The days in the Western Hills were always to be associated with the
singing of birds. In the first hours of the morning they began their
blithe chattering; the maples and locusts rang with their notes,
notes of many modes from the raucous shriek of the jay, the screech
of the oriole, as he plunged recklessly like a yellow meteor into the
leafy branches, through a gamut of whistling and twittering, of doves
cooing and cuckoos never tiring of their two-syllabled speech, to the
liquid trills of the myna, whose efforts were a challenge for the
birds of the temple to emulate.
It was time for Edward and Li-an to tumble joyfully through the dewy
grass and for Nancy to follow them when once the canaries were awake
in their bamboo cages, swelling their throats to tell the animation
of clear sunshine while the starlings with their split tongues
discoursed the news of the day.
Nancy could not go wholly back to the past. Li-an was a more
congenial playmate for Edward. The mountains were so new to her that
she was willing to believe all the elaborate mysteries the boy
invented and to do her part manfully in digging for treasure.
The atmosphere of the household was one of calm. Even Kuei-lien
seemed to have no ends of her own to pursue and kept her master's
affections in a tranquil key as though she herself wished some
holidays after the hectic winter she had spent. The settlement of
Nancy's fortunes gave every appearance of having wiped off the score
between the two girls so that a friendliness of the old sort thrived;
many a hot afternoon they spent together in comfortable abandon,
content to discuss only those topics they could treat gayly.
Nancy made the most of her father's license and seldom was there
favorable weather that she did not climb by narrow paths to the top
of the ridge where she could fancy the whole wide world at her feet.
She did not guess, though her instinct must have taken knowledge,
that she might meet the friend who held his dark corner in her
memory. Nasmith was not likely to return to the Western Hills
without some effort to see whether Herrick's strange family were
occupying their temple. He upbraided himself for folly, but it
became more and more his habit to excuse himself from Beresford's too
cheerful company and to lurk in the outskirts of the house where he
had declined his chance with such justifiable weakness the year
before. He tried to condone his curiosity on grounds of plausible
interest, yet he felt always too much the spy to knock openly at the
door, so that days passed before he knew the Herricks really had
returned. This news he did not even dare tell his family, but he
hovered like a discontented spirit on the hills above, straining his
eyes for impossible glimpses of Nancy, and then, one afternoon, as he
was bound to do, came upon her sitting in a pocket of rock high above
the ravine. She did not hear him approach.
"Good afternoon, Nancy," he said, "it is a long, long time since the
happy day when we met. You don't go roving any more to temples."
The girl gave him a startled glance. A look of momentary fear
gleamed in her eyes. Gladness came next, and then misery. The wind
had blown her hair in disarray over her forehead till it was like a
veil behind which her thoughts seemed to hide. Nasmith longed to
draw them out from their covert, to see whether they were happy
thoughts, whether they dwelt with contentment on the betrothal by
which they were bound. There was an instant when his senses laughed
at control, when he felt it his duty and his right to carry off this
girl in defiance of all pledged engagements; and had he realized what
Nancy herself did not realize, that she sat there with the implicit
hope of meeting him, he might for once have acted upon his senses;
but she seemed so unapproachable, so cool, in the alien shape of her
garments, the white grass-linen which clad her slender body, that the
thought of loving her from nearer than a distance became sacrilege.
"I only come here," said Nancy, and smiled a little; "I don't go to
temples any more."
"And you don't play cricket any more, I suppose?"
"Oh, no, I never learned cricket."
"And what do you do?" Nasmith inquired. "How do you pass the time?"
"I come here to read--Edward is noisy sometimes--and I like to see
the mountains."
"Won't you ever come to see us again? My nieces ask about you and
talk about you day after day."
"No, I can't do that now. My father would not like it."
"But he was very friendly last year and this spring he asked me to do
some important business for him."
"Yes, but I am not so free as last year."
"Why?"
