Nancy and Edward made a very different return from their homecoming
of a year before. The girl would not hear of her friends walking
with her; farewells were so painful that she wished to be finished
with them, whatever the cost to her feelings, and get what peace she
could from the dull melancholy of the journey in her chair. There
was not much peace in the slow procession over the hills. Her eyes
burned from weariness, her mind scanned discontentedly every word she
had spoken in the three crises of the past twenty-four hours, yet
suggested no better words in their place.
Almost to her surprise, her father looked better and stronger than he
had seemed for months. He greeted his returned children with his old
hearty affection. Nancy had feared to find him again in bondage to
Kuei-lien; if she had found the fogs of that evil spell clouding the
household, the daughter might well have turned her chair round, given
up the fight for her father, gone back to Ronald.
But the great joy of her father in welcoming his children made Nancy
ashamed of these treacherous thoughts. She read in his face his own
sacrifice, the self-control which had kept him from forgetting his
loneliness of a fortnight by exploiting his passion for the
concubine. His restraint had been more than human. Only his love
for his daughter, the wish not to mar her last days by any shadow of
unhappiness, had held the man back from the delectable oblivion in
Kuei-lien's beauty. He had spent many hours in his study, had
written characters and read dry books and taken Li-an for long
prattling walks, all the time wondering what Nancy was doing, hoping
that she would not return, that she would yield to the persuasions he
had foreseen, yet counting off one by one the days of her visit and
dreading the one first act of disloyalty which might keep her with
the friends and lover from the West.
When the chairs were announced he did not know which was uppermost,
sorrow or joy, as he hastened to greet the wanderers. It was not his
fault that Nancy had come back. The chance had been hers to escape.
It was not his fault that they must fulfill the bond they had made.
It was fate. One cannot fight against the ordinances of fate. He
could only make the most of Nancy's last days at home.
But Kuei-lien and Li-an saved the return from being desolate. They
were so full of questions that they awoke echoes of laughter in the
household. They embarked Edward upon long tales and they set even
the woebegone amah bragging till she forgot the dreariness of being
back again in recounting the glories of the Ferris establishment,
glories, she let her hearers distinctly understand, such as she had
been bred to appreciate. When she descanted upon the cleanliness of
the Ferris family, the unashamed use of soap and water, the delicacy
which did not tolerate dust and cobwebs even in corners where they
could not be seen, the splendor of the dinner table set with linen
and silver and shining glasses, the manners and dress of the
children, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, the kitchen, the pantry, it
was only a step to her memories of Nancy's mother and of stories she
got new zest, fresh energy, to tell for the hundredth time.
Nancy also lost part of her sadness in satisfying Kuei-lien's
curiosity about everything that had happened during her stay--about
everything except the things which mattered. She was clearer than
her fulsome old nurse in describing the picnics and games and
swimming parties and rebuilding before Kuei-lien's eyes every last
detail of the costumes she had worn. Clothes intrigued the
concubine; they were a harmless topic for Nancy to enlarge upon,
indeed, kept her mind from graver regrets, so that Kuei-lien became
quite enchanted by extraordinary surmises as to why the foreigner
wasted good embroidery on her chemise and hid satin ribbons where
they could not be seen, and cumbered herself, even at home, with the
superfluity of a skirt.
As a practical demonstration, Nancy consented to wear a dress which
Helen and Elizabeth between them had given her.
"It's our gift of remembrance," Helen had said.
"And who knows if the time won't come when you will want to give up
being Chinese," added Elizabeth. "You will always have this ready."
Kuei-lien and Li-an led Nancy out, made her walk up and down the path
behind the temple, while they clapped and laughed their applause at
her unwonted appearance. So excited were they that they never heard
Herrick approach, did not even guess his presence till he had stood
for some minutes dumbly watching his daughter. When they saw him
they turned suddenly quiet. Herrick gave a little helpless toss of
his head, then he called Nancy to his room.
"Sit down," he said, looking wonderingly at this stranger of a
daughter whom he felt--so curiously changed was she by her Western
garments--he had never known before.
"I have been wondering," he began rather deliberately, "why you asked
to be married earlier. The more I think of it, the less I understand
it. What were you hiding from me?"
