For a second time, after all his years in Peking, Herrick was denying
the sureness of the root which his life had taken in alien soil, by
turning to a casually met stranger from the West for help he looked
in vain to obtain from his adopted countrymen.
"This is a hideous place," he remarked, scanning the dirty
whitewashed walls of the guestroom into which Nasmith had ushered
him. "You don't live here, I hope."
"No, thank God."
"This is the blight our Western ways put upon China. How can you
instruct students in a hole like this? These places make me more
anti foreign than the Chinese themselves. I should like to sweep all
of you into the sea; I can see too well the beauty you are
desecrating."
Nasmith thought to himself that the reverse might also be true. He
had spent an unquiet winter. He had never ceased debating the choice
Herrick had given him, as though the offer still lay open for his
decision. It was futile, useless debate, a purely academic
distraction from which no profit could be gained, yet it continued to
wound him. Nancy had cast a spell of vivid charm over all his
family; she had won their hearts by an interest which long outlasted
the summer, a charm which hung over them like a receding shadow so
that they lived almost with bated breath beneath the fascination of
her mystery, wondering where she was, what she was doing and--this
they felt but feared to mention aloud--what perils she might be
facing with the steadfast dark eyes they remembered so tenderly.
Nasmith's particular recollections were still more poignant because
Herrick's unconventional offer, the curious phrasing of his scrolls,
upon which the offer had shed some light, made him feel that Nancy's
life was bound to his by a fateful sympathy which would persist even
though it were balked of all real fulfillment. Yet even now,
attracted to a Nancy who was almost a legend, he could not make up
his mind to accept, if her father renewed the proposal.
He might have spared himself these worries. The older man set that
issue at rest by his next words.
"I have come on a matter of business," he said.
"Business?"
"Yes, I want your help in something I have postponed for years,
something I hoped I might never have to do: it smacks too much of
your dreary Western formality. But I know, now, my mind will be
easier when it's done. I want to make my will."
"Aren't there any provisions for a will in the Chinese customs you
like so well?" asked Nasmith, smiling ironically as he spoke.
"Surely the Chinese, after four thousand years, have devised some way
of leaving their treasure behind them. Or have they excelled us
again and learned how to lay up their gold and silver in Heaven?"
"Oh, they have their ways," admitted Herrick, ignoring Nasmith's
sneer; "the family inherits the money and attends to its just
distribution. That is of no use to me, however, for I have no
family."
"Haven't you? I thought you were a shining example of the family
man."
"Ah, yes; but all women. They would tear each other in pieces if I
put any money in their hands. It's only men who can manage these
matters."
"Yes, it is a misfortune that you should not have been born Chinese.
That would have solved many difficulties. But what advice am I
worthy to give you? If you, with all your years in China, can't
leave your money satisfactorily, how can my limited experience be of
use?"
"I am not seeking advice; I want you to be my--what do you call
it?--executor, and keep my will, and see that my property is fairly
distributed. I seem bound to ask favors of you. This is no easy
one, I know, but perhaps it is easier than the last. If I live long
enough, it may cost you no trouble at all."
"If you don't?"
"Then I admit frankly you will have the devil of a time. You'll have
to apportion certain sums, which I shall specify, among several
women, each of whom will think you are robbing her. But, once you've
done it, you're rid of them. They can gamble away their share in a
night if they wish without your being under any obligation to
interfere. I don't expect you to take this trouble without being
paid for it; I insist upon that, though I know that will not be a
consideration to you if you really wish to help me; but I wouldn't
ask my own brother to make so large a gift of his time and patience
without some reward, so please don't protest. Your most exacting
burden will be keeping an eye upon my boy, Edward. If he's
twenty-one before I die, well and good: you'll have no
responsibility. If he's younger, he'll need some direction."
"What about Nancy?"
"Ah, Nancy--she is arranged for; I won't bother you with that
responsibility again. She is to get her share when she's married."
"Married!"
"Yes, I've found a good husband for her. How could I rest easy with
that responsibility on my mind? Let's hope, my dear sir, that when
you're married you will have only sons. You'll have more sleep, less
worry. It is too great a strain to have the future of growing
daughters on one's mind."
"But when is she to be married?" asked Nasmith, trying to keep his
voice level.
"That I can't say. Not for four years, I hope. You remember the
terms you found too extravagant. If I find my strength failing, I
shall hasten it. If anything should happen too suddenly, that is, if
she should fail to be married before I die, then I shall have to ask
you to hand over her marriage portion. But I shall leave no stone
unturned to spare you such a disagreeable necessity."
"Then she is to marry a Chinese?" asked Nasmith, scarcely brave
enough to hear the answer.
"She is engaged to a Chinese."
