CHAPTER II
The day that Ivy came to her, appealing for her help to overcome “Mother’s wicked obstinacy,” and broke down and wept out what until now she had never told any one, Lady Snow came nearer really caring for Chinese-faced Ivy than she ever had before, and much nearer than she could have believed possible.
“I could almost forgive her; I think I could,” Ivy pleaded, “if she would marry him. Why doesn’t she? There is every reason why she should—and not one single reason not to!”
“Forgive your mother! You have no right to say that, or to think it,” Lady Snow said sternly—more sternly than she felt.
“You know that I have!” the girl insisted passionately. “How would you like to have a Chinese face? You’d loathe it, as I do. You do not like me; and I like you for it—for not liking me—not liking me because I look Chinese.”
“Haven’t I been good to you, Ivy?”
“Oh, yes,” the girl’s shrug of contempt was Eastern—a “courtyard” petulance—“as good as ever you could bring yourself to be. But you’ve had to try—had to remember to be kind to me every time. Every one is good to me. I’m rich and so is Mother, and she goes everywhere and knows every one worth knowing—that’s why. I don’t want people to be good to me. I could kill people when they pity me—and perhaps some day I will.”
“No one pities you, child. No one could.”
“You do!”
Emma Snow made no reply.
“Everybody pities me that has any sense. I have no doubt that my own mother does. She ought to. Ruben doesn’t—he envies me. But Rue’s mad. Cousin Charles never shows that he does, but of course he pities me too, for all his liking for Chinks. Every one must pity me who cares for me the least little bit—every one who isn’t a lunatic like Ruben. I don’t want people to be good to me. It’s impudent of them, and it is not what I want. There is only one thing on earth I want. I want to be English!”
“You are half-English, Ivy,” Lady Snow reminded her gently.
“Half!” All the agony of the sore old interracial tragedy was packed in the girl’s one bitter word.
Emma Snow’s heart ached for the girl and she said the most healing thing she could think of. “You are very beautiful, Ivy.” She laid a caressing hand gently on Ivy’s shoulder.
They were alone in Lady Snow’s own sitting-room, she with a bit of embroidery she’d taken up desperately, as a refuge for her eyes, when Ivy’s words had become dangerous. The girl was hunched on a stool at the other’s knee in a willowy attitude that was pretty but not Western. Ivy was facing the other, and not so near that she could not look up at her very directly.
“I used to think so,” Ivy Sên said sadly, “when I used to look in the glass years ago—saw how I looked, and didn’t know what I looked like. But now I do know and my own face is the most repulsive sight I ever see. I dare say I’ll be the rage—for one Season—when Mother presents me; but what sort of a rage? A joke! People will like to look at me and laugh and point me out to each other as the daughter of the English woman who married a Chinaman. ‘Miss Sên the Society mongrel’; that’s what they’ll call me!”
“Ivy!”
“It’s what I am. And it’s what they’ll call me. ‘See! there she is—the mongrel beauty!’ Oh, I’ll be the rage all right! How would you like to hear Blanche called a mongrel? Do you think that Rupert Blake would have fallen in love with her, let alone married her, if she’d been a half-caste—and looked it!”
The woman’s eyes filled with tears. She knew that her easygoing but socially exigent son-in-law certainly would not, and she bent her eyes on her work, and hastily stitched a blue petal on a red rose.
“Ivy,” she said slowly, “I want to help you—truly I do, dear. I want to persuade you to help yourself; it’s the only way, your only way out. Accept it, Ivy, once for all and make the best of it. You don’t like it; a great many girls would. Take the good of it, Ivy—there’s lots of good, and good-luck too, in it—and put your foot on the rest of it—what you think the bad of it. Don’t let it lame you. Really you shouldn’t! Above everything else, don’t let it make you bitter. Nothing spoils a girl like being bitter. Begin on little things. Don’t say ‘Chink,’ dear. It isn’t nice. Your cousin Charles won’t even let me say ‘Chinaman’; he broke me of it years ago. Say ‘Chinese,’ dear.”