Nancy groped vainly for the faintest suggestion of an answer, but she
could find no word to say. She sat mutely and helplessly on the edge
of her uncomfortable chair.
"Were you hiding anything from me?" the man pursued.
"I don't know how to tell my reasons," said Nancy finally.
"Ah, Nancy, you are a mystery to me. I don't understand a tenth of
you. I feel as though I had lost you. Did you want to be married?"
The question was like an appeal for reassurance on the part of her
father, as if he wanted some support from the girl to resist his own
doubts. Nancy did her gallant best to comfort him.
"Yes," she replied.
"I wish I could believe you," he sighed, only half convinced.
The ten days with his children away, his unexpected fortitude in
denying to his nerves Kuei-lien's lethal comfort, had been a
sacrifice he would have been wiser never to have made. There had
been too much time to think. And Herrick had reached the state of
body where thought was a uselessly distracting exertion. So long as
his will shirked the strain of mending what was not past cure,
Nancy's marriage, which had seemed such a reasonable match when it
was four safe years away, had become a sinister dream he could not
thrust from him. The sight of Nancy in her Western clothes made the
pain unbearable. He tried to convince himself that he was not
offering her up on the altar of his folly.
"Do you really want to be married?" he asked next, not content with
her previous answer. "Do you understand what it means? You are so
young. Time goes so fast."
"And if I don't want to be married," asked the girl, with a look of
curious insight into the hesitations of his heart, "if I don't want
to be married, will it make any difference?"
This was the very question Herrick wished she had not put. It
required such a definite answer. To say "yes," to say that the
marriage could be prevented at this eleventh hour, meant an act
Herrick did not have the courage to perform so abruptly. The issue
would be nothing less than throwing over the past thirteen years of
his life. After so grave a breach of custom as the deliberate insult
to the t'ai-t'ai's family in stopping a marriage on the verge of
consummation, Chinese life would be impossible to him. The memory of
Nancy's perjured troth would haunt the rest of his days. His only
recourse would be to return to the West he had disowned. For his own
sake, Herrick dreaded the thought; for Nancy's sake, Herrick groped
for the strength of will to make the detestable change. But Nancy
gave him no help. She did not weep, she did not shake his heart with
sobs for pity, she did not stimulate the sapped vigor of his courage.
At the moment when his heart cried to his daughter, by the sight of
her uncontrolled weakness, by terror, misery, any violent agony of
passion, to make him be brave, she would only put this candid
question, which had to be answered so definitely by yes or no.
"I'm afraid it can't make any difference," he admitted after a
fearful pause, "things have gone so far."
"Because I don't really wish to be married at all," said Nancy
perversely.
Her father's raising a question which he himself now confessed was
not the least likely to have any practical bearing upon her fate
stirred up a sudden gust of anger, till she was unready to leave him
the comfort of thinking she was happy. But Herrick, far from
accusing himself of any fault, saw merely a freshly irritating
symptom of the waywardness which had vexed him several times in the
past.
"Why must you say that now?" he demanded. "How can I ever satisfy
you when you ask for a thing at one time and then, when it is too
late, tell me you don't want it?"
"It doesn't make any difference, anyway," said Nancy. "I was just
answering your question."
"It does make a difference, a tremendous difference," the father
cried. "Do you want me to throw over this engagement, to tell the
t'ai-t'ai you won't marry her nephew, to bring everlasting disgrace
on our heads?"
"No, we can't do that," replied Nancy, not permitting herself time to
toy with the notion.
"It would mean the end of our life in China," added Herrick.
"Yes, it would."
"And taking you and Edward home to England. Would you like that?"
"I don't want to go to England. I want to stay here."
"So you see how impossible it would be to change."
"Quite impossible," Nancy agreed.
Herrick looked at the girl narrowly. He wondered if she were mocking
him.
"What did the Ferrises think of your marriage?" he asked with a
disconcerting shift in the direction of his words. "They didn't like
it, I suppose?"
"Yes, they didn't like it."
"Did they want you to be a foreigner? Did they ask you to stay with
them?"
"Yes."
