CHAPTER XXXII

Sir Charles had meant well, and so had Miss Julia; but the result of their united effort was that they hastened it on. It has happened before.

It was Ivy herself who, though she did not directly say it, showed Sên clearly that she wished it so.

She was unhappy at her cousin’s. Emma Snow was all that was kindest. But Sir Charles could not hide his displeasure and the something too of shame that he felt. He did not blame Sên King-lo as much as he felt that he ought. He saw great excuse for Sên King-lo—for his impulse, if not for his stubborn persistence. Men loved. It came and it went. But it had to come. Shut off from his own people, debarred from the women of his race, it was inevitable that his manhood should turn to some one of the women among whom he lived. And Sir Charles appreciated what Ivy’s appeal and lure had been—appreciated it all. Desdemona, on the stage, usually is golden-haired and tea-rose faced. A finer art would show her Venetian dark. Sir Charles heard the Chinese note in Ivy’s laugh and knew that the colors she oftenest wore and the dangling things she instinctively thrust in dress and hair had a Chinese touch—and how that must be in Sên King-lo’s eyes. Although she did not know a taotai from a compradore, a hong from a pai’fang or a k’o-tang, a tong from a yamên, yet he now and then heard a Chinese sentiment from her English lips, caught a Chinese trend and bias in her mind. Her sensitiveness was as Chinese as it was girlish. Her love of flowers and that she liked one or two or a spray far more than she did a mass of them, her fondness for stringed-instruments—the harp was more to her than the piano or organ—her interest in handwritings, and a dozen traits, small enough singly, were not unlike those of the Chinese. Her horror of debt—he never had known her to owe a farthing—her pride and her quick sense of humor were more general in China than they were in England. He could understand Sên’s madness, even while he steeled his soul not to condone it.

But he saw no excuse for Ivy. To him she seemed the victim of wilful and headstrong infatuation. Sên King-lo was a rich man, and Snow partly realized how the girl loathed her poverty. But he was just enough to know that in this she had given dollars and cents no thought. And there were rich men and to spare here in Washington and at home in England—and Ivy had beauty, personality and charm. Of course she wished—whether she knew so or not—to marry. Every nice girl did—and should. But an English girl as nice as he had believed his cousin to be would have lived forever unwedded and childless, rather than marry an Oriental. He had not forgotten Lotus; but he had been a boy then, and she not much more than a child who never had seen a man of her caste but not of her blood—until she had looked up from his arms into his face. And, too, that had been very different—love’s young dream in a lotus-garden, the dream that all Nature and strange circumstances had conspired to make it. And he had had the sound sense and the stern British good taste to renounce it. And it had been a long time ago.

Ivy had lost caste with her cousin. And, in spite of himself, he showed it. And the girl, sensitive, proud and dependent, felt it intensely. They had been close friends, particular chums until now, and now they were merely a disgusted kinsman and an outraged kins-girl.

Then, too, money was pinching her: the need and lack of it. Lessons were a thing of the past now. Emma Snow good-humoredly had insisted upon that and then regretted that she had, for Ivy flatly refused even a dime of Charles’ money that she had not so much as pretended to earn. Her purse was empty, and she needed new gloves. Emma missed seeing a ring and a brooch of Ivy’s and suspected that she had sold them.

And most of all now the girl longed to get away from the house in which even her cousin’s bread tasted bitter. She refused the dishes she liked best, stole many bits of needlework from Justine, and mutilated almost her last ten dollars to buy stuff she made into a little frock that Blanche didn’t need, and counted how many of the meals she unwillingly ate its shop value would have paid for. She burned her electric light sparingly, bought her own stamps and used as few of them as she could, and walked to save street-car fares.

They were married in August—Sên King-lo was eagerly glad to have it so—and Washington society had no wedding-day treat.

There were neither bridesmaids nor cake. And they left Washington in an hour after. Sên King-lo had had no difficulty in arranging for an official transfer to London; for the semidiplomatic position he held under China’s new Republic was elastic, a roaming brief when he chose, and its itinerary very much at his own discretion.

Earlier than social Washington often stirred from its beds, Sên and Ivy were married in a small quiet church in a small quiet tree-shaded street. And before Washington knew of the ceremony Mr. and Mrs. Sên were on the Atlantic.

Sên King-lo had wished intensely that Sir Charles Snow should give his cousin away and had urged it, jealous for her that she should come to her husband as English girls were accustomed to do. But Snow could not, and Ivy would not have allowed it.

So Abraham Kelly, wearing a flopping gray frock-coat and feeling as if his maiden aunt had caught him at a game of draw-poker in a churchyard, gave Ivy away, while the Chinese Minister looked on with a beam on his face and rage in his heart.

No girl-friend was there. Only Emma Snow and Dr. Ray stood beside her, and, except the clergyman, no one else was there. There was no music. But for the ruby-red bud in Sên King-lo’s lounge coat, there was not a flower, unless the red peppers he himself had bought at dawn at the market—and that Ivy wore in the little gray frock that Elenore Ray had given her—counted for flowers.

There were more old clothes than new in Ivy Gilbert’s trousseau, and those that were new were Dr. Ray’s gift.

