Sun and moon

by Vincent H. Gowen

CHAPTER XXXI

In the first relief that followed this kindly greeting, Nancy nearly broke down. Tears welled to her eyes, do what she would to hold them back. She could not help sobbing, but the old woman stroked her hands as though she knew the misery pent up in the heart of this alien bride.

"My husband and your father were friends," she said, "and I am glad that his daughter has become my granddaughter. But it's hard, isn't it?"

She gave a little chuckle, seeming to appreciate her own experiences as a bride in years which only a handful of bent gray figures like herself still lived to remember. Nancy could have lived as long without forgetting this reception by the wise old woman whose harsh tongue she had been taught to dread. It came with such sudden, blinding beauty at the end of a comfortless journey, at the end of four suffering weeks in which her spirit had been tortured nearly to the limits of its endurance!

Nancy would have suffered much from the women, from her mother-in-law and from her stepmother—for the latter visited on the daughter her anger over the justice of Timothy Herrick's will—and even at the hands of lesser people, who took their pattern from this spiteful pair, but she had hoped for some measure of sympathy, some pity, even if there could not be love, from the youthful stranger, Ming-te, who had been given the rights of a husband over her life.

In this she was disappointed. Ming-te felt that there was no one with a grievance comparable to his own. His parents, however much they might dislike this foreigner in the family, had invited her by their own choice. But he had been given no choice.

Like most youths of his modern day, he detested being bound by an early marriage even to a girl of his own race; he detested being set to breed heirs for the pleasure of his parents. He envied the new laxities of Shanghai and Peking, the parody of Western freedom carried on under the guise of choosing one's wife for one's self. He was eager to push aside convention, to realize republican liberty by bursting all restraint; he was a student, member of a class bound by no laws of right or reason, to whom all things ought to be allowed in the pursuit of knowledge; yet just when his imagination had begun to run riot over the thought of embracing slim girl students to the mutual advancement of their studies, when he was becoming conscious of his own sacred importance as the hope of China and the flower of creation, he had been put under restraint like his forefathers, suddenly, brutally married, his hopes dashed. And his sacrifice had been unmentionably worse than theirs; he, the heir of the ages, had amounted to so little in the eyes of his elders that they had flung him a foreigner for a bride!

So Ming-te, the handsome, spoiled idol of his parents, took his marriage in bad grace and vented his spleen on Nancy. He did not take the trouble to see whether here might not be the ideal comrade of whom he had prated so freely in the safe company of his friends; he had made up his mind to dislike the girl long before he set eyes upon her. The disgrace of his bridal night, his sheepishness, the mockery of his family, of which he still heard the echoes, were an added score to be wiped out. And because he could not avenge himself on her mind he tried to avenge himself on her body, for at heart he was afraid of Nancy; at heart he realized her contempt for his shallowness and conceit; he seemed to see her eyes despising him as a weakling, a petulant small boy, till she challenged him to ecstasies of cruelty to prove that he was indeed her master.

Nancy had learned many undreamed-of things during this month, but nothing more dumbfounding than the fact that real sorrow is an experience without appeal; it has no glamour, no romance. It is like a headache which goes on forever. She wondered at the vernal innocent person she had been, blithely offering herself for a life of torture, as though it were no more than one of those tempestuous black tragedies of childhood which last for an hour, then ripple peacefully away like bird notes after a storm. It seemed so splendid to sacrifice herself, against the protests of Ronald and his nieces and Edward and Kuei-lien and even her father himself; she had been thrilled by her own daring even when her heart was cold with the prospect, so that, while she entered the bridal chair sad and afraid, longing to cling to everything she was forsaking, some small part of her could not forbear standing aside to gloat over the picturesque courage of her deed.

But she had been wakened too unmercifully from her dream; her vanity, so excusable, so childishly serious, broken by a punishment out of all justice to what it deserved. Her days of shyness were passing. She was putting off the bride to put on the shrew—in that hard-mouthed family no other role was safe—when her regrets for the folly of her sacrifice suddenly dissolved and her heart swelled with pride, with thankfulness, because she had kept faith with an old lady she had never met, who greeted her in the twilight of a gray day, saying, "I have waited a long, long time to welcome you."