IX

Seated in the library, placidly waiting for Edward Dunsack to go, Taou

Yuen studied him briefly. A long or thoughtful survey was unnecessary:

the opium was rapidly mastering him. That fact absorbed all the rest. She

had an immeasurable contempt for such physical and moral weakness; all

the three religions fused in her overwhelmingly condemned

self-indulgence; her philosophy, the practical side of Lao-tze's

teaching, emphasized the utter futility of surrender to the five senses.

At the same time he was the subject of some interest: he was an American

who had lived in China, and not only on the fringe of the treaty

ports--he had penetrated to some extent into the spirit, the life, of

things Chinese; while she, Taou Yuen, was amazingly married to Gerrit

Ammidon, was a Manchu here, in America.

Absolutely immobile, her hands folded in her lap, she considered these

facts, each in relation to the other: there was wisdom hidden in them for

her. If Mr. Dunsack had retained the ordinary blustering Western

commercial mind, his knowledge of China confined to the tea houses and

streets, he would probably be prosperous and strong to-day. The wisdom

lay in this--that here she must remain Manchu, Chinese; any attempt to

become a part of this incomprehensible country, any effort to involve

herself in its mysterious acts or thought, would be disastrous. She must

remain calm, unassertive, let the eternal Tao take its way.

Edward Dunsack looked actually comic: he was staring rudely, with a

foolish air of flattery, and breathing in labored gasps--like a coolie

who had run miles with a heavy palanquin. Then her mind, hardly reacting

from immediate objects, returned to the contemplation of the deeper

significance of her presence here. Bent in on itself her thought twisted

like a moonflower vine about the solid fact of Gerrit. She realized, of

course, that he must have had the past of any healthy honorable man of

his age, and that it would have included at least one woman. However,

when even the present was an almost complete puzzle his past had been so

lost to her that she had not considered it until now.

"You must overlook my unceremonious speech," Edward Dunsack proceeded in

creditable Chinese. "It was clumsy, but I was deeply affected. It is my

niece, you see, who was hurt, and who has a very sad history. Then there

are some special circumstances. I'd have to explain a great deal before

you could understand why she sent for your husband and why he left so

hurriedly."

"There is nothing you need tell me," Taou Yuen replied in her slow

careful English. "Manchu eyes can see as well as American."

"A thousand times better." He, too, returned to his native speech. "It is

delightful to talk to a truly civilized being. All that would have to be

shouted at the women of Salem is unnecessary now. You see--you understand

the heart of a man."

"I understand you," she said impersonally.

"I wonder if you do," he speculated. "You ought to see what--how much--I

think of you. My brain holds nothing else," he declared in a low intense

voice, drawing nearer to her.

She had a momentary, purely feminine shrinking from his emaciated shaking

frame, the burning eyes in a face dead like a citron; then her placidity

returned, the assurance that it was all ordained, that his gestures, the

pumping of his diseased heart, had no more individual significance than

the movements of a mechanical figure operated by strings, here the

strings of supreme Fate. She even smiled slightly, a smile not the mark

of approval or humor, but an expression of absolute composure. It drove

him at once into febrile excitement.

"At least I understand you," he cried; "far more than you suppose! You

can't impress me with your air of a Gautama. I know the freedom of your

country. It doesn't shock you to realize that your husband has gone to

see a woman he loved, perhaps loves still, and you are not disturbed at

my speaking like this."

Here, she knew, regarding him no more than a shrilling locust, was the

center about which for a moment blindly her thoughts of Gerrit and

herself had revolved. His past--"a woman he loved." But it didn't in the

least upset her present peace of mind, her confidence in Gerrit. There

was a sharp distinction between the eternal, the divine, Tao, that which

is and must prevail, and the personal Tao, subject to rebellion and all

the evil of Yin; and she felt that her husband's Tao was good. Out of

this she remarked negligently:

"After all, you are more ignorant of China than I thought. But, of

course, you saw only the common and low side. You have not heard of the

books girls are taught from--'The Sacred Edict' and 'Mirror of the

Heart.' You don't know even the first rule of 'The Book of Rites,' 'Let

your face and attitude be grave and thoughtful,' and the second, 'Let

your steps be deliberate and regular.'" She paused, conveying by her

manner that he was already vanishing and that she was relieved.

