People from the streets had joined the guests in a clamorous entry into the bridal chamber, long before which time Nancy had been taken from the quieter feast of the women and prepared for the ordeal to which every Chinese bride must submit, when she stands the rude inspection of the crowd. This is always an occasion of ribald wit,—curiously allowed by the custom of years,—in which strangers do their best by the indelicacy of their remarks to disconcert and embarrass the "new woman." But the fact of Nancy's being a foreigner added spice to the event; it made the girl a natural victim of the worst pranks the crowd could concoct. And the freedom with which wine had flowed stirred men to pitiless depths of cruelty in torturing their prey. They teased the girl with unbridled lust of word and gesture such as would have revolted any of them in his right senses. During the three long hours of this orgy the husband of course remained discreetly absent,—he was in fact too sick to come,—while Nancy was compelled to stand beside the gaudy bed, submitting to every whim of her tormentors without a word of defense or even a sign that she was noticing their obscene spite, and with no attendant except an amah almost as much a stranger as the rest.
The men crowded round her in a mocking circle. They discussed every feature of her body with abominable frankness, pulled up her skirts, pinched her legs, examined the bangles on her arms, chucked her freely under the chin, tried to force wine between her teeth. The amah, whose business it was to play the buffoon and draw these attacks from her mistress by rollicking diversions, was too mean-spirited a creature to perform her part, and let Nancy suffer the full force of their lewdness unhindered. There was much laughter over the drunkenness of the bridegroom; he would be quite unable to share the bridal bed, the crowd boasted, and the most boisterous of them played fingers to see who should sleep with this handsome foreign devil in his place. The thought tickled their wits; they pulled out clothes from Nancy's boxes, dressed themselves in a mocking masquerade, threw themselves on the bed, amid howling applause, to portray an indecent drama of Nancy's modesty and Nancy's shame. Through it all she stood with half-averted face, eyes and cheeks ablaze, pretending neither to hear nor to see, knowing too well that the least sign of anger would draw down the redoubled hostility of her persecutors.
Yet, despite her outward passivity, the experience was burning deep marks upon her heart. She began to realize what she had protested against all her life, that she was in truth a foreigner. The pleasant manners of her father's household had deceived her too long. The little differences between herself and her father's wives had been too slight, too amiably adjusted, to make her know the cleavage of race that divided her own instincts from the instincts of the Chinese among whom she had been trained. She had beguiled herself with books, with romance and poetry, with the language which came by first impulse to her lips, but now she understood what a lie she had been living all these wasted years.
Late in the evening, long after Nancy's feelings had been outraged into a state of numbness, the coarse abuse of the bride brought signs of reaction. The befuddling effects of the wine were wearing off and some began to feel compassion for the girl who had borne so unflinchingly a measure of evil treatment which even they, with many memories of such bride-baiting, had never seen matched. Sympathies veered. Those who had held their tongues through the worst indignities now commenced to find them; their appetite for cruelty was sated. Yet the irony of the event was that these impulses of pity should deal the girl her sorest wound.
"Shame!" cried one man, hardier than the rest. "You are a coward to treat a girl so when her heart must be sorrowing for the death of her father."
The remark, uttered with such loud scorn, hushed the mob for a moment. In their sport many had forgotten Nancy's bereavement; some had never known of it. The fickle crowd responded to an instant's compunction. There ensued a brief but appalling silence, and when the sport was resumed it was never with the former heartiness. Little by little the throng began to dwindle. Guests and onlookers slipped away till only the more obstinate braves, hilarious intimates of the family, stayed to stipulate with the groomsmen a feast for the morrow as the price of their leaving husband and wife to a first night's undisturbed felicity.
But the outcry of Nancy's one defender, which was a quickly forgotten incident to the others, made the torture and coarseness of the evening trivial to the wretched girl learning for the first time that her father was dead. She turned strangely calm, strangely rational, as though she never had been so gravely alive, but her one mastering desire was to talk to someone about her father, to pour out her words, to make him live on the frantic accents of her tongue.
At last the room was quiet. The candles had been changed for those which should burn through the night. Nancy's mother-in-law appeared to speak a few formal phrases to the bride and to see that the attending women were doing their part properly in making her ready for bed. Then the bridegroom, amid fresh jesting on the part of his family, was led to the chamber. Nancy did not sit up to look at him, but waited till the others had withdrawn. She heard them tittering outside, but she paid no heed to other people, once the heavy doors had been shut. With slow scrutinizing gaze she stared at the youth who stood timidly beside the bed. It was the first time she had seen him.
Ming-te had a face marked both by intelligence and by weakness. He was handsome, with quick bright eyes, a skin of singular clarity, a slightness of figure which made him seem younger than the girl he had married. His distaste for being confined in this embarrassing loneliness with his bride made him seem the weaker of the two, and Nancy knew by instinct that he was no match for her strong will. His family had overplayed their part in rousing his courage with wine; he was trembling from the effects of sickness, the nausea of unfamiliar drunkenness, and failed of confidence to meet Nancy's look.
"Is my father dead?" the girl suddenly asked him.