CHAPTER XLVIII

“Thou wilt cleave to her then, my son?” Ya Tin asked gravely, as they sat alone at midnight conference.

“While I live,” Sên King-lo answered.

“Yet it tortures thee to go.”

“It tortures me,” he said.

“When do you wish to go?” Ya Tin asked calmly.

“Soon,” King-lo pleaded. “Dismiss me soon, O Mother, I entreat thee. The lingering is hard.”

“And if I will not dismiss thee—will not dismiss thee ever, Sên King-lo, or release thee from the obedience and fealty thy ancestors have sworn of thee? But chain thee to my side, and to thy place of heritage where thou belongest, where thy spirit will be, no matter where or how thy bones will go? What then?”

Sên King-lo held her eyes with his, but he made no other answer, neither spoke nor moved.

They sat so while the water-clock dripped slowly in their silence.

At last the Chinese grandam laughed, leaning a little towards him, mocking him with her eyes; a grim, gray crackle of laughing.

“Thou wilt disobey me, if I forbid thee go! And I am Sên Ya Tin, and thou art Sên King-lo!”

Still he neither spoke nor moved. But his soul gave her soul answer, and her stern soul met his and hailed it.

Still a time she let the water-clock drip and the silence keep between them as they sat with nothing else between them but the tiny, low table of her pipes’ lacquered tray.

“Enough!” she spoke at last. “Go! And go in peace, Sên King-lo, first-born of my first-born. I have other sons of our race. But thou shalt go richer than thou camest. Much of thy heritage shall go with thee. Nay!”—as his lips moved to frame a word, his hand gestured towards protest—“it is my will. I will not brook it otherwise; for thou art the son of the dearest thing I ever suckled or quietened in my arms, and it is punishment enough for thee that thou must go, must go from China.”

Sên’s face quivered.

“But,” she added quickly, “thou art right to go, King-lo, and I would not have it otherwise. I am shamed that thou must lie in the barbarian land, shamed that thou mayst not dwell here, as thou shouldst, with thy Chinese wives about thee and thy small-footed concubines and thy scores of slave-girls. My honorable lord had many—more than he could count, or cared to—but I counted them all, and I ruled them well. All the province knew what a Number-one I was, and they heard it and spoke of it in the Vermilion Palace at Pekin. My lord, thy father’s father, boy, took no heed: he cared more for the stickpins in my hair than for all the painted roses on his under-women’s faces; but I took great heed of all his women and their children and of all that was his. And I burn in flame that no such state as he kept thou shalt keep—in thy celestial native land. But thou art right. I applaud. Did I forbid, thou wouldst disobey,”—again the crackled chuckle—“and it pridens me that thou wouldst. A Sên must pay his score at the inn of life. Thou hast made a marriage-bargain with a foreign woman and made it in her own barbarian way. It was thy weakness and thy sin. But now the tally-hour has come, and thou must pay. The man who cheats a woman, or mocks her with a payment in coin she does not value, is lower than the vermin that feeds on putrid shellfish, fattens on the slime-bellied scavengers of the ocean. Go—when thou wilt. And I will raise a pai-fang for thy pardon of our gods; I will build a great temple on the hill where the peach trees cram the melons on its slope and the cypresses wear the winter snow on its crest; and I will make the old temple, where thou madest thy young play as a child, a riot of blooming flowers, a hymn of running water. The nightingale and the kingfisher shall join in its song, and I will cram the temple hall with jades and yellow roses. That shall be thy penance here in China, as loneliness and longing shall be thy penance in England—the England of thy wife; and perchance the gods will accept my bounty and thy pain, and thou shalt come again to thy people in the garden of on high. We will not often send message or courier to each other, I and thou, for it is ill to scald a sore; but thou shalt think of me, and I shall think of thee, across the oceans and the years. I shall hold my pride in thee for the sacrifice thou makest and the troth thou keepest even to the end; for it proves thee worthy of the milk I gave thy father, O, babe of my babe. Greatness is built on sacrifice, always it is so. I bless thee, and I bless thy sacrifice, Sên King-lo.”

He rose, unsteadily, and then k’o-towed before her slowly; once, again, and then again. Then he slipped to her feet and laid his hand upon her girdle and his face against her knees. And Sên Ya Tin laid her palms on his hair and smoothed it softly.

At last she sent him to his rest, for the day was breaking, and as he moved to go, she held his sleeve a moment, and said, “I like thy woman, the girl with thy mother’s milk-name. She is a woman of the barbarians, but she is a sash-wearer, Sên King-lo; I like thy English woman. And she too shall have a taper and a crimson slip of silk-paper prayer in the temple I will build, and another in the hall of the old temple over yonder beyond the oak-trees where thou used to make thy playing in the courtyard. And her name shall not be taboo or coarsely spoken in the harem-courtyards of thy kindred. For she has worn a girdle of thorns under her inner garments here, Sên King-lo, and she has borne it quietly and bravely like the sash-wearer that she is. She has neither scratched nor whimpered. If she bears thee a girl-child, I charge thee then to send me word, for it shall have my stomacher of diamonds and my gold-lacquered tobacco-box with the lizard of rubies on its lid.”

