Ronald did not see Nancy again until the day of Timothy Herrick's
funeral. On that dreary day she was more remote than ever, wearing
her headdress of white sackcloth and weeping loudly. Even Edward,
who had thrown off many vestiges of his Chinese upbringing in the
short time he had lived with the Ferrises, fell back disconcertingly
into old habits and was as Chinese as Herrick's half-caste children
when he had donned his coat of coarse bleached calico.
Ronald rightly insisted that as Herrick had lived so should he be
buried, and he advised the t'ai-t'ai to spare none of the rites
suitable to a mandarin of her husband's rank. He brought Beresford
with him to the funeral. Beresford was intrigued by the many
peculiar rites, but Ronald listened to it all with insufferable
weariness and wondered if the priests were ever to be finished
chanting their guttural prayers. Each stroke of bell and drum seemed
to remove Nancy farther than ever from his hopes, tangling her spirit
in an alien region from which she would never come out again. He saw
nothing picturesque in the great scarlet catafalque put over
Herrick's coffin, the silk umbrellas, the tables with their food for
the dead, the spirit chair intricately wrapped in white muslin, the
horrid crayon copy of Herrick's photograph, borne in a chair of its
own, the bright silken copes of the priests, their contrast with the
rags of the beggars, who carried white banners certifying to the
merits of the dead, the green-clad coolies who labored with the
weight of the coffin, the pervading smell of incense and burning
sandalwood--these were all details which Ronald might have noted with
an interested eye if he had not been oppressed by their meaning for
Nancy. It was her tragedy that when those who loved her could bring
the girl no comfort, she had to seek relief in this pitiless
barbarity which seemed to sing her father's failure, his exile from
his own people, his cheerless sojourn in the cold places of the dead.
All this Ronald heard in the weird music of the procession, as the
coffin and its mourners moved slowly toward the gates of the city; he
felt that the road Timothy Herrick was traveling, this same road
there was no one to prevent his daughter from taking, despite all her
lovable instincts for joy and for beauty--no one good enough to
prevent her from following in her own desolate hour.
Beresford, however, thought the whole funeral very splendid. So much
better, he declared, than being reminded of the skin-worms, and
forced to linger in the sickly smell of a church which had been
banked like a flower-seller's shop while bald-headed gentlemen
trundled the coffin with exaggerated slowness up the aisle. He
envied Herrick's escape from those absurd rites and from being
consigned into eternity by the throaty reading of a curate in a
starched surplice. This brilliant procession, winding with such an
unrehearsed mixture of carelessness and dignity, did seem in his eyes
to express more reasonably the tragic naturalness of death. Even
Ronald, before they had reached Herrick's burial-place, began to feel
himself haunted by the sobbing voice of the flutes and to know that
this garish splendor was the ancient and simple way of keeping up
man's courage before the mystery of death. It was a shock, on coming
outside the city, to see the coffin stripped of its pall, the
umbrellas and chairs sent back, as though the chief object of the
parade had been not to honor the unseeing dead but to win honor from
the populous streets of the city, yet the quiet which ensued induced
meditations that were not unpleasing though they were sad. Autumn
lay with warm sunshine on the land; sloping shafts of light made the
dry grass glow; wide and blue was the sky. The only sound was the
low-toned note of a gong which a priest rang from time to time as he
walked in front of the coffin.
Ronald was moved by the loneliness of Herrick's burial-ground. It
was so tranquil that he, too, half envied the dead man's privilege of
sleeping quietly with all the scenes he had loved, the serene clarity
of the Western Hills, the climbing palaces of Wan Shou Shan, the
towers and golden roofs of Peking, compassing from the far distance
the little circle of pine and cypress round the grave. Ronald's
spirit was hushed by the stillness. The man looked idly at the four
characters gilded on the end of Herrick's coffin: "Hai returns to the
halls of spring," they said, and for the first time Ronald believed
that there was immortality in lying here beneath the open spaces of
heaven. A fresh outburst of wailing, the burning of paper money, and
exploding of crackers could not touch the peace of a heart fortified
by the strangely comforting thought that life was soon over.
The grave was ready at two, but the hour was even-numbered, unlucky;
mourners and priests and workmen waited in little gossiping groups
till the more fortunate hour of three, when the coffin was lowered
into the grave with the lavish sunshine pouring down upon it as if to
make amends for Herrick's last sight of day. Every clod that had
been dug was thrown scrupulously upon the round mound of the grave.
