"You mean do I consider marriage to my nephew a punishment?" said the stepmother, for once talking openly to Nancy as she never would have talked to one of her own race. "Would I have made the match if I thought of it so? I am not used to these newfangled manners. When I was married, my mother didn't speak of it to me or ask me what I wished. Her wisdom was enough. But your father has new ideas, perhaps they are foreign ideas, and so we promised you should have these four years at home because he thought you wanted them. So there we are, bound by a promise. And my mother is growing old and feeble; she wants to see her grandson married; she keeps reproaching my brother for his promise, saying she cannot live another three years, she cannot wait so long. What am I to do? If you told your father you were ready to be married, he might release us from this promise. Then there would be happiness for all of us."
The t'ai-t'ai grew embarrassed by the unexpected lengths of her recital and was not her usual cool self. The unlooked-for event of Nancy's even seeming to hesitate over this proposal had shaken the woman out of her suavity. Nancy too might have been confused by hearing her marriage and even her future husband so freely mentioned by that most correct of all persons, the t'ai-t'ai, but this breach of impropriety dwindled to inconsequence beside the choice she felt bound to make.
"If I tell my father this, will the amah remain?"
"I will see that she does remain. I promise you that, although it will not be easy, now that your father has decided she shall go."
"And suppose I tell my father this, what does it mean? Does it mean that I must be married this year, that I cannot wait three more, even two more, years?"
"I can't answer for what it may mean to your father. You know his mind as well as I do. It may mean nothing to him. He makes his own laws. He may choose to wait, he may choose to hasten your wedding, he may choose anything. How can I see into his brain?"
The t'ai-t'ai showed by a gesture that she had long ago given up fathoming the vagaries of her husband's will.
Nancy pondered the matter. More than deep affection for the amah stirred her heart. She was seized by an unconscionable longing for sacrifice, a desire to do something heroic, to end the tedious apathy of waiting and fearing which had sapped her spirit in recent months. The suspense and the slowly encroaching tyranny of her stepmother were becoming unbearable. She wanted courage to drag out day after day of this dreary monotonous life, knowing too well it was only a joyless postponement of the sacrifice she must at last make. Her books had been taken away from her, her play, her English lessons, the companionship of her father; now they were taking away the nurse who had been like a mother. What was life worth under these conditions? What happiness did her respite of four years promise? How could the misery of the future be worse than the misery of the present?
Nancy, like most children, could not appreciate the immense distance of years which still lay ahead, time enough to make the sorrows of her teens seem slight reason for tears. Her sadness of the moment loomed eternal. The girl was swept by a gust of despair when she thought of her own plight and heard the frightening echoes of her father's debasement, the father whose sordid state she could only guess because every effort she made to be of help only estranged him further. She was in a mood to be desperate. If she did no good to herself, her consent, however rash it might be, had at least this merit in the good it was doing for the nurse she loved so well.
"Yes," she said, glad to feel she was active again, "I will do as you wish: I will tell my father, as soon as he sends for me, that I wish to be married this year. But you must do your part of the bargain."