Then he left her, and she sat alone while the old water-clock dripped the morning hours away.

And Sên King-lo lay a little on his mat, in the room that he’d used so as a boy—lay down on his mat because Sên Ya Tin had commanded him.

Soon he rose, and when he had bathed and perfumed his hands, he lit a taper before the ancestral tablet in the ko’tang and went out through the courtyard and the twisting yellow paths, till he stood alone beneath the cypress-trees on the eastern hill.

CHAPTER XLIX

June flowers grew in the grass, a beryl and cinnabar sky crowned and mantled the world. The trees were heavy and big with leaf, grave and gay with a score of greens. Bees hummed in the wild roses; an old apple-tree, late but lusty of blossom, buffeted and bent by a thousand gales—but its good roots held—lay prone on the ground, its flowers lay a perfumed white and rose veil heaped on ferns and blue harebells; a baby squirrel sat bolt up on the prostrate gnarled trunk, industriously washing his baby face. The summer air had a score of scents and bore on its fragrant warmth one message. And married birds were teaching their babies to fly.

The flowers that had bloomed in the wood at the Potomac’s edge were blooming here. The same butterflies swam above them.

They were wonderful old apple-trees—the prone one here and the prone one there. But when the apples of this one ripened they’d be insipid and tasteless, as almost all Chinese apples are, more ornamental than eatable, but deliciously scented and valued for that; and the fruit of the other tree had ripened at Ivy’s wedding-day as crisp of flesh and full of sour-sweet wine as the apples that grow in Albemarle County.

Ruby sat on the ground, as she had been sitting for almost an hour. She crouched there in misery, so motionless and still that the little squirrel had not scampered away when he’d come, and scarcely was eyeing her now, as he completed his toilet and preened and plumed his feathered, furry tail. He would have whisked off squirrel-quickest at the farthest sight of a dog; but he had been born fearless of human creatures, as fearless as he was of the patient, friendly buffaloes on whose humped backs he often rode, for Chinese are never cruel to such soft, small, woodland things, and never kill them but at need. Rats, and even puppy dogs, if of valueless breeds, have quick despatch in China often; but wild little things of softer, longer fur and swifter speed are rarely molested and never teased, and so are scarcely wild at all. But this wee squirrelling would have kept his greater distance and washed his face in greater seclusion had the woman there on the grass been less stock-still.

Her brooding eyes were fixed and hard, staring bitterly at the lovely, laughing landscape before her. It was prison bars to her, all of it, and the site of her shame.

For it had come to that: Ivy Sên was ashamed, not of King-lo, never that! but ashamed of her own displacement and not unashamed now of the birth of her child.

But she was sickening for the sight of Ruben, the song of his inarticulate baby voice, the feel of his fat, naked, pink and white foot in her gloating hand, the precious down of his head against her cheek, the intimacy of his fearless eyes, the baby claim of his imperious little hand on her bosom. It had been stingingly hard to leave him, cruelly so too, because the day of her leaving him had been also the day of his weaning; but the wrench of that parting had been less than the dull ache of her waxing missing of him. She wanted her baby, and every hour she wanted him more.

If King-lo did not take her back to Ruben soon. . . .

Six months ago!

How had she stood it?

How much longer could she stand it?

She had been so proudly glad when she first had known that a babe was soon to lie in her arms, so exultant when it had come!

But now her inmost being shivered and cringed, because she knew that again a new-born child would lie in her arms. But not here! Not here in this horrible China! That should not be. It had come to her in China, this poor little unborn one, but she would not bear it in China: they must go home, she and it.

She had not told Lo. She could not tell him here. He must not know! No one must know or think of it here.

Why had she come? Had her cousin Charles no love of her left that he had not warned her of what life would be to her here?

For all her torture—and it had been just that—at leaving baby Ruben behind her, she had come with radiant gladness—impatiently eager to reach the country of her husband and to make it hers, without losing for an instant her own. Lo had done so much, perfect citizen of the world that he was! Why should his wife be less splendidly adaptable—more crassly insular? She had fretted, almost fumed, for the ship to go faster, reach China sooner, feeling it a laggard, and feeling,

And yet she could have danced for joy and anticipation every waking hour of the way on the boats that had brought them.

