CHAPTER XLIX
When they lingered together for a few moments after their guests were gone—as it was their custom to do, and usually for longer than they did to-night—Mrs. Sên did not mention either Mr. C’hi or his daughter to her son. She had no need to ask, “How did you like my new Chinese friends?” She knew; and she had no wish to hear Ruben say it.
And she sent him from her sooner than she wished, for she dreaded sitting alone here in front of the gentle fire—sitting alone and making the sharp stock-taking of life that she knew was hers to take before she slept. She sent him away because her shrewd mother-eyes saw that beneath his deep new happiness Ruben was strangely tired.
Ruben was tired. Small wonder that he was. Bravely as he had borne it, the grind of the long weeks since the news of C’hi Yamei’s cruel death had shattered him at the threshold of the kuei, had worn him relentlessly. He had steeled himself to carry himself gaily, for his mother’s sake. His devotion to her, his great pride in her and his unquenchable enjoyment of her companionship had made even that unselfishness and sacrifice not only a matter of course, but had made it easier than it could have been to a different son of a different mother. But his sorrow for Yamei and for his loss of her had gnawed him ceaselessly; and the living grief that one hides, secreting it with constant vigilance beneath smiling face and debonair manner, has a sharper tooth than ingratitude.
To-night’s revulsion—the sudden flood of joy and hope—had whipped him soul and body. He had been a widowed lover, a Chinese always to be childless, when he had come into this drawing-room a few hours ago. He had come in to know himself, almost instantly, again perhaps bridegroom—husband—father. Great blows of intense joy are harder to take quietly than the blows of sudden grief. Reprieve calls for sterner, firmer self-control than does sentence. The descent from the scaffold is more difficult, more fumbling, than the ascent. Pride—the very relief of knowing that it all will be over in a moment now—braces the criminal to the gallows. The sudden new lease of life devastates him mind and body—frays his human nerves more sharply than can the sight of the dangling rope.
Ruben had been, in mere good behavior and in respect of her, obliged to meet C’hi Yamei—come back to him from the dead—conventionally, to greet her almost casually—as soon as he could. It had not been easy. Dinner had been almost as much of an ordeal as a pleasure. He was not on sure ground with the C’his by any means. He dared not startle the girl or affront her father. He had had to guard sternly his eyes and voice—to watch his words. And he had had to avoid scrupulously making the Chinese girl in any way conspicuous, by glance or tone of his, at his mother’s English dinner table—conspicuous to a roomful of quick-witted, observant English people. He had had to turn away from her now and then and make small talk with the woman on his left—speak social nothings in English while his mind was thinking riotously in Chinese.
In the drawing-rooms after dinner he had had to leave her a good deal of the evening, to mingle with his mother’s other guests, to be their host. He had had to let her go with no more open emphasis of his regret at her going than he had showed the others.
None of it had been easy. Sên was very tired.
He accepted his mother’s dismissal without reluctance—or pretense of it.
“No,” Mrs. Sên told him, “I am not going up yet. Clark will begin to undress me, whether I want her to or not, the moment she sees me; I know Clark! Send her word to go to bed herself—or pop your head in my door as you pass it, and tell her. I feel like toasting my toes here alone for a bit—and I’m going to. I’ve some very serious things to think out before I go to bed. I have tangled to-morrow rather, and I must make up my troubled mind which important over-lapping engagements I’ll keep and which I’ll break. Just give me my engagement book, Rue—it’s down there, behind those carnations. I was grouching over it when Jenkins announced the Palmers.”
Ruben laughed and brought the little social volume to her, kissed her good-night, and left her unsuspiciously.
And if he had wondered a very little that she, who had told him so enthusiastically that two Chinese were coming here to-night, had spoken no word of them now, Ruben had been glad that she had not. Even to her he longed not to speak of C’hi Yamei to-night.
He was not surprised to find Kow Li waiting for him in his room.
Kow Li had his mask off! The old man’s wrinkled yellow face was coruscated with delight and triumph. If Sên Ruben had any doubt how it was to end, Kow Li had none.
But he too saw that Ruben was tired. He had expected him to be.
Kow had known that the great Ta Jen C’hi Ng Yelü was to be Mrs. Sên’s guest here to-night. It was that that had brought the old millionaire from the curio shop to stand in servant-attendance behind a so noble Chinese Ta Jen’s chair, to see that inferior English “rice” was offered to a descendant of Mencius with decent ceremony. But Kow Li had not known that the Chinese maiden whose portrait had hung at the London Academy, and whom they—Lord Sên Ruben and he—had sought so ceaselessly and so unavailingly, was a C’hi lady. He too had believed her gone on-High; for Sên Ruben had told him when first back from Ho-nan, “Look for the perfect pearl-one no more, Kow Li. I have found her, and I have lost her. Kwan Yin-ko has gathered her into her own courtyard on-High.”
Only that once had she been mentioned between them.
Kow Li had known Sên Ruben’s grief; had grieved for it and had respected it.
Nor was C’hi Yamei mentioned between them to-night.
Old Kow, wise in the blunders of rumor, had understood it all accurately enough, if not its detail, the instant he had seen Sên Ruben and the maiden of the picture together in the dining-room.
The details of Ruben’s mistake he might learn some day, or he might not; it was of complete indifference to Kow Li, for it was of no importance.
The flower-of-jade fact stood: Sên Ruben had found his heart’s desire.
As though his master were again a little child, old Kow Li undressed and tended him. Kow Li tucked Ruben in lingeringly and left him.
It were difficult to say which was the happier—the young Sên sleepless but dreaming, or the old yellow gray-beard padding softly with careful quiet down the richly-carpeted stairs of the hushed house.
Probably Kow Li was. Ruben doubted and feared almost as much as he hoped and loved. Kow Li neither doubted nor feared; his cup was full; he was altogether jubilant.
Ruby Sên was not happy.
Sitting alone in the vast drawing-room, the red-bound engagement-book she had not opened, a patch of brilliant color on the lemon of her satin gown, for the first time since her early girlhood Mrs. Sên looked her years; her face a little drawn, her brooding eyes heavy—not with sleep—a restless toe tapping the steel fender, a nervous hand picking at her skirt—watching a dying fire she did not see.
It was morning when Mrs. Sên rose wearily, left the little red book unheeded where it fell, and dragged drearily up to her room.