CHAPTER XLII

At daylight Sên Ruby came out from her tent, clad for the first time as Sên ladies had been since the older garbs of China (Japan, imitative in all things, wears them now) had been discarded.

She was laughing as she came, delighted with her new masquerade; it made her feel she had dressed for a big charity function of dance and fun at Albert Hall—highly pleased with herself and her fine new quaint clothes. Lo had chosen them well. He had chosen every “prettiest” garment she had had since her marriage. Her hair had been the most bothersome. She’d puffed it out and screwed it up; but it wouldn’t stay stiff, and its slight but established curliness would not “keep put”: it didn’t look right, and it felt horribly wobbly. Never mind, she’d try again after they’d breakfasted, and Lo should get her flowers and dangling buds to stick in it at rakish celestial angles! What fun! She wondered if Lo had brought his camera along. She hoped so!

A Chinese man came to meet her, a gentleman far more bravely clad than their servitors—more expensively clad, she thought, than she’d seen any man before; for Sên’s Chinese friends in Hongkong she had seen in Western dress only. How curious his clothes were! She didn’t like them. Chinese women’s clothes were picturesque and comfortable—the best of all clothes for fancy “dress up.” But these Chinese masculine garments that she saw now almost for the first time, she did not like; she thought them fantastic, absurd, unmanly—only fit for a comic opera. Who was he, she wondered, and how did he come to be here in this wild countryside—no dwelling for miles, but the tumbled-down inn with fat pigs and thin hens strolling in and out of it—this richly dressed man in a fur-edged under-coat of turquoise cashmere, a top coat of violet silk, and a skirt of gentian-blue-embroidered bright green? A man in petticoats! But she gave the stranger a courteous glance—Lo could not be far away. Then she smothered a giggle. Did the bedizened and skirted stranger think she was Chinese, she wondered.

And then she saw.

Repulsion disfigured her face, and she shrank back as she involuntarily screamed.

It was King-lo!

And she was his wife—the wife of a man in a petticoat!

She had screamed softly—scarcely a scream, but it had cut Sên King-lo as a sharp, poison-steeped sword.

His wife made her amends at once, laughed at her own silliness, pretended it had only been that he’d startled her. He’d said—she remembered it now—“if we wore;” but she hadn’t thought of it, hadn’t thought of anything but her own fine new things—they were lovely, perfectly sweet.

But they both knew that it was not surprise, but horror and revulsion, that had wrung that half-scream cry from her whitening lips.

They made the best of it—passed it by—both too well bred, too brave, and too kind to do less.

But it stayed.

And shyness—that slowly grew almost to strangeness—crept between Sên King-lo and his wife.

CHAPTER XLIII

In the miserable days that followed that day, Sên King-lo’s loyalty never swerved, but his love reeled. He still loved his wife—love does not die in an hour; only slow torture and persistent mal-usage can kill love—but his contentment in her was maimed. But his loyalty held, for he clung to it fast, and loyalty won.

He wooed her again, with no show of passion, but taxing every resource of his splendid nature and subtle mind to draw her back to her old confidence and contentment. His contentment was bruised and marred, but his soul resolved that her contentment and ease should return. There were men in England and America who ranked Sên King-lo high, as high in ability and skill as in character—and they all were big men and wise, and skilled in their weighing and gaging of manhood. But never before had he been so nearly great as he was now, or so fine in method and difficult achievement. He demanded nothing, pressed nothing, labored nothing; but he heaped her comforts about her, anticipated her needs and created them. And presently his charm reached her again (even through the Chinese motley it wore) and steeped her again in warmth and satisfaction. He wooed her again for himself and succeeded in his suit. He wooed her, too, for China and failed, failed in the pictured loveliness all about them, as he knew he perhaps was destined to fail again in the teeming home of many people and old customs to which he was taking her now.

She spoke of the beauty about them, its delicacy and majesty; tiny flowers in the brookside moss, rivers of white light, torrents of shadow on great crags and mountain forests—but she never saw it. And Sên King-lo knew; but he tended her gently and waited.

At night, when dusk and darkness curtained, he came to her tent, or threw himself down by her side on the ferns gaily, wearing once more his light English tweeds and carrying an English book in his hand, an English jest on his lips, or gossip of cricket and golf. He longed to read Yuan Mei (China’s garden genius of happiness, of thought, and of singing) to her here where the world was steeped in all that had moved Yuan Mei to song: longed to give her (because she was his, and he hers) what Yuan Mei, Tu Fu, and Ou-Yang Hsin had given him, what China gave him; but he bottled his longing up and read “Daniel Deronda,” or, instead, a novel from Mudie’s, a Morning Post leader, or verses from Punch.