"That would do well enough if you were a scholar, or a bonze," he

retorted; "but such innocence in a fashionable woman is a pretense. If

you are so pure how can you explain your gold and bracelets and pins,

all the marks of your worldly rank? Lao-tze taught, 'Rich and high but

proud brings about its own misfortune.'" He was so close to her now that

she caught a faint sickly reek from his body. It seemed to her that she

could see his identity, his reason, vanish, replaced by madness in his

staring eyes.

"I worship you," he murmured.

"Opium," she spoke disdainfully.

"Your own tobacco is drugged," he asserted. "But that's not important. I

tell you I worship you, the most beautiful person in the world. These

fools in Salem, even your husband, can't realize one-tenth of your

perfection; they can't venerate you as I do. And now that Ammidon has

gone back to the first, we are free too."

"You are a liar," she said with an unexpected colloquial ease.

A darker color stained his dry cheeks. "You saw him," he replied. "Did

he get pale or didn't he? And did he or not rush from the room like a

man in a fever? I tell you it's no use pretending with me; say what you

please I know how delicate your senses are. I'll tell you this too: It's

written in our progression that we should meet here, yes, and be a great

deal to each other. It was written in the beginning, and we had been

drawing together through a million cycles before Gerrit Ammidon stumbled

across you."

Taou Yuen was surprised by a sudden conviction that a part of this, at

least, was so. No living thing, however minute, escaped from the

weariness of movement, either ending in final and blessed suspension or

condemned to struggle on and on through countless lives of tormenting

passion. All had this dignity of hope or despair; all she encountered

were humble, impressive or debased in the working of the mighty law. She

had been guilty, as this American had pointed out, of dangerous and wrong

pride, and she accepted her lesson willingly. There was, however, an

annoying conflict between Edward Dunsack, the example, the impersonal,

and Edward Dunsack making violent profession of his unspeakable desire

for her. Even the word seemed to soil her; but there was no other. He

went recklessly on, trying to increase his advantage:

"We're made to be together."

"If we are it is because of some great wickedness of mine. If we are,

then perhaps I am lost. But it is allowed to resist evil, at least, as

far as staying out of its touch is resistance."

"Nothing can keep you from me," he declared. Another short step and his

knees would be brushing her gown. A stronger wave of dislike, shrinking,

anger, drowned her logical and higher resignation. "It is time for you to

go," she said, her voice still even.

"Never."

It seemed to her that she could feel his hot quivering touch and, all her

philosophy dropping from her, she rose quickly. "If this were China," she

told him, in a cold fury, "you'd be cut up with knives, in the court-yard

where I could look on. But even here I can ring for a servant; and when

Captain Ammidon comes back he'll know what to say to you."

She could see that the last affected him; he hesitated, drew back, his

hanging fingers clasping and unclasping. That, she thought, relieved,

would dispose of him. Then it was clear that his insanity persisted

even in the face of the considerable threat of Gerrit's hot pride and

violent tempers.

"It's our destiny," he repeated firmly in his borrowed faith, at once a

little terrifying and a little ridiculous in the alien mold. His lips

twitched and his bony forehead glistened in a fine sweat. Now, thoroughly

roused, she laughed at him in open contempt.

"Diseased," she cried, "take your sores away! Dog licked by dogs. Bowl

of filth," she was speaking in Chinese, in words of one syllable like

the biting of a hair whip. Edward Dunsack gasped, as if actual blows

cut him; he stood with one hand half raised, appalled at the sudden

vicious rush of her anger. A leaden pallor took the place of his normal

sallow coloring, and it was evident that he had difficulty in

withstanding the pressure of his laboring heart. He stood between her

and the door and she had a premonition that it would be useless to

attempt to avoid him or escape. She could, however, call, and some one,

there were a score of people about the house, must certainly appear. At

that moment she saw a deep change sweep over his countenance, taking

place in his every fiber. There was an inner wrenching of Edward

Dunsack's being, a blurring and infusion of blood in his eyes, a breath

longer and more agonized than any before, and she was looking closely

into the face of an overwhelming hatred.

