In a household where every trivial accident was snatched at by the
jaded inmates as meat for hours of excited gossip, an event so
unparalleled as the visit of three foreigners was bound to stir
Herrick's cloistered family to throbbing ecstasies of curiosity.
Herrick in his own time gave away the secret. He called the
t'ai-t'ai and told her the terms of his will. There was a glint of
malice in his eyes when he saw that her imperturbable countenance,
well controlled though it usually was, could not hide consternation
at this unwelcome news. He took pleasure in extolling the fairness
of his scheme, in hauling out one by one, like a magician extracting
rabbits from a hat, the advantages of a plan in which he knew too
well and too keenly the dazed woman could see no shadow of advantage.
When she had been given the precedence of her station, a full
twenty-four hours to meditate upon the abominable Western rectitude
of this will, the British justice which was the last outlandish
gesture of the Timothy Herrick who had ceased to be, he called up the
other wives in turn and told them what their share was to be and, in
great detail, how they were to get it.
None, of course, was satisfied, none but was sure this unknown
executor would rifle the estate with amiable peculations of his
own,--why shouldn't he?--yet the three subordinate wives who filled
the gap between the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien had less cause to
grumble, because they knew their shares were safer in the hands of a
stranger than left to the charity of the t'ai-t'ai. This worthy
woman gaped for words to vent her disgruntled spleen.
"The older he grows, the madder he gets," she told Kuei-lien. "Who
would have thought, after all these years, after the careful
management I have exercised in his house, that he would turn from me,
his wife, and put this extravagant trust in a stranger? It's these
beastly children he's concerned for; they disturb his mind and put
these queer notions into his head."
"Oh, we're no worse off than we were before," said Kuei-lien. "I can
still get money from him in the old way--"
"If his daughter doesn't interfere."
"We must see that she doesn't interfere."
The t'ai-t'ai accepted this advice with a snort. But there was food
for thought in the words. She must take pains to see that Nancy did
not enjoy the liberty she had enjoyed all too freely in the past.
"You do your part and I'll do mine," she said finally.
Kuei-lien was called upon soon for hers. Herrick, sitting dejectedly
in his room, felt himself at the loose ends of patience with life.
The future was settled. He could enjoy his desires without
constraint. He sent for his concubine. He was fingering his check
book when she entered.
"You have been very clever," he said, "far more clever than these
other women of my household, I see. My affection, I notice, has paid
you well in the last few months."
Kuei-lien smiled, not troubling to deny the greed he had uncovered.
"Cleverness is always costly," she remarked.
"Yes, you are right, it should be."
The man wrote a check larger than any of his previous rewards; he
read the sum before her eyes.
"It is unsigned, you observe," he explained. "Now show me if you are
clever enough to win my signature to this piece of paper."
This was temptation the concubine relished. She led the man through
every extreme of her sensual imagination, but even when beguiled into
amorous confusion by her beauty she found him obstinate in paying the
price of her victory, as though he had locked the gate to his
treasure, locked the gate and discarded the key. Kuei-lien fell back
upon the last resource of her trade. She provoked him to cruelty.
She stood the sting of the lash across her naked shoulders, smiling
grimly, biting her lips to keep from crying out in pain, quivering
but not shrinking from each fresh agony of his fury, till the time
came when he fell, sobbing like a baby, on his couch, exhausted in
spirit, ashamed of the mordant brutality which would have been
accounted vile from a beast. It was easy, in his repentant mood, to
secure the signature of the check.
While the ordeal was livid in her memory, the girl bargained her
stripes against the cupidity of the t'ai-t'ai, refusing downright to
face more of this abuse till she had got her share of the gains
greatly increased.
The t'ai-t'ai needed to keep her husband occupied, since she was
trying, for the first time in years, to win some control over Nancy.
In the interests of her own family, the family to which the girl was
betrothed, she had specious excuses of duty for overseeing the
occupations of the girl. She dismissed Nancy's teacher; what time
was there, she asked, for further frivolities of study in a girl who
had learned already too much for her own and her husband's good? To
her surprise, Nancy submitted without complaint, submitted so
gracefully that the t'ai-t'ai suspected some darkly cherished plot
and went further in her exactions, shortening the hours of Nancy's
play in the garden, setting her heavy tasks of sewing upon her bridal
garments.
