CHAPTER XII
For a full week Herrick lived behind closed doors. It was a long devastating bout, and it was a hatefully dull week for Nancy and Edward. Recent liberty made their present confinement wear all the more heavily. Romantic memories of Elizabeth and Helen and David made the lonely children captious and cross with one another. They had no zest for books; the sun kept eternally shining; it called them away to the mountain tops. Edward fumed because he could get no practice with his newly made bow; Nancy sat on the platform above the ravine, musing as to who should rescue her from her boredom, and more and more she wondered who could rescue her from fear. For fear was beating at the gates of her courage.
In this narrow temple of the Western Hills Herrick's absence weighed like sultry heat upon the atmosphere of the household, quieting the tongue of the amah and the vociferous exchanges of the servants. Kuei-lien came and went with the preoccupation of a nurse waiting upon a sick man. But the fact Nancy saw and the fact she despised was that the preoccupation was a happy one. At last, one day Nancy could stand it no more.
"I want to see my father," she said.
Kuei-lien looked at her with surprise. The sneer on her lips almost faded before the resolute dignity of the girl. For the first time the all-conquering audacity of the concubine was checked; Kuei-lien began to feel misgivings about this stubborn child, misgivings and a little fear, because she could not meet Nancy's obstinacy with her usual effective mockery.
"I want to see my father," the girl repeated.
"But you can't see him," Kuei-lien said. "He is busy. He would call for you if he wished to see you."
"Ask him if I may see him."
"Oh, I can ask him, but I know what his answer will be."
Kuei-lien went away much disturbed.
"I have had the most absurd request from Nancy," she told her master, who was lying heavily on his couch. "She wants to see you. She told me she must see you."
"Very well, tell her to come," said Herrick.
Kuei-lien could not believe the report of her own ears.
"You want her to come?" she asked. "I told her you were too busy to see her."
"What right have you to speak for your master?" the man shouted. "Go and tell her to come."
Kuei-lien had no course but to go.
"You have made a pretty mess of things," she warned Nancy. "Your father is furiously angry at your asking to see him. He said, Yes, you should see him, and ordered me to make you come."
"I am going without being forced," said Nancy with irritating self-possession. "You don't have to make me."
Kuei-lien, balked in her effort to frighten the girl, went ahead of her and opened the door of Herrick's bedroom. The shutters had been thrown wide to let in the late afternoon sun, but there had not been time to clear the mustiness of the place, the lurking odor of the drug, which clung to the bed curtains and to the implements laid ready on a table by Herrick's side.
Nancy evinced not a sign of disgust as she entered the room and stood waiting impassively for her father's first words. Yet she seemed out of place amid the disorder of the chamber, which was littered with signs of Kuei-lien's occupancy.
This was apparent to Herrick himself. Although the situation could not foster any illusion as to how he had been spending his days, the father nevertheless made the effort to greet his daughter with the ceremony proper between them. His orgy had burned itself out, but his face showed the strain of dissipation; his eyes were dull, there were haggard lines round the mouth, pouches of puffy flesh beneath his eyes. Nancy could not avoid glimpses of his unkempt fingers nor of the loose robe bound round his body.
"And what is it so important that you must ask permission to see me?" Herrick inquired, speaking in Chinese.
Nancy had her one sentence prepared. She uttered it in a low cool voice.
"I was afraid to leave my father so long alone with his enemy."
A pause, fraught with deep feeling, ensued upon these daring words.
"Is that all?" Herrick asked finally.
"Yes," admitted the girl, "that is all."
"Very well, you may go."
Nancy turned obediently and went out of the room. Even Kuei-lien had the decency to wait until the child was out of earshot before she gave vent to her mirth.
"Ha, ha, ha!" she laughed. "What a speech! Afraid to leave her father alone with his enemy. Whom does she mean? Does she mean me?"
Her amusement was not very convincing. It seemed forced, bolstered up by weak bravado.
"Yes, she means you," retorted her master, "she means you and she means all this mischievous rubbish."
With a sweep of his hand he brushed the glasses, the opium pipe, the little lamp, from the surface of the table. They fell with a crash to the floor.
"Don't be so wasteful," protested the concubine, more entertained by this flare of temper on Herrick's part than by Nancy's grim sentence. "What a shame to break all these things. You'll need them again."
"Yes, that is the beastly part of it," Herrick acknowledged, "I shall need them again—but not now—not now. And I don't need you either. You may go."
"Your eloquence is not so impressive as your daughter's," said Kuei-lien, as she retreated. Her indomitable capacity for being merry never deserted the girl, even at times of defeat.
Left to himself at last, Herrick began to repair the disorders of the past few days. He shaved, dressed himself neatly, returned to his books and his pens. But throughout the mechanical functions which helped to bring back self-respect, his mind was filled with the vision of Nancy's face, her impassive demeanor, in unreproaching contact with the signs of his own collapse. Again and again he mumbled the girl's words. It was a curiously saving trait in Herrick's character that he did not resent them.
"'Alone with his enemy,'" he kept saying, "How right she was, how just! Ah, but I must take care lest my enemy be her enemy too."
Then on a sudden came a frightening spasm of pain, the first in his life. Always Herrick had been well and robust, seldom ill for two days together; but now he gasped and choked, held his hand to his chest, thinking with ungovernable terror that he was going to die with all the loose strings of his life untied. After minutes that were years, the spell passed. He lay back white-faced in a chair, his forehead pouring sweat. He recognized the warning. His heart was affected. What use would there be in disguising the truth?