For a moment, she realized, he had even considered killing her with his

flickering hands. Then that impulse subsided before a sidelong expression

of cunning. "With all your Manchu attitudes," he mocked her, "yes, your

aristocratic pretense of mourning and marks of rank, you are no different

from the little pleasure girls. Your vocabulary and mind are the same. I

was a fool for a while; I saw nothing but your satins and painted face. I

forgot you were yellow, I had forgotten that all China's yellow. It's

yellow, yellow, yellow and never can be white. I shut my eyes to it and

it dragged me down into its slime." His voice was hysterical with an

agony of rending spiritual torment and hopeless grief. "It poisoned me

little by little, with the smell of its rivers and the cursed smell of

its pleasures. Then the opium. A year after I had lost my position,

everything; and when I came over here it followed me ... in my own blood.

Even then I might have broken away, I almost had, when Gerrit Ammidon

brought you to Salem. You came at a time when I was fighting hardest to

throw it all off. You see--you fascinated me. You were all that was most

alluring of China, and I wanted you so badly, it all came back so, that I

went to the opium to find you."

"Progression," she said ironically.

"Perhaps," he muttered. "Who knows? I'm finished for this life anyhow.

You did that. I can't even keep the books for my father's penny trade."

His hands crept rigidly toward her. If they touched her she would be

degraded for ever. Yet she was incapable of flight, her throat refused

the cry which she had been debating; alternate waves of revulsion and

stoical resignation passed over her with chills of acute terror. Yet she

managed to preserve an unstirred exterior; and that, she observed, began

to influence him. His loathing was as great as ever; but his vision, that

had been fixed in a blaze of fury, broke, avoided her direct scrutiny,

her appearance of statue-like unconcern.

There was a sound of quick light feet in the hall, the bright voice of

one of Gerrit's nieces. Edward Dunsack fell into a profound abstraction:

he turned and walked away from her, standing with his back to the room at

a window that opened upon the broad green park. He was so weak that he

was forced to support himself with a hand on the wall.

Taou Yuen was motionless for a perceptible space, and then moved toward

the door in a dignified composure. All this had come from the utter

impropriety of the life in America. Dunsack glanced at her as she

withdrew, and for a moment she saw his fine profile sharp and dark

against the light-flooded window. His lips stirred but she heard no

sound. Then she was on the stair mounting to her room.

There mechanically she filled her pipe; but doing this she noticed that

her hands were trembling. How lamentably she had failed in the

preservation, the assertion, of her superiority, not as a Manchu, but in

the deeper, the only true sense of the word--in submission.

"Requite hatred with virtue."

She spoke Lao-tze's admonition aloud and, in the customary devious

channel of her mental processes, her thoughts returned to her early life,

her girlhood, so marred by sickness that the Emperor had surrendered his

customary proprietary right in the daughters of Manchu nobles.

Surrounding the fact of her early suffering, which had kept her out of

the active gayety of brothers and sisters, she remembered in the clearest

detail her father's house in the north; the later residences in Canton

and Shanghai, even the delightful river gardens of the summer place at

Soochow, were less vivid. Inside the massive tiled stone wall the

rooms--there were a hundred at least--faced in squares on the inner

courtyard, and were connected by glass enclosed verandas. The reception

houses of the front court, the deeply carved wooden platform with its

scarlet covering, were of the greatest elegance; they were always astir

with the numerous secretaries, the Chinese writers and messengers, the

_mafoos_ and chair coolies, the servants and blind musicians with the old

songs, _The Millet's in Flower_ and _Kuan Kuan Go to the Ospreys_. The

side door to the women's apartments, however, opened into a retreat,

where her father's concubine, he had but one, trailed like a bird of

paradise, and there was the constant musical drip of a fountain in an old

granite basin. There, during the years when she was lame, Taou Yuen

mostly stayed.