His heart ached, but his nerve never failed or his vigilance slacked. And all the time China was calling him, claiming him, possessing him wholly, as a child in the womb of his mother.

The child leapt.

But the man stood to his ploughshare, held to his bond.

And the fear in a woman’s eyes died.

The coolies sniffed at the verdure about them, as they shouldered the chairs and boxes and trudged gaily on; for Chinese spring was turning to Chinese summer.

They came on the edge of his home suddenly at noontide, a day of riotous color and warmth. The half-mile from the outer gate to the wide-flung, tulip-tinted dwelling looked but an easy breadth in the clear, ambient radiance: a long, leisurely house, that looked a series of houses, sprawled among persimmon trees and violet walks, the under-lip of each up-curled roof elaborately carved, a house so much lower than the trees beyond it that it looked, here from the hillside above it, like a clumped growth of red and pinkish mushrooms crowding close together in a nest of white and yellow lilies and ferns—for some of the roofs had been newly painted and varnished or glazed, and blazed red in the sunshine, and some were faded and blinked palely pink. A forest of oak-trees stretched in the distance. A pai-fang with markings of gold and silver on its crimson lacquer stood spruce, graceful, and speckless in a garden of tulips scarcely a stone’s throw from a small shabby temple. Peasants—scantily clad, and clad too alike to show of what sex at a distance—squelched in a great paddy field and chattered, so it seemed—Ivy could not hear them so far—under their great sun hats as they bent to their wet, oozing work. An old woman was carrying on her back a bundle of faggots, larger than she, into a kiln-shaped outhouse; an urchin who wore very little but ropes of marigolds—one on his head, one on his hips, three round his neck—was perched impudently on a great, patient buffalo, driving it round and round a dripping water-wheel and thrashing it sternly with a long, harmless branch of young, pliant willow. Peacocks promenaded the terrace. Ducks quacked thirstily in a clovered meadow. A beautiful mare nuzzled the colt that was nursing her and washed its back with a fondling tongue. A cow called to her calf. A spinning-wheel hummed in a near mat-hut. Two graybeards were playing backgammon under a mulberry-tree. Children were at play on a far hillslope, for kites rose from it like a school of excited (if not scandalously tipsy) butterflies. Dozens of tiny dogs scampered and yapped on a mignonette field, and others slept in the sun. A cat was chained to a sundial. And roses clotted everywhere; more roses and more kinds of roses than ever grew in Virginia.

All the homestead place bristled and sang with human life; anvils rang, chisels scratched, saws rasped, grain ran like noisy sand in the man-made chutes and conduits; frail, busy smoke curled slowly up from dozens of twisted chimneys; an employed, thriving, bustling world, the home-hold of the Sêns. Beyond its low, stonewalled boundaries all was wild and silent—a great active hive of human affluence, set in an untouched wilderness of Nature’s holding.

Sên King-lo caught his breath, and his eyes filled with tears.

Ruby Sên’s eyes did not kindle. She smiled a little—and involuntarily a word came in her alien thought: “Caravanserai.”

A servant came running, others ran at his heels. The high doorlike gate was unchained, unbarred, and opened, and the guard-devils—or perhaps they were gods—painted on it drew apart and aside, as if making obsequious way for the Sên who had come home.

And Sên King-lo with his hand on his wife’s litter walked slowly on to the house in which another Sên Ruby had borne him and died.

Sên King-lo’s soul flamed; but he leaned down to his wife as they went—between prostrate retainers now—and spoke to her with as light unconcern as he might have done at the Eastbourne or Windermere end of a long day’s journey.

CHAPTER XLIV

Mrs. Sên knew before they left Hongkong (for Sên King-lo had told her, explaining it all as well as he could) that she would find odd customs, some, at least, of them unwelcome and irksome, to which she’d have to conform at the home of Sên Ya Tin. In Hongkong she had accepted and assented cheerfully, gaily even—thinking them all part of the fun and, too, sincerely holding them part of the nothing-price to pay for the pleasure of going with him and for the great adventure of making a long Chinese journey in a Chinese way, of seeing his childhood home and sharing it with him, and feeling radiantly and deeply sure that any personal, discomfort, embarrassment even, of hers would be a joyful contribution to make to his happiness. But she found it hard to feel so now, even at first; and as the days passed and the newness a little lost color, and the dullness and out-of-placeness deepened, she found people in fantastic clothes with grotesque manners and it impossible.

They gave her great greeting—these funny Chinese ways, who thronged the old homestead—and they gave her ceremonial and elaborate attendance and entertainment that also was heartily kind. But it all both bothered and bored her, and it repelled her.

