In the first relief that followed this kindly greeting, Nancy nearly
broke down. Tears welled to her eyes, do what she would to hold them
back. She could not help sobbing, but the old woman stroked her
hands as though she knew the misery pent up in the heart of this
alien bride.
"My husband and your father were friends," she said, "and I am glad
that his daughter has become my granddaughter. But it's hard, isn't
it?"
She gave a little chuckle, seeming to appreciate her own experiences
as a bride in years which only a handful of bent gray figures like
herself still lived to remember. Nancy could have lived as long
without forgetting this reception by the wise old woman whose harsh
tongue she had been taught to dread. It came with such sudden,
blinding beauty at the end of a comfortless journey, at the end of
four suffering weeks in which her spirit had been tortured nearly to
the limits of its endurance!
Nancy would have suffered much from the women, from her mother-in-law
and from her stepmother--for the latter visited on the daughter her
anger over the justice of Timothy Herrick's will--and even at the
hands of lesser people, who took their pattern from this spiteful
pair, but she had hoped for some measure of sympathy, some pity, even
if there could not be love, from the youthful stranger, Ming-te, who
had been given the rights of a husband over her life.
In this she was disappointed. Ming-te felt that there was no one
with a grievance comparable to his own. His parents, however much
they might dislike this foreigner in the family, had invited her by
their own choice. But he had been given no choice.
Like most youths of his modern day, he detested being bound by an
early marriage even to a girl of his own race; he detested being set
to breed heirs for the pleasure of his parents. He envied the new
laxities of Shanghai and Peking, the parody of Western freedom
carried on under the guise of choosing one's wife for one's self. He
was eager to push aside convention, to realize republican liberty by
bursting all restraint; he was a student, member of a class bound by
no laws of right or reason, to whom all things ought to be allowed in
the pursuit of knowledge; yet just when his imagination had begun to
run riot over the thought of embracing slim girl students to the
mutual advancement of their studies, when he was becoming conscious
of his own sacred importance as the hope of China and the flower of
creation, he had been put under restraint like his forefathers,
suddenly, brutally married, his hopes dashed. And his sacrifice had
been unmentionably worse than theirs; he, the heir of the ages, had
amounted to so little in the eyes of his elders that they had flung
him a foreigner for a bride!
So Ming-te, the handsome, spoiled idol of his parents, took his
marriage in bad grace and vented his spleen on Nancy. He did not
take the trouble to see whether here might not be the ideal comrade
of whom he had prated so freely in the safe company of his friends;
he had made up his mind to dislike the girl long before he set eyes
upon her. The disgrace of his bridal night, his sheepishness, the
mockery of his family, of which he still heard the echoes, were an
added score to be wiped out. And because he could not avenge himself
on her mind he tried to avenge himself on her body, for at heart he
was afraid of Nancy; at heart he realized her contempt for his
shallowness and conceit; he seemed to see her eyes despising him as a
weakling, a petulant small boy, till she challenged him to ecstasies
of cruelty to prove that he was indeed her master.
Nancy had learned many undreamed-of things during this month, but
nothing more dumbfounding than the fact that real sorrow is an
experience without appeal; it has no glamour, no romance. It is like
a headache which goes on forever. She wondered at the vernal
innocent person she had been, blithely offering herself for a life of
torture, as though it were no more than one of those tempestuous
black tragedies of childhood which last for an hour, then ripple
peacefully away like bird notes after a storm. It seemed so splendid
to sacrifice herself, against the protests of Ronald and his nieces
and Edward and Kuei-lien and even her father himself; she had been
thrilled by her own daring even when her heart was cold with the
prospect, so that, while she entered the bridal chair sad and afraid,
longing to cling to everything she was forsaking, some small part of
her could not forbear standing aside to gloat over the picturesque
courage of her deed.
But she had been wakened too unmercifully from her dream; her vanity,
so excusable, so childishly serious, broken by a punishment out of
all justice to what it deserved. Her days of shyness were passing.
She was putting off the bride to put on the shrew--in that
hard-mouthed family no other role was safe--when her regrets for the
folly of her sacrifice suddenly dissolved and her heart swelled with
pride, with thankfulness, because she had kept faith with an old lady
she had never met, who greeted her in the twilight of a gray day,
saying, "I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."
The t'ai-t'ai and her sister-in-law were more surprised than Nancy.
