CHAPTER XXXVIII

Ivy Sên laid her hand on her husband’s knee. She was speechless.

“It’s true,” he assured her, “though I scarcely believe it myself yet. Dr. Ray in Hongkong or in any other interesting place seems explicable and natural enough, but Miss Julia Townsend is stark impossibility. But here she is.”

“You have seen her?”

Sên King-lo smiled affectionately and a little grimly, “No. She would not see me. But she is here.”

“But, Lo, she couldn’t possibly afford it! All that way—Washington to San Francisco—hotels—the boat! She couldn’t ever do it. You have no idea how poor she was really! She dressed like an old-fashioned queen, and she had literally dozens and dozens of old chests—big ones made of cedar wood—crammed with the costliest things, a hundred years old, some of them, and yards and yards of lace older than that; but I never knew her to buy anything new to wear except gloves and boots and slippers. I don’t think she bought even stockings. She had dozens and dozens of pairs of silk ones—the loveliest silk ones—some thin like cobwebs and some thick as flannel; but she never wore anything else, winter or summer. And besides all those she used to knit others, and so did Dinah and Lucinda—she’d taught them herself. She used to make her own handkerchiefs, hemstitch them and monogram them and all. She almost lived off the place. But she never sold a thing—not so much as one thin old silver spoon, not a tomato, or one of those funny turkey-wings Lysander used for a crumb-brush. She can’t have sold Rosehill or anything in it. She’d as soon have sold her mother’s grave, or her portrait of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate flag that had been in battle with Stonewall Jackson, or Jefferson Davis’ autograph letters to her father. And she never, never has let Dr. Ray pay for her. She wouldn’t do that! She couldn’t: not a five-cent street-car fare. How has she found the money? Oh—and she always did so long to travel—above all to see China. She has told me so time after time. And she had never been out of Virginia farther than Washington, in all her life, and never expected to be! Lo,” his wife cried with a broken giggle that sounded full of tears, “she must have sold Lysander and Dinah!”

“Have you ever heard her speak,” Sên asked, “of a second or third cousin of hers, Theodore Lee?”

“No.” Ivy had not.

“Neither have I. But Dr. Ray, who is several years older than Miss Townsend, you know, though she looks much the younger of the two—another case of work keeping us fresher than rust does—Dr. Ray remembers him perfectly. He, too, was quite a few years older than Miss Townsend. He served under General Lee in the Civil War—the youngest officer in the Confederate Army, Dr. Ray says. He lost an arm at Ball’s Bluff and a foot in the Battle of the Wilderness. The war left him penniless, as it did so many, and his father and older brothers were killed.”

“It was a holocaust,” Ruby murmured sadly.

“The most terrible holocaust in history until the World War,” King-lo added.

“But slavery had to be stamped out, Lo!”

“It usually dies a natural death,” the husband insisted, “as it has in your own British Empire, and a far pleasanter death for all concerned, the slaves included. We have seen a pleasant and beneficent side of slavery in China, as I believe the South did——”

“Miss Townsend has poisoned your mind!” his wife told him.

“Not at all,” he denied. “Facts are facts—that’s all. And the war between the North and the South had nothing to do with slavery. That was an after-thought, dragged in for political purposes, necessary, perhaps, and certainly good strong propaganda.”

“Sên King-lo! I don’t believe it!”

Sên laughed. “You didn’t specialize in American history during your earnest scholastic career, did you? However, as your own uncrowned laureate has said several times, that’s another story.”

“Yes—do get on about Miss Julia.”

“Lee—young Theodore Lee—worked his way to South America somehow. He had but little luck there, but he saved enough to come home on a visit after some years, and he spent a month at Rosehill when Miss Julia was about sixteen.”

“Who told you all that?” Ruby interrupted him again.

“Dr. Ray—today at lunch. He went back to Brazil and had failure after failure there—just managed to live for year after year. But he stuck to it, one thing after another. He doesn’t seem to have had much of a business head, but he must have had plenty of grit. And his luck turned at last, nothing much, but it must have seemed a fortune to him. He struck oil about a year ago—alfalfa and rose-wood and ipecacuanha, I think.”

“What a mixture!”

“A good many fortunes are mixed,” Sên observed. “He turned his little pile into money and sailed from Buenos Ayres almost at once—presumably, as the sequel shows, to repeat his visit to Rosehill. But he died on the voyage. He was buried at sea. That is the story. He left Miss Julia all he had: nearly twenty thousand dollars, Dr. Ray says. She has bought new clothes now, Ivy!”

“Black crêpe ones?” the girl said softly.

Sên King-lo nodded. “And the rest,” he added, “or most of it, she’s spending in seeing the world.”

Ruby Sên’s eyes filled with tears. “And the rest?”