She had expected immediate and affectionate grandmotherly greeting from a touched and grateful old lady to a young mother and wife who had come so far to visit her—and had left her baby across the world and its seas to be able to do so. She did not see Sên Ya Tin for more than two days. And when she did old Ya Tin did not come to greet her but sent for her grandson’s wife to come to her presence, inclined a head to her proudly, scanned her with calm, slow eyes and very sharp ones, gave her three small sweetmeats, and dismissed her with a thimbleful of pale, boiling tea—and then apparently forgot her for days.

She had planned to go everywhere hand-in-hand with Lo, he showing her where he’d flown his first kite, spun his first top, stolen his first bird’s eggs; giving his childhood to her as he found it again for himself. It seemed to her that she scarcely saw King-lo.

That was not true; but he and she were together far less than they ever had been, even when he was busiest, since their marriage. His grandmother commanded and engrossed him; his kinsmen—there were thirty-six of them here at the homestead—surrounded him, and tore him away. And when he came to her, even his consummate adroitness was not enough to hide from her that his truer being was off with his kindred—in the k’o-tang with his grandmother or out in the far open with the men of his blood. Sên Ya Tin was everything here—all others but her satellites and chattels. Ivy never had felt so “small” before. Even the nursery governess at Washington had had more freedom and been of far more consequence. Chinese etiquette and customs hedged her about, and she felt that they throttled and insulted her; most of all they bored her very much.

On her arrival she had been taken at once to the harem quarters and, unavoidably, Sên King-lo had not. Even in her smothered rebellion she could not fail to see and think that the harem rooms and courtyards were very beautiful, but a eunuch stood or lay at each entrance! And her British gorge rose at her close proximity to Sên C’hian Fan’s three wives, who pressed about her all at once, felt her face with their hands, as if to see what it was made of, giggled and screamed at her feet, pulled down her hair with pitying squeals, and summoned a tire-woman (who was a concubine also and made no secret of it) to put it up “right.”

She was not imprisoned, but she felt so. She passed in and out of the “flowery” quarters as she would, and no eunuch ever gestured or glanced to stay her. For Sên King-lo had made his request, and Sên Ya Tin had given her orders. She roamed the great domain as she chose, but when she returned the concubines whispered together apart and looked at her in a way that told plainly that they regarded her as abandoned, lacking in self-respect—if not worse. And in England she had a vote!—Or had, unless alien marriage had lost her it—while here——

Even the babies saw her as “strange,” and only the most complacent of the plump little crawlers and toddlers would suffer her hands or her friendship. But those of them that would were her safety valve and alleviation. Even so, they hurt her; for they made her sharply homesick and panged her with an added knife-like ache for Ruben. It had not been easy for Mrs. Sên to leave her baby in England. She had done it because she could not let Sên leave her; but it had hurt almost intolerably, and the sight and sound of the Sên babies here—they were Ruben’s kindred, and twelve of them were babies in arms—rubbed her sore mother-hurt raw.

They gave her a chamber of her own and a courtyard of her very own, too, but even the fear of Sên Ya Tin could not keep the other women out. They were all over her—chattering, laughing, tweaking queer little instruments, scolding servants who scolded back, handling her most intimate belongings, handling her. The “flowery” was a beehive of women, and sometimes Ivy’s indignation called it a monkey-house of them.

They were the kindliest, merriest things on earth. They were curious, of course, childishly curious, to gaze on the human curio she was to them—not one of them ever had seen a European before—but their close pressing and constant attentions, that she so abhorred, were at least nine-tenths sheer womanly kindness. Even the concubines were sorry for her—so far from her own home and so uncouth and untaught—she hadn’t even a painted face, poor thing—and they all were heartily anxious to sister her and make her at home. And they went to work at it with one united will. They gave her their baubles; they tried to teach her blind-man’s buff—and failed as Blanche and Dick had failed before them; they tried to lend her their prettiest clothes, their pipes, and their face paints. They implored her, in words she could not understand, and in gesture and clutches she could, to gamble with them; and Mrs. Sên, who had bought her platinum and diamond wrist-watch with bridge winnings, was disgusted. And they never left her alone.

The prettiest woman there—and even Ruby saw how pretty she was—was the youngest concubine, and her baby was the prettiest baby of all the fat, dimpled lot. The girl had a tender heart and an unspoiled soul. Her eyes filled with tears sometimes when she saw Sên King-lo’s foreign wife sit silent and listless apart. One night La-yuên cried on her mat because she was so sorry for Sên Ruby, and the next day she brought her tiny baby and laid him in Ruby’s lap. And the baby, after one startled look, laughed and held up his wee hand and clutched at Ruby’s beads. And Ruby caught him closer and held him to her face—snuggling and loving him in spite of his sad, smirched birth; forgetting, not sensing, that the sins of the East are not the sins of the West.

