everywhere
and the wide, dusty streets were full of elegant rickshas, commodious
enough for the fat officials who sat in stupid composure while their
outrunners pushed and shouted a rapid way for them through the
traffic. But Herrick would have none of these. He preferred the
dignity of his heavy blue chair, which four bearers carried in state
while his Chinese secretary, bringing cards, scuffled hastily in his
wake.
The chair coolies finally halted before the gate of an ugly building,
a grim and cheerless structure imitated in gray brick from the most
disheartening of Western models. Herrick loathed the penal
appearance of the place. After some hesitation he sent in cards for
Mr. Ronald Nasmith.