The visit was almost at its end. The girls were in despair.
"We won't let you go home," they told Nancy. "You must have another
week, at least. Surely your father won't mind."
"Perhaps he won't," she agreed, "but I must go back and ask him."
She was no more ready than they were to have her stay finished. Time
had gone so swiftly. The first few days she had been careless of its
passing, as though she had the leisure of years before her, but now
each day was oppressed by the closer approach of the end. It would
be the end to so many things, the end to her youth, to her freedom,
her all too brief season of play. Nancy wished at times she had
never known these friends; she would not have missed them so. Barely
a month remained till her marriage. She looked at the moon shining
through the trees. Even now it was at the first quarter. The next
time she should see it thus, she would be back in Peking, the centre
of odious preparation, half enslaved already, and before she could
see it again she would be married, hidden in some brawling Chihli
village where her mother-in-law might not give her time to watch the
slow processions of the sky.
The praise of the twins had awakened a delight in her own beauty.
She would stand slowly undressing before the mirror, extending her
arms, admiring the rounded softness of her shoulders, the glint of
light upon her long silk stockings. She reddened with shame and with
fear at the thought of giving her body to the mercy of a stranger.
Not new thoughts were these, but for the first time intimately felt,
and by contrast the quick comradeship which prevailed in the Ferris
family made their home the treasure-house of all things desirable.
Whatever she might predict of her future home, she knew it would not
be like theirs. She dared less to think how different it might be.
She wanted security. She wanted peace of soul. She wanted the grave
trust of a man like Nasmith. She did not know that, with all her
rapt joy in the company of the twins, her one desire from waking till
sleeping was to appear lovely in his eyes. "I was the moon--I was--"
she mused once or twice, and checked herself dreaming before the long
mirror.
Nasmith too had come down from counting days to counting hours. A
whole ten days with Nancy near--they had promised so much and been
nothing but tantalization and sorrow. And now but one day lay before
him. The conversation of the dinner table turned to his rescue of
Nancy a year ago. Beresford revived the story with sundry
mock-heroic touches, descanting upon the execution Edward had done
with his bow till he made their intervention seem merely a belated
attempt to save the lives of the monks.
"Shall we go back there, Nancy?" said Nasmith, half in play, half
trying to veil the bitter seriousness of his eyes, "and see if we can
remember it all? It was so long ago, it has begun to seem almost a
joke."
His suggestion was taken up eagerly by the girls. They had not
consented to thinking of the morrow as Nancy's last day among them;
she must win her father's agreement to a longer visit; but, if last
day it were, a slight trembling in Ronald's voice told them he would
make the most of it. So early the next day they started with all the
paraphernalia of these outings to make holiday high among the rocky
shoulders of the mountains. The sun shone in broad waves of light
down the grassy slopes; the paths were still wet with dew.
"Who shall lead the way?" Nasmith asked.
"You and Nancy, you must be the pilgrims," called out Beresford
cheerily.
The twins had trusted him with their secret.
"Do you love Nancy?" Helen had demanded of him the night before.
"Yes, of course I love Nancy," he had answered.
"Oh, don't be stupid," the girl retorted, stamping her foot. "Do you
_love_ her?"
"I will, if you wish," Beresford answered gallantly.
"Well, I don't wish it. If you're really and truly sure you don't
love her, I want you to keep David and Edward in hand when we go to
the temple; find a tiger for them, even if you have to buy one--"
"Couldn't I be a tiger myself? I look well in stripes,--some have
been ungracious enough to suggest my wearing them permanently,--and
if you can give me some hint of how a tiger roars or whether a tiger
does roar or merely sits on his hind feet and purrs,--I won't do
that, mind you,--"
"I am not joking," Helen broke in. "I want you to keep the boys
amused so that Ronald can have a chance."
"Right-o," he said, suddenly understanding. He was a little
saddened, for the habit of seeing Nancy was growing on him.
"Well, I'm late in the race," he thought to himself. "I can't
complain." So, at Helen's command, he was tactfully alert to every
chance of helping what he supposed, in his simple way, were lovers.