“A check to the Louise Home, flowers for Confederate graves. She didn’t do it impulsively, Dr. Ray tells me. They talked it over thirty or forty times. Then one night suddenly, as they sat on the porch, Miss Julia exclaimed: ‘I’m going to do it. It’s what I’ve longed to do as long as I can remember, and I’m going to now. I’ll put one thousand dollars in the bank, to make things a trifle easier after I’m back, and to pay for my funeral. My funeral has troubled me rather—especially if I should happen to die soon after one of the garden-parties: I’m sometimes a little short of ready money then. My shroud is all ready, and the lot in the cemetery was paid for long ago, of course; but there are always extra expenses, and a Townsend must be decently buried, and buried with Townsend money.’ ”

“I don’t see Miss Julia on the rates,” Mrs. Sên said shakenly.

“No!” Sên King-lo said proudly. “ ‘I’ll put one thousand dollars away, and I’ll spend every cent of the rest and see China and Spain and the Bridge of Sighs and Westminster Abbey at last,’ and here she is in the best rooms of the best hotel!”

“I can’t think of Washington without Miss Julia across the river at Rosehill,” Ruby said musingly.

“Nor I,” Sên King-lo agreed. “It’s like a harp with its sweetest string gone.”

“And how those poor darkies will miss her! And what a time they’ll have! Dinah and Uncle Lysander must feel like orphans.”

“Lysander and Dinah are here with Miss Julia,” Sên chuckled.

Mrs. Sên gave a little gasping laugh. “Great Scott!” she cried.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Dr. Ray came soon after breakfast the next morning, and she stayed all day.

“Here is your bridesmaid,” she told Ivy gaily, as she took Mrs. Sên in her arms, then put her away a little to search the younger face with shrewd, beautiful eyes that hid the anxiety they felt. “I’m having the time of my life. Nothing but slang will express it. Between Julia Calhoun and this marvel of a place and the hotel bills, I’m quite off my head. How are you, my child! But you needn’t tell me; I only asked for manners. I can see how you are!”

Ivy laughed happily. “How is Miss Julia?” she asked gently.

“More so than ever,” Dr. Ray replied. “How I ever am to get her home again, I don’t know. I thought I’d never get her away from Honolulu. I must not say that she went surf-riding, for she didn’t; but I know she wanted to.”

“Scandal!” Sên King-lo rebuked their guest with a quiet laugh.

“Not a bit of it,” Dr. Ray protested. “The scandal is coming. But she watched the surf-riding and loved it. She bought a Hawaiian phrase-book and climbed up Diamond Head road to the peak on a pony. She wore a lei! She went to a moonlight picnic at Weiniea, and she saw a hula dance.”

Sên King-lo’s face broke into ripples of fun, as only a Chinese face can, and then the room moaned with his laughter.

“But,” Ivy expostulated, “Dr. Ray! How could you let her do it!”

“Let her! Have you never seen Julia Townsend with the bit between her teeth? I have. Let her, indeed! I assure you, this is her trip, and she runs no risk of my forgetting it. She asserts herself.”

“She always did,” Sên said, with a tender smile on his handsome mouth.

“Yes,” his wife agreed, “in her quiet, beautiful way.”

“Oh, Julia is quiet still. But there is a sort of wonderful, hushed splendor about her. I believe she has grown an inch since we left Washington.”

“In width?” Mrs. Sên asked smoothly. And they both knew that she meant not “width” but “breadth.”

The physician shook her head. “But I wish you could see the way she carries her head, the history of all the Townsends in her face, a child’s unspoilt joy in her eyes, and the Star-Spangled Banner waving over her.”

“The Star-Spangled Banner?” Sên reminded.

“It was her fathers’ flag for nearly a hundred years, Mr. Sên. At home she is a Southern woman first and last. ‘Dixie’ is her anthem, Lincoln and Grant anathema. But here she is just an American woman, proud of every state in the Union.”

“Then she has broadened—very much,” Mrs. Sên exclaimed.

“No,” Sên objected. “I fancy it’s merely a matter of breeding; ‘company manners’ abroad.”

“Precisely,” Dr. Ray agreed, “a sort of traveling cloak that she considers it good taste to wear. But, by the way, Ivy, I did not ‘let’ Miss Julia attend the hula dance. I was not there and did not even know anything of her going until several days later. I was away in Molokai. This is a pleasure jaunt for Julia, but I came for a different purpose. There are several diseases that I have wished for years to see at short range in their native lairs. And when I found that Miss Townsend really was making this trip—the wisest thing she ever had done, I thought at the time, and now I know that it was—I almost instantly decided to link my travel up with Julia’s, and that’s how I come to be here now. Oh! Is that Ruben?” She left the chair that Sên had placed for her where the shaded breeze came in from the garden and took up the photograph in the lacquered frame and studied it minutely, with wise, kind eyes that again told very little of the thoughts behind them. “Very, very charming!” was her comment as she replaced it.

“He doesn’t favor my side of the house, does he!” Sên King-lo demanded with a laugh. “Our son is very English.”