If the impulse of all love is to create, its even greater, more constant, longer, finer impulse is to share. She had loved Sên King-lo well, and she had staked her soul to give him all that was she or hers, to have for her very own all that was he or his. That was why she had insisted upon leaving her child and crossing the world with her husband, crossing the world into China. She would give and she would take all. And he should set the key and choose and make the frame of their mutual being: marriage meant that, as her soul and the feminine instinct of her womanhood sensed and gaged it—and craved it. His people should be her people, his God her God. It had not been lust for adventure, or wilfulness, or freak. It had been loyalty, womanliness, and wifehood. A splendid, sacred trinity!

And they had failed her; she had failed them.

Whose was the fault?

Not Sên King-lo’s. He had not failed her. Her English fairness, her heritage of centuries, knew it and said it. Never had man failed woman less, or mate mate. He never had failed her once, not for a breath, not by the width of a hair.

Nor had her heart failed him. She did not love him less than she had. His quality appealed to her not less but more as they passed hand in hand through the long glade of days. Her husband’s quality was her highest and firmest pride. He never had grated on her once nor affronted her taste, and she knew how rarely even the happiest wives could say that. His charm, that perfume and weapon of personality that cannot be defined or expressed, held her almost increasingly; it gripped her securely and close. And she knew that, be the years however long, let them bring whatever they might, stretch wherever they might, she should love her man to the end.

She knew how generous he had been to her—how he had warded off from her every ill thing, great or petty, that he could. He had been tender of her every failure, her miserable little shames, her worthless shrinkings and had covered and condoned them—had covered them gently as a hen its chicks under its wing. And what it must have cost him to see her shrink and “turn”! Would a Chinese woman have failed an English husband as she had failed her Chinese husband? She believed not. Was China’s then the better part? China that she disliked and was ashamed of! She had made no sacrifice in marrying Sên King-lo, but she knew now that he had made a sacrifice in taking her to wife, and could but have known that he did. For he had known both his country and hers, his people and hers, had known both well, and she had known only her own. He had known all the spiritual barrier, the fundamental prohibition. He must have realized her disqualifications! And when pay-day had come, how gaily he had paid the price, how ungrudgingly! Paid for both. For she knew that his tally had been tenfold hers. If it had vexed her to be here, to suffer the repugnance of odd and uncongenial ways, what must it not have been to him?—and she—his wife—knew that the texture and nerves of his soul were as fine and sensitive as those of his strong sensitive hands. (She had seen him balance by its stem a long peacock feather on the tip of his finger until it ceased to seesaw or move at all, and she had seen him lift Reginald Hamilton, bulky and heavily clothed, up off his saddle and swing him lightly down to the ground.) What must it not have been to Sên King-lo to see her scarce-smothered dislike of his home and kindred, of all that meant all to him; what must it not have cost him to bring her here, knowing, as he must have known, how poor a thing, unfitted and unpolished, she would seem to Sên Ya Tin, to all his kinsmen, to the women of the domain, to the very coolies?

She had meant so well and so bravely, and she had done so ill and so cowardly!

She had been happy in Hongkong. And Hongkong’s scorn and innuendo had reached her. (In that one thing she had been cleverer than he.) And she had not cared. She had been unaffectedly indifferent to it all, because Sên King-lo was “MacGregor,” and she sat on his right hand.

But here, where it had mattered most, here where she had garnered up her dream of infinite and exquisite sharing with him, here where he had been at her woman’s mercy, his English wife’s mercy, her happiness had sickened, her comradeship and pluck had crumpled.

The little furry thing had finished his toilet, and he scampered away. The woman never moved.

Oh—to see Ruben! Oh—to be in England! Her husband’s people were not her people, his home was not her home!

Ruben’s baby voice called her. England called her. The shabbiest, grimiest taxi in the Strand was more to her than all the pagodas and lacquers and peonies in China!

She hated peonies now. She always should. She hated all of this. The bamboos that bent over there in the breeze mocked her. She had been pilloried here in Ho-nan. To live and be with thickly painted, chattering women who tittered all the time; who never had the dignity of a sorrow, or the blessing of a care; who had no responsibility—hadn’t even the grit or tang of jealousy—but tottered about, because their feet were deformed; who were vain of their hideous deformity; and who gorged on sickly sweetmeats and scandal! She couldn’t understand a word they spoke or whispered, but she knew Mayfair and Washington too well and too shrewdly not to know the sound of scandal when she heard it! To eat with a posse of giggling chattering women, young and old, or to eat alone, half her meals, while a dancing bear reared above her shoulder and growled for tit-bits! To see cats chained and tethered like house-dogs and hear them wailing how they liked it! Sên Ya Tin was addicted to cats, and on one moonlight night the screech and yowl of twenty tethered and outraged cats had well-nigh crazed Ruby Sên. Lo had not been there to slake her nervous fury, for he had been in an all-night attendance on Sên Ya Tin in the ko’-tang or hawking in the moonlight with his kinsmen.

China! Oh—to go! Oh—never to have come! She would escape the place. They could not keep her—they should not! But could she ever escape the memory?

