Sun and moon

by Vincent H. Gowen

But the newest concubine, the reigning favorite in Timothy Herrick's affections, was an animated contrast to the three who had preceded her. While they were handsome, she was brilliantly beautiful, an exquisite figure and face, with creamy skin, glowing eyes, lips which needed no scarlet paint to accentuate their color, heavy black hair that shone by an iridescence of its own to which the oil of elder bark could have added nothing. She was the only one of his wives with whom Herrick had become definitely infatuated. Such was his delight in her company that for days she did not appear at meals with the other women or enter their apartments, but shared the board as well as the bed of her master. In consequence she was so bitterly disliked that any of her three predecessors gladly would have thrust a knife into her breast or marred her body by slow torture.

It was a further cause for quarrel with the t'ai-t'ai that this wanton creature had been taken particularly under her protection. Indeed, she was accused of having brought about Kuei-lien's advancement. Most of the slave girls were coarse drudges, soon polluted by the sluttery of their living quarters. Kuei-lien not only had been bought at the instance of the t'ai-t'ai but made the subject of partial treatment, spared the harder tasks, given better clothes, and defended from the familiarity of the menservants. So there was reason to perceive more design than accident in Herrick's discovery of the girl and his command that she be divested of her humble attire, bathed, dressed in costly silks, and brought like a queen to his chamber.

The relationship of Nancy and Edward to the four mistresses of their father was most informal. They were not shocked by the function of these women because they had never been taught to be shocked. It was an ordinance of nature that a man should have as many wives as he could afford, a sign that all was well with the business investments from which Herrick drew his income. The boy and girl moved quite freely through the house and were on amiably chatty terms with its inhabitants. They played with the children, most of course with Li-an, who had been longer their playmate and was a fair partner in their quarrels and their peacemakings; they fell out now with one group, now with another, but most often with each other, so that no one grieved long over these usual bickerings of children. In the jealousies of the household they had not been involved. The women had treated them with advised caution, preferring not to complicate their intrigues by introducing a new and unstable ingredient. They did not understand the two foreign children, and so treated them with a careful friendliness such as committed themselves neither to enmity nor to love.

But Kuei-lien had disdained these wary tactics. She had set herself quite openly to win Nancy's affection and of course had met no reverse, since the charm which had won the father was easily adaptable to winning the daughter. Nancy even had asked the t'ai-t'ai to put Kuei-lien at the table with them, but this slight upon the others Hai t'ai-t'ai and the amah both agreed was not politic. Still there was nothing to prevent Kuei-lien's spending much time in Nancy's room, which the others never entered of their own accord, where talk, replete with zest and flavor, helped the intimacy to grow.

The championship of the amah had won her charges more seclusion than the others enjoyed. The house, like all Chinese houses, was of many sections, divided by courtyards, and, like the houses of the North, it was substantially built. Occupants and servants and even the dogs moved with no thought of privacy through its rooms and hallways, that is, through all except the portion allotted to Nancy and Edward. Now that the brother and sister had grown too old to live together, they had been given the choicest part of the house and the innermost, where they lived, virtually isolated, between the garden and the last of the courts, with the t'ai-t'ai and their amah for the only immediate neighbors.

They could have asked no place more charming. Their rooms were to left and right of the hallway; which was continued in a straight line through every section of the house so that if all the heavy middle doors had been opened the garden could have been seen from the street as at the end of a long tunnel. Their doors and windows faced the courtyard and this was a very pleasant place. Locust trees towered on either side; from their lowest branches hung cages in which canaries sang and starlings raucously mimicked human speech. Into the pavement two small pools had been built, where goldfish flashed their tails as they swam to and fro round islands of porous rock on which tiny houses and temples and bridges and figures of men and women, in fascinating diversity of posture, had been set to give lifelikeness to the mossy crags. There were flower beds too, multicolored in their profusion of zinnia and canna and marigold, while a vine with diminutive scarlet blossoms climbed the bamboo scaffolding, across which matting was rolled to break the glare of the sun.

Here Nancy and Edward enjoyed very comfortable quiet. Except when servants went through to wash clothes in the pond, they were seldom disturbed; the concubines preferred the liveliness of their own courtyard and rarely went walking in the garden till the afternoon sun had gone down. All day long, after the clothes had been beaten dry on flat stones and the thumping of wooden paddles had ceased, the children heard only the songs of their birds and the agreeably shrill noise of the cicada.

Since her preferment, however, the slave girl Kuei-lien had become a visitor to Nancy's room and at any hour of the day, when the children were not shouting their lessons from the adjacent schoolroom, might lift the screen of Nancy's door and enter. The afternoon was the time she liked best to come, when the shady coolness of Nancy's room was a refuge from the child-infested chambers of her own quarter.

It was a simple room but spacious, divided into two parts by a screen of carved wood in which was an octagonal opening, quaintly shaped, to allow passage from Nancy's bedchamber to what in effect was her parlor. The furniture was not sumptuous; the carpets had been removed at the beginning of summer and the stone floor covered with matting. There were the usual stiff-backed wooden chairs and one or two reclining ones of wicker, narrow tables on which stood gaudy vases, cheap and disagreeably shaped. The walls were decorated with Nancy's own efforts at painting. In the bedchamber were boxes of white pigskin where the girl stored her clothes. The bed itself was a large varnished affair inlaid with different woods. Four posts held up the muslin mosquito curtain. Nancy, never having known steel springs or horsehair mattresses, was quite content with the wicker network over which she had spread a thin cotton pad, leaving the heavier quilts and the mat, which was the coolest to sleep upon in sultry weather, rolled to one side of the bed.

It was here Kuei-lien usually found the girl lying, comfortably divested of the outer garments she donned only for meals and classes, her head raised upon a bamboo pillow and her hand slowly fanning the knees she had drawn up in front of her. Kuei-lien herself would slip off trousers and jacket and lie on the bed beside her or squat cross-legged on a large low stool and share with Nancy the cigarettes which helped their confidences. And Edward, if he were bored or too lazy to sleep, made a third and teased the girls with pleasant sedateness proper to a hot afternoon.