Sun and moon

by Vincent H. Gowen

Her old nurse was not so complaisant. Her grumbles lost their discreetness; their echoes were heard throughout the house. Kuei-lien warned her mistress.

"That's the old jade from whom Nancy gets her mischievous ideas," she remarked. "She did her best to break up the engagement to your nephew."

"You mean you and she did your best, don't you?" sniffed the woman. "Still, you are right; the children have grown up. Why should they need a nurse?"

This was not a new thought. But now the desperation of the t'ai-t'ai heaped fuel upon her courage. With Herrick growing day by day more helpless in the arms of his concubine, more childish, more easily and pitifully led like a bear with a ring through his snout, the woman believed the time at last had come for settling old scores and writing off her balance of revenge.

The chance came when the cold winds blew for weeks and filtering dust of spring, sweeping in clouds from the plains of Kansu and the crumbling deserts of Gobi, choked the house, suffocated ears and eyes and nostrils and throats with fine sand, and reduced everyone's temper to that inflammable point where quarrels leap up from a spark. Nancy did fumbling work on her bridal skirt. The t'ai-t'ai rebuked her with harsh words. The child threw aside deference to her stepmother and responded as angrily. But her flare of indignation paled before the great blaze of wrath which suddenly burst from the lips of the amah, who had interposed in the dispute and been unable to quench her long-stifled embers of hatred.

For all the pent-up enmity of the past she now found words and, with no care who should hear her, she denounced Nancy's tyrant with long sentences of withering invective. The whole household rushed to hear; the other wives stood round with gaping mouths, secretly gloating over the t'ai-t'ai's discomfiture. Even Herrick could not remain deaf to such noise and was forced irritably to inquire the reason for this disturbance. In her frenzy the nurse was like a poetess, singing out her unforgivable abuse in a rhythmical chant which her victim was powerless to quell. Every line was jerked short with a taunt, as though the infuriated woman defied the world to contradict her words. The taunts stung like little leaden pellets on the end of a whiplash. Nancy, standing cold and white in dismay, expected to see these venomous syllables cut marks of blood across the face of her stepmother.

A scene like this could not be excused. The result was what the old nurse had foreseen and tried with such patience to guard against during every provocation of the last few months: she was called before Herrick, his wife standing vindictively at his side, and told the cruel, farcical pretexts proper to the decencies of the occasion. The children had outgrown a nurse. She deserved a rest after these many years of faithful service, service Herrick was glad to reward with a gift which would keep her in comfort to the end of her years. The man knew in his heart he was pronouncing a dastardly sentence. His voice faltered when he referred to the better reward the old woman would find in the hearts of his children. But it was a just sentence. He would not be moved when the amah threw herself at his feet and begged with tears to remain. The demonstrative scene vexed him. He hated scenes. The more the stricken woman pleaded, the more stubbornly his will hardened. He turned away and left her weeping uselessly.

Yet, terrible as her grief had been, not till Nancy and Edward learned her punishment did it reach its climax. The two children heard the news as though the world had crumbled round them. They were losing the only mother they knew, for there had been not a day of their lives but began and ended with the cheerful gossip of their nurse. Edward was dazed by a whimpering unbelief, while Nancy went to intercede with her father. But he was tired of the subject, conscious that he had been less than fair, so he curtly told her to mind her own affairs and for the last time to stop interfering with the counsels of her elders.

In her despair the wretched girl sought the t'ai-t'ai, from whom she could not remember having ever asked sympathy or help. She was too proud to beg or to weep; this was not her way.

"It was my fault, not amah's," she said. "Won't you punish me? I provoked the trouble. I was undutiful, hot-headed. I deserve to be punished, not an old woman who has been a servant so long that she has forgotten her place. She will never do this again, I can promise you."