Nancy found this question hard to meet even in English; in Chinese
she never would have dreamed of answering. But foreigners, she had
understood, discussed these things without reticence.
"My father has promised me to be engaged, to be married."
"Yes, but that is four--or is it three--years away."
"No, I am to be married soon--in two months."
Nasmith looked at her in dazed unbelief.
"Your father said you were not to be married till you were twenty."
"I changed that--I asked to be married earlier."
Nancy went on quite naturally from one confession to the next,
talking frankly on the banned subject as though thirteen years of
Chinese life had not forbidden fear. She liked the thrill of
breaking such unwelcome news to the friend she trusted so oddly.
"You changed it! Do you like the thought of this marriage?"
"I don't know--I was tired of the house, tired of the women, tired of
sewing."
"And do you think that there won't be a house and women and sewing
after you are married?"
"They will be different."
It was pleasing to meet someone who thought of her part in the
bargain that had been made.
"Different!" exclaimed Nasmith. "Ah, Nancy, it will be worse
drudgery than anything you have known. You speak like a child. You
don't know what you are saying. Do you think marriage is play?"
"I have to be married. My father said so."
"Do you know what your father did?" said the man, emboldened by his
pity. "Do you know that your father offered to marry you to me?"
This was a question the girl was wholly unready to face. The swift
progress of their conversation had carried her too far.
"And I refused," said Nasmith, determined to have it out, "I refused
because he asked impossible terms. He wanted to keep you till you
were twenty, would not let you go to school as I asked, would not let
you be brought up with my nieces. I was a fool. I should have kept
my claim upon you. You are not Chinese, Nancy, you have no right to
be Chinese. And now you are to be thrown away because of my
obstinacy and your father's blindness."
"You are not my father," said the girl indignantly; "he is not blind.
I am Chinese. I am Chinese--I must go home. I talk too much."
She stood up. Anger and despair fought in her brain. She felt
helpless before Nasmith's outspoken manners, a prey to her stupid
frankness in encouraging him.
"Don't go," begged the man. "I suppose you think I am rude, but I
had to speak out my mind. It is our Western way, you know. I keep
forgetting you are not used to it. I can't keep quiet when I see
anything as wicked as this marriage to which you are being
sacrificed. If I went to your father to-day, don't you think he
would hear me? If I told him to have his own way, to keep you where
he pleased till you are twenty, couldn't we break this engagement?"
"We don't break engagements," the girl answered proudly. She turned
cool, almost cold in her firmness, now that Nasmith had been betrayed
into what she felt was a dishonorable weakness. "My father doesn't
change and I don't change. We have promised."
"Fiddlesticks! Engagement is not marriage. It was your father's
first wish, remember, that I should marry you."
"My father has told me his wish. I am engaged."
"Can you read this?" persisted the man, drawing from his pocketbook a
copy of the scrolls Herrick had written. "This is what your father
wrote. Can you read it?"
Nancy looked at the paper curiously.
"Did my father write this for you?" she asked.
"Yes, he wrote it for me last year, the day when we brought you home
from my sister's house. He told me these characters had a meaning
for me if I could understand them."
"They have a meaning," the girl admitted.
"What meaning?"
"You are the sun," she said.
"Of course; but who is the moon?" he demanded.
"I was the moon--then--last year."
"You are still the moon," he declared. "They were not written merely
for last year."
Nancy did not answer him. The copied characters of the scroll had
been like a glimpse into her father's mind. She had played so long
with these riddles as to be profoundly moved by what she saw so
clearly her father had meant to be prophecy. Great was her reverence
for the written word. She was like the Chinese who will not allow
even a scrap of printed paper to be trodden underfoot, like the
governor who forbade newspapers to be used for wrapping parcels
because this was treating characters shamefully, showing despite to
the very means of the culture which sages and poets had labored to
create. For scrolls her deference was superstitious. They were
oracles, working out their own mystical fulfillment. Versed as she
was in their subtlety, in their history, in the earth-shaking powers
of a single well-written character, the byplay of allusion which had
torn down dynasties or raised men to favor with the Son of Heaven,
she looked with fear and bewilderment upon her father's message as
though she were reading a mandate of the gods, for the scroll
expressed her father's belief and his wish that she should be the
wife of this stranger from the West.