They were all sorry for her, and sorriest because it was whispered that the lord King-lo, even in the terrible land where they lived, had not even one concubine; and they all were very kind to her.

Nowhere else are social barriers at once so high and so negligible as they are in China. A Chinese lady chums with her maid—between the whiles she cuffs and beats her—eats with her, consults with her, gossips with her. And this disconcerted and revolted English Ivy even more, if the truth must out, than the ever present and patent concubinage did.

Sên King-lo came to his wife as often as he could. At Sên Ya Tin’s decree, startling but not to be questioned, rules of social sex decorum were scandalously relaxed. Sên King-lo had access to his wife at all times, of course, and because—that she never need lack friendly faces and voices about her—she was quartered so unisolated from her new kinswomen, in going and coming to her King-lo came more in touch with the haremed ladies of his kinsmen than was Chinesely decent, and far more than old Madame Sên would have cared to have it whispered abroad. And he saw several Chinese girls now—unmarried daughters of the house, but he thought little about any of them, and neither the wives nor the maidens seemed to resent it—unless giggling is a protest. Ruby still wore her Chinese dress invariably, but he came now and then in his English clothes. The first time he did there was a harem riot, for one of the women had spied him, or a eunuch or a slave girl had seen him and told; and the little painted ladies tore pell-mell into Ivy’s room, pushing and jostling each other in their mad rush to see and to touch, and women who never had left their own precincts or seen a forbidden man, much less let one see them, nearly ripped Sên King-lo’s coat off his back.

And one tripped and fell—fell thump across King-lo’s knees, and Sên King-lo chuckled and chortled with glee, and so did the tumbled one’s husband who came in then to see what all the noise—excessive even in a Chinese “flowery”—was about. He’d no business there of course, in Sên Ruby’s apartment; but she went freely among his kinsmen, so that did not so much matter; but that he was here with his kinsmen’s unveiled Chinese women was an enormity. But no one seemed to mind in the least, and the fun ran fast and shrill. Sên Po-Fang caught his wife up by her girdle and shook her, and she slapped his face, and they both giggled—and so did every one else except Mrs. Sên King-lo.

They devised many a rout and festive function for foreign Sên Ruby—games, temple picnics, fireworks, peacock-races, kite contests, juggling, wrestling, a play enacted by performers sent for from many miles away—and when the monthly festival came they kept it with even unwonted observance and noise—for Sên Ruby. All that China was they tried to give her, all that China had to show they showed her—because she was a stranger come within their god-guarded gates, and because the lord King-lo had held the cup of hot marriage wine to her maiden lips and drunk it with her.

But Ruby thought it all absurd, uncivilized; found it tame and paltry.

Miss Julia would have revelled in it, would have found and greeted the soul in it all and threaded out its meaning, learned its histories, loved its pictures. In a slighter way, Ruby would have done so too, had she come upon it merely in privileged travel, had she not been the English wife of a Chinese man—the English mother of a half-Chinese child.

But Ruby Sên hated it all.

She liked the food; no one could help liking the best food on earth. But she found meal-times abominable, except when Sên King-lo came, which he did whenever he could, to take his rice with her. When he did not she ate alone as often as she could; but even then the women crowded in—there was neither a door nor a key in all the place—to watch her eat, greatly excited at her plying of forks and knives, for Sên King-lo had brought those from Hongkong.

Ruby hated it all, and most of all she disliked Sên Ya Tin.

But Sên Ya Tin liked Sên Ruby.

CHAPTER XLV

When King-lo left his wife at the fragrant apartment’s outer entrance, he had gone to the outer gate again and waited there until Sên Ya Tin should summon him.

She sent for him soon.

She sat immovable on the great carved and inlaid chair on the red-covered daïs at the far end of the great k’o-tang, as Sên King-lo came through the opened panel and k’o-towed thrice to the floor. A slave in the outer room closed the panel again, and they two were alone in the great carved room.

Sên Ya Tin was not old as Western women count years now. But she looked very old, for life and her own flaming spirit had scorched and burnt her. Her face was as brown and crinkled as an autumn leaf that the lightest touch will flay into dust. Her black eyes—time had not dimmed them—glittered diamond-cold and hard, under her snow-white eyebrows which tweezers had shaped and torn into almost the sharp shape of the accent that crowned the proud name of Sên—narrow, almost thread-like eyebrows that were so silken that they glistened on the brown parchment of her wrinkled forehead like sun sparkled snow streaking a rough brown rock. Her hair was as white and as glistening as they, fantastically dressed, and bristling with costly stickpins. Her tiny brown hands—more claw-like than human with no look of age’s exquisite softness about them—were arrogantly wide-spread on her robe, every finger and one thumb covered from joint to knuckle with blazing gems, seven of the eight fingers tipped with heavy jeweled nail-protectors more than finger long.

