CHAPTER XXI
The days in the Western Hills were always to be associated with the singing of birds. In the first hours of the morning they began their blithe chattering; the maples and locusts rang with their notes, notes of many modes from the raucous shriek of the jay, the screech of the oriole, as he plunged recklessly like a yellow meteor into the leafy branches, through a gamut of whistling and twittering, of doves cooing and cuckoos never tiring of their two-syllabled speech, to the liquid trills of the myna, whose efforts were a challenge for the birds of the temple to emulate.
It was time for Edward and Li-an to tumble joyfully through the dewy grass and for Nancy to follow them when once the canaries were awake in their bamboo cages, swelling their throats to tell the animation of clear sunshine while the starlings with their split tongues discoursed the news of the day.
Nancy could not go wholly back to the past. Li-an was a more congenial playmate for Edward. The mountains were so new to her that she was willing to believe all the elaborate mysteries the boy invented and to do her part manfully in digging for treasure.
The atmosphere of the household was one of calm. Even Kuei-lien seemed to have no ends of her own to pursue and kept her master's affections in a tranquil key as though she herself wished some holidays after the hectic winter she had spent. The settlement of Nancy's fortunes gave every appearance of having wiped off the score between the two girls so that a friendliness of the old sort thrived; many a hot afternoon they spent together in comfortable abandon, content to discuss only those topics they could treat gayly.
Nancy made the most of her father's license and seldom was there favorable weather that she did not climb by narrow paths to the top of the ridge where she could fancy the whole wide world at her feet. She did not guess, though her instinct must have taken knowledge, that she might meet the friend who held his dark corner in her memory. Nasmith was not likely to return to the Western Hills without some effort to see whether Herrick's strange family were occupying their temple. He upbraided himself for folly, but it became more and more his habit to excuse himself from Beresford's too cheerful company and to lurk in the outskirts of the house where he had declined his chance with such justifiable weakness the year before. He tried to condone his curiosity on grounds of plausible interest, yet he felt always too much the spy to knock openly at the door, so that days passed before he knew the Herricks really had returned. This news he did not even dare tell his family, but he hovered like a discontented spirit on the hills above, straining his eyes for impossible glimpses of Nancy, and then, one afternoon, as he was bound to do, came upon her sitting in a pocket of rock high above the ravine. She did not hear him approach.
"Good afternoon, Nancy," he said, "it is a long, long time since the happy day when we met. You don't go roving any more to temples."
The girl gave him a startled glance. A look of momentary fear gleamed in her eyes. Gladness came next, and then misery. The wind had blown her hair in disarray over her forehead till it was like a veil behind which her thoughts seemed to hide. Nasmith longed to draw them out from their covert, to see whether they were happy thoughts, whether they dwelt with contentment on the betrothal by which they were bound. There was an instant when his senses laughed at control, when he felt it his duty and his right to carry off this girl in defiance of all pledged engagements; and had he realized what Nancy herself did not realize, that she sat there with the implicit hope of meeting him, he might for once have acted upon his senses; but she seemed so unapproachable, so cool, in the alien shape of her garments, the white grass-linen which clad her slender body, that the thought of loving her from nearer than a distance became sacrilege.
"I only come here," said Nancy, and smiled a little; "I don't go to temples any more."
"And you don't play cricket any more, I suppose?"
"Oh, no, I never learned cricket."
"And what do you do?" Nasmith inquired. "How do you pass the time?"
"I come here to read—Edward is noisy sometimes—and I like to see the mountains."
"Won't you ever come to see us again? My nieces ask about you and talk about you day after day."
"No, I can't do that now. My father would not like it."
"But he was very friendly last year and this spring he asked me to do some important business for him."
"Yes, but I am not so free as last year."
"Why?"
Nancy found this question hard to meet even in English; in Chinese she never would have dreamed of answering. But foreigners, she had understood, discussed these things without reticence.
"My father has promised me to be engaged, to be married."
"Yes, but that is four—or is it three—years away."
"No, I am to be married soon—in two months."
Nasmith looked at her in dazed unbelief.
"Your father said you were not to be married till you were twenty."
"I changed that—I asked to be married earlier."
Nancy went on quite naturally from one confession to the next, talking frankly on the banned subject as though thirteen years of Chinese life had not forbidden fear. She liked the thrill of breaking such unwelcome news to the friend she trusted so oddly.
"You changed it! Do you like the thought of this marriage?"
"I don't know—I was tired of the house, tired of the women, tired of sewing."
"And do you think that there won't be a house and women and sewing after you are married?"
"They will be different."
It was pleasing to meet someone who thought of her part in the bargain that had been made.
"Different!" exclaimed Nasmith. "Ah, Nancy, it will be worse drudgery than anything you have known. You speak like a child. You don't know what you are saying. Do you think marriage is play?"
"I have to be married. My father said so."
"Do you know what your father did?" said the man, emboldened by his pity. "Do you know that your father offered to marry you to me?"
This was a question the girl was wholly unready to face. The swift progress of their conversation had carried her too far.
