CHAPTER IV
Mrs. Sên intended to present Ivy at next season’s first Drawing-Room. It was about that the four women were talking earnestly over the strawberries and cream of tea in the garden one July afternoon at the Blake’s place in Dorset.
Snow and his son-in-law, Rupert Blake, and Whitmore were more amused than interested in the keen discussion of the important palace toilet, but Ruben Sên lounging on the grass near his mother was vitally interested. Ruben “loved clothes” like the veriest woman. Color and line fed Ruben Sên, and he never was cold to ornament.
“A débutante need not necessarily wear white,” Lady Snow urged, “quite a number don’t.”
“Yes; and I wish you wouldn’t,” Ruben broke in eagerly. “One of the lovely girlish colors would look ever so much better. White looks flat by artificial light, Ivy. Don’t you think so, Mother?”
Ivy darted her brother a tiny sinful glance from her narrow eyes. She knew what Rue’d like her to wear. Then she sighed softly, for she knew well enough that she’d look best dressed as Ruben would have chosen—dressed in a blaze of colors, shapeless sacks of gorgeous embroideries, jewels of three or four colors, her black hair worn in some fantastic fashion. But she had no intention of looking her best at the cost of wearing a Chinesey dress. She answered gently enough. This was one of Ivy Sên’s gentle days, and for all that she had said to Lady Snow less than a year ago, Ivy loved her beautiful mother very dearly, and rarely hurt her deliberately.
“I’d rather have it all white, Mother—like other girls.”
Ruby Sên put her hand lovingly on her daughter’s shoulder. “It shall be as white as ever you choose, Baby.”
“I wonder why I never have seen you wearing white,” Whitmore said to Mrs. Sên, as he took her empty plate. “I don’t remember that I ever have.”
“It’s rather young wear for forty odd, don’t you think?” Mrs. Sên laughed.
“Rubbish!” Emma Snow scolded. “Mean to tell me that I look mutton-dressed-as-lamb?” Her cool gown was snow white. “I shall wear white when I’m eighty—on days like this.”
“And go to dances—and dance, won’t you, Cousin Emma?” Ruben demanded.
“I most certainly shall.”
“Don’t you care for white, Mrs. Sên?” Lord Whitmore persisted.
“I am like Ruben, I like plenty of color. And in our country we only wear white for mourning!” John Whitmore had vexed her an hour ago, or she would not have answered him so. Whatever Ivy Ruby Gilbert had been, Mrs. Sên almost never was catty. And when she felt her daughter’s fingers stiffen a little under hers she wished she had left it unsaid. The man had been a bore of late and being bored always infuriated her. Ruby Sên had outlived several faults. She could not outgrow that one. Moreover, harmless and conventional enough as the man’s questions had been, his tone had been a little possessive, and for that she had flicked him—but she had not meant to touch Ivy on the raw. Ruby Sên looked after her child with regretful eyes as the younger Ivy slipped quietly away and across the garden. Oh, if only Ivy need not feel it so! Their lovely Ivy, ashamed of her own loveliness!
Ivy Sên went slowly across the grass almost to the other side of the great garden until she was in the thick of the beech trees.
When Lord Whitmore came upon her suddenly almost an hour later the girl was crying bitterly. He had seen Ivy Sên in a tempest of tears before this—and more than once. They were old friends and staunch allies. In a sense they were fellow conspirators. He sat down beside her on the garden bench and laid a fatherly arm about her shoulder.
“Quite right, dear; cry it out,” was all he said.
The girl did. These wild tears were past gulping back. It would have choked her.
“Why can’t they let me forget it—ever?” she wailed when her tears were nearly spent. “I was happy till they reminded me. I’ve loved being here; I suppose I’ve no business to feel at home anywhere—but I always do here with Blanche and Rupert. I care more for them than for any one else—next to mother and Rue, and I love Dorset so dearly. I wish we lived here always. Half the Dorset people never heard of China. Then they had to go on about ‘color,’ and ‘lovely flowing lines,’ and remind me! What they meant was that the clothes English girls wear would look ridiculous on me. ‘Natives’ need lots of red and orange—that’s what they meant! And then Mother had to go and speak as if she were tar-brush too—which she isn’t!”
“Of course not. And your mother is very nearly as brunette as you are, Ivy.”
“Brunette!”
“I wish you didn’t mind,” Whitmore said gently.
“So do I,” the girl retorted bitterly. “Mind it! Girls born as I was ought to be smothered at birth. If my courage was half as much as what I suffer over it, I’d take the suicide-way out. Yes; I would—and have every right to—precious more right than they had to bring me into a world in which there is no place for such as Ruben and me. Perhaps I shall too—do it—some—time. Oh, I have thought of it. Or, I’d be a nun—only I’d hate it! And they wouldn’t have me!”
“No vocation? I quite agree,” Whitmore spoke lightly to cover an emotion of sympathy he would not show.
“There ought to be convents for half-castes! The League of Nations ought to start one. That would be one useful thing to their credit anyway!”
“I predict you’ll have an awfully good time—your first season, and afterwards—” her friend said, changing the subject rather lamely.
