"I want no snivelling humbugs in here," said the implacable old lady.
Apart from making polite inquiries, the others were glad to leave Nancy the burden of the sick chamber. She sat in quiet, broken only by the hard breathing of the patient, who was also awake. She was not tempted to doze. There were too many puzzles of her own to unravel. Her fortunes hung in the balance again, with the fortuitous coincidence of Ronald's arrival in Paoling and the t'ai-t'ai's sudden, withering illness. She wished Ronald had not come. She was afraid of the sign, connecting it, as did the old t'ai-t'ai herself, with her death. And she had wanted so grievously to be left, if only for a few months, in the peace which had come since her protector had extracted her secret of the sun and the moon.
She was in the mood which her father had surprised long ago when he asked his daughter to whom he should marry her and she shirked the question, saying that she did not wish to be married at all. She knew she belonged to Ronald, her heart spoke unhesitatingly in his defense, but she lacked courage to meet his claims; they promised so much trouble, so much stress and uneasiness, perhaps a catastrophe worse than the marriage which had seemed so certainly to destroy all hope. Because she cherished this hope given back to life again, she wanted to treat it tenderly, to nourish it in the quietness of her mind, to allow it months of rest and growth, not to expose it suddenly to the storms of decision, saying it must be settled now or never. She dreaded casting everything upon the chances of a day to know whether she must live or die. She had no heart to face Ronald now. And yet he had come, and her aged friend was dying.
The past weeks had been happier beyond measure. Nancy had had nothing further to conceal from the old t'ai-t'ai. They understood one another perfectly. The t'ai-t'ai, having decided that Herrick's scrolls were the will of heaven, never turned back from this belief.
"These things are ordained," she had declared; "we can't fight against them."
She had walked with Nancy in the dried remnants of a garden which was the only breathing space the Chou family could boast. The paths were weedy and overgrown, the pond shrunk to a few pailfuls of stale water, withered vines hung from a summer house which was too chilly for them to enter. But Nancy had memories of winter sunshine, warm when the wind did not blow, and of blue unclouded skies, and she never forgot the picture of this imperious old woman who never deigned to lean upon her gnarled red cane, but walked erect, letting the sun glow proudly upon her white hair and bring mellow lustre from her jacket, which was dyed the stain of crushed cherries. The t'ai-ta'i had been a gay, unbent figure on days like those; the shape of an irascible tyrant, which her family dreaded so cravenly, she seemed to have left within doors to stand guard against her return. Meantime she took her holiday to pour out for Nancy's ears all the wealth of experience she had stored in the long changing years of her life. In recounting days at court, days when her husband wore the Emperor's button in his hat, and the peacock's feather, when he presented himself for an audience at the mysterious morning hour of three, his coat dazzling with twisted dragons, with a border rainbow-colored to show sunlight foaming across waves of the sea, her eyes grew luminous as they often did when she looked on Nancy; she became almost tolerant of her successors and their failure.
"Heaven made them fools," she exclaimed, half pityingly. "They could only do what they had it in them to do."
Nancy had never interrupted those stories. Her taste was not spoiled, like the taste of too many Western children, by a surfeit of books and papers. She was hearing romance from the lips of one who had lived. Half shutting her eyes she let the sun draw bright patterns from her lashes and fancied herself strolling through the painted corridors of the lake palaces. Her childish fancy returned. She should have been born earlier. She should have been one of the maidens chosen for the Emperor. Then perhaps she could have won his love. Her heart relaxed into meditating upon imaginary pictures which never could have been true, but which were pleasant to think about, wound about her as they were by the golden haze of the old t'ai-t'ai's memories. But they made her slightly disdainful of the West, till even the home of the Ferrises seemed common-place compared with her dreams of a barge punted lazily through the flowering heads of the lotus or the indolence of sipping tea in a red pavilion beside a still pool.
"No, those times are gone," said the t'ai-t'ai with a sigh, "they won't return in our day. And you, my child, will never be one of the ladies of the Emperor." She smiled quietly at Nancy's conceit. "But you can still hold these things in your heart; you can paint them and make them into verses for your children. For you will have many children and you will teach them to love China."
Nancy flushed at the t'ai-t'ai's prediction and wondered whose these unborn children should be.