“Chinks!” the girl on the stool retorted viciously. “That’s what they are. I loathe them. I am a Chink, Cousin Emma; and it won’t wash off. Pretty! Oh, yes, I dare say I am pretty in an odious Chink way. But there isn’t a girl in England who is English and looks English, that I wouldn’t change places with to-morrow—now—this hour—and thank God for letting me do it.”
“Hush, dear.”
“I would! Have you seen our new kitchen maid? Her name is Tibbs, Ada Tibbs; she has a bad cast in one eye; she hasn’t any eyebrows—scarcely any eyelashes. I nearly had a fit when I saw her. She has the most hideous face I have ever seen. But it is English! I would change places with Ada Tibbs, and be thankful and glad of the chance to.”
“You wouldn’t like it when you had,” Lady Snow said gently.
“I’d like it better than being what I am—looking as I do.”
“You don’t know what you are saying, dear.”
“I know what I am feeling.”
Lady Snow sighed.
“Can’t you make Mother do it? Can’t you? She ought to. It wouldn’t wash the Chinese off my face—nothing ever will do that—but it would whitewash it a little. Mother owes it to me. I could almost forgive her, if she would. And I want to love my mother! Can’t Cousin Charles make her?”
Lady Snow shook her head slowly, folding away her needlework, smiling sadly. She was thinking of twenty years ago, when Sên King-lo and Ruby Gilbert had fallen in love, and had married.
“I have known your mother for more than thirty years, Ivy, and I never have known any one even once able to ‘make’ her do anything against her will. I can’t quite see why you are so terribly anxious that your mother should marry Lord Whitmore. Your mother has about everything that a woman can have to make life comfortable and interesting and beautiful too—for her and for you and Ruben. She is enormously rich. She still is a beautiful woman. Her position is as secure and desirable as any woman’s in England.”
“Because her Chinese husband is dead!” the girl interjected.
“Listen to me, Ivy. Your father was a very great gentleman and I never knew a more charming man. Sir Charles loved and respected him. Sên King-lo was a great man, Ivy; a noble by birth, and entirely noble in nature.”
“Don’t! Don’t tell me about him. I can’t stand it.”
Emma Snow’s eyes fell at the tragedy in the girl’s. “He loved you very dearly,” she said sorrowfully. She was too bitterly sorry for Ivy Sên to reproach her beyond that.
“Don’t!” the girl shuddered.
Lady Snow unfolded her needlework again, to steady herself with something mechanical and because she could think of nothing not quite hopeless to say.
“Why did Mother do it?” the passionate voice went on suddenly.
“Do what, dear?” But Emma Snow knew.
“Marry a Chinese man!”
“They loved each other very dearly.”
“It was horrible!”
“You might not have thought that if you could have known him and seen how he was held, dear. I’ll be honest with you, Ivy; we were not glad but it was impossible to feel that our cousin had married beneath her. Why are you so anxious to have a stepfather, Ivy? Most girls are not.”
“I am—to have an English father—and to have an English name.”
“But your mother changing her name wouldn’t change yours.”
“I’d see that it did! He’d be willing. I know he would. To be his daughter, and be called by his name, would make me seem a little more English. That’s what I want, above everything on earth.”
Lady Snow doubted if Ruby Sên would allow her children to discard their father’s name—felt rather sure that Ruby would not—even if she did marry Whitmore. But there was no need to annoy the excited girl by telling her so, particularly as Emma was convinced that Mrs. Sên never would marry Lord Whitmore.
Perhaps Ivy suspected the other’s thought for she demanded, “Do you know what I am going to do, the day I am twenty-one? I am going to call myself by some other name—some decent English name. And I shall marry the first Englishman that asks me the day after I’m of age and my own mistress, if any Englishman ever does—any Englishman—a footman, a sweep or a potman!”
Lady Snow laughed lightly though she could have cried more easily, and touched the other’s face softly with her hand. “Don’t be a goose, little one,” was all she said. But Lady Snow’s heart ached bitterly for Ivy Sên.