CHAPTER LVII
After as glorious a sunrise as England often sees, the day again turned to rain; not the soft veil of misty drizzle of yesterday, but a hard thudding downpour that persisted and grew to a sullen vicious storm of leaden rain.
The Chinese love all weathers, seeing beauty, finding blessing in each. To them the long twisted icicles hanging off the eaves of a hut are as exquisite as the red flower-heavy passion vine clambering a lacquer trellis; the lowering clouds of black winter that blot the sky from earth as beautiful as the wild flowers that clot the sweet-scented meadow-grass of early summer. Ruben caught neither chill nor omen in the black tumbling storm that almost blanketed the breakfast-room windows.
Mrs. Sên never had been depressed by any weather; August heat never had wilted her, girl or woman; the worst London fog never had disgruntled Ruby Sên.
Ruben snapped on the electric lights with a laugh, and his mother poured their coffee with a smiling tranquil face.
And when they had breakfasted, and went across the hall arm-in-arm, the morning-room was bright with flowers under the silk-softened electric lights that shone, not too coldly or garishly, on pictures and cushions, bits of marble, ivories and bronze, cabinets and bric-a-brac. The outer rage and dark but made the luxurious little room a nest of comfort and friendliness; a place of plenty and taste that was fit confessional where the priest was love and the guiltless penitent about to show his heart to his mother.
Ruben Sên put his mother into her favorite chair, brought her another cushion which she did not need but liked to have because he had crossed the room to get it for her. Then he drew a stool close and, holding the arm of her chair with his hand, told her his story.
He told it tenderly and proudly—tender to her his mother, tender of C’hi Yamei, his love. His eyes never left his mother’s face—glad blue eyes that were fearless and trusting. His low voice did not falter once.
The telling was not brief. Love lingered over the old, old story—the hours they had spent together in Ho-nan, he and C’hi Yamei, good times, and wise, serious times too, that they had shared in London; words she had spoken, things he had said, places they both had liked, people they had laughed at. He had not known for a long time if he could win so much as her liking, and then, presently, he had dared to hope. He had known at once how it was with him. He had known that before he had met Miss C’hi in Ho-nan.
The mother all but cried out when he told her of his falling in love at Burlington House with a picture, and had vowed himself to it—had sworn to search the world for the girl in that picture.
That fatal Academy! Ruby Sên could hear Ivy’s outbreak after she had seen that Academy portrait—an outbreak of swollen, poisoned misery a mother could not forget. She had heard it anew as she held Ivy’s unloved baby, her own widowed heart almost bursting with love of them both—daughter and grandchild.
She had not heard before that Rue had seen the portrait of “A Chinese Lady.” He had mentioned it to no one but Kow Li. And he had loved it! Betrothed himself to it!
That seemed as fantastic to the English-born woman as a revolting “dead marriage,” an absurd “vase marriage,” or any other of the nuptial abnormalities that she knew did take place now and then in China. But she knew that if Sên King-lo had fallen in love with a picture and had vowed himself to it, he would have held to the oath while he lived.
How like Lo their Ruben looked sometimes! He did now; and how like his father’s, his voice!
Not even Sir Charles Snow, who had searched for it, perhaps hundreds of times, ever had seen a trace of King-lo’s face in Saxon Ruben’s or heard a note of King-lo’s voice in the boy’s; but now and then Ruby Sên did.
She saw Ruben, their son, very like her husband to-day. The beautiful molding of the mouths had a sameness; a sudden lift of deep-fringed blue eyes and of black, a lilt of voice that rang softly and caressed; and Rue used his hands—very English hands, unlike Sên King-lo’s—in moments of quiet emotion just as Lo had. Ruby Sên often saw her husband in their son; and what she saw was there—more, perhaps, an inner something that, piercing through the flesh, marked it with lines and hints of contour so fine that only the eyes of the wife and mother who loved them both could see them.
Ruben went on with his joyous telling—a child in his eager outpouring to his mother, a man in his proclaiming of his love and craving and claiming of C’hi Yamei as mate and wife. Ruben went on turning a knife in the heart of his mother.
It was not yet she would have him marry. Ruben was so young!
It was not a Chinese wife she would have him choose, not a Chinese daughter she could learn or school herself to love—to share him with.
And he looked so English—more English than she herself—and had lived so naturally a normal English life, in English ways!
Months ago she had felt this coming, and had schooled herself to meet and accept it. But it had receded from her fear of late, partly because she had been so locked with Ivy’s estrangement and with Ivy’s anxiety. And the strain and grind of the last few months had weakened her and her fund of resolution. Mrs. Sên heard Ruben to the end, all her being in revolt; and then she failed him.
“Oh, Ruben—must you?” she cried in open bitterness.
Ruben’s face changed—as a confiding child’s that the mother he loved and trusted had struck when it had lifted to her for a caress.
“Must you announce it just yet, dear?” the mother added quickly, and very tenderly. “Ivy is absolutely lost in misery just now. Baby will pull her out of it, I am sure. It is the dearest baby, Rue! It’s a perfect duck! Ivy cannot resist it. But let us give Ivy a few weeks—let us, can’t we—you and I and C’hi Yamei? Not thrust our happiness in front of her until she has found her own happiness again?”
The woman leaned back against her cushions a little pathetically.
She had made her amende. The mother had played up splendidly to her boy. And she knew that she should not fail him again. She would welcome C’hi Yamei cordially and hide what she felt about it always.
That was her penance for her willfulness of long ago. But it was a mother’s selfishness too. She would not lose Ruben. The Chinese girl should not come between them—not altogether!
