CHAPTER XLII
Ruben was laughing gaily when they turned their horses out of Stream-side Lane into the wide gate of Ashacres. It had been a splendid scamper home since the sudden flakes had warned them of the heavy snowfall coming.
Mrs. Sên giggled softly as he swung her from her saddle, giggled and dashed across the wide doorstep, light-footed as a girl, and raced Ruben to the blazing logs in the hall’s great inglenook.
“Rue, we’ll have snow-balls if this lasts; and won’t I pelt you!”
“Think you’ll hit me? There—I’ve brushed you,”—he had, with gauntlets and handkerchief—“down you go!” He thrust his mother gently into the great chair’s many cushions. “Tea, dearest, before you change?”
Ruby Sên nodded. “Lots of tea, Ruben; I am famished. I wonder where the others are?”
“I don’t,” Ruben told her as he pressed the bell, “for I jolly well don’t care. Just you and me’s a party any old time, Motherkins. I don’t want any one else, and you mustn’t.”
“Just like lovers for all the world,” the footman reported to the housemaid of his momentary preference, when he returned to the servants’ hall without the tea tray.
They were lovers—Ruben Sên and his mother.
He had kept the oath his broken heart had registered while he kept his vigil of grief in the Ho-nan temple. His life was dedicated to his mother’s service, and he served her gaily.
Never should his mother have the hurt of knowing that he had been wounded in Ho-nan.
Sir Charles Snow, coming from the library in search of tea and companionship, saw and heard them, before they knew that he was there—Ruben lazy on the hearth-rug with his head on his mother’s knee, Ruby’s jeweled hand threading her boy’s hair—and wondered if his task of holding Ruben unwedded, as King-lo had asked him to do if he could, might not prove easier than he had feared.
It seemed to Snow that Mrs. Sên might prove an unconscious conspirator to aid him in carrying out the wish the dying man had entrusted to him.
When the first summertime of sex came to Ruben Sên, no love of mother would tether his heart back from the greater love; Snow knew that never happened—not in the West. But Ruben was, he now believed, so intensely Chinese that his mother always would be the dominant note in all his life.
Ruben looking up and seeing Snow, jumped up quickly though not at all ashamed of having been found curled at his mother’s feet, with his head on her lap. He pushed the big chair a little nearer the crackling logs before he rang. Their tea must be cooling by now even under its cosy, and Sir Charles liked his tea almost Chinese hot. When Snow had seated himself, Ruben sat down again on the hearth-rug, bolt upright this time, facing Sir Charles.
“Glad to be home, boy?”
“Splendid to be with you all, sir. To-morrow, if the mater will spare me, I’ll take a run up to town and see Kow Li—I have a good deal of family news for him—but I’ll be back by dinner time. I can’t spare my mother yet—even if she can me.”
“He will be uncommonly glad to see you.”
“Bring him back with you, Ruben,” Mrs. Sên said.
“Thanks, Mater, I’d like to—if he’d come. But would he quite fit in—dear old Kow in an English Christmas home-gathering?—and, you know, dear, Ivy wouldn’t like it.”
Mrs. Sên sighed softly.
“But she ought to,” Ruben added briskly. “But, I say, Ivy looks to me now as if she’d like anything!” Their mother smiled and nodded brightly. “She must think a precious lot of Gaylor, and he of her, for her to look the way she does. Why, Ivy’s face is just one sparkle!”
“She is very happy!” the mother told him.
Snow stirred his tea very slowly.
“Ruben,” Lady Snow said, as she pushed through the sitting-room’s portière, “your face is the color of a red, red rose. Guilt?”
“Not that altogether, Cousin Emma; blushing from the buffets of December’s gale, I wouldn’t wonder. It tingled us, didn’t it, Mother?”
“It was glorious,” Ruby said, “but the wind did cut a bit as we hurried home.”
“Sit where you were, Charlie. The fire’s too hot for me there; I like this better.” Emma made herself very comfortable among the cushions of the wide window seat. “No, Rue, I’ve had my tea upstairs. But your Cousin Charles is signaling you for more.”
“Delicious tea this—for England,” Snow said as Ruben took the cup. “Must seem pretty small beer to you though, after what you have been drinking this last year.”
Ruben Sên only smiled.
Snow suspected that he did not care to talk about China, and wondered why. He had given Ruben several leads since the boy’s return a week ago and Ruben had not followed up one of them. He was gay as a grig and looked and seemed perfectly happy. But there was something—Snow did not know what, but something—he had caught, then instantly lost, once or twice. It was something in Ruben’s eyes—or was it in his voice?—not a shadow but shadowy—a reservation. How had it fared with King-lo’s son in China?
“Where are Ivy and—her husband?” Ruben asked Lady Snow.
“Goodness knows. They’ll turn up at dinner. They don’t wear their welcome out, do they!”
“Is he good enough for Ivy?” Ruben persisted.
“Quite—while he makes her happy. Any man is good enough for any woman—and more than good enough—if he makes her happy.”
“Will it last?” Sên’s voice was openly anxious.
“That, Ruben,” Emma Snow said slowly, “no one on earth can tell you. I doubt if the wisest of all the angels up top ever knows that. But it does last sometimes. Tell me, Rue, did you see any girls in China half as pretty as Ivy?”
She would not have made the oblique reference to Ivy’s Chinese appearance if either Ivy or Gaylor had been here.
Snow smoking lazily—they all were smoking now—seemed to be gazing idly at the tapestry on the wall, looking at it without troubling to see it; but he was watching Ruben Sên narrowly, listening intently to hear what Ruben would say, and how he’d say it, in answer to Emma’s question, “Did you see any girls in China half as pretty as Ivy?”
Ruben’s answer came promptly and Sir Charles Snow did not catch anything beneath it—and yet—
“I saw one that looked a lot like Ivy, Cousin Emma; one of my Chinese cousins, Sên No Fee—pretty as they make ’em in China or out, and a perfect little devil; sweet as sweet, but the greatest imp I have ever seen. There were any number of pretty girls in our kuei. The Sêns are not a bad-looking lot. Most of the Sên women are lovely and several of my cousins liked a bit of fun, and took it; but No Fee was the Chinese limit.”
“She looks like Ivy, you say?”
“Yes, Mother, very.”
“And did you like China, now that you have really been there—seen it?” Lady Snow demanded.
Sir Charles smiled.
“Like China, Cousin Emma?” The question had startled Sên; it seemed to him both inexplicable and fatuous.
“Did you like it as much as you thought you would?” his mother asked gently.
“Yes, quite,” Ruben spoke promptly.
“More, even?” There was just a touch perhaps of anxiety in Mrs. Sên’s voice. Both the men caught it.
“No, Mother; just as I believed that I should like it.”
Snow smiled again.
“I wonder you ever came back,” Lady Snow remarked lightly, “and came back so soon too!”
“Nearly a year,” Ruben reminded her. “And there is one thing that I love more,” he added gravely, “than I do China—one place I’d rather be.”
They all knew that he meant his mother, and with her. Ruby Sên’s eyes misted in the firelight, and her face flushed a little with tender pleasure.
Ruben began then—resolutely, Sir Charles thought—to talk of other things: friends and happenings in England.