It was a very tiny figure that sat bold upright in the huge chair. Her blunted scraps of feet just peeped arrogantly beneath the fur hem of her turquoise-tinted trousers, just resting on a cushioned teak-wood stool that was higher than most such footstools, or else the tiny woman’s tiny feet could not have reached it. Stripped of her heavy robes Ruby Sên might have lifted and carried her. But her embroidered robe of yellow brocade must have weighed as much as she. It was not the sacred imperial yellow, of course; but it was yellow, which it had no business to be. There is no sacred color in China now, alas, and perhaps not too much else that is sacred in the old imperial way. Alas, and alas! But that was not why Sên Ya Tin sat with jeweled yards of satin brocade about her. The lady Sên took little notice and no “stock” of Young China. She held with old ways, waited serenely for them to return, and kept them here as she always had. This was a learned woman. She could both read and write. The blind scribe that squatted by his low bamboo table in the fragrant courtyards and wrote for the wives of her sons, when those letterless ladies wished to write to the homes that had been theirs before marriage or purchase, never did personal service for Sên Ya Tin. She knew, too, her country’s history. She knew that, though individual insanity had been unknown until European intrusion had bred it there, China had suffered civic and national insanity before, and more than once—before the birth, nine centuries ago, of Wang Ah-shih, the poet father of Chinese socialism, and after that erratic Prime-Minister of the easy-going Emperor Shen Tsung had gone on high. But always the convulsion had been short. Socialism and peasant-franchise had strutted but a day. Then China had shaken the distemper off and returned to her state. Sên Ya Tin looked for China to do it again. The new Republic troubled Madame Sên as little as it concerned her, but she always had hugged a personal vein of wickedness of her personal own. And because she had no right to wear even a tinge of yellow, she often did, and often had since widowhood had made her supreme in the house of the Sêns. No one outside her gates would know, for no one within her gates would presume or dare to report.

A vase of almost inestimable value, a porcelain saucer of melon seeds, with a tiny-bowled, long-stemmed silver pipe, a tinder and a gold-lacquer box of fine tobacco and a tiny queenly fan lying near it, stood on a small, octagonal, carved teak-wood table beside her; a small, tight bouquet of mint and sage and musk lay on her lap; a tiny tame monkey, tethered by a silver chain, perched on the top of the tall, throne-like chair; and about her neck Sên Ya Tin wore, as she always did, the long mandarin chain of cornelian beads of her dead husband’s—as the widow of a British officer often wears his regimental badge.

She sat with her face square to the panel that had slid open for King-lo and slid close again behind him, and her unmoved face was a wrinkled, lifeless mask.

Three times Sên King-lo k’o-towed to the floor, then stood with downcast eyes and hands meek within his wide sleeves and waited for her to command.

She let him wait, neither pleasure nor love nor welcome in her adamant eyes.

The water-clock dripped a long minute away.

Sên King-lo did not lift his eyes. Sên Ya Tin did not move hers. She watched him stiffly through unwavering narrow lids—and so did the mouse-sized monkey, too.

“Approach!” she said in a cold, relentless voice.

Sên King-lo neared her by three slow steps; his padded Chinese shoes made no sound as he moved; his hands were still hid in his sleeves; his eyes were still on the floor. And then he k’o-towed again, and again three times, then stood and waited as before.

Again she let him wait—but not so long.

“Nearer!”

Three steps more he went, three more obeisances he made, and as he stood again erect he lifted his eyes to the face of his father’s mother. And Sên Ya Tin sent her eyes to his, steady old eyes, harder than age, that looked but told nothing, gave no hint or sign.

It was nearly twenty years since his eyes and hers had met; for she had been ill with smallpox when he had been in China last, and she had forbidden him—as her will and self-control had forbidden the smallpox to disfigure her. And boy and pox had obeyed.

She looked at him long, coldly. And he waited for her to signal or speak; to beckon or dismiss.

His eyes were the eyes of her father. A silver nail-protector studded with diamonds clattered a little against a pearl-studded one of gold. His mouth was the mouth of her favorite and first-born son. The cornelian beads moved a little on her bosom.

Slowly, very slowly Sên Ya Tin rose from her seat, came from the daïs, spurning the high footstool from her way, tottered across the glass-like mahogany floor on her tiny, tuber-like, satin-shod feet. Still Sên King-lo did not move. Her face broke up a little. His eyes leapt to her then. A cry that was only a whisper of sound breathed from her lips that scarcely moved. Sên King-lo took a step—another—two more, and she hid her working face on his coat. Her grandson’s arms were about her. They held her close, his head bent low to hers. Her hands fondled his sleeves. She was quivering now. He heard her heart beat under all its harness of silk and satin, embroidery and jewels, and she heard his. She was sobbing now.