“Very, and very handsome!” Dr. Ray answered cordially. But to herself the physician added: “And more interesting than handsome. He is your first-born: a throw-back, of course, to some blonde ancestor of your wife’s. Baby number two may be as Chinese as baby number one is Saxon. What then?”

“What did Miss Julia think of the hula dance?” Sên King-lo asked slyly, as they sat at lunch.

“That,” Elenore Ray replied, “I have not been told. She has never referred to it; but I gathered from Dinah that her mistress spent the next day in bed, with the blinds down. Uncle Lysander was certain sure powerful scandalized. He claims to have blushed all over and to have been nuffin but a jelly.”

“What do Lysander and Dinah think of China?” Sên persisted.

“Lysander is as frightened as if he were alone in a churchyard at midnight,” Dr. Ray told them cheerfully, “and Dinah giggles more than ever. I have to give her ‘drops’ every night to calm her—and I make them bitter. Dinah does not add to the dignity of our party. Now it is my turn to ask questions.” And she turned the talk into more impersonal channels.

As she and Ivy sat alone for an hour in the garden after lunch, they spoke only of Washington. The visitor felt no impulse to question young Mrs. Sên. Her trained eyes had seen with their first glance in the drawing-room that all was well with Sên King-lo’s English wife. There was not a cloud the size of a baby’s palm in Ivy Sên’s horizon—or, if there were, Ivy had neither seen nor sensed it. Their friend too had seen, clearly enough, that the affection and confidence between husband and wife had endured and grown. But she had caught a look once or twice in Sên’s Chinese eyes that she had not liked. And when Ivy in her turn left Dr. Ray and King-lo alone for half an hour—not in neglect of a guest but because the English letters had come and because she knew how well they two would entertain and satisfy each other—the physician turned to Sên presently and asked him, as the quality of their mutual friendship and respect licensed her to, “Tell me, my friend, how has it worked?”

“Can’t you see?” Sên King-lo questioned for question.

“I see that your wife is perfectly happy. I see that you are beautifully satisfied in each other and that, if you and she could shut the world out and keep it shut out, all would be very well indeed with you both. But that is just what none of us can do—and perhaps have no right to attempt to do. Most of our troubles come to us from outside, I think. I believe that the vital germs of every one of them—always—are in ourselves, either in some quality of ours or in some conduct, but that it usually is the friction of cross-currents that develops them. Something troubles you, Mr. Sên. May I know? Can I help? It is the friend that asks, but it just might be possible for the doctor to help—to see the way out.”

“May I smoke?” King-lo asked her, and lit his cigarette slowly. Through its slender smoke he sat and watched the bungalow garden, its bamboos and tulips and fern-trees, and Hongkong down below the twisting roadway, with its blur and huddle of Chinese homes and shops and markets, and the gaunter, though prouder, assertion of Europe’s overlordship, and the turquoise sea beyond it.

“It has worked perfectly,” he said after a time. “We have had no regret—neither of us. Ruby, I think, has not had an anxiety. I, when Ruben was coming, had my bad half-hours. A Chinese baby would have been a complication, even in London, the kindest, least censorious place on earth and the most sincerely cosmopolitan. You see a greater and a more obvious mingling—or, at least, mixture of races in many other places; Constantinople, Venice, San Francisco, and twenty others. But it is only in London—only in London of all the world—that there is genuine welcome for the strangers within the gates. But in London itself there would have been no place for a Chinese child of ours. And also, I wondered how the sight of a Chinese baby in her arms—at her breast—would affect Ruby. I have the type of Chinese face—that we Chinese have now and then—that does not bear country stamped on it too strongly. I might pass as any one of several races, two or three of them not Oriental or only remotely so, but it’s not a family trait. Every other Sên I ever saw and every other Pei-fu—my mother was a Pei-fu before her marriage—has been unmistakably, strikingly Chinese in appearance. And Ruby was used to me. She scarcely remembered, except in a hazy, detached way, that I was not English. But Nature plays many tricks, but will brook none played on her. The Mongolian is a persistent type; and such mixed marriages as ours, through some inscrutable law of Nature, seem almost sure to perpetuate, and even to emphasize, one racial type and to ignore the other.”

“Yes,” the physician murmured.

“I knew that our child might be born more Chinese than the Chinese—and I wondered if I might not see my wife shrink, even a little, from the child our love had given us. I was hideously anxious for her. And I dared not say one word, give one hint, to prepare her; help her, as that perhaps might have done, to resist an almost inevitable revulsion—to destroy it before it existed. But Nature spared us!”

“This time,” the physician thought to herself.

“When I saw how lily-fair our babe was——”

“So you quite forgave him for looking so little like your own people? I wondered, if you had, if you could, when I saw his picture just now.”

“I worshiped him for what he had spared his mother,” Sên King-lo said simply.

“He certainly looks a changeling, even for a child of Ivy’s,” Elenore Ray said musingly. “Atavism is intensely interesting—and very baffling.” She added, “What is it that is troubling you, nagging you, then!—if I may know?”

