CHAPTER LV
The heart of a man stood still; Sên’s face flooded with color.
The girl was bending over his roses. She did not know he was there and her face was eloquent; C’hi Yamei whom he saw lovelier because she wore her Chinese garments.
And Sên Ruben knew that the time had come for him to speak—not to her, though he believed even that C’hi Ng Yelü, the adopter of Western ways, might condone, but to C’hi Ng Yelü himself, sending Kow Li as preliminary suitor and go-between.
He would approach the Chinese maiden as a Chinese should. No rougher, Western wooing was possible between his love and hers. It was hard to keep back the words that surged from his heart to his lips, but he would do even that to show his reverence for C’hi Yamei, the jade of his soul. Kow should approach C’hi Ng Yelü, and should come as the matchmaker sent by Sên Ruby. That meant more delay, for his mother might stay even a week longer with the new-come grandchild in the nurseries that Ivy its mother had forsaken.
A week of seven eternities! But no less than the most would he offer to C’hi Yamei the yellow jasmine of the world.
Sên Ruben saw the rose on her breast. It gave him a message. His nails found the flesh of his palms as he clenched his hungry hands, and his breath tangled in his throat.
He wanted her so!
The girl bent her head still lower over his roses. The smile that curved her lips grew sweeter, more tender, and Ruben knew that if that dear face touched those yellow roses he should stride across the long room and snatch his happiness to him—before it was given.
Lest that temptation came—not to be mastered by human man who loved as he did—Sên Ruben spoke quickly. He dared not stand watching longer her lips almost caressing the roses he had sent her; he could not turn and go.
“Good afternoon, Miss C’hi.” He steadied his voice almost to coldness, and he prayed that he had steadied his eyes. “Good afternoon. Please don’t turn me out; Mr. C’hi sent me up here to wait for him. He promised that you would put up with me until he came back. He was leaving the house as I came up the steps, but he will be home again in an hour. I have strict orders to wait for him—here with you.”
He rarely spoke to C’hi Yamei in English when they were alone but he had not dared speak in Chinese now.
The girl started at the sound of his voice—Ruben saw that; but what of it? She probably would have started if Billings, the aldermanic butler, had accosted her so unexpectedly. Had he been less busy with gripping himself, he also might have seen that C’hi Yamei had paled a little at the sound of his voice.
“May I come in?”
Miss C’hi smiled, turned away from the flower-decked Brinsmead, and went to a seat near the far windows—the window that looked down on the garden.
“I did not know that Father was going out,” she began. “Oh—yes, though, I did—I forgot—he said something about it at lunch. Please sit down.”
“Thanks. I wonder if Pling and Yolu are inciting poor little Burmese fish to murder and suicide to-day.” He glanced at his wrist. “It is just on the Hour of the Tiger at home. I hope my cousins are taking their pleasure less ruthlessly than they did two years ago to-day.”
“I hope so,” Miss C’hi agreed.
So—he did remember.
She turned towards the window, for she felt that her face was flushing.
“I hope that my father had an umbrella,” the girl said lamely. “See, it is raining.”
Sên rose and went to the window. “So it is. I did not notice that it threatened to as I came.”
That was quite true. Ruben Sên had paid no attention at all to the weather as he walked from Kensington to Westminster. And he had not noticed whether Mr. C’hi had gone out armed with an umbrella or coatless and hatless.
A fine thick drizzle was falling. Ruben liked it; it seemed like a veil shutting them in here gently—almost a symbol.
“Now you can’t turn me out!” he laughed softly as he turned and faced Miss C’hi. “It was not raining when I came in and I have no umbrella.”
“How careless!” the girl mocked him. “No sensible person ever goes out in England without an umbrella; it is riding a tiger. But I can lend you an umbrella, Mr. Sên.”
“Will you? One of your own?” His voice said, “I’ll not return it to you ever; I’ll keep it as long as I live, Yamei.”
But he sat down again, as he spoke, facing her. Apparently he was not braving the outside drizzle at once.
Miss C’hi played with her girdle.
For a time neither spoke.
