CHAPTER XXIII
The visit was almost at its end. The girls were in despair.
"We won't let you go home," they told Nancy. "You must have another week, at least. Surely your father won't mind."
"Perhaps he won't," she agreed, "but I must go back and ask him."
She was no more ready than they were to have her stay finished. Time had gone so swiftly. The first few days she had been careless of its passing, as though she had the leisure of years before her, but now each day was oppressed by the closer approach of the end. It would be the end to so many things, the end to her youth, to her freedom, her all too brief season of play. Nancy wished at times she had never known these friends; she would not have missed them so. Barely a month remained till her marriage. She looked at the moon shining through the trees. Even now it was at the first quarter. The next time she should see it thus, she would be back in Peking, the centre of odious preparation, half enslaved already, and before she could see it again she would be married, hidden in some brawling Chihli village where her mother-in-law might not give her time to watch the slow processions of the sky.
The praise of the twins had awakened a delight in her own beauty. She would stand slowly undressing before the mirror, extending her arms, admiring the rounded softness of her shoulders, the glint of light upon her long silk stockings. She reddened with shame and with fear at the thought of giving her body to the mercy of a stranger.
Not new thoughts were these, but for the first time intimately felt, and by contrast the quick comradeship which prevailed in the Ferris family made their home the treasure-house of all things desirable. Whatever she might predict of her future home, she knew it would not be like theirs. She dared less to think how different it might be. She wanted security. She wanted peace of soul. She wanted the grave trust of a man like Nasmith. She did not know that, with all her rapt joy in the company of the twins, her one desire from waking till sleeping was to appear lovely in his eyes. "I was the moon—I was—" she mused once or twice, and checked herself dreaming before the long mirror.
Nasmith too had come down from counting days to counting hours. A whole ten days with Nancy near—they had promised so much and been nothing but tantalization and sorrow. And now but one day lay before him. The conversation of the dinner table turned to his rescue of Nancy a year ago. Beresford revived the story with sundry mock-heroic touches, descanting upon the execution Edward had done with his bow till he made their intervention seem merely a belated attempt to save the lives of the monks.
"Shall we go back there, Nancy?" said Nasmith, half in play, half trying to veil the bitter seriousness of his eyes, "and see if we can remember it all? It was so long ago, it has begun to seem almost a joke."
His suggestion was taken up eagerly by the girls. They had not consented to thinking of the morrow as Nancy's last day among them; she must win her father's agreement to a longer visit; but, if last day it were, a slight trembling in Ronald's voice told them he would make the most of it. So early the next day they started with all the paraphernalia of these outings to make holiday high among the rocky shoulders of the mountains. The sun shone in broad waves of light down the grassy slopes; the paths were still wet with dew.
"Who shall lead the way?" Nasmith asked.
"You and Nancy, you must be the pilgrims," called out Beresford cheerily.
The twins had trusted him with their secret.
"Do you love Nancy?" Helen had demanded of him the night before. "Yes, of course I love Nancy," he had answered.
"Oh, don't be stupid," the girl retorted, stamping her foot. "Do you love her?"
"I will, if you wish," Beresford answered gallantly.
"Well, I don't wish it. If you're really and truly sure you don't love her, I want you to keep David and Edward in hand when we go to the temple; find a tiger for them, even if you have to buy one—"
"Couldn't I be a tiger myself? I look well in stripes,—some have been ungracious enough to suggest my wearing them permanently,—and if you can give me some hint of how a tiger roars or whether a tiger does roar or merely sits on his hind feet and purrs,—I won't do that, mind you,—"
"I am not joking," Helen broke in. "I want you to keep the boys amused so that Ronald can have a chance."
"Right-o," he said, suddenly understanding. He was a little saddened, for the habit of seeing Nancy was growing on him.
"Well, I'm late in the race," he thought to himself. "I can't complain." So, at Helen's command, he was tactfully alert to every chance of helping what he supposed, in his simple way, were lovers.
