"The times are hard and wages low, Oh, leave her, Johnny, leave her. I guess it's time for us to go, Oh, leave her, Johnny, leave her. I thought I heard the old man say, Oh, leave her, Johnny, leave her. To-morrow we will get our pay .......leave her"

Rhoda Ammidon discovered herself leaning forward tensely, her hands shut in excitement and emotion; and she relaxed with a happy laugh as the Nautilus, with her yards exactly square and rigging taut, her sides and figurehead and ports bright with newly laid on paint, moved to the wharf.

It seemed to her that Gerrit, descending a short stage from the deck, looked markedly older than when he had last sailed. Yet he had a surprisingly youthful air still; partly, she thought, from the manner in which he wore his hair, falling in a waving thick line about his cheeks. His mouth was at once fresh and severe, his face clean shaven, and his eyes—if possible—more directly blue than ever.

"I'll take the ship's manifest to the Collector," he said, greeting them and impatiently waving aside the vendors after the cook's slush, the excited women and runners and human miscellany crowding forward. "Then Java Head." He paused, speaking over his shoulder: "I'd be thankful if you would send the barouche down in an hour or so."

Driving back, her hand on Jeremy Ammidon's knee, Rhoda wondered at Gerrit's request. It was entirely unlike him to ride in the barouche; rather he had always derided it in the terms of his calling. However, unable to find a solution for her surprise, she listened to the other's comments and speculations:

"I suppose William's first question will be about the cargo, and, of course, I hope the ship has done well. But I'm just glad to have Gerrit back; I am for a fact, Rhoda."

"We all are," she assured him, "and William as happy as any. You mustn't be misled by his manner, father. I hope the supper will be good and please you."

"Gerrit will be satisfied with anything," he chuckled. "Probably he's been out of beans even for a month. Did you notice that fore-royal mast and yard? They were rigged at sea: Gerrit carried them away. It hurts him to take in a sail. Some day I tell him he'll drag the spars out of his ship. His confounded pride will founder him." He made these charges lightly, with a palpable underlying pride; and, Rhoda knew, would permit no one else to criticize his son.

She found her daughters in a state of gala excitement on the front steps. "Uncle Gerrit in the Nautilus," Laurel chanted; and it was evident that Camilla herself was thrilled. They all went up to put on holiday dress. Rhoda turned to the coachman, "Have the barouche at the head of Derby Wharf in an hour."

Gerrit's unusual demand again puzzled her. A fantastic possibility lodged in her brain—perhaps he was not alone. She pulled the bell rope for her maid, changed into black moire with cut steel bretelles, and selected the peacock coloring of a Peri-taus shawl. She found her husband with his father in the library. "I understand it's a splendid cargo," William remarked. Jeremy nodded triumphantly at her, and she expressed a half humorous resentment at this mercenary display. "He ought to be here," the younger man declared, consulting his watch. As he spoke Rhoda saw the barouche draw up before the house. She had a glimpse of a figure at Gerrit Ammidon's side in extravagantly brilliant satins; there was a sibilant whisper of rich materials in the hall, and the master entered the library with a pale set face.

"Father," he said, "Rhoda and William, allow me—my wife, Taou Yuen."

Rhoda Ammidon gave an uncontrollable gasp as the Chinese woman sank in a fluttering prostration of color at Jeremy's feet. He ejaculated, "God bless me," and started back. William's face was inscrutable, unguessed lines appeared about his severe mouth. Her own sensation was one of incredulity touched with mounting anger and feeling of outrage. The woman rose, but only to sink again before William: she was on her knees and, supported by her hands, bent forward and touched her forehead to the floor three times. Gerrit laughed shortly. "She was to shake your hands; we went over and over it on shipboard. But anything less than the Kul'on was too casual for her."

She was now erect with a freer murmur of greeting to Rhoda. The latter was instantly aware of one certainty—Chinese she might be, she was, but no less absolutely aristocratic. Her face, oval and slightly flat, was plastered with paint on paint, but her gesture, the calm scrutiny of enigmatic black eyes under delicately arched brows, exquisite quiet hands, were all under the most admirable instinctive command. Rhoda said:

"I see that I am to welcome you for Gerrit's family." The other, in slow lisping English replied:

"Thank you greatly. I am humbled to the earth before your goodness."

"You will want to go to your room," Rhoda continued mechanically. "It was only prepared for one, but I'll send a servant up at once." She was enraged at the silent stupidity of the three men and flashed a silent command at her husband.

"This is a decided surprise," the latter at last addressed his brother; "nor can I pretend that it is pleasant." Jeremy Ammidon's gaze wandered blankly from Gerrit to the woman, then back to his son.

Never before had Rhoda seen such lovely clothes: A long gown with wide sleeves of blue-black satin, embroidered in peach-colored flower petals and innumerable minute sapphire and orange butterflies, a short sleeveless jacket of sage green caught with looped red jade buttons and threaded with silver and indigo high-soled slippers crusted and tasseled with pearls. Her hair rose from the back in a smooth burnished loop. There were long pins of pink jade carved into blossoms, a quivering decoration of paper-thin gold leaves with moonstones in glistening drops, and a band of coral lotus buds. Pierced stone bracelets hung about her delicate wrists, fretted crystal balls swung from the lobes of her ears; and clasped on the ends of several fingers were long pointed filagrees of ivory.

"Taou Yuen," Gerrit repeated shortly, with his challenging bright gaze. "That means Peach Garden. My wife is a Manchu," he asserted in a more biting tone; "a Manchu and the daughter of a noble. Thank you, Rhoda, particularly. But I have always counted on you. Will you go up with her? That is if—if my father has a room, a place, for us."

"This will always be your home, Gerrit," Jeremy said slowly, with the long breath of a diver in deep waters.



IV

In the room that had been his since early maturity Gerrit Ammidon gave an involuntary sigh of relief. Taou Yuen, his wife, was standing in the middle of the floor, gazing about with a faint and polite smile. Her eyes rested on a yellow camphor chest—one of the set brought home by his father—on a severe high range of drawers made of sycamore with six legs, on her brilliant reflection in the eagle-crowned mirror above the mantel, and the sleigh bed with low heavily curved ends.

The situation below, however brief and, on the whole, reasonably conducted, had been surprisingly difficult. At the same time that he had felt no necessity to apologize for his marriage he had known that Taou Yuen must surprise, yes—shock, his family. She was Chinese, to them a heathen: they would be unable to comprehend any mitigating dignity of rank. Where they'd actually suffer, he realized, would be in the attitude of Salem, the stupid gabble, the censure and cold pity caused by his wife.

Personally he regarded these with the contempt he felt for so many of the qualities that on shore bound the interests of everyone into a single common concern. It gave him pleasure to assault the authority and importance of such public prejudice and self-opinion; but, unavoidably implicating his family, at once a part of himself and Salem, he was conscious of the fact that he had laid them all open to disagreeable moments. He was sorry for this, and his regret, principally materialized by his father's hurt confusion, had unexpectedly cast a shadow on a scene to which he had looked forward with a distinct sense of comedy. Where the realities were concerned he had no fear of Taou Yuen's ability to justify herself completely. He possessed a stupendous admiration for her.

He watched her now with the mingled understanding and mystification that gave his life with her such a decided charm. Her gaze had fastened on the mirror-stand above the drawers: she must be wondering if she would have to paint and prepare herself for him here, openly. He knew that she considered it a great impropriety for her face to be seen bare; all the elaborate processes of her morning toilet must be privately conducted. He recognized this, but had no idea what she actually thought of the room, of his family, of the astonishing situation into which her heart had betrayed her.

One and then another early hope he saw at once were vain. It had seemed to him that in America, in Salem, she might become less evidently Chinese; not in the incongruous horror of Western clothes, but in her attitude, in a surrender to superficial customs; he had pictured her as merging distinctively into the local scene. In China he had hoped that in the vicinity of Washington Square and Pleasant Street she would appear less Eastern; but, beyond all doubt, here she was enormously more so. The strange repressed surrounding accentuated every detail of her Manchu pomp and color. The frank splendor of her satins and carved jades and embroidery, her immobile striking face loaded with carmine and glinting headdress, the flawless loveliness of hands with the pointed nail protectors, were, in his room, infinitely dramatized.

The other, less secure possibility that she might essentially change perished silently. In a way his wish had been a presumption—that a member of the oldest and most subtle civilization existing would, if she were able, adopt such comparatively crude habits of life and thought.

She moved slowly up to the bed, examining it curiously; and again he understood her look of doubt—in China beds were called kang, or stoves, from the fact that they were more often than not a platform of brick with an opening beneath for hot coals. She fingered the ball fringe of the coverlet, and then turned with amazement to the soft pillow. A hand with the stone bracelet falling back from her smooth wrist rose to the complicated edifice of her headdress.