The man had no wish to speak—no wish to break their companionable, intimate silence. It was intimate.
The girl could think of nothing to say.
The gathering rain tinkled the window panes, tapped on the glass like fairy fingers.
“Thank you,” Ruben said at last in a queer low voice.
Miss C’hi looked a puzzled interrogation.
He moved a hand in salutation towards her embroidery-bordered sleeve. “You are all Chinese to-day, C’hi Yamei, a Chinese flower wrapped in Chinese silk,” Sên Ruben murmured in Chinese, “all of a Chinese maiden’s lovely Chinese strewments”—his eyes swept from the little padded shoes to the pretty dangling stick-pins—“all as it should be, Lady C’hi Yamei, all but the face-paint.”
“I couldn’t find my face-paint box,” the girl explained; she would have spoken more truly if she had said that she had no face-paint box here in England. But she was making words to shut off a silence she feared, catching up idle words carelessly to keep their talking safe.
She knew now what was coming, and she too wished her lover whom she loved to say it to C’hi Ng Yelü. She wished it so, not because she cared a Japanese yen—or one small cowrie shell—for the conventions of East or of West, but because it would be easier to hear it first from the father voice that had spoken all the intimate, tender words she ever had heard. Moreover, though she herself cared not a jot now for East or West, she was keenly sure that Sên Ruben cared everything for China. C’hi Yamei was not minded that he should realize, as she herself did, how little she now preferred Chinese ways and customs—if she preferred them at all—to those of England; for she knew that he would find it a flaw.
Moreover C’hi Yamei came of a race of women who for thousands of years had only been wooed so before their wedding-day—wooed by the go-between’s overtures and a father’s acceptance of them. Probably this influenced her rather deeply, and made her share far more than she suspected Sên’s conviction that his wooing of her in any but the old accredited Chinese way would be a slighting of her.
The girl was deeply stirred and knew that she was. Almost she wished that Sên would go. She felt shy of him—they alone here in “Reverence Books” to which the servants would usher no chance caller, and she in her Chinese garments, harem clothes that seemed to demand harem seclusion for a Chinese maid who wore them. Décolleté at his mother’s dinner-table, dancing a dozen times with his arm lightly about her, laughing and chatting with him at dozens of functions—a little less freely, though, than nice English girls would have done—Miss C’hi never had felt at all shy with Mr. Sên. But she grew oddly and naturally shy with Sên Ruben now, since they were Chinese and she in Chinese dress. Worst of all she feared that at but a word of more direct love-making she should cry. Her tears were near. To avoid what she half thought might break from him, she said the first frivolous and very English thing she could think of, rising and going towards the other window as she spoke.
Ruben went with her of course.
The girl had jumped up quickly. Her stick-pins tinkled as she went, and a tiny pack of apricot-colored flowers fastened not securely enough over an apricot-colored ear loosened and shifted. Miss C’hi halted and lifted a tiny jeweled hand to push the truant bunch of buds back to where a girl’s hair-flowers should be. She lifted both hands, in case the other little flower-bunch had slipped too, and accidentally her impatient tiny fingers pushed back the little straight fringe of down that lay like silken dust on her forehead.
“Now you are a wife, Yamei!”
It broke from Sên Ruben involuntarily as he devoured with leaping eyes the strip of naked brow they should not have seen.
C’hi Yamei’s face had found its paint!
Her tunic rose and fell with the flesh that fluttered beneath it. In spite of herself the girl’s eyes filled with tears.
But she laughed softly, a sound as silver and elfin as the tinkle-tinkle of the jeweled stick-pins in her hair—a soft outburst of mirth, that is a giggle, but should be described by a prettier word. But it cannot.
The lover saw the rush of color painting her face; he saw the dimples in the uplifted apricot-tinted arms from which the loose sleeves had fallen; he saw the dew in Yamei’s black velvet eyes, saw her lashes tremble, and the ring-jewels tremble from the trembling of her fingers; he saw the girlish mouth quiver.
And Sên turned and fled.
He did not dare stay.
Sên knew that the time had indeed come for him to speak to C’hi Ng Yelü.