"And I refused," said Nasmith, determined to have it out, "I refused because he asked impossible terms. He wanted to keep you till you were twenty, would not let you go to school as I asked, would not let you be brought up with my nieces. I was a fool. I should have kept my claim upon you. You are not Chinese, Nancy, you have no right to be Chinese. And now you are to be thrown away because of my obstinacy and your father's blindness."
"You are not my father," said the girl indignantly; "he is not blind. I am Chinese. I am Chinese—I must go home. I talk too much."
She stood up. Anger and despair fought in her brain. She felt helpless before Nasmith's outspoken manners, a prey to her stupid frankness in encouraging him.
"Don't go," begged the man. "I suppose you think I am rude, but I had to speak out my mind. It is our Western way, you know. I keep forgetting you are not used to it. I can't keep quiet when I see anything as wicked as this marriage to which you are being sacrificed. If I went to your father to-day, don't you think he would hear me? If I told him to have his own way, to keep you where he pleased till you are twenty, couldn't we break this engagement?"
"We don't break engagements," the girl answered proudly. She turned cool, almost cold in her firmness, now that Nasmith had been betrayed into what she felt was a dishonorable weakness. "My father doesn't change and I don't change. We have promised."
"Fiddlesticks! Engagement is not marriage. It was your father's first wish, remember, that I should marry you."
"My father has told me his wish. I am engaged."
"Can you read this?" persisted the man, drawing from his pocketbook a copy of the scrolls Herrick had written. "This is what your father wrote. Can you read it?"
Nancy looked at the paper curiously.
"Did my father write this for you?" she asked.
"Yes, he wrote it for me last year, the day when we brought you home from my sister's house. He told me these characters had a meaning for me if I could understand them."
"They have a meaning," the girl admitted.
"What meaning?"
"You are the sun," she said.
"Of course; but who is the moon?" he demanded.
"I was the moon—then—last year."
"You are still the moon," he declared. "They were not written merely for last year."
Nancy did not answer him. The copied characters of the scroll had been like a glimpse into her father's mind. She had played so long with these riddles as to be profoundly moved by what she saw so clearly her father had meant to be prophecy. Great was her reverence for the written word. She was like the Chinese who will not allow even a scrap of printed paper to be trodden underfoot, like the governor who forbade newspapers to be used for wrapping parcels because this was treating characters shamefully, showing despite to the very means of the culture which sages and poets had labored to create. For scrolls her deference was superstitious. They were oracles, working out their own mystical fulfillment. Versed as she was in their subtlety, in their history, in the earth-shaking powers of a single well-written character, the byplay of allusion which had torn down dynasties or raised men to favor with the Son of Heaven, she looked with fear and bewilderment upon her father's message as though she were reading a mandate of the gods, for the scroll expressed her father's belief and his wish that she should be the wife of this stranger from the West.
"I am engaged," she repeated as though she were defying heaven. "We have promised!"
Nasmith saw this could not be argued further. More words only would make the girl stubborn, perhaps lose him the chance of seeing her again.
"Very well, we won't debate the matter," he said, "but do you think your father would let you come to stay for a few days with my sister—and your brother, of course? My nieces will never be satisfied to miss seeing you; if they heard I had met you, they would send me back for you. And this is not the request of a stranger, you know. After all, I am almost a guardian. You will come, won't you?"
"Why?"
Nancy was in a contrary mood.
"Why?" echoed Nasmith impatiently. "Why? I should not have thought you needed to ask that question. Does not your memory suggest reasons enough? After all, Nancy, you won't find friends so plentiful in this world that you can afford to neglect those you have."
"Perhaps Edward can come," she admitted, "but if I can come—I don't know. It is different for me because I am engaged."
"Will you ask your father?" Nasmith persisted.
"Yes, I will ask him," said Nancy; and away she went swiftly, like the quiet, swift descent of evening.
Nasmith did not try to follow, although it was high time for him to be swinging into his sturdy stride homeward. He felt as much amazed by the riddles as Nancy herself. Suddenly it occurred to him that this was only his second meeting with the girl—two meetings, and these a year apart. He could not account for the intense feeling which made him still loiter in this spot as though all that was real of her were lingering with him. He could not understand the attraction which held him. Was there real insight, after all, expressed in those words whose meaning with baffling enlightenment he now realized?
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.
Or had these words, slowly maturing in his mind, worked their own desire for fulfillment? He loved these mountains the sun had painted in broad sweeping colors, to which night was hurrying to put in shadow. He regarded them tenderly; they seemed to breathe of Nancy, to sing of Nancy, with the old time-worn cadence of the land whose tongue she had learned. Ah, what a beacon he could light for her, what a splendid beacon he must set blazing! She could not, she should not, be lost to him!
So the serene glow of evening had helped him find himself, had made him resolute, had sent him home resolute, after a year of fighting shadows.