"Your pillow is coming along from the ship," he told her; "the women here do up their hair every morning."

She considered this with geranium lips slightly parted on flawless teeth, and nodded slowly. The westering sun striking through the window overlooking the Common illuminated her with a flat gold unreality.

"I'll have a day bed brought for you," he continued, realizing that, as the result of fortunate chance, she understood most of what he said without an actual command of the individual words. In reply she sank before him in the deep Manchu gesture with one knee sweeping the floor, the humility of her posture dignified by grace. He touched the crystal globe of an earring, pinched her chin, in the half light manner by which he instinctively expressed his affection for her. She was calm and pleased. "Taou Yuen," he continued, "you miss Shanghai, with the wall of ten gates and the river Woosung stuck full of masts. You'll never think Salem is a paradise like Soochow."

"This is your city," she replied, slowly choosing the words. "Your ancestors are here." There was not a shade of regret in her voice or manner. He tried once more, and as vainly as ever, to penetrate the veil of her perfect serenity. She never, it became apparent, descended from the most inflexible self-control; small emotions—surface gayety of mood, curiosity, the faintest possible indication of contempt, he had learned to distinguish; the fact that she cared enough for him to desert every familiar circumstance was evident; but beyond these he was powerless to reach.

His own emotions were hardly less obscured: the dominating feeling was his admiration for her exquisite worldly wisdom, the perfection of her bodily beauty, and the philosophy which bore her above the countless trivialities that destroyed the dignity of western minds. He realized that her paint and embroidery covered a spirit as cold and tempered as fine metal. She was totally without the social sentiment of his own world; but she was equally innocent of its nauseous hypocrisy, the pretensions of a piety covering commercial dishonesty, obscenity of thought and spreading scandal. The injustice he saw practiced on shore had always turned him with a sense of relief to the cleansing challenge of the sea; always, brought in contact with cunning and self-seeking men and heartless schemes, with women cheapened by a conviction of the indecency of life, he was in a state of hot indignation. From all this Taou Yuen offered a complete escape.

On the purely feminine side she was a constant delight, the last possible refinement, he told himself, of instinct and effect. She was incapable of the least vulgarity; never for an instant did she flag from the necessity of beauty, never had he seen her too weary for an adornment laborious in a hundred difficult conventions. She was, too, a continuous source of entertainment, even as his wife she never ceased to be a spectacle; his consciousness of her as a being outside himself persisted.

"I must go down and see where our things are," he said, rising. In the hall he stopped before the tall clock whose striking was a part of his early memories. Below, the house seemed empty; and, instead of turning to the front door and his purpose, he went into the drawing-room.

The long glass doors to the garden were open, and the interior was filled with the scent of lilacs. The room itself had always reminded him of them—it was pale in color, cool gilt and lavender brocade and white panels. Nothing had been moved or changed: the inlaid cylinder fall desk with its garlands of painted flowers on the light waxed wood stood at the left, the pole screen with the embroidered bouquet was before the fire blind, the girandoles, scrolled in ormolu and hung with crystal lusters, held the shimmer of golden reflections on the walls.

He had remembered the drawing-room at Java Head as a place of enchanted perfection; in his childhood its still serenity had seemed a presentment of what might be hoped for in heaven. The thought of the room as it was now, open but a little dim to the lilacs and warm afternoon, had haunted him as the measure of all peace and serenity in moments of extreme danger, his ship laboring in elemental catastrophes and in remote seas. Its fragrance had touched him through the miasma of Whampoa Reach, waiting for the lighters of tea to float down from Canton; standing off in the thunder squalls of the night for the morning sea breeze to take him into Rio; over a cognac in the coffee stalls of the French market at New Orleans, the chanteys ringing from the cotton gangs along the levees:

"Were you ever down in Mobile Bay? Aye, aye, pump away."

As he left the room he saw Laurel, William's youngest child, and he imprisoned her in an arm. "You haven't asked what I've got for you in my sea chest," he said. Gerrit was very fond of all four of the rosy-cheeked vigorous girls, and a sense of injury touched him at Laurel's reserved manner. She studied him with a wondering uneasy concern. This he realized was the result of bring home Taou Yuen; and an aggravated impatience, a growing rebellion, seized him. He wouldn't stay with his wife at Java Head a day longer than necessary; and if anyone, in his family or outside, showed the slightest disdain he could retaliate with his knowledge of local pettiness, the backbiting enmities and secret lapses.

God knew he didn't want trouble, all he asked was a reasonable liberty, the semblance, anyhow, of a courtesy toward his wife. Whatever might be said would be of no moment to her—except in the attitude of his father—and Taou Yuen's indifference furnished a splendid example for himself. He wondered why the devil he was continually putting his fingers in affairs that couldn't concern him. No one thanked him for his trouble, they considered him something of a fool—a good sailor but peculiar. The damned unexpected twists of his sense of the absurd, too, got him into constant difficulty.

His father was standing outside the principal entrance; and, as he joined him on the steps, he saw two men from the Nautilus carrying his ship's desk by the beckets let in the ends. The wind was blowing gently up Pleasant Street; the men, at his gesture, lifted their burden up the steps, between the direction of the wind and Jeremy Ammidon. The latter rose instantly into one of his dark rages:

"What do you mean, you damned packetrats—coming up a companionway to the windward of me! I'll have no whalers' habits here." He repeated discontentedly that everything on sea and land had fallen into a decline. Others followed with a number of Korean boxes, strapped and locked with copper, and wicker baskets. A man in charge said to Gerrit Ammidon:

"The chest was left for Mr. Dunsack at the foot of Hardy Street, sir, as you ordered. The inspector sent it off complimentary with your personal things." Gerrit asked, "He didn't stop to get a whiff of it then?" The other shook his head. "Edward Dunsack asked me to ship it here and explained that it was only junk he was bringing home, but what it amounts to is about a case of Patna opium. He's lucky."

They turned inside, William was in the library, and Gerrit instinctively followed his father into the room. William surveyed him with a moody discontent. "What I can't understand," he proceeded; "is why you call it a marriage, why you brought your woman here to us, to Rhoda and the children."

"It's simple enough," Gerrit replied; "Taou Yuen is my wife, we are married exactly as Rhoda and you are. She is not my woman in the sense you mean. I won't allow that, William."

"How can it matter what you will or will not allow when everyone'll think the other? Shipmasters have had Chinese mistresses before, yes, and smuggled them into Salem; but this conduct of yours is beyond speech."

Gerrit Ammidon said:

"Don't carry this too far." Anger like a hot cloud oppressed him. "I am married legally and, if anything, by a ceremony less preposterous than your own. Taou Yuen is not open to any man or woman's suspicions. I am overwhelmingly indebted to her."

"But she's not your race," William Ammidon muttered; "she is a Confucian or Taoist, or some such thing."

"You're Unitarian one day a week, and father is Congregational, Hodie's a Methodist, and no one knows what I am," Gerrit cried. "Good God, what does all that matter! Isn't a religion a religion? Do you suppose a Lord worth the name would be anything but entertained by such spiteful little dogmas. A sincere greased nigger with his voodoo must be as good as any of us."

"That is too strong, Gerrit," Jeremy objected. "You'll get nowhere crying down Christianity."

"If I could find it," the younger declared bitterly, "I'd feel differently. It's right enough in the Bible. ...Well, we'll go on to Boston to-morrow."

"This is your home," his father repeated. "Naturally William, all of us have been disturbed; but nothing beyond that. I trust we are a loyal family. What you've done can't be mended with hard words."

"She may become very fashionable," Gerrit mockingly told his brother. "It'll be a blow to Camilla," Jeremy chuckled. "Some rice must be cooked."

"Manchus don't live on rice," Gerrit replied. "They don't bind the feet either nor wear the common Chinese clothes. Rhoda will understand better."

Again in his room he found his wife bending over a gorgeous heap of satins, bright mazarines and ornaments. "We'll go down to supper soon," he told her. Already there were signs of her presence about the room: the chest of drawers was covered with gold and jade and green amber, painted paper fans set on ivory and tortoise shell, and lacquer fan boxes; coral hairpins, sandalwood combs, silver rouge pots and rose quartz perfume bottles with canary silk cords and tassels. On a familiar table was her pipe, wound in gilt wire, and the flowered satin tobacco case. An old coin was hanging at the head of the bed, a charm against evil spirits; and on a stand was the amethyst image of Kuan-Yin pu tze, the Goddess of Mercy.

