CHAPTER XXIII
La-yuên the concubine had not overpraised it; Ya Tin had not overpromised it when she had said to Sên King-lo at their parting, “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.”
In all China—where man’s hands have achieved the most—no lovelier thing than this ever was achieved; not even when Marco Polo, whose eyes had surfeited on the sumptuous beauty of Venice, saw Hangchow the jewel city of earth, as it was.
Ruben had seen it before in his dreams. For often Kow Li had boasted and crooned to him of the pearl-of-all-temples.
But Ruben Sên had not seen this!
Matched to the reality, the dream was poor and cheap; for the boy dreaming in London had had but his knowledge of the tawdrier buildings of Europe from which to filch the fabrics of his dream temple.
High on the hill slope, in a garden of peach trees, Ya Tin had builded of marbles and ivory the temple whose incredible cost was small in comparison to its beauty; a great low, one-storied temple that lounged on the peach-tree hill like a great sprawled, sun-drunk dragon of ten thousand glittering jeweled scales.
Winds and rains and the heat-torrents of summer had stained the twisted ivory columns a delicate apricot, but the marbles of the alternate pillars—white, pink, green, one blue, one gold, two red-veined black, one of gold-stone from Kokonor, two the color of blood—were as undiscolored as when Sên Ya Tin’s workmen had heaved them into place, fresh and virgin from mallet and chisel.
The few broad steps that led up to the temple door were of solid malachite, their edges encased in lead open-work. The temple’s windows—four at the East to welcome the day-star’s coming, four at the West to hold the stain of his going as long as they could on the temple’s lacquered floors—were latticed with lace insertions of silver, threaded with wires of gold and paned with painted and embroidered silk.
The temple roofs of pale-bronze tiles looked like tents of scaled gold. Little beasts of clay and of pottery squatted and perched and lolled on its ridge poles and corners. Long tassels of iridescent glass dangled from the roof’s up-curved lips, lamps and lanterns of elaborate workmanship hung and swung from its eaves. The under-sides of the fluted out-jutting roofs were intricately carved and inlaid, their very edges delicately scalloped.
About three of the great outer pillars enormous metal, clinging dragons twisted and writhed, their heads of gold thrust out, their open, coral-lined snarling mouths and angry red-lacquer tongues menacing all evil-comers, their restless jeweled eyes aflame in the sunlight.
Two great pelicans—one of burnished steel and copper and bronze, one of chisel-feathered stone—stood on either side of the temple’s approach. One held in his polished beak the chains of a gong, the other a hanging incense-holder; and the pelican of stone itself was an incense-burner so cunningly contrived and wrought that up through his feathers always twisted thin spirals of perfumed smoke-burning incense never suffered to burn out and die; for Sên Ya Tin dying nearly a dozen years ago had willed and charged it so.
The sky above was cloudless molten blue; the trees behind were a tapestry of splendid greens, from the nearly black of the cypress trees to the apricot-green of the peach-trees’ baby leaves; jade and emerald bamboos, moss and sea-greens; a lovely jumble of green that ravished the eye and rested the soul and mind; a gentle, quivering, imperial arras behind the loveliest temple in China, built by a Chinese woman for a Chinese man who had erred in marriage, and strayed and stayed in barbarian heathen lands and ways.
Beyond the temple a pai-fang spanned a gurgling stream that sang and danced over its bed of pebbles beneath soft banks of violets and ferns, forget-me-nots and tiny musk roses sewn thickly with little wild lilies and nodding, head-heavy daffodils.
Sên Ruben could not hear the music the brook made, but he saw its bubbling dance of green and blue and gold and pearl. He knew his father had dabbled baby hands in it. He knew that temple and costly crimson pai-fang were a prayer for the peace of his father’s soul.
Sên Ruben gazed and knelt, looked long, and covered his face with his sleeve.
There was utter silence here.
The bamboos bent and swayed as if in welcome and kindly attendance. The foliage of oak and cinnamon-maple stirred a little in the Spring’s pleasant air. Violets and anemones quivered gratefully in the grass. A squirrel watched shyly, very still up in a silver-stemmed red beech.
Sên Ruben looked again.
His face was as still as the squirrel’s, almost as soft and shy, but his heart was quivering; his being shook.
The beauty over there on the hill of peach-trees with tiny green, new-come melons lumping the vines and cluttered between the peach-tree trunks moved him; but a thousand times more he was moved because of what pai-fang and temple said to him.
They spoke; he heard.
Sên Ruben thought that his father Sên King-lo and old Sên Ya Tin, who had loved and not misunderstood, stood on the temple porch and smiled at him.
Who shall say?
Sên Ruben rose.
The dress he wore no longer seemed strange to him. He drew his fan from his sash and gestured with it respect and fealty—and smiled.
“Can you lead me there?” Ruben asked, without turning his head or his eyes.
“This slave can lead you, flower-like lord,” La-yuên did not turn towards him or lift her eyes from the ground as she spoke.
“I would go,” Ruben murmured.
“It is no too far,” the woman answered.
“I would lie there to-night—alone. I wish that none may know.”
“No one need know,” La-yuên told him. “It is this same concubine widow-one who feeds at sunset the belly of the incense pelican. She will lead you, sir; and when at the Hour of the Hen she has filled it with adequate powdered sandalwood, she will leave her lord, not to return to him until the hour he has bade that she should.”
“To-morrow’s morrow at the Hour of the Snake I would go as I have come—unseen, unknown.”
“It shall be,” La-yuên said.
“Lead me the way.” Ruben turned to her.
And La-yuên lifted then her face and looked at the lord Sên Ruben—and she smiled. No one had seen La-yuên smile since Sên Po-Fang had died—not even Sên O-i-t’ing her son, for the babe she had borne her dead lord had died at its birth and lay in an unmarked grave at a far edge of the Sêns’ garden of tombs.
Then La-yuên—when she had ko’towed, once to Sên Ruben, twice to the temple Sên Ya Tin had builded of marble and jasper, of ivory and brass and lead, jade, malachite, and of prayer and love—turned and went through the lemon and ginko trees, on through the camphor trees, through a glade of golden willows, through a world of wild white roses, over a meadow of violets until they came to a vine-hidden lane that led to the temple.
La-yuên’s heart sang as they went—as it had not since her lord had died. But the heart of Sên Ruben was so full that it ached.
The tender, red-tipped leaves of the peach-trees were uncurling in the warming spring; here and there on their glossy stems of spray a little soft clot of velvet thickness, the size of a baby nut, was a peach that before Autumn had come would swell into a wrinkled ball of luscious meat covered in sumptuous colors of ripeness. Blue and jade butterflies were taking their first flight. The grass belched out the sweetness of mignonette, thyme and verbena underneath the easy crunch of their padded feet as the man and woman went across it, and in Ho-nan even the grass is sweet.
Neither spoke as they went. It was not for La-yuên to speak to the lord she guided unless some word or gesture of his bade her speak; and Sên Ruben was speechless.
The day-star marked the Hour of the Hen on the temple eaves and stained its gold on the green of the temple steps.
Sên Ruben stood and watched the woman while she replenished the fragrant smoldering fire stored in the gray stone pelican’s body.
Then she left him without a word passing between them.
He knew that she would come as he had bade. La-yuên knew that he would keep his vigil alone.
And the woman knew that he would fast here at his lord father’s temple and arch. It was not for her to bring him food here. His thoughts and his pious fealty would feed and strengthen him.
Sên Ruben would not touch coarser food than meditation and prayer here. But perchance he would bathe his brow and his wrists, and would drink at the bubbling silver brook that danced and laughed between the crimson shafts of Sên King-lo’s pai-fang.