CHAPTER XVII
By one shrewd stroke the t'ai-t'ai had regained Kuei-lien's faltering allegiance. She was very happy over the effects of her skill and particularly pleased at her discernment in the choice of an agent. The concubine had won more than she had lost in the admiration of her mistress. Any ordinary girl, caught thieving, as the t'ai-t'ai termed Kuei-lien's machinations, would have held stubbornly to her story and forced a final violent exposure. It took genius to give way before the inevitable. Kuei-lien had that uncommon genius. So the new alliance thrived on a mutual respect and understanding.
Kuei-lien saw that for the present at least her fortune consisted in loyalty to her mistress. She paid her dividends, as it were, by skillfully teasing Herrick into health and out of it, never letting him lose the need of her or grow sated, and inveigling him more and more easily into the gifts of money which the man granted now almost from force of habit. After the first marked change from the robustness of his former days, there were few further signs of decline. The man was sinking, but sinking imperceptibly. He ceased to see much of his children: he would see them to-morrow,—so he told himself day after day,—but each new morning there was the plea of illness.
The truth was that Herrick was afraid of death, afraid to provoke those terrible spasms of pain which he laid wrong-headedly enough to worry over Nancy's affairs; he was satisfied to stop thinking and surrender to the lulling security of the senses, to a desire for Kuei-lien's presence, which overpowered every thought of duty, every wish. So week by week his strength and his money drifted away; week by week the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien buried their three fourths and one fourth of his treasure.
They could not wholly conceal their secret. There were others too intimately involved in the state of Herrick's health not to watch jealously the spoils that Hai t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien were taking. Nancy and Edward went their way in ignorance, but to the three other concubines it was a matter of life and death. If Herrick died, they would be the property of the t'ai-t'ai without a cent or a right of their own. Time was slipping past. Herrick seemed to have forgotten they existed; he never called for them. Even when the third and fourth concubines bore sons in quick succession, Herrick did not come. The t'ai-t'ai heaped presents upon this auspicious progeny, gave great feasts for each of the babies at the end of their first month, but the father did not appear. He was too ill. The second wife read the message of this dissimulated kindness and knew correctly that the more the mistress of the household showered them with gifts, the greater wrong she was doing them behind their backs.
At last she saw no recourse except to appeal to Nancy. The English children were the only ones who could demand access to Herrick. With great caution the second wife discarded her old policy of holding aloof from these Westerners, knowing that the t'ai-t'ai might be alive to the first hints of an uncommon friendship. She bided her time till she caught her enemies at a discreet distance, then she came out frankly, volubly, with the whole story of what Nancy's stepmother and fifth wife were managing.
"They are killing your father and robbing him, and they are going to sell you to the t'ai-t'ai's nephew."
"But the t'ai-t'ai and Kuei-lien are not friends," exclaimed Nancy, taken aback by these sudden confidences. "Kuei-lien tried to prevent my engagement—"
"Till she got her price. Now they are fond as thieves. Everybody knows it. None of us is blind except your father. They keep him sick so that they can wheedle money out of him. They will screw thousands of taels out of him for your wedding—that will go to the t'ai-t'ai's family, and you'll be married in a year."
"That can't be. It's arranged that I shall not be married for four years."
"Four years, bah! Don't you think they can persuade a dying man into hastening such a happy event?"
"Surely he is not dying!" she exclaimed in great agitation.
"He is dying," affirmed the woman; "his brain is nearly dead now; his body will soon follow."
Nancy stared with immensely opened eyes as though she saw the whole terrible scene before her. She had forgotten to sit down. Her hands took a firmer grip on the chair behind which she stood.
"What shall we do?" she asked in a strangely quiet voice.
"We!" exclaimed the visitor. "We can do nothing. If the t'ai-t'ai so much as heard that I had been to see you, off she would pack me to-morrow. You have four friends, every one of us helpless. You have two bitter enemies. It is just as much your battle as ours. You can see your father; we cannot. If anyone is to do anything, it must be you."