Taou Yuen sank on the floor with a little embarrassed laugh at the confusion in which he had surprised her. "Let your attitude be grave," he quoted from the Book of Rites with a pretended severity. Her amusement rose in a ripple of mirth. He opened his desk, rearranging the disorder brought about by its transportation; and, when he turned, she was prostrate in the last rays of the sun. "O-me-to-Fuh," she breathed; "O-me-to-Fuh," the invocation to Buddha. This at an end she announced, "Now I am grave and respectful for your family."

Supper, Gerrit admitted to himself, promised to be a painful occasion; conversation rose sporadically and quickly died in glances of irrepressible curiosity directed at his wife. She, on the contrary, showed no pointed interest in her surroundings; and, in her hesitating slurred English, answered Rhoda's few questions without putting any in return. Camilla preserved a frozen silence; Sidsall was pleasantly conciliating in her attitude toward the novel situation; Janet, her lips moving noiselessly, was rapt in amazement; and Laurel smiled, abashed at meeting Taou Yuen's eyes.

The recounting of his delayed return offered Gerrit a welcome relief from the pervading strain: "There's no tea to speak of at Shanghai, and I took on a mixed cargo—pongees and porcelain and matting. I got camphor and cassia and seven hundred peculs of ginger; then I decided to lay a course to Manilla for some of the cheroots father likes. The weather was fine, I had a good cargo, and, well—we pleasured out to Honolulu. I was riding the island horses and shipping oil when the schooner Kahemameha arrived from the coast with the news of the gold discovery in California. Every boat in the harbor was loaded to the trucks, crowded with passengers at their weight in ginseng, and laid for San Francisco.... Well, I was caught with the rest.

"Five thousand dollars was offered me to carry a gentleman and his attendant. Two others would pay three for the same purpose. Stowage was worth what you asked.... The Nautilus made a good run; then, about a day from land, Mr. Broadrick told me that there wouldn't be a seaman on the ship an hour after we anchored. They were all crazy with gold fever, he said. I could see, too, that they were excited; the watch hung under the weather rail jabbering like parrots; an uglier crew of sea lawyers never developed.

"There was one thing to do and I did it—called them aft and gave them some hot scouse. They'd shipped for Salem and there they must go. I didn't anchor, but stood off—the harbor was crowded with deserted vessels like some hell for ships—and sent the jolly boat in with the passengers and a couple of men. They didn't come back, you may be sure. The consignment for San Francisco I carried out that evening, for I made sail at once."

"You had a pretty time getting a way on her," Jeremy Ammidon remarked.

"I did," Gerrit acknowledged shortly. "The second mate's ear was taken loose by a belaying pin that flew out of the dark like a gull. Mr. Broadrick had a bad minute in the port forecastle after he had ordered all hands on deck a third time. The fine weather left us, though, and that kept the crew busy; we carried away the fore-royal mast and yard before we were within a thousand miles of the latitude of the Horn. That hit us like a cannon ball of ice. You know what it is at its worst," he told his father; "weeks of snow and hail and fog and gales; and not for anything can you keep an easting. God knows how a ship lives through the seas; but she does, she does, and you lose the Magellan clouds astern."

The old man nodded.

Gerrit was relieved, however, when supper ended and his wife formally departed for her room. Immediately slipping a hand inside Rhoda's arm he conducted her to the drawing-room. "I'd like you to know more about it," he said directly.

"It was very extraordinary. A Lu Kikwang was a high official of the Canton Customs, and when Shanghai was declared an open port in forty-two they made him hoppo there. I remembered him at Canton, a dignified old duck with eighty or a hundred servants to keep anyone from possibly speaking to him of business, but there had been some trouble about foreign vessels selling saltpeter illegally and—he knew some English—we had quite a friendly little consultation. Yet it hadn't prepared me for his coming off to the Nautilus at Shanghai with a linguist and an air of the greatest mystery. His manner was beautiful, of course, absolutely tranquil and that made what they said, what he hoped, seem even wilder than it was.

"His son, it appeared, had married and was accidentally drowned in the Great Canal hardly a month after the ceremony. His widow belonged, then, to the husband's family, and from that moment her father-in-law had had nothing but bad luck. He had been robbed, his best stallion died, there had been a flood in his tea which not only spoiled the crop but filled the ground with silt—it was impossible to relate his calamities. He consulted a necromancer at last and learned that it was all caused by the presence of Taou Yuen.

"This, you see, made the difficulty, as it's a frightful disgrace to return a married daughter to her own father's home, and Lu had grown very fond of her. She was extremely clever and virtuous, he said. The other thing was to kill her or force her to commit suicide. He told me very calmly that he would like to avoid this.

"Then, in the linguist's most flowery manner, they went on with what Lu Kikwang proposed. He had recognized that I was a man of 'superior propriety' and he wondered if I would take Taou Yuen away to America with me. Very secretly though—there would be an uproar if it were known that a Manchu woman had been married to a foreigner. I could see her first in his garden without her knowing anything about it.

"It's needless to tell you that I went with them that afternoon. A meeting was arranged for the next day—" he broke off, sitting forward with elbows on knees, gazing fixedly at his clasped hands.

"You make that very clear, Gerrit," his sister-in-law replied; "I now understand the past almost as well as yourself; but it's the future I'm in doubt about. I saw immediately that your wife was not an ordinary woman; it would be much easier if she were. Certainly you don't intend to stay here, at Java Head; but that is immaterial. Wherever you go in America it will not be suitable for her. She'll be no more at home with your friends than you with hers. I feel terribly sad about it, Gerrit; you were as selfish as only a man can be."

"You are unjust, Rhoda," he protested. "Taou Yuen was willing to come. She had read about other countries and saw a great deal of the English wife of a rich Dutch factor at Shanghai; as Lu Kikwang said, she's wonderfully intelligent. I think she is happy, too."

"Rubbish! Of course she loves you; I am not talking about that. How will she get along while you are away on your long voyages? She couldn't possibly live in the cabin of a ship, and do you suppose she'd be contented in Salem with you absent for a year!"

"We have as many chances of success as any other marriage," he asserted. "The whole business is foolish enough."

"That opinion might do for a single shipmaster, with only a month or two out of the year on land. When you were free, Gerrit, your impatience with convention was refreshing and possible. But can't you see that you have given up your liberty! You have tied your hands. However loudly you may cry out against society now you are a part of us, foolish or not. You'll find that your wife has anchored you in Salem, Boston or Singapore, no matter where you go: people will reach and hurt you through her.

"She is very gorgeous and placid, superior on the surface; but the heart, Gerrit—that isn't made of jade and ivory and silk."

"I'll bring down your presents to-morrow," he told her, avoiding any further present discussion of his marriage. "Has father failed, do you think? His tempers are vigorous as ever."

"He seems baggier about the eyes and throat. He is just as quick, but it exhausts him more. Things would be much better if he were only content to let William manage at the countinghouse. Times are shifting so quickly with these new clipper ships and direct passages and political changes."

"There's no longer any doubt about the clippers," Gerrit declared; "the California gold rush will attend to that."

In his room he found Taou Yuen, in soft white silk worked with bamboo leaves, on the day bed, smoking. She rose immediately as he entered; and, coming close to him, ran her cool fingers through his hair. He stood gazing out at the dim oil flares that marked the confines of Washington Square, considering all that Rhoda had said. Strangely enough it led his thoughts away from his wife; they reverted to Nettie Vollar.

He had been, he realized, very nearly in love with her: what he meant by that inaccurate term was that if the affair had continued a little longer he would have insisted on marrying her. Nettie was not indifferent to him. An impersonal feeling had attracted him to her—a resentment of her treatment by the larger part of Salem, particularly the oblique admiration of the men. His supersensitiveness to any form of injustice had driven him into the protest of calling and accompanying her, with an exaggerated politeness, about the streets. It had not been difficult; she was warm-blooded, luxurious, a very vivid woman. Gerrit, however, had made a point of repressing any response to that aspect of their intercourse—the sheerest necessity for the preservation of his disdain.

She had cried on his shoulder, in his arms, practically; he had acted in the purely fraternal manner. But the thing was reaching a natural conclusion when her grandfather, Barzil Dunsack, had interfered with his unsupportably frank accusations and command. The Nautilus had been ready for sea, and his, Gerrit's, imperious resentment had carried him out of the Dunsacks' house—to Shanghai and Taou Yuen—without another word to Nettie.

How strangely life progressed, without chart or intelligent observations or papers! He heard the tap of his wife's pipe; there was a faint sweetish odor of drugged tobacco and the scent of cloves in which she saturated herself. Outside was Salem, dim and without perceptible movement; the clock in the hall struck ten. Taou Yuen didn't approach him again nor speak; her perceptions were wonderfully acute.