Nancy, in her own way, was tranquil. The habit of taking life as it came enabled her to speak simply to her father about this meeting with Nasmith and about his request. The father was still indulgent. He did not need to remind himself of his promise; this was Nancy's summer. He had screwed his will to its final pitch when he consented to the date of her marriage. Nothing more seemed to matter; nothing more was he willing to debate. Let life run as it chose.
"I see no harm in it," he said, dealing with Nasmith's invitation. "Mr. Nasmith is a man I trust and his family, so far as I met them, are delightful. The change will be good for you both. I will send a man the first thing in the morning to tell them you are coming, and by the afternoon the chairs can be ready for you to start. Amah of course must go. They're sure to have room for her."
In this matter-of-fact way Herrick granted the request as though it were business of no concern. Nancy was not so sure. She too could not rid her memory of the prophetic lines her father had written. The words had caught in her brain. She repeated them till she fell asleep and repeated them again in the morning when her spirit had become infected by Edward's growing excitement. With great ado the little procession set out, the amah waving more farewells than a traveler bound across the ocean. Nancy was not insensible of the bustle. She was both glad and afraid, timid and joyful, but she abandoned her body to the motion of the chair, lying back with eyes half closed, while the sun beat hot through the screened window. She was content to let her spirit be carried, like her limbs, with the inertia which leaves every directing impulse to destiny. "The sun—the moon; the moon—the sun—t'ai-yang, yueh-liang; yueh-liang—t'ai-yang," the words made their own drowsy refrain to the slogging pace of the coolies.
Deep was the silence which had fallen over the deserted household. Herrick had not realized how much he would miss these children whom never before had he allowed to go away from their home. The sun shone vacantly on the temple; in the evening he walked with Kuei-lien in the moonless dark, passing the tomb of the monk and standing pensive on the little platform which overhung the ravine. He was like a lonely child, but afraid of something worse than the loss of Nancy and Edward, afraid of the solitariness of death, which seemed to threaten him from the deep shadows of the mountains.
Kuei-lien too felt the spell and did little to cheer him. The song she sang was sad, the old tragic tale from The Three Kingdoms of the first break in a brotherhood, which had become classic, the brotherhood of the Peach Orchard, wherein three heroes had stood gayly steadfast to each other through years of war, only to be separated by death at the last. She sang the story Herrick knew so well and loved for its sombre beauty: how Liu Pei, King of Shu, had wakened from troubled sleep to see the ghost of his blood-brother, Kuan Yü, not knowing it was a ghost, not knowing he had been slain.
A cold gust of wind blew in his chamber; the lamp flickered and became bright again. Liu Pei looked up and saw a man standing behind the lamp.
"What man are you that comes in the dead of night to my chamber?"
The man did not answer. Liu Pei, in alarm, got up to look. It was Kuan Yü who was hiding behind the shadow of the lamp.
Liu Pei exclaimed:—
"Ah, my brother, have you been well since we parted? You must have great reason to come thus in the depth of night. You and I are the same bone and flesh; why do you show this deference?"
Then Kuan Yü wept and said:—
"Brother, raise your armies and avenge me. Wipe my wrongs clean as snow."
He finished speaking. A cold wind arose. He had vanished. Suddenly Liu Pei awoke; and it was a dream.
Kuei-lien's voice made the tragedy seem real to her master—the terror of that awakening. She told how at the third watch Liu Pei sent for his minister, K'ung Ming, whose strategy and knowledge of the stars and unworldly faithfulness had won him this kingdom in the west. K'ung Ming tried to comfort him out of his fear, but when he had left the presence of the King he met a friend who told him that there were evil rumors abroad about the fate of Kuan Yü. Then K'ung Ming unburdened his heart.
"To-night I have seen a sign in the heaven," he confessed. "I saw a star fall over Chingchou and I know that Kuan Yü has met with evil there. But I am afraid of my master's grief and dare not tell him."
Even while the two were speaking a man suddenly came forth, caught hold of K'ung Ming's sleeve and said:—
"If there is evil news, why do you deceive me?"
K'ung Ming looked; it was Liu Pei.
"Why do you distress yourself over uncertain news?" he said. "Why let yourself be so unprofitably sad?"
Liu Pei answered:—
"I and Kuan Yü have sworn to live and die together. If he has fallen, how can I stand alone?"
Then, one by one, disturbing the peace of the night, came messengers.
"Kuan Yü is defeated."
"Kuan Yü is betrayed."
And, before it was light:—
"Kuan Yü is slain."
Liu Pei, when he heard it, gave one great cry and fell fainting to the ground.
Herrick listened as though these things had not happened centuries and centuries ago, as though the three men still whispered beneath the flickering torches of the palace. He saw the King cast down by his mighty grief to the cold stones of the pavement. It was as if Kuei-lien herself had sung away the Golden Age and its heroes. He turned to the girl; her face was almost luminous in the dark. His heart was too burdened for speech. She had sung away his own Golden Age, sung away his lustihood and strength.
"Why do you deceive me, ah, why do you deceive me, Kuei-lien?" he asked sadly, echoing Liu Pei's words with a meaning which the girl understood for a moment, but never understood again.