Would she love her child—her second baby? She did not love it now. Could she ever love it—would she when she heard its cry—a child begotten in this China! She loved Ruben, second to his father; she loved Ruben, her fair-haired, Saxon-seeming baby son. She was dearly proud of Ruben. A young queen-mother might envy her Ruben. But this unborn child of hers—would she live to hate the flesh and blood that were bud of her own? Might she live to be ashamed of her own baby? What if China marked it!

CHAPTER L

Old women’s ignorant, unscientific tales, silly peasant chatter—English tales, English chatter—ribaldry lurched threateningly to her recollection. Laughed at, turned from in disgust, when she had heard them, they half distracted her now—and she had been near enough distraction without their sudden menace. What if . . .

Trembling violently, she crouched still lower on the ground and hid her face on the old tree’s trunk.

King-lo, coming to find her, heard her wild sobbing long before he saw her.

He quickened his pace; but he came very quietly, and when he reached her he knelt down and laid his hand upon her shoulder and left it there without a word.

And as he waited for the rougher paroxysm of her grieving to wear itself a little out, he saw that it was an old apple-tree that lay upon the ground, an apple-tree struck down by some raging storm of China, in one of those fury times when the Yellow Sorrow lashed and churned its low banks into wide, endless miles of hideous flooded wreckage and of seaweed thick with stark and twisted floating human bodies, and when angry winds mowed peasant homes and huts of mat and reeds as sickles mow the ripened grass; but that, so stricken, the tree still lived and grew and bore, its good roots still holding securely in the earth. His face, already tender for his stricken woman, took an added softness and an added strength. So, he thought, a man knocked to the ground might hold with steadfast fibers to the foundations and nourishment of being, still grow and give.

He knew the old tree well. He had climbed it and rifled it of its tasteless, rosy, scented apples often when a boy.

He saw the veil of white and pink its blossoms scarfed upon the grass. He saw the little wild flowers blowing near it—the June wild flowers of Virginia, and he remembered. He saw love’s confession and its shyness come in a girl’s dark English eyes. He held her surrender and her dearness in his arms.

He knew that he would remember this old apple-tree, its courage and its beauty, this one, selfsame apple-tree, in China and Virginia, with its rosy, hopeful, perfumed signal on the ground, its sturdy triumph of endurance and persistence in prostration, its dual message and its dual memory, the little wild flowers smiling at the ferns beside it; he saw in it a token and a commandment, and he knew that it would live with him while he lived and that living it would link—in his spirit—East and West.

He laid his hand upon his wife’s.

Ruby stirred to the touch and let him lift her to his arms.

“It’s my head,” she told him, choking back her sobs. “It has ached all day”—as indeed it had. “I wish you hadn’t found me while I was so foolish.”

“I am very glad I did,” he answered.

“The pain made me cry,” she whispered brokenly. “I won’t cry any more.”

Sên King-lo had never seen her cry before. But he only said quietly, as he soothed her hair, “Cry it out, dear.”

But she was made a little of his own metal, and she laughed through her dwindling sobbing and dried her face upon his sleeve.

He held her close, and she seemed glad to nest so. And they stayed together in the quiet, while a squirrel bounced softly back and looked them up and down.

“It will be better soon now,” Ruby said presently. “It is better already.”

“We must try to cure it soon, Ivy.” He had never called her that before. “Rest a little longer, sweetheart, then let me take you back and bathe it while you try to sleep. I cannot take a sick girl the long trail that is waiting for us, and I had hoped that we might start tomorrow.”

“Start—” She dared not say the rest, but he felt the pulse leap in her wrist.

“—for home, dear,” he finished for her. “It is time we went.”

She made no answer. She could not trust her voice, and she was trying desperately to keep some of the joy from her face.

“Are you not rested a little?” Lo asked her before long. “Shall we go, slowly, now?”

“Quite rested—and very much ashamed,” Ruby told him.

Sên lifted her and led her beside him, with his arm about her shoulder.

When they saw the red roofs in the distance, the red up-curling roofs of his birthplace, Ruby drew away from him and faced him.

“Lo,” she asked, “are you sure that you are ready? Is there any hurry? Lo—tell me—do you want to go?”

“Want to go!” Sên mocked her, laughing down at her, and his eyes laughed with his lips, “want to go home—and to Ruben!”

And his wife believed him.

It was the first lie Sên King-lo had ever told her.

CHAPTER LI

If they had given her courteous welcome, they gave her kindliest parting. They gave her many words, and she understood the kindness of their tones. And they gave her many gifts. Sên Ya Tin gave her jewels and a jeweled lute, a silver box of sweetmeats, her own face, painted before King-lo had been born, and a cape of peacocks’ feathers. The women gave her silks and embroidered crêpes and opal-tinseled gauze. Her husband’s kinsmen gave her ivories and jades, and the toddlers gave her flowers and splint-baskets of persimmons and lychees, and one gave her its favorite doll.