Yam-Sin, the monkey, pounced on the porcelain saucer and gorged himself on melon seeds that snapped briskly between his strong, tiny teeth, his silver chain clank-clanking against the high chair’s inlaid wood; the tiny pipe of an august lady clattered to the floor; and the fine, silken tobacco streamed after it, raining down from an upset lacquer box.

CHAPTER XLVI

The Chinese doyenne and autocrat of the Sêns and the young English wife of the house met two days later.

If the meeting was not awkward, it was badly circumscribed. Ya Tin knew not a word of the other’s tongue, and Sên Ruby scarcely a score of Ya Tin’s.

Their meeting was only decently ceremonial, and Madame Sên had made no elaborate and hampering toilet today. She was a sensible old creature and did the little she could to give the younger and so foreign woman a friendly and unembarrassing welcome. Since she had consented to receive Sên Ruby at all and in doing so acknowledge and condone a marriage she strongly deplored—and she had consented in reply to a letter King-lo had sent her from London, her answer reaching them in Hongkong—she, having consented, intended to show Sên Ruby all not too inappropriate kindnesses. But the language barrier was insurmountable. Sên King-lo acted as interpreter, but conversation so spoken cools in the process and grows increasingly difficult. And Sên Ya Tin was by nature and habit unbending and had no knack of assuming an easy congeniality that she never had felt. She had few affections; the few that she had were veritable passions. But between them and icy indifference and vitriolic hate Sên Ya Tin was almost devoid of creature feeling. She was critical and self-indulgent to a degree. She was brutally, and sometimes coarsely, frank. But she had high principles, and she never relaxed in her personal adherence to them—no matter what the cost to her own inclination and convenience. It was largely from this grandmother that Sên King-lo had inherited the uprightness of character and relentless habit of self-analysis that underlay and dominated all his suavity and sunny good nature. He had inherited also from her no little of his manliness, but he had inherited from Ya Tin few of his tastes. Indeed, she had few, and, unlike most women of her years and power, she had no foibles. Her sometimes wearing yellow was not a foible, it was an assertion. China until recently was an empire of innumerable kingdoms—and queendoms—and in her own Sên Ya Tin would brook little control, and still less dictation.

For a Chinese woman she was very untalkative. Nothing escaped her narrow, bead-like eyes; little came free to her tongue. But she always spoke the truth—almost un-Chinese in this, and, too, it must be owned, a little unfeminine. She was capable of almost incredible indifference, but also, though far more rarely, of exquisite sympathy. She was almost devoid of a sense of humor—almost denying her Chinese blood in that. Few had heard her laugh, and no one, but three men who were dead, ever had seen her smile. She cared for few amusements—unless her pipe was one—and she was not industrious. She was intellectual, but read few books—cared little to whet her mind on the minds of others. Argument vexed her. Conference and conversation bored her. The music that King-lo so loved was nothing to her, and the poetry that fed him as the river feeds the verdure and cereals on its banks never nourished and rarely pleased her. She took flowers for granted, but she liked and understood fine stuffs. Ivories interested her, and lacquers enchanted. She liked all animals, and they liked her. She regarded children as belongings and possibilities. She was ruthless to servants. She ate but little and paid little heed to what she ate, or when. She was without religion, except for her personal creed and observance of uprightness and her belief in China and her loyalty to it. Her nepotism was broad but easy-going, more her one milk of human kindness than a cult. She loved the stars and gloried in them and was no mean astronomer. She had few superstitions and no cheap ones. She was not prejudiced. She had a fine and very mathematical mind, though she cared more for color than for form. She had little imagination but great intuition. She was neither a man’s woman nor a woman’s woman. She thought most women dolls or harpies and most men gullible and weak. She liked or disliked, if she did either, at first sight, and she never changed her mind.

During the scant half-hour of their initial visit, Sên Ya Tin repelled Ruby, who thought her ugly, sour, and mediocre. But Sên King-lo saw that Ya Tin liked, and in some odd, strong way approved of, his English wife, and his heart leapt and his courage quickened that she did. He had not expected it, and it seemed to brace and stamp the self-respect of what he had done and the un-Chinese choice he had made.

He wondered why his grandmother did. She could have told him. She, too, had caught a something Chinese in this alien granddaughter-in-law. She liked Ruby’s uncringing manner—to which she was unused in the women her sons and her sons’ sons had married. And she thought the younger woman rather brave than foolish to have made both the marriage and the journey she had. There was nothing that Sên Ya Tin admired more than she did courage.

Sên Ya Tin questioned.

Sên King-lo translated.

Mrs. Sên answered.

Sên King-lo translated.