"I am engaged," she repeated as though she were defying heaven. "We
have promised!"
Nasmith saw this could not be argued further. More words only would
make the girl stubborn, perhaps lose him the chance of seeing her
again.
"Very well, we won't debate the matter," he said, "but do you think
your father would let you come to stay for a few days with my
sister--and your brother, of course? My nieces will never be
satisfied to miss seeing you; if they heard I had met you, they would
send me back for you. And this is not the request of a stranger, you
know. After all, I am almost a guardian. You will come, won't you?"
"Why?"
Nancy was in a contrary mood.
"Why?" echoed Nasmith impatiently. "Why? I should not have thought
you needed to ask that question. Does not your memory suggest
reasons enough? After all, Nancy, you won't find friends so
plentiful in this world that you can afford to neglect those you
have."
"Perhaps Edward can come," she admitted, "but if I can come--I don't
know. It is different for me because I am engaged."
"Will you ask your father?" Nasmith persisted.
"Yes, I will ask him," said Nancy; and away she went swiftly, like
the quiet, swift descent of evening.
Nasmith did not try to follow, although it was high time for him to
be swinging into his sturdy stride homeward. He felt as much amazed
by the riddles as Nancy herself. Suddenly it occurred to him that
this was only his second meeting with the girl--two meetings, and
these a year apart. He could not account for the intense feeling
which made him still loiter in this spot as though all that was real
of her were lingering with him. He could not understand the
attraction which held him. Was there real insight, after all,
expressed in those words whose meaning with baffling enlightenment he
now realized?
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon for the moon;
The moon following from the east tenderly displays the
reflection of the sun.
Or had these words, slowly maturing in his mind, worked their own
desire for fulfillment? He loved these mountains the sun had painted
in broad sweeping colors, to which night was hurrying to put in
shadow. He regarded them tenderly; they seemed to breathe of Nancy,
to sing of Nancy, with the old time-worn cadence of the land whose
tongue she had learned. Ah, what a beacon he could light for her,
what a splendid beacon he must set blazing! She could not, she
should not, be lost to him!
So the serene glow of evening had helped him find himself, had made
him resolute, had sent him home resolute, after a year of fighting
shadows.
Nancy, in her own way, was tranquil. The habit of taking life as it
came enabled her to speak simply to her father about this meeting
with Nasmith and about his request. The father was still indulgent.
He did not need to remind himself of his promise; this was Nancy's
summer. He had screwed his will to its final pitch when he consented
to the date of her marriage. Nothing more seemed to matter; nothing
more was he willing to debate. Let life run as it chose.
"I see no harm in it," he said, dealing with Nasmith's invitation.
"Mr. Nasmith is a man I trust and his family, so far as I met them,
are delightful. The change will be good for you both. I will send a
man the first thing in the morning to tell them you are coming, and
by the afternoon the chairs can be ready for you to start. Amah of
course must go. They're sure to have room for her."
In this matter-of-fact way Herrick granted the request as though it
were business of no concern. Nancy was not so sure. She too could
not rid her memory of the prophetic lines her father had written.
The words had caught in her brain. She repeated them till she fell
asleep and repeated them again in the morning when her spirit had
become infected by Edward's growing excitement. With great ado the
little procession set out, the amah waving more farewells than a
traveler bound across the ocean. Nancy was not insensible of the
bustle. She was both glad and afraid, timid and joyful, but she
abandoned her body to the motion of the chair, lying back with eyes
half closed, while the sun beat hot through the screened window. She
was content to let her spirit be carried, like her limbs, with the
inertia which leaves every directing impulse to destiny. "The
sun--the moon; the moon--the sun--t'ai-yang, yueh-liang;
yueh-liang--t'ai-yang," the words made their own drowsy refrain to
the slogging pace of the coolies.