Nancy was unbelievably docile. She was not reconciled to the
t'ai-t'ai's show of authority, which came with a bad grace after the
many years she had been left to go her own willful path. But the
t'ai-t'ai for the moment was too powerful and she was doing, after
all, only what Nancy recognized she had a right to do, making the
girl a meet and seemly wife for her nephew. The marriage lurked
inescapably in front of her; Nancy had neither thought nor plan of
evading her engagement. It was no use making enemies of the family
to which she must go, the family to which the t'ai-t'ai, though she
had left it, still seemed more closely related than to Herrick's
improvised house. Meekly Nancy bent her face over the scarlet satin
of her bridal gown and meditated all the gloomy, curious, fearful,
teasing thoughts which the mere color of the garments stirred in her
virgin mind.
Her old nurse was not so complaisant. Her grumbles lost their
discreetness; their echoes were heard throughout the house.
Kuei-lien warned her mistress.
"That's the old jade from whom Nancy gets her mischievous ideas," she
remarked. "She did her best to break up the engagement to your
nephew."
"You mean you and she did your best, don't you?" sniffed the woman.
"Still, you are right; the children have grown up. Why should they
need a nurse?"
This was not a new thought. But now the desperation of the t'ai-t'ai
heaped fuel upon her courage. With Herrick growing day by day more
helpless in the arms of his concubine, more childish, more easily and
pitifully led like a bear with a ring through his snout, the woman
believed the time at last had come for settling old scores and
writing off her balance of revenge.
The chance came when the cold winds blew for weeks and filtering dust
of spring, sweeping in clouds from the plains of Kansu and the
crumbling deserts of Gobi, choked the house, suffocated ears and eyes
and nostrils and throats with fine sand, and reduced everyone's
temper to that inflammable point where quarrels leap up from a spark.
Nancy did fumbling work on her bridal skirt. The t'ai-t'ai rebuked
her with harsh words. The child threw aside deference to her
stepmother and responded as angrily. But her flare of indignation
paled before the great blaze of wrath which suddenly burst from the
lips of the amah, who had interposed in the dispute and been unable
to quench her long-stifled embers of hatred.
For all the pent-up enmity of the past she now found words and, with
no care who should hear her, she denounced Nancy's tyrant with long
sentences of withering invective. The whole household rushed to
hear; the other wives stood round with gaping mouths, secretly
gloating over the t'ai-t'ai's discomfiture. Even Herrick could not
remain deaf to such noise and was forced irritably to inquire the
reason for this disturbance. In her frenzy the nurse was like a
poetess, singing out her unforgivable abuse in a rhythmical chant
which her victim was powerless to quell. Every line was jerked short
with a taunt, as though the infuriated woman defied the world to
contradict her words. The taunts stung like little leaden pellets on
the end of a whiplash. Nancy, standing cold and white in dismay,
expected to see these venomous syllables cut marks of blood across
the face of her stepmother.
A scene like this could not be excused. The result was what the old
nurse had foreseen and tried with such patience to guard against
during every provocation of the last few months: she was called
before Herrick, his wife standing vindictively at his side, and told
the cruel, farcical pretexts proper to the decencies of the occasion.
The children had outgrown a nurse. She deserved a rest after these
many years of faithful service, service Herrick was glad to reward
with a gift which would keep her in comfort to the end of her years.
The man knew in his heart he was pronouncing a dastardly sentence.
His voice faltered when he referred to the better reward the old
woman would find in the hearts of his children. But it was a just
sentence. He would not be moved when the amah threw herself at his
feet and begged with tears to remain. The demonstrative scene vexed
him. He hated scenes. The more the stricken woman pleaded, the more
stubbornly his will hardened. He turned away and left her weeping
uselessly.
Yet, terrible as her grief had been, not till Nancy and Edward
learned her punishment did it reach its climax. The two children
heard the news as though the world had crumbled round them. They
were losing the only mother they knew, for there had been not a day
of their lives but began and ended with the cheerful gossip of their
nurse. Edward was dazed by a whimpering unbelief, while Nancy went
to intercede with her father. But he was tired of the subject,
conscious that he had been less than fair, so he curtly told her to
mind her own affairs and for the last time to stop interfering with
the counsels of her elders.
