This was both more and less than Timothy Herrick had planned.
CHAPTER II
The bell rang for tiffin. The servants were very punctilious about this bell. The custom of ringing it, imported by the amah for the seemly benefit of her two children, had become a family rite and the subject of much pride to the women, who boasted to the families round about that they were always called to meals by this stately summons. Such was Nancy's and Edward's deference to the custom that they rushed immediately to their rooms, Li-an only a step behind them, and had soon appeared, clad in trousers and jacket, to do honor, as their nurse had taught them, to the formality of the noonday meal.
Herrick of course did not eat with them. The condescension was not expected. But the size of his family was amply demonstrated by the women and children who had gathered round the square tables in the room which was referred to rather proudly as the dining-room, although dining was only one of its dozen functions. Nancy and Edward sat at one table with their half sister Li-an and her mother, the woman who as Herrick's wife held the right of first place in the household.
Hai t'ai-t'ai, as she was called, was not an old woman; she had been less than twenty when her father, Herrick's teacher for many years, a man harassed by a shoal of impecunious relations, saw profit to his family and the strengthening of a curious attachment in marrying his daughter to this wealthy Commissioner of Customs. But responsibilities had aged her appearance till she seemed nearer fifty than thirty,—responsibilities and much good eating,—so that she was now a stout matronly person with the wooden masklike face which goes with dignity. On her shoulders fell the management of the establishment, the settlement of the many disputes which were bound to arise where wives and maids and menservants and children of several breeds were so inextricably mixed.
On the whole, she was equal to her place. She maintained her rule with considerable strictness, controlled expenditure thriftily enough to lay aside means of her own, saw that Li-an, if she could not lord it over Nancy and Edward, could at least lord it over the inferior brothers and sisters that had followed. She would not have exchanged the privileges of power for the less substantial marks of favor which fell to the lot of the younger wives. From only one person could she claim no obedience; that was the nurse. But Hai t'ai-t'ai, in the happy old Chinese manner of compromise, tacitly recognized the care of the two white children as a matter outside her province, accepting them as though they were ambassadors with treaty rights in her kingdom.
Between the two other tables the four concubines and their families were divided. To the casual observer they seemed an amiable, good-tempered group, knit together into a queer democracy, democracy based upon a man's more volatile affections, yet there was not a person among them who did not have her own pretensions and rights, so that the family, if all secrets could be told, was the most carefully graded of principalities. Since all of them, like the t'ai-t'ai herself, had been chosen because they satisfied Herrick's fastidious notions of beauty, all were young, all were vivacious and handsome. It was not fading of feature but cares of motherhood that had caused each in turn to be supplanted, although none of them could claim her master's love to the exclusion of the others.
As secondary wives, they lacked of course the rank of the t'ai-t'ai; they also lacked her gentility. But they were not deterred by the fact of inferior station from grumbling over her control and imagining ways of replacing her in the management of the family. The oldest of these concubines felt particularly aggrieved because she had borne her master two sons and by Chinese custom should have stepped definitely ahead of a wife who had borne but one miserable daughter. She felt her injury more deeply as the years passed; the delights of the table, from which she could not hold herself back, were visibly altering the daintiness of her figure and she deemed it only fair, only the natural course, that she should regain through her sons the influence her body was resigning.
Of the other three, two had been mothers once and had the prospect of soon being mothers again, while the last was a young slave girl of seventeen who had been exalted to the rank of mistress by the recent whim of her master. The two mothers were pretty, ordinary women, very much wrapped in their children and busier ramming chopsticks into those sticky mouths than in filling their own. They accepted the lead of the first concubine, aligning themselves with her complaints, but they were always properly docile in the presence of the t'ai-t'ai and, if left alone, would have found business enough in the care of their children.