Herrick had no intention to consult a physician. Physicians had not saved his wife; they had never been of use to him. He knew the advice they would give: diet, self-control, no excitement. They had no cure for this complaint. Some people lived on for years, others were snuffed out in a night; what was bound to fall fell despite the advice of all the doctors in the world. After the gripping pain had relaxed—there was no room for any state except fear while it lasted—the man even treated the subject jauntily and swore he was as likely as any to round off his threescore and ten. But he could not do it peacefully if he left any room for grief to befall Nancy and Edward.
It was after this attack that Ronald Nasmith received a letter to which with surprise he saw Herrick's signature attached. The note was short, impersonal in its wording; the writer had business of importance he could not discuss on paper; he asked Mr. Nasmith to indulge the infirmities of an older man by paying him a visit; he also must request that his letter and the subject of the visit be treated as confidential.
Nasmith dispatched Beresford as acting-uncle on a picnic to some hot springs while he slipped away to see Herrick. His mind during the past few days had been much occupied with Herrick and the puzzle of the scrolls. He had been studying a riddle which instinct told him was full of personal import, a message that Herrick intended and wished him to decipher. Yet the answer evaded his closest research. It might seem easy to Herrick, schooled in these antithetical couplets by which the Chinese conveyed the many thoughts they did not care to lay bare on the surface; it was not clear to Nasmith, who burrowed through all his dictionaries and went to the length of asking help from his teacher. The dictionaries explained little and the teacher, although he exclaimed at once that the characters were the work of a master, offered explanations so involved that Nasmith, even though he understood less than half of what his teacher said, knew that this excess of commentary was merely the happy Chinese way of concealing ignorance: the teacher was groping for a clue, as Nasmith once before had caught him doing when the drowsy pedagogue had elaborated the most profound moral sentiments from what proved to be simply the Chinese transliteration of the name Australia. In the end, exhaustive study had not told as much as Herrick himself chose to reveal:—
The sun moving to the west kindles a splendid beacon
for the moon;
The moon following from the east tenderly displays the
reflection of the sun.
"I wonder if he will have expected me to master his riddle," thought Nasmith, as he set out upon his long walk.
Herrick received his guest in the same room as before. He was regaining the dominance of his nerves but there was, nevertheless, a stiffness of bearing which caused Nasmith to eye his host keenly, anxious for any hint of the business in hand, and to note marks of the upheaval through which the man had been passing. Something was wrong—business cares, worries about property, some trouble in which the man could not turn to Chinese friends for assistance. Perhaps Herrick wanted an executor or a witness to his will. No, that could not be the difficulty; he would have called for Beresford as well.
"I suppose you are mystified as to the reasons for my letter," Herrick began. "Did you read the scroll I wrote for you?"
"I tried to read it," Nasmith admitted.
"And failed. I am not surprised. It was the truth, and the truth is always far-fetched. I have, I am afraid, the Chinese faculty for talking in riddles and as to the inner meaning of those two sentences I prefer not to explain it, for the best part of your life will come when you find out the meaning for yourself—if you do."
"That is putting rather too great a strain on my curiosity, don't you think?"
"Perhaps. But I'm going to offer you the key to the puzzle and you can make the best of it as you choose."
Herrick fingered the lip of his teacup for a minute or two while Nasmith wondered if he had been summoned all this distance merely to hear more of such cryptic nonsense.
"Do you think my wits are wandering?" Herrick asked with disconcerting suddenness.
"I am not sure of it," replied his guest, willing to be as provokingly frank. The older man laughed.
"I have been ill," he said, "but my wits are still here. I have wit enough to recognize an honest man; that is why I have asked you to come."
"Thank you; the compliment is enjoyed, even if it isn't deserved."
"How much patience would you have, to keep talking in this vein?"
"Not much more," Nasmith confessed.
"Ah, you will never become Chinese."
"I don't wish to."
"Good. You are thoroughly English, quite thoroughly English, aren't you? You wouldn't care to follow my example and become Chinese?"
"If you wish me to say what I think, I should say a life like yours was a waste, a shameful waste, not fair to yourself, Mr. Herrick, and especially not fair to your two children."
"You are honest, that is the important point. For your opinions, Mr. Nasmith, I don't care a snap of the finger. Opinions don't have half the influence we imagine. But you have touched the subject I have in mind. It is my children and what is fair to them that I am keeping in mind. I have been ill: without mincing matters I might just as well tell you I have very definite signs of heart trouble. You know what that means. It means that I might drop even while I am talking with you here. That is disquieting. I don't care to leave the future of my children dependent on the whims of this worn-out heart of mine."
"Why do you keep them in China? Why don't you take them home?"
"I have a home here and I am too old to change it, don't wish to change it, in fact. No, I didn't call you for advice, Mr. Nasmith; I am capable of giving myself all the advice you can suggest. If I wished to, I could put Nancy and Edward to school, but I don't wish to. Let's not argue about it, just say I am too selfish, too pig-headed, not willing at my time of life to lose the company of two delightful children. I want something more definite from you, something which will be a real provision for the future and not the making myself and my children miserable by shipping them off to school among strangers and foreigners—"
"You want, then—" interrupted Nasmith, anxious to stem Herrick's garrulous speech.
"I want to betroth my daughter Nancy to you."