The second irritant was of another kind and quite another degree; it grew in seriousness with the passage of years and vexed the quiet of his sleep. It was the fate of Nancy and Edward, the two children of his first marriage. For his other children, he did not worry; there were several of them, from Li-an, a girl of eleven, down to an infant son still being bumped in his cradle, but they were all more Chinese than foreign and with the help of generous betrothal gifts could be assimilated by the country of their birth. Nancy and Edward were different. Although they never knowingly had seen, apart from their father, another member of their own race and in twelve years had left their compound only on the rarest occasion and then in a covered mule cart to visit the Western Hills, there was no disguising their foreign blood.
It had seemed easy, when they were babies, to mould them to their environment by education and custom and speech, but there was a stubbornness inherent in their nature which had resisted the Orient and kept the girl and the boy exotic. They had lost claim to any country and grown up disinherited by West and East alike. The father saw this more and more plainly and regretted his selfishness in keeping them when it would have been so easy to send them to his kinsfolk at home. At the time of his first wife's death he could not bear to part with them. They were the only relic of a woman he had loved so well that his whole after life had become a slow descent, because his heart told him the hopelessness of living again on the plane he had reached with her.
He had deliberately turned away from that life because it was ended, cut short, impossible of being renewed. He had chosen in preference a life which would ask no comparison with the past; the tale of his success was being revealed in the relaxing lines of his mouth, the sensual fullness of his chin, a hardening of the eyes. The more serenely burned the memory of his wife,—the years never changing the austerity of her beauty, something perfect like the imperishable beauty of jade,—the more contemptuous did he grow in his thoughts of women, as if to mark her apartness, and give rein to the amorous cruelty of a tyrant. One by one the children had seen the household increase as some new young girl was bought to satisfy the whims of their father, and one by one they had seen these favorites, after serving their time as mistress and mother, relegated to the women's quarters, which were daily becoming more expensive a luxury.
But Herrick remained uncomfortable amid it all. He could not be morally at ease while these two wide-eyed strangers from the West reminded him of his troublesome duty. They were holding him back from that complete immersion in the indolent life he had chosen. He could not swallow the opiate of peace. Their faces seemed to reproach him for neglect; they were uncomfortably knowing. He imagined them talking between themselves in the candid youthful way which appraises too exactly the faults of parents. Theirs had been a curious education because Herrick had made it plain from the first that they were not to be interfered with by the Chinese women of his household.
Trouble had begun after Li-an was born, the stepmother, with a child of her own to advance, having tried to cow these children of an alien mother by petty acts of jealousy, which it was fortunate for Nancy and Edward they had the championship of their old nurse to resist. This nurse had been with them all their lives, and, by fighting tooth and nail each effort to reduce their position, had won for them a freedom from the quarrels and intrigues of the family. As Li-an soon had other rivals to dispute her inheritance, her mother had trouble enough in wielding her sway over the rank of inferior wives and was content to let the foreign girl and boy go their way alone. So they were in the family but not of it, intimately subject to the direction of only one person, the old amah, who humored and spoiled them, telling them always that they were superior beings and secretly undoing their father's attempt to make them Chinese.
Herrick's desire was one the amah hotly resented. She had the peculiar loyalty of an old servant and, remembering Nancy's mother with an affection close to worship, looked with contempt on the women who had followed. They were trash. She was not going to let Herrick's aberrations of passion ruin the hopes of her foster children. With the servile fidelity of a dog she had attached herself to creatures of an alien race, had wrapped her interests in theirs, till her one wish was to see Miss Nancy and Master Edward restored to their own people, where their station, she was sure, would be almost royal. So she fed them with marvelous tales of the West; of its greatness; tales of their own importance. She waited on their moods like a slave and produced in them a bearing of haughty independence which they never quite laid aside, even when they mixed in play with their half brothers and half sisters or took their part chattily in the gossip of the inner courts.
Their formal education, for a long time, had been only in Chinese, the old classical education to which Herrick was partial. They had learned to recite the Four Books and much of the Five Classics and had passed through the obsolete training of Chinese youth, from the redundant exercises laid like a yoke upon children—the Tri-metrical Classic, the Thousand Character Classic—to the pleasanter fields of T'ang poetry, which their teacher explained to them with unusual interest and skill, so that Nancy and Edward often amused themselves patterning upon the hero and heroines of the Red Balcony in contests for writing verse of their own. They wrote well. They spent hours over characters and could fill a scroll with swift symmetrical strokes. They could draw and paint landscapes which they had never seen, landscapes of mountain and valley, temple and trees, delicately colored after the unwavering tradition of the past. This, except for the few novels their teacher approved, The Three Kingdoms, The Dream of the Red Balcony, and Travels in the West, and the many which he did not approve, novels they begged secretly from the women of the household and which related with utmost frankness every physical detail of intercourse between the sexes,—though the talk they had listened to all their lives left them little need to be enlightened further,—this promised to be the whole of their education till their father began, in a hesitating way, to teach them English.
Timothy Herrick had not intended such instruction. It marked the first timid thought of surrender, a breach in the logic of their training. But Nancy at ten so disquieted him that he could not rest till he had made some amends for depriving her these many years of the birthright of her native speech. If his plans did fail,—he would not admit that they could,—if she and her brother did resist their absorption into Chinese life, he could give them this means of saving themselves. It was the least he could do, but it meant the possibility of sending them to England, should the need come, where among the uncles and cousins and aunts, to whom he had written not a word in a decade, there were certainly some who could take his children in charge.
He taught them, however, with discretion, always reminding them that English was a foreign tongue. So Nancy and Edward, though they learned to speak with a considerable if bookish fluency, looked upon English very much as an English schoolboy looks upon Latin, as a speech dealing with far-off times and manners. They liked to use it between themselves from the sheer mischievous pleasure of mystifying the other children of the compound; there was the spiteful relish of abusing to their faces people who were not a word the wiser. Then again it was a bond with their father, of whom they grew measurably fonder now that he and they constituted a little aristocracy to which no others had access. Herrick himself soon realized this and liked it less; it was another subtle influence helping to tear him asunder. But when once the habit of daily lessons was formed he could not give up the grave companionship of these two children, who, fight the thought as he would, came closer to his heart than all the tumbling black-haired brats of the compound.
Yet the first thoughts of the girl and the boy were always Chinese. Their background was the Confucian background of their long-nailed teacher, though there were side paths of course into Buddhist and Taoist lore, things they learned from the women or from the nuns who came to collect alms. Of Western history and life, of wars and political changes, they knew scarcely more than the Chihli farmer ploughing his sandy fields or the Mongolian camel-driver leading his tinkling caravan on the night road to Peking. What they heard, except from the few colorless English books they were allowed, was the chatter and gossip of the courts. Newspapers did not come into the women's quarters; these were kept in that sombre room, their father's study, where they dared go only when invited. So they felt themselves better than the Chinese they mingled with, but no kin to the prodigious people of the West.