CHAPTER XIV
The departure had been as sudden, as arbitrary, as Herrick's few acts of decision usually were. The household had not recovered from the surprise of Nasmith's visit when orders came to pack. In the mysterious way by which news permeates a Chinese dwelling the subject of Herrick's conversation with his guest was common property while the two men were still debating it. Kuei-lien in great glee told Nancy that her engagement was being arranged. She was to be married to one of the light-haired men who had rescued her, the one with the little moustache under his nose. Nancy, who recognized Nasmith from Kuei-lien's mocking description, blushed a violent red and denied that any such transaction was in progress.
"Oh, yes it is," declared the concubine, "I know. They are discussing your presents right now. What a way to do it, with no middleman! But that's your foreign custom. Soon you'll be squeezing your waist into corsets and hiding your face with a white veil like a mourner. Poor Nancy, you won't have a red chair; foreigners never use them. They'll put you into a motor car and send you to a foreign worship hall where you'll have to kiss your husband and take his hand, so"—Nancy jerked free from Kuei-lien's provoking fingers,—"and then you'll use a knife and a fork and eat goat's meat till you smell like a Mongolian shepherd."
"I won't, I won't, I won't!" vowed Nancy, stamping her foot.
"Don't tease her," begged the nurse, beaming with smiles at the happy news; "you know it is not seemly to talk to a maiden about her future husband."
"Oh, it's quite all right by foreign custom. Your fiancé will come every day to see you; we shall all hide behind the door while you sit and talk and make love together."
"Yes, that is the custom," the amah admitted. "She will grow used to it. She ought to follow the practice of her ancestors."
Nancy, however, had not stayed to listen. She had slammed the doors of her room in their faces and flung herself across the bed, where in the semi-darkness she meditated upon a change she never for a moment doubted had been agreed to. It was while the nurse still triumphantly declaimed the fitness of Nancy's marrying an Englishman that Herrick appeared in the courtyard to deliver his curt message that they were to return to Peking on the morrow. The exultant words were frozen on the tongue of the amah. She had seen in Herrick's eyes the defeat of all her hopes.
Nancy and Edward were miserable at coming back to Peking. It was utterly dispiriting to be fenced by high walls in a garden that had shrunk: no wide views, no sound of tumbling streams, no walks across hills teeming with wild flowers—just the beat of paddles as the clothes were rinsed at the pond and the tedious gossip of women whose minds were confined like their bodies. The boy and girl relapsed into their old routine, took up again studies with their teacher, intermittent lessons with their father, the usual round of writing and reading, yet all with lassitude of spirit, with hearts aching for the hills.
Not even the Mid-autumn Festival, which because of the fewness of the Chinese holidays always had made such a stir in their lives, could wake the children from this lethargy. Nancy passed idly by the flowering cassia, the pride of her courtyard, and wholly forgot to thrust a sprig of the fragrant white blossoms into her hair. More from habit than from relish she ate her round moon cakes and climbed into the pine to see the largest moon of the year rise slowly from the east. She was homesick for her brief hours with Helen and Elizabeth and wrote them letters in English, long, affectionate letters which she could not send because she had no knowledge of where to send them. The exercise did bring some comfort; it seemed to provide some intercourse with her friends, and would have entertained them greatly, could the naïve, oddly phrased missives have found their destination.
Kuei-lien did not visit Nancy as she used to do. The words the daughter had spoken about her father's enemy were hard to forgive. She never pressed Nancy for their meaning because she always avoided unprofitable quarrels, but it became her policy to be cool to the girl, to snub her as one might snub a pert child. Much of the time she spent with the t'ai-t'ai, to whom she had related the tale of the summer. The t'ai-t'ai agreed unreservedly that Nancy and Edward were a problem; they ought to be sent back to the West. She offered no proposal, however, as to how they should be sent. The fact was that she was nursing plans of her own, plans which might not jump with Kuei-lien's humor.
She had gone to her husband, shortly after his return, and taxed him on the subject of her own daughter, Li-an. The girl was twelve. Ought they not to be choosing her a husband?
"Good God!" exclaimed Herrick in English, "have we got to find another?"
"My heart will have no peace till she is engaged," she said.
"But Li-an is only a babe in arms."
"She is twelve," the mother repeated.
"I hardly know the child. Bring her here. Let me talk to her."
Herrick's attention had in truth been so predominantly centred on Nancy and Edward that the second daughter came before her father like a stranger. There had never been the contact of English lessons to quicken his knowledge of this fast growing girl.
"Yes, she is pretty," he thought to himself, "and, thank heaven, Chinese."
Herrick examined the scholarship of his daughter, put many questions which she answered cleverly. Then the whim seized him to ask what he had asked of Nancy, to see how she would pass the test of bringing what she valued most. Li-an went at once to her mother and told her of Herrick's strange request.
"The most precious thing you have?" inquired the t'ai-t'ai. "What a thing to ask! We must think about it and make sure not to disappoint him. You might take a copy of Mencius, or the Four Books, or perhaps your ink-stone and brush. No, they won't do; I have a much better plan."
She extracted a photograph from her box.
"Take that," she said; "that will please him."
Herrick received the photograph and looked at it curiously. Then he frowned. The picture was one of himself taken years before, a portrait which revealed its subject in the stiff pose so dear to Chinese photographers: there were flower pots bestowed in harsh symmetry on either side of him, a drop painted to show trees and balustrades behind, and Herrick, glued to the chair, facing the camera with exasperated belligerency as though daring the lens to do its worst—which it did. The man had forgotten such a picture existed. In a moment of weakness he had given way before the entreaties of the t'ai-t'ai and consented to its being taken.
