Sun and moon

by Vincent H. Gowen

Nancy was properly confounded. Her cheeks grew red with embarrassment, but Herrick's sternness consisted in words alone. He had got the hint he wished and could afford to smile at his own reproof, for the wisdom of a father sometimes compassed facts his daughter had not even guessed, facts she lacked the experience to acknowledge.

Nancy went away much puzzled. She had thought, from some of her father's questions, that he actually intended sending her to visit the Ferrises. In the first lonely reaction to the excitement she had been enjoying, excitement so unexampled in her tranquil life, she wished with all her heart he would let her go so that she might laugh and talk and share her world of new impressions with Elizabeth and Helen. The house still echoed to their voices, the rooms were still haunted by their eager merry faces. Edward was no comfort to her just now. Life had suddenly become drab.

She went to her room, bolted the door, lay face down on the bed and abandoned her overladen heart to a spell of frantic weeping.

Herrick too had done a thing he seldom did: he had gone walking alone. He also felt the depression which pervaded the house. He had got a glimpse of Edward, sitting woebegone in the courtyard, trying, with the half-hearted need of doing something, to fashion a new bow. The sight was too much. Here was another problem forced upon him. He had been thinking so exclusively of Nancy, whose case was so urgent, that he had forgotten poor Edward for the moment, forgotten that his was another difficult future to provide. The man could not sit at home any longer. He had to walk off his mood by stubborn climbing, climbing which did not end till he had scaled the old beacon tower and seated himself heavily in a bastion that overlooked leagues of mountain.

Here he had no choice but to think. He saw only vaguely the lucent glory of the scene, the still evening sunshine, the imperturbable towers of the distance; even the far, far-away golden palace roofs of Peking vexed him because they spoke of the peace he had been seeking these many years whereas his mind had been betrayed into nothing but ugly turmoil.

Herrick pictured the might-have-beens of the past. Suppose he had sent his children home, as he knew he ought to have done when he first discarded his kinship with the West; what would they have been now? Would the benevolence of uncles and aunts have compensated for the loss of their father? Yes, perhaps it might have compensated them; they would have grown up ignorant of the parent whom their elders would refer to in bated, pitying terms as a man gone wrong. It might have compensated them; but how could it have made up to him for the loss of his two children?

He wished he could have seen Nancy in a Western frock as the Ferris girls had clothed her. Then he might have judged for himself whether she was to be preferred to the grave maiden whom the East had trained. By now she would have spent twelve years in the peace of an English garden. She would be making the daily round of her flowers, the primroses and foxgloves and hollyhocks he could fancy her tending, and playing tennis on the cropped lawn, or reading lazily in a basket chair, dreaming of the seaside and dances and picnics. And Edward would be home for the holidays, speaking the amazing idiom of a schoolboy. It was a pleasant picture, Herrick admitted, rather sentimental perhaps, and, except when he was homesick, a little insipid; but the one element of the scene which stuck in his mind was that in this scene he could take no part. He certainly did not wish to be doddering round with a cane or listening to his relatives as they discussed the vicar's Whitsunday sermon and the prospects of the county show or the perennially banal topic of Farmer George's rheumatism. It seemed really a merit not to have condemned Nancy and Edward to this.

No, it was not the past of which Herrick was jealous, but the future, the future which threatened to tear away his children. The father discerned the enmity of fate in the chance that, after his long-maintained watchfulness, suddenly had given Nancy and Edward friends from the West. He hated these friends, hated the attraction which would undo all his careful work, breathing life into the stolid wood-block people of their English readers, restoring to the girl and the boy a living tongue for one he wished them to think of as dead. He was jealous of Helen and Elizabeth, jealous of Mrs. Ferris and Beresford, but above all things jealous of the quiet Nasmith, in whose destiny he perceived some occult link with Nancy's itself.

"I will not give them up," he said vehemently. "After training them all these years, after giving them something better and finer than anything they could have got in England, what a fool I should be to turn them over to the first blond strangers they meet. It would be a waste, nothing more than a waste. Nasmith and the rest of them can hang before I'll let Nancy or Edward see them again. I won't destroy my own work."

Having made this decision, which decided nothing, Herrick gave it immediate effect. He ordered his children for their safety's sake not to go out of the temple enclosure. He said nothing more about Nancy's visiting the Ferrises. He was mastered by the need to forget all these urgent problems. He called for wine, called for his opium pipe, called for Kuei-lien.