Sên Ya Tin gave them pleasant, tranquil speeding—at the outer door this time—and there was no hardness in her eyes.

And Sên King-lo went as he had come, with his hand on his wife’s litter, smiling lips and cheerful, happy eyes.

The red roofs of the homestead were dimming in the distance when a veiled and shrouded woman slipped from among the trees, and held out a tiny yellow hand to stay them.

At a gesture from lord Sên King-lo the bearers waited, and La-yuên came closer, throwing off her dark merino veiling as she did so. She held out to Mrs. Sên a long and slender parcel and another that was cube-shaped and not large, each swathed in rice paper that glistened silky in the daylight and each tied criss-cross and securely by thin, red cord-string.

Ruby took what La-yuên offered; but before she could frame words of thanks, or King-lo improvise them for her, the girl had shaken her clasped hands at Sên Ruby, made the k’o-tow of subservience to the lord Sên King-lo, and darted like a tottering lap-wing back towards the homestead through the shelter of the forest. But they both had seen that as she turned and sped away her eyes had filled with tears.

For the concubine had loved Sên Ruby and was loath to have her go.

“Ought she to have come?” his wife asked anxiously. “Will she get in trouble for having left the courtyard?”

“Undoubtedly,” Sên smiled as he said it, “if a eunuch sees her, or her baby cries before she gets back, and they hear and miss her. She’ll get a furious wigging—but not much more for this ‘first offense.’ She’ll not be beaten, have her stickpins taken away until the new moon, or get less soy with her evening rice, perhaps. She’ll not be lowered to the grade of the handmaidens. Po-Fang is very fond of La-yuên, and so is his Number-one. But I dare say she’ll worm back in as snugly as she wormed out. It’s a ‘capital offense,’ but I dare say she knows her wicked ropes—many of the concubines do—though I have heard the grandmother say that this girl was the most obedient of all the flowery quarter. It will be all right if her baby does not cry.”

“No—it is his nap-time now,” Ruby said more contentedly. “He is not apt to wake, and if he should, he’s got a stick of barley-sugar in his hand.”

“Sweet dreams!” Lo laughed. “You needn’t fret, dear. It will be all right, then, if the frog has got his suck-stick.”

“But if a eunuch does see her going back and your grandmother is told?”

“She will only shrug her shoulders, I think—today—and send the fellow about some other business; but she’ll not hear it, I am sure. It would be reported first to Po-Fang or to his Number-one. She has the right to hear it first, and she would only laugh and say she herself had sent the girl on an errand, and Sên Po-Fang would only wink at the eunuch and toss him a coin. Don’t you worry,” King-lo repeated as he motioned the bearers to move on.

It was very wrong of the lord Sên King-lo to be footing it across China while his woman rode in a padded, cushioned palanquin. But he had come much of the way so, he had entered and left the homestead of his people, on foot, with his hand on his English wife’s chair, and he was going as he’d come.

At dusk-fall they halted, and while their servants made their camp King-lo and Ruby feasted on the grass.

“Now,” she said, as she gave him her empty coffee cup, and nodded to him for a cigarette, “open the parcels La-yuên gave me. I want to see.”

“No.” Sên shook his head, as he struck her match. “You must not look at your last parting gift, given you after you had left the protection of the devil-screen. It will bring you bad luck for eleven moons, if you so much as peep, until your journey is over, until you are safe behind your own devil-screen of your own house door.”

“A devil-screen, in Kensington!” she tossed at him scornfully. “We haven’t got a devil-screen at our front door.”

“Oh—yes, we have.”

“What?” Ruby demanded.

“Love,” her husband told her.

“Yes,” she answered softly, “and we’ll trust it, outside as well as in. Cut those strings at once.”

When the rice-paper was pulled off it left a striped box of flat, gaily-colored straw, a box of tiny drawers which, when Ruby drew them out, showed each a saucer and a wee soft brush. Sên King-lo chuckled as he leaned over her shoulder. It was a paint-face outfit—white, carmine, rose and black, and a number of soft chamois “sop-rags” and “smooth-off cloths” all complete, that his cousin’s concubine had given his wife.

“There’s a hint,” he chaffed her.

“And here’s a poem!” Ruby exclaimed, pouncing on a slip of crimson paper lying unfolded on the little piles of chamois.

La-yuên could neither read nor write—the blind courtyard scribe must have made the characters of her message—but she knew that it was sin to deface, or even crease by folding, a printed, cut, or brushed word.

“Poem! More like a sermon!” Lo laughed as he took it from her.

“Read it to me,” Mrs. Sên commanded.

“ ‘Make thy face a garden of roses and lilies and find favor in thy honorable lord’s eyes,’ ” Lo translated carefully. “Now you know!”

