CHAPTER LIV

Ruby Sên did not hate her Chinese baby. And because she did not King-lo loved her with an added love.

Ruby loved her baby. It was hers—and Lo’s!

Ruby Sên had a valiant soul, and something of Sên King-lo’s valor and sweetness had crept into hers.

Mrs. Sên loved her wee daughter very much.

Sên King-lo loved his baby girl almost as tenderly as he loved the mother he had never seen. Once, in the demanding day of early wifehood when Ruby had asked him, as wives foolishly will, pathetically must, if his love of her was his great love, he had told her simply, bravely, “No Chinese loves any one else as he does his mother.”

They all grew to love her—except Emma Snow—she never did.

They named their daughter “Ivy.” Sên King-lo would have it so. But her signature was written on her face—a Chinese signature. Lady Snow had been right in that. Little Sên Ivy was unmistakably Chinese. Both Sên himself and Sir Charles Snow knew that they never had seen a being that looked more typically or more intensely Chinese. She had not a trace of Europe on her; but almost from the first Sên King-lo suspected that she had almost no trait of China in her, that—except for that outer sheath of Chinese beauty—she was all a Western.

Luckily for both the babies, Ruben was delighted with his sister and vastly proud of her—though he called her, as soon as he could talk, “funny Ivy!”

But in one thing Emma Snow was wrong. Baby Ivy was very lovely, in her vivid, flower-like Eastern way: a lovely, laughing, pomegranate child. She was lovely from the first. New-born babies are not often beautiful, unless to mother eyes. Most of them have a smudged, unfinished look, and they come red-raw and wrinkled into life. But Baby Ivy’s loveliness came with her, and it grew as she grew. Sir Charles Snow sometimes thought that, had she lived in China in the old imperial days, her face might have gained her the yellow chair of an Emperor’s first wife and the throbbing desire of any countryman that ever saw her. The Trojan war was not fought for a woman; but wars have been fought so in Asia, and Snow smiled grimly, more than once, thinking that her Surrey birthplace had perhaps spared Asia bloodshed.

Soon after Christmas the Snows left Brent-on-Wold. Emma was due in Devon where their children had been holidaying with her mother, and Sir Charles was wanted at the Foreign Office. M. P.s and Barristers and even mere peers may take and make themselves long and frequent holidays, but woe betide us all if the Foreign Office took a breather! That Whitehall bulwark of Empire must, like Tennyson’s brook, go on forever—though not often so tranquilly.

They stayed for the christening, and then the Sêns were left alone in their new home.

The baby throve, and Ruby was vigorous and active again. And Lo promised that she should ride with him soon.

Both secretly wondered if the local gentry was going to call, and, except for the other, neither cared.

The gentry was wondering the same thing and was both more interested and exercised about it than were Mr. and Mrs. Sên.

Several ladies, younger ones, wished to call; several others, older ones, preferred to avoid the necessity. But that had nothing to do with it. None of them would dare to call, or to receive Mrs. Sên, unless Lady Margaret Saunders did; and, if Lady Margaret did, no other matron of Brent-on-Wold’s upper-circle would presume not to do so.

Lady Margaret Saunders ruled Brent-on-Wold and its adjacent small estates, as completely and autocratically as Sên Ya Tin ruled in a coign of Ho-nan, and she ruled far less amiably, far more erratically. Sên Ya Tin was tyrannical but easy-going. There was nothing easy-going about Lady Margaret Saunders. She hectored the village shopkeepers, of whom her patronage was small; she alternately cajoled and abused the rector and almost invariably prescribed his texts; she had driven two curates away and sent one to the milder rule of the county asylum. She controlled the relieving officer, the cottage hospital, and the tennis club—although she’d never had a racquet in her hand. She directed the procedure of the cricket and football clubs and dictated the number of the buns and the strength of the tea with which they regaled visiting teams, though she had neither sons nor grandsons to bowl or to kick the national balls. She was the local flower-show, though the glass at “the big house” was not much and the grounds were more occupied with broccoli and potatoes than with roses and carnations. She had “early closing” changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays. And not even the cottage women who “went out to oblige” ever defied her.