She had been dropped from a palanquin in her sixth year; sharp

pains soon after burned in her hip, and the corresponding leg had

perceptibly shortened. A great many remedies were tried in vain--burning

with charcoal, the application of black plasters, sweating,

acupuncture--sticking long needles into the afflicted part. The doctors

declared that the five elements of her body--the metal, wood, water, fire

and earth, were hopelessly out of equilibrium. Her mother had then called

necromancers and devil charmers; lucky and unlucky days were explored;

strange rites were conducted before her terrified eyes screwed into the

determination to show no alarm.

A year, perhaps, after they had become resigned to her injury, her

father, always a man of the most liberal ideas, had suddenly brought into

the garden to see her an English doctor passing through China. Against

the wailing protests of the women the Englishman had been given authority

to treat her; and he had caused to be made a thin steel brace, clasping

Taou Yuen's waist and extending in a rigid band down the length of her

injured leg. After putting a high shoe on her other foot he had commanded

them to keep the brace on her for two years.

It was through that period of comparative inactivity that she acquired a

habit of reading and thought, a certain grasp of philosophical attitude,

common to the higher masculine Chinese mind but rare among their women.

She had, for instance, later, read Laotze's Tao-teh-king, and been

impressed by his tranquil elevation above the petty ills and concerns of

life and the flesh. Her father, like all the ruling class, regarded

Taoism--which had, indeed, degenerated into a mass of nonsense about the

transmutation of base metals into gold and the elixir of life--with

contempt. But this seemed to her no depreciation of the Greatly Eminent

One or his philosophy of the two Taoes.

The household, or at least the family, worshipped in the form of

Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred _hiao_ or filial

submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as

was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual

brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to

recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely

recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given her mind had remained.

The colorful pageant of her first marriage, the smaller but splendidly

appointed house of her husband--he was extremely intelligent and had

honorably passed the examination for licentiate, one of only two hundred

successful bachelors out of twenty thousand--and the period following his

accidental drowning wheeled quickly through her brain....

Only Gerrit Ammidon was left.

She loved him, Taou Yuen realized, for a quality entirely independent of

race: he had more than anyone else she knew the virtues of simplicity and

purity announced by Chwang-Tze as the marks of the True Man. "We must

become like little children," the Old Master had written. She had seen

this at once in the amazing interview sanctioned by her father-in-law.

Most women of her class, even widows, would have perished with shame at

being exposed to a foreigner. But Lu Kikwang had expressed her difference

from them in the terms of his proposal. His words had been "finely

better" although the truth was that her curiosity had always mastered the

other and more prudent instincts. Yet that alone would not have

prostrated her before Gerrit Ammidon--death was not unthinkable--nor

carried her into his strange terrifying ship and stranger life. The love

had been born almost simultaneously with her first recognition of his

character. Now her passion for him was close and jealous. A constant

shifting between such humanity and the calm detachment which prefigured

heaven was what most convinced her of the truths of Lao-tze.

All this took body at the announcement of Edward Dunsack about Gerrit and

his niece. Certainly he might have had an affair; that she dismissed; but

the insinuated permanence of this other affection was serious. She would

not have believed Mr. Dunsack for an instant, but, as he had pointed out,

Gerrit had undoubtedly been upset; he had turned pale and hurried away

impolitely. It was by such apparently slight indications that the great

inner currents of life were discovered. The fact that Chinese officials

had more than one wife, or, to speak correctly, concubines in addition,

had no bearing with Gerrit; such was not the custom with American men. It

represented for him, yes--dishonor.