"You are the pilgrims," he called, "you must brave the thorny places
of the wilderness. Young Edward and I will hold our trusty bows in
reserve. If you chance upon peril, give three piercing cries,--you'd
better make them two shorts and a long so we won't be led astray on
other adventure and fail you in your need,--three piercing shrieks,
and we'll tumble to your assistance."
Laughingly Ronald took up his post of guide, with Nancy halfway
between him and the twins, while Beresford kept his two young cubs in
leash by the sheer interest of his talk, and hallooed cheerfully to
Mrs. Ferris to make sure that she and her mountain chair were still
pursuing.
"Though fa-int, yet pursuing, we go on our way,"
he would hum, and then break off, reproaching himself with a grimace
for such irreverent use of a hymn. Meanwhile the twins, satisfied
with the arrangement of the party, slowly widened the interval
between themselves and Nancy, very cautiously, of course, not too
quickly nor too far, lest the girl suspect, yet far enough so that
her walking and talking with Ronald could become the habit of the day.
"Well, here's the grove," said Ronald, at last. Nancy had been
taught to call him by his name, "the communism of the family," he had
assured her. "Now what shall we do?"
They waited for the party to draw up.
"I smell water," exclaimed Mrs. Ferris.
"There is a stream in a ravine close by," offered Beresford, who had
explored these mountains inch by inch with his friend.
"Splendid, just the place we need for tiffin. Tiffin before temples,
my dears."
They arrived at the edge of the ravine and slipped down the gravelly
path to the rocks below.
"There must be swimming somewhere," said Elizabeth, prying round.
Soon shouts and splashing told the story of her success. She and
Helen came back, gay and dishevelled, their wet swimming suits under
their arms, pulled up Beresford, who had been soberly showing Edward
and David how to make whistles from the pliant twigs of the trees,
and gayly the family sat down to a meal which had been spread with
the usual elegance. They lingered a long time over the coffee, while
the men smoked pipes and outdid each other with the stories they told.
"Well, I'm going to sleep," said Mrs. Ferris, finally. "You had
better show Nancy her temple, Ronald, before it's too late."
"Will you come and see it?" the man asked.
Something in the eagerness of his voice made her hesitate, but after
a long pause she said yes. He got up silently and she followed,
while the rest sat watching, with no word to say, for they were
wondering in their hearts what the issue would be.
The afternoon was hot and oppressive; a haze was veiling the sun.
The pines stood like trees of an enchanted wood. Not a branch moved.
The silver trunks glistened in the heat. Nancy was dumb and uneasy
as though the sultry weather were laying its spell upon her as it
veiled the sun. She knew this was no ordinary chance, this walk, and
waited fearfully for Ronald to speak, to break the quiet which lay so
heavy upon her breast.
"We are pilgrims, Nancy," he said. "I wish I knew what is to be the
end of our pilgrimage."
But he left off talking riddles. A look in the girl's face warned
him that the time was not ripe. It was easier to relieve the tense
atmosphere with light-hearted mention of that day a year ago when he
and Beresford had been walking this selfsame path without thought of
the adventure they were to meet. He pointed out the place where
Edward had run into them, pictured the monks stopping foolishly a few
paces away. He was almost as amusing as Beresford in his way of
telling the story, but he had seen more deeply than his friend the
tragedy they foiled, so that his words never quite lost the graver
tones of a scene which he remembered almost as much with pain as with
joy.
"Well, here's your temple," he said at last.
Nancy looked with a slight shock of panic, but the red walls were
harmless enough, almost pitiful and desolate, under a sky that was
growing gray.
They stopped for a moment before entering. Inside, the temple seemed
dark and musty. The monks were asleep. Ronald had to shout before
one of them appeared, startled by visitors he had not expected.
Nancy recognized him,--he was the younger of the two priests who had
welcomed Edward and herself,--but, to her surprise, he gave her only
a blank stare. Her Western dress was effectual disguise. Quickly he
brought tea and, pulling off the lid of a round black box, gave them
handfuls of melon seeds, dried jujubes, cakes of powdered rice. The
tea was too hot; Ronald was restless. He got up and studied the
musty gods and turned to Nancy, who had too many evil memories of the
place to trust her friend out of sight.
