CHAPTER XXIV
They found the rest of the family where they had left them. A cave to which the storm had driven them had saved the picnickers from the worst of the downpour although the swift rise of the stream had threatened for a few anxious minutes to engulf them. Ronald saw by their faces, however, that their concern had not been over their own plight, but over his; he read their unspoken queries about the outcome of his suit. He had never confided in them and could not confide now.
"We were delayed in the temple till the rain passed over," he explained. The words were enough to show that he had failed. Nancy had a look of proud reserve with which none of them dared meddle.
The picnic ended with drooping spirits; that this was the last hung heavy on the minds of all, the last and too late. Dinner was no merrier. The unspoken failure of the afternoon hushed the usually careless talk. Only Edward and David, who were not imaginative, chattered on in their heroic style, enlarging their remarks to fit the silence which was offered them.
"Ronald, you are a bungler," scolded Elizabeth, when she had a chance of catching her uncle alone.
"A bungler?" echoed the man.
"Yes, a bungler! Don't you suppose we know your secret? We had counted on you, for the honor of the family, to save Nancy."
Ronald gave a wan smile.
"Since you know so much," he said, "how would you save Nancy?"
"Marry her, stupid! Haven't we all been doing everything we could to help you? Why on earth do you suppose we let you go chasing off to that temple by yourselves? Just think of all the trouble we had, reining in David and that impetuous young brother of hers. I am ashamed of you, thoroughly ashamed of you."
Ronald was used to the stormings of his niece,
"It's not nearly so simple as you think, my dear Betty," he laughed, "even with your all-powerful help. Nancy is already engaged and if she thinks two engagements are a complication, what am I to do?"
"What are you to do? What does any man with any pluck do? What does her engagement amount to—you know what it is—to a Chinese! Are you going to sit idle-handed and see her thrown away like that?"
"I haven't sat idle-handed, but when Nancy proves a peculiarly stubborn young lady,—like some other persons I know but won't mention,—that's the end of it. I could hardly follow the precedent of our friends, the monks, and kidnap her."
"Well, kidnapping would be better than letting her go back to that horrible marriage."
"Ah, Betty, I wish the man luck who tries to kidnap you!"
"I suppose I shall have to propose for you," said Elizabeth with a sigh.
"Propose by all means; but don't imagine I have lost Nancy for lack of proposing."
"I can fancy the way you would propose. Drew it up as a brief, no doubt, with preamble, articles one, two, three, and four, and half a dozen 'whereases.' If it had only been Beresford instead of you we might have had some hope of success."
"Unfortunately it wasn't Beresford," said Ronald, and walked away.
Elizabeth had no mind to acquiesce in Ronald's surrender, and throughout a dreary evening, in which the spirit had left the forms of their amusements vacant, her brain was busy with arguments for beating down Nancy's obstinacy.
"This can't really be your last night here," she said, when bedtime had come and she and Helen and Nancy were in the privacy of their own room. "We won't allow it."
"I must go back to my father first," Nancy answered in a firm voice. "I must ask him if I can stay longer."
"Oh yes, I know what that means. It means you won't come back. Honestly, Nancy, doesn't it?"
"Perhaps it does," the other girl admitted.
"And it means you will have to marry that Chinese."
Nancy was startled. The fact of her engagement had always lurked between them, but had never been mentioned. She had hoped this last night might pass without its being mentioned. But the fiery Elizabeth was tired of evasions.
"Doesn't it?" she challenged.
"Yes," Nancy confessed.
"Why?" asked her relentless questioner.
"Because it has been arranged."
"Did you arrange it?"
"No, my father arranged it; that's our custom."
"And are you going to let yourself be handed over to an ugly Chinaman you have never seen just because of your father's whim?"
Helen thought the question a little harshly put and opened her mouth to repeat her sister's words more gently, but Elizabeth frowned her into silence. Nancy's face was white, but the girl was still sufficiently mistress of her lips to answer with an even-toned composure:—
"It is our custom, you see—"
"It is not our custom, and you are one of us, Nancy. It is an unthinkable, disgraceful thing! It is bad enough that you should have had all the best years of your life stolen from you because of your father's selfishness in bringing you up like a Chinese, but to be handed over to a greasy mandarin or coolie or whatever he is, that is more than you have any business to allow. You've got to do something to bring the man to his senses."
"My father is my father," said Nancy, a little stiffly.
"You're going too far, Betty," protested Helen, and then turned to Nancy.