She laboriously recalled his every attitude since they had landed in

America, and was obliged to admit that he had changed--he was less gay

and though his manner was always considerate she recognized a growing

impatience beneath his darker calm. Her philosophy was again torn in

shreds by sharp feminine emotions. She was filled with jealousy and

hatred and hurt pride. The clearest expression of his possible discontent

had marked his face when he had suddenly come into their room and saw her

rising from a prayer for his father. Gerrit's lips had been compressed,

almost disdainful; at that moment, she knew unerringly, he found her

ugly. Of course it had been the hideous garments of mourning.

She must wear the unhemmed sackcloth and dull slippers, bind her

headdress and cover her pins with paste, for a hundred days; and then

a second mourning of black or dark blue, and no flowers, for three

years. It might well be that by then Gerrit, blind to these

proprieties, would find her unendurable. Suddenly, in the tremendous

difficulty of holding him against an entire world, his own and of

which she was supremely ignorant, it seemed to her that she needed

every possible means, every coral blossom and gold filament and finger

of paint, the cunning intoxication of subtle dress and color and

perfume. With a leaden sense of guilt, but in a fever of impatience,

of haste, she stripped off the coarse hemp for her most elaborate

satins, her santal and clover and carmine.

When Gerrit came in it had grown dark with night, and he explained that

he had been busy inspecting the _Nautilus'_ spars. She lighted a lamp,

then another, all she could find, and studied him unobtrusively. She was

shocked at the worn expression of his face; it seemed as if he had aged

in the few hours since he had left the library. He was uneasy, silent;

and, secretly dismayed, she saw that he was indifferent to her changed

appearance, too. Taou Yuen debated the wisdom of telling him about the

painful scene with Edward Dunsack; against her original intent she

decided in the negative. She informed herself that the reason for this

was a wish to preserve him, now that they were practically at the day of

departure, from an unpleasant duty. But there was an underlying dimly

apprehended and far different motive: she was afraid that it would blow

into flame a situation that might otherwise be avoided, bring to life a

past naturally dying or dead.

She saw that he was scarcely aware of her presence in the room, perhaps

in his life. A period of resentment followed. "You are dull," she

declared, "and I am going down to the garden for entertainment." Gerrit

nodded. He would, he told her, be along shortly. Below she found Roger

Brevard, with the oldest Ammidon girl and her mother.

Roger Brevard, she had discovered, was in love with Sidsall. The latter,

it developed, was to leave shortly for a party; Mr. Brevard was not

going; and, when Gerrit's sister-in-law walked across the grass with her

daughter the man dropped into an easy conversation with Taou Yuen. She

had a feeling, which she had tried in vain to lose, of the vulgarity, the

impropriety of this. Yet she recognized that there was none of the former

in Roger Brevard; he resembled quite a little her dead husband,

Sié-Ngan-kwán; and for that reason she was more at ease with him--in

spite of such unaccustomed familiarity--than with anyone else in Salem

but Gerrit.

He was, she admitted condescendingly, almost as cultivated as the

ordinary Chinese gentleman. Many of his thoughts, where she could

understand their expression, might have come from a study of the sacred

kings. At the same time her feminine perception realized that he had a

genuine liking for her.

"You'll be delighted to leave Salem," he said, leaning forward and

studying her.

"That would not be polite," she answered formally. "You have been so

good. But it will give me pleasure to see Shanghai again. Anyone is

happier with customs he understands."

"And prefers," he added. "Indeed, I'd choose some of your manners rather

than ours. You see, you have been at the business of civilization so much

longer than the rest of us."

"Our history begins two thousand years before your Christ," she told him;

"our language has been spoken without change for thirty-three centuries,

as you call them. But such facts are nothing. I would rather hear your

non--nonsense," she stumbled over the word.

"Do you mean that what we call nonsense is really the most important?"

"Perhaps," she replied. "Devotion to the old and dead is greatly

necessary yet you smile at it. I didn't mean that, but moons and lovers

and music." He cried in protest, "We're terribly serious about those!"

"I hear nothing but talk about cargoes and sales and money."

"We keep the other under our hats," he instructed her. She was completely

mystified, and he explained.