"Who put you up to bringing this atrocity?" he demanded. He tore the picture asunder and threw the pieces on the floor.
"Tell your mother," he said, "that it is rather early to be teaching her daughter to lie."
The t'ai-t'ai appeared, full of explanations, full of apologies. The child had been puzzled by her father's command, and was unhappy because she had nothing precious enough to take to her father.
"So I asked her whom she honored most. 'My father,' Li-an answered, 'of course I honor my father more than anybody.' I showed her the photograph merely to test her and instantly she begged me to let her have it. When I saw the happiness come over her face and how she valued it I suggested that this was the gift to bring to her father. I am sorry it displeased you, but there was no time to frame it suitably."
The excuse was so much more flagrant than the offense itself that the man could not keep back a burst of laughter.
"Not even from your lips can two lies cancel each other, my good lady," he remarked dryly in English. The t'ai-t'ai was a standard by which he could mark his growing absorption into Chinese life and realize how much deeper he still needed to sink himself before the waters covered his soul.
"I'm afraid your daughter is much too clever," he said, openly accepting Li-an's ill-advised act as a joke. "Fancy a child of twelve practising such artful wiles on her old father."
The mother's face beamed in relief.
"But we mustn't be in too great a hurry in choosing her a husband. We must make certain of a suitable man. Meantime I want your help in something far more pressing. You realize of course that Nancy is four years older than Li-an. We must make some arrangement for her; we can't delay it any longer. I thought for a time of marrying her to an Englishman, but now that I have been thinking about the matter I know that Nancy, though she is English-born, can never be at home in the West. She is Chinese by nature and training and speech, and Chinese she ought to remain; so now I am determined to find a Chinese husband for Nancy, and I want you to be matchmaker. Please don't annoy me by a statement of objections and difficulties; I know these as well as you. But there are a few points to keep in mind: first, I must see the man you suggest. I am not going to be put off with any dunderheads; I want the best. If I can't get the best there will be no engagement. Furthermore, the man must be of good family; he must be well educated, a man of scholarly tastes—and he must know no English, no English at all. I won't have a son-in-law sucking his breath and grinning at his own smartness as he gibbers 'Yes-s' and 'Alright.' Do you understand?"
The woman nodded.
"You may think I am asking the impossible in expecting such a paragon. Well, you know the proverb that what we value cheaply we sell cheaply. We don't need to apologize for Nancy and I will not have you setting about this task as though we were asking favors. Yet of course there will be a prejudice against the girl because of her foreign birth. That perhaps will frighten the conservative families, the very families we ought to look to for decent, obedient, scholarly boys. I am ready to make one concession to overcome the handicap of Nancy's having been born English; if I am satisfied with the man you choose, I will give Nancy a portion of ten thousand taels at her marriage; if I am very well satisfied, I might stretch the sum to fifteen thousand."
After this last offer, which outweighed all Herrick's other provisions, the t'ai-t'ai accepted her commission as matchmaker. She was admirably fitted for the post, since she came of good family herself, an excellent but impecunious family with many ramifications, many branches, all prolific of sons and daughters, all equally genteel, all equally poor. Within the confines of her own family the t'ai-t'ai knew she could find many candidates for Nancy's hand. She did not propose to look further.
Her father had been Herrick's teacher of Chinese. He was a gentleman of the old school, a scholar of distinction, benignant in his ways, a fountainhead of Chinese lore. The family had been broken by the disgrace of the patron, whom an arbitrary whim of the Empress Dowager had banished from court. Without exception every man of the family had been thrown out of official employment. Years of vain waiting for reinstatement had followed: they could not dig; to beg they were ashamed. Swiftly their fortune melted away till Herrick's future father-in-law broke with tradition by undertaking to instruct foreigners in the obscurities of the Mandarin tongue.
For a long time he was the only man of his extensive family who deigned to work. The others continued from day to day, living always on the edge of solvency, getting food and clothing by some mysterious means of which Chinese families are rarely so impoverished as to lose the secret; they had been rather contemptuous over the one member who stooped to teach foreign devils for a living, but they did not scruple to share in the profits of his abasement; they were outraged by his marrying a daughter to a foreign devil, but always borrowed a liberal part of the money the t'ai-t'ai brought home as her gift to the exchequer. They waited and taught their sons and grandsons to wait for the turn of affairs which might restore them to office, restore them to the emoluments of magistracies and deputy inspectorships. Waiting had become the family profession and was practised with all the assiduity of the Oriental who has known better times and feels sure that in some lucky cycle of the future, in the wheel which shifts dynasties and oligarchies and republics and chaos, fate again will provide better times to her patient servants. The t'ai-t'ai, surveying the case, decided that fifteen thousand taels would be an extremely useful addition to the family fortunes, the very harbinger of better times. There was more profit to be made out of Nancy than out of her own daughter Li-an, for Nancy, being no kin, could be married to a member of her prolific family, whereas Li-an's dowry would be swallowed by some other voracious clan. It would be foolish to let fifteen thousand taels slip out of her hands to the advantage of someone else. With so many nephews and cousins sitting idle at home, one surely could be sacrificed in the interests of the family, even to contract something so undesirable as a mixed marriage.
The t'ai-t'ai put the reins of the household into the hands of the nurse—she was always careful not to give power to a concubine—and after she had stipulated this and stipulated that, lest the old amah wax rich in her absence, she climbed into a mule cart and started lumbering along the dusty ruts of the road home.