No one defied Lady Margaret Saunders. She was not pleasing to look at and less pleasing to converse with. She had a German face, which was a libel on her ancestors, and an enormous Jewish nose, which was a crueler libel on the Hebrew people. All her forebears were Yorkshire. She sniffed in public and nagged in private. No one liked her. No one disputed or challenged her acid authority. She ruled.

Why? Because it was her nature to rule. Dominance was her being, and her dominance was as direct and relentless as Niagara. Her force was Titanic, and her bad manners were irresistible.

But she was not only obeyed, she was courted. And Lady Margaret was not only courted, but reverenced.

The “gentry” was her creature, disliked her to a woman, and feared her to a man.

Lady Brewster was the woman most nearly admitted to her intimacy.

General Saunders had left a leg in the Kyber, and his other leg’s foot as well. He spent his days now in a wheel chair. His wife called him “Polly,” and paid very little attention to him—in public.

They were childless.

Lady Margaret Saunders called on Mrs. Sên, and then the “gentry” rushed to do the same.

The gentry of Brent-on-Wold was two doctors, the rector, a scattering of army officers—many of them retired, others still on the “List,” and serving at Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberly and the War Office—a well-to-do musician who could neither play nor compose, a retired architect (who wished he hadn’t), a novelist who did write but didn’t seem to publish, and a veritable millionaire who had wandered in from Leadenhall Street (and escaped from Bayswater) in a Rolls Royce and a sable coat, with a chef, a maître d’hôtel and three footmen in his wake. Then there were a dozen others, neither rich nor poor, who owned their own homes and each paid a cook and parlor-maid, did nothing for a living, and dressed for dinner—with, of course, their families.

Sên King-lo had not chosen the locality of their new home for its society. He had chosen it for its roses and the beauty of its hills and vistas. Nightingales had a leafy stronghold in the woods and gardens of Brent-on-Wold. The house suited them rather more than moderately. It was not too far from London for people who had as good a car as theirs was. Sên King-lo did not in any way intend that Ruby should be cut off from London or from London friends, or that he should even stay permanently in the countryside, if she should prove to dislike it. For himself he craved a little rest, or, rather, he felt that he must have it. It was rest, not rust, he craved and thought he needed: not to slack his industriousness but to slake it in a hill-set garden. He liked “Ashacres”; Ruby liked it when he took her to see it; and, almost best of all, its purchase and occupation were immediately available. So he bought it, and they furnished it and moved in in less than a fortnight from the day that Ruby first saw it. Money in sufficiency can speed up most human sloths—even lawyers and furniture dealers.

But they did not dismantle their Kensington house, or even close it, for Ruby should have her old home ready and waiting whenever she chose to go there.

Lady Margaret Saunders had not intended to call on Mrs. Sên, and Lady Margaret was almost as little given to changing her mind as Sên Ya Tin was. But she had a nephew at the Foreign Office whom she loved better than she liked him, and when she heard that Sir Charles and Lady Snow were staying at “Ashacres” and that the influential diplomat was Mrs. Sên’s cousin, she thought she’d think it over. Then Lady Brewster had the presumption to assume that Lady Margaret Saunders would not call on Mrs. Sên, and that settled it.

Lady Margaret called at once. She liked young Mrs. Sên, and she liked Chinese Mr. Sên, a perfect gentleman, and intelligent, very much indeed, and she said so steadily for several days.

Mr. and Mrs. Sên were as pleasantly established in Brent-on-Wold as they’d been in London.

CHAPTER LV

It had been an unflawed year of renewal and achievement. They had ridden a great deal—always gay and happy and near to each other when they rode together—with something of the surprise and enjoyment of their first ride together always recurrent and fresh in their last. Sên King-lo danced as willingly as ever and as well. He still made music for his wife whenever she bade him. Their congeniality held, and he was still her lover.