"Shall we look at your prison?" he asked.
"No!" protested the girl.
"It is a worse prison you are going to," he commented dryly, "far
worse. Why don't you show the same fear for the future that you show
for the harmless memory of the past? I saved you from one. Ah,
Nancy, why won't you let me save you from the other?"
She looked past him at the gods on their lotus blossoms, and made no
answer. Ronald watched her, noted the masses of dark hair piled low
round her forehead, the tranced stare of her eyes, the slow curve of
her throat, arms half bare, hands far too smooth and supple for the
rough-grained table on which they were stretched.
"You were not meant for prison, Nancy," he said gently.
But the appeal of his words was frustrated by the entrance of the
monk. Every moment the girl expected his yellow-toothed confederate
to appear.
"I can't talk here," she said. "This place hurts me. It chokes me."
The man, however, was unwilling to leave the cobwebbed hall. An
unbelievable superstition held him here because this had been the
place they had named for their pilgrimage. He felt the influence of
the dusky temple fighting his battle in Nancy's heart.
"Don't you see?" he cried in a low voice. "Doesn't this place show
you what I mean? Nancy, Nancy, you say it hurts you, chokes you.
What chokes you? Just the memory of a danger long ago. What is that
compared with the marriage you are facing? A laugh and a smile. If
you can't bear to think in this mouldy, decaying place because the
walls stifle you with torturing thoughts, what are you going to do
when you have no friend, no protection, when life really begins to
choke and to hurt--when they lock you into a red chair and send you
away to be the slave of strangers?"
"I will stop doing. I will stop thinking," answered Nancy simply, as
though deed and thought could be laid away like garments too rich for
the everyday wear of life.
"No, Nancy," Ronald demurred, shaking his head, "you will never be
able to stop thinking and, worse yet, to stop feeling."
The priest, finding his company unwanted, had withdrawn softly to the
next hall and was watching his guests curiously through a crack in
the door.
"You can never stop feeling," Ronald persisted.
"You are a Westerner," said Nancy bravely; "you don't understand our
customs."
"I understand this much, Nancy, that you don't want to be married in
this cruel way any more than you want to die."
In fact he thought she would rather die, but he did not like to say
this openly, lest he put the thought into her head.
"One has to marry," the girl remarked calmly.
"Yes, but there are two ways of marrying. You have chosen the wrong
one."
"Chosen!" she said indignantly. "I haven't chosen anything. I can't
stop the winter from coming, can I? How can I stop being married?
When it's time to be married, I'm married."
"You're only arguing to hide your own fear. You know as well as I do
that this whole business is ghastly and wrong."
"What should I do?" she asked, vexed by the truth of his words.
"You should break the engagement, tell your father you won't consider
it."
"And bring shame to my father."
"Better shame for him than for you. After all, it would only be an
artificial shame for him, a short-lived one at that; for you it would
be all too real--and lifelong."
Nancy stood up, tired of hearing things she knew too well.
"You are kind," she said, "and it's very simple according to your
ways, but these are things that can't be mended by talk."
"Wait," commanded the man, "I haven't even begun to say what I
intended. I am not trying to mend a bad matter by talk. There is a
better way. I know your father wanted you to marry me, else why
should he have offered me the engagement? It was only annoyance,
pride, injured vanity, whatever you choose to call it, that made him
arrange this other hapless engagement. He has gained nothing by it,
not even the terms he tried to exact from me. He has managed to keep
you only one of the four years he stipulated. Do you think he is
happy over this business into which he has drifted so helplessly? He
is no happier than you or I. Ah, Nancy, why can't you see it, why
can't you see that worry is killing him--worry over what is to become
of you? If you wish to save his life, you must disobey him; you must
not go back; you must stay and marry me."
By now Nancy had grown used to this habit of frank speech. Ronald's
pregnant ending was outweighed by his accusation that she was killing
her father.
"I must go," she said. "I can't think of these things here."
She wanted swift motion to keep time with the wheeling circles of her
brain.