Edward knelt down and wept; Nancy wept and bowed her forehead to the
ground; the women prostrated themselves, tearing their hair and their
clothes. Ronald stood watching dumbly, but he got his moment of
reward when Nancy rose, for she gave him one searching look, one
glance of understanding and love, over which hovered the trembling
flicker of a smile. She showed she had not forgotten his kiss; this
was her answer. So completely, indeed, had Nancy seemed to belong to
him throughout all the tedious hours of the funeral that Ronald
remembered afterward, with some amazement, that among the gathering
of the t'ai-t'ai's family, which followed the coffin, he had not
knowingly set eyes upon or even thought of singling out Nancy's
husband.
After Herrick had been buried, there was nothing to keep him from
dividing what remained of his money. Ronald was anxious to be done
with the task. He exacted but one promise, a promise from the
t'ai-t'ai that when Nancy's first month of married life was complete
and the girl, as custom allowed, was able to sleep a few nights under
another roof than her husband's, she should come to his sister's home
instead of the father's house she ought to have visited. This was
reasonable, for Edward was the only kinsman left to her.
Herrick's pretentious household melted away. Each wife, when she
received her money, took pains to put herself out of the t'ai-t'ai's
reach. There was none of them that wished to be slave to that
arrogant lady. With a contemptuous smile she watched them scatter.
After they and their children and their bundles and bedding and their
wrangling servants had gone, she gave up the lease of the house
Herrick had occupied so long, sold what she could of his furniture,
and betook herself to her brother's. Of the line her husband had
been so ambitious to found, literally not even the name remained.
Ronald took care to obtain and note the t'ai-t'ai's address; Nancy's
bridal month was so nearly finished that he could not govern his
eagerness to have her come. The rest of Herrick's family he made no
effort to trace. Except the amah, who of course remained with
Edward, they might scatter to the winds for all he cared. But
suddenly one evening when the Ferrises had finished dinner a hubbub
in the kitchen woke them from the lethargy of worrying about Nancy,
for Edward's presence among them had been a continual reminder of his
sister's absence; they jumped up in alarm when the old nurse rushed
gasping into the room, crying out, "They've gone, they've gone!" It
took them some minutes to understand what she meant. Not till
Kuei-lien appeared and rapidly poured out her story to Edward was the
cause of the amah's excitement understood.
To their consternation they learned that the t'ai-t'ai had broken her
promise. She had gone with her brother and his whole family back to
their native town of Paoling. And Nancy, as naturally she must do,
had gone with them. It was the last blow.
The other details of Kuei-lien's story were more interesting to
Edward than to his discouraged guardian. The one fact which might
have been of use, her coming from the same town as the t'ai-t'ai, was
robbed of advantage because the girl did not dare nor intend to go
home. If she had done so she would have been handed over to the
t'ai-t'ai by her stupid and covetous family. She was the single one
of Herrick's concubines whom his wife had tried to retain. Her
parents were dependents of the Chou family, absolutely under their
orders, while the t'ai-t'ai not only did not like losing a slave of
Kuei-lien's beauty and cleverness but still more regretted letting
her escape with the money she had gathered. Their separation had
cost them a quarrel. The t'ai-t'ai had commanded the concubine to
remain, had threatened to hold her boxes and to have the girl beaten.
If Kuei-lien had been less bountiful in bribing the servants, she
could not have got away. The t'ai-t'ai's stinginess had proved her
safety.
So Kuei-lien, meditating new plans, lay low. She cultivated the
friendship of the amah, husbanded the money she owned, while she
looked for chances to get more. And because she maintained some
slight connection with Pao-ling and might get them news of Nancy, the
Ferrises were pleased to let her stay. They did not guess a tenth of
her plans nor realize that she was using the shelter of their servant
quarters to let it be known she was under foreign protection, that
any offense offered to her would be visited upon the offender by the
King and Parliament of Great Britain.
As for poor Nancy, the King and Parliament of Great Britain had lost
interest in her. The secluded Chihli village of Paoling kept her as
hidden from prying strangers as the fastnesses of Turkestan. Nancy
had never been told of the promise that she should visit Edward in
his new home. She was saved this disappointment. But she knew it
was the last step away from her friends when her mother-in-law
summoned her to pack and to get up long before dawn for the cold dark
ride to the station. Long as she had lived in Peking, the city was a
place strange and unfamiliar to the girl, yet she conceived a
fondness even for the arches and walls she barely could descry in the
darkness, for she felt she should never set eyes upon them again.
With the rest of her husband's family she bundled uncomfortably into
a third-class carriage, squeezing herself so tightly between baskets
and bedding that she sat as though cramped stiffly in a vise.