The “gentry” had proved far less dull than it had seemed at first. King-lo found and made many interests here, and Ruby found several amusements.

Sên King-lo became a sort of lord of the manor, unofficial but acknowledged and accredited, as respected as the official one who, through no fault of his own, was very deaf, a trifle gouty, and more than a trifle parsimonious. Mr. Sên was the more popular and the more consulted of the two. Half the children in the village brought their troubles to him, and so did the postmaster, the rector, the constables,—there were three there and thereabouts—and the sidesman; and more than once so did Lady Margaret Saunders.

Brent-on-Wold was a happier and a kindlier place, and a more awake and alive one, because a Chinese man had come to live there.

Ruby was entirely contented now, and she often chatted frankly, almost affectionately, of her days in China. Released from it, Ho-nan grew a very pleasant and interesting place in her memory and in her talk. She sometimes spoke of her bungalow on the Peak with a regret that was perfectly unaffected and sincere. Her husband was Chinese, and so was their name; but she did not mind in the least, because Lo was so thoroughly English.

If Sên King-lo had trod a ploughshare, he had trod it to good purpose; and, if he had, no one in England suspected it, unless Charles Snow did.

Snow caught a hint of terror in the younger man’s eyes now and then—or thought he did; for he was never quite sure.

Next to her husband, Ruby Sên loved her children, and even King-lo did not know that she sometimes wished that Ivy might, as she grew, grow a little more English in appearance.

“I don’t know how ever Ivy will bring herself to present little Ivy when she’s old enough,” Emma Snow had said to Sir Charles more than once. “I know I couldn’t.”

Sir Charles made no reply.

Debonair always, interested in everything that his wife cared for, boyishly ready to play tennis with her, to ride or sing with her, to help her entertain or be entertained, yet Sên King-lo found time to be alone sometimes and to spend a great deal of time with his children. Baby Ivy spent hours on her father’s knee—in some quiet garden nook when the day was warm enough.

The bond between the two was very close. Ruben’s chief love was for his mother.

Ivy—little Ivy—was a child of many moods, and she had a vein of quarrelsomeness. The two nurses found her a handful. Ruben gave no one any trouble ever; but he was an odd little fellow. He liked to be alone and would lie for hours on his stomach by the brookside, watching one flower, or flat on his sturdy back, gazing raptly at the changing clouds. His color came and went at the odor of a rose; his eyes would fill at the singing of a bird.

Ruben had a “temperament”; Ivy had a temper.

But it only broke out angrily upon her father once.

They were sitting in the garden, the baby and the man. His arms were close about her, and she was playing with his watch. The day was very still; they were quite alone. A linnet called to its mate. At the sound King-lo raised his face to the sycamore tree above him and quoted softly but aloud a Chinese line that Li Po had made for Kublai Khan’s daughter twelve hundred years ago. At the sound of the strange tongue she’d never heard before, the baby’s Chinese face was convulsed with sudden fury, and she tore her tiny hand from the bright yellow timepiece and struck her father in the face with all her angry might.

When Sên King-lo was alone now he was very quiet. Neither book nor work occupied him. He sat almost motionless, with his eyes on the trees or turned with a brooding hungry look towards the East. A man might have sat and seemed so who kept tryst with memories and with a self that had gone far away. And when he kept alone so, and the bell in the old village church chanced to ring, a strange wistful smile flickered slowly on his face.

It was May again. The snowballs were out, and the golden laburnum and the bluebells, and the early peas were hinting thinly in their pods. Sên King-lo knew what no one else suspected. He knew that his exile was nearly ended—unless indeed the angry gods of China would debar his very spirit from the East.

He feared it—but he hoped.