"But you cannot go now," cried her lover, suddenly conscious that he
had been stamping out his words to the rumbling accompaniment of
thunder. There was a bright flash, an ear-shattering explosion; the
two stood speechless, stunned, certain the temple had been struck.
Then Ronald laughed nervously; he could hear the rain sweeping toward
them through the trees; nearer and nearer it came, like the menacing
roar of a great wind, till it hissed through the branches and burst
upon the tiles of the temple roof with an awful noise, more deafening
than the clatter of stones. Lightning seethed round the temple,
illuminating the darkest corner with incessant brilliance as bolt
after bolt flared down the sides of the mountains; thunder and rain
were mixed in an inseparable welter of sound.
"You can't go now," Ronald shouted; "we must wait until the storm has
passed on."
He went back and stirred up the frightened monk to bring them more
tea. Nancy was sitting with her arms stretched across the table, her
hands clenched, her eyes intent upon ghosts she could not see, ghosts
of herself and Ronald and her father. Ronald's speech was so
terribly plausible, it matched her father's unforgettable
couplet--the sun and the moon; the words came back to torment the one
paltry bit of peace she had cherished, the peace of obeying her
father. She tried to put Ronald out of the debate, to exclude the
charm which had been working silent mischief in her heart. She
wanted to think entirely of her father, to please him, to save him;
the failure of her labored attempts for his safety, the battle she
had done against Kuei-lien's schemes, made her look carefully,
gravely, at the bewildering implications of Ronald's undreamed-of
project, that by defying her father she could make him happy.
The tumult of the storm relieved her of speech. She sat and stared,
and let her tea grow cold. The lightning flashed less frequently,
but the rain held and the temple was steeped in unnatural darkness, a
perilous gloom which oppressed her with hatred of the place. Again,
a second time, it had become her prison. Surely there was nothing
but mischief in store for the pilgrims who paid their vows here.
"The rain is stopping," Ronald reminded. "Have you any answer to
make?"
"I have no answer," Nancy replied.
"Are you going to put all my words aside without a thought?" asked
the man in despair.
"I have thought--I have thought many times; but I must go back. My
father let me come here; he trusted me. If I did not go back, it
would be shame and evil to him. How can I dare to break his promise?"
"Don't you understand, don't you see, Nancy? Must I go over it all
again! He doesn't want this marriage. It is only his stubbornness,
his obstinacy that makes him cling to it. I showed you his own
words, the scrolls he wrote for me; he told me that these were the
truth and that the best part of my life would come when I found out
the meaning for myself. If they were the truth, then your marriage
is false and your father is false to himself, false to his own
heart's desire in allowing it. It will kill him; remember that--it
will kill him."
Ronald saw that his earnestness had made a deep impression; he
hurried to strengthen his advantage.
"And now, Nancy," he went on, "I have read his words, his scrolls,
read them for myself, and I know that he was right, that the best
part of my life will come not only from understanding them but from
realizing their meaning in actual life. You don't belong to the
East, Nancy, you belong to the West whence you came; it is my
happiness to take you back to the West of your birth. That is my lot
and my destiny because I know in my heart I love you. I have been
learning this through all the troubled months of the past year. I
love you, Nancy; my claim upon you is greater than your father's; it
is the claim to which he appointed me. His claim is passing, his
life is nearly run. He will die, but we must live."
The girl listened to him in breathless quiet. Tumult, agitation, had
frozen her muscles so that her face in the dim light showed neither
anger nor joy, merely a ghostly whiteness, an unblinking passivity
like the gilded immobile calm of the gods.
"I don't understand," said the girl after a long silence. "You
should tell these things to my father, not to me."
"No," protested the man, "it is time to tell them to you, to make you
understand. You are not blind, Nancy, you have been with us, you
know something of the life I wish to offer you. No hiding away in an
ignorant village, no father-in-law and mother-in-law and a whole
courtyard of mangy relations tyrannizing over you, but your own home,
friends to visit and be visited, and a husband who will love and
reverence your slightest wish. Ah, Nancy, how can I tell you these
things, how can I make you know that I love you, that life won't be
life for me if I cannot have you?"