"You are the pilgrims," he called, "you must brave the thorny places of the wilderness. Young Edward and I will hold our trusty bows in reserve. If you chance upon peril, give three piercing cries,—you'd better make them two shorts and a long so we won't be led astray on other adventure and fail you in your need,—three piercing shrieks, and we'll tumble to your assistance."
Laughingly Ronald took up his post of guide, with Nancy halfway between him and the twins, while Beresford kept his two young cubs in leash by the sheer interest of his talk, and hallooed cheerfully to Mrs. Ferris to make sure that she and her mountain chair were still pursuing.
"Though fa-int, yet pursuing, we go on our way,"
he would hum, and then break off, reproaching himself with a grimace for such irreverent use of a hymn. Meanwhile the twins, satisfied with the arrangement of the party, slowly widened the interval between themselves and Nancy, very cautiously, of course, not too quickly nor too far, lest the girl suspect, yet far enough so that her walking and talking with Ronald could become the habit of the day.
"Well, here's the grove," said Ronald, at last. Nancy had been taught to call him by his name, "the communism of the family," he had assured her. "Now what shall we do?"
They waited for the party to draw up.
"I smell water," exclaimed Mrs. Ferris.
"There is a stream in a ravine close by," offered Beresford, who had explored these mountains inch by inch with his friend.
"Splendid, just the place we need for tiffin. Tiffin before temples, my dears."
They arrived at the edge of the ravine and slipped down the gravelly path to the rocks below.
"There must be swimming somewhere," said Elizabeth, prying round. Soon shouts and splashing told the story of her success. She and Helen came back, gay and dishevelled, their wet swimming suits under their arms, pulled up Beresford, who had been soberly showing Edward and David how to make whistles from the pliant twigs of the trees, and gayly the family sat down to a meal which had been spread with the usual elegance. They lingered a long time over the coffee, while the men smoked pipes and outdid each other with the stories they told.
"Well, I'm going to sleep," said Mrs. Ferris, finally. "You had better show Nancy her temple, Ronald, before it's too late."
"Will you come and see it?" the man asked.
Something in the eagerness of his voice made her hesitate, but after a long pause she said yes. He got up silently and she followed, while the rest sat watching, with no word to say, for they were wondering in their hearts what the issue would be.
The afternoon was hot and oppressive; a haze was veiling the sun. The pines stood like trees of an enchanted wood. Not a branch moved. The silver trunks glistened in the heat. Nancy was dumb and uneasy as though the sultry weather were laying its spell upon her as it veiled the sun. She knew this was no ordinary chance, this walk, and waited fearfully for Ronald to speak, to break the quiet which lay so heavy upon her breast.
"We are pilgrims, Nancy," he said. "I wish I knew what is to be the end of our pilgrimage."
But he left off talking riddles. A look in the girl's face warned him that the time was not ripe. It was easier to relieve the tense atmosphere with light-hearted mention of that day a year ago when he and Beresford had been walking this selfsame path without thought of the adventure they were to meet. He pointed out the place where Edward had run into them, pictured the monks stopping foolishly a few paces away. He was almost as amusing as Beresford in his way of telling the story, but he had seen more deeply than his friend the tragedy they foiled, so that his words never quite lost the graver tones of a scene which he remembered almost as much with pain as with joy.
"Well, here's your temple," he said at last.
Nancy looked with a slight shock of panic, but the red walls were harmless enough, almost pitiful and desolate, under a sky that was growing gray.
They stopped for a moment before entering. Inside, the temple seemed dark and musty. The monks were asleep. Ronald had to shout before one of them appeared, startled by visitors he had not expected. Nancy recognized him,—he was the younger of the two priests who had welcomed Edward and herself,—but, to her surprise, he gave her only a blank stare. Her Western dress was effectual disguise. Quickly he brought tea and, pulling off the lid of a round black box, gave them handfuls of melon seeds, dried jujubes, cakes of powdered rice. The tea was too hot; Ronald was restless. He got up and studied the musty gods and turned to Nancy, who had too many evil memories of the place to trust her friend out of sight.