Deep was the silence which had fallen over the deserted household.
Herrick had not realized how much he would miss these children whom
never before had he allowed to go away from their home. The sun
shone vacantly on the temple; in the evening he walked with Kuei-lien
in the moonless dark, passing the tomb of the monk and standing
pensive on the little platform which overhung the ravine. He was
like a lonely child, but afraid of something worse than the loss of
Nancy and Edward, afraid of the solitariness of death, which seemed
to threaten him from the deep shadows of the mountains.
Kuei-lien too felt the spell and did little to cheer him. The song
she sang was sad, the old tragic tale from The Three Kingdoms of the
first break in a brotherhood, which had become classic, the
brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, wherein three heroes had stood
gayly steadfast to each other through years of war, only to be
separated by death at the last. She sang the story Herrick knew so
well and loved for its sombre beauty: how Liu Pei, King of Shu, had
wakened from troubled sleep to see the ghost of his blood-brother,
Kuan Yü, not knowing it was a ghost, not knowing he had been slain.
A cold gust of wind blew in his chamber; the lamp flickered and
became bright again. Liu Pei looked up and saw a man standing behind
the lamp.
"What man are you that comes in the dead of night to my chamber?"
The man did not answer. Liu Pei, in alarm, got up to look. It was
Kuan Yü who was hiding behind the shadow of the lamp.
Liu Pei exclaimed:--
"Ah, my brother, have you been well since we parted? You must have
great reason to come thus in the depth of night. You and I are the
same bone and flesh; why do you show this deference?"
Then Kuan Yü wept and said:--
"Brother, raise your armies and avenge me. Wipe my wrongs clean as
snow."
He finished speaking. A cold wind arose. He had vanished. Suddenly
Liu Pei awoke; and it was a dream.
Kuei-lien's voice made the tragedy seem real to her master--the
terror of that awakening. She told how at the third watch Liu Pei
sent for his minister, K'ung Ming, whose strategy and knowledge of
the stars and unworldly faithfulness had won him this kingdom in the
west. K'ung Ming tried to comfort him out of his fear, but when he
had left the presence of the King he met a friend who told him that
there were evil rumors abroad about the fate of Kuan Yü. Then K'ung
Ming unburdened his heart.
"To-night I have seen a sign in the heaven," he confessed. "I saw a
star fall over Chingchou and I know that Kuan Yü has met with evil
there. But I am afraid of my master's grief and dare not tell him."
Even while the two were speaking a man suddenly came forth, caught
hold of K'ung Ming's sleeve and said:--
"If there is evil news, why do you deceive me?"
K'ung Ming looked; it was Liu Pei.
"Why do you distress yourself over uncertain news?" he said. "Why
let yourself be so unprofitably sad?"
Liu Pei answered:--
"I and Kuan Yü have sworn to live and die together. If he has
fallen, how can I stand alone?"
Then, one by one, disturbing the peace of the night, came messengers.
"Kuan Yü is defeated."
"Kuan Yü is betrayed."
And, before it was light:--
"Kuan Yü is slain."
Liu Pei, when he heard it, gave one great cry and fell fainting to
the ground.
Herrick listened as though these things had not happened centuries
and centuries ago, as though the three men still whispered beneath
the flickering torches of the palace. He saw the King cast down by
his mighty grief to the cold stones of the pavement. It was as if
Kuei-lien herself had sung away the Golden Age and its heroes. He
turned to the girl; her face was almost luminous in the dark. His
heart was too burdened for speech. She had sung away his own Golden
Age, sung away his lustihood and strength.
"Why do you deceive me, ah, why do you deceive me, Kuei-lien?" he
asked sadly, echoing Liu Pei's words with a meaning which the girl
understood for a moment, but never understood again.