Nearly always the air was heavy with fine red dust. It enveloped them like a fog, penetrating clothing, finding its way into packs and hand-bags. At times it softened and exquisitely tinted the view.
At long intervals the little caravan wound its slow way through villages that were usually built along a single narrow street. In the broader valleys the villages, gray brown and faintly red like the soil of which their bricks had once been moulded, clung compactly to hill-slopes safely above the torrents of spring and autumn, each little settlement with its brick or stone wall and its ornamental pagoda gates, and each with its cluster of trees about some consequential tomb rising above the low roofs in plumes of pale green April foliage.
Nowhere was there a sign of the disorder that was ravaging the province like a virulent disease. Brachey was aware of no glances of more than the usual passing curiosity from slanting eyes. He saw only the traditional peaceful countryside of the Chinese interior.
This sense of peace and calm had an effect on his moody self that increased as the day wore on. Life was turning unreal on his hands. His judgment wavered and played tricks with memory. Had it been so dangerous back there in T'ainan? Could it have been? He had to look steadily at the ragged, trudging figure of the erstwhile elegant Mr. Po to recapture a small degree of mental balance.... He had brought Betty away. He saw this now with a nervous, vivid clarity for what it was, an irrevocable act. It had come about naturally and simply; it had felt inevitable; yet now at moments, unable to visualize again the danger that had seemed terribly real in T'ainan he felt it only as the logical end of the emotional drift that had carried the two of them far out beyond the confines of reason. It was even possible that Mrs. Boatwright's judgment was the better.
But Betty couldn't go back now; they had turned her off; not unless her father should yet prove to be alive, and that was hardly thinkable. Anxiously during the day, he asked Mr. Po about that. But Mr. Po's confidence in the accuracy of his information was unshakable. So here he was, with a life on his hands, a life so dear to him that he could not control his mind in merely thinking of her there in the litter, traveling along without a question, for better or worse, with himself; a life that perhaps, despite this new spirit of consecration that was rising in his breast, he might succeed only in injuring. Brooding thus, he became grave and remote from her.
In his distant way he was very considerate, very kind. During the afternoon, as they moved up a long valley, skirting a broad watercourse where peach and pear trees foamed with blossoms against the lower slopes of the opposite hills, he persuaded her to descend from the litter and walk for a mile or two with him. He felt then her struggle to keep cheerful and make conversation, but himself lacked the experience with women that would have made it possible for him to overcome his own depression and brighten her, Once, when the caravan stopped to repack a slipping saddle, he asked her to sketch the view for him. It was his idea that she should be kept occupied when possible. He always corrected his own moods in that disciplinary manner. But just then his feelings were running so high, his tenderness toward her was so sensitively deep, that he spoke bruskly.
They rode on through the sunset into the dusk. The red hills turned slowly purple under the glowing western sky, swam mistily in a world-wide sea of soft dame.
Betty opened her windows wide now; gazed out at this scene of unearthly beauty with a sad deep light in her eyes.
2
They rode into another village. A soldier galloped on ahead to inspect the less objectionable inn. He reappeared soon, and the caravan jingled and creaked into a courtyard and stopped for the night. John dismounted and plunged into argument with the innkeeper. The cook set to work removing a pack-saddle. Coolies appeared. The mules were beaten to their knees. Brachey threw his bridle to a soldier and helped Betty out of the litter. Then they stood, he and she, amid the confusion, her hand resting lightly on his arm, her eyes on him.