The sense of loneliness that sometimes overtook him on shore deepened, a feeling of impotence, as if he had suddenly waked, lost and helpless, in an unfamiliar planet. There was the soft whisper of his wife's passage across the room. In the lamplight the paint on her cheeks made startling unnatural patches of—paint. The reflections slid over the liquid black mass of her hair, died in the lustrous creamy folds of her garment. She was at once grotesque and impressive, like a figure in a Chinese pantomime watched from the western auditorium of his inheritance. His fondness for her, his admiration, had not lessened. He surveyed his position, the presence here, in his room at Java Head, of Taou Yuen, with amazement; all the small culminating episodes lost, the result was beyond credence. His thoughts returned to Rhoda's accusation of selfishness, the disaster implied in her pity for his wife. He tried again to analyze his marriage, discover whatever justification, security, it possessed. Was his admiration for Taou Yuen sufficient provision for his part of their future together? It was founded largely on her superiority to the world he had known; and here it was necessary for him to convince himself that his wedding had not been merely the result of romantic accident. He knew that the sensual had had almost no part in it, it had been mental; an act of pity crystallizing his revolt against what he felt to be the impotence of "Christian" ethics. Yet this was not sufficient; for he, like Rhoda, had found under his wife's immobility the flux of immemorial woman.

No, it wasn't enough; but more existed, he was certain of that. No one could expect him, now, to experience the thrill of idealized passion that was the sole property of youth. What feeling he had had for Nettie—he was obliged to return to her from the fact that it was the only possible comparison—had come from very much the same source as the other. The old impersonal motives!

The danger, Rhoda pointed out, had been admitted when his marriage made impossible the continuation of that aloof position. He doubted that it could change him so utterly. The thought of the entertainment his wife would afford him in Salem expanded. He regretted that the best, the calling and comments of the women, was necessarily lost to him, but Taou Yuen would repeat a great deal: she, too, had a sly sense of the ridiculous. He hoped that his sister-in-law didn't suppose her helpless; the impenetrable Manchu control gave her a pitiless advantage over any less absolute civilization. In the darkness before sleep the heavy exotic scents in the room oppressed him strangely.

He rose early, and quietly dressing went out into the garden: buds on the June roses against the high blank fence on the street were swelling into visible crimson; there were the stamping of horses' feet on the cobbles of the stable inclosure, the heavy breathing and admonitions of the coachman wielding a currycomb. The sunlight streamed down through pale green willow and tall lilac bushes, through the octagonal latticed summerhouse and across the vivid sod to the drawing-room door. Gerrit turned, and entered the farther yard, where his father was inspecting the pear trees.

"The Nautilus will need new copper sheathing," Gerrit said: "she's pretty well stripped forward."

"Take her around to the Salem Marine Railway at the foot of English Street. A fine ship, Gerrit, with a proper hull. I tell you they'll never improve on the French lines."

"She won't go into the wind with a clipper," he admitted; "but I'll sail her on a fair breeze with anything afloat."

"If you come to that," his father asserted; "nothing handsomer will ever be seen than an East India-man in the northeast trades with the captain on the quarter-deck in a cocked hat and sword, the shoals of flying fish and albacore skittering about a transom as high and carved and gilded as a church, the royal pennant at the mainmast head. Maybe it would be the Earl of Balcarras with her cannons shining and the midshipmen running about."

"Yes," the younger man returned, "and taking in her light sails at sunset, dropping astern like an island. The John Company's ruining British shipping."

Jeremy Ammidon muttered one of his favorite pessimistic complaints. "What did you say her name was?" he demanded abruptly.

"Taou Yuen."

"Taou Yuen Ammidon," the elder pronounced experimentally. "It doesn't sound right, the two won't go together."

"But they have," Gerrit declared. He thought impatiently that he must listen to a repetition of Rhoda's assertions.

"I don't know much about 'em," Jeremy proceeded. "All I saw, when I was younger, was the little singing-girls playing mora and wailing over their infernal three-stringed fiddles something about the moon and a bowl of water lilies."

Taou Yuen did not come down to breakfast, and Gerrit stayed away from their room until her toilet must be finished. It was Sunday; and with the customary preparation for church under way William said:

"I suppose you will go down to the ship?"

The hidden question, the purpose of the inquiry, at once stirred into being all Gerrit's perversity. "No," he replied carelessly; "we'll go with you this morning."

"That's unheard of," William exclaimed heatedly; "a woman in all her paint and perfume and outrageous clothes in North Church, with—with my family! I won't have it, do you understand."

"No worse than what you see there every week," Gerrit retorted calmly; "corsets and feathers and female gimcracks. Plenty of rouge and cologne too. It will give them something new to stare at and whisper about."

William Ammidon choked on his anger, and his wife laid a gloved hand on his arm. "You must make up your mind to it," she told him. "It can't hurt anyone. She is Gerrit's wife, you see."

Above, the shipmaster said to Taou Yuen: "We are going to church with the family." He surveyed her clothes with a faint glimmer of amusement. She had, he saw, made herself especially resplendent as a Manchu. The long gown was straw-colored satin with black bats—a symbol of happiness—whirling on thickly embroidered silver clouds, over which she wore a sleeve coat fastened with white jade and glittering with spangles of beaten copper. Her slippers were pale rose, and fresh apple blossoms, which she had had brought from the yard, made a headdress fixed with long silver and dull red ivory pins.

She smiled obediently at his announcement, and, with a fan of peacock silks and betel nuts in a pouch like a tea rose hanging by a cord from a jade button, she signified her readiness to proceed.

William had gone on foot with his girls, Jeremy was seldom in church, and Rhoda, Taou Yuen beside her with Gerrit facing them, followed in the barouche. It seemed to the latter that they were almost immediately at the door of North Church. The leisurely congregation filling the walk stiffened in incredulous amazement as Gerrit handed his wife to the pavement. Rhoda went promptly forward, nodding in response to countless stupefied greetings; while Gerrit Ammidon moved on at Taou Yuen's side.

Prepared, he restrained the latter from a prostration in the hall of the church. Nothing had changed: the umbrella trough still bore the numbers of the pews, the stair wound gloomily up to the organ loft. He again found the subdued interior, the maroon upholstery, the flat Gothic squares of the ceiling and dark red stone walls, a place of reposeful charm. The Ammidons had two of the box pews against the right wall: his brother and children were in the second, and, inside the other small inclosure, he shut the gate and took his place on a contracted corner bench. Taou Yuen sat with Rhoda against the back of the pew. The former, blazing like a gorgeous flower on the shadowed surface of a pool, smiled serenely at him.

He could hear the hum of subdued comment running like ignited powder through the church, familiar faces turned blankly toward him or nodded in patent confusion. The men, he noted, expressed a single rigid condemnation. The women, in crisp light dresses and ribboned bonnets, were franker in their curiosity. Taou Yuen was a loadstone for their glances. As the service progressed her face grew expressionless. Fretted sandalwood bracelets drooped over her folded hands, and miniature dragon flies quivered on the gold wires of her earrings; the sharp perfumes of the East drifted out and mingled with the Western scents of extracts and powders. He only saw that she was politely chewing betel nut. It wasn't, he told himself, reverting to his critical attitude toward Salem, that he was lacking in charity toward his neighbors, or that he felt any superiority; but the quality that signally roused his antagonism was precisely the men's present aspect of heavy censure and boundless propriety, their stolid attitude of justifying the spiritual consummation promised by the sermon and hymns.

The long night watches, the anxiety of the sea, the profound mysteries of the wheeling stars and the silence of the ocean at dawns, had given him, he dimly realized, an inarticulate reverence for the supreme mystery of creation. He was unable to put it into words or facile prayer but it was the guarded foundation of most that he was, and it bred in him a contempt for lesser signs. The religion of his birth, the faith of Taou Yuen, the fetishism of the Zanzibar Coast, he had regarded as equally important, or futile—the mere wash of the immensity of beauty, the inexorable destiny, that had seemed to breathe on him alone at the stern of his ship.

He lost himself now in the keenness of his remembered emotion: the church faded into a far horizon, he felt the slight heave of the ship and heard the creaking of the wheel as the steersman shifted his hands; from aloft came the faint slapping of the bunt lines on rigid canvas, the loose hemp slippers of the crew sounded across the deck, the water whispered alongside, the ship's bell was struck and repeated in a diminished note on the topgallant forecastle. The morning rose from below the edge of the sea and the pure air freshened.... His thoughts were recalled to the present by the dogmatic insistence of the clergyman's voice, promising heaven, threatening hell. His gaze rested on the chalky debility of Madra Clifford.