"Don't be offended," she begged. "That's just Betty's way of expressing herself. She's not trying to be insulting. I've known her since she was born, so you must believe me. We are not criticizing your father; he has his ideas and we have ours, but he is old and you are young, and he has lived by himself so long that he probably doesn't know quite what is fair to you. You see you aren't truly Chinese, Nancy; anybody could know that by looking at you. But he has been living so long with his Chinese books and all that,"—gracefully she included the concubines in the "all that,"—"as to have forgotten that you aren't Chinese."
Nancy was mollified, but Elizabeth, once aroused, did not like apologies being made for her own frankness.
"He might at least have tried to find an English husband for you," she declared.
"He did try," said Nancy, enjoying the sensation of her statement.
"He did try? When?" both sisters cried in unison.
"Last year, but—" Nancy added, with a faint spice of malice, "I was—rejected."
A light burst suddenly upon Elizabeth's eyes.
"Do you mean to say he asked Ronald?" she demanded.
"Yes."
This Western game of frankness had its triumphs even in defeat, Nancy was able to observe during the pause which ensued.
"Well, I am—yes, I am damned!" exclaimed Elizabeth. "There's no other word for it. I see it now, and that's why we have had to put up with his hangdog looks all these months. I suppose he submitted a whole code of regulations and provisos, didn't he, and your father was not willing to accept? That's just what he would do."
"I don't know what he did do," said Nancy, shifting to the defense of her lover. "Perhaps my father had his own code of regulations and provisos, if that's what you call them."
"And he never said a word to us," Elizabeth continued. "Oh, why are men so stupid?"
"He is not stupid," said Nancy; "he didn't understand our customs."
"Did he tell you about this?"
"Yes."
"And now, as usual, he's a year too late. He'll be a year too late for his funeral. Look here, Nancy," she asked, with a disconcerting change of tactics, "do you love Ronald?"
A whisper of warning came from Helen.
"Yes, I know it's a beastly question, but you do love him, don't you, Nancy? Of course you can't expect us to reverence our own uncle. We shall have to be foolish over someone else's uncle. We will spare you the mention of all Ronald's endearing little faults if you'll just say you love him."
Her pleasantries saved Nancy the embarrassment of an immediate reply. Her eyes, the sudden rush of blood to her cheeks, might have seemed to give her answer, but the girl's tongue took refuge in the same answer it had given Ronald himself.
"I don't understand this love."
"That's nonsense," vowed Elizabeth; "you know if you love him—and you do love him. It's no use denying it. You daren't look me in the eyes and say you don't."
Nancy evaded the challenge. She did not speak.
"Yes, you do love Ronald," cried her accuser in triumph. "Don't try to hide your face, Nancy dear; I know the symptoms. Now you can't go back."
She spoke as if the matter had been decided and nothing remained except to give Nancy to her lover. But Nancy was not so easily beaten down. She looked quite calmly into the eyes of the friend whom a minute ago she had been afraid to face.
"I love my father," she said, "and I must go back."
Elizabeth gave a gesture of vexation at the stupid way people insisted upon tangling their own happiness. For a moment she was speechless, leaving argument to her less overbearing sister.
"But it isn't as if you were going back to your father," insisted Helen, "not for more than a few weeks. You are going to a husband whom you don't love, whom you have never seen. That is not right, Nancy, not right for you, not right for Ronald, because you do love him and you know it. You are going back just to please an old man, and not to please him for long."
"I am going back to please my father. I want to please him. I don't care how long it is."
"But if he has made a mistake—"
"My father doesn't make mistakes."
"Oh, doesn't he?" snorted Elizabeth, unable to keep out of the debate longer. "What has he been doing all these years but make mistakes? And now he is too selfish, he isn't man enough, to save his daughter from the mess he has made. He has ruined his own life and isn't happy till he has ruined yours."
Nancy's eyes flashed with anger.
"I am going now," she said. "I won't stay in your house and hear such words. My father is right. Everything he does is right. I am not a foreigner. I hate your ways, I hate your ugly clothes, all your talk about love! My father is not selfish, he is not selfish! I won't listen to you. I am going home."
She clutched wildly at her dress. In her passion she was ready to tear off the despised garments. Then suddenly the sense of her own helplessness overwhelmed her and she knew that she had insulted these, almost her only friends in the world. The experiences of the day had been too great for her sorely tried nerves. She had fought against all she desired until there was no strength for battle left in her veins. She was standing, unable to move, wondering where she could go, how she could carry out her frantic threats of flight, when the instantly contrite Elizabeth threw her arms across the shoulders of the distracted girl.
"I was a beast, Nancy," she confessed; "do forgive me, do forget everything I said. I didn't mean to spoil your last evening here, but you seem to belong so much to us that I couldn't bear not to say what I could."
Helen too was plying her with penitent words.