"Did they tell you that your father was a fool, that he was ruining
your life by his selfish schemes?"
"No," said Nancy, her loyalty shocked by the question.
"Then they were not as good friends as I had hoped they might be,"
said the father bitterly. "Ah, never mind me," he continued, ashamed
of the puzzled dismay he had brought to Nancy's eyes. "I am saying
stupid things. I can't help it when I don't feel well. Your
marriage will be quite all right, my child. Of course you don't want
to be married. What maiden does? But it's nothing to worry about.
It's not like going among foreigners and having to learn new ways.
The Ferrises have seen you only as a foreigner, just as you are now,
and a pretty English girl you do make, Nancy; even I have to admit
that."
Suddenly the picture of his daughter in Western clothes overpowered
him; the mere mention of her appearance opened the floodgates of his
despair, released a torrent of memories which rose higher and higher
in his brain till they threatened to drown out his life with their
unprisonable anguish. Herrick stood up like a man in great wrath;
the veins of his forehead were swollen, his eyes ablaze with the
violence of this unexpected temper.
"Go away, Nancy," he ordered, "go and change those wretched things!
You have bewitched me with this masquerade. How can I decide
anything, give my right mind to anything, when you sit mocking Me
with the very clothes you wear?"
By a gesture he seemed to sweep the frightened girl out of his sight.
Only slowly, in the quiet of his room, did his muscles relax and his
heart cease pounding. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His
hand was shaking.
"Why must I do these things?" he sighed. "It was not her fault."
His harshness had filled the house with silence. He rang his bell
and to his surprise Kuei-lien appeared.
"Is there anyone alive in this cursed place?" he asked. "Can't you
sing or shout or do something to make a noise? Where have Edward and
Li-an gone? Have they lost their tongues?"
"You have frightened them all," said Kuei-lien, with an amused smile.
"You shouldn't speak so crossly to your daughter. She is weeping.
Her heart is not at peace."
"I don't need you to tell me that," Herrick retorted. Then his voice
softened. "Where is she?" he asked.
"In her room, naturally," was the tart rejoinder of the concubine.
"Did you think she was so happy that she would be out on the hills
catching butterflies?"
"I will go and see her," said the father.
"Good, we'll all weep together."
Herrick paid no attention to this last impudence but strode across
the courtyard to the room where his daughter was draining the
bitterness of reaction which had overflowed her heart after the sore
tests she had been forced to meet in such quick succession these last
two days. Even in her bewilderment she had obeyed her father's wish
and was dressed again in Chinese clothes. The discarded Western
finery lay in a pathetic heap upon the floor.
"Nancy," said the father, putting his hand gently on her shoulder, "I
am sorry. I did not mean to speak so angrily to you. I did not want
to make you so unhappy."
Not for years had he said such words as these. Long ago he had lost
the habit of making an apology. He had played the part of the
all-sufficing tyrant who does not expect his acts to be questioned.
But Nancy's distress, the sight of her wish to please him even by
unreasonable obedience, struck deep beneath every artifice of manner,
making him utter his words of contrition as genuinely as though he
had not laid aside such language thirteen years back. At the sound
of his voice Nancy pulled herself up and faced him with tear-stained
eyes. She did not know how to answer her father's strange words.
"You are not to blame for making me angry," the father went on,
carried beyond measure along the path of genuineness by the sorrow
Nancy's face revealed, "it was my fault. I could not bear that
glimpse of you in the Western dress you ought to have been wearing
all your life. It reminded me too unspeakably of how I have cheated
you. It made me realize how I have robbed your mother's daughter,
Nancy, merely to follow selfish dreams of my own. All these years,
my child--they have been a mistake, and I can never make them up to
you."
The girl was still speechless, her grief forgotten in this immense
unveiling of her father's heart.
"But I can stop one thing," he vowed, "I can make up one mistake, I
can stop the folly of this marriage. You are young and I am old.