Ivy took the crimson letter from him with a quiet smile and put it back. “Open the other one,” she ordered.

“You are a fearless woman,” Sên King-lo asserted as he obeyed. Then he shouted joyfully. La-yuên had sent his English wife a Chinese “back-scratcher,” but not such as you can buy any day in State Street in Chicago, or in Museum and Hart Streets in London: “scratchers” quite genuine in their not patrician way and useful enough, if you chance to need them; but sometimes their tiny hands are imitation ivory, and their long black handle-stems made of painted wood.

This tiny palm was of perfect, finest ivory as exquisitely molded and as perfect as Ruby’s own hand; each wee knuckle flashed an embedded jewel, very small but very good; and the sharpness of the minute finger-nails was considerately smooth. The long handle was of “green-moonlight” jade: an exquisite, costly toy, despite the raw suggestion of its useful purpose: an implement of self-indulgence fit to rasp discomfort even from the person of a red-button mandarin. And from the “chop” carved in the jade of the long handle, King-lo made little doubt that in other days it had done so; but he kept that surmise to himself.

CHAPTER LII

Ruby smiled in her sleep that night, lying in her tent, dreaming pleasantly and kindly of a Chinese concubine who had been loath to say “goodbye.”

At dawn King-lo left her still sleeping happily and went quietly out of their tent.

He turned back on their route and retraced his own steps of the day before. On a hillock not far from the tent his wife was in but standing back on their road of travel, nearer, if only a few rods nearer, to the homestead he had left—forever—he stood and looked back towards where the red roofs lay that he could not see—that he would not see again. His face was very calm, but its gaiety had gone. No need to wear a mask now!

This was his last turning back.

He knew that he would not turn back again. This should be his last self-indulgence, his last lingering alone with self. He was going into exile—exile self-made, self-inflicted. He would not falter in his courage, or, while they lived, fail Sên Ruby, the mother of his son. He had sown—and he would reap. He would reap a golden harvest and lay its rich, ripened sheaves at her feet—and she should never know. She could not be of his people; to his utmost he would be of hers. His inner soul, his spiritual core of being, was his own, an ownership no man could renounce. His soul was his and China’s for all time; but his heart should beat for the wife he had chosen and taken, and his daily doings should be as her country’s.

He dismissed it then—and stood alone with China; a proud flush dyed his cheeks; tears filled his eyes.

Sên King-lo lifted his hands and held them out with a gesture of farewell and of endless fealty and longing towards the dominion of the Sêns, the queendom of Ya Tin.

He gave a greeting, and he took one.

Then he turned—again—towards his tents.

When Mrs. Sên lifted the curtain of her sleeping-tent and came through it, King-lo was directing the servants who were spreading the breakfast meal. He was humming “Annie Laurie,” and he was clad in English clothes.

Why had he done that so soon? she wondered. When she spoke the question later, Sên replied, “Oh, we may as well now. The country here is quiet again. I was needlessly concerned before, I’m sure, and the coolies know us better now and understand.”

And that was true. He had been needlessly doubtful of his coolies and the servants, whose menace had been one of social dislike and spiritual disapproval, not of physical attack. The coolies and servants were good-natured on all the return journeying. Many of them lived in Hongkong, and several of them had left their wives and children in the narrow, crowded streets of Victoria City.

As soon as their morning meal was over, they pushed on—towards Hongkong and the West. Mrs. Sên would not delay the restart to change then. But when they halted again to dine, and for the night (they had not camped at noon, and lunch had been but a picnic) she laid aside silk trousers and tinseled satin coat—to her surprise a little regretfully. They were pretty, if odd, those costly Chinese garments that Lo had chosen and given her. They would make wonderful finery for Albert Hall charity gatherings or for some ducal function of masquerade, but Sên King-lo’s wife could not wear Chinese costume for “fancy dress.”

Lo was giving her deft aid over a dinner frock that “did up” in twenty places, most of them beyond her reach, when she put the troubled question to him in their tent.

“That’s up to you, dear,” he answered with a laugh, as he snapped a final “popper” behind a puff of ninon, for they were dining in some state tonight, al fresco in the wilderness. “They have served their purpose. You might make cushions and tea-cosies and those vanity-bag things you women like to swing out of them, I’d think, and take them home for presents,” he added. Then he gave the puff of silvery, smokey ninon another careful tweak and bent and kissed a dimpled shoulder.

“You are very good to me,” Ruby whispered with her hands upon his coat. “Lo, tell me, does it hurt you very much—to leave China?”

“Very much,” he told her, “but it would hurt me more to stay. I have loved being here as only Easterners love such things, I think; but I am ready to go home now, Ruby. I take my treasure with me, and we go back to the treasure we have left. My wife is my happiness and my contentment. I would not give her for a world ‘made of one entire and perfect chrysolite’!”

