CHAPTER XXXIII
Kuei-Lien more than justified her connection with the Ferris household by the news she was able to bring. Not so long after Nancy herself, Ronald knew that Nancy's husband—he made a grimace every time he used the word—was to take a second wife. He was pleased. Any barrier between Nancy and Ming-te warmed his own hopes and, from the liberal store of gossip which Kuei-lien got from Paoling, it seemed that there were real barriers of distrust between the young couple. Nancy, he learned, had become the attendant of the old grandmother, "a terrible old woman," Kuei-lien volunteered. This was not such good news except that serfdom to the old t'ai-t'ai saved her from bondage to the rest of the family, for the old lady, declared Kuei-lien, was very jealous of those who waited upon her, kept them always in sight, always ready to obey her uncounted whims. Nancy would have few chances to see her husband. Ronald made Edward translate every phrase of Kuei-lien's voluble information, seeking what hints he could to guide his own course of action.
"How long will things go on like this?" he demanded.
Kuei-lien shrugged her shoulders.
"I am not a fortune-teller," she said; "it will go on till the old t'ai-t'ai dies, at least."
"And if the old t'ai-t'ai dies?"
"Then she will be free to wait upon her mother-in-law."
Kuei-lien smiled, but Ronald saw what she told was likely.
"Do you think she is happy?" he asked.
"She must be very stupid to be happy in such a place. Hm-m," she grunted, "I know the family. Very quarrelsome they are and they will quarrel with her and make her a servant because they didn't want her. They only took her because of the money. They show they don't want her, else why should they get a new wife so soon? They want Chinese children. They will try to give this woman first place."
"Then what hope is there for Nancy?" Ronald inquired desperately.
"Oh, she can jump into a well. The wells at Paoling are quite salty, but they are deep."
Ronald was out of patience with Kuei-lien's grim humor.
"Couldn't she run away?" he suggested.
"Yes, she could run away, but they would soon follow. Where could she fly to? She has lived behind walls all her life; she doesn't know whether Peking is east, west, south, or north, and if she asked—ha, then she would be discovered. Chinese girls don't walk through the country asking their way to Peking."
Ronald was growing more and more restive under the restrictions of custom which kept him from seeing Nancy, although he knew no obstacle could stop him, were it not for the obstacles she herself would make. But he felt the need to move, to do something, no matter how useless it might be.
"I must go there," he said. "Are there any foreigners in Paoling?"
"Yes, there is a foreign doctor at the hospital. Perhaps there are others, but they cannot help you. The Chou family has nothing to do with missionaries. You would see the front gate; that is all. A beggar can see as much."
Nevertheless Ronald decided to go. Classes did not stop till January, but he found out the names of the foreigners who lived in this isolated town, got letters to them, and set out on the first of his holidays with no definite plan except that it was better to be moving than to sit at home with arms folded. The weather was bitterly cold. The miserable train depressed his spirits. But even that was luxury compared to the mule cart in which he jolted all day. The country was like a frozen desert; the cart slipped and plunged and nearly overturned in deep icy ruts. If he could get Nancy out of a land like this, Ronald vowed, never would he venture into it again.
The doctor and his wife, having been informed of his coming, were glad to welcome him. They thawed his stiff limbs before a great stove. His visit interested them the more because they had heard of a foreign woman hidden in one of the Chinese families of the town. The wife, especially, was sympathetic over every detail of Nancy's story. But neither of them could think of any way to see the girl.
"These places are barred to us," the doctor explained, "except when someone is very ill. Then, when the patient has been mauled and mishandled, plastered with dirty paper and stuck with infected needles, they call us in to undo the mischief of the Chinese doctors."
Just as if to give point to this remark, a servant came in with a card and a request that he come at once to attend a sick woman.
"Chou Hu-wei," mused the doctor, reading the card; he turned abruptly to Ronald. "There is witchcraft in this," he said, "this is the very same family you were seeking. I expect it's the old t'ai-t'ai herself—didn't you say it was she that the sister of your young friend was attached to? Yes, she must be the one. These January winds snuff out old lives. Ah, dear me, Paoling is not a place to grow old in."
It was the old t'ai-t'ai, the doctor found, and little chance of life he gave her. He read her case at the first glance and knew that the winds had done their work.
"Pneumonia—just what I feared," he said to himself.
The urgency of the case, the need of clearing out curious hangers-on and of getting ventilation to relieve the fumes of charcoal braziers so fully busied him that it was an hour before he could pause to notice the help he had been given by a foreign girl in Chinese clothes. The patient was as comfortable as she could be, lying sleepless but fully conscious, like one determined to die with her mind ruling to the last, not in the craven manner to let death sneak upon her when she was senseless. Nancy stood by her side, but with the same rigid control over her nerves.
"I expected to find you here," said the doctor. "Only to-day a visitor has come from Peking, a Mr. Nasmith—ah, you know him, I see; he is your brother's guardian. He came especially to find out whether you were well."
"What does he say?" asked the t'ai-t'ai, letting no movement escape her vigilant eyes, even in her pain, so that Nancy's start at Ronald's name gave her the hint that something weighty had been said.
"He says that the man whom my father first chose for my husband has come to Paoling," answered Nancy.
"Ah, it is fate," exclaimed the t'ai-t'ai. "I know now my time is finished. I will die. You must not wait for me, child. You must go back to him."
At these words Nancy's endurance crumpled.
