CHAPTER XXII
Long before he reached his camp Ruben knew that some one was following him.
At first he thought that some other was taking by chance this same path as he; but he thought it odd that even one of all that countryside had kept apart from the jubilant anxious throng that went forth to meet the Spring and to bring Ox and Ox-driver back to the cremation that would send down their ashes to till and to urge under the ground, sending up the fructified grains to bulge the bins of the Sêns. Some woman or child, perhaps weary of waiting for the procession’s return, or sent on some imperative errand, it might be; for the tread that followed his was light.
Then he knew that whoever it was was following him; told it by the inexplicable, voiceless oracle that we never see, but that always we feel—and usually heed.
Ruben swung round and waited.
A woman—in mourning! Excluded for that from the day’s jollification? He never had heard though that they that mourned might not worship; and Li Ch’un was a worship of Spring.
The woman came more quickly on, and when she had gained to where he stood waiting, ko’towed and threw herself at his feet.
In trouble? Wanted his help? he wondered.
She should have it! The first of his race who had claimed his succor here in the Province of his fathers!
“What would you?” Sên Ruben asked—and his voice was a promise.
The woman lifted up her head, reached up towards him her close-clasped hands, in gestures of salutation and of fealty—and she still knelt at his feet.
“Hail, lord-one! Nine times three times welcome home, noble son of thy celestial father!” the woman cried, half sobbing. Ruben saw the wet on her face.
“Who are you?” he questioned her gently.
“Thy slave!” the kneeling woman told him passionately. “I am your slave-one, noble lord of our noble clan—your slave and the widowed concubine of the pure and elevated, honorable Sên Po-Fang who keeps his fragrant state on-High now with his holy hand on great Ya Tin’s girdle.”
“How comes it that you know me?”
“That, great lord, La-yuên the concubine-one cannot say. She thinks the trembling leaves of the soap-tree whispered it to her as you passed her, she sitting there in the cool of its fragrant shadow waiting to see Mang-Shên come back. I know that the lotus-like lord-one is Sên Ruben, the son of Sên King-lo whom Ya Tin so loved that she builded for him a temple lovelier, costlier than all other temples here in our Queendom. Ya Tin, the green jade of all women, rules us now from on-High, as she ruled us here in her house and courtyards, because her soul is great and her heart a day-star and of infinite wisdom. Hail and welcome! Sên Ruben, son of Sên King-lo, son of Sên Ruby, the White Rose of China—Sên Ruby whom La-yuên the concubine loved with a great love that was humble.”
Ruben flushed. He had thought that his own name for his mother, though never, for some deep hidden reason, to her had he called her so. And now this widowed “secondary” of a dead Sên, crouching down in the dust at his feet, clad in the coarse unbleached sackcloth-like stuff of Chinese widowhood, spoke of his mother so. Perhaps his father had called her so!
Sên Ruben bent and lifted La-yuên up to her almond-nut-shaped feet. And she giggled a little as he did so, because since she had come to Sên Po-Fang’s harem, little more than a pretty painted child, no hands of a man, save only the hands of Sên Po-Fang, had touched her before.
“You have not her deep beautiful color,” the woman said commiseratingly, “but something you have of her face-features, this concubine-person thinks, and I hear in you her voice, though deeper since a man’s. However, I know, I know, my lord-one, that you are hers, as surely as I know that you are lord Sên King-lo’s. She spoke not our tongue of Ho-nan, but my ears hear her voice in yours. Comes not my lord now to his home? Your feet go from it as you went, before you turned at the sound of mine. There”—she pointed—“behind that glade of oak and sycamore lies the great gate of your people’s wall. This way you went leads to nowhere, honorable lord Sên Ruben.”
“It leads to my camp,” Ruben told her. “There I will lie to-night, and to-morrow, when their busied time of Li Ch’un is past, will I beg the welcome at the gate of our house.”
La-yuên screamed in dismay. “Lord-one, lord-one,” she protested, “it is not for you to lie out in the open wild like a coolie who toils for his rice. Come in through your own walls, La-yuên implores, and this your slave will do all for your honorable comfort until those more fit to welcome you come home with Li Ch’un and Mang-Shên. True, there are few there to serve the lord Ruben, but at the Hour of the Hen those noble ones will come, and until their fragrant return the larders of the kitchens are bursting with succulent salt-things, or if my lord eats sweet, as do the white tribe of his honorable mother, there are cases and cases of sweetmeats. Your slave, the widowed concubine-one, has the keys of the wine-room; she will draw for you flasks of the golden wine of Shantung, and when she has washed from your beautiful feet the dust of the way that has presumed to approach their elegant loveliness, she will coax her lute to sing to you. La-yuên is skilled in the touch of the music lutes. I entreat you, come home!”
