For a second time, after all his years in Peking, Herrick was denying the sureness of the root which his life had taken in alien soil, by turning to a casually met stranger from the West for help he looked in vain to obtain from his adopted countrymen.
"This is a hideous place," he remarked, scanning the dirty whitewashed walls of the guestroom into which Nasmith had ushered him. "You don't live here, I hope."
"No, thank God."
"This is the blight our Western ways put upon China. How can you instruct students in a hole like this? These places make me more anti foreign than the Chinese themselves. I should like to sweep all of you into the sea; I can see too well the beauty you are desecrating."
Nasmith thought to himself that the reverse might also be true. He had spent an unquiet winter. He had never ceased debating the choice Herrick had given him, as though the offer still lay open for his decision. It was futile, useless debate, a purely academic distraction from which no profit could be gained, yet it continued to wound him. Nancy had cast a spell of vivid charm over all his family; she had won their hearts by an interest which long outlasted the summer, a charm which hung over them like a receding shadow so that they lived almost with bated breath beneath the fascination of her mystery, wondering where she was, what she was doing and—this they felt but feared to mention aloud—what perils she might be facing with the steadfast dark eyes they remembered so tenderly.
Nasmith's particular recollections were still more poignant because Herrick's unconventional offer, the curious phrasing of his scrolls, upon which the offer had shed some light, made him feel that Nancy's life was bound to his by a fateful sympathy which would persist even though it were balked of all real fulfillment. Yet even now, attracted to a Nancy who was almost a legend, he could not make up his mind to accept, if her father renewed the proposal.
He might have spared himself these worries. The older man set that issue at rest by his next words.
"I have come on a matter of business," he said.
"Business?"
"Yes, I want your help in something I have postponed for years, something I hoped I might never have to do: it smacks too much of your dreary Western formality. But I know, now, my mind will be easier when it's done. I want to make my will."