“You have used the one right word, Dr. Ray, ‘nagging.’ When the messages—there were two—came that called me to China, I tried to come alone; but my wife would not let me.”

“No, of course,” the woman said regretfully. “Must you be here long—in China?”

So she knew, had divined, what his trouble was, understood half of his dual trouble—for Sên King-lo was carrying two, and they were quite distinct—knew without any need of being told! But because she had asked him, and because it was a relief to speak to one he so trusted and liked, of what he could not have spoken to any one else, unless perhaps to Charles Snow, Sên King-lo went on.

“As short a time as I can make it,” he replied. “She wanted to bring our boy with us, of course; but there I would not yield, and our physician backed me up.”

“Wonderful people, doctors!” the physician remarked, “and beautifully helpful.”

Sên smiled his agreement. “But I ought not to have brought her,” he added gravely. “It was a terrible risk, an unpardonable mistake, and I do not see how I am to save her from finding it out. No one avoided us in London. No one resented our marriage, or dared to misunderstand it. She was too fine, too unmistakable—and a little because I was so seemingly cosmopolitan, and because London is London—at once indifferent and wholesome. But here it is not so.”

“Has Mrs. Sên been ostracized here?”

“Something like that. The Europeans have been supercilious—salacious-minded and evil-tongued amongst themselves and behind our backs, I have little doubt. And my own people have been hard, unbending. The English sneer, more or less openly, and the Chinese have tabooed my wife. An Englishman, a married man who also has a Chinese ménage and children in it, called here one day when I was out, and Ruby gave him tea; but I happen to know that he has forbidden his wife, an Englishwoman, to call on mine.”

“But you are going soon,” Dr. Ray said more cheerfully than she felt. “Get her away. That is the only thing to do. And you are going soon now, Ruby said.”

“Farther into China. To my own family. That will be worse, I fear.”

“Oh! I hope not. She wouldn’t stay with me, I suppose, while you went and came back for her? We could take a little trip—to Japan perhaps—she and I. I will part ways with Julia Townsend, for a time, or bring her to reason.”

“I’d give a great deal if she would,” Sên replied. “But she will not. It isn’t even worth trying. Don’t think me ungrateful.”

“I know that you are not that,” Dr. Ray said emphatically.

Mrs. Sên came to them from the drawing-room then, her home letters read, Emma’s cried over a little—for it had told her of Ruben’s first tooth and of a pair of tiny new red shoes he preferred to suck rather than wear—and nothing more of analysis or of confession passed.

It was late when Dr. Ray went back to her hotel down in the city, and Sên walked beside her with his hand on the edge of her chair.

Even in high daylight (day is never garish in Hongkong) the apish incongruities and misfitments of Young China ways and clothes cannot rob Hongkong of its unequaled beauty. The bamboos’ luxuriant, sword-shaped, fern-like beauty still edges with gray-green lace the twisting footpath between Victoria City and the blue-topped Peak. Red Chinese roofs still up-turn here and there among the persimmons and oleanders. Junks and sampans still huddle in the harbor, and the water still croons blue and green and limpid about them. At night Young China seems almost a myth, an unloveliness almost forgotten and quite negligible; the moon and the stars keep their old state up in an imperial sky; lights still shimmer like fireflies and flash like friendly arrows of flame from bush and vine-entangled homesteads and from long pendant lanterns swinging in coolie hands, and down in the great craft-huddled harbor, lights twinkle and proclaim in every color that man-made light can show; queer, passionate Chinese music still throbs now and then through the darkness, and English pianos tinkle long after London’s bedtime; Chinese voices rise and fall in velvet guttural across the night-time stillness, and the laugh of a young English voice pierces it over there behind the thicket of moon-drenched roses; a nightingale sings in an old cherry-tree; and night moths wing their filmy flight from the passion-flowers.

As they turned one of the steep, narrow pathway’s sudden curves, they almost collided with a singing quintet of young Chinese—two girls and three men, swinging along all arm in arm and quite spanning the narrow yellow path. They were singing an English music-hall song stridently, the men dressed in European clothes that were European—Bayswater or Battersea—the two young women in “English” raiment that was not English. One girl swayed a little as she walked, because her golden lilies, disfigured now in sensible English boots, had not “unbound” successfully. They drew aside to let Dr. Ray’s chair pass, backing against the bamboos at the road’s edge, still linking arms, still singing, but much more softly, just keeping it up: “My mother-in-law ain’t no jellyfish.” And they looked, as they were, perfectly respectable and self-respecting.

When the descending chair had passed on, they swung back athwart the path and went on again in step and singing again in louder tones: “My mother-in-law ain’t no lamb, and she ain’t no Venus neither”—crashing it out to the Chinese night, where the moon above showered the yellow path and the gray-green bamboos with a rain of opals, and the nightingale broke off its fragrant song in the old cherry-tree.

