CHAPTER LXI
The things that we anticipate with the most dread almost always gall us less than we feared they would.
One can suffer only so much at any one time over any one thing; it is one of the great mercies of human existence that each individual’s capacity for pain is strictly limited. If dread is craven coward, sufficiently applied it turns anæsthetic, and numbs the nerves it first has tortured. Often, too, the bad quarters of an hour we agonize over in the night have a gracious habit of blowing over. Again, the creditor we face quakingly and with raw humiliation proves rather a jolly good fellow at shorter range, and lets us down softly.
His interview with C’hi Ng Yelü was harder and worse than Sên had expected it to be; and he had counted upon its being incredibly difficult and painful.
He was taken to C’hi at once. It was evident that the servant who let him in had had his orders.
As they went through the hall Sên Ruben heard a girl laugh—a clear, soft laugh of perfect happiness. C’hi had told her, and she was glad! Ruben believed that a note he never had heard before in Yamei’s flute-like voice told him that!
She would not come to her father’s room unless she was sent for—perhaps not even then, while he was there—Ruben was sure of that; nor would she come downstairs at all. She would run no risk of meeting him in the hall—if only she learned that he was here! But it unmanned him to know that she was in the house at all. It made what he was going to do seem more dastardly, a more intimate, more brutal affront to her whom he loved. Was she wearing her Chinese dress again to-day? He thought so! And she had not cared to go to the Morton “at home.” Had she one of his roses—yesterday’s roses—tucked in her little jacket?—nestling at her chin perhaps! What was she doing up there in that room? They had been together there yesterday! Pranking gently up there with her little Chinese dogs, perhaps. Or was she standing beside the piano, bending over a bowl of yellow roses, telling them, laughing it to them shyly—her love story? Her love story and his! Gods!
C’hi Ng Yelü did not give him a Chinese welcome, but swept Sên’s low obeisance of deep respect aside with a chuckle, caught Ruben’s hand and shook it warmly.
“Sit down, my dear fellow, have a cigar. We are not in China—we won’t pretend that we are. You really should not perpetrate a ko’tow in English-cut trousers; the two don’t click.”
He took Sên by the shoulders and pushed him down willy-nilly into an easy chair—an ideal chair to smoke in and to lounge in, but no chair at all to make black confession in. It was not a chair to sit in while you affronted a man telling him that you withdrew your offer of marriage, insulting his daughter!
Ruben took the cigar—too embarrassed to decline it—and laid it down.
C’hi chuckled again. “’Pon my word, Sên, that funny old bird—Kow Li, isn’t he?—nearly caused a riot in the hall. One of the housemaids was passing through the hall when Billings let him in, and caught sight of him. She scuttled down to the housekeeper’s room in high hysterical delight, and I gather, from the sounds that penetrated a wall and three doors, that every domestic retainer I have was lined up in the hall, and peeping over the staircase to feast their eyes on him as he went. Some mei jên, what, Sên! He certainly did you credit!”
“He felt greatly honored to come, sir,” Sên said ruefully.
“He dressed the part!” C’hi chuckled again.
Sên Ruben began at once—haltingly, lamely enough.
C’hi Yelü smoked, and heard him through without a word. He gave no sign—even he smiled—coldly, once or twice. But Ruben felt C’hi stiffen, and knew that C’hi Ng Yelü’s Chinese blood was boiling and frothing.
When Sên had done, C’hi bowed to him graciously across the table, then spoke with almost elaborate courtesy.
“You are quite right, Sên. Pray do not distress yourself about the little incident in the least. Believe me that I do not; I assure you that I do not. And my daughter never will know of it. I have not mentioned it to her.” Sên Ruben believed it a lie, and applauded it. “Much of what you have just urged against what was suggested to me, by Mrs. Sên’s messenger a few hours ago, I already felt very strongly, but I preferred not to state such delicate objections to a mere go-between who had been sent to me by a Sên—preferred to temporize, because of my great regard for your noble clan. But to you yourself I must have stated my objections quite frankly before we went any farther—to you, of course, not to Mrs. Sên—”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I do not take the slight race difference quite as seriously as you do. I think you exaggerate it—on my soul, I do—but frankly, in spite of my very great regard for you, while I should not have forced my daughter’s inclination—I resolved long ago never to do that—I should have regretted the arrangement had it been arranged. But I have reason to think that if, after our conference—yours and mine—I had been persuaded to broach it to her, she would have declined it. I feel that I can say this to you without offense, because I am confident that you will be glad to know that Miss C’hi’s personal interest has not become involved.”
“Very glad, sir,” Sên forced out through stiff lips. He admired C’hi Ng Yelü enormously.