The service over, the aisle past the Ammidon pews was filled with a slow-moving inquisitive throng. Rhoda chose to wait until the greater part was past, and then she followed with the unmoved Taou Yuen and Gerrit. "This is my brother's wife," he heard the former say. "Mrs. Saltonstone, Gerrit's sister, Mrs. Clifford and Miss Vermeil. Yes... from Shanghai. Overdue. We were worried, of course." Taou Yuen smiled vigorously and flapped the vivid fan. Against her brilliant colors, the carved jade and embroideries, silver and apple blossoms, the other women looked colorless in wide book muslin and barege, with short veils of tulle illusion hanging from bonnets of rice straw and glazed crepe. Palpably shocked by her Oriental face masked in paint, her Chinese "heathen" origin, yet they fingered the amazing needlework and wondered over the weight of her satins.

The men he knew gave him, for the most part, a curt greeting. They glanced more covertly at his wife; he understood exactly what thoughts brought out this condemnation soiled by private speculation; and his disdain mounted at their sleek backs and glossy tile, hats supported on stiffly bent arms.

After dinner he walked through the warm sunny emptiness of the afternoon to Derby Wharf and the Nautilus. Standing on the wharf, smoking a cheroot, he leaned back upon his cane, studying the ship with a gaze that missed no detail. There was not a sound from the water; across the harbor Peach's Point seemed about to dissolve in a faint green haze; a strong scent of mingled spices came from the warehouses. There was the splash of oars in the Basin beyond, and the more distant peal of a church bell.

At the sound of footfalls behind him he turned and saw Nettie Vollar and her uncle, Edward Dunsack. A dark color rose in the girl's cheek, and her hand pulled involuntarily at Dunsack's arm, as if she wished to retreat. Gerrit thought that she had aged since he had latest met her: Nettie's mouth, with its full, slightly drooping lower lip, had lost something of its fresh arch; her eyes, though they still preserved their black sparkle, were plainly resentful. Edward Dunsack, medium tall but thin almost to emaciation, had a riven sallow face with close-cut silvery hair and agate-brown eyes with contracted pupils.

"Well, Nettie," Gerrit said, moving forward promptly, "it's pleasant to see you again." Her hand was cold and still. "Dunsack, too."

"I am obliged to you for my chest," the latter told him, unmoved by Gerrit's quizzical gaze.

"Glad to do it for you," the other replied; "it came ashore with my personal things, and so, perhaps, saved you something."

"Perhaps," Dunsack agreed levelly.

Looking down at the cob filling of the wharf, Nettie Vollar said, "You came home married, I hear, and to a Chinese lady."

Gerrit assented. "You'll certainly know her, and like her, too. Taou Yuen is very wise and without the prejudices—" he stopped, conscious of the stupidity of his attempted kindness. Nettie looked up defiantly, biting her lip—a familiar trick, he recalled. Dunsack interposed:

"You will find that the Chinese have none of your little sympathetic tricks. No foreigner could ever grasp the depth of their indifference to what you might call humanity. They are born wise, as you say, but weary. I suppose your wife plays the guitar skillfully and sings the Soochow Love Song."

Gerrit Ammidon studied him with somber eyes and a gathering temper: it was, however, impossible to decide whether the implication was deliberately insulting. He wouldn't have any Canton clerk, probably saturated with opium, insinuate that his affair was on the plane of that of a drunken sailor! "My wife," he said deliberately, "is a Manchu lady. You may know that they don't learn dialect songs nor ornament tea houses."

"Very remarkable," Dunsack returned imperturbably. "We never see them. How did you manage a go-between, and did you send the hour of your birth to the Calculator of Destinies? Then there is so much to remember in a Chinese wedding—the catties of tea and four silver ingots, the earrings and red and green silk and Tao priest to consult the gods." Gerrit heard this with a frowning countenance. If Nettie were not there he would put Dunsack forward with the hypothetical crew to which he belonged. He felt as sorry for Nettie, he discovered, as ever. It moved him to see her vivacity of life, her appealingly warm color, slowly dulled by Salem and the adventitious circumstance of her birth. What a dreary existence she led in the harsh atmosphere of her grandfather and the solemn house on Hardy Street! At one time he had fancied that he might change it... when now here was Taou Yuen, detached and superior, waiting in his room at Java Head.

"I stopped for a moment to look at the ship," he said, with the trace of an ungracious bow, "and must get back." The sunlight flung a warm moted veil over Nettie Vollar. She gave him a startled uncalculated glance of almost desperate appeal and his heart responded with a quickened thud. Edward Dunsack was sallow and enigmatic, with thin pinched lips.



V

"The stupid bruiser," Edward Dunsack declared in a thin bitterness that startled the girl at his side. "The low sea bully!" He was gazing at the resolute back of Captain Ammidon. A surprising hatred filled him at the memory of the other's intolerant gaze, the careless contempt of his words. He thought, oddly enough, of the delicate and ingenious tortures practiced on offenders in China; the pleasant mental picture followed of Ammidon bowed in a wooden collar, of Gerrit Ammidon bambooed, sliced, slowly choking.... With an intense sense of horror he caught himself dwelling on these dripping visions. His hands clasped rigidly, a sweat stood out on his brow, in a realization that was at once dread and a self-loathing.

About him lay the tranquil Salem water, the still wharves, the familiar roofs and green tree tops. This wasn't Canton, he told himself, but America: there was Nettie; only a few streets away was his father's house, his own home, all solid and safe and reassuring. China was a thing of the past, its insidious secret hold broken. It was now only a dream of evil fascination from which he had waked to the reality, the saving substance, of Derby Wharf. "It's his domineering manner," he explained the outburst to Nettie; "all shipmasters have it—as if the world were a vessel they damned from a quarter-deck in the sky. I never could put up with them."

"He is very kind, really," she replied, looking away over the harbor. "It is so queer—marrying a Chinese woman like that. How will he ever get along with her or be happy?"

"He won't," Edward Dunsack asserted. "Leave that to time." He studied her attentively. "Was it anything to you?" he asked.

"It might have been," she acknowledged listlessly, her gaze still on the horizon. "He came to see me two or three times, quite differently from other nice men, and took me to a concert at the Philharmonic Society. He was getting to like me, I could tell that, when grandfather interfered—"

"I see," Dunsack interrupted, "with the immorality of the supermoral."

"Whatever it was he was past bearing. No one could blame Gerrit for getting into a fury. The next day I stood almost in this spot, it was late afternoon too, and watched the Nautilus sail away. All the canvas was set and I could see her for a long time. When the last trace had gone it seemed to me that my life had sunk too ... out there."

"The old man's a fool," he said bluntly of his father. "How do you suppose he got hold of a Manchu?" he shifted his thought, addressing the stillness about them rather than his companion. "Don't imagine for a minute that you are superior to her," he told Nettie more directly. "There is nothing more remarkable. They must be gorgeous," a faint color stained his long cheeks. "What incredible luck," he murmured.

He was thinking avidly of the women of China—the little gay girls like toys, the momentary glimpses of enameled faces in hurrying red-flowered sedan chairs, faces of ivory stained with carmine, in gold-crusted headdresses. A sudden impatience at Nettie Vollar's obvious person and clothes expanded to a detestation of an atmosphere he had but a minute or so before welcomed as an escape from something infinitely worse than death. Now it seemed impossible to spend a life in Salem. It would have been better, when he had been released by Heard and Company, to have taken the position open in the Dutch Hong.

He was in a continual state of such vacillation, as if he were the seat of two separate and antagonistic personalities; rather, he changed the figure, in him the East struggled with the West. It was necessary for the latter to triumph. The difficulty lay in the fact that the first was represented by an actual circumstance while the other was only a dim apprehension, a weakened allegiance to ties never strong.

He cursed the extraordinary chance that, against every probability, had brought the chest of opium safely to him here. Its purchase had been the result of habit evading his will, he had despatched it—in that seesawing contest—by a precarious route, half hoping that it would be lost or seized; and, when he had seen the chest carried down Hardy Street to his door, a species of terror had fastened upon him, a premonition of an evil spirit flickering above him in a turning of oily smoke. Why hadn't he pitched the thing into the water at the foot of their yard! There was time still: he would take the balls of opium and dispose of them secretly. A sudden energy, a renewed sense of strength, flooded him. This distaste for Nettie changed into a pity at the ill luck that had followed her: she didn't deserve it. Generous emotions expanded his heart. He dreamed of taking hold of his father's small commerce in rum and sugar with the West Indies and turning it into a concern as rich and powerful as Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone.

Why not!

