Nancy now became the least important personage in the household. She
was the centre, it was true, round which the preparations of the
t'ai-t'ai were grouped, but she had discarded her personality when
she surrendered this last right to hold her destiny an arm's length
away. Now she was merely the prop on which to hang scarlet bridal
garments. The old impersonal traditions of the past, which weighted
and stiffened all that had to do with so human and pathetic an act as
the sending a maiden out from the home of her father, hung heavily
from her slight shoulders. The rite, promising so welcome a break
into the monotony of the women's quarters, filled every mind, but
there remained little thought or sympathy for the girl who was the
cause of it all.
The t'ai-t'ai had given her husband no time to change his mind. She
had sent the news at once to her brother, urging upon him haste in
choosing the festive date. This the family of the bridegroom were
prompt to do. They called in the fortune-tellers once more and, with
their sage advice, settled upon a day, the twenty-fifth of the eighth
moon, soon after the autumn festival, a date practical besides
auspicious, because the bills for this expensive event need not be
met till the New Year.
Nancy heard the news quietly and regarded the preparations going
forward as though they belonged not to herself but to another. The
amah, whom she had saved, took her reprieve with stolid surprise.
She thanked the t'ai-t'ai and said nothing more. She seemed
thoroughly cowed by the narrowness of her escape and was more
discreet than she had ever been, taking care to leave Nancy alone
lest she appear to interfere with the cherished schemes of the
t'ai-t'ai. Yet she did much thinking. She was not blind to the
mystery of the change in her fortunes, but quick enough to connect it
with the openly mooted rumor that Nancy herself, incredible though it
was, had asked to have the day of her wedding hastened. She thought
and brooded, but there was no one to whom she could appeal.
Nancy was silent. Her father showed signs of renewed illness; he
grew haggard and lean, took no care for any company except
Kuei-lien's, abused her in spells of morbid cruelty and then fell
back, terrified and choking, a prey to the attacks of heart disease
which were recurring more and more often. The man had given up hope
of living much longer.
"I will enjoy myself while I last," he vowed.
Kuei-lien was both his passion and his doom. He was jealous of every
moment she spent out of his sight. He planned, in his more evil
moments, to kill his concubine before he died so that she should not
have the satisfaction of practising upon others the wiles she had
practised upon him. He hated her and adored her, and for hours
satiated his hunger for the receding beauty of life by the sight of
her clad in the most splendid garments he could command, stiff golden
brocades, satins dyed to match the dissolving gray of the eastern sky
at dawn, lustrous fabrics surpassed by the cool skin of the girl,
fabrics forgotten when Herrick looked at the poignant loveliness of
her face, features of a candid delicacy on which the lust and greed
of the world seemed to have written no trace. She sang the old
haunting songs of the farmer and the fisherman and the scholar and
the hermit in his mountains, verse after verse, with an artlessness
which was incomparable art, the pathetic innocence of a child. There
were times when Herrick's gloomy room was lit up by the splendor of
Kuei-lien's beauty, when the concubine herself, great in the austere
perfection of her presence, was not great enough to vie with the
golden illusion she created.
Often the pain of these supreme illusions drove the man into frenzy;
at other times it quieted his heart, as though there were nothing
more to be satisfied with in life. His spirit grew numb. Caught by
Kuei-lien's enchantment, he nodded his head, fell drowsily asleep,
thinking what bliss it would be never to wake, but to stay lulled
through eternity by the vision he had seen. Yet he always woke, and
always from disturbed dreams in which Nancy unaccountably had taken
the place of Kuei-lien and reproached him with a slow smile on her
lips. She kept jerking him back to life, jerking him back when all
his senses were slow and his eyes ready for sleep.
"There will be no peace till she is married," he said, "and I wonder
if I shall have peace then."
On the impulse of a moment he decided to atone to his children for
the neglect of a year. They should have one more summer in the hills.
"She shall have one more happy summer and be free as the wind," he
said.