"Shall we look at your prison?" he asked.
"No!" protested the girl.
"It is a worse prison you are going to," he commented dryly, "far worse. Why don't you show the same fear for the future that you show for the harmless memory of the past? I saved you from one. Ah, Nancy, why won't you let me save you from the other?"
She looked past him at the gods on their lotus blossoms, and made no answer. Ronald watched her, noted the masses of dark hair piled low round her forehead, the tranced stare of her eyes, the slow curve of her throat, arms half bare, hands far too smooth and supple for the rough-grained table on which they were stretched.
"You were not meant for prison, Nancy," he said gently.
But the appeal of his words was frustrated by the entrance of the monk. Every moment the girl expected his yellow-toothed confederate to appear.
"I can't talk here," she said. "This place hurts me. It chokes me."
The man, however, was unwilling to leave the cobwebbed hall. An unbelievable superstition held him here because this had been the place they had named for their pilgrimage. He felt the influence of the dusky temple fighting his battle in Nancy's heart.
"Don't you see?" he cried in a low voice. "Doesn't this place show you what I mean? Nancy, Nancy, you say it hurts you, chokes you. What chokes you? Just the memory of a danger long ago. What is that compared with the marriage you are facing? A laugh and a smile. If you can't bear to think in this mouldy, decaying place because the walls stifle you with torturing thoughts, what are you going to do when you have no friend, no protection, when life really begins to choke and to hurt—when they lock you into a red chair and send you away to be the slave of strangers?"
"I will stop doing. I will stop thinking," answered Nancy simply, as though deed and thought could be laid away like garments too rich for the everyday wear of life.
"No, Nancy," Ronald demurred, shaking his head, "you will never be able to stop thinking and, worse yet, to stop feeling."
The priest, finding his company unwanted, had withdrawn softly to the next hall and was watching his guests curiously through a crack in the door.
"You can never stop feeling," Ronald persisted.
"You are a Westerner," said Nancy bravely; "you don't understand our customs."
"I understand this much, Nancy, that you don't want to be married in this cruel way any more than you want to die."
In fact he thought she would rather die, but he did not like to say this openly, lest he put the thought into her head.
"One has to marry," the girl remarked calmly.
"Yes, but there are two ways of marrying. You have chosen the wrong one."
"Chosen!" she said indignantly. "I haven't chosen anything. I can't stop the winter from coming, can I? How can I stop being married? When it's time to be married, I'm married."
"You're only arguing to hide your own fear. You know as well as I do that this whole business is ghastly and wrong."
"What should I do?" she asked, vexed by the truth of his words.
"You should break the engagement, tell your father you won't consider it."
"And bring shame to my father."
"Better shame for him than for you. After all, it would only be an artificial shame for him, a short-lived one at that; for you it would be all too real—and lifelong."
Nancy stood up, tired of hearing things she knew too well.
"You are kind," she said, "and it's very simple according to your ways, but these are things that can't be mended by talk."
"Wait," commanded the man, "I haven't even begun to say what I intended. I am not trying to mend a bad matter by talk. There is a better way. I know your father wanted you to marry me, else why should he have offered me the engagement? It was only annoyance, pride, injured vanity, whatever you choose to call it, that made him arrange this other hapless engagement. He has gained nothing by it, not even the terms he tried to exact from me. He has managed to keep you only one of the four years he stipulated. Do you think he is happy over this business into which he has drifted so helplessly? He is no happier than you or I. Ah, Nancy, why can't you see it, why can't you see that worry is killing him—worry over what is to become of you? If you wish to save his life, you must disobey him; you must not go back; you must stay and marry me."
By now Nancy had grown used to this habit of frank speech. Ronald's pregnant ending was outweighed by his accusation that she was killing her father.
"I must go," she said. "I can't think of these things here."
She wanted swift motion to keep time with the wheeling circles of her brain.