Nasmith did not pursue this topic further. There were too many
thoughts to be uttered; he did not know which to select. The shame,
the wrongfulness of the father's action choked him, but he remembered
that he had been warned. He had refused his chance and felt
honor-bound not to protest, now that Herrick had disposed of his
daughter in a way which seemed to him so utterly appalling. He knew,
also, how unavailing protests would be, how deaf the ears upon which
they would fall. A betrothal in China was too binding, too sacred a
compact to be dissolved by the persuasion of a moment. So he kept
silent, preferring not to waste words.
Disappointment over Herrick's relentless execution of a threat he
himself never had taken seriously made him all the more willing to
accept this second trust the man had sought from him. He would be
able to follow events in this weird family, still more to assume some
responsibility for them; perhaps Nancy's tragic case was not
hopeless--some stubborn cell of his brain would not be reconciled to
accepting it as hopeless--he might yet, he must, have his part to
play, his chance to intervene. In one breath he prayed that Herrick
might live to be ninety and that Nancy's affianced bridegroom be
struck down by all the plagues of the East.
"This time," he told Herrick, "I can help you. I shall be glad to
act as your executor, but I hope the necessity of doing so may never
arise--at least not for many years."
"Thank you," said Herrick gravely, "you have taken a great load off
my mind. Now we must have witnesses, and the will, of course, must
be left with you. It would never do to put it where others can
tamper with it."
"I can get witnesses: Mr. Beresford should do, and my
brother-in-law--he is a banker. I am sure he will be useful."
"Good. Can you bring them to my house? Here is my card. I will
write the address in English, if you wish. Could you come, say, at
five to-morrow?"
"I am sure we could."
Herrick departed, greatly pleased at the granting of his request and
not without regretful thoughts over having lost what seemed a
predestined husband for Nancy. What, after all, was the training he
had boasted of giving his daughter? Months had gone. Except during
his spell of illness, he had scarcely seen the girl. He began to
feel that he had sacrificed her for an inconsiderable point. The
thought was too painful. It was better to be philosophic, to say
that what was to be would be despite all the evasive twistings of
little human schemes. With this comfortable casting of his burden
upon fate Herrick went to sleep and did not waken till he felt his
chair settle on the pavement of his own courtyard.
Promptly at five the next day Nasmith with his two witnesses drove up
the narrow hutung to Herrick's star-studded gate. His news had
caused a great outcry at home. He had kept in confidence the story
of Herrick's offer of betrothal and how the father had threatened to
marry his daughter to a Chinese. No hint had been suggested to break
the shock of this grievous information. So stunned were his sister
and nieces by an arrangement which seemed both wanton and abominable
that Nasmith, to his own bitter amusement, found himself defending
the father, trying to convince his outraged relations that there was
nothing unnatural in betrothing to a Chinese a girl who had been
trained, all her life, to Chinese manners, Chinese ways of life. He
was a lame advocate and could only listen, with a disheartened smile,
to the dozen wild plots for saving Nancy which were bandied round the
table.
"If she ever has a mind to it, she will save herself," was the best
comfort he could offer.
"Do you know the way Chinese women save themselves?" asked his
brother-in-law grimly. "At the bottom of a well."
Nasmith cheerfully would have strangled Mr. Ferris for this
ill-chosen remark.
At five the next day Herrick received his three guests. They went
curiously through the draughty hallways, the wintry courtyards, to
the room their host had prepared for them.
"Here is the document," he said, offering them a piece of carefully
inscribed foolscap. "Will you read it? I think it is properly
phrased. I spent twenty years in the Customs, you know, and did my
turn at writing dispatches."
The three men scanned the paper and could pick no flaw in its
wording. Nasmith did begin to protest that he wanted no executor's
fee, but Herrick overruled him. After repeated scrutiny Ferris and
Beresford signed their names as witnesses. Even Beresford's lips
failed of their customary joke at the solemn moment when Herrick
handed to his executor the will, which seemed the last seal on a life
that had failed. Nasmith took it with trembling hands.
"Now, my friends, to be more cheerful," said Herrick, "we must
celebrate the occasion with a feast."
The banquet, it seemed, was ready. In a neighboring room the
surprised men found the table spread with a cotton cloth and crowded
with the tidbits which precede the meal: oranges, quarters of
pomegranate, sections of pomelo, ducks' eggs, black from their
pickling in lime, the thinnest slices of ham and sausage, dried melon
seeds, candied peanuts--a dozen dishes grouped in a pattern.
Despite the festive appearance of the board, the grotesque
decorations,--gay ph[oe]nixes ingeniously put together from scented
orchids, silk, and brass wire,--Herrick surveyed the sight glumly.