They, too, would have a big white house on Washington Square or Chestnut Street, with servants—Chinese servants—and horses and great ships sailing in, laden with the East. Why not indeed! He, Edward Dunsack, had more brains than Jeremy Ammidon, that stiff old man with a face the color of a damask plum. His niece would go to all the balls at Franklin and Hamilton Halls, the injustice of her position overcome by an impressively increasing fortune. Abstractly he patted her shoulder with a hand as long and gaunt and yellow as his face. All this would come as a result of throwing the opium into the harbor. It was as good as accomplished.

In the face of his prospective well-being he felt already the equal of anyone in Salem. If Gerrit Ammidon had married a Manchu lady it was his privilege, no, duty, to call and put his experience in things Chinese at their command. She would speak only a little if any English; no one here understood the preparation of her food—her delicate necessity for dishes not the property of an entire household; a hundred such details of which the infinitely cruder West must be ignorant. He thought complacently that he would understand her better than anyone else in Salem, in Boston, in America; far better than her husband. She would without doubt learn to depend on him: they would laugh together at the manners and people about them. Ammidon would be away for long periods on the China service.—

His dreams broke off with a sardonic laugh, a repetition of the tone in which he had objurgated the ship-master. Such visions were the property of youth, and he was forty-two, forty-two and nothing more than a discredited clerk who had fled across the world from a shadow. But he was right—he had seen white men who had caught the breath of China accepting just such opportunities as the one offered to him after his dismissal by Augustine Heard. At the Dutch Hong he'd be expected to talk about his late employer. Such situations, he had realized in a rarely illuminating flash, were only temporary, a descending flight.

These men resembled the fate of, say, a brig sailing into the China Sea in all the perfection of order of the British Marine: at, perhaps, Hong Kong, sold to a native firm, she would be refitted under an extravagant flag, and slowly the order would depart until, in a slovenly tangle of rigging and defilement, she'd be seen yawing on secret and nauseous errands.

A homely chime of bells was repeated from the town; a ship's fast strained resinously with the changing tide. "It will be getting on toward supper," Nettie told him. They walked slowly from the wharf, turned silently into Derby Street and Hardy on their way home. Beyond the inner fence of the garden the thick uneven sod reaching to the water was dark and cool against the luminous flush of evening. A sound of frying and heavy odor came from the kitchen, and Kate Vollar's voice informed them that the meal was ready.

Barzil Dunsack bowed his head over the table and pronounced a grace in startlingly resonant tones, the reverent humility of his words oddly emphasized by a sort of angry impatience. It seemed as if he at once subjected himself to his God and expressed a certain dissatisfaction with His forbearance. Edward Dunsack was plunged in the thought of the resolution he intended to fulfill that evening.

The throwing away of the opium had lost a part of its symbolic meaning. It now seemed even a little rash when he could find an immediate highly profitable market—the opium had cost him seven hundred dollars in China. But he must, he realized, be firm. Afterwards, in his room facing away from the street over darkening yards and gables and foliage, he stood gazing at the chest of mango wood that held the drug. Edward Dunsack unlocked and lifted the lid. On the tray before him were twenty balls, each the size of his two fists, wrapped in a hard skin of poppy leaves, and there was a similar number beneath. It was obvious that he couldn't carry a tray through the house, and he took out two balls, after which he secured the remainder.

He walked quickly down the stair and through the close turning of the lower hall that led through a side door to the yard. A pale rectangle of lamplight fell from the sitting room window over a brick path and ground tramped bare of grass; a clinking of dishes sounded in the kitchen. The sod was damp, and perhaps eight feet below the wooden buttress of the land the water showed impenetrably black.

Safely there he passed a tense hand over a brow suddenly wet; he was shaking as if in the grip of a chill. His condition needed drastic measures. The cold heavy opium gave out its tantalizing odor. In a minute it would be disposed of and he would go for more. He calculated that this necessitated twenty trips at the present rate—a bag might serve his purpose better. He raised an arm with an opium ball, but his hand remained suspended in air. An inarticulate protest seized him, a suffocating sense of impending loss. He would never be able to get Patna opium here; it was a valuable medical property. His nerves shook at the thought of its delights. Then as if without his volition and against every intention, his arm described a short arc and his hand was empty. There was the impact of a solid object striking the water, a faint ripple on the motionless expanse, and then absolute silence.

He was aghast at his wanton act, the irreparable waste of a precious substance, and cursed in a low audible Cantonese. Whose concern was it if he did, very occasionally, smoke a "pistol"? How could it possibly matter! The dreams about a great foreign commerce, a white house like the Ammidons', were futile; it was too late. He could expect nothing from life but the unspeakable monotony of his father's dwelling, the bare office. He had worked hard, been as full of splendid early resolutions as anyone, and he wasn't blamable if chance balked his ambition. A soul was nothing more than a twisting leaf in the wind of fate. There remained only to take what escape was offered—golden visions, luxury, beauty beyond all earth.

His contrary determination seemed of less actuality than the imagined echoing of the splash that still hung in his brain. It was a thing far away, belonging to another time, another man; like the memory of a period of charming ignorance. The thought of it wove a strand of melancholy into his present mature realization like the delicate scent of blossoming trees borne to him on the evening air, barely perceptible and then lost in the pungency of the opium. The latter became, mystically, all China, the irresistible fascination that had gradually possessed his imagination, dulling the associations of his heredity and birth, calling him further and further into its secretive heart.

He returned to his room, where he put back the second ball in the tray of its chest. An extraordinary weariness hung over him, there was a sense of leaden weight in his arms and feet. Flashes of a different perception pierced his apathy; a voice, seemingly outside his being, whispered of danger, evil and danger.... A twisting leaf, he told himself again with his deep fatalism.

The memory of Gerrit Ammidon's crisp blue gaze, his vigorous gestures and speech, became an intolerable affront, representing the far lost point of his own departure. His contrary feelings met and grappled in his mind; but in the end the past, Salem, was always defeated, weaker, more faintly perceived. In a great many essentials, he told himself, he had become Chinese in sympathy and fiber.

The lamp threw a smooth gleam over the mango wood chest, and he bent, turning the key in the ornamental brass lock. He could reconsider the disposal of the opium to-morrow; there was no hurry; he had no intention of becoming a victim to the drug. That would be an inconceivable stupidity, the negation of all the philosophy he had gained. Very occasionally—

His thoughts swung to the surprising fact of Ammidon's Chinese wife: if, as he had first suspected, she were a common woman of the port who had made a fool of the dull sailor he perceived the making of a very entertaining comedy. There would be the keenest irony in exposing her to himself before the complacent ignorance of her husband. He knew such women: convicted in Chinese, perhaps before the entire Ammidon family, not a muscle of her face would betray surprise or concern. She might try to murder him, very ingeniously, but never descend to the intrigue, the lies, of a Western woman placed in the same position. She'd stoically accept the situation. These visions ran rapidly, vividly, through his brain; he was accustomed to them; a greater part of his waking life was filled with such pictures, infinitely more alluring, persuasive, than the disappointing actuality. He got out of his clothes, and, in a loose gown of black silk, sat at his open window, his chin sunk in the palm of a hand, his face set against the night.

The next morning, at the breakfast table, he listened with a fleering mouth to his father's long dogmatic grace before meat. His sister sat opposite their parent, her gaze lowered in a perpetual amazement, her entire person stamped with a stupid humility. There was nothing humble, however, in Nettie; the crisp French coloring positively crackled with an electric energy; her mouth was set in a rebellious red blot. Studying her, Edward Dunsack saw that she was prettier than he had first realized on his return to Salem. He speculated over the story she had told him yesterday about Gerrit Ammidon's attachment. What an incredible idiot their father had been: Edward would have relished Gerrit as a brother-in-law; good would have come to them all from such a connection.

If he had been in America at the time no such error would have been permitted. With his counsel Nettie would have caught Ammidon beyond any escape. He wondered if the girl had actually cared for the shipmaster or if the affair had been nothing more than a sop to her wounded pride and isolation. In a way beyond his present understanding this seemed to be considerably important. If she had loved him no one could predict what her attitude might be in any future development of their contact; but if her pride only had been involved, injured, she might readily be an instrument for his own obscure purposes.

The office where Barzil Dunsack conducted the limited affairs of his West India trading was a small one-room building back of the dwelling. There was a high desk at which a clerk stood, or balanced on a long-legged stool, a more formal secretary against the length of the wall, with a careful model of a full ship, the spars and standing rigging slack and the whole gray with dust, a built-in cupboard opposite, a dilapidated chair or so and a ten-plate iron stove for wood. A window looked out across the grass to the harbor and another opened blankly against a board fence.