His bones would lie forever in the quiet churchyard here—for he had willed it so—until his ashes lived again in the petals of the flowers growing on his grave; but he knew that his soul would take its flight towards the East even while the English church-bells tolled his body’s passing to its English grave. But he thought, he dared to hope and think, that some time, after centuries of homeless wanderings, perchance, though forever banished from his kindred “on high,” the gods would give his spirit—at the Feast-of-Lanterns time, perhaps—leave to mingle with the spirits of his ancestors and be with them in Ho-nan, and look upon the living children of the Sêns as they came from the red-roofed homestead to the high hillside, to watch the long processions of the lanterns swaying, wending.

June had come. Sên King-lo was dying. He was dying as he had lived. He was dying in the garden, sitting easy in his cushioned wicker chair, a red rose on his knee, his eyes smiling into Ruby’s, his hand upon her hair.

So quietly had his release come to him that until a week ago no one had seen or heard it coming—no one but he.

A sudden spasm—here, too, in their garden—one afternoon had turned Ruby’s happy chatter to a cry of terror.

The clutching, grinding pain had gone almost as it came, but she had summoned doctors and wired to her cousin.

The doctors spoke of indigestion, and one who was a grandfather had patted Mrs. Sên upon her shoulder and told her that it was “quite all right.”

But Ruby Sên had seen the attack which the doctors had not, and her alarm did not pass. And King-lo bent his will and his love to comfort her alarm rather than to disabuse it.

Before Snow reached them, or the great man from Harley Street that Ruby had ’phoned for, the local doctors could make nothing of the case, and the London physician told Sir Charles frankly that he could make no more.

No other attack of pain came; but each day Sên moved a little more slowly, and his gray pallor deepened.

He took no farewells. He gave no last directions, made no last requests. He neither kept his bed nor moped. He was ready, and all that he could do for those he was leaving was in readiness.

He kept his wife’s hand in his and was her lover to the last, because he loved her and because he knew that to have him that to the utmost moment of their comradeship would be the dearest, proudest memory he could give her.

But to Sir Charles, the day after Snow came, Sên King-lo lifted a corner of his curtain.

“I know,” Sên said as they sat together for an hour—the only hour that Ruby left him till he died—“that you will do all you can for Ruby—always.”

Her kinsman nodded.

“But there is something I am anxious to say to you. I cannot lay the burden on Ruby, and I cannot lay it down. I must pass it on.”

Snow held out his hand.

“Keep Ruben and Ivy in England—always—if you can. Build up to that. Life will go hard with them. They must pay the price I owe! But I believe that it will be a lighter price, and less galling, if they never know my people or my country. I wish that I might hope that neither my boy nor girl would marry.”

That was the strangest wish a Chinese father ever framed.

But Charles Snow understood, and again he merely nodded.

“ ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ ” Sên King-lo quoted sadly. Then he said, “I fear least for Ruben, but I fear—terribly—for them both. Ruben is Chinese. He looks English, but he is thoroughly Chinese. If he marries, he should marry a woman of our people, a Chinese girl whose parents live here, just possibly. That will be so more and more, I believe. But I wish earnestly that he may not marry—or Ivy either. You know why. Teach Ruben to worship his mother, to garner his heart upon her, to live for her. It will not be difficult, I am sure, since his instincts are so intensely Chinese.”

Snow wondered if his cousin herself might not marry and hated himself for letting the thought come to him here and now. She was still so young and so full of life and of beauty.

But Sên King-lo knew that Ruby would be Sên Ruby while she lived. He knew.

“It is for Ivy,” King-lo went on, “that I fear most. Mere baby that she is, I know she is English. Yes, I am right. She is as English as Ruben is Chinese, more so perhaps. The mixture of race bloods has modified nothing racial for either of our children—fomented and intensified rather. Ivy is wholly English. I can see it every day. Sometimes when I have been alone, not often but sometimes, I have said something in Chinese—just to hear the Chinese words, just to taste them on my lips. I did, not long ago, when I was nursing her. She didn’t like it. She loathed it.”

That sounded fantastic—but Sir Charles did not think so. He had lived too long in China!

“An English girl with a Chinese face, an English soul and mind in a Chinese body! What she’ll probably have to live through! I beseech the gods that she may never marry!”