From Emma the girl would take nothing, for Emma too had been a penniless bride, and Ivy would accept nothing for which Charles Snow’s money had paid. Lady Snow was greatly hurt, but she understood and forgave.

It sounds a sad wedding and a drear one. But the man and the girl that stood at the altar were radiant-eyed. Neither had a doubt now.

They said goodbye in the vestry—the two women holding Sên King-lo’s wife in their arms lingeringly—and she and he breakfasted alone in his rooms, to be dismantled now. Then Mr. and Mrs. Sên caught the next train for New York.

They dined alone. Ivy still wore her peppers dangling in a gown they matched, a red dress which—he had told her so now—he had thought like the wedding-dress of a Chinese bride, the night she had given him her confession-book.

Three days later they sailed for Liverpool. Mrs. Sên was glad to go; she was going home, and New York had not been entirely comfortable. Washington necessarily is cosmopolitan and race-seasoned. No one had looked at her askance when she had walked its streets beside a Chinese friend or lingered with him in the Corcoran Gallery—unless the darkies who met them did. New York was different. Ivy thought that the man who served their meals was curious, and she had a tingling sense that the shop-discipline deferential courtesy of the clerk at Tiffany’s was all for Sên’s purse—less than none of it for their companionship. She thought that several passersby on Fifth Avenue looked at them odiously; twice she saw a lip curl, and once a woman laughed.

She did not regret Washington. But she was glad to leave New York.

The voyage was smooth, and her cabin was sweet with lilies that kept their waxen freshness and their intoxicating perfume well past-midocean.

CHAPTER XXXIII

Three years had passed.

All had gone well with Mr. and Mrs. Sên. There had been tiny rasps, of course; but they had been very tiny and had gone almost as soon as they had come. And neither the man nor his wife had had a regret. Sên had been busy, prosperous and content—keen on his “job,” proud of his wife, desperately fond of her still. And, if China had called to him now and then, he had kept it to himself. Ivy had had three years of happiness and good times, and she had enjoyed every hour of it. Her husband had proved the best of long-distance companions, and his intimate charm had even increased with their days. London society, the grave and best, as well as the gay, had given them both cordial welcome, with never a shrug or the breath of a slur. Sên King-lo had a very long purse now, and he took a still boyish delight in having his beautiful wife dip into it. There was no question now of needed new gloves or homemade blouses and jumpers for young Mrs. Sên. They met great folk on a parity. Ruben, their baby, had his father’s sunny temper and strong self-control, and though he had his mother’s dark gold-brown eyes, straight-set, was almost a blonde: an Anglo-Saxon baby, deliciously and ridiculously fat, great pals with his father and very much in love with his mother.

They had a rambling old house, discreetly modernised, delightfully furnished, a skilfully “old-world” garden about it, Kensington High Street not much more than a stone’s throw away, and a tiny rose-covered crib on the river. Their love had held and had grown, and their congeniality and mutual confidence were entire. Mrs. Sên had left almost her last annoyance on Fifth Avenue and at Tiffany’s—and only two had come to her since, both so small that they scarcely are worth mentioning, even if straws do have a reputed significance.

When the first bewitchery wore off, she discovered that she disliked her new name—and that it embarrassed her. And, believing her slightest wish her man’s sacred law, she suggested modifying and (as she thought, though she didn’t say it) “civilizing” Sên into “Senn.” She even went so far on that road as to have visiting cards engraved “Mrs. K. L. Senn” and handed one to King-lo as he sat reading in her room after tea.

“Who is she?” he asked with a smile. “A new acquaintance or an old one who has found you again?”

His wife made him a very low bow. “Behold her!” she said.

He understood on the instant—and he sensed a chasm ahead, a yawning rent in their future.

But his face did not change.

He drew his wife down on to his knee, and, with his face on hers, told her that she might not rename herself “Mrs. K. L. Senn,” nor anything else. How her wish to do it had cut him, he did not tell her, and she never suspected it even. She yielded, but she was vexed and disappointed. But she put the alias-cards in the fire and soon forgot all about it, disappointment and all. But Sên King-lo’s hurt stayed.

And when she saw her name, as he and thousands of Chinese years had given it to her, engraved on the cards she ordered the next day, she decided that Sên had a chic of its own. (The venerable name, the honorable name of Sên, chic!) She grew fond of writing her name and took special pleasure and pains in making the tent-like accent and perching it as carefully and daintily over its “e” as she did a new toque on her beautifully dressed hair. And she found that its very unusualness made it a social asset—if a cheap one—in avid London; and revalued it for this. Her handwriting was as individual and almost as pretty as she was—and many more than her husband thought so—and her name as she wrote it looked particularly well. She always signed herself “Ruby Sên.” And Sên King-lo never asked her to write it “Sên Ruby.” But he wished it.

The other small cloud was a name-cloud, too, and more permanent.