“To-morrow, kind widow-one, I will come, and then you shall make me sweet music, and give me the flowers-and-jades of the larder—I too ‘eat salt’ more often than I ‘eat sweet,’ and we will drink together, you and I, to the souls of our ancestors.”
“My lord! my lord”—La-yuên did not giggle now; La-yuên was painfully shocked—“speak not such uncouth thing in the ears of Sên C’hian Fan and Sên Jo Hiêsen! They would misjudge it. The concubine may not moisten her lips in the presence of a lord-one!”
Ruben laughed. “I will maintain the greatest circumspection in the presence of my august kinsmen, doubt not you that. And for that same estimable reason—our Sage would command it—Sên Ruben will not break in among his kinsmen like some wolf of the forest that prowls at the night hours—see, already the day-star turns and bends lower up in the heaven clouds—but will come as a Sên should come to the Sêns when the star rises up trailing its jeweled robes behind it, throwing them before it—rises up from the East side of our Earth ball.”
“Must so it be, great lotus bud of a lotus clan?” La-yuên asked sorrowfully.
“It must, kind widow-one; for I know that so it should be. Turn you back now; retrace your way to the others who watch at the wayside for the return of Mang-Shên; I go on to where my camp waits my return. I bade that it waited until I came or sent. To-morrow you shall greet me again within the gates of our people.”
“Show me first,” the woman pleaded, “where your place of halt lies, that I may find it. Then will this slave-one obey you and leave you—not to go again to the throng of women-ones and babe-ones that wait chattering at the waysides and on the hill-slopes for the procession’s come-back, but to hasten her to the home-place, that she may bring to her lord-one Sên Ruben comforts for his night-time, basins of fit eat-things, flasks of rich drink-things, soft mats for his lie-on, warm rugs that he be covered, for the night dew is chill, lord-one. All that she can carry she will bring, making the journey again and again.”
“That you shall not,” Ruben said gently, “none of it! I forbid it.”
La-yuên held out her hands in entreaty.
“I forbid it! Truly, kind-one, my camp-place is well furnished with all that I need.”
La-yuên wrung her hands.
She no longer disputed his decision, but she murmured despairingly, reproachfully too—for all her voice’s humility, “If our great Old-one were here with us, she would beat me that I lay on my soft mat while the son-one of the lord Sên King-lo lay without his own walls. Nor will I! All this night-time I will lie out in the cotton garden with the scarecrows, where the night-bats make the sleep-hours a flap-noise with the clamor of their leathern wings. And I will fast until you come, for so Sên Ya Tin would command, the jade-like Old-one who so loved Sên King-lo that she builded to him a temple the fairest in Ho-nan, and so loved his wife Sên Ruby, the White Rose of our clan, that always, by Sên Ya Tin’s command, in the temple of Sên King-lo burns a ruby candle to the honor of the lady Sên Ruby.”
“I would see it,” Sên Ruben said eagerly. “Can I see it from yonder hill-slope?”
“No, lord-one; but if you will suffer this secondary to lead you but a short space beyond those walnut trees there by the water, you shall see its roofs shining like golden water rippled in the sunshine.”
Sên Ruben caught his breath, turned and followed La-yuên without a word.
Even when they had reached the summit of the hillock carpeted with Spring’s wild flowers, beyond the walnut grove, and the woman paused, neither spoke.
Nor did La-yuên look at Sên Ruben. It was not for her to watch his face as he looked on the temple that old Sên Ya Tin’s love had builded in bribery to the gods for the purging of Sên King-lo’s soul, that it might be received on-High at last, all its soil of Western sojourn, Western marriage forgiven; all his stain washed away by the purification of her prayers, the vigils she had kept, the incense she had burned, the costliness and beauty of the dedicated temple. Yellow roses sprang across from a trellis of lacquer to a trellis of jasper and roofed with a mat of leaves and buds and blooms incense burners of silver and of jade; it was a temple of indescribable loveliness.