Elenore Ray smiled, kindly, a little sadly, as she saw Sên King-lo’s hand clench on the frame of her chair.

“You are disappointed,” she told him gently.

“In Young China?” he replied frankly. “In some of its surface tricks—candidly yes. Yes, Dr. Ray, I carry two anxieties now.”

“So I thought.”

“But,” he added stoutly, “every new movement has its scum, and scum always rises to the top.”

“Always,” she agreed. “But fulfilled dreams are sorry things often. I sometimes have wondered what George Washington would think of the Chicago Board of Trade when it’s busy, and of the stock-yards.”

“But the cause for which he lived and fought and worked was supremely right,” Sên reminded her.

“We Americans like to think so,” the woman told him; “but right gets terribly twisted in human hands again and again. And the longer I live, the deeper I probe, the more convinced I grow that ‘causes’ count for strangely little, individual lives for almost everything—everything that really matters.”

“And you believe,” Sên King-lo questioned slowly—thinking as he spoke of a Chinese Emperor of whom Dr. Ray never had heard—“that in his record of personal character, Washington left his nation a greater heritage than he did in the victory of the War of Independence and in all the great national foundation he and Hamilton built after Yorktown?”

“Just that,” was the quiet reply. “In mental equipment and achievement, I incline to believe that Alexander Hamilton was the greatest genius in history, and certainly the greatest of our country. But George Washington was the greater man—because he was the more entirely good.”

“Do you hold,” Sên asked with a slight smile, “that all who are good are great?”

“I do—the greatest.”

The five harmless revelers were near them again, for the hillside road had swung round on itself, and the singers were not far away and directly overhead; and the Leicester Square doggerel belched stridently down: “My mother-in-law she’s got a walk like a crab and a tongue like a toad.”

“This is not China!” Sên King-lo said, in sudden unleashed passion.

“Tell me something—” the woman laid a motherly hand on his hand that lay on her chair, and her eyes that were very kind also were twinkling. “Do you hate and despise the Manchus as much as you did?”

“No,” the Chinese man said quickly, “I do not. I am older. And I see what I see.” He smiled back at her as he spoke, but his eyes and his voice were sad.

The chair coolies came to a quiet halt, as they often do at some point of special beauty.

Elenore Ray gazed about her with a sigh of great content.

“I wish you could have seen Hongkong as it was but a few years ago,” Sên King-lo said, as they moved on again.

“This is supremely beautiful,” Dr. Ray insisted. “But,” she added musingly, “I begin to suspect that the missionary and the gunboat have a great deal to answer for.”

“The Chinese who have taken a wrong turning—if they have—will have a great deal more to answer for,” Sên King-lo said bitterly.

CHAPTER XL

Ruby had not noticed that her husband had avoided going out with her in Hongkong and was avoiding it more and more; but it was so. He was imperatively busy now, crowding into days the work of business drive and finesse that might well have over-crowded weeks, if not months, for a less capable man. He could not well take his wife to hong and to counting-house, to long bank conferences that more often than not ran with a strong political under-current—the very life-blood of young China, if not of China itself—or to more secret and smaller conclaves which took place behind well-barred doors, when only two or three Chinese gathered to speak together in slow, hushed tones and anxious quiet words. But this was not the reason why Mr. and Mrs. Sên so rarely were seen together in Hongkong. The reason lay close and well-guarded in Sên King-lo’s breast: a tiny coiled serpent that lifted its narrow hooded head now and then, meeting Sên’s eyes with sly, cold, wicked eyes, and sometimes at night hissing softly in his ear. There were functions to which he might have taken her, long rambles which invited and beckoned, water-side strolls, leisurely peak-side climbs. And there was Happy Valley, the incessantly recurring Derby Day of all the Anglo-Chinese world and his wife, and there was Church Parade, as smart a function, if more narrowed, as London’s own, and far more picturesque. But Sên avoided and evaded them all whenever he could. Every hour that he could spend with Ruby at the bungalow he did, and he filled them all so full of intimate charm and gay comradeship that they fed her all the happiness and content that even she—greedy of both—could crave or assimilate. And sometimes she chid herself sharply that she could be so happy so far from Ruben. But Sên King-lo had no doubt of her motherliness for he saw the look in her eyes as they turned to the harbor on “home mail” day.

Sên King-lo was doing his utmost, and his English wife did not suspect—not yet, at least—the cancerous price that a Chinese soul already was paying for a bunch of red peppers an English girl had tucked in a jade-green dress once in Virginia.

A few days after Dr. Ray had visited them Mrs. Sên insisted that her husband should go with her to a shop in Victoria City at which she had been tempted the day before by some ivories and a Satsuma gift-jar she did not feel competent to buy without Lo’s endorsement of their value. She knew she admired them and wanted them. Lo would know whether they were admirable or not, and worth half the stiff prices the Chinese curio merchant asked for them. She insisted that King-lo should go with her and decide. He had no way of escape, unless he took the drastic one of telling her frankly why he wished not to go shopping with her in Victoria City. The risk of some discourteous glance or half-smothered word that she might or might not catch or interpret seemed to him less than the risk of making to her the intolerable explanation. So he yielded and went.