Mrs. Sên did not know what to call her husband. “King-lo” she did not care for—she thought it had a heathenish sound, and smacked of Limehouse laundries—though she had the sweet good taste never to tell Sên so. “King” by itself she particularly disliked. “It would be too silly to call you ‘King’ all over the place when you’re only a Mister. And I won’t call you ‘Sên,’ for you are not a peer.” She tried to invent a name of her own for him but couldn’t find one. Finally she called him “Lo” thinking it funny and short and belittling at first. But she soon forgot that she had, and Sên thought its sound from her lips the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

And beyond these two Ivy had never felt a shadow since she sailed from New York City in a jade-colored green dress that she had worn once at a Rosehill garden party.

The baby could not write its name yet—some five-months-old babies cannot—and no question had arisen as yet as to whether that important signature would be “Ruben Sên” or “Sên Ruben.” Sên King-lo had named their firstborn, rather insisting on “Ruben” in place of the “Ruby” he had wished. But he realized that even a Chinese man—very probably a future great President—could not appropriately go through life and international preëminence under the winsome name of Ruby. But the father liked the sound of “Ruben” better than the mother did.

Ruby—the young mother—enjoyed her social popularity keenly, and neither she nor Sên suspected that it had grown even more from the estimate in which several eminent people held him than from the undeniable charm of her personality and easy adaptability. She loved her home, especially the rose-covered crib with only room for two. She enjoyed her husband’s “vogue” and his cordial welcome in high places. But most of all she loved her husband and child—and King-lo the dearer of the two.

No one looked at them with unpleasant surprise. London has an easy grace of the darker strangers within her imperial gates. And Mrs. Sên soon realized that in Mayfair there was more distinction than disgrace in being the English wife of Sên King-lo. And, whatever they thought or felt about it there, they were very kind to Mrs. Sên at Portland Place where the five-colors flag flew. She made his Chinese friends welcome and was sweetly cordial to them, and most of them liked her. The Chinese in London grow in numbers, and there are many of a birth and class that do not affiliate with Limehouse. But their home and home-life were English. Kwan Yin-ko hung beside their bed, and an old Chinese miniature of an older “Ruby” was locked away in Sên King-lo’s own “den.” But there was nothing else Chinese in the house. Few smart houses in Hampstead, Mayfair, Chelsea or Kensington but had more Chinese curios than the Sêns’ had. It was both kind and wise of Mr. Sên, many sage folk said. But they misjudged him there. It was Sên’s doing, not his English wife’s; but it was a selfishness—almost his sole one. He did not wish too many material reminders about him of the homeland he had forsaken. England was his home now, and he did not intend ever again to be homesick for China, and he cut the risks of it as close as he could. But he still read his own classics, when he sat alone in his den, and the love-songs of Li-Po. A man cannot forgo the books that were the mother’s milk of his soul.

And Sên King-lo still brushed many a letter to friends in Chinese—not all of them business letters. And he still sometimes played a game of chess with an opponent in Shansi, and he often heard the Yellow Sorrow surge and creak—in his dreams as he slept.

But most of his nights were untroubled and dreamless, and whatever his sleep, he woke each day to a deeper and more tender love of the girl who lay beside him.

King-lo always woke the earlier. For centuries his people had waked at dawn, and the old race-habit stayed.

When King-lo woke he scarcely stirred lest he disturb her. Sometimes he drew a book from his bedside table and kept himself quiet with the volume’s pages till she moved and he turned to greet her waking. But oftener Sên King-lo lifted his chin on an elbow-supported hand and watched and worshiped the girlish loveliness of the delicate face asleep on its pillow. He thought of the girl on whose face he had laid his face as they stood by an old fallen apple-tree, the girl he had taken to wife one early morning in a crumbling, dreary church, on an old-fashioned street—a church that had not been any god-place of his churchless people—in the crown-city of an alien people, the Queen City of the Potomac. Though he’d loved the girl well, and had dared to risk for her the convictions of his being and the future of all his years, in defiance of the instincts of centuries and the laws of his fathers, she had not been loved as he loved his wife resting beside him, sleeping safe and secure in his love and in the keeping of his manhood. Day after day Sên King-lo’s soul kept a sacred tryst with the woman who slept happily there while the sun came back from China, going its way to China, rose over New York City, throwing splashes of gold over skyscrapers, Central Park, boat-busy river, “Flat Iron” and ocean.

They had had many a golden jaunt together—a month in Venice, wonderful weeks in Spain, again and again a week in Paris—these married lovers and best of friends, before Ruben had come to call a halt to their journeying and make their London life more of a permanency than it had been. They had learned North Wales together and watched Windermere. No reasonable wife could have seriously asked more of marriage and husband than Sên King-lo had given her. And riant Mrs. Sên was a very reasonable and entirely contented woman.

CHAPTER XXXIV

It had worked so well that, when the Snows had come home a year ago, even Sir Charles had wondered if Sên King-lo might not prove to have been wiser than he—if only they stayed in England. He wondered often now what Sên thought of so English-looking a son, what he planned for Ruben’s future; but he himself—Sir Charles—saw some simplification of a vexatious problem, a sore racial complex, in the baby boy’s Anglo-Saxon fairness and features.