They were dismayed. What the old t'ai-t'ai said, she meant; she had
come to an age when she did not trouble to hide her thoughts of other
people, but ruled her clan, as the last of the oldest generation,
with an unsparing frankness such as made them quail. Hers was a
witty, biting tongue which she found life too short to think of
bridling; she did not like her daughter, still less her
daughter-in-law, thought none too highly of her sons, and, as for her
grandchildren, she called them a litter of gaping puppies. Her mind
was a catalogue of their faults; she could make the best of them
wince with a single sharply prodding phrase, for there was nothing
ridiculous that any of them had done, and wished with all his heart
to forget, that she could not recall when the occasion suited her.
Grown men writhed for a pretext to get beyond earshot of her chuckle.
Yet she did not welcome Nancy kindly--as the t'ai-t'ai and her
sister-in-law concluded--merely to annoy them. Her instinct, which
always was extravagantly right, had told her that Nancy would be a
friend. She did not care whether Ming-te had a wife or not, but she
longed for someone young, someone talented and pretty, to whom she
could talk and be kind. Her own family bored her. She yawned when
she thought of them. They were a small, petty-minded generation,
while her memory dwelt upon the large days of the past. Her loyalty
was all to the past, to her husband and his father, to the family in
its time of splendor, before its name had been dragged in the dust by
a progeny that forsook their books and squabbled over cash like
beggars fighting in the street. So she had ruled them with a testy
loneliness, glad to be alive only because she knew they would be glad
if she were dead.
Her first glimpse of Nancy satisfied the keen-sighted old tyrant.
She drew the pale girl to her side like a child.
"It's a long time since I've seen anyone really young," she said,
"young and wise together as they used to be. Now we have a republic;
men don't trouble about wisdom and they think they can rule the
eighteen provinces before they have left off their mother's milk.
You have read books, I have heard, and can write poems. Your father
would see to that. He knew our customs. He was one of us."
She could be tactful when she chose; in her questions about the death
of Nancy's father she soothed rather than irritated the quick
feelings of the daughter.
"To die on the day of your wedding, ai, that was a strange thing. I
have lived many years, but I have never heard the like. That was a
proof that he loved you, my child. You must remember such a father.
And you have a brother, too; where is he?"
Nancy told the story of Edward's friends.
"So you have Western friends. How did you come to make them?"
Paragraph by paragraph she drew from Nancy's lips the tale of how
they had met and visited the Ferrises. The old lady enjoyed the
freshness of the girl's story. She wanted most exact details of how
these foreigners lived.
"It must have surprised them to see one of their own blood living in
the fashion of a Chinese. Did you like their ways?"
"Sometimes," Nancy admitted.
"Do you like our ways better?"
Nancy was surprised at the question and reluctant to answer.
"Perhaps--sometimes," suggested the old grandmother, answering
herself, and turned to laugh at the shadow of the smile Nancy could
not hide.
"Don't be afraid of me," she said, patting the girl's hand from
pleasure at her own jest. "I shall be your father and your mother
from this time forth--hm-m, just like a magistrate, remember. You
can tell your troubles to me as freely as you please and, even if the
walls have ears, they won't dare speak till I let them."
Her words lulled Nancy into a pleasing warmth of security. She
forgot her weariness, the despair with which she had risen this very
morning to start on a hopeless journey, for the old t'ai-t'ai's words
were spoken with the authority of one who could promise peace when
she wished and protection to those she liked. And she really liked
Nancy.
"Your Western friends," she resumed, "they must have been appalled by
your marrying a Chinese. Did they try to dissuade you?"
"Yes, they did try."
"Ah, of course, they wouldn't understand. And perhaps they were
right. You may go back to them some day; who knows?"
"Oh no, I shall never go back to them," Nancy protested, dreading
lest the woman should doubt her loyalty to the promise she had made.
"Young people, my daughter, should never use the word 'never.' When
you are as old as I am and have to think soberly of the spring winds
as not just a chance to fly kites, then 'never' means something; ah,
it means too much. There is so much happiness I shall never know
again, so many faces I shall never see. But you, with your handful
of years, there is no 'never' for you. You thought to-day you would
never smile again. You had heard of me, hadn't you, and trembled to
meet a bad-tempered old grandmother; don't deny it--I saw it in your
face when they made you kneel. I shall not be bad-tempered to you,
child. We old people like to have flowers about us. I shall be
selfish of your company and most surely will begrudge you to others.
And will you be sorry? Aha, I don't think you will. Your father
must have taught you wisely for you remind me of children as they
used to be when I was young. I am tired of being waited on by
servant maids or by people who wonder when I'm going to die. Why
should I die just to make fools more comfortable in their folly! No,
I shall not be bad-tempered to you, because you are the first person
I have had round me for years who really wished me to live. But I'm
not going to share you."
