"I shall always love you, Nancy," he said.
Nancy trembled a little beneath the touch of his lips, but the kiss came so naturally that she had no time to be surprised and could only wonder long afterward at the trance which had held her silent under so strange a greeting, so strange a token of farewell.
CHAPTER XXX
Ronald did not see Nancy again until the day of Timothy Herrick's funeral. On that dreary day she was more remote than ever, wearing her headdress of white sackcloth and weeping loudly. Even Edward, who had thrown off many vestiges of his Chinese upbringing in the short time he had lived with the Ferrises, fell back disconcertingly into old habits and was as Chinese as Herrick's half-caste children when he had donned his coat of coarse bleached calico.
Ronald rightly insisted that as Herrick had lived so should he be buried, and he advised the t'ai-t'ai to spare none of the rites suitable to a mandarin of her husband's rank. He brought Beresford with him to the funeral. Beresford was intrigued by the many peculiar rites, but Ronald listened to it all with insufferable weariness and wondered if the priests were ever to be finished chanting their guttural prayers. Each stroke of bell and drum seemed to remove Nancy farther than ever from his hopes, tangling her spirit in an alien region from which she would never come out again. He saw nothing picturesque in the great scarlet catafalque put over Herrick's coffin, the silk umbrellas, the tables with their food for the dead, the spirit chair intricately wrapped in white muslin, the horrid crayon copy of Herrick's photograph, borne in a chair of its own, the bright silken copes of the priests, their contrast with the rags of the beggars, who carried white banners certifying to the merits of the dead, the green-clad coolies who labored with the weight of the coffin, the pervading smell of incense and burning sandalwood—these were all details which Ronald might have noted with an interested eye if he had not been oppressed by their meaning for Nancy. It was her tragedy that when those who loved her could bring the girl no comfort, she had to seek relief in this pitiless barbarity which seemed to sing her father's failure, his exile from his own people, his cheerless sojourn in the cold places of the dead.
All this Ronald heard in the weird music of the procession, as the coffin and its mourners moved slowly toward the gates of the city; he felt that the road Timothy Herrick was traveling, this same road there was no one to prevent his daughter from taking, despite all her lovable instincts for joy and for beauty—no one good enough to prevent her from following in her own desolate hour.
Beresford, however, thought the whole funeral very splendid. So much better, he declared, than being reminded of the skin-worms, and forced to linger in the sickly smell of a church which had been banked like a flower-seller's shop while bald-headed gentlemen trundled the coffin with exaggerated slowness up the aisle. He envied Herrick's escape from those absurd rites and from being consigned into eternity by the throaty reading of a curate in a starched surplice. This brilliant procession, winding with such an unrehearsed mixture of carelessness and dignity, did seem in his eyes to express more reasonably the tragic naturalness of death. Even Ronald, before they had reached Herrick's burial-place, began to feel himself haunted by the sobbing voice of the flutes and to know that this garish splendor was the ancient and simple way of keeping up man's courage before the mystery of death. It was a shock, on coming outside the city, to see the coffin stripped of its pall, the umbrellas and chairs sent back, as though the chief object of the parade had been not to honor the unseeing dead but to win honor from the populous streets of the city, yet the quiet which ensued induced meditations that were not unpleasing though they were sad. Autumn lay with warm sunshine on the land; sloping shafts of light made the dry grass glow; wide and blue was the sky. The only sound was the low-toned note of a gong which a priest rang from time to time as he walked in front of the coffin.
Ronald was moved by the loneliness of Herrick's burial-ground. It was so tranquil that he, too, half envied the dead man's privilege of sleeping quietly with all the scenes he had loved, the serene clarity of the Western Hills, the climbing palaces of Wan Shou Shan, the towers and golden roofs of Peking, compassing from the far distance the little circle of pine and cypress round the grave. Ronald's spirit was hushed by the stillness. The man looked idly at the four characters gilded on the end of Herrick's coffin: "Hai returns to the halls of spring," they said, and for the first time Ronald believed that there was immortality in lying here beneath the open spaces of heaven. A fresh outburst of wailing, the burning of paper money, and exploding of crackers could not touch the peace of a heart fortified by the strangely comforting thought that life was soon over.
The grave was ready at two, but the hour was even-numbered, unlucky; mourners and priests and workmen waited in little gossiping groups till the more fortunate hour of three, when the coffin was lowered into the grave with the lavish sunshine pouring down upon it as if to make amends for Herrick's last sight of day. Every clod that had been dug was thrown scrupulously upon the round mound of the grave. Edward knelt down and wept; Nancy wept and bowed her forehead to the ground; the women prostrated themselves, tearing their hair and their clothes. Ronald stood watching dumbly, but he got his moment of reward when Nancy rose, for she gave him one searching look, one glance of understanding and love, over which hovered the trembling flicker of a smile. She showed she had not forgotten his kiss; this was her answer. So completely, indeed, had Nancy seemed to belong to him throughout all the tedious hours of the funeral that Ronald remembered afterward, with some amazement, that among the gathering of the t'ai-t'ai's family, which followed the coffin, he had not knowingly set eyes upon or even thought of singling out Nancy's husband.