There was little that Charles Snow would not have given or done to have prevented the Sên marriage, and he still winced at it—English prejudice and preconceptions are sturdy moral weeds—but as soon as it was sealed he wished it only well, bent his strength to its support, and did all he knew to regain the old footing between his cousin and himself. He wrote to Ivy the day after her marriage as unforced a letter as he could, and he wrote several longer, easier letters after she had reached Europe. But she answered none of them, and she made no response to any message he sent in Emma’s friendly and cousinly letters.

He and Sên King-lo exchanged letters, not very frequently, but always cordially, though not with the verbal ardor of women. And when he and Lady Snow had come back to live in London and in the old place in Kent in which his mother and Ivy’s had been born, and he walked into his cousin’s drawing-room quite as if he knew she’d expect and wish him to, and simply would not be snubbed, she found it impossible to greet him as coldly as she thought he deserved. And after a first touch of frigid hauteur which he in perfectly good humor ignored, she took up their old friendliness, if not quite their oldtime friendship, again. And she soon found it easy enough to forgive him, almost to forget. It’s a mean victor who cherishes venom, and Ivy Sên was the least mean of women. She and Lo had made good. Dear old Charlie had written himself down a goose. Who could be too hard on a goose? Not the happiest, proudest woman in England. And when she saw the look in the two men’s eyes as they met, and saw the affectionate grip of their honest hands, her own eyes melted.

The four cousins had dined together at the Sêns’, and the two women were discussing chiffons and babies and the sins of chauffeurs over a drawing-room fire—there were two fires in Ivy’s long drawing-room—and the men were discussing tobacco, matters of international import, and a little whiskey in Sên’s den.

As King-lo leaned over the narrow table to refill the other’s tumbler, he said:

“It has come.”

“Has it? That’s enough soda. What has come?” But he knew before Sên told him, and Sên told him at once.

“The message from China. They want me at once. By rights, I should go next week. I haven’t told her yet. I don’t know how she’ll take it.”

“Thoroughbred,” Snow replied in a word.

“Superbly. But she won’t like being left.”

“You won’t take her?”

“Of course not. The time isn’t quite ripe, I think——”

Sir Charles Snow was sure that it was not even ripening and never would be, but he smoked on in silence.

“But,” King-lo added hurriedly, “I may be wrong there. But we couldn’t possibly take the young Lord Ruben home with us yet. Two messages came by the same post—this morning’s early one. It isn’t only that the bank needs me over there for a bit; but my grandmother tells me to come to her——”

“The devil she does,” thought Sir Charles Snow. He knew those Chinese grandmothers—he knew what their suzerainty was and the ruthless way they asserted and enforced it. China might be a republic, but twenty republics couldn’t clip the wings of one old hobble-gaited grand-dame who lived, shrill and impregnable, far off from the tourist-beaten paths.

“I might do the work at the banks by proxy, important as it is. But Sên Ya Tin must be obeyed.”

Snow nodded. He knew that.

“And I couldn’t think of taking the baby that journey. You know where we live. I don’t see my son on that trip! The Yangtze in flood as like as not, local troubles in at least two of the provinces between Hongkong and home, shotguns in full action, and not a cow for miles. No, Sên junior cannot accompany Sên. I must leave them here.”

He might or might not leave Sên Ruben, but her cousin felt sure that he was not destined to leave Mrs. Sên. But again he kept his opinion to himself. He had “looked in” on Ivy’s matrimonial affairs for the last time. It caused friction, and it availed nothing.

“I wish Ivy would come to us then,” was what he did say.

“I wish she would,” Sên replied. “It would be jolly for her in Kent with you. And splendid for the boy. But I don’t believe she will. I think she’ll wish to stay here in our own home and in the cottage.”

“Shall you be gone long?”

“Hard to say. Five or six months, if not longer, I’m afraid. I must give things a thorough overhauling at Hongkong. We have a number of ramifications now, you know—in six of the provinces, and I ought to go myself to the end of them all. Then it will take some time to get home and come back from there. And my grandmother does not say for how long she will keep me with her—a day or two, perhaps, or it might be longer—weeks perhaps. I can’t tell.”

Sir Charles Snow wondered. It might be months perhaps! The venerable Madame Sên could tell, he knew; and he knew that she would.

“I suppose you’ll tell Ivy as soon as Emma and I have gone?”

“No—in the morning,” Sên replied. “She won’t like it. I’d hate her to. And I don’t like it myself.”

“But you’ll be glad to see China again—to be in China again?”

A light grew in Sên King-lo’s face.

“Yes,” he said, “I shall be glad to be in China again—for a time. It hurts to go from this, even for a time. Ruben will cut a tooth—learn to crawl, perhaps to stand. And I shall not be here to see it. And—it means a good deal to me to leave my wife—more than it will to her—and she won’t like it. But she’ll have the boy. But I shall be glad to be in China again. I am glad that I am going back to China, to hear my own tongue spoken everywhere once more—once I’m well away from the polyglot treaty ports—to see the birds I used to know at their breakfast, to eat the old foods in the old way. I haven’t snapped a melon-seed between my teeth for years, or seen a mango that was a mango, or a lychee that wasn’t a petrified mummy—do you remember how the lychees taste when the wine of their ripeness is in them still?”

Snow nodded.