"But you cannot go now," cried her lover, suddenly conscious that he had been stamping out his words to the rumbling accompaniment of thunder. There was a bright flash, an ear-shattering explosion; the two stood speechless, stunned, certain the temple had been struck. Then Ronald laughed nervously; he could hear the rain sweeping toward them through the trees; nearer and nearer it came, like the menacing roar of a great wind, till it hissed through the branches and burst upon the tiles of the temple roof with an awful noise, more deafening than the clatter of stones. Lightning seethed round the temple, illuminating the darkest corner with incessant brilliance as bolt after bolt flared down the sides of the mountains; thunder and rain were mixed in an inseparable welter of sound.
"You can't go now," Ronald shouted; "we must wait until the storm has passed on."
He went back and stirred up the frightened monk to bring them more tea. Nancy was sitting with her arms stretched across the table, her hands clenched, her eyes intent upon ghosts she could not see, ghosts of herself and Ronald and her father. Ronald's speech was so terribly plausible, it matched her father's unforgettable couplet—the sun and the moon; the words came back to torment the one paltry bit of peace she had cherished, the peace of obeying her father. She tried to put Ronald out of the debate, to exclude the charm which had been working silent mischief in her heart. She wanted to think entirely of her father, to please him, to save him; the failure of her labored attempts for his safety, the battle she had done against Kuei-lien's schemes, made her look carefully, gravely, at the bewildering implications of Ronald's undreamed-of project, that by defying her father she could make him happy.
The tumult of the storm relieved her of speech. She sat and stared, and let her tea grow cold. The lightning flashed less frequently, but the rain held and the temple was steeped in unnatural darkness, a perilous gloom which oppressed her with hatred of the place. Again, a second time, it had become her prison. Surely there was nothing but mischief in store for the pilgrims who paid their vows here.
"The rain is stopping," Ronald reminded. "Have you any answer to make?"
"I have no answer," Nancy replied.
"Are you going to put all my words aside without a thought?" asked the man in despair.
"I have thought—I have thought many times; but I must go back. My father let me come here; he trusted me. If I did not go back, it would be shame and evil to him. How can I dare to break his promise?"
"Don't you understand, don't you see, Nancy? Must I go over it all again! He doesn't want this marriage. It is only his stubbornness, his obstinacy that makes him cling to it. I showed you his own words, the scrolls he wrote for me; he told me that these were the truth and that the best part of my life would come when I found out the meaning for myself. If they were the truth, then your marriage is false and your father is false to himself, false to his own heart's desire in allowing it. It will kill him; remember that—it will kill him."
Ronald saw that his earnestness had made a deep impression; he hurried to strengthen his advantage.
"And now, Nancy," he went on, "I have read his words, his scrolls, read them for myself, and I know that he was right, that the best part of my life will come not only from understanding them but from realizing their meaning in actual life. You don't belong to the East, Nancy, you belong to the West whence you came; it is my happiness to take you back to the West of your birth. That is my lot and my destiny because I know in my heart I love you. I have been learning this through all the troubled months of the past year. I love you, Nancy; my claim upon you is greater than your father's; it is the claim to which he appointed me. His claim is passing, his life is nearly run. He will die, but we must live."
The girl listened to him in breathless quiet. Tumult, agitation, had frozen her muscles so that her face in the dim light showed neither anger nor joy, merely a ghostly whiteness, an unblinking passivity like the gilded immobile calm of the gods.
"I don't understand," said the girl after a long silence. "You should tell these things to my father, not to me."
"No," protested the man, "it is time to tell them to you, to make you understand. You are not blind, Nancy, you have been with us, you know something of the life I wish to offer you. No hiding away in an ignorant village, no father-in-law and mother-in-law and a whole courtyard of mangy relations tyrannizing over you, but your own home, friends to visit and be visited, and a husband who will love and reverence your slightest wish. Ah, Nancy, how can I tell you these things, how can I make you know that I love you, that life won't be life for me if I cannot have you?"