No one called on Mrs. Sên in Hongkong—few knew that they were back. King-lo scarcely left the bungalow, the few days they waited for a boat.

Men came to see him, and he completed with them the business things he had planned and come to do.

The day before they sailed, by the man who took a message and a greeting to Sên Ya Tin, his wife sent a letter and an offering to the venerable lady and a horde of costly Chinese garments to the concubine La-yuên. Perchance something of China’s quiet, whispered message had reached Sên Ruby after all!

She kept one of the lovely native costumes, to treasure it for memory. She kept all her stickpins and every Chinese bauble that Sên King-lo had given her, and with them a flower that he had gathered her in the forest, and one that he had fastened at her breast, in their bungalow garden, late the night before. It was then that she had told him—shared with him—what was coming in the English winter. And for answer he had put his hands about her face and kissed her slowly on her lips.

They stood together on the deck, as the great ship moved slowly from Hongkong.

Presently his wife made an excuse of something she wanted in the cabin—no, she’d rather find it herself—and left Sên King-lo to take his last look, say his last goodbye to China—alone.

Hongkong grew a blur. Sên King-lo’s face was very pale as he took his last look at his country; but his eyes were calm and steadfast, though his heart ached with a pain passing the pain of woman. And he thought that the gods of China made mouths at him.

CHAPTER LIII

The rural social strongholds in England are far less complacent and easy-going than London is. London is something of a jade and unbends to any fun. The “county” is a prude, respectable to a degree. “County” never bends. London’s the more human and undoubtedly has the better time. If “county” has a finer art of living, London has the prettier knack, and the gayer, more amusing.

“Give me the county for my funeral,” Emma told Sir Charles, “but let me live in London every time.” But Lady Snow was frivolous and meant to stay so.

And even Sir Charles, who saw through most things, could not see why the Sêns had moved to Surrey in October, almost on their return from China. London could be trusted to keep its welcome of Mr. and Mrs. Sên warm, but he doubted considerably whether the semi-county of Brent-on-Wold would welcome them at all.

Sên King-lo had his reasons, of course, and probably they were good ones; but Sir Charles could not think what they were.

It was Sên’s doing, not Ivy’s, Snow was sure.

Ruby had been quite willing to make the home-move that her husband had suggested, but not glad. London was her Mecca and always would be; but she was content to live wherever Lo wished, if it might be with him and not in China. She knew that she would not be prisoned in Surrey, or forbidden long drinks of London’s wine. King-lo was no wing-clipper, least of all of hers. If he longed for country life, or chose it for some other reason, she was more than willing to have it so. It was his turn to have his way, she felt sincerely. And what did it matter, if they were together, with Ruben, bonnier than ever, toddling at their feet, clutching at her skirts? Sên King-lo had no entire monopoly of loyalty and sunny niceness, or of fineness and bigness.

Sên King-lo had not suggested their moving because of any longing he felt for flowers and trees, open spaces, and running water. All such things were one to him now. London meant a great deal to Sên. And his opportunities for the big Anglo-Chinese work he still meant to do, and to do with his might, opportunities for the personal touch and mutual yeasting of friendly minds and foemen’s, which are so much of all international work’s success, were in London tenfold what they could be in any other spot in Europe. But he knew that he was very tired, and that unless he rested certain mental and personal forces of his that had suddenly worn thin, his hand might lax hopelessly and fall away from its helm. There was work to do that needed him for its best doing. Ruby needed him, and would need him more and more as Ruben grew older. For Sên King-lo already knew what no one else suspected, not even Charles Snow, that Ruben’s Saxon body was but the sheath of a mind and spirit and inclination intensely Chinese. Sên saw a coming day when it might be for him to stand between Ruby and their boy; to curb Ruben, to comfort Ruby, to spare her all he could, to save Ruben from mistakes that were the heritage of the father’s son. And the child that was coming in December—how might it not need him, how might not Ruby need him because of it?

It was because of all this that Sên King-lo had turned from the vivid rush and inexorable pull of London life to the haven-quiet of the place he found and bought in Surrey.

Winter was mild that year in England. The drooping weeping-ash trees were naked of their leaves, fires were comfort as well as “company,” of course; but the grass still kept a hint of greenness; the holly was scantily berried; here and there a tiny flower-face peeped up from the rock garden; an heroic, insensitive, old rose-vine was erratic enough to put forth a shivered, puny bud; a japonica-tree at the sunniest stretch of the south wall frankly threatened to flower. There was no demand at all for skates, but there was some for racquets by young and enthusiastic players.

The Snows were staying with Sên and Ruby, and the cook took her orders from Lady Snow, for a time. There was a trained nurse in the house, and the local doctor whom Mrs. Sên had chosen “dropped in” at tea-time fairly often, at Sên King-lo’s request.