At the door of the curio-shop, a famous shop which rich globe-trotters had made a veritable Mecca of the extravagant, Mr. and Mrs. Sên drew a little back to let a woman, or rather a group of three, all parcel-laden, pass out.

Miss Julia Townsend came first, her arms very full—she never carried a parcel less worthy a place in her hands than a prayerbook, a lace-edged handkerchief or a vinaigrette, in Virginia. But the curio-hunter’s fever was on her now, and she came from No Wink’s shop hugging as many bulky and shapeless paper-wrapped burdens as she could clasp in both arms and hands, her long crêpe gown trailing behind her as never a skirt of hers had dragged in the dust the plebeian populace trod, before. Dinah and Lysander came just behind her, each carrying a pack-horse load of bundles and boxes and brown-paper knobs. Lysander looked mulish, and his ebon was a sable pallid. Dinah grimaced as she waddled, throwing friendly, fat, kittenish glances to all and sundry as she came. Miss Julia moved, as she always did, at a queenly pace, with a queenly mien; but her old face glowed with the art-lover’s victory-look. She thought she had found treasure of great price in the curio shop of No Wink.

The doorway was narrow. Sên King-lo drew back and uncovered, as he would to any woman for whom he made way. His wife waited at his elbow noncommittal, neither offering recognition nor advance, nor hinting retreat. Miss Julia neither hurried nor slowed. She looked at Mrs. Sên with unacquainted eyes, then turned them on Sên King-lo and went leisurely on, with a slight inclination of her proud old head, an inclination paid to the small courtesy their drawing aside had been but in no way an inclination to either of them.

Her servants followed after her. Uncle Lysander gave Sên King-lo a vicious glare that would have been insolence had it been less absurd. But Dinah gave them both a caressing giggle, and a wide look of friendship and fealty out of her surprised faithful eyes.

Ivy passed on into the shop, with a proud little laugh that was not cattish. And Sên King-lo stood and watched his old friend until she was out of sight, his hat in his hand, love and respect and regret in his beautiful Chinese eyes.

Then he turned and joined his wife and addressed himself to the wares and the price-list of old No Wink.

The curio-seller was courteous. He knew of Sên King-lo’s wealth, but his courtesy was frigid and unbending. And Sên King-lo, who had laughed in his generous soul at black Uncle Lysander, could have throttled No Wink.

Much as he had loved her, tenderly as he always had shown it, Sên King-lo showed his wife an added affection, a warmer tenderness, a deeper deference that night. But Sên King-lo’s eyes were sad even when they laughed at her. And To Sung began to believe that his master was crazy.

They never saw Miss Julia again, rarely spoke of her again to each other, and she never again to any one mentioned either of them.

The next day Sên King-lo went again, and alone, to No’s curio-shop.

At lunch her husband gave Ruby Sên a string of pearls. She already had more pearls than she often wore; but she cried out in wonder at the burnished pigeon-breast tints gleaming softly on these and examined curiously the odd clasp of beaten and twisted lead that fastened them.

That same afternoon Miss Townsend received from No Wink, the curio-dealer, a cube-shaped, red crêpe-lined box of camphor-wood and an obsequious note. He begged his distinguished and generous patron’s acceptance of the unworthy and nearly valueless curio he ventured to offer her and explained that it was an old and honored Chinese custom to make some humility gift of appreciation to noble and liberal customers.

Miss Julia Calhoun Townsend did not relish accepting a gift, no matter how small, from a shop-keeper and said so to Dr. Ray, but she liked even less to resent as an over-familiarity what so evidently was an act of respect, and a Townsend always held old customs sacrosanct. So she kept the “trifle,” and before she left Hongkong, made a point of going again to the curio-shop and spending there a sum which she made no doubt was many times the value of the crinkled cup in the camphor-wood box.

But Elenore Ray, who had given some study to ceramics, though she had no idea that this bit of Satsuma was one of the rarest pieces, the gem of No’s collection, and had been, hundreds of years ago, the rouge cup of an Imperial bride, knew that the brownish Satsuma handleless cup was good and very old; and she had no doubt who had paid for it and sent it as a loving-cup, brimming with golden drops of “kindness yet.” But, only seeing that it was carefully packed and well guarded, she said nothing of what she “guessed”—a Southern woman’s fineness of soul perhaps, perhaps a physician’s deep-rooted habit of silence.

CHAPTER XLI

Ruby, the wife of Sên King-lo, journeyed like a queen when her husband took her from Hongkong to the home of his fathers.

They went a short way unromantically enough on the new railroad. Then they made their long slower progress across China in palanquins and by junks.

The second night they camped in a wayside inn’s nondescript garden. Sên would not take his wife into the comfortless, unspeakable native hostelry. He had no wish to go there himself.