Against the violent protests of the t'ai-t'ai, he stuck to his plan,
but as a sop to his wife he added Li-an to the party, and off to the
Western Hills he went. Kuei-lien, Nancy, Edward, the amah, they all
went along, rubbing their eyes to see the willows still hanging low
over the ditches, the two camels grazing where they grazed twelve
months ago,--they seemed hardly to have moved in the seasons which
had intervened,--and to gaze, with the rapture bred of imprisonment
within walls, upon the vast, gentle color of the mountains.
While their chairs toiled over the hills, Kuei-lien sang fragments of
old songs; her voice was tender as the evening light. Much though
the bitterness which had grown between them, Nancy could not help
loving the other girl in this hour of sunset because there came forth
from her tones that sadness of the human lot which was common to them
both.
"The falling sun glows upon crumpled mountains,
Making every ridge gold, every deep valley amethyst;
The bamboos fling plumed heads like spray at the foot of the cliffs;
Vainly their waves sweep round the crimson walls of the temple;
Up the slope winds the path;
Peasants, balancing great loads, sing as they climb.
Ah, their songs are all of heaviness and burdens."
Nancy looked with pondering eyes upon the wild upper meadows;
illuminated they seemed, not only by the sun but by the words of the
song which went so close to their heart. With redoubled intensity
came the longing to sink her spirit in these tranquil scenes, to make
them her home where she might dwell with the flowers she had
worshiped. Tears swept like rain across her face; she bowed her head
and wept. There was no cure for the unhappiness she felt. She had
plucked the flowers and tossed them aside; so men would deal with her.
"Being scoffed at as a fool, I bury the flowers,
Yet know not who in other times will bury me;
In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old;
Flowers fall, men perish; both are known no more."
So she quoted the words of Tai-yü and dreamed that she too shared the
fate of that pitiful heroine whom life had dowered with too burning a
capacity for passion, too great and destroying joy in beauty.
This was not the way Herrick meant his daughter to begin her last
free summer. The next morning, early, he sent for her, and in the
room Nancy remembered so well, with the sun pouring blithely through
the window, the rustle of trees, the noise of the brook at full
traffic, sounds carried crisply on the air of a young vigorous day,
amid these things which belonged more intimately to the room than its
furniture, the father explained how careless of trouble he wished his
daughter to be.
"This is our last summer together," he said, "and I have planned this
summer for you. Perhaps I have been harsh at times, and not always
fair; it is difficult to be fair when one is ill. I truly do not
wish to lose you, Nancy, but--well, you know how things have
happened. Nothing can happen but what the gods allow. We can't
question fate. So let's enjoy ourselves as though no shadow hung
over us. I want you to crowd a lifetime of happiness into these
months, for it's no use disguising from you, my child, that you will
have burdens in the future; happy though you may be, you will have
burdens. I've scandalized your stepmother by bringing you here: she
thinks you ought to be sitting at home sewing. But I don't want my
daughter to spend her last months of childhood as a seamstress. This
is your summer, Nancy, you are to be free as you wish. No one is to
hinder you. I make no rules, impose no conditions. I only ask you
to be happy, be the child that you ought to be at your time of life,
and not give a moment's worry to what must come afterward."
He gave the silent girl a glance of affection which seemed to have
taken twenty years from his age. The thinness which had come upon
him of late enabled one to guess how fine his features once must have
been.
"Come, Nancy," he said softly, "don't stay so solemn. Can't you give
your father just one smile?"
In response to his begging Nancy's face lightened. Her eyes
displayed such a look of perfect confidence that the father felt
himself privileged never to forget what he had seen, for he had seen
the mother herself given back to him for a brief moment from the
region of shadows. The look spoke thoughts deeper than anything the
girl knew or could frame in words: it spoke of a trust, an
understanding, which would live between father and daughter, no
matter what sorrows, no matter if death itself interposed.
Separation would come, but never could they be truly separated. This
was the loyalty Nancy offered. It was not entirely a smile; it had
too much of the unearthly radiance of clouds which flame at dawn
before a tempest; but it satisfied her father and filled his heart.