For Ruben’s face—and her memory of the unalterable constancy of Sên King-lo, his father—had told her, even as she cried, “Ruben, must you?” that he must, that it was inevitable.
She knew that it was done and knew that it was not for her to smirch or sour his gladness with any sadness of hers.
She would deceive him to the end to hold him hers.
She did not believe that Ruben would marry without her consent. She had no doubt that he would hold to the most sacred sacrament of Chinese manhood: devotion and fealty of a Chinese son to his mother. The ball was at her feet! She could banish C’hi Yamei from Ruben’s life; but if she did, Ruben would pay the price. And not even to obey or gratify her would he love again or be coaxed to any other marriage.
Ruben should not pay her debt. She would pay it to the utmost that it could be paid—the last small coin of suffering and of renunciation.
He had chosen the Chinese of his two irreconcilable birthrights. She would not forbid him.
“Perhaps I am wrong though, Rue. I believe I have lost my sense of proportion—I’ve fretted so over poor Ivy. Yes—it was just feeble-minded nonsense. Ivy has her own life now, a very full and happy one, if she’ll let it be so—and she will presently, I’m sure. She is an enormously lucky girl with Tom—a husband made to order, I call him—and that perfect peach of a baby. Yes, dear, it is your turn now—your turn at the wheel of happiness; our turn—yours and Yamei’s and mine. Give her my love to-day, Rue,” she leaned to him and took his face in her hands, “and bring my daughter to her mother.”
Ruben drew his mother’s hands down and kissed them lingeringly.
“You will love her, Mother?”
“I do love her!”
Sên’s face blazed his happiness.
“But, if you’d rather London didn’t know yet—that is, if I can get C’hi Ng Yelü’s consent, and hers, Mother—of course it shall be so. Why should London be informed any more than consulted! It’s no business of London’s, is it? And, Mother dear, I’d rather not even ask them yet—Mr. C’hi or Yamei—if you would rather I waited. But there is something I must tell you, before you decide. I was there yesterday—”
Mrs. Sên laughed.
“Really!” she mocked him lovingly.
Sên laughed back at her happily.
“We were alone, she and I, and I lost my head, or very nearly did—I don’t exactly remember just what I said.”
“I can imagine, Rue,” the mother laughed. “And,” she added gravely, “I know how you said it, and how a girl’s heart beat; your father wooed me when I was a girl.”
They were silent for a long moment.
“I did not do that, dear. At least, I hope not. But I think she understood me.”
Mrs. Sên nodded softly. She remembered.
“And I do feel that I ought not to wait an hour longer than you wish me to wait before putting it clearly to C’hi Ng Yelü.”
“Certainly not! Go to him to-day.”
“Won’t you send, Mother?”
“I, dear? I will do whatever you wish. Rue. I will go myself, or ask Mr. C’hi to come to me; just whatever you like best. But, dear, really it is your job, isn’t it?”
“Not in China, Mother.”
“Oh—of course. I forgot. We had no go-between, your father and I, Rue. It—it just happened.”
“It very nearly just happened yesterday,” Ruben owned.
“Tell me just what you would like me to do and say, Rue.”
“Thank you, Mother.” Sên’s voice and face brimmed with his gratitude and it hurt the mother that they did.
She hid that though.
“Will you send for Kow Li or let me send him to you?”
Mrs. Sên understood. “And send him from me to C’hi Ng Yelü—my mei jên?”
“Yes, please.”
“Not Cousin Charles?”
“No—please. The mei jên need not be a man of quality—almost never is, at home.”
Home! The mother’s heart winced again; again she hid it.
“Kow Li will do it perfectly. He is a Chinese and of our province, a servitor of our family for centuries. Kows have been henchmen of the Sêns for thousands of years, you know. Why, Kow is our ideal mei jên, born for the part. And,” Sên chuckled, “how it will delight him to go to C’hi Ng Yelü and negotiate the marriage of the noble C’hi’s accomplished and virtuous daughter and the loathsome, ignorant, deformed son of the lady Sên Ruby!”
Still the woman smiled.
“But, I say, Mater, I think I ought to tell Cousin Charles what we are up to—don’t you?—before it is signed, sealed and delivered. He has been almost Providence to me, hasn’t he? And so jolly good to me always. I think I owe him that courtesy. I’ll blow in at Kow’s shop this afternoon, shall I? And then go on to Sir Charles and have my talk with him while you are giving your orders to Kow.”
“Why not this morning, Rue? Chinese affairs of great moment should be begun at the sun-up.” Ruby Sên knew that Ruben had said “this afternoon” because he would not leave her abruptly, or even seem willing to; but she had set her foot, her naked woman’s foot, on the hot plowshare of Ruben’s young man-desire, and she meant to stint her sacrifice of nothing.
And she knew that, though his lips and his love of her—his cherishing of her and of her first place—had said, “this afternoon,” the heart of the man she had borne was crying, “now!”
But Ruben was fine too.
“Not much sun-up about it in London to-day, is there! No, please. There’s not all that hurry. I haven’t seen my mother for weeks. You needn’t think I am going to let you turn me out until after lunch for I am not! The morning is ours, Mrs. Sên, whether you like it or not. After we have lunched I’ll trot off to the picturesque suburb of Bloomsbury and then on to the House of Snow.”
His mother’s laugh thanked him.
But perhaps she would have found it easier to have had him go now. It had to be done—so, the quicker the easier. And Mrs. Sên would have liked to be alone—just for an hour—now.