In her despair the wretched girl sought the t'ai-t'ai, from whom she
could not remember having ever asked sympathy or help. She was too
proud to beg or to weep; this was not her way.
"It was my fault, not amah's," she said. "Won't you punish me? I
provoked the trouble. I was undutiful, hot-headed. I deserve to be
punished, not an old woman who has been a servant so long that she
has forgotten her place. She will never do this again, I can promise
you."
"I am not punishing anyone," said the t'ai-t'ai with her blandest
accents. "The quarrel--pooh, I've forgotten that. We all lose our
tempers at times. I'm not punishing your amah. Why should I wish to
punish an old and loyal servant? This is your father's decision, a
decision he made long ago. How can you call it a punishment to
reward a faithful servant by letting her spend the rest of her life
in peace and quiet? Is there any one of us who wouldn't rejoice at
such punishment?"
"But if she doesn't want peace and quiet, why force these blessings
upon her?"
"She may not desire peace and quiet; we do," replied the t'ai-t'ai
unwarily.
"Then it is a punishment."
The woman was vexed by Nancy's persistence.
"You are too young to concern yourself with things you don't
understand."
"But I do understand this," Nancy insisted; "you are punishing her
because she does not wish to go. You are punishing her for my fault.
I want to be punished."
"You want to be punished, do you? And what do you consider a
suitable punishment? Would you go and tell your father you wish to
be married this year, not to wait three more years? Would you do
this so that your stupid old amah can wear out her bones working when
she might be at home, growing fat in ease and idleness?"
The t'ai-t'ai phrased her proposal in terms of contemptuous
absurdity, as though to say she had no hope of its being accepted.
She watched the girl narrowly, enjoying the look of dismay which
crossed her face and more than a little surprised that Nancy should
take the offer seriously.
"Is this a punishment?" she asked.
"You mean do I consider marriage to my nephew a punishment?" said the
stepmother, for once talking openly to Nancy as she never would have
talked to one of her own race. "Would I have made the match if I
thought of it so? I am not used to these newfangled manners. When I
was married, my mother didn't speak of it to me or ask me what I
wished. Her wisdom was enough. But your father has new ideas,
perhaps they are foreign ideas, and so we promised you should have
these four years at home because he thought you wanted them. So
there we are, bound by a promise. And my mother is growing old and
feeble; she wants to see her grandson married; she keeps reproaching
my brother for his promise, saying she cannot live another three
years, she cannot wait so long. What am I to do? If you told your
father you were ready to be married, he might release us from this
promise. Then there would be happiness for all of us."
The t'ai-t'ai grew embarrassed by the unexpected lengths of her
recital and was not her usual cool self. The unlooked-for event of
Nancy's even seeming to hesitate over this proposal had shaken the
woman out of her suavity. Nancy too might have been confused by
hearing her marriage and even her future husband so freely mentioned
by that most correct of all persons, the t'ai-t'ai, but this breach
of impropriety dwindled to inconsequence beside the choice she felt
bound to make.
"If I tell my father this, will the amah remain?"
"I will see that she does remain. I promise you that, although it
will not be easy, now that your father has decided she shall go."
"And suppose I tell my father this, what does it mean? Does it mean
that I must be married this year, that I cannot wait three more, even
two more, years?"
"I can't answer for what it may mean to your father. You know his
mind as well as I do. It may mean nothing to him. He makes his own
laws. He may choose to wait, he may choose to hasten your wedding,
he may choose anything. How can I see into his brain?"
The t'ai-t'ai showed by a gesture that she had long ago given up
fathoming the vagaries of her husband's will.
Nancy pondered the matter. More than deep affection for the amah
stirred her heart. She was seized by an unconscionable longing for
sacrifice, a desire to do something heroic, to end the tedious apathy
of waiting and fearing which had sapped her spirit in recent months.
The suspense and the slowly encroaching tyranny of her stepmother
were becoming unbearable. She wanted courage to drag out day after
day of this dreary monotonous life, knowing too well it was only a
joyless postponement of the sacrifice she must at last make. Her
books had been taken away from her, her play, her English lessons,
the companionship of her father; now they were taking away the nurse
who had been like a mother. What was life worth under these
conditions? What happiness did her respite of four years promise?
How could the misery of the future be worse than the misery of the
present?
