She went to him with a happy smile on her face for she had been waiting a long, long time to hear this summons. With the instinctive genius of the wanton she lured the man to new frenzies of love, taunted him, by a modesty artfully affected, into committing new blissful indignities, glamorous outrages, in which her master tried to stifle the soul as well as the body of his slave and succeeded only in stifling his own. Then she sat naked on the floor before his couch, her hair raveled but her eyes cool, and lighted the lamp and heated the first of the little pellets which were to induce days of passionate stupor. He dozed; he dreamed; the sickly smoke filled the room.
Kuei-lien picked up her scattered garments. She was still smiling.
CHAPTER XII
For a full week Herrick lived behind closed doors. It was a long devastating bout, and it was a hatefully dull week for Nancy and Edward. Recent liberty made their present confinement wear all the more heavily. Romantic memories of Elizabeth and Helen and David made the lonely children captious and cross with one another. They had no zest for books; the sun kept eternally shining; it called them away to the mountain tops. Edward fumed because he could get no practice with his newly made bow; Nancy sat on the platform above the ravine, musing as to who should rescue her from her boredom, and more and more she wondered who could rescue her from fear. For fear was beating at the gates of her courage.
In this narrow temple of the Western Hills Herrick's absence weighed like sultry heat upon the atmosphere of the household, quieting the tongue of the amah and the vociferous exchanges of the servants. Kuei-lien came and went with the preoccupation of a nurse waiting upon a sick man. But the fact Nancy saw and the fact she despised was that the preoccupation was a happy one. At last, one day Nancy could stand it no more.
"I want to see my father," she said.
Kuei-lien looked at her with surprise. The sneer on her lips almost faded before the resolute dignity of the girl. For the first time the all-conquering audacity of the concubine was checked; Kuei-lien began to feel misgivings about this stubborn child, misgivings and a little fear, because she could not meet Nancy's obstinacy with her usual effective mockery.
"I want to see my father," the girl repeated.
"But you can't see him," Kuei-lien said. "He is busy. He would call for you if he wished to see you."