Over and over again—that and only that.

Then the small bowls of green, smoking tea and the scant sweetmeats came and were given and taken without a word.

Then Sên Ya Tin dismissed them.

CHAPTER XLVII

It rained all the next day, and King-lo sat with his wife and read to her and talked with her of England and of Ruben. And they wrote letters home—letters that would be long in going; for runners must take them to a distant, but the nearest, treaty-port, before they could make any positive postal start.

Towards evening Sên Ya Tin sent for her grandson.

Ruby scarcely expected to see her husband for hours; but almost at once, as she sat crocheting, he came back, eager of pace and of face—and a soberly dressed man followed him to her side and bowed, crossed his hands, and stolidly waited, not looking at Mrs. Sên but carefully eyeing the silk jumper she was making.

Deft-fingered always, Ruby practically had discarded needlework—even its pretty playtime offshoots—since her marriage, no longer in need of her own industry to be always well-dressed. She had liked to sew well enough, partly, no doubt, because she did it so well; but she had hated the necessity, and she always had taken more pleasure in shopping than in making or mending.

But in Hongkong King-lo had warned her, “You may be dull some days—just at first—at the homestead, while it is all strange. Take along something to do, something you like doing.”

Mrs. Sên had laughed it to scorn, the suggestion that she could be dull, even for an hour, alone with him in China, with him in the wonderful place he’d called home as a boy. But he had repeated his words, even appealing to her, and to please him she had laid in a great store of ivory needles and silks. And already she was finding the advice she had laughed at good, for already she had found the life in the women’s quarters monotonous and deadly. She could quite understand why the painted and jewel-hung prisoners smoked so incessantly. She herself was smoking more cigarettes in a day here than she ever had smoked in London or Washington in a fortnight. One must do something, drug the discomfort of personal stagnation with some sedative motion, if only of one’s hands. One couldn’t smoke all the time—at least, she could not, so she had begun an elaborate jumper that she didn’t need and could not wear in Ho-nan over a stiffly embroidered Chinese coatee.

She looked up at King-lo with questioning eyes.

“He’s one of the tailors,” Lo told her. “Sên Ya Tin’s best one. She has sent him to you.”

“To me! What ever for?”

“To make you a habit.”

“A habit—what sort of habit?” Did she need more Chinese clothes, she thought rebelliously. Did they think she was going to stay here forever? Lo had promised to take her home. Didn’t they know that? Ruben was in England! Didn’t they care?

“A riding-habit,” King-lo told her.

“A Chinese riding-habit! I didn’t suppose there were any. Why must I wear it? When must I wear it?”

“No,” Sên said gently, “there are no Chinese riding-habits. An English riding-habit.”

“He couldn’t make one,” Mrs. Sên retorted with an unappreciative glance at the motionless tailor.

“He can make most things,” Sên laughed.

“Has he ever seen an English habit?” his wife demanded. She was not in the least convinced.

“Surely not,” King-lo owned, “nor any other sort of riding-habit, nor even any sort of a picture of one, I dare swear. But he’s a genius.”

“He doesn’t look it,” Mrs. Sên remarked crisply.

“Granted,” her husband agreed good-naturedly, “but you know the classic adage, ‘Things are not always what they seem’—not even Chinese things. ‘Skim milk’—you know the poem. This chap can do as he’s told.”

“But who’s to tell him?”

“You and I.”

Ruby giggled—she had not often done that of late. “You’re crazy, Lo,” she asserted. “I couldn’t tell him how to make one, and I’m sure you can’t.”

“Don’t be too sure,” King-lo advised her. “Ah, here come the stuffs for you to choose.”

Several half-grown Chinese boys had padded in as he spoke, each carrying a paper-wrapped roll of material—sober-eyed lads with far shaven foreheads and silk-tasseled queues hanging almost to the hems of their sober robes, the crest-badge of the Sêns on each blue-clad back.

“Master-artist Worth’s apprentices,” Sên pronounced them.

“Tell them to apprentice off then,” his wife commanded. “They look more like dummies than apprentices,” she added. “Tell them to go, Lo. I don’t want a habit—here—what should I do with it? We couldn’t even ride in Hongkong. Send them away.”