There Edward Dunsack made a column of entries in a script fine and regular but occasionally showing an uncontrollably tremulous line. He was conscious of this tendency, growing through the past year; and he surveyed his writing with a feeling of angry dismay. Try as he might, with a frowning concentration, to pen the words and numerals firmly, presently his attention would slip, his hand waver ever so slightly, and a sudden stricken appearance of old age fasten on the characters.... By heaven, to-night he'd throw all that stinking stuff away!

Outside the day was immaculate, the expanse of the water was like celestial silk, such sails as he saw resembled white clouds. The early morning bird song had subsided, but a persistent robin was whistling from the grass by the open door. The curd-like petals of a magnolia were slowly shifting obliquely to the ground, he could hear the stir of Derby Street. He was inexpressibly weary of the struggle always racking his being: it seemed to him that in the midst of a serene world he was tormented by some inimicable and fatal power.

He fastened his thoughts on commonplace happier objects, on the page under his hand, the entries of Medford rum and sugar cane and molasses, and the infinitely larger affairs of Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone. There was no reason why he shouldn't call on Jeremy Ammidon's family. The latter had signified by his visit the desire to end the misunderstanding between them. He was as well born as Gerrit Ammidon; only ill chance had made them seem differently situated. Anyhow, unlike Canton, mere exterior position had comparatively little weight in Salem. The shipmasters, the more important merchants, arrogated a certain superiority to themselves: but it broke down before the inborn democracy of the local spirit.

That afternoon, he decided, he'd be in Pleasant Street; and later he dressed with the most meticulous care. A growing doubt seized him as he mounted the outside steps of the Ammidons' impressive house; but he crushed it down and firmly rapped with the polished knocker on the opened door.

The family, a servant told him, was in the garden; and he followed through a large white-paneled hall into a formal drawing-room and green space beyond. He was again uncertain before the number of people grouped about a summerhouse and apparently watching his approach with cold surprise. But Gerrit Ammidon stepped forward and greeted him with an adequately level civility.

"You know my father," he said, and Jeremy Ammidon, his heavy body in linen above which his face was dusky, put out an abrupt hand. There was a Mr. Brevard, a slender unconcerned person in very fashionable but restrained clothes; William Ammidon's wife, a large woman in India muslin, handsome enough, Edward Dunsack conceded, in the obvious American sense; a daughter of William's, a girl blooming into womanhood, far too vigorous and brightly colored for his taste; and Gerrit's wife.

The latter had been hidden from him at first, and he saw her suddenly, completely: his surprise caused him to stand in an awkward suspense—never had he imagined that a woman, even a Manchu, could be so beautiful! He recognized, in a score of unmistakable details, that she was of irreproachably high birth; her satins were embroidered with the symbols of nobility and matrimonial felicity; the gold fingernail guards, the jade and flowering pearls, her earrings and tasseled tobacco pouch and ivory fan, were all in the most superlative manner.

A deep pleasurable excitement filled him as he made his greeting in correct Chinese. The long delicate oval of her face showed no emotion at the sound of her native speech and she returned his periods in a slowly chosen mechanical English. Edward Dunsack thought that as he spoke an expression of distaste stamped Gerrit's features. However, he was left in no doubt: "My wife," the other instructed him, "prefers to speak English. That is the only way she has of picking it up."

A contempt filled Dunsack which he was barely able to keep from his voice and manner. He nodded shortly, and subsided into a study of Taou Yuen so open that she must have become aware of his interest. Seated on the bench that circled the interior of the latticed summerhouse she moved so that he could no longer see her face. Brevard was beside her, talking in a low amused voice: there was a ringing peal of laughter from Sidsall Ammidon and a faint infinitely well-bred ripple from Taou Yuen. The brilliant patch of her gown made an extraordinary effect in the Salem garden. Edward Dunsack recognized the scents that stirred from her, more Eastern and disturbing even than opium: there was a subtle natural odor of musk, the perfumes of henna and clove blossoms and santal.

A curious double feeling possessed him in the split consciousness of which he was capable—he had the sensation of having come, in the suave afternoon garden, on overwhelming disaster, and at the same time he was enraged by the play of Fate that had given such a woman to Gerrit Ammidon and denied him, with his special appreciation of Oriental charm, the slightest satisfaction. A more general hatred of Gerrit tightened to a consuming resentment of the other's blind fortune.

One thing was unmistakably borne upon him—in spite of the courtesy he was meeting it was clear that he could not hope to become a customary visitor at the Ammidons'. He was put definitely outside the community of interests in which Brevard easily entered. William Ammidon joined them, and something like astonishment at Dunsack's presence was visible on his complacent face.

He remained, however, in a stubborn resistance to small adverse signs in the hope of gaining some additional facts about Taou Yuen. She had been, he learned, a widow and Gerrit had married her with her father-in-law's consent although the latter was a rich official. He wanted to ask a thousand questions, but he knew that even if the Ammidons were too dense to grasp his curiosity, Taou Yuen herself would comprehend his impoliteness. Nowhere else could be found the wisdom and poise of a Manchu lady.

Jeremy Ammidon, in a lawn chair, a smoking cheroot in his fingers, asked him about affairs of Chinese government and commerce. As the old man talked he flushed darkly with quick indignation. "The English have made our political diplomats look like stuffed gulls!" he declared. "Look at their Orders in Council and the British Prize Courts," he proceeded, waving his cheroot; "stop an American vessel anywhere and pretend to find a deserting English sailor. With the Treaty of Ghent and cod-headed commissioners and a Congress that wouldn't know a ship from a bread barge the country's going to hell on greased ways! I've said it a thousand times and any man not a complete ass knows that you can't run a government without a strong head. Locofocos," he muttered.

Edward Dunsack listened to this tirade with an air of polite attention which hid completely the fact that he heard or comprehended scarcely a word. His thoughts were filled by the fragrant vision of Taou Yuen; already he was deep in the problem of how to see her again, to-morrow. It would be excessively difficult. Eastern women never, if they could avoid it, walked; and they were, he knew, entirely without the necessity that drove the women of Salem into a ceaseless round of calling and gossip. It was probable that, except to ride, she wouldn't leave the house and grounds. He cursed the chance quarrel that had set a customary void between the houses of Dunsack and Ammidon, the unfortunate affair of his sister and Vollar inescapably adding to the permanency of the breach; he particularly cursed Nettie. There, however, his mind took up the twisted thread of the vague possibility that the latter might be useful to him: he was amazed at the way in which his premonitions fitted into the pattern of situations yet to be materialized.

Edward Dunsack turned from his contemplation of Taou Yuen to a careful consideration of Gerrit Ammidon. The latter had a countenance which showed strong, easily summoned emotions. It was an intolerant face, Dunsack judged, and yet sentimental; and it was surprisingly young, guileless. At the same time it was unusually determined—an affair of uncomplicated surfaces, direct gaze, marked bone.

He questioned sharply, irritably, the length to which his projections had reached. What were they all about? The answer was presented by the glittering figure of the Manchu; she had risen and was standing in the entrance of the summerhouse. He thought, with a jerking pulse, of Oriental similes; she was a lotus-woman, a green slip of willow, an ambrosial moon, a mustard flower. Her teeth were white buds, her breasts blanched almonds.

His entire life in China had been a preparation for the realization of the present moment. The sense of danger, of anger at Gerrit Ammidon, perished before the supreme emotion called up by Taou Yuen. He wanted to embrace her satin-shod feet, to cling to her odorous hands, such hands as were never formed out of China, like petals of coral. Not only her bodily charm intoxicated him, but the thought of her subtle mind added its attraction, its shadows never to be pierced by the blunted Western instinct, the knowledge of pleasures like perfumes, the calm blend of the eight diagrams of Confucius, the stoicism of the Buddhistic soul revolving perpetually in the urn of Fate, and of the aloof Tao of Lao-tze.

Brevard left with an easy familiarity, already planning a return, that filled Edward Dunsack with resentful envy. The sun had disappeared behind the house; long cool shadows swept down the garden; it was past time for him to go. A reluctance to move from the magic of Taou Yuen possessed him: he was unable to think how, when, he would next see her. He raged at the prohibition against speaking Chinese; that ability should give him an overwhelming advantage of Gerrit Ammidon. This was, of course, the reason that he had been virtually commanded to limit himself to English. Many of the forms of extreme Chinese courtesy were impossible to express in another language.

Finally he rose; in departing he emphasized the importance of Jeremy Ammidon—Taou Yuen should recognize and applaud that. He saw that she was watching him obliquely, her lips in repose, her hands still among the satin draperies. An American would have betrayed something of her reaction to him, he could have discovered a trace, an indication, of her thoughts; but the Manchu's face was as inscrutable as porcelain. William Ammidon nodded, the old man responded to his leave-taking with a degree of warmness, Gerrit at least smiled in a not unfriendly manner. Edward Dunsack bowed to Taou Yuen, and she gravely inclined her head. He had a last glimpse of her glowing in the green light of the inclosure of rose-bushes and poplars, emerald sod and tangled lilac trees.