"In China," she remarked tentatively, "it is possible for a man to love

two women at once, maybe one a little more than the other, but he can be

kind and just and affectionate to them both. Tell me, is--is that

possible with an American?"

"No!" he spoke emphatically. "We can love, in the way you mean, only one,

perhaps only once. I wouldn't swear to that, but there are simply no

exceptions to the first. Men are unfaithful, yes; but at a cost to

themselves, or because they are incapable of restraint. To be unfaithful

in anything is to fail, isn't it? You can lie to yourself as effectively

as to anybody else."

She fixed a painful attention upon him, but lost at least a half of his

meaning. However, one fact was clearer than ever--that Edward Dunsack had

said an evil thing about her husband. "It seems," he went on, "that even

spiritual concerns can be the result of long custom." If he was trying to

find an excuse for Chinese habit she immediately disposed of it. "No,"

she said, "you are upside down. The spirit is first, the eternal Tao,

everywhere alike, but the personal spirit is different in you and in us."

A sudden dejection seized her--now the difference seemed vaster than

anything she had in common with Gerrit. A wave of oppressive nostalgia,

of confusion and dread, submerged her in a faintly thunderous darkness.

She felt everywhere about her the presence of evil and threatening

shades. The approach of her husband, his heavy settling into a chair, did

nothing to lighten her apprehension.

"How soon do we go?" she asked faintly.

"In two weeks, with nothing unexpected," he responded without interest or

pleasure. It flashed through her mind that he was depressed at leaving

Salem, that other woman. His present indifference was very far from the

manner in which he had first discussed their leaving. Yet, even that, she

recalled in the light of her present sensitiveness, had been unnaturally

abrupt and clothed in a great many loud-sounding words. She told herself

arbitrarily that Edward Dunsack had lied--for the purpose which his

conduct afterward made clear--but her very feeling was proof that she

believed he had spoken the truth.

She was a victim of an uneasy curiosity to see... she made a violent

mental effort and recaptured the name--Nettie Vollar. Of course the

latter had been the deliberate cause of whatever wickedness had

threatened at the return of Gerrit with her, Taou Yuen. She had however

no doubt of the extent of this: Gerrit was upright, faithful to the

necessity Roger Brevard had explained; all that assaulted her happiness

was on an incorporate plane, or, anyhow, in a procession of consequences

extending far back and forward of their present lives.

But, she recognized, she had no excuse nor opportunity to see Nettie

Vollar. Mrs. Ammidon, when she heard of the accident, had at once

declared her intention of going to the Dunsacks' house; still that

promised no chance of satisfying her own desire. The least politeness in

the world prohibited her from going baldly in and demanding to see the

woman. She couldn't, all at once, make convincing a sympathy or

impersonal interest entirely contradictory to her insistent indifference.

The best she could hope was for them to sail away as quickly as possible;

when on the other side of the seas Gerrit would probably return to the

simplicity of being she had adored.

Then a trivial and yet serious fear occurred to her--perhaps here, among

all these dead-white women, he no longer held her beautiful. The word was

his own, or it had been his; he had not repeated it, she realized, twice

since they had been in Salem. Personally, she found the American women

entirely undistinguished and dressed in grotesquely ugly and cheap

clothes--not unlike paper lanterns bobbing along the ground. Their faces

were shamelessly bare of paint and their manners would have disgraced the

lowest servant in a Chinese courtyard. This was natural, from any

consideration of the hideous or inappropriate things that surrounded

them, and from the complete lack of what she could distinguish as either

discipline or reverence. Yet Gerrit, a part of this, would be unable to

share her attitude; she had heard him praise the appearance of women so

insipid that she had turned expecting vainly an ironic smile.

Roger Brevard rose and made his bow, the only satisfactory approach to a

courteous gesture she had met outside Gerrit's occasional half-humorous

effort since leaving Shanghai. He stirred, muttered a perfunctory phrase,

and sank back into obscurity.