“Just a minute,” Sên King-lo begged. “The grandmother will be disappointed. She has planned it to give you pleasure. Two of the grooms are trying out a horse for you now, a splendid, gentle creature that my cousin Wang’s son often rides. The venerable one has commandeered it for you. It has never had a woman on its back, or a side-saddle, but it has a side-saddle now: the saddlers were up all last night, making it by candle-light. Sên Wo P’ing has seen Englishwomen ride in Shanghai on the Bubbling Well road, and he was with them all night—it was the grandmother’s command—directing them as they worked by candle and torch and lantern light. And they’ll be doing it again tonight. Ka’-ka’ is careering about now in the storm with a side-saddle on her back, but it is only a half-finished one. One groom is clutching and dancing at her bit, hanging there for grim life, the other is side-saddled on her back and looks like to break his neck—but he won’t do it. They all three are having the time of their lives, as we used to say in Washington. But tomorrow or the next day Ka’-ka’ ’ll be as tame as any rabbit. The old heart is set on it, and so is mine. Won’t you have her kindness, wifeling?”

Ruby Sên rose slowly, the silken jumper falling to the floor.

“She is very, very kind, your grandmother,” she said softly, and King-lo saw a mist in her eyes. “I shall love to ride here with you. Come, help me choose,” she bade him as she moved towards the stolid waiting urchins.

Sên King-lo’s face glowed. He was grateful to Sên Ya Tin, and he was grateful to Sên Ruby.

And, seeing them engrossed with soft cashmeres and stout tussores, the master tailor dropped on a surreptitious knee, then squatted squarely on the floor with his feet tucked in beneath him, and studied the fallen jumper eagerly.

“What is it, dear?” Sên asked her presently, when he saw a new perplexity a little wrinkling her forehead.

“Won’t my riding-skirt drive the mare crazy, Lo? You say she has never carried a lady?”

“Nor has she, but,” Sên chuckled, “you forget—Ka’-ka’ has carried many skirts—quite as long ones as the one you wear in the Row.”

His wife turned a sudden painful crimson. She had forgotten for a moment. Was she to ride with her husband riding beside her wearing petticoats?

Lo saw and understood. But he gave no sign and moved quietly to his wife’s writing-table, sat down and found a brush and dipped it.

“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Sên asked as she followed him.

“Make your riding-habit,” King-lo told her.

“Lo, you are wonderful!” she exclaimed, as the habit grew quickly on the pad, a habit perfect in every detail.

She had found a new talent in her Chinese man, and she leaned and watched him proudly with her hand upon his shoulder.

The tailor slipped up without a sound and came and watched the rapid brush-work too. And when it was finished, he drew a long tape from his sleeve and nodded without speaking.

“He says, ‘Can do,’ ” Sên told her, with a laugh.

And it was true, whether the man had said it or not. The new habit completed would have disgraced neither Rotten Row nor Bond Street.

Sên Ya Tin stood and watched them as they started for their first ride together in China, an odd, but not unkind, look in her sharp, agate-hard eyes. She smiled a little, grimly—she who had not smiled since this Sên’s father had died—smiled when King-lo held his hand under Ruby’s boot and mounted her so. And Ya Tin stood and watched them till they were out of sight, lost in the verdure of the far-off hillside; for the day was very clear, and Sên Ya Tin’s ageing eyes were very sharp.

When Lo had come to tell her that the horses were ready at the house door, Ruby had started a little and then had flushed; for King-lo’s riding clothes were as British as her own.

How would Madame Sên like this, Ruby wondered—if Madame chanced to know.

But, if Sên Ya Tin was surprised, she scorned to show it, and Ruby wondered if she’d already known and consented, for she knew that no innovation intruded into the queendom of Sên Ya Tin that did not come licensed by imperious Ya Tin.

It was the first of many rides, and they were the best and the most wholesome pleasures of Ruby Sên’s sojourn in the homestead of the father of her child.

When they galloped side by side through the quivering bamboos on the hillslopes, along the mossy banks of a rushing river, through avenues of vermilion roses, under fragrant, wax-flowered lemon-trees that met and roofed above them, some of the old springtime ecstasy and comradeship came back to her, and the charm of her man found and wrapped her again.

Her escort was as devoted and as careful of her as he’d been on the Potomac, his eyes as kind, his laugh as ready. But it was his breeding, the breeding of his race, the man’s loyalty to the woman who had trusted him and given her life into his keeping, the personal loyalty of his manhood and his being that laughed and chatted with her as they rode; for Sên King-lo was not with the English wife who rode beside him, Sên King-lo was back in China, his soul meshed in China’s, his heart torn, every nerve an ache, with the thought that again he must go, go from the flowers and skies of China, from her rainbowed loveliness and her barren rocky places and her wild and rushing torrents, from the customs of his people, the tombs of his ancestors, and the dingy, disregarded temples of their gods.

And when he drew his bridle, and slacked their pace, and pointed with his slender amber whip to some special bit or stretch of beauty, and called her attention to it in a quiet voice that almost trembled and that throbbed in his throat, Ruby scarcely saw, caught no message; because this was China, and China would forever leave her cold.

It is human blood and story that makes country, not architecture or flora, neither bleating polar cold nor seething equatorial heat.