The boy broke into English, most alarming English, violent curses such as foreigners in China use to loose their wrath on servants who luckily cannot understand, mixed with phrases he could have learned only in books—he showed at once that he had not acquired the tongue from playmates of his own age but was speaking it from the need to say something portentously terrible, something which to his youthful consciousness would answer the purposes of blasphemy.
"You filthy devil, Nancy," he shouted, "I will strike you dead! I will cause you to fall!"
Nancy answered him by peals of laughter. She stood poised with tantalizing ease, her hands held up to the branch above her, and swayed back and forth without fear of her brother's threats. She exposed to derision the bookish mould of his words.
"Oh, you naughty boy, Edward, you will cause me to fall, will you?"
Before the boy could move out upon her precarious platform, she had let go her hold, doubled her knees, and shot from bough to bough down the tree like a white cascade or like snow shaken free from overladen branches.
Edward, seeing his enemy had escaped, was satisfied in his turn to pelt her with cones and was vigorously at battle when a third child, even younger, emerged from the bamboo and protested at the noise of their quarreling. This child, a girl, was decidedly different from the others. She had Chinese complexion, Chinese features; she was dressed in the hot-weather négligé which girls of her age could wear in the privacy of the home, long loose trousers, stockings, slippers, an apron, cut so that it covered the front of her body and held in place by strings round her back and her neck. When she came up to Nancy, however, and stood beside the taller girl, there was immediately apparent a resemblance between the two children, a resemblance baffling to decipher, for, even when allowance was made for four years' disparity in age, no one could say it consisted definitely in eyes or mouth or even in the slightly un-Chinese prominence of the nose, yet the resemblance was latently noticeable and was a likeness which included the boy as well. This second girl, then, gave some clue to the history of these strange children; she was certainly their half sister, and it took no great powers of deduction to surmise European parents for them, the same father and a Chinese mother for herself. Exactly this was the case.
Timothy Edward Oliver Herrick had been the subject of Peking scandal twelve years before. He had, to the shocked astonishment of his friends, "gone Chinese," which was another proof, to those who hated the drudgery of turning the pages of Giles's heavy dictionary, that too much study of Chinese makes men mad. He had come to China at the early age of twenty—that was thirty years back—and risen quickly from post to post in the Imperial Customs, passing his examinations brilliantly, learning much in all the ports of the Middle Kingdom, charming society out of its stiffness by his wit and tact, penetrating the aloofness of the mandarin, winning distinction in diplomacy and sport, orders, badges, medals, cups, a whole roomful of trophies, and marrying a girl fresh from her schooling in England, the daughter of a consul and undeniably the loveliest, in a decade, of those damsels who return to enjoy a brief season with exiled parents in the East. So for four years they had lived, favored by wealth, honor, love, the ingredients of a fairy tale, till on a sudden Nancy Herrick died,—cholera that year struck down even those in high places,—while her husband retired into a seclusion he never again broke.
In appalled whispers it was mooted through Peking that Timothy Herrick, with his two children, had taken house in an obscure hutung of the Tatar city and that the beautiful Nancy Herrick had been followed not by one Chinese wife only but by several.
Gossip, for once, was true to the facts, probably because society could think of no exaggeration more dreadful than the truth. At the back of twisting lanes, behind bright blue doors studded with brass, Timothy Herrick had created a new world of his own in the spacious security of a Chinese house and there with his wife and his concubines he lived the life of a mandarin. He had discarded Western clothes, Western ways, discarded his British nationality, taken to a moderate use of opium, and now passed his time between an erudite searching of the Buddhist scriptures and the composition of severely classical poems.
Yet this placid consolation for sorrow, this refinement of the patriarchal life which has stood the Chinese race so well for centuries, had one or two irritants. The first, seemingly small yet vexing, was Herrick's chagrin at his failure to grow a queue or, rather, at the futility of a brown queue in a land of black-haired people. He remembered the ridiculous figure of a missionary who had tried this, and knew that while his own florid face, with its heavy eyebrows and moustaches, bobbed up oddly from the collar of his lavender jacket, it would look none the less incongruous if his square forehead were shaved and the back of his head ornamented by a dwindling tail. The Revolution, however hateful its other changes, did at least solve this problem of how to be completely Chinese by making the queue unfashionable.