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It wasn't possible, however; his knees sagged walking the length of the floor; in the sitting room he fell into a leaden apathy. Nettie Vollar's gaze rested on the volume of the life of the missionary who had died at such an early age on the Ile de France.
A flush like match flames burned in Nettie Vollar's cheeks, and she said in a voice at once weak and sharp: "You're her!" Taou Yuen nodded slowly, disdainfully. "Oh, how could he!" the other exclaimed in what sounded like the thin echo of a passionate cry. "I knew you were Chinese, but I never realized it till this minute."
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.
It was reasonable to expect small differences between her and Salem: at times her calm chilled him by a swift glimpse of utter coldness, at times he would have liked her gravity to melt into something less than ivory perfection; even her goodness had oppressed him. The last hadn't the human quality of, for example, Nettie Vollar's goodness, colored by rebellion, torn by doubt, and yet triumphing.
A further, almost philosophical, consideration engaged Taou Yuen's mind this extraordinary occasion, her being with the other alone, Nettie Vollar's fragility, were, it might be, all a part of the working of the righteous Yang. In the light of this, then, she had been brought here for a purpose ... the ending of a menace to her husband.
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.
He intended to kill her, to mar and spoil her throat, a degradation forbidden by Confucius, an eternal disfigurement. This filled her with a renewed energy of horror.... Here there was none but a feeble woman to hear her if she called. She rose mechanically, a hand on the table; Taou Yuen saw Nettie Vollar's deathly pallid face rolled awkwardly from the pillow, and the bowl of opium.
Something had occurred, or threatened to occur, between her uncle and Nettie; what it was she had never been told; but she realized that only one thing could really happen between a man and a girl they must have been in love. In the interest of this she recalled Nettie Vollar's appearance, but was unable to discover any marked attractions.
To her astonishment she had forgotten Nettie Vollar's existence a shaken voice from the bed demanded: "Uncle Edward, what's come over you! Don't you see Mrs. Ammidon! Oh " her speech rose in a choked exclamation. Edward Dunsack had turned the key and was crossing the room with a dark twisted face, his eyes stark and demented.
His inquiry was reaching a depressing certainty when, passing and gazing down Hardy Street, he saw the Ammidon barouche standing in front of the Dunsacks'. Roger Brevard stopped: the Ammidon men, he knew, seldom drove about Salem. He had heard of Nettie Vollar's accident and came to the conclusion that Rhoda was within.
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