"These things should not be said to me," said Nancy, her voice burdened with pain. "You are late, late! Why do you say such things when you know it is useless, when you know my father has promised and I have promised? I have no power. I cannot call back spoken words, my spoken words."
"Then you do not love me," said Ronald, in a low, discouraged voice.
"I don't know," faltered the girl, unable to say the one phrase which would have quelled his importunity, unable to accept him, unable to give him up. "I don't understand this—this love."
"You are fighting against your own heart," said Ronald. "You are making the mistake which has tortured your father for years. Give me an answer, Nancy. This is no time for holding to foolish promises; it is no time for dainty, meticulous points of honor. Your father's life rests in your hands. You will hurt him if you don't go back; you will kill him if you do. I don't mind your sacrificing me,—I do mind, of course, but we'll not stop to argue over it,—but will you sacrifice your father? Will you sacrifice yourself?"
Nancy's composure was shaken. She was exhausted by the strain of arguing against everything she desired. Ronald was trying to persuade her to things whereof she longed only too ardently to be persuaded. She was worn out by the thankless irony of defending her own worst interests. She could not deny that she loved Ronald; she could not confess that she did; her heart was in a fever of eagerness to put into his masterful hands the knotted strings of her life, but her will, even when half convinced, balked at an act which, however surely it might lead to her father's ultimate welfare, would be desertion and disloyalty to his trust.
The rain had stopped. There was only the sound of water dripping from the trees to remind her that they must join the others, discover how they had fared in the deluge.
"I cannot say yes, Ronald," she announced in unthinkably clear tones, "and I cannot say no. I don't know what to say. You called this a pilgrimage. Then I am a pilgrim and I shall get my answer as the pilgrims do."
She stood up, pushed back her stool with a clatter which brought the listening monk to the door.
"Get me some incense," she commanded.
One by one she took out the frail sticks from the packet he brought, and round the temple she went, lighting a stick before each god and thrusting it deep into the ashes of the porcelain burner before she did obeisance with clasped hands held stiff in front of her. The eighteen Lo-han she worshiped, Kuan-yin and the gods of the four mountains, at the back, and then returned to the main hall to kneel prostrate before the three lotus-throned Buddhas. Ronald looked on with amazement and dismay at the outrageously incongruous picture of this foreign girl in Western clothes performing an act so unnatural to her appearance. The sight did violence to his imagination, this vision of Nancy with knees pressed upon a dirty prayer-mat of straw, the lace edges of her skirts draggled in the mire, her hair tumbling over her shoulders as she bowed before these pitiless, imperturbable gods. Yet he was too much fascinated by the weirdness of the scene to think of intervening.
The priest had been surprised, too; he had recognized the girl at the first sound of her vigorous Chinese speech. This time Nancy had the upper hand; she gave her commands quickly and clearly so that he was only too prompt to obey. He stood by the bell while she chanted her appeal to the gods, a strange petition that they should tell her whether she ought to obey or disobey her father. Three times she bowed, three times he struck deep full-toned reverberations from his bell. With the last note Nancy seized a round bamboo box from the table in front of her; she shook it and threw the bamboo counters to the floor. The gods must tell her which was right, to go back to her father or not to go back, to yield to the scarlet chair and to Chou Ming-te for her husband or to remain and marry Ronald.
The bamboo counters fell with curved sides uppermost. "No," the gods told her, "you are not to go back."
But the girl could not break her trust even for the gods.
"This is an evil place," she said, turning calmly to Ronald. "I know now that I cannot do what you wish. I must go back as I promised."
Ronald followed her dumbly through the dripping trees. Inwardly he cursed the superstition that could pin a great choice upon the chance fall of two bamboo counters. He was too bitter to speak, bitter over this childish, futile end to their pilgrimage. He was almost ready to despise Nancy.
He never guessed that the gods had been on his side—that the girl had thrown over their advice, thrown over his, thrown over her own.