“And the mangosteens?”

“Only too well!”

“To see only Chinese faces once more—to be among my countrymen! Oh, I’ve been in exile, and sometimes I’ve found it bitter—often—until one day Miss Julia ‘gave a party’—and Ruby was there——”

Sir Charles’ face was very grave. He saw writing on the wall.

Sên King-lo went on with his home-going. “To see the silk-worms gorging on the mulberry-trees, to see the red poppies growing—not much use for opium, but you remember the sea of color they make, lakes and oceans of it—and the fire-weed—to hear the sound the mallets make when they strike the bells—the gongs too—in the old temple courtyards that used to be my playground when I was a boy—” He broke off and passed the decanter.

CHAPTER XXXV

Sên King-lo did not sleep that night, torn between two vibrant emotions—sorrow at the impending separation from his wife and joy to go home again.

Perhaps Ruby Sên caught in her sleep something of his double strain, for she woke as the first light filtered through their loose-drawn curtains; and her waking was sharp and instant, wide-eyed at once, which it rarely was. Usually she stirred and dozed, coming back very gradually to the life of brazened day, as the convolvulus sleepily unfurls its twisted spiral to the dawn. She was fast asleep—then, wide awake.

Sên King-lo turned and took her in his arms, and told her where he was going, when and why.

Her dark eyes sparkled with quick pleasure. But she exclaimed chidingly, “And that was what was in those two letters you had from China by the first post yesterday! And you’ve only told me now! A whole day wasted, and with all the packing to do in no time at all! Lo, you are simply wicked.”

“Since when have you done my packing, Mrs. Sên? And I seem to remember that I not unfrequently have done yours. My mistake no doubt.”

Ivy giggled and tried to shake him. There was an interlude.

“I shall not take much luggage,” Lo told her.

“Your luggage!” his wife retorted contemptuously. “Two handkerchiefs and a razor and a book of poems—I know your luggage. But you don’t imagine that I and Baby and Nurse are going half-way across the world with only one suitcase between us, do you?”

“Dear,” her husband said very gently, “we couldn’t take Baby. It’s too far, the way too hard, whole weeks of discomfort, if not worse—for you and him, I mean. I shall enjoy every rod of it, with my goat-legs—and home at the end of the journey. I never am ill, and, if I were, the smell of Ho-nan would be all the medicine I needed. But we can’t take our frogling off of the doctors’ beats.”

“No!” the frogling’s mother instantly agreed. “Oh—Lo—I shan’t like leaving him behind. But—of course—for his own sake—but, oh! Lo—how shall we do it!”

“Of course not,” he answered her quickly, with a hand on her hair, “so you’ll have to stay with him, mother-girl.”

Ruby Sên slipped from her husband’s arms, thrust them gently but firmly away, and sat up on the pillows, eying her husband.

“I am going with you, Lo,” she told him quietly.

“No,” he said, a little tensely, “not this time. I can’t take you to China now, heart of my heart.”

“Why?”

“The time isn’t ripe. You wouldn’t be comfortable.”

“I should be with you.”

Sên King-lo thanked her with his eyes and with the touch of his hands. They were lovers still, these two who had ventured the perilous marriage.

But he persisted, “I cannot take you, dear. I’d rather give it up than do that.”

“You want to go, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “And you think that you ought?”

“I know that I ought. And I want to go more than I could tell you.”

“But not to have me with you?”

“Always that. But not to take you with me. I must not.”

Ruby studied the yellow flowers on the blue eiderdown a moment and then turned her eyes again to her husband’s and searched his face, laying her hand, and keeping it there, on his hand that lay on the lace below her throat. She said, “Are you ashamed to take me to China, Lo? Ashamed to have me there with you?”

Sudden color flooded the face of the Chinese man; but he answered her truthfully and fairly, as he always had and always would do.

In every marriage there must be something of sacrifice—and always it must be so, because the bonds that fetter human souls one from the other are eternal set—always have been and always must be—till we cross the River; and it is in the higher wedlock, the happiest union, most nearly perfected, that that sacramental sacrifice is the greatest and costliest. In the sacrifices to come it might be laid upon him to keep from her unsaid some of the thoughts that welled to his heart and vexed his mind—indeed already he had done so once or twice, eagerly willing to bear tenfold any trouble alone rather than to share it with her. But he never had lied to his wife in small things or great, and it did not occur to him to do it now in this hour of their intimate mutual testing. And though he would instantly, ungrudgingly, have sacrificed to her his life and things far dearer than life, he could not sacrifice even to her his word—and truth was a very part of his loyalty. There were white-skinned women in London—a few—who pitied Mrs. Sên, even while they sought her and made much of her—pitied her because she was the wife of an Eastern—but there were sadly few who might not have envied her had they known the quality of her husband’s loyalty—exquisite and absolute.

“Ashamed!” he repeated. “Never that! Need you ask?”

“What is it then?”

“Afraid. Afraid for you, dearest.”

“Of what?” She would not let him off.

And he went on simply and bravely and left no blank in this confession. “Afraid of slights and slurs. They might not come, but they might.”