You have your whole life before you. I have--nothing. It doesn't
matter what becomes of me. I am going back to Peking to-morrow to
tell the t'ai-t'ai that I am done with these schemes--my heart was
never in them--I am not going to sacrifice my only daughter--for you
are the only daughter I have been able to care about--I am not going
to sacrifice my only daughter just to pile up the ruins of my own
wasted life. After that--well, it doesn't matter what comes after
that. I suppose I can dodder along in a frock coat and a silk hat
till you find the one man who will love you better and care for you.
Then one old man less in the world won't matter."
Nancy's quick sympathy rushed to raise her father from this unseemly
abasement, to prove to him that he had not sacrificed her, that he
had not done wrong, not made ruin of his life or of hers. How would
he survive, she wondered, when all that he had delighted in was swept
away? How could she ask him, at his time of life, to make these new
beginnings for her? The blind love which had been too strong for
Ronald's arguments, for the indignant persuasiveness of the twins,
would not let her give way even before the appeal of her father
himself; for she felt that he was pleading against himself. She had
never known him outside the comforts of his Chinese home, the
graceful amenities in which her own pride helped her to compass his.
To make him an exile from these, from the spacious mode of living
which she thought of as the very marrow of his bones, the tissue of
his flesh, that was a fate she was not willing, cost what it might,
to bring upon him. Her own dread of the West and its alien customs
made her shrink still more sensitively from dragging her father out
of the peace of a home which ought to be the shelter of his failing
years.
"I would be unhappy all my life, if you did this," she said. "What
right have I to hear my father saying such things? How can we break
the promise we have made and not be ashamed forever after? No matter
where you took me, my heart would not be at peace, for I should
remember that my willfulness had destroyed my father's good name.
'Shall I follow the desires of my ears and eyes and bring my parents
to disgrace?' Please don't remember my foolish words," she begged.
"I don't want to go to the West among strangers. What do I know
about foreign customs? My father gives too much weight to my
mischievous idle words. I was only wearing foreign clothes to amuse
Kuei-lien and Li-an. I will never wear them again. I did not mean
to trouble my father or to make him think I was unhappy."
"Are you telling me the truth?" demanded Herrick, already alarmed by
the largeness of the renunciation he had proposed.
"I am telling the truth," replied Nancy, with her eyes cast down.
"But you just said you didn't really want to be married."
There was a flush in her cheeks, a faint smile on her lips.
"What maiden ever really wanted to be married?" she asked. "If you
offered me all the men in the world I should say the same thing."
There was a pause. "I say many, many things," she went on softly,
"and sometimes my words fight against each other. You have made me
so happy, you have given me so many good things, that I could not but
be sad to go out from the home of my father, even if I were called to
the halls of the palace itself. But ah, my father, you know that
your will is mine. The tree cannot be torn up to give light to the
sapling. I am not so ignorant, not so self-willed, as not to know
that 'to look upon obedience as right is the law for women.' I
learned that long ago. In a thousand ten thousand of years I won't
forget it."
Herrick was strangely moved by this grave eloquence from the lips of
his child.
"You are wiser than you ought to be," he murmured; "there is not a
man on this earth fit to marry you. I don't know whether I am brave
or a coward in letting you go. You will miss me, Nancy, but oh, how
I shall miss you! Sometimes I wish you weren't flesh and blood, but
were like the rustling of the autumn leaves in the locust trees; then
I could always have you and no one would envy me."
"The locust trees lose their leaves," said the girl quietly; the poem
recurred again like a persistent undercurrent to her thoughts:--
"In a morning the spring is finished, the crimson colors are old--"
"Yes, they do," admitted Herrick; "we are foolish to take our little
plans so seriously. It would be better if we were enjoying to-day
instead of weeping over to-morrow. I have been weak, fickle,
changeable, Nancy, and I have tried to blame you, tried to put the
burden upon you. Here I have even been so irresolute as to hand over
my will for you to direct. That was a thing no father should ask of
his daughter. After all, what does it matter how much trust we put
into our paltry schemes, what is the use of vexing ourselves, when
the stars, whether we like it or not, decide our lives for us? You
were right: autumn leaves do fall. I shan't remember you in them. I
shall remember you in the stars, which give you your heart's
quietness because you obey them. They don't change and grow old,
they and the sun and the moon--"
"And the sun and the moon," echoed Nancy.
Then the world went black before her eyes.