"Yes, you are right," said Nancy, remembering her encounter with Kuei-lien in the Western Hills. "I will do something. And no one shall know you asked me."
This interview gave an ultimate touch to the change which the experiences of the last few months had wrought in Nancy. She examined her chances of grief open-eyed, prepared to meet them with the simplicity of courage which came natural to her steady heart.
The first step was to supplant Kuei-lien and the t'ai-t'ai in their dominance over her father. She moved so swiftly that the two conspirators were astonished to find the girl installed in her father's room. Herrick, with pathetic docility, childlike in its readiness to be pleased by trifles, surrendered himself wholly to the mastery of a strong will.
Kuei-lien protested that Nancy would do injury to her father's delicate health by so uncalled-for an intrusion.
"My father is ill," replied the daughter. "It would be wrong for me to waste my time playing when he needs my help. It is time I took some share in my duties instead of leaving all the hardship to you."
"But you have had no experience; you don't know how to take care of him."
"I can learn. He will be glad of a change and so will you."
Kuei-lien knew Nancy's obstinacy too well to waste more time in futile dispute. She hastened to tell the t'ai-t'ai the alarming turn Nancy's action had caused.
"We can't separate them," she exclaimed. "The miserable girl has had her bedding moved into a room next to the Great Man's and says she will live there till he is well. What can we do?"
"We've got to get her married," said the t'ai-t'ai; "there will be no peace till she's gone. Suppose he dies because of her folly; we shall be left like beggars."
"But we can't get her married. She won't obey us. She will obey her father, but she won't listen to us."
"It's my own stupidity," moaned the t'ai-t'ai. "I should never have allowed that old hag of a nurse to remain; I should have taught these two young demons to obey me when they were young. She put these conceited notions into their heads, taught them to lord it over us as though we were dust for their feet to trample. You must persuade the Great Man to hasten the wedding of his daughter; you must find some way. Ah, if I can only get her locked into her red chair and safe in my brother's house, I'll show them how to handle the vixen. She'll be a tamed daughter-in-law if they follow my advice! A stick—that's what the hussy needs, till she's glad to beat clothes at the pond and clean my brother's pipes."
"Very entertaining thoughts," Kuei-lien scoffed, "but not very helpful just now."
They were, in truth, far from helpful. Nancy had learned her lesson and quarantined her father from his too solicitous concubine with the coolness and resource of which she could thank Kuei-lien for teaching her the trick. She would not be enticed from her father's door, and day after day her excuse for this usurpation became greater because it was undeniable that she was nursing the exhausted man slowly back to strength.
At last the t'ai-t'ai had to intervene, an act she was most reluctant to do, preferring always, as a politic woman, to remain in the background. Nancy did not dare to stop her from an interview with her father and retired when she saw that the wife wished to be alone with her husband. For a long time the door remained shut. She could hear the t'ai-t'ai talking indistinguishable sentences in a low rapid voice. Occasionally a laugh was audible. As no immediate conclusion to this talk seemed likely, Nancy took the chance to fetch some clothes from her room. She was not gone many minutes. To her relief she found the door still shut, and the conversation still continuing. But after an hour the girl became restless. No answer was paid to her knock. She tried the door; it was bolted. Not till she had beaten upon the wooden panels for several minutes did anyone deign to take notice. The door was pulled ajar; the girl saw to her amazement the face of Kuei-lien.
"Your father is feeling better now," said the concubine, "and has sent for me to take your place. He wants you to rest."
"But I don't wish to rest," protested Nancy, "and, if my father gives orders, I take them from him, not from you."
Before Kuei-lien could stop her, she had pushed her way into the room. In the few minutes she had been gone, not only the concubine had been smuggled into the place, but the glasses, bottles, pipe, all the vicious instruments she had been so wakeful to keep out of her father's grasp. For the first time in her life she forgot her father's presence in her rage at the duplicity practised by the concubine.