Everyone spoke shrilly; the early hour, the bitterly frosty morning,
had set their tempers on edge. No one was in a mood to enjoy the
novelty of a railway ride. Nancy looked wearily at the dingy houses
they passed, wondered if their occupants could be unhappier than she
was; she saw in the distance the blue roofs of the Temple of Heaven,
but paid no heed; if her legs had not been so stiff, her whole body
aching from the need of movement, she might have gone to sleep
counting the numbers of the telegraph poles. Her mind did go to
sleep; her body persisted in staying painfully awake.
She was grateful to get off the train, grateful to shake her numb
legs into life, pulling boxes and bales quickly out of the car. The
t'ai-t'ai and her mother-in-law gave contradictory orders, they
wrangled and shouted, pulling servants helter-skelter, scolding
Nancy, scolding her husband; they were only one of many groups
invoking heaven and hell in their panic lest the train should start
before the last bundle had been rolled out of the window.
By a miracle they got themselves untangled and down to the platform,
where the women sank breathless on rolls of bedding, waiting for a
bargain to be struck with the mule-drivers. This was not quickly nor
quietly done and Nancy, used to having these small matters arranged
without her presence, despaired of its ever being done at all. To
the mule-drivers and their opponents, however, the hiring of a cart
was more heady business than speech in a public forum. Not till
vulgar interest was diverted to Nancy, whose presence in this company
became an eighth day's wonder, did the arguing parties see that their
prominence of the moment had passed; they made the same bargain they
could have made half an hour back. Chou hsien-sheng swore he was
cheated, the drivers swore they were robbed, but the price they fixed
had been the unchanging rate for a decade.
Nancy was glad to get into her cart, even to be thriftily crowded
among three women servants and a suffocating mass of baggage. She
had not enjoyed the ring of staring eyes which had surveyed her nor
the coarse guesses of the people as to her history, guesses loudly
and impudently debated with many rustic guffaws over the joke of a
foreigner reduced to Chinese clothes and the whims of a Chinese
master.
All day long the carts moved slowly forward, lumbering in ruts,
shaking the teeth of their passengers on miles of chipped highway,
ploughing deep through sand. Nancy was acutely mindful of other
mule-cart journeys, the rides to the Western Hills, when Edward and
Kuei-lien had been her comrades and each new turn of the road had
tempted their eyes to objects of joyful interest. She was scornful
of the ignorant maids squashed into this unpleasant contact, closed
her eyes to avoid seeing their puffy faces; their few monosyllables
were like a parody of human speech. They wheezed and grunted and
reeked of garlic till Nancy wondered why she could not withdraw all
her senses, as she had withdrawn her sense of sight, and shut herself
from these clownish wenches like a mussel in its shell.
Shortly before dark the carts lurched down the sunken streets of
Paoling. It was like all the other villages they had passed, dusty
and poor. Dikes of baked mud served for walls. Two policemen
lounged at the gate as though the place were not worth their vain
offer of protection. Mud and gray tile and leafless trees, streets
without shops, worn into deep trenches, people clothed in rags so
dirty that the very patches were blended to a greasy uniformity of
color--not an item relieved the drab scene. And the home of her
husband, Nancy found, was a consistent part of its surroundings. It
was filthy, musty, and cold, a huge ramshackle place replete with
tottering chairs and tables, its stone floors overlaid with grime,
its courtyards heaped with dung. Only rats and spiders seemed fit to
inhabit such a place and Nancy's heart became chill with dismay when
she thought of dragging out her life in this cheerless hole.
In a panic of sheer terror she was taken to greet Ming-te's
grandmother, the matriarch of the clan, the old lady whose temper she
had heard discussed with lively fear during the month she had been
married. She shrank from being led to something more terrible than
any of the evil things she had seen. Her nerves were so unstrung by
the weariness and misery, the depressing finish of the day, that she
was ready to shriek. She halted stock-still in a room ill lit by
native wicks.
"Kneel," chided the voice of her mother-in-law.
Nancy knelt and kowtowed three times before the august personage to
whose face she had not yet presumed to raise her eyes. She waited,
prostrate on the floor.
"Lift her, you fools," cried a voice that showed by its testiness it
was used to being obeyed. "Can't you see she is worn with weariness?"
The other women hastened to help Nancy to her feet. The girl looked
wonderingly at the little old woman who sat muffled in quilted satin
on the k'ang. From a face crossed and transcrossed with wrinkles
burned eyes whose haughtiness spoke an older and a finer generation
than the women to whom Nancy had been subjected. Her mother-in-law's
were dog's eyes compared with them. Nancy lost her fear. The eyes
brought memories of her father. They seemed to pierce, with their
sadness, their cynical discontent, the very mysteries of life.
"Come here, my child," said the old woman gently. "Come and sit with
me and tell me how you are. I have waited a long, long time to
welcome you."