Little quirks of unfamiliar disturbing feeling ran through Taou Yuen; her

mind, it seemed, had become a thing of no importance; all that at one

time had so largely ordered her life was superseded by these illogical

emotions spreading apparently from her heart. The truth was, she told

herself, that--with all her reading and philosophy--she had had little or

no experience of actuality: the injury to her hip and quiet life in the

gray garden at Canton, her protected existence in the women's apartments,

whatever she might have learned from them neglected because of the

general silliness of their chatter, the formal early marriage, had all

combined for the preservation of her ignorance.

She regarded herself now with distrust; nothing could have been more

unpleasant than the failure of her will, this swamping of her equanimity.

She never lost for a moment the image of superiority that should be her

perfect example, the non-assertion that was the way of heaven; but her

comprehension was like a figure ruthlessly dragged about by an

overpowering unreflective force. A sharp hatred of Nettie Vollar seared

her mind and perished in a miserable sense of weakness.

Against the dark, charged with a confusion of the ten thousand things,

she stared wearily and wakeful. She reminded herself again that Gerrit

would soon be gone from Salem, alone with her on the long voyage to

China; but he'd return to America, come back to Salem; and she knew that

he would never bring her westward again. A period of depression followed

which seemed to have no immediate connection with Gerrit; she had an

indefinable feeling of struggling in vain against adversity, of

opposition to an implacable power.

For a short while after she rose in the morning it appeared that she had

regained her self-control, her reason; and a consequent happy relief

irradiated her. But when Gerrit came up after she had finished her toilet

and she saw, from his haggard face, that he too must have been awake,

tormented, through the night, a passion of bitterness enveloped her at

which all that had gone before turned pale. She could scarcely restrain

herself from a noisy wailing accusation, and stood regarding him with a

tense unnatural grimace, the result of her effort to preserve propriety.

She told herself, at the tempest of vulgar phrases storming through her

consciousness, that what Edward Dunsack had said about her being no

better than the tea house girls was true, and she was aghast at the inner

treachery capable of such self-betrayal. Not a quivering word, however,

escaped; she managed a commonplace phrase and turned aside in a trivial

pretext of occupation.

"I am going into Boston with Captain Dunsack on business connected with

his schooners." The girl's grandfather! "Very well." She spoke placidly,

and with a tempestuous heart watched him stride quickly about the park.

She settled herself in a long motionless contemplation, fastening her

mind upon the most elevated and revered ideas conceivable. She saw the

eternal Tao flowing like a great green river of souls, smooth and mighty

and resistless; and she willed that she too might become a part of that

desirable self-effacement, safe in surrender. Men striving to create a

Tao for personal ends beat out their lives in vain. It was the figure of

the river developing, like floating on a deliberate all-powerful tide or

struggling impotently against it.

Later a message came up from Mrs. Ammidon--she hoped that Taou Yuen would

drive with her that afternoon. She dressed with the most particular care,

in blue and dark greens, her shoulders thick with embroidered garlands

and silver _shou_, her piled hair ornamented in glittering silver leaves

and garnets.

She went down when she heard the horses on the street below but the

barouche was empty except for the coachman. "Mrs. Ammidon left a half

hour ago," a servant told her; "and sent the carriage back for you." They

moved forward, going, she saw, into a part of the town where they seldom

drove--the narrow crowded way by the wharves--and, turning shortly into a

street that ended abruptly at the water, drew up before a dingy house on

her right.

The door was open, and they waited, confident that Mrs. Ammidon would

hear the clatter of hoofs and come out; but a far different appeared. She

gazed for a silent space at Taou Yuen seated above her, as if confused by

the glittering magnificence. It was probable that Gerrit's brother's wife

had come there on an errand of charity for the woman was poor, dingy like

the house, with a face drawn by suffering and material struggle.

"Of course you're Captain Ammidon's wife," she said; "and you are here

after Mrs. William Ammidon. Well, she's gone; but she left a message for

you. She will be at Henry Whipple's, the bookseller. After she saw Nettie

she went right off to send her some things; wouldn't wait for the

carriage. A kind-hearted determined body."