“Need we care?” she demanded, pressing a little the fingers under hers. “ ‘Where MacGregor sits is the head of the table.’ ”

Sên King-lo made no reply.

“Slights from whom, Lo?”

“From my own people, perhaps.”

She bent over him then, and something as a mother might. “ ‘Thy people shall be my people,’ ” she crooned, “ ‘and whither thou goest there also will I go.’ ”

Sên King-lo gathered his wife down to his breast and held her there. Neither spoke. The room was very quiet.

CHAPTER XXXVI

But Sên King-lo had no intention of yielding. And for several days they pitted their wills against each other, while Mrs. Sên went quietly on with her packing.

His Chinese will and her English will met and interlocked, and, because her will was a woman’s, Ruby won.

Ruben went into the keeping of Lady Snow, “perfectly delighted to have another baby without any of the preliminary unpleasantness,” the overwatching care of his cousin Charles, with Dick and Blanche for special and voluble bodyguard; and the roses bloomed alone and unpruned on the tiny cottage, and Kwan Yin-ko lived alone in the Kensington house.

“Would you not like to live in China?” Mrs. Sên had asked her husband one day before they left London. “Make it our home, I mean? I have been thinking about it a good deal these last few days. You have been like a boy since you’ve known you were going back to China.”

“Transplant my English flowers to the wilds of China!” Sên laughed.

“Ruben is only half-English,” she reminded him, “and I am your wife.”

“Ruben looks rather more English than you do,” he retorted.

“That’s no answer, Lo. Listen—” she put her hands on his shoulders and held them there. “I have been very happy here. It has been splendid. I’ve loved the fun of London and all the interest. But the one thing I care for is to be with you and the boy. Truly, Lo. I meant every word I said to you the other morning: every bit of me did. I don’t care where we live. On my soul, I don’t. Let us live in China—most of your business is there. Take me to your own home, Lo, and make me a Chinese woman.”

He took her face in his hands. It was the only answer he made her.

“Wouldn’t you like to stay in China?” she persisted. “We could come here for nice long visits sometimes. Shall we?”

Sên King-lo laughed oddly. “We’ll try a trial trip first,” was all he said.

It was left at that.

Baby Ruben was taken to Kent, the old room Ivy Gilbert’s mother had been born in made his day nursery, with Jack and Jill, Little Bo Peep and all her sheep, the Cow with the crumpled horn and the Old Woman who lived in a shoe and found it crowded, newly papered on the walls. Old Father Thames, in very bright blue, meandered tranquilly beside them, with golden stars for Oxford and Maple Durham, for Windsor and Eton, and one very big star with two extra points for London town. Sên King-lo and Ruby his wife crossed the world together.

CHAPTER XXXVII

Mrs. Sên clapped her hands and the “boy”—a wrinkled-faced Chinese of sixty—brought in the teapot and the crumpets.

She had seen Lo’s chair as the bearers carried it up the path, and she was sure he’d want his tea as soon as he could get it, after being coolie-jolted all the way from the Bund to the top of the Peak, this broiling, brazen day. She knew she wanted hers.

She frowned a trifle impatiently as she rearranged her tea-table a little. To Sung had forgotten the sugar again. Lo didn’t take sugar here—but she did. Well, she’d not take sugar today, for Lo would be here in a moment now and, if she called the servant back to bring it, probably Lo would hear and see; and she didn’t want her husband to know that To Sung had forgotten her sugar again—if he had forgotten it. It had infuriated Sên King-lo when it had happened once before. His face had blazed and he had hurled some terrible words at old To Sung, and Ruby had seen a Chinese side of her husband that she never had seen before. To Sung had listened with an expressionless face to the torrid abuse and had gone for the sugar basin when Sên had ended. But only Mrs. Sên’s insistence had saved him dismissal. “I thought you had to be deferential to every old person,” she said as she sugared her half-cold tea. “Every rule has its exception, even in China,” Sên had told her, “and I’ll have no servant of ours forget the slightest service to you.”

She did not dare, for poor old To’s sake, to have Lo know that he had forgotten, or neglected, to bring her sugar again.

They were wonderful servants, these Chinese house-servants of hers, and the bungalow on the Peak ran on even smoother and more noiseless wheels than her admirable London ménage had: more tempting dinners even more perfectly cooked—service swifter and surer. But now and then some personal English need of her own was overlooked. And for all the expertness and well-nigh perfection, Mrs. Sên felt that it was a chillier service than that her London servants had given her. She ignored it, tried to believe that she did not know why it was, brooded over it rather, and hid it from Lo whenever she could.

It was the one small blemish in her delight in her new life in a new place, though she began now to wonder how soon people would begin to call.

“Young China” has done some remarkable things to Hongkong, if it has done nothing else. Sên King-lo found Victoria less to his liking than it had been. But Ruby, who was seeing her first of the Orient now, was entranced with Hongkong. It was all so unexpected, so unlike anything she ever had seen or imagined, that its every oddity and burlesque had a charm and seemed a picture. She never really tired of the bizarre kaleidoscope of the Hongkong streets, but when she was a little satiated with the incredible medley and cram of the odd human mêlée and the narrow, sign-hung streets, she had only to rest her eyes on the boat-flecked water, or lift them for refreshment and delight that never failed to the Peak and its slopes; and always she had the home-haven of the bungalow and its hillside garden.