Today Ruby had not come down to breakfast, Emma had left the cook to her own devices, and Sir Charles thought that the doctor was upstairs now and had been there a deuce of a time.

Sir Charles Snow was smoking strenuously, not in the big drawing-room, but in the pink-and-white absurdity which the servants called “the downstairs boudoir”—the big drawing-room’s near neighbor, almost annex—and that was worse, for the “boudoir’s” dainty, expensive fripperies were perfect caches for smoke-smell and smudge. But a man, at least an English man, has a right to do what he likes when a whole house is at sevens and sixes, every woman in it looking important, meals late, fires neglected, and men ignored or snubbed.

“It is too damned still,” Snow grumbled irritably to his third cigar.

Suddenly the big man jumped like a nerve-ridden woman—at least his heart did—at a sudden sound.

But it was only a sympathetic tail thumping ingratiatingly at his feet.

“Hello yourself!” Snow replied, glad even of a terrier to speak to. “You’ve no business in here. Wait till my lady wife sees you—only, if you take my advice, Bimbles, you won’t, old boy.”

Bimbles yapped a pleased reply.

“Oh, all right,” Sir Charles retorted; “if you don’t care, I don’t.”

Even a dog’s company was better than none.

The door opened, and Emma hurried in—but before his wife had closed the door again, Snow had heard a tiny cry.

“Well?” he demanded anxiously. Emma looked “bad,” he thought. And that wasn’t her way!

His wife made no reply, except to sob and throw herself, almost vixenishly, in a chair.

“Tell me,” he begged her brusquely.

“Oh, Charlie, it is too terrible,” Emma wailed angrily.

“Ivy?”

Lady Snow shook her head. “All of us. It’s a Chinese baby.”

Charles Snow looked at her with gloomy eyes.

“The ugliest baby I ever saw. It isn’t like a baby. It’s like a hideous little Chinese god, and it looks ten thousand years old.”

“Then it mustn’t,” Sir Charles remarked grimly; “only an emperor may look ten thousand years old.”

“Well, then,” his wife retorted, “it looks twenty thousand. It hasn’t any eyes—just up-and-down wrinkled slits. It’s all cheek-bones and yellow—cheek-bones right up to its awful little eyebrows. It hasn’t any nose, and what it has is wider than its mouth, and those horrid up-and-down slits that I suppose are its eyes, if it has any eyes, keep waggle-waggling all the time, blink, blink, blink.”

Snow sighed, a smothered, dreary sigh. Emma’s description sounded Chinese enough.

“Looks like Sên, then?” he said.

“It does nothing of the kind!” Lady Snow stormed. “I tell you it is the most hideous, living thing I ever saw—and more Chinese-looking than any Chinaman I ever saw. It looks like Low Tease, or whatever you call him, when he was nine hundred years old, in those awful illustrated Chinese books of yours, and it looks twice as Chinese as Low Tease does.”

“Lao Tze was a mere boy of two or three hundred when he died, dear,” Sir Charles murmured gently.

“I don’t care!” Lady Snow snapped through her angry weeping. “It looks a disgrace! So there!”

“Are you sure? Sure that Ivy’s baby looks so very Chinese?”

“Sure? Of course I’m sure! I’ve seen it, haven’t I? I tell you, it is Chinese. Nothing on earth would make me believe that it was Ivy’s child at all—if I didn’t know.”

“Has she seen it—seen it as you have?”

“She’s seen it, and I suppose she saw it. She saw a speck of fluff or something on his coat when King-lo gave her a drink, and laughed at him for being untidy, and flicked it off.”

“Did she seem to mind?” Snow asked.

“Mind? Mind a speck of fluff? Oh, the baby! Mind the awful Chinese look of it? She didn’t seem to, but she must. And she’ll hate it! How she’ll hate it!”

“I hope not,” Charles Snow said gently.

“Of course she’ll hate it. I hate it now! And King-lo ‘minded’!”

“How do you know?” Snow asked quickly.

“Oh, I don’t know—but he did. How can I explain every single thing to you? You ought to know by yourself. I’m too upset to go on talking forever. He minded terribly, I tell you. He went to the window and stood looking for ages—at nothing. Even his back minded. He never stirred until Ivy called him back to her. He minds. I nearly dropped. Don’t you mind, Charles?”

“I’m not glad,” Sir Charles said gravely.

“Well,” his wife conceded bitterly, “that’s something. Not glad! Wait till you see it, Charles Snow! ‘Finest race on earth!’ Well, perhaps they are, but—” She finished the sentence and began another, but the rest of her words were quite inarticulate through the thick smother of fresh sobbing.

“Boy or girl?”

The commonplace and very usual question seemed to steady her.

“That’s the worst of it,” she answered desperately but clearly. “It’s a girl.”