"It is the spirit of our mother," she said in Chinese.
Herrick took the fragile object from her hands. He looked at the golden characters so faithfully written. Their meaning he knew well enough, but his eyes seemed too blurred to read the letters distinctly. With great difficulty he restrained himself from falling low before this little thing of wood. The task of deciding Nancy's fate was too much for him. He was tired.
"You are your mother's daughter," he said. "Nancy, Nancy, Nancy—I cannot choose for you."
CHAPTER VII
Kuei-lien tried in vain to learn what had been said between father and daughter. She could get no clue. Herrick smilingly told her that Nancy was too young to think of marriage. "We needn't bother about it till the time comes." She was afraid to ask open questions from the child, who was mistress of a baffling, innocent reserve at times, which outwitted the clever fencing of the concubine.
Kuei-lien was not idly curious. Her acute instinct told her plainly that momentous things had been said, things closely concerned with her own fortune. She read this much in the faces of the man and the girl. She read news of defeat and was vexed to find herself worsted by an enemy she could not circumvent.
Already it was August, the last sultriness of summer; the terrific rains, which would not come again for ten months, had poured down the mountain side and swamped the plains. Even the rockiest slopes were a lush green, while camels, ungainly brutes in charge of little naked boys who guided their movements with a well-aimed pebble, had excellent pasturage at the foot of the hills. The days would be clear now, but soon there would be frost; the leaves of the maples would change color. Herrick detested cold weather, would be restless for the warmer comforts of town. If there were to be any profit from this solitary retreat to the mountains Kuei-lien knew it was time to make haste.
She altered her tactics, recognizing now that the episode of the kiss, laughable though it had seemed, had snapped her hold upon Nancy. So she diverted her attention to Edward, who was a quick, lively youngster, ready to venture forth and slay monsters. The watchtower was always a goad to the boy's imagination, making him aware that he was treading the byways of an ancient hunting park where the Tatar princes used to send swift arrows to the heart of their quarry. Edward prepared his own bow and arrows while Kuei-lien stirred him to mimic the exploits of his dead heroes. He took advantage of Herrick's nodding eye and wandered far afield, achieving merciless execution upon the trees and stones which were all these degenerate days offered in place of the tigers and bears and antlered stags men once hunted. He did get one thrilling glimpse of a fox, which he magnified in his excitement to a leopard, and he often twanged his bow ineffectually in the wake of rabbits and pheasants. His most vigilant guard, however, was against foreigners. Against their approach he had built a little beacon tower of stone, and he secreted dry sticks from the all-seeing eye of the fuel-gatherer so that when the time came, when alien hordes approached threatening from the West, he could light a warning flame and save the golden roofs of Peking!
Inevitably Edward pressed Nancy into his play. What was the good of a sister unless she lent herself to something useful? Nancy was quick enough to justify her own usefulness and not content to take merely passive roles, to be nothing better than the Mongol foe or the harassed tiger, which Edward with traditions unconsciously derived from the boys of his English ancestral country thought a girl and a sister predestined to play. The two children climbed and played and quarreled and smiled again and explored devious sheep tracks with a freedom they had never known; they grew bolder and bolder in the distances they ventured, plunging down the gravelly paths before the sun was high and trying to outstretch the light of the evening twilight.