Sên saw it differently. Whatever his country had gained in freedom and in international grip, he had an appalling feeling that it had lost in beauty and in manners. And once or twice he felt that the soul of China was tarnished, and his taste, if not his reason, veered more and more to Sir Charles’ attitude: “Would that the Manchu were back on the dragon-throne.” It seemed to him that the new Chinese Democracy was overblown and that it was underbred. His countrywomen, that he saw everywhere in the city streets, hurt him almost intolerably. Chinese girls, no longer girlish, “walked out with their ‘young men,’ ” girls so preposterously clad that conjecture often might leave their sex a toss-up, figures so absurd and meaningless that no comic paper in Europe would have reproduced them, or known what to call them if it had. Chinese women wearing spats and rakishly tilted fur caps, thin peek-a-boo blouses and scant tweed skirts cut half-knee high and violently patterned with checks so big that neither a “darky” woman nor a “nigger minstrel” would have worn them in St. Louis or Chicago, stood in strident groups on thoroughfare corners, discussing in shrill, unabashed voices diseases and “causes” of which the courtyard-sheltered woman never had heard. He saw one making a “book” at Happy Valley, he heard another call her escort “old bean,” and when he heard two young Chinese girls placidly discussing abnormalities, sex, and grimmer things with men not much older than they, and saw an undoubtedly respectable matron at a restaurant wearing a monocle and reading through it a French novel of which he would not have allowed Ruby to touch the cover, Sên King-lo felt that Ts’z-hi had died too soon, and all the sweetness and soundness of Chinese womanhood with her.

But he reflected that Hongkong always had been a drag-net for flotsam and jetsam, and he hoped and prayed that when he had journeyed on into the interior he should find his country less “advanced” and changed, the waters still clear and tranquil in the lily-tanks, the tulips and violets still at ease in the gardens, the wild roses by the bamboo-edged waysides still white and sweet. The emancipation of his traveled mind failed him a little, and his soul revolted hotly that East no longer was East.

His countrymen struck him as less changed in appearance, and less unmannered, than his countrywomen did; but he missed the costume he himself had not worn for many years. He missed old ceremonial greetings, old suavities, old detachment, and even the down-hanging queue and the tight braids of hair closely bound about half-shaven heads. Many a man with whom he had business offered him a whiskey and soda or a big cigar who yesterday would have given him a tiny bowl of tea or a long-stemmed, small-bowled, betasseled pipe. Sên King-lo was as homesick for China in Hongkong as he ever had been in Washington and was homesick in a sorrier way.

He always was glad to get back to the bungalow on the Peak which he had taken and furnished for Ruby through a cablegram sent from Vancouver. Sên King-lo had not cared to take his English wife to a Hongkong hotel.

They had been in Hongkong several months now, during which time he had been away more than once on the bank’s business, once with Ruby, twice without her. He did not intend to take her with him again when he went on a business journey. There had been a hint of unpleasantness for them—not between them—more than once on that one journey, hints that had reached him more clearly than they had her. He understood the language and the people; she did not.

She had amused herself comfortably enough on his two brief absences, and he would have been glad to hope that he might persuade her to remain in Hongkong when he went to Ho-nan to see his grandmother at his old home. Ruby had certain social assets here that could not be ignored or too ruthlessly discounted. The Governor was a lifelong friend of Sir Charles Snow’s; his wife a distant relative of Lady Snow’s; and in London Ruby and he had dined with them and they with the Sêns. It had not been possible for Mr. and Mrs. Sên to be excluded from Government House. And that gave her a chance of amusement which might, he thought, be a little more cordial if he himself were away. But Sên knew so well that his wife would not be persuaded to remain behind when he went to Ho-nan that, much as he wished it, he scarcely urged it. What was the use?

Sên King-lo began to see, faint but growing clearer, the same writing on the wall that Sir Charles had seen, and been aghast but not surprised to see, at Kensington.

Eagerly determined that this holiday and homecoming of his should be all Lo’s, filled to the brim with all that would make it happiest for him and pleasant to remember, Mrs. Sên cared very little how many Europeans called on her or how many did not; but she was keenly anxious to know and “make friends” with Chinese women, that she and Lo might come and go among his Chinese friends, seeing them in their homes and in the Sên home. Sên had hoped to gratify her in this, believing that it would be easy enough under the change in woman’s position in China. To an extent he had, but it hadn’t worked.

Chinese ladies had called on Mrs. Sên—a few; two had invited her to lunch; and one, more emancipated perhaps, or perhaps more good-natured, or it even might have been under a husband’s control, had gone so far as to bring her daughters with her the second time she called. She had dined once at the Sêns’ bungalow and had once invited them both to dine with her husband and herself—on which occasion neither of her daughters had been present.

