CHAPTER XXXVIII
Sên Ruben’s heart broke into song; sang an old Chinese love-tune, and his face flooded with a look—an old, old story—that girl-eyes far less world-wise and experienced than the black eyes of C’hi Yamei must have understood.
Almost as it came, Sên Ruben controlled it—drove it away with sheer force of his will and reverence. He pressed back as far as he could against the bamboos, and dropped his eyes, dropped them to make his hot beating heart throb and quiver anew at the sight of the girl’s tiny, binded, gay-shod golden-lilies.
Then, remembering that a servant should turn his back upon a noble-one who passed him in the roadway, Sên Ruben made to turn his face against the wall of bamboos.
But C’hi Yamei spoke.
“You are Mr. Ruben Sên,” she said in English. “You must be. I am Miss C’hi, No’s friend Yamei C’hi,” and she held out her hand to Ruben frankly.
Ruben took it—he had to, and as he held the lovely apricot-colored thing in his coarser white hand he knew that he was this girl’s for all his life.
He wondered if she felt what thrilled and shocked through all his blood as their hands held.
All his life Sên Ruben would regret sharply that she first had spoken to him in English.
Why had she? he wondered. Some day he would ask her!
Had she, this calm-eyed, low-voiced maiden—peerless here even more than he had seen her in her picture—watched the gruesome vulgar fish fight?
No Fee had bragged and vouched that she would—and would like it!
Ruben winced to think of it.
But he knew that, no matter what she had done, he was sealed to her forever, heart, soul and kindled body.
“It has been a great day at the side of the amber fish-pool.” Did her lip curl a little, or did his intrigued eyes imagine it? “You scorned to watch it, No said. Oh, she is very angry with us, Mr. Sên, with you and me; and I am vexed with No Fee—the minx!”
“Angry with you!” Ruben spoke in Chinese—his first words to her—and he did not say “Miss C’hi”—he would not.
Perhaps his ease of the language surprised C’hi Yamei, for she flushed a little and laughed lightly. But she spoke in Chinese too now.
“Sên No Fee is very angry with us both—and for the same one fault, Sên Ruben,”—Ah! the music to him as she said it—“our fault of desertion of her and of the honorable fish fight. I have had to make my day alone as best I could. I had no liking to stay longer than etiquette compelled me in the ladies’ courtyard. They were babbling of the horrid fish fight sickeningly. So—I slipped from them when I could,”—Sên Ruben’s heart leapt—“and it has been lovely out here in the wood alone, but I think that I have lost my way—I never have been here before. I am lucky to have found you to guide me back to the house.”
Sên Ruben did not say that the luck was his—the greatest luck he had ever had; but perhaps he looked it.
C’hi Yamei almost smiled as her eyes fell.
“Did then my cousin No Fee watch, as she threatened me she would, the fish fighting?”
“I make no doubt she did. After we had come through the gate of ceremony, made our obeisances for honorable welcome, and had broken our fasting, and the ladies of the honorable harem thought that I lay resting in my chamber, wearied from the jolting of my litter as we came our long way, No, the imp-one, coaxed me out of the courtyard and through the wistaria pathway, through the gardens to behind the amber pool where already your servants made ready for the cruel sporting; and she showed me a cave-like hole in the rotting bole of a great soap-tree, a hole in which we both could have sat, and have peeped through the bamboos growing there, and have seen over the heads of the men—too engrossed in what was doing down in the battle-water to pry with eyes or thought into our screen of leaves—have seen the self-slaughter of the poor little fighting fish down in the pool. She scolded that I would not stay; I scolded that she would not come with me. So I left her there—because I had to. Oh, Lord Sên Ruben, how could No Fee look on at it! It has sickened me but to think of it—to know that it was doing. Little laughing No is gentle as the zephyrs of the Lotus Month. Why, why this naughty freak to-day? For years we have been in friendship—”
Ruben saw the dark eyes fill with tears, saw the red lips quiver as C’hi Yamei broke her speaking abruptly.
“It is over long ago, illustrious maiden,” he told her gently. “The suffering of the little fighting fish was brief—always it is so; they fight so fiercely; and in the fury of their fighting it is probable that they do not feel.”
“I hope so,” the girl said a trifle unsteadily. “I would go back to the house, and make my peace with Sên No Fee. Will you lead me the way, lord?”
Narrow as the path was, somehow they contrived to go side by side for most of it; and as they walked they talked.
Sên Ruben was a little scandalized that C’hi Yamei, a high-born Chinese maiden, dealt him such frank friendliness, but it was no flaw in her—she was flawless. The fault was her father’s who had given her the ways of Europe—thrust them on her, no doubt, in the nomad years they had spent together in the capitals of Europe.
He liked English ways for English girls, but he felt that they profaned Chinese girlhoods.
Then he remembered that but for C’hi Ng Yelü’s strange emancipation of his daughter, he should not have seen her pictured loveliness at the Academy, could not have walked beside her chatting through the Ho-nan woodland as he did with Blanche and Ivy, had with twenty other English girls, through the woods of Dorset and Surrey; and towards C’hi Ng Yelü and his laxness Sên Ruben’s heart unhardened. And, too, he owed this hour-of-hours to naughty, willful Sên No Fee; so towards No Fee also his heart unhardened.
They chatted as they went; and C’hi Yamei did not speak to him again in English.
Girlish, lovely, wrapped in soft dignity, she was all that a perfect lily of Chinese girlhood ever had been or could be. What a disloyal brazen traitor, crassly gullible, he had been to have believed for a moment that this peerless-of-all-maidens would have watched, and liked, the abominable fish-fight! He would do penance for that!—penance at her feet, if he could gain to kneel there.
They went slowly through the sunset, through the bamboo coppice and through the meadows of little, smiling wild flowers.
And Sên Ruben rejoiced that C’hi Yamei was not clad in Western garments.