Nancy, like most children, could not appreciate the immense distance
of years which still lay ahead, time enough to make the sorrows of
her teens seem slight reason for tears. Her sadness of the moment
loomed eternal. The girl was swept by a gust of despair when she
thought of her own plight and heard the frightening echoes of her
father's debasement, the father whose sordid state she could only
guess because every effort she made to be of help only estranged him
further. She was in a mood to be desperate. If she did no good to
herself, her consent, however rash it might be, had at least this
merit in the good it was doing for the nurse she loved so well.
"Yes," she said, glad to feel she was active again, "I will do as you
wish: I will tell my father, as soon as he sends for me, that I wish
to be married this year. But you must do your part of the bargain."
"You can depend upon me for that," answered the t'ai-t'ai, taken
aback, even after Nancy's long silence, by this sudden pleasant
sequel to a proposal offered wholly at random. She had never dreamed
that Nancy would comply. Truly, these foreigners were unsearchable.
Nancy's one bitter satisfaction from the scene was in noting the
t'ai-t'ai's bewilderment, the t'ai-t'ai's sense of being baffled,
even in her moment of triumph, by the simplicity of the girl who had
promised on point-blank request what she herself had been preparing
months of subtle intrigue to effect.
"You must prepare the way," Nancy added, "if you want me to speak to
my father. I cannot go to him outright and say I wish to be married.
I am not so shameless as that."
"It isn't shameless for foreigners to discuss these things," the
t'ai-t'ai reassured her. "Nothing is shameless for foreigners."
"I am not a foreigner," Nancy answered sharply.
The t'ai-t'ai was equal to the task. Although she had not expected
Nancy's compliance, for weeks she had been drumming into Herrick's
ears, through Kuei-lien's insinuating lips, the thought that Nancy
ought to be wedded. The father, at first, had listened humorously as
though he read the jest of Kuei-lien's envy. But insistence had
forced the notion into his brain. He began to argue it with himself
and then with his concubine.
"Why should I make my daughter unhappy for your amusement?" he
protested.
And now Kuei-lien was able to say, "It is her own wish."
"It is, is it?" scoffed the father. "Very well, we shall see."
He summoned his daughter.
"Nancy," he said, "you know perhaps that when I arranged your
betrothal I did this on condition that you should not be married till
you were twenty. I wanted you to enjoy the last few years of your
childhood in the freedom your mother had. And I did not choose to
deprive myself too soon of your companionship. I haven't had so much
of your companionship as I looked for, but--well, we won't go into
that. My illness has upset matters. But now Kuei-lien astonishes me
by saying you don't want this freedom, that you are tired of your
father's home and wish to be married. Never mind the delicacy or
indelicacy of the question, but just tell me frankly, is this true?"
"It is true," answered the girl, speaking quickly lest time to think
alter her reply. She needed more than her old amah's reprieve, so
suddenly given, so unbelievingly accepted, to hold her steady to the
promise she had made; she needed new symptoms of the willful spirit
which urged her to risk her life's happiness all on the prospect of
change. The symptoms were not to be depended on; they might fail.
She used them while they lasted, and said, "It is true."
"You mean you wish to be married, you would rather be married than to
wait?"
"Yes."
Seldom had Herrick imagined his heart torn as by this terse reply.
He took it as a mark of Nancy's immense ingratitude. Had he not been
vexing himself cruelly over her future, picturing the sorrow, the
loneliness and homesickness which even the best-laid plans must bring
to pass, desperately trying to convince himself that he had done only
right in betrothing the child; and now she was stretching out her
hands for what seemed in her eyes to be only a glittering toy. He
was saddened, disappointed. He had never thought Nancy could be so
fickle. His vanity was hurt. He had never believed his daughter,
the object of long-drawn-out concern and anguish, could so quickly,
almost flippantly, resign the father who had loved her.
Her own self, as he remembered her from tender moments of a summer
gone by, cried out against the words she had spoken. She had wanted,
so she once said, to remain "like this forever--forever." Now she
denied these words. She had no feeling, no affection. She was
shallow, inconstant, humbugged by one whim to-day, by another gaudy
whim to-morrow, no better than the tattling women round her. Well,
it showed the folly of being anxious about the sorrows of other
people, even of one's own children. "I am at least rid of this
worry," thought the man in his anger.
"Just as you please," he said coldly. "If you wish to be married,
married you shall be--and soon."