Nancy's anger dissolved under their kindness. Their love touched her heart to the quick. She could not control herself longer; her pride, her anger, her remorse, were swept away in tears. She tried to struggle through a few incoherent phrases, but the tide of weeping drowned speech, drowned thoughts, drowned everything except a devastating pity which convulsed her breast with great heaving sobs and set her weeping again and again after the wells of her eyes had seemed eternally drained of tears.
There was no more the girls could say. They could only let her weep away the bitterness of her heart.
When she got up at the first glimmer of dawn and put on again her Chinese clothes, they did not stop her, for they knew quite well she had not slept and must find her bed wearisome after the vigil of the night. She would be better breathing the cool air of the morning. They let her go alone to purge her brain in the dew and the sunshine of the hills.
"I will be back," Nancy told them, "but I want to walk. I shall feel better; then I can sleep in the chair all the way home."
She hurried round the upper paths of the settlement, passing houses which were heavy with slumber. The morning was still; the sun had not come up over the plains to waken the dragon flies into humming life. Nancy was trying to walk herself out of the desperate mood in which nothing she did seemed worth any pain. She had gained some satisfaction, when she was angry, from the heroism of returning to her father, which of course was only another way of saying to the marriage he had ordained. But now she was not angry, only sad. Her heroism was only like a memory of last night's acting lingering in the stale air, amid the litter and refuse of a stage, the morning after a great tragedy. The actors have gone, the theatre is given up to charwomen. So Nancy's heart was given up to dustpans and brooms. The anguish upon which she had wracked her spirit lay strewn across the floor of her soul like crumpled flowers. It was bad enough to be sacrificing so much that she loved to the demands of duty, but it was worse not to believe in the sacrifice.
In this mood Ronald overtook her.
"I am going back to my father," she announced, as though he had been following the debate in her mind and might try to prolong fruitless argument and score many profitless points.
"I don't doubt it," said Ronald, smiling gravely. "I don't doubt that you are going back. I didn't come to plague you with my efforts at persuasion. I wanted just one last walk with you, Nancy, to be at peace and happy because you are with me. I am wiser than I was yesterday, and I know you would have agreed if you could. So we'll let it rest at that, shall we?"
They walked quietly, enjoying the little things that caught their eyes, the brilliant touches of an early summer morning, "my namesake, the sun,"—as Ronald grimly remarked,—which came up from a saffron bed of clouds, far across the plains beyond Peking. Nancy was glad Ronald had found her. There was an unforced merriment to his talk which cheered her vexed mind. Her doubts vanished like the mist. He was well named "the sun," for his steadfast courtesy in defeat shed light on the misty passes of her will and helped her to see the rightness of the instinct which was taking her back to her father. The mountains had lost their vagueness of surface; the sun was etching the deep shadows of each ravine.
"Well, it is time we went back," said Ronald, after they had walked a long way and seen the sun leap high above the plains. "I am glad we had this walk, Nancy, because I didn't trust myself to say good-bye to you down there. I haven't given you up, you know; I will never do that, for I hope against hope that your father's prediction may yet come true."
He stopped for a moment.
"Ah, Nancy," he said, turning to the girl, "it's so hard, even now, to say good-bye to you."
She looked at him, frightened by the thought of never seeing him again, afraid of his never knowing that she did love him. Impossible wishes were in her heart, impossible words on her tongue, for it seemed so wrong that she should be offering herself only next month to a stranger and parting without a word of endearment for the friend, the lover, who filled the vivid horizon of this morning walk. This Western life and Western speech had been playing havoc with all Nancy's conventions. She was on the point of confessing her love for Ronald, a disastrous confession which could only complicate the unhappiness of their friendship, for she had not changed and would not change her intention of going back to her father as she had said.
"Well, we might as well be done with it," exclaimed Ronald. "It's no time for making speeches, is it? You know how I feel, Nancy. I am not good at disguising my feelings, but I do hope that, whatever comes of all this mixup, you will be happy. That, after all, is the important thing."
Nancy looked away as though her eyes were intent upon the sunlit boldness of the slope. She was too well schooled to betray emotion in the ordinary ways, by nervous play of the hands, by shifting of the feet, but the tense posture of her body suggested to observant eyes the strain she was meeting; Ronald's eyes were too observant to be at ease in watching her. The man turned away. The steadily mounting splendor of the sun gave him courage.
"A priceless pair of fools we are," he said, suddenly, "a priceless pair of fools, mooning like this on such a splendid morning. They'll be wondering if we're never coming to breakfast. Good-bye, Nancy."
He took her hand and held it a moment. The girl thanked him with a grateful look for this brusque loyalty. For the last most difficult time she was able, by his help, to subdue the protesting voices of her blood.
"Good-bye, Ronald," she said quietly.
And so their parting was accomplished.