“My girl likes and values you very much as a friend. But I am sure that she would have asked me to decline the unquestionably great honor that Mrs. Sên’s suggestion did us both.”
“Father!” C’hi Yamei cried gaily, dancing lightly in from the hall, “I want you to come and—” Then she saw that C’hi Ng Yelü was not alone, saw who was with him and stood a moment motionless in confusion, her lovely face crimson as a bride’s veil. Then with a little smothered cry she fled from the room.
He had seen her again—in yesterday’s robes; and he had seen the bunch of yellow roses at her breast.
Sên had sprung up at the sound of her voice; he turned away and went to the window, and standing there with his back to the room Sên Ruben set his teeth hard in his lip.
C’hi had risen too—to go to his child, to ask her gently to excuse him until his business talk—of matters at Peking—with Mr. Sên was finished.
But he had not needed to do that—Yamei had not given him time.
Perhaps her coming, and what her confusion—and something else in her eyes before she dropped them—had told, had moved C’hi Yamei’s father as intensely as it had Sên Ruben.
C’hi did not sit down again—he went to the window.
“Ruben!”
Sên swung round.
C’hi Ng Yelü’s face was working. Sên’s was ghastly.
“Ruben, let us sit down again, and talk this over sensibly. We must thrash it out now—without pride or subterfuge; there is too much involved for either.”
“Let me go, sir,” Sên pleaded.
“Not yet!” C’hi Ng Yelü urged, as one who asks a favor, but asks it as a right.
They both sat down.
“I do not know just what report of how he fared with me the mei jên Kow Li gave, or if you have seen him.”
“I have seen him, sir—but he said very little. I—I put it off.”
“It doesn’t matter either way. I indicated to him that your mother’s offer was not unwelcome to me. It was not. It is not. I wish the marriage, Sên. I approach no man for C’hi Yamei; there are few whose approach of me I would have welcomed, few that I would have reported to her. She has not lacked suitors; she will not, for she is beautiful and sweet and I am rich. But I care for her happiness more than I care for all other things, more than I ever have cared for any other thing but her mother’s and the love her mother gave me. My care for C’hi Yamei’s happiness is more than my pride. You are not bound to go on with the contract which I believed was made—I do not hold you so bound—but I want you to consider gravely what this sudden decision of yours may do to Yamei.” Ruben moaned. “She has not lived the life of a Chinese girl here where we have spent so much of our time, nor has she lived it at all strictly in China. She has seen a good deal of you, Sên. She may have read what was in your heart until to-day.”
“It is there still. It always will be there,” Sên muttered miserably.
“She may have understood; she may have responded, as English girls do. You saw her now—she flushed and ran away. Why? We live in changed times now, even we Chinese. The Son of Heaven himself has chosen to go among men as a man of the new ways. We may see a Chinese Empress unveiled and unpainted at a London function before long; little would surprise me in this time of flux and transition. The bars are down, Sên. We cannot put them up, you and I. I, for one, do not wish to put them up again. I want China to find her rightful place in the sun—and not in insular isolation. I may be wrong, I may be right; but that is how I feel about it. I do not feel that your Western blood is an advantage to mine; but is it the insuperable barrier that your fine sensitiveness thinks it? I believe not.”
C’hi Ng Yelü said more—a good deal more.
Sên made little reply.
But the sum of all he said remained, “I must pay my father’s debt.” And he also said that he would not do C’hi Yamei what, as he saw it now, would be an irrevocable wrong; that he would not put her, as marriage with him must inevitably put her in both hemispheres, at social discount.
C’hi Ng Yelü bowed to a decision he saw that he could not shake; and they parted friends.
As C’hi heard the outer door close, he went heavily across the hall, up the stairs, and reluctantly into Yamei’s room. He would not delay his telling her what he must tell; the sooner the wound, the sooner its cure—if he and time and her own pride and youth could cure the hurt it was his sorrowful lot to deal his only child.
Ruben went slowly, with feet that disliked their office. It was improbable that he would come here again; he hoped that he should not. But he could not go abruptly. He had to linger and lag—weakly, perhaps—keeping a last lonely tryst with the house from which he shut himself out forever; prolonging still the “sweet sorrow” of his parting.
The Square was empty, and Sên waited a few moments looking up at Yamei’s windows—the window where they had stood together yesterday. The window was open.
Was she there?
Had C’hi gone to her yet? He knew that C’hi Ng Yelü would not put off long the difficult cruel-kindness that had been thrust upon him.
A cry! Yamei had cried out—and then he heard her sob. A little hurt girl was weeping bitterly.
Sên Ruben went wearily home.
The next day he and his mother went to Ashacres; and Ruben Sên never saw C’hi Yamei again.