"These things should not be said to me," said Nancy, her voice
burdened with pain. "You are late, late! Why do you say such things
when you know it is useless, when you know my father has promised and
I have promised? I have no power. I cannot call back spoken words,
my spoken words."
"Then you do not love me," said Ronald, in a low, discouraged voice.
"I don't know," faltered the girl, unable to say the one phrase which
would have quelled his importunity, unable to accept him, unable to
give him up. "I don't understand this--this love."
"You are fighting against your own heart," said Ronald. "You are
making the mistake which has tortured your father for years. Give me
an answer, Nancy. This is no time for holding to foolish promises;
it is no time for dainty, meticulous points of honor. Your father's
life rests in your hands. You will hurt him if you don't go back;
you will kill him if you do. I don't mind your sacrificing me,--I do
mind, of course, but we'll not stop to argue over it,--but will you
sacrifice your father? Will you sacrifice yourself?"
Nancy's composure was shaken. She was exhausted by the strain of
arguing against everything she desired. Ronald was trying to
persuade her to things whereof she longed only too ardently to be
persuaded. She was worn out by the thankless irony of defending her
own worst interests. She could not deny that she loved Ronald; she
could not confess that she did; her heart was in a fever of eagerness
to put into his masterful hands the knotted strings of her life, but
her will, even when half convinced, balked at an act which, however
surely it might lead to her father's ultimate welfare, would be
desertion and disloyalty to his trust.
The rain had stopped. There was only the sound of water dripping
from the trees to remind her that they must join the others, discover
how they had fared in the deluge.
"I cannot say yes, Ronald," she announced in unthinkably clear tones,
"and I cannot say no. I don't know what to say. You called this a
pilgrimage. Then I am a pilgrim and I shall get my answer as the
pilgrims do."
She stood up, pushed back her stool with a clatter which brought the
listening monk to the door.
"Get me some incense," she commanded.
One by one she took out the frail sticks from the packet he brought,
and round the temple she went, lighting a stick before each god and
thrusting it deep into the ashes of the porcelain burner before she
did obeisance with clasped hands held stiff in front of her. The
eighteen Lo-han she worshiped, Kuan-yin and the gods of the four
mountains, at the back, and then returned to the main hall to kneel
prostrate before the three lotus-throned Buddhas. Ronald looked on
with amazement and dismay at the outrageously incongruous picture of
this foreign girl in Western clothes performing an act so unnatural
to her appearance. The sight did violence to his imagination, this
vision of Nancy with knees pressed upon a dirty prayer-mat of straw,
the lace edges of her skirts draggled in the mire, her hair tumbling
over her shoulders as she bowed before these pitiless, imperturbable
gods. Yet he was too much fascinated by the weirdness of the scene
to think of intervening.
The priest had been surprised, too; he had recognized the girl at the
first sound of her vigorous Chinese speech. This time Nancy had the
upper hand; she gave her commands quickly and clearly so that he was
only too prompt to obey. He stood by the bell while she chanted her
appeal to the gods, a strange petition that they should tell her
whether she ought to obey or disobey her father. Three times she
bowed, three times he struck deep full-toned reverberations from his
bell. With the last note Nancy seized a round bamboo box from the
table in front of her; she shook it and threw the bamboo counters to
the floor. The gods must tell her which was right, to go back to her
father or not to go back, to yield to the scarlet chair and to Chou
Ming-te for her husband or to remain and marry Ronald.
The bamboo counters fell with curved sides uppermost. "No," the gods
told her, "you are not to go back."
But the girl could not break her trust even for the gods.
"This is an evil place," she said, turning calmly to Ronald. "I know
now that I cannot do what you wish. I must go back as I promised."
Ronald followed her dumbly through the dripping trees. Inwardly he
cursed the superstition that could pin a great choice upon the chance
fall of two bamboo counters. He was too bitter to speak, bitter over
this childish, futile end to their pilgrimage. He was almost ready
to despise Nancy.
He never guessed that the gods had been on his side--that the girl
had thrown over their advice, thrown over his, thrown over her own.