"This is the way you look after a sick man, is it?" she cried. "Take these things away."
Kuei-lien did not move.
"Have you lost all respect for your father?" she asked in the correct tones of a schoolmistress chiding a naughty pupil. Then she turned to Herrick on his couch. "Now you see what she's like," she said, as if to justify some previous remarks. "Do you wonder that none of us can do anything with her when she tries to rule even her father with these haughty ways?"
"I am trying to make my father well. She is trying to make him ill," groaned Nancy, addressing her father in desperation. Kuei-lien snorted in bitter amusement.
"What profit would there be for me in making him ill? Doesn't my life depend upon his? Do I wish to be turned away like a penniless beggar?"
"This has gone far enough," protested Herrick, rousing himself to the distasteful duty of interference. "You are both wrong to quarrel in this shameless way."
Nancy's self-possession had been too sorely tested in recent days. She could not hold back tears of vexation at hearing her words dismissed as a vulgar quarrel.
"Oh my father, they are killing you, killing you, and robbing you!" she cried.
Kuei-lien scoffed.
"A nice imagination your daughter has," she said. "She has borrowed too many novels from her old amah."
"Isn't it the truth?" demanded Nancy.
"Oh yes, of course it's the truth if you insist upon it. Your father is so helpless, isn't he, that he must need his seventeen-year-old daughter for a nurse to protect him!"
Herrick had grown more and more uncomfortable; this bickering was compromising his dignity, making him a laughingstock.
"Now, now, Nancy," he said soothingly, "you are saying quite unjustifiable things. Your feelings are carrying away your sense of reason. Kuei-lien is right. I am not a child."
"Make her take those things away," Nancy persisted, determined upon one last stubborn appeal. "She is only trying to harm you. I am—"
"Be still," her father interrupted curtly. "I have had enough of this, do you understand? You have done your duty, you have taken care of me when I was ill. But it is no part of your duty to advise your father. Who has been teaching you such presumptuous manners? If I need you again, I shall call for you; until I do so, I don't want you coming here making these disgraceful scenes. I won't hear of such ungovernable interference with my own will—and that from a chit of a girl."
"Her boldness is becoming intolerable," commented Kuei-lien, as Nancy silently withdrew. This was one word too many for Herrick's ruffled temper.
"I wish you were as honest as she is," he said.
Nancy had won this much of a victory in blighting Kuei-lien's charms for the moment. Deep irritation settled on Herrick at the thought of this wordy brawl between concubine and daughter, a brawl they had waged as though his presence, his judgment, did not matter. They had treated him like a weakling. The irritation stung and rankled because the man knew too well his own cowardice was at the bottom of it, his cowardice and his vanity, which had kept him from supporting Nancy in her appeal to his best instincts. Nancy had said wild things, of course, but there was no doubt she believed all that she had said and it was more than possible that these wild guesses passed for truth in the women's quarters; Herrick had gained insight enough, after his years of multiple weddedness, to know some of the jealous currents that animated the course of life in his household. He did not appreciate a tenth of the actual facts, but he was beginning to see that his wives were not of one mind and that they were subject to natural fears as to what might become of them and their children if he died.
"I'll settle it once and for all," he decided, astonishing the household by calling for his chair. In Peking sedan chairs were becoming out-dated relics of the past; motor cars rushed everywhere and the wide, dusty streets were full of elegant rickshas, commodious enough for the fat officials who sat in stupid composure while their outrunners pushed and shouted a rapid way for them through the traffic. But Herrick would have none of these. He preferred the dignity of his heavy blue chair, which four bearers carried in state while his Chinese secretary, bringing cards, scuffled hastily in his wake.
The chair coolies finally halted before the gate of an ugly building, a grim and cheerless structure imitated in gray brick from the most disheartening of Western models. Herrick loathed the penal appearance of the place. After some hesitation he sent in cards for Mr. Ronald Nasmith.