He did understand much for which it was hopeless to seek words.
"This will be your home now," he told Edward, "your home till we can put you in a proper school. I promised your father that. You don't wish to live there, do you, now that your father has gone and Nancy has gone?"
"No," the boy answered bravely.
"Now I must see what I can do. Your father left me a lot of business to finish. But you must come with me and help me. I might not make myself clear and there will be a lot I shall need you to explain."
The boy accepted all that he said without question. Together they returned to the mourning household, which mocked the clear sunshine of the streets with its gloom. Ronald had unutterable thoughts as he entered the gate from which Nancy had gone out one day too soon in the loneliness of her scarlet chair. He could not bear to dwell upon this picture, but asked to see the body of her father and went with a sigh of weariness upon his lips into the room where with difficulty, with much labored unbending of stiff limbs, they had laid out the corpse. The boy was afraid to come in. Ronald stood by himself and looked at a face which made death terrible.
The women had taken up their burden of wailing when he entered the house; harshly the noise struck his ears, for in Herrick's quiet features he could find no answer to the riddle of why the dead man had lived only to come to this pitiless ending. His only satisfaction was to see that Herrick did not sleep peacefully, that he had not died content; the restless lines in Herrick's face told their own story.
The ill-fated time of his death had upset his unstable family. The women could not face this blow right on the heels of their excitement at Nancy's wedding. In their panic over what their future might be, they had neglected the first rites of the dead and were weeping uselessly, undecided what respect they should pay to the dead man whom, despite his years of pretension, they remembered only as a foreigner.
But the t'ai-t'ai was recovering her wits when Ronald asked for her.
"She wants," Edward explained, after the formalities of the meeting had been dealt with, "first of all to settle the business of Nancy's marriage. My father promised to give ten thousand taels when she went to her new family, but he died so quickly that he had no time to do this."
"Yes, I know," said Ronald, "he told me about it and that he expected to pay this himself. But I can't do anything yet."