Taou Yuen leaned out to command the coachman to drive on; but the other,

plainly bent on making the most of a rare opportunity for such a

conversation, continued talking in her low resigned way.

"I was glad to have her too; Nettie gets pretty fretful up there with

nobody but me, really. She hasn't been so well, either, since--" here she

stopped abruptly, recommenced. "I like to see a person myself of Mrs.

Ammidon's kind. I've been alone all day; father's gone to Boston and

Edward away I don't know where."

Taou Yuen's curiosity to see Nettie Vollar returned infinitely

multiplied; here, miraculously, was an opportunity for her to study the

woman who was beyond any doubt an important part of Gerrit's past,

present--it might be, his future. The men were gone. ... She got

resolutely down from the barouche. "Take me up to your daughter," she

directed quietly.

"Why, that's very kind, but I don't know--Yes, certainly. Mind

these stairs with your satin skirt; I don't always get around to

the whole house."

Taou Yuen saw at once that Nettie Vollar was far sicker than she had

realized: her head lay on the pillow absolutely spent, her brow damply

plastered with hair and her eyes enlarged and dull. Taou Yuen drew a

chair forward and sat beside a table with a glass bowl of small dark

pills which from a just perceptible odor she recognized as opium. She

looked intently, coldly, at the prostrate figure. A flush like match

flames burned in Nettie Vollar's cheeks, and she said in a voice at once

weak and sharp:

"You're her!"

Taou Yuen nodded slowly, disdainfully.

"Oh, how could he!" the other exclaimed in what sounded like the thin

echo of a passionate cry. "I knew you were Chinese, but I never realized

it till this minute."

As Gerrit Ammidon's wife had feared she was totally unable to judge a

single quality or feature of the girl before her. She looked exactly like

all the others she had seen in Salem: in order to realize her she needed

Gerrit's eyes, Gerrit's birth. Then one fact crept insidiously into her

consciousness--here, in a way, was another being who had Gerrit Ammidon's

childlike simplicity. That was the most terrifying discovery she could

have made. Taou Yuen felt the return of the hateful irresistible emotions

which had destroyed her self-control. She wanted to hurt Nettie Vollar in

every possible way, to mock her with the fact that she had lost Gerrit

perhaps never to see him again; she wanted to tell her that she, Taou

Yuen, entirely understood her hopes, efforts, and that they were vain.

An utter self-loathing possessed her at the same time, a feeling of

imminent danger as if she were walking with willfully shut eyes on the

edge of a precipice above a black fatal void. Not a trace of this

appeared on her schooled countenance; and once more she completely

restrained any defiling speech. She deliberately shifted her point of

view to another possible aspect of all that confronted her--it might be

that this woman was a specter, a _kwei_, bent on Gerrit's destruction.

Such a thing often happened. How much better if Nettie Vollar had been

killed! She studied her with a renewed interest--a fresh question.

Perhaps the other would die as it was. She was extremely weak; her

spirit, Taou Yuen saw, lay listlessly in a listless body. Nettie Vollar

slightly moved her injured arm, and that little effort exhausted her for

a moment; her eyes closed, her face was as white as salt.

A further, almost philosophical, consideration engaged Taou Yuen's

mind--this extraordinary occasion, her being with the other alone, Nettie

Vollar's fragility, were, it might be, all a part of the working of the

righteous _Yang_. In the light of this, then, she had been brought here

for a purpose ... the ending of a menace to her husband. She hesitated

for a breath--if it were the opposite malignant _Yin_ there was no bottom

to the infamy into which she might fall. It was a tremendous question.

The actual execution of the practical suggestion, from either source, was

extremely easy; she had but to lean forward, draw her heavy sleeve across

the strained face, hold it there for a little, and Nettie Vollar would

have died of--of any one of a number of reasonable causes. She, Taou

Yuen, would call, politely distressed, for the mother ... very

regrettable.