"No, no, no," she cried, "you must not die! What can I do if you die? I don't want to go back. I want to stay with you. Don't let her die," she begged the doctor, forgetting, so excited she was, to speak English.
She fell down beside the bed and hid her face in her hands.
"I am not your sun, child," said the old woman softly; "you must not grieve for me. Of course I must die, but I shall take these words of yours with me; I shall not need any other sacrifice. They will burn money and houses and servants and weep on my grave till the sand has scoured the name from my stone, but I shall pay no attention to any of these; I shall always hear your words and smell them like burning sandalwood."
But Nancy would not be comforted. She jumped up again and faced the doctor with glowering eyes.
"You will not let her die, will you?" she demanded.
"Come, come, child, keep up your courage," said the doctor in his steadiest tones, "we won't talk of dying yet. You do your part and I will do mine."
He diverted her attention with many precautions about the care of the patient and about keeping the room free from intruders, while all the time the old t'ai-t'ai listened with a smile on her lips as though she deemed they were taking many needless pains.
"I have seen the girl you were looking for," he told Ronald, when he had come home again, "and you can set your heart at rest about one thing; she has not been ill-treated by the old t'ai-t'ai she is serving. I don't know what her relations with the rest of the family may be; I can guess that they have not been happy. But as to her feelings for the old t'ai-t'ai—well, I have been beside many deathbeds and I have never seen such an outburst of grief and love."
He detailed the scene exactly as it had happened before his eyes. Ronald was puzzled. He had heard such evil things about Nancy's aged mistress, such harsh pictures had been painted by Kuei-lien's vivid tongue, that he could not think of her as anything but an enemy.
"You say she told Nancy not to wait but to come to me?"
"That certainly was what I gathered. I have been twenty-five years in China; I don't often mistake words as clear as hers."
Ronald groaned.
"I wonder if she is going to sacrifice herself once more, just to please this old woman," he exclaimed.
The doctor had been moved by his impression of Nancy's love and also by the quiet dignity with which the sick woman bore her illness. He was a little out of patience with Ronald's remark, which sounded both hard and selfish.
"It seems foolish to you, no doubt," he said testily, "but more of her spirit would not be bad for the world. She knows her duty and is going to do it, no matter what you or I choose to say, and she thinks her old mistress is worth the sacrifice. For my part, I say more power to her arm. Pluck like that is not going to lose in the end."
"Yet the old t'ai-t'ai is going to die, isn't she?" asked Ronald.
"I should say, yes. She is very ill and pneumonia doesn't spare people at her age. But of course there is no certainty in these matters. Your friend might make her live—I have seen miracles like that before—if it were not for the fact that the old lady quite evidently thinks it is time to die and has made up her mind to die. The Chinese will do that, you know, when they grow old; sometimes their families suggest it to them because they have become feeble and a nuisance. That's a side of filial piety we don't hear advertised. But when they make up their minds to die, when they deliberately set themselves to give up the ghost,—I knew one old man who passed in ten days from sound health to the coffin,—when they do that, they are past praying for. I doubt if this old woman will live for all the doctors in the world. She seems to think she can help your friend by dying now."
"But if she dies, how will Nancy fare with the rest of the family?"
"Hm-m, I don't think she expects a very cordial time. Probably it will be spear against buckler, as the Chinese say."
"It was extraordinary," Ronald observed, beginning to pick up one by one the astonishing details of what the doctor had heard, "it was extraordinary that the t'ai-t'ai should have told Nancy to come to me."
"It was extraordinary indeed. I have never heard the like. For one of her position—in the husband's family, mind you—advising a hsi-fu to run away, that's absolutely without precedent. I don't understand it, however much she may like your friend Nancy. Of course her being a foreigner makes a big difference; the family is surely not keen on a foreign wife,—that second marriage, done so soon, proves that,—but they took her with their eyes open and they would not relish the poor compliment of her running away. Did her father, by the way, ask you first to be this girl's husband?"
"Yes," acknowledged Ronald.
"You didn't tell me that, you know. Were you engaged to her?"
"No."
"Well, your being here has become, for some reason, very important in the old t'ai-t'ai's eyes. Perhaps you can untangle it."
Ronald thought he could, though he did not trouble the doctor with his reasons, for the latter was ready for bed and said frankly that daylight solved more puzzles than lamplight. The t'ai-t'ai had made a curious remark about the sun. This gave the lover his cue; he lay awake nearly till daybreak going back and forth over scenes of the past: the importance Herrick ascribed to the scrolls he had written; Nancy's surprise when she saw them; the indication that the t'ai-t'ai knew of them. The sentences danced in his brain till he became afraid of them. Herrick must have trafficked with black art when he wrote those lines. They were always promising him Nancy, always withholding her.
At times he felt like copying the passive manners of the East and sitting, hands in lap, waiting for the prophecy, if prophecy it were, to fulfill itself, but his restless Western blood would not keep him still. The excitement of having Nancy so near, of almost having been given her by the unlooked-for command of the t'ai-t'ai, this was too urgent for sleep. Perhaps the old woman would die to-day, and Nancy would come. His fingers ached to pull away the curtain of these next few hours. He dared not hope too much. If that evil family hid her away again, he was ready to drag down their sagging house round their ears.
Hour after hour struck from the clock beneath his bedroom. He wondered whether Nancy were standing vigil over the dying woman whom he envied because she loved. If only he could keep vigil with her!