down to the coast, to Shanghai. We’ll get our things ready tonight, and start out in the morning.”
“The natives,” Sarah started to say.
“It’s got nothing to do with that nonsense,” he said, a trifle too emphatically. “There are things I need, some books I ordered, for one. And I rather thought you’d both welcome a change of scene. Of course, if you’d rather stay here....”
“No,” Sarah said quickly. “No, we’ll be ready in the morning.”
“We’ll leave at dawn, then,” he said. “Might as well get an early start.” He went out of the room. It seemed to Lydia that his gait was a trifle unsteady.
* * * * * * *
They did not leave at dawn, however. Hours before that, Lydia was awakened by her mother.
“Your father’s been taken ill,” she said, shaking Lydia from her sleep.
“Is it—is it the cholera?”
“I’m afraid so.”
What followed was like a nightmare that seemed to go on and on without end. For three days Reverend Holt’s condition worsened, while his wife and daughter ministered to him as best they could, and listened in dread to every sound from without. They could not know what turn outside events had taken.
Sarah dismissed the servants, fearful that one of them might let it be known that the master was dying, so the two women were left unprotected. Women did not count for much in China, and it was not unlikely that someone might try to take advantage, particularly in view of the anti-white uproar sweeping the country.
To add to their fears, Ke Loo returned once more to press his suit.
“My husband is away at the moment,” Sarah said. The reverend had the misfortune to utter a low moan just then. Ke Loo’s eyes slid in the direction of the bedroom.
“One of the servants,” Sarah said, alarmed.
Ke Loo left, but Sarah was certain he would return. It was horrible; she hadn’t an ounce of courage of her own. She had always journeyed without question or hesitation anywhere her husband had chosen to go, but in doing so she had only relied upon her utter confidence in him and upon his own lack of fear. To travel with him into the interior of China had seemed no more alarming than any of a dozen other trips they had taken, without any harm befalling them.
To be left in China on her own was terrifying beyond belief. If only they were in Shanghai, or Hong Kong, somewhere where there were other Americans or English; but she had no idea even how to arrange their transport to one of those places. Her husband had never allowed her to trouble herself with such matters. She spoke not a word of Chinese, though Lydia had learned a smattering of the language. At any rate, it was unthinkable that two women could travel across the Chinese mainland without a man’s escort. Yet they surely could not stay here, either.
Joshua Holt died on the third day of his illness. Lydia came into the room to find her mother weeping softly. Her father’s eyes, looking ghastly in his pale, sunken face, stared unseeingly upward. Though it filled her with horror, Lydia forced herself to close his eyes.
“What shall we do?” she asked her mother. Sarah shook her head helplessly.
I shall have to be strong, Lydia thought suddenly, for both of us.
It was a new idea to her, and in a way more frightening than all the rest that had happened, or was still threatening to happen. Never before in her life had she really needed to be strong, for there had always been her beloved father to rely upon. Now, though, every instinct told her that it was on her shoulders, and not her mother’s trembling ones, that her father’s mantle of responsibility must fall.
“We shall go to the Cabots,” she said aloud; the Cabots were the missionary couple who lived in Mei Fu, thirty miles away. “We’ll wait until night, and travel by darkness.”
Her mother meekly accepted her authority, and at Lydia’s direction began to pack their bags. It did not apparently occur to her to ponder the one question that most worried her daughter: what if the Cabots had already left that city?
They were packed and ready to go by the time darkness fell, but Sarah would not leave without burying her husband.
“We can’t just leave him here like that,” she insisted. “Suppose they came in a mob, there’s no telling what they might do to him.”
“Yes, of course, you’re right,” Lydia said, though her common sense urged her to flee without any delay. “It will have to be in the garden, then. We’d better find something for digging.”
The moon had not yet risen and the air was hot and heavy with dampness, threatening a storm. They found a pair of hoes, but no shovel.
“Under the plum tree, I think,” Lydia said, indicating the straggly tree at the far corner of the enclosure. “It stays damp there. The ground will be softer.”
The ground was indeed soft under the tree. Even so, it was hard work. Within minutes Lydia’s clothes were clinging wetly to her. She had vowed that she would not think of the purpose of their labors, but it was impossible to judge the size of the pit they were scratching from the earth without considering what was to go into it.
The stillness of the night was broken by a distant sound of shouting. The two women stopped their work, cocking their heads, as a single cry of terror, like the soprano in a mass, soared high and clear above the others, ending abruptly.
“Bandits,” Lydia said, straining at the silence that had rushed back over them; or was that a footstep beyond the garden wall? Had someone whispered, or was it only the restless birds in the branches above them?
“Someone being slaughtered,” Sarah said.
Lydia shuddered, trying to think of something to say, as her father would have done, to break the tension, and all too aware of her own inadequacy.
Sarah’s hoe slipped from her fingers and dropped with a soft thunk to the ground. “I can’t do any more,” she gasped, swaying slightly.
Lydia steadied her with an arm about her shoulders. “It will do,” she said.
It would have to do, or they would be too exhausted to travel, and go they must, for she was convinced that the longer they stayed here, the greater their danger, two women, alone and unprotected, in an alien and increasingly unfriendly land.
First, however, they must finish the grim task at hand. They went into the house. Almost at once, Sarah sank weakly onto one of the hard wooden chairs.
“I can’t get my breath,” she said.
Lydia came to her and wiped her brow; her mother’s face was burning to the touch. The cholera? But if her mother died....Lydia felt a fresh spasm of fear.
“You rest here,” she said.
She went into the bedroom alone. The shutters were open and she closed them before lighting the oil lamp. In its flickering light her father’s lifeless face had a waxen, unearthly look. Lydia knelt by the bed, meaning to pray, but her heart was gripped with fear and the words would not come. Finally, despairing, she got up again.
