The household, or at least the family, worshipped in the form of Confucius; his precepts and admonitions, the sacred hiao or filial submission, the tablets and ancestral piety, were a part of her blood; as was the infinitely fainter infusion of Buddhism; yet in her intellectual brooding it was to the Tao-teh-king that she returned. She paused to recall that, the brace at last removed, she was practically completely recovered; but the bent, the bracing, given her mind had remained.
The colorful pageant of her first marriage, the smaller but splendidly appointed house of her husband—he was extremely intelligent and had honorably passed the examination for licentiate, one of only two hundred successful bachelors out of twenty thousand—and the period following his accidental drowning wheeled quickly through her brain….
Only Gerrit Ammidon was left.
She loved him, Taou Yuen realized, for a quality entirely independent of race: he had more than anyone else she knew the virtues of simplicity and purity announced by Chwang-Tze as the marks of the True Man. "We must become like little children," the Old Master had written. She had seen this at once in the amazing interview sanctioned by her father-in-law. Most women of her class, even widows, would have perished with shame at being exposed to a foreigner. But Lu Kikwang had expressed her difference from them in the terms of his proposal. His words had been "finely better" although the truth was that her curiosity had always mastered the other and more prudent instincts. Yet that alone would not have prostrated her before Gerrit Ammidon—death was not unthinkable—nor carried her into his strange terrifying ship and stranger life. The love had been born almost simultaneously with her first recognition of his character. Now her passion for him was close and jealous. A constant shifting between such humanity and the calm detachment which prefigured heaven was what most convinced her of the truths of Lao-tze.
All this took body at the announcement of Edward Dunsack about Gerrit and his niece. Certainly he might have had an affair; that she dismissed; but the insinuated permanence of this other affection was serious. She would not have believed Mr. Dunsack for an instant, but, as he had pointed out, Gerrit had undoubtedly been upset; he had turned pale and hurried away impolitely. It was by such apparently slight indications that the great inner currents of life were discovered. The fact that Chinese officials had more than one wife, or, to speak correctly, concubines in addition, had no bearing with Gerrit; such was not the custom with American men. It represented for him, yes—dishonor.
She laboriously recalled his every attitude since they had landed in America, and was obliged to admit that he had changed—he was less gay and though his manner was always considerate she recognized a growing impatience beneath his darker calm. Her philosophy was again torn in shreds by sharp feminine emotions. She was filled with jealousy and hatred and hurt pride. The clearest expression of his possible discontent had marked his face when he had suddenly come into their room and saw her rising from a prayer for his father. Gerrit's lips had been compressed, almost disdainful; at that moment, she knew unerringly, he found her ugly. Of course it had been the hideous garments of mourning.
She must wear the unhemmed sackcloth and dull slippers, bind her headdress and cover her pins with paste, for a hundred days; and then a second mourning of black or dark blue, and no flowers, for three years. It might well be that by then Gerrit, blind to these proprieties, would find her unendurable. Suddenly, in the tremendous difficulty of holding him against an entire world, his own and of which she was supremely ignorant, it seemed to her that she needed every possible means, every coral blossom and gold filament and finger of paint, the cunning intoxication of subtle dress and color and perfume. With a leaden sense of guilt, but in a fever of impatience, of haste, she stripped off the coarse hemp for her most elaborate satins, her santal and clover and carmine.
When Gerrit came in it had grown dark with night, and he explained that he had been busy inspecting the Nautilus' spars. She lighted a lamp, then another, all she could find, and studied him unobtrusively. She was shocked at the worn expression of his face; it seemed as if he had aged in the few hours since he had left the library. He was uneasy, silent; and, secretly dismayed, she saw that he was indifferent to her changed appearance, too. Taou Yuen debated the wisdom of telling him about the painful scene with Edward Dunsack; against her original intent she decided in the negative. She informed herself that the reason for this was a wish to preserve him, now that they were practically at the day of departure, from an unpleasant duty. But there was an underlying dimly apprehended and far different motive: she was afraid that it would blow into flame a situation that might otherwise be avoided, bring to life a past naturally dying or dead.
She saw that he was scarcely aware of her presence in the room, perhaps in his life. A period of resentment followed. "You are dull," she declared, "and I am going down to the garden for entertainment." Gerrit nodded. He would, he told her, be along shortly. Below she found Roger Brevard, with the oldest Ammidon girl and her mother.
Roger Brevard, she had discovered, was in love with Sidsall. The latter, it developed, was to leave shortly for a party; Mr. Brevard was not going; and, when Gerrit's sister-in-law walked across the grass with her daughter the man dropped into an easy conversation with Taou Yuen. She had a feeling, which she had tried in vain to lose, of the vulgarity, the impropriety of this. Yet she recognized that there was none of the former in Roger Brevard; he resembled quite a little her dead husband, Sié-Ngan-kwán; and for that reason she was more at ease with him—in spite of such unaccustomed familiarity—than with anyone else in Salem but Gerrit.