But all this visiting had been as barren to Ivy as Sên realized it to be perfunctory, if not, as he suspected, actually enforced. Ivy knew no Chinese. Only one of the Chinese ladies who had called upon her knew a few words of English. Great international issues may be reconciled and solved via interpreters, but feminine intercourse cannot be. The day Mrs. Sên lunched with Mrs. Eng-Hung, the English lady was provided with English cutlery; but its newness was assertive—almost a protest—and the hostess ate with chopsticks. When Mrs. Sên offered to shake hands with her Chinese women visitors, the palms that met her outstretched hand were instant and courteous but limp and irresponsive. And the husband of every Chinese woman that called even once either was under some large business obligation to Sên King-lo, or aimed to be. Several Chinese ladies whom, through their husbands, Sên had asked to call upon his wife, did not do so. Sên had little doubt that Mrs. Ma T’en-k’ai had made her sudden journey to their country home rather than do so; and Ma T’en-k’ai was deeply in debt to Sên for financial advancement. Yen F’eng-hui, who owed more to Sên King-lo’s influence than any other man in Hongkong did, frankly told King-lo that he would not permit Mrs. Yen to know an Englishwoman who had married a Chinese. He did not blame Mrs. Sên for being English, that would be absurd, since we all had be to born where the gods decree. There were English ladies in Hongkong whom he would not forbid his wife to meet, though he had no wish that she should; but he held strong and unalterable views concerning such inter-racial marriages. He hoped that his honorable friend would pardon him. Sên King-lo did more than that: he liked Yen for his upright frankness, and courage—it takes courage to defy your banker—and Sên King-lo could not condemn Yen, who had never been out of their birthland, for feeling and saying stoutly what he himself had felt as strongly scarcely four years ago, he who had traveled far and wide, from whom long foreign sojourn and alien associations inevitably had rubbed off many natural angles.

So he did all he could to fill his wife’s Hongkong hours pleasantly, to keep a sour thing from her. He knew that he would be glad when they were once more on the Pacific, with their steamer’s prow turned towards the east.

Lo did not notice the absence of the little sugar-basin, and he drank his Chinese tea and ate his English crumpets in high contentment.

“They can’t have done you very well at the Club today at lunch,” Ivy said severely, as he passed his cup for its second refilling and helped himself to a fourth macaroon.

“I had an excellent lunch,” her husband asserted, “but not at the Club. I lunched and wined at the hotel with a lady.”

“And she gave you the flower in your coat!”

“She did.”

Mrs. Sên giggled. “You took Mrs. Yen out to lunch on the sly! Did you have a private room?”

“I did not,” Lo said sadly, “take Mrs. Yen out to lunch. It would not have been permitted.”

Ivy wanted a second cup of tea, but she would not take it for fear that Sên would miss the sugar-basin. She always took three lumps, and she knew that he always watched her hands. So she munched a sandwich instead and quenched her thirst with a mango.

“I lunched with a lady, though.”

His wife knew that he wanted her to say: “Who was she?” and because she knew it, she said nothing.

And because she would not ask, he would not tell her—yet. They often played that game, and Sên usually won. If an English woman could wait, so could a Chinese man.

“Is the home mail in, Lo?”

“No, not even signaled yet, dear.”

Sên looked about the pretty room as he lit her cigarette. They had finished their tea.

“Ruby,” he said, as he gave it to her, well and truly lit, “I believe you’d make home out of a soap-box and an old coffee sack.”

“I’d try for you, Lo,” she told him.

“I’ll match this against any room on the island,” he added.

“But you furnished it,” his wife reminded him.

“Yes—by wire. But I didn’t make it. You did that. I didn’t rearrange it. I didn’t put those flowers in that vase or Ruben’s picture in its lacquer frame—” Sên broke off, silenced by a sudden grinding thought. He had seen and understood the look in Chinese eyes when they first had seen that photograph, had seen and quickly looked away. Ah well——

“But,” he added, “I did bring the one perfect thing in the room, and put it here.”

Mrs. Sên looked about her drawing-room in surprise. What had Lo actually chosen and bought that was here! Not the cabinet, not the screen, not the quaint and costly teapot with a writhing dragon for handle and a slender snake curled up asleep on its top, not the lovely cups with butterflies poised on the delicate rims and a dear little red “ladybird” inside each fragile cup. What—then she understood and giggled again—a pretty sound from her, if not a pretty word, and shook her clasped hands at him in the pretty Chinese way he’d taught her.

But not even for such a compliment (and they’d been married almost five years now!) would she ask the question he was waiting for her to ask.

“I lunched, all alone, with a lady,” he said at last, “and she is coming to lunch with you tomorrow.”

Still Mrs. Sên waited.

“You used to know her.”

“Oh—some one turned up from London.”

“No, from Washington.”

Ivy threw him a mock-horrified look. “Sên King-lo, you have been lunching with Emmeline Hamilton! She’ll sue you for breach of promise. What fun for Hongkong! Lady Montsurat’s face will be a picture.”

Sên laughed. Then he drew the carnation from his coat and leaned towards her and tucked it in Ruby’s frock.

Then she knew that it was some one she had cared for, cared for very much. And she cared for so few people—for so very few women.

“Lo,” she whispered, “it isn’t—it isn’t——”

“Yes, it is. Dr. Ray is in Hongkong, and Miss Julia is with her!”