After they’d eaten, they sat a long time beside the great sweet cone fire their coolies had lighted outside Ruby’s tent; for as night neared, a cool tang came in the evening air.

A young crescent moon cut with its sickle the silver and cinnabar sky, and a thousand stars pricked it with emerald and sapphire and the red of Mars’ and of Saturn’s ring. The atmosphere indescribably clear, the fireweed still showed a crimson glow at the edge of the gorge its lush growth fenced and hid, and the perfumed smell of wild white roses and the heavier scent of forests of honeysuckles was everywhere; but the violets looked now swathes of white on the grass about them, and the death of the sunlight had stolen their green from the bamboos thicketed behind the squalid inn, leaving the graceful, soft swaying but silent bamboos a mistier, ghostlier gray, and their jointed stems a duller bisque.

Voices chanted on the distant pathway, for it was springtime, the unmatched spring of China, and there as in Chaucer’s England when spring comes with its up-moving sap and its tender crinkling leaves “then longen folk to gon on pilgrimages.” A band of crickets chirruped to the moon, bathing their horned flanks in the dew on the ferns. And Sên King-lo knew that the hour had come to say what he dreaded to say: the first positive, personal dread that ever had thwarted his comfort and ease in her presence, with her hand in his, a fold of her dress on his knee—for they sat on the fern-bushed grass.

He would say it now, but still he waited a little for his words.

A temple bell in the distance answered its mallet.

Sên King-lo had been eager to quit Hongkong, more eager than glad; for fear had clutched cold on his heart as they had turned from the island, off into China.

But even as they newly journeyed his soul had quickened and throbbed to his country. All that Europe had wrapped about him as an intimate garment fell from him as ash falls from a cigar. He was Chinese again, only Chinese, wholly Chinese, and at home. Westminster, Oxford, New York and Virginia were farther from him and more alien than Mars and Orion. Men he had known and liked, broken bread and thought with, in London and Washington were as gone from him, as nothing, as children’s names that the inexorable pulse of the great tide has washed and ironed from the seashore sands. The West was scarcely a dream, less than a wraith or a sun-sucked mist that’s forgotten in the yellow throb of an August day. Of all the West, only one thing stayed with him now: the woman he loved and their child—that, too, was exquisitely, sacredly she—part of her body as of his, part of his soul as of hers—the physical and spiritual fruit of the spiritual and physical love of man and woman who were one—the tangible signature of life’s greatest impulse.

He thought of Ruby, leaning beside him here, contented and confident, as of some white human rose he had gathered and grafted into his being and keeping here in the dear homeland that was hers as much as his, hers, because his, and, because his, even more hers than his own: his by inalienable birthright, hers by a greater title-deed; more sacramented hers—doubly, trebly hers, because it had given her Chinese wifehood and Chinese motherhood, the supreme, imperial motherhood to which all other earthly motherhoods are small and weak. And he thought of his child as of a bud that the sun of a Chinese love had warmed into Chinese life.

Every tiniest flower that grew by the wayside—commonest flowers of Kent and Virginia many of them—every bird that swung and fluted on a tree that shaded their path, welcomed him home; and his soul denied, his senses disavowed, that close-kindred flowers, birds so feathered and throated, grew in any alien mileage of Earth.

The waterfalls that surged and flung, the tiny brooks that tinkled over the pebbles and romped with the baby trout that played in their happy iridescent bosoms, were real, real water, real beauty, real message, only because they were Chinese—Chinese cascade, Chinese brook, Chinese water. There were no others. All places beyond China were one dun, lifeless No Man’s Land between Earth and Heaven, between Time and Eternity, as bleak, fruitless, unbellied as a far gray stretch of flat polar ice, as barren and lifeless and hopeless as the Turanian desert at night. There was nothing but China, lovely, laughing, forever imperial, his Mother! And Sên Ruby was the white rose of China, twined in his heart, soul of his soul, pulse of his day, dream and crown of his night, who had perfumed his manhood and borne him a son.

Sên King-lo forgot Europe, the playing-fields of Eton, the rush of hoofs at Goodwood, the books he had read at Bloomsbury and at the Bodleian, geranium-hung houseboats on the Thames, Big Ben’s luminous signal of time, the clasp of Englishmen’s hands. He only remembered the woman beside him because his manhood and loyalty could not swerve even a hair’s-breadth from what she had been to him, given him, trusted, consummated.

But he moved beside her now, a Chinese man with his Chinese mate. Once or twice he had spoken to her in Chinese, and only the English lilt of her good-natured laughing at him had reminded him—jerked him back, even with the music of its ripple, to the valley of actuality with a bi-national quicksand under the tomato-red of the succulent, toothsome love-apples.

Sên King-lo never thought in English now, and when he spoke to his wife as they journeyed on and on into China, and still on and on, he had to translate the word symbols of his thoughts before he spoke them.

Translation is a thief. Always!