Sir Charles Snow noticed the plural.

“An English girl in a Chinese body!” Sên’s voice broke as he said it. And he said no more.

“I will do my best,” Snow told him.

It was enough.

The specialist came again from London the next day, and again he spoke alone with Snow after he had seen Sên King-lo.

“I am completely in the dark,” the great man said bitterly. “Mr. Sên is dying—I can’t say how soon—but dying, if I know anything at all about my business. We doctors have to doubt that now and then, unless we are complete asses. I know that Mr. Sên is dying, or I think I do, because I can see that there is no grip on life left in him; but I have not the remotest idea what is killing him, and that’s flat. There’s been a touch of heart trouble—no indigestion about it—but I suppose those fellows here had to call it something, and no wonder they barked up the wrong tree. I’ve been puzzled before—a doctor lives in one big maze of puzzle—but I never ran up against a puzzle like this before. Never! There has been a touch of heart trouble, but not enough to kill any man—scarcely enough to kill a mouse. I’d give a limb to know what is killing Mr. Sên.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” Snow said quietly, “if you will regard it as professional confidence.”

“Of course, of course. But—you know? Out with it, for Heaven’s sake, man!” But the physician’s eager voice was more skeptical than eager.

“Homesickness,” Snow told him.

“By Jove, you don’t believe that!” Dr. Foster was openly contemptuous. But, even so, he was interested. “Go on,” he commanded. “How do you make that out?”

“I know Sên King-lo well, and I know his race,” Snow replied.

“Well—well,” the physician said after a pause. “I wonder—we might have tried it—strange things turn out true ones sometimes—I wonder—we might have tried it—sending him back to China—but, I’m afraid it’s too late now. By Jove, I wish I’d been on the track of this case six months ago!”

“No,” Sir Charles Snow told him, “you might not have tried it. He would not go.”

“Tut! tut! A sick man must do what he’s told, to get well.”

Snow made no reply.

“I’d give a good deal to have been called in sooner—six months ago or more,” the physician repeated.

“You’d need to have been called in nearly five years ago,” Snow retorted, “and then you would have failed. I was on the case five years ago,” he added bitterly, “and I failed.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Foster remarked limply. Harley Street does not over-value or over-esteem lay practitioners.

CHAPTER LVI

They were alone in the garden at sunset.

They had been sitting here, on the broad garden bench, hand in hand, since tea, but saying little. King-lo had left her a few moments ago and had gathered the rose that she was wearing at her breast, where he had pinned it.

“The sweetpeas need thinning over there,” Lo said, pointing. Then he drew his hand across her face. “Ruby!” His eyes smiled into hers, and then, like a tired child, he laid his head on her shoulder.

And when she understood—it was some time—before her tears came—his wife bent and kissed him on the lips.

When the bell began to toll there was scarcely a window in the village at which a hand did not draw down a blind.

When Sir Charles Snow’s letter reached Ho-nan, Sên Ya Tin proclaimed a year of mourning. Every lute was put away. Every woman laid aside her gay rich garments, her stickpins, and her face paints. All the Sêns—women, men and children, and all their people—were clad in hempen sackcloth, and their rice was plainly cooked and scanted.

They gave Sên King-lo his funeral, the funeral of his rank, in the homestead of his fathers.

Sên Ya Tin walked behind a costly empty coffin, weeping, wailing, moaning, tearing her white disheveled hair, and she staggered as she walked.

And all his kindred followed her, and all their priests, servants and peasantry.

On his tomb, when the stone was sealed down above the empty coffin, they spread a princely feast: chicken, soy, lychees, melon, curd, and yellow wine in costly tiny cups—food for the spirit of lord Sên King-lo.

And Sên Ya Tin fasted till she fainted.

But in her heart Sên Ya Tin did not grieve. For she thought that it was better so.

The berries are red upon the holly. There is snow upon the graves. It is quiet in the churchyard.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.

Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.