Sun and moon

by Vincent H. Gowen

"Humbugs!" she snorted in a cold scornful voice which struck with double sharpness on their ears because of the sudden hush in the chamber. "Humbugs!"

Then she dropped back with a gasp on her pillow. The old t'ai-t'ai had spoken her mind to the last.

There was a shameful pause, as though the family waited one of her familiar scoldings and could not believe she was dead. Her eldest son was the first to rouse himself. During the unspeakable silence which still prevailed he got up slowly and lighted incense and white candles beside the bed while everyone watched him, spellbound. Not till the first spluttering glow of the candles could they move.

When at last they realized that the spirit of the old t'ai-t'ai was being lighted on her way, they went mad. Everyone began shouting and crying and tearing his hair; the women beat their breasts and forced tears from their eyes. The room was not large enough to hold the echo of their weeping. Yet in the midst of this paroxysm Nancy could hear her name called. She looked round. Her stepmother was beckoning to her. The others were so taken up by their own grief that they paid no heed when Nancy stumbled over them to emerge from the frenzied circle of mourners.

"I have some work for you to do," whispered her stepmother, giving her orders about things she was to fetch.

Nancy stole out of the room unobserved and went blindly through the dark house, hearing the din of the weeping family jangling across every cold courtyard. She was too numb with sorrow to think about herself or her own fate. She wanted to weep out her heart beside the body of her mistress. Nothing else at this moment could satisfy her. She found a candle and groped into the room to which her stepmother had sent her. Suddenly she heard a noise and turned. Only a pace behind her stood the woman herself. Nancy saw, with a frightened glance, that she had no good intent in her mind; she saw her glaring, like a panther ready to spring.

"I promised you should go," said the woman harshly, "and you're going—now! You are not going back there, do you hear me? You are not one of us, you don't belong to this family, and you shall not weep with us just because you managed to addle the brains of my old mother. You killed her. You are not fit for us to wipe our feet on. Out you go, I say! Go and play the whore with your foreign friend! You are a stench in our nostrils. You slut, you filthy tortoise, you dirty bawd, what right have you to think you can go in there and corrupt the dead with your false tears?"

Nancy was staggered by this abuse. It meant only one thing in her mind, that she was being robbed of her place beside the body of her protector. Her heart could not grasp the idea of being torn away with this cruel, this unbelievable abruptness. She cared nothing for herself, nothing for her own future; she would have bartered the freedom of a lifetime just to be allowed to cling to that lifeless body; she was lost to all reason; she sobbed for the privilege of being close to her dead mistress as though more than her life hung upon it. She could not believe that her stepmother was in earnest; she could not believe that she, who had shared the golden beauty of these last days in the company of her beloved old t'ai-t'ai, should be driven away like an outcast, like a creature lower than the dogs which slunk through the open doors. She opened her mouth in protest, ready to offer herself as a slave, but the woman fetched her a stinging blow across the lips.

"Your words have done enough mischief in this house," she jeered. "I won't hear more of them."

Nancy drew back. The candle shook in her hand, throwing ominous, weird shadows across her face. She was an animal which has been wounded and does not know the meaning of the violence dealt to it. Then from far away, like a rising gust of wind, came the dismal lamentation of the mourners. With a start Nancy dropped the candle. An overpowering impulse seized her to rush back, back to her mistress, to throw herself on the floor, to throw herself on the ground by the bed, and to weep. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else must stand in her way. She was mad. She was indeed an animal, an animal trapped, beating out its life in its panic to get the one thing it desired.