Ivy sighed rebelliously and unhappily.
“I wish you’d smoke, and give me one.”
Lord Whitmore obliged her in both particulars, looking over his shoulder in their most probably vulnerable direction as he held out his cigarettes to Ivy. Sixteen-year-old Ivy was not forbidden an occasional cigarette—but Mrs. Sên preferred them to be very occasional, and in selected society.
“I don’t care whether I have a ripping time or a perfectly horrid time, Lord Whitmore—if only some one will want to marry me.”
Whitmore was distressed, but he was not going to show it; and he only partly understood. He had no doubt whatever that every girl wished to be married, and that most girls were greedy for suitors. But it distressed him to hear any girl say it.
Perhaps Ivy Sên divined this and probably her own taste also disallowed it, for she added apologetically as well as petulantly, “Oh, let me talk to you, say just what I want to! I’ve only let myself ‘go’ about it once before in all my life, nearly a year ago, to cousin Emma. It’s choking me—it often is; let me talk to you about it; do!”
“Of course; talk away, child; say everything you wish to. But, Ivy, take it from me that you need not have any anxiety about Mr. Right; he’ll appear promptly—sure to. Give him time to get here and give yourself time to be sure that it is Mr. Right. You’ll have dozens of suitors; be careful not to take the wrong one.”
“I don’t care whether he’s Mr. Right or Mr. Wrong—not tuppence. Mr. Anybody’s all I ask for, if only he’ll marry me. You,” she added before the man could get in a word, “you do still want to marry Mother, don’t you?”
“More than anything in all the world.” Whitmore met the girl’s anxious, beseeching eyes steadily.
“I wish you’d make her then.”
“That is just what I am going to do.”
“I wonder,” the girlish voice was openly dubious. “Tell me something—would you want to marry my mother if she had had a Chinese father—and looked it?”
The Englishman laughed tenderly before he said earnestly, “Yes, Ivy, even if she were a Zulu lady.”
“I don’t believe it! And I shouldn’t like you if it were true. You couldn’t! No nice man could. You say that plenty of men will be ready to marry me, and perhaps they will, poor men—adventurers and nincompoops. No man of your sort or Rupert’s will. They couldn’t. That’s why I say Mr. Anybody—any man that will take my money in payment for making me Mrs. Anybody English.”
“You will not need to bribe your way into wedlock, Ivy. Many a man of our own sort will love you—bound to—and not give two hoots for your blessed money.”
Ivy Sên shook her head sadly.
“I don’t believe it!” she said again. “I’ll have to take a derelict or an idiot.”
“God forbid!”
“I wish He had forbidden my birth; He ought to have,” Ivy cried passionately. “If only I looked English, I wouldn’t mind it half so much. Why couldn’t Ruben look this way? I believe he’d like to, and why couldn’t I look as he does? No one on earth would ever suspect Ruben of having Chinese blood, would they?”
“No one,” the man admitted.
“But I believe he is a little Chinese. And I am English! Every atom and fiber of me is English. I love every blade of grass that grows in England—every leaf on every tree, every gravestone in the old village churchyards—the cattle in the pastures, the little thatched cottages, the long, leafy lanes; even when Mother has taken us to Italy and Spain—my poor yellow face wasn’t quite so noticeable there, and I had the comfort of knowing that it wasn’t—even then, much as I enjoyed it, I was terribly homesick all the time for England. I am sorry for every one who isn’t born English. To me there is no other thing half so proud and beautiful as being an English man or woman. Oh, it’s hard to have to pity myself because I am only half English, and don’t look as if I were English at all! I wonder if you can understand, even a little, how hard it is!”
Whitmore nodded. He would have given many acres to have known how to comfort Ruby Sên’s daughter.
“Dear,” he told her, with his hand on her hair, “how I wish you were my daughter! And I hope you will be.”
Ivy caught Lord Whitmore’s other hand and gripped it pathetically. “Would you truly let me be your daughter? Could you feel as if I were?”
“Try me.” As the man looked at her, the answer was sufficient.
“Oh, that helps me! You wouldn’t be ashamed of me?”
“I’d be awfully proud of you, little daughter.”
“God bless you!” The girl’s voice choked; her tears were near again. “You’d let me be called ‘Ivy Whitmore,’ wouldn’t you?” she whispered.
“Love it.”
“Me—with an English name! a truly English name!” The girl drew a long breath, as if she were drinking slowly the wine of the garden’s English roses. “It—it—oh—then I’d wait for Mr. Right—wait ever so long. I’m not horrid really,” Ivy said eagerly, “but I am so hungry to have an English name. Our name hurts me. I loathe it. It isn’t fair that I should have to be called an odious thing like that—and Mother won’t even let us leave off that silly fool’s cap of a triangle on top of the E. I am English, Lord Whitmore, all of me except the odious yellow envelope I’m caged in. English!... I wonder—would you adopt me—make it my legal name?”
“Why, of course, little Ivy,” the man told her instantly. But to himself he added, “If your mother would let me do it.”
Then, at the look the dark little girl paid him, Lord Whitmore bent down and kissed her gently on her forehead.