How firm were her intentions was soon shown, for Nancy's
mother-in-law came in to say, in a voice too carefully
matter-of-fact, that if the old t'ai-t'ai had been gracious to say
all she wished to the 'hsi-fu,' they hoped she would give her
permission to withdraw, for there was much work to be done and her
room to be set right.
"And whose work, indeed, is she to do, if not mine?" asked the old
t'ai-t'ai. "Her room we can discuss later, but to-night her room
will be here."
"Oh, but that would not be convenient," faintly protested the younger
woman; "we must not separate the bride from her husband. My mother
speaks this out of her kind heart, but surely it would make my mother
uncomfortable."
"It will be entirely convenient," snapped the dowager.
"Very well, that is only what we wished to be sure of," said
Ming-te's mother hastily, "we wanted to make sure of your comfort."
Yet the next day she was still so far from being satisfied of the old
t'ai-t'ai's comfort that she asked her sister-in-law to intercede and
to get Nancy out of the old lady's clutches before it was too late.
Hai t'ai-t'ai, Nancy's step-mother, was more than ready to try, for
she knew that while the old lady lived, if they did not make a stand
quickly, Nancy would be lost to their control. She had a portion of
her mother's independence and did not cringe in the august presence
as her sister-in-law was apt to do. Waiting a chance when Nancy was
absent, she went boldly into the den.
"You have come to ask after my health, have you?" inquired her mother
brusquely. "My health is excellent, this morning. It has done me
great good to meet someone new.
"We are so glad that the foreign hsi-fu meets with your favor," lied
the daughter cheerfully. "I thought of your comfort when I began to
arrange the match."
"Did you? Well, you thought most intelligently, so intelligently
that I have decided to keep her as my companion, to give her the room
next to mine."
"Your companion, by all means," agreed Hai t'ai-t'ai, "but not too
much your companion. We can never permit her to tire you with her
prattle. She might become spoiled and think you were indulging her
in liberties only fit for yourself. I have known her for many years
and I speak the truth when I say she is difficult to control. She
puts forward a good face at first, but she is an obstinate,
self-willed child, not always obedient to her elders. Her training
was sadly neglected because she was left to the charge of an
indulgent old amah--"
"And you think her training will suffer at my hands, do you?"
interrupted the old t'ai-t'ai with a laugh, "you fear that I will be
another indulgent old amah to her?"
"Oh no, not at all, but we trembled to put the burden of her training
in your hands."
"You are all very busy people. What is there for an old woman like
myself to do? I shall be happy to take the burden of her training
into my hands. When I weary of it, I have a tongue; I can tell you."
The daughter shrugged her shoulders. Nancy always had been a
mischievous obstacle to her plans; and now, with her new ally, was
more dangerous than ever. Her hands itched to beat the wench. But
she went on in smooth tones:--
"We must be just to Ming-te."
"I am just to Ming-te."
"But he has had his bride only for a month. Is it right to leave the
boy lonely without a mate for his bed? These things mean so much to
the young. If he is lonely, he may go out to drink and to gamble
with evil companions. He did not want to marry, yet for our sake he
did even more: he married a foreigner to help his family. And now,
when he is beginning to understand her excellent qualities--"
"Self-willed and obstinate," reminded the t'ai-t'ai.
"To understand her excellent qualities," continued the daughter, as
though she had not heard the interruption, "and is beginning to
appreciate her for his wife, you surely would not reward his
unselfishness by taking her away and making her a stranger to him.
What of the future of the family? How will they learn to live
together in peace and harmony like--"
"Like a sparrow and a ph[oe]nix," suggested the mother wickedly. Hai
t'ai-t'ai flushed in annoyance, but the dowager stopped her from
speaking.
"How will they learn to live together in peace and harmony?" she
echoed. "Ah, my daughter, you are old enough to answer that
question, or must I answer it for you and say they never will learn.
If you could have got fifteen thousand taels without this girl, would
you have taken her? No, indeed not. But I would have taken her
without a cash. So she belongs to me. She will never be of any use
to this family because I am the only one who knows how to use her.
And I am old--and I have no husband to give her. She will be safer
with me. If Ming-te wants a bedfellow, get him one. You can afford
to spend on him a little of the money he has earned. Buy him a nice,
good-tempered, pretty wife; the country is full of them. He will be
happy, you will be happy, and I shall have peace."