"Four is poor company for a feast," he said, "but the ladies will
help to cheer us up."
"The ladies?" Nasmith wondered, with great hope in his breast, and
kept an ever expectant eye upon the door, through which he longed
every moment to see Nancy enter. But the "ladies" were not of the
household. Never would Herrick have violated Chinese custom so
grossly as to bring women of his own family to eat with strangers.
They were sing-song girls, merry entertainers introduced after the
great dish, the sharks' fins, had been steamingly served. Slim,
lithe children in gaudy satin jackets, scant trousers, they came in
laughing, and sat in pretended embarrassment on stools behind the
four men. Thimble-cups of heady kao-liang soon put them at ease amid
these Western barbarians, roused their throats to shrill rhythmical
songs which Nasmith, in his disappointment, was slow to appreciate,
though the succession of explosive vowels and sharply punctuated
trills often gave scope for tones of great tenderness. Herrick was
instantly at home with these girls, patted them on the knees, teased
them by bouts of drinking games into consuming more wine. Beresford
followed his example and waxed merry with the slender damsel assigned
for his delight, but Ferris, conscious of a wife at home and of her
brother present, was more discreet, while Nasmith sat in morose
silence, angry at these trivial philanderings when his heart was
aching for Nancy.
Yet even his anger melted as he began very slowly to recognize that
Herrick's gayety was feigned, that the man was bidding an empty
defiance to the shadow of death, the shadow of defeat, which hung
over him. From the moment Nasmith realized this the scene became
almost too ghastly to be endured. The sight of this aging man, with
no recourse but a painted courtesan to keep up his spirits, became
the most pathetic display he had ever watched. He felt he was
helpless in the presence of sorcery, helpless to raise his fist and
shatter the web of illusion.
Dish followed dish, all the variegated delicacies of a Chinese meal,
giblets fried and peppered, whole ducks torn apart from their tongues
to their feet, fish spicily sandwiched in cabbage, steamed bread
flavored with garlic and pork, glutinous sweet rice into which lotus
seeds and candied fruit had been mixed--course after course, till
they had long become uncounted, before wine was poured under a copper
vessel and the flames allowed to lick its sides with tongues of livid
blue and green light and the boiling water crowded with slices of raw
fish and pheasant and chicken, green vegetables and crusts of burnt
rice, the last splendid dish of the feast. Herrick pushed these
ingredients into the cauldron with his chopsticks and then heaped up
the bowls of rice which had been served to his guests, bidding them
eat when they had no longer appetite to eat.
Then he rose unsteadily. He had consumed tens of the tiny cupfuls of
wine; his face was flushed. But it was more than the wine which
seemed to overcome him at this portentous moment. A look in his eyes
bade even the laughing sing-song girls be quiet. With the glare of
the electric lights beating upon his forehead he looked like a man
lost, utterly spent by the violence of a tropical sun. He lifted a
glass with one shaking hand, leaned against the table with the other.
His guests wondered dumbly what amazing action was to follow.
"Gentlemen," he said, "my heart is at rest."
"What a lie!" thought Nasmith.
"For a long time I have made myself miserable with half measures.
That is finished, I tell you--finished, finished. To-night for the
last time you have heard me speak my native tongue. I will never
speak it again. I want you to drink to Timothy Herrick. He is dead,
thank God! He has no successors. All that remains of him is that
piece of paper you have folded into your pocket."
Higher went his glass. "To Timothy Herrick!" he cried.
"Surely he is mad," said the eyes of the men who were watching him.
"To Timothy Herrick. He was an unhappy man. The sooner he is
forgotten, the better. God rest his spirit!"
He drained the glass and then with an emphatic gesture hurled it to
the floor. Instantly the four sing-song girls followed his lead.
Highly amused by this noisy whimsical end to the banquet, they
"dried" their cups--as the expression went--and hurled them down with
a crash, so that the splinters skipped like diamonds across the stone
floor. Beresford, too, carried away by the tense feeling of the
moment, drank the ominous toast and shivered his glass into
fragments, making a crash which stirred the girls into much laughter,
much cheering and clapping of hands. Only Ferris and Nasmith took no
part in the riotous demonstration: the one pulled his moustache in
embarrassment over such an unmanly display of emotion, the other
looked at Herrick as though he had beheld his words literally
fulfilled, as though he were gazing upon a corpse.
Not because of Herrick alone did his heart seem suffocated with pain.
He was like a man staring into a crystal. Behind the vow of lips
that never again should speak English he suffered a vision of Nancy
shut off from sight and sound, shut off from the timeless beauty of
love. In the shattered fragments of glass, sparkling even in the
brilliance of this garish room, he saw all that she had been born to
enjoy flung away, wantonly destroyed.