At the supper table his sister's appearance in somber untidy black barege, Nettie's unrestrained gestures and speech, the coarse red cloth and plain boiled fare, all added to a discontent that he could scarcely restrain. With the utmost discrimination in delicate shades of beauty and luxury he was yet condemned to spend his days in surroundings hardly raised above poverty-stricken squalor. Incongruous as it was he could yet imagine Taou Yuen moving with a certain appropriateness about the Ammidons' spacious grounds and house; but he was absolutely unable to picture her here, on Hardy Street.

All the vivid scenes that continually formed and shifted in his mind gathered about Gerrit Ammidon's wife. He used this phrase in a contemptuously satirical manner: it was impossible for Ammidon actually to marry a Manchu. Such racial mating, he told himself, could not be consummated; there were too many deep antipathies of flesh and spirit; the man was too—too stupidly normal. Sooner or later he would swing back to his own. With him, Edward Dunsack, it was different; he always had an inner kinship with China; at first sight its streets and sounds, odors and ways, had seemed familiar, admirable.

The realization of this, when his place with Heard and Company collapsed, had sent him back to America, in a strange dread. He remembered how the vague fear had followed him to Derby Wharf. Now he laughed at it, welcoming every Chinese instinct he had. They seemed to throw a bridge across enormous difficulties, bringing him finally to Taou Yuen.

He lingered at the table after supper, his head sunk on his chest, revolving the various aspects of his position. One thing was definite—he must have Taou Yuen; it was unthinkable that she should continue with Gerrit Ammidon. It needed skillful planning, tortuous execution, but in the end he'd get his desire. He had no doubt of that. It was necessary. If she opposed him she would discover that he, too, could be subtle, Oriental, yes—dangerous. None of the stupid inhibitions that, for example, bound his father interfered with the free exercise of his personal wishes. He was beyond primitive morality.

An ecstasy of contemplation ravished his senses.

"Goodness, Uncle Edward," Nettie exclaimed, "you scared me, you looked so like a Chinee."

"There are no such people," he retorted sharply, exasperated by the vulgar error. She was undismayed; and when, in reply to the question, she learned that he had been at the Ammidons' her surprise increased his irritation. He saw from her manner that his calling there had been at least unexpected. Nettie interrupted the preparation of the table for breakfast, and dropped into a chair beyond him, her hands—the sleeves were rolled back to her elbows—clasped before her.

"You must tell me everything," she declared eagerly. "What is she like? Do they seem happy? Did he hold her hand? Do Chinese women kiss? Is she tall or—"

"I can't remember a question out of your rattle," he interrupted her. He was about to give expression to his admiration for Taou Yuen, when he stopped, with tight lips. Here, perhaps, was the lever by which so much was to be shifted.

"She's Chinese," he said indifferently, "and that means yellow." Nettie made a gesture of distaste. "They seem to get along well enough. Of course, it's ridiculous to call it a marriage, and it seems to me very questionable to impose it on the Ammidons as that. The thing is—how long will it last, how soon will he get tired of her and send her back to Canton?"

Nettie Vollar closed her eyes, her hands were rigid. The lamplight, streaming up over her face, showed him that it was tense and pale and answered a question. Her feeling for Gerrit Ammidon had been more than a mere hurt pride. In addition to that he saw beyond any doubt the proof of its existence still. This complicated his problem: inspired only by a resentment that he might fan into hatred she would be far more pliable than in the grip of a genuine affection for Gerrit Ammidon. He understood the processes of the former, a flexible and useful steel; but no one could predict the vagaries, the absurd self-sacrifices, of love. Well, he'd have to work with what offered. That, he realized, was the strength of his philosophy—he accepted promptly, without vain regret, the means that lay at his hand.

"Ammidon seems worn," he said generally; "they were in the garden, and I had a few words privately with him." Nettie glanced swiftly across the table; her lips moved; but she repressed the obvious question trembling on them. "He showed, I think," he continued carefully, "a very improper interest in you."

"How?"

"He asked if you were well and happy. I most certainly told him, for any number of reasons, for pride alone, that you were."

"Then you told a lie," she cried in a tone so hard that it surprised him.

"Of course," he went on smoothly, "I know that you are not, almost all your circumstances prohibit that. But I don't intend to circulate it in Salem. Opinion here may have forced you into a long loneliness, but I shan't give anyone the satisfaction of knowing it. And, after all, you have your grandfather mostly to blame. You would have been married to Gerrit Ammidon now if he hadn't interfered; you would have been walking about the Ammidons' garden with your hand on his arm in place of that Chinese prostitute."

"I don't see why you should make me so miserable," she declared. "I don't care anything about the garden, it isn't that. Why do you suppose he brought such a woman home?"

"Pique," he told her; "he couldn't care for her in the way he might for, well—you. As I said, he'll drop her on his next voyage to the East; he will leave her and probably never come back to Salem again. I hear that Ammidon, Ammidon and Saltonstone are planning a new policy—bigger ships, clippers in the China and California trade; and that means removal to Boston. Their facilities here are no longer suitable."

She moved, her chin fell upon her hands, propped up with her elbows on the table. Apparently Edward Dunsack was gazing at the wall beyond her. Her breast gave a single sharp heave. When Nettie looked up her face was flushed. "I wish that I were really a bad woman," she spoke in a low vibrant voice.

"What is bad and what is good?" He still seemed to ignore her, considering a question that had no personal bearing. "In one country a thing is thought wrong and in another it is the highest virtue. In one age this or that is condemned, when, turn the calendar, and everyone is praising it." He became confidential, the image of kindness. "I'll tell you what I think is wicked," he pronounced, leaning toward her, "and that is the way you two were kept apart; unchristian is what I call it."

"Gerrit doesn't care," she said.

"How do you know?" he demanded. "I cannot agree with you. I don't find a great deal in him to admire, he is too simple and transparent; but there's no doubt of this, he is faithful. One idea, one affection, is all his head will hold."

"That's a beautiful trait." A palpable wistfulness settled over her.

"It's greatly admired," he agreed; "although not by me. I believe in taking what is yours, what you need, from life. I suppose that I have been away from proprieties so long that they have lost their importance. They seem to me of no greater weight than barriers of straw. But, of course, that mightn't suit you; probably, living in Salem as you have, its opinion is valuable."

"Salem!" she exclaimed bitterly. "What has it ever been to me but an unfair judgment? I owe Salem no consideration; I can't see that I owe any to life."

"I don't want to insist on that," he proceeded deliberately. "The tragedy of your position is that married to Ammidon everything in the past would have been overlooked, forgotten. Even now—" he stopped with a gesture indicating the presence still of large possibilities.

God, what a vacillating fool the girl was! He could say no more at present, and he rose, leaving the room with Nettie staring dully across the table. He went outside, to the grass fronting on the harbor. Here, last night, he had thrown the opium into the water. It seemed to him that he had lived through a complete existence since then: the presence of Taou Yuen had created a new world. He thought she walked to him through the gloom; he saw her slender body grow brighter as she approached; he heard her speak in a low native murmur; their hands caught in an eager tangle.

He put aside, momentarily, the problem of the difficulties of going again to the Ammidons' for an easier one—the bringing of Gerrit Ammidon here. He was confident that, thrown together on the still rim of the water, at evening, the emotion born between his niece and the shipmaster and prematurely choked would revive. He had no means of knowing Ammidon's present exact feeling for Nettie; he was counting only on a general theory of men and nature at large. He was already convinced, from very wide knowledge, experience, that the other could not form a permanent attachment to the Manchu; and Nettie's great difference, together with the romance of her unhappy position, must have a potent effect on the fellow's evident sentimentality. A dank air rose from the water, like the smell of death; and, with an uncontrollable shiver, he turned back toward the house.

In his room Edward Dunsack recalled that he had promised himself to throw away the remainder of the opium on this and succeeding nights. In view of that his movements were inexplicable: he got out from a locked chest the yen tsiang, a heavy tube of dark wood inlaid with silver ideograms and diminutive earthen cup at one end. Then he produced a small brass lamp, brushes, long needles, and a metal rod. Taking off his clothes, and in the somber black folds of the silk robe, he made various minutely careful preparations. Finally, extended on his bed, he dipped the end of the rod into opium the color of tar, kept it for a bubbling moment near the blaze of the lamp, and then crowded the drug into the pipe. He held the bowl to the flame and drew in a long deep inhalation. A second followed and the pipe was empty. He repeated this until he had smoked a mace.