If the Chinese who never have left the land of their birth, the centuried home of their race, love China as no other country is loved, the Chinese who have left her, lost her a little in exile, as exiles must, and have found her again, washing their homesick eyes in her beauty and joy, laving their souls in her soul, must love China even more. Comparison is the acid test. China stands it.

And so Sên King-lo loved China now.

He did not love his woman less. But he loved his country the more.

And now there was something he must say—the time had come—something the kindness of which he did not question, could not question, but the seeming-kindness of which he doubted. How would it seem to her? Even—how would she take it—she, he remembered it now with a sudden sickness, who even in honeymoon’s sans souci and complacent time had desired and bought visiting cards engraved “Mrs. K. L. Senn?”

He had meant to suggest it before they left Hongkong—but occasions had slipped, or been crowded out. And, too, in Hongkong, he had assumed that she took, as he did, its advisability and convenience for granted. But he realized now that Ruby had not. And in Hongkong he himself had not realized it as the necessity he saw it now.

She had been scrupulously tended and served as they journeyed, but small danger signals had pricked his quick and subtle intelligence, as broken twigs and twisted vines or scattered grain, a feather caught on a thorn, a bead dropped by a cactus, are messages of warning to a Sioux. He had seen a look that was scarcely a look—more a veneered masking crust than a look—on coolie faces and the faces of pilgrims they’d met and passed—nothing much—and yet—he kept his pistol well loaded and lay at night across the curtain-door of her tent, and his thoughts busied his mind as the silk-wrapped shuttle busies the rapid loom.

In London she’d said to him: “Make me a Chinese woman!” She had meant it. Would she say it now? Could she mean it now? He thought not.

She had liked Hongkong—in spite of its social coldness—as a child likes a ribbon-tied box of sweetmeats, and had nibbled at it much as the child nibbles and likes its chocolates and nougats. But she had not warmed to the realer China as they had passed through it. She had exclaimed at its picture and beauty, laughed at its “quaintness,” but he sensed that it had not touched her, and that not once had she prostrated herself before it. This soul-pilgrimage of his was a picnic to her: gaily colored, well-provisioned, inimitably stage-managed—a delightful kaleidoscopic interlude.

Few tricks of custom, manner or words had crept in to her use during her Washington years, and no traits of personality or thought. But the American vocabulary is too apposite, it catches too neatly and firmly, not to have irresistible appeal to all word-quick ears, and no English girl—princess or housemaid—could listen as often and as long as Ivy Gilbert had to voluble Lucille Smiths and Mary Withrows without adopting a syllable or so of a fresh young vernacular so limpid and forceful that it needs no dictionary and grows a classic.

A hillside homestead, a small husbandman’s that clung like a rosy fungus on the mountainous steepness, morning-glories and long columbine ropes matting the overtopping lemon-trees that flanked and perfumed it, had lumped King-lo’s throat and quivered his lips as they came into sight of it; Ruby had clapped her hands at it when she saw it, and called it “cute.”

A bird on a cypress-tree twittered some sudden domestic anxiety to her absent mate, and Sên King-lo turned to his wife and said in a slow, quiet voice: “Ruby, I am sure that it would make our going through these untraveled places easier and more simple if we wore what Chinese gentlefolk wear—clothes not unlike all those that the Chinese who meet us ever have seen. And it would be a kindness to the old, untraveled grandmother who is waiting for us in Ho-nan. Would you mind? Would you mind too much, dearest?”

His wife turned clear laughing eyes to his anxious eyes.

“I’d love it,” she told him.

Sên King-lo drew a long breath. And his heart blessed her.

“But how can we manage?” his wife reminded. “I haven’t spied a shop since we left the railway.”

“No,” Sên laughed, “and you’ll spy none again until we return to the railroad, unless a heap of mangos and plantains here and there, with a more than half-naked boy squatted beside them keeping the dragon-flies and the white ants off, with a few coins in a wooden bowl beside him for change, will pass muster for ‘shop.’ And if it would, there’d be no chiffons or picture-hats or peek-a-boo blouses for sale there. But I had thought of that. And I have brought you all you’d need.”

“Did Mrs. Yen select my Chinese frocks?” Ruby teased him.

“She did not! Your husband selected and bought them. Will you wear them, if you don’t dislike the feel and look of them when you’ve put them on?”

“Of course I will,” Mrs. Sên cried gaily. “And I promise to like them, my venerable lord!”

Sên took her face in his hands and brushed her cheek with his lips.

Very rarely had he done that. But he had divined long ago that his English wife, little as she liked or even could tolerate kissing, would lack and miss something of love’s legitimate sweetness, if he never paid her the token that every loved wife in the West received.

Once in a great while Sên King-lo kissed his wife lightly—her face or her palm—and when he did Ruby Sên always laughed softly.

Their lips had never met. And Ruby knew that he never had kissed Ruben. She did not often do it herself—and then only a bath-fresh dimpled hip, or the “sugar-spot” on the back of the baby neck.