CHAPTER VI
Lord Whitmore could not have chosen a less auspicious moment to urge his suit again, though it is equally true that he could not, as far as results went, have chosen a better one. But to-day Mrs. Sên resented his courtship which until now she merely had regretted.
She was tired.
Sir Charles had caught her at breakfast, and insisted upon a long morning devoted to a rigorous inspection of accounts, leases, securities and other documentary paraphernalia of a great fortune. Under her cousin’s persistent tutelage widowed Mrs. Sên had become an uncommonly capable business woman; it was in her blood, for that matter, but she never could see why “Charlie” and her solicitors should not manage it all for her, and this morning she had had other plans for the hours between breakfast and luncheon. But Sir Charles had insisted; and she had yielded. Ruby Sên usually did yield to her cousin in small things. It had been a lifelong habit. In big and more vital things she would yield to no one, not even to Snow himself. And they both knew that she would not.
The day was exceedingly hot. The long business morning had both bored and fagged her.
Luncheon had exasperated her; people had drifted in whom she particularly disliked, and had stayed for the midday meal. Long before peaches and finger bowls Mrs. Sên had been bored to tears.
She fled to the rose-garden as soon as she half-decently could. And there she sank down on a comfortable bench with a soft chuckle of victory and a soothing feeling of security.
In this tiny world of fragrant, glowing roses, a lovely fastness of color and spiced sweetness, her fag and rancor passed. And when a little breeze came and played with the roses, cooling the garden deliciously, she smiled lazily and scolded herself for being an impatient, ungracious woman.
Could roses be lovelier than these of Blanche and Rupert’s, anywhere on earth? What about the Vale of Kashmir? Mrs. Sên had been in China. She knew how color could paint an Oriental garden, how perfume could clot one. But she could not think that roses could be lovelier, smell sweeter, than these.
Roses always made her think of King-lo; all flowers did. He had worn a vivid red flower in his coat the day they had met, a carnation whose spice had reached and pleased her as they sat next to each other at supper. Their friendship in those first far-off Washington days had been a friendship of flowers. He had sent her violets that first time; most often he had sent her lilies; but often too he had given her roses, always exquisite of color and shape, always exquisitely perfumed, always with their own perfect foliage—never too many, never too few. The first roses he ever had sent her had been tea-roses. They were the first of his flowers she ever had worn.
She left her seat and paced slowly from bush to bush, searching for a tea-rose she wanted—a tea-rose in memory. And when she found it she held the half-open bud in her hand a long time before she put it carefully in her gown.
She went on through the ordered wilderness of roses, moving slowly, searching carefully for another rose she wanted—a very red rose, just the right red, just the right shape, just the same scent as the roses Lo had sent her long ago because her name was Ruby and because he had loved her, though neither he nor she had known then that he did.
There! Very carefully she chose a ruby-red rose. Very gently she gathered it, and went back to the seat she had left, holding the fragrant ruby rose in fingers that caressed it softly now and then, and fell a-dreaming of days that were gone, of a man that had been dead fifteen years.
What a lover he had been!
And Lo had been her lover, tender and ardent and true, from the first to the last; from his first loving of her until he had died in her arms in their Surrey garden.
Ruben had been but a toddler then, Ivy a baby.
Dear little Ivy! Ivy whom Ruby Sên knew that next to her husband-lover, Sên King-lo, she had loved most of all the world.
Partly, no doubt, it was because she had given so little to others that she had given King-lo so much, but far more it had been King-lo’s own quality that had caused her to give so much to her lover and husband; and Mrs. Sên knew that it was so.
Ivy Ruby Gilbert had been a nice girl; intrinsically nice, exquisitely sensitive; but she had married above her—this English girl who had amused Washington, appalled her friends and gravely troubled her kindred by marrying a Chinese.
She had suspected at the time that he was more than she; she had learned it very surely during her five years of marriage. And now in her maturity, having seen more of her world and watched it shrewdly, widowed Mrs. Sên realized it much more deeply and consciously than she had while King-lo had been with her.
She appreciated him now—a trick that death and memory give; and she even, remembering him, praised him for all his excellence more than was his individual due—held to him as personal virtue much that was racial trait. She was too Western to realize justly that Sên King-lo had been what he was because he was bred and born of a nation of gentlemen; men refined and strengthened for centuries by the spiritual and social good-breeding that Confucius taught.
Mrs. Sên smiled, remembering as she drew the ruby rose across her face, rides they had had by the dimpled Potomac, through the sun-dappled woods of Virginia, on the city’s broad tree-shaded streets; their garden in Hong Kong, Sên’s grasp of her hand, the sound of his voice, the hold of his arms, the precious lure of his tender eyes, his patience, his courtesy, his exquisite charm, games they had played, confidences at dawn, the day he had told her he loved her—the radiant, secure years he had proved to her that he did.
A squirrel scurried softly through the grass where standard roses grew imperially beautiful from delicate carpets of emerald.
The woman watched the little furry thing, a tender smile on her tremulous lips, a hint of mist in her soft brown eyes. She sighed gently, and looked away—and saw Lord Whitmore coming to her through the beech trees that girdled the radiant rose-garden.
She dreamed of Sên King-lo, and saw John Whitmore.
“Day dreaming?” he asked, as he seated himself, and shied his panama hat not unkindly at a now hurrying little squirrel.
“No,” Mrs. Sên said crisply, “living. Living contentedly in a very beautiful castle.”
“Enjoying it very much—you looked.”
“Intensely,” Mrs. Sên told him.
Lord Whitmore was not dull. When she had said “living” he had known that “reliving” would have been the truer word. He gaged her mood, he understood the cool crispness of her tone. And yet—he spoke and risked it; took his plunge, perhaps because the promise he had given little anxious Ivy pushed him over the brink, perhaps because the scent of a thousand sun-drenched roses had gone to his head, perhaps because he so wanted the woman who sat there only half the length of the garden bench away.
“May I have it?” he asked, holding her eyes with his, reaching his hand for the rose she held.
She shook her head very slightly, a queer little smile answering him too, and fastened the ruby rose at her breast.
“Dear—” he urged.
Color came and went like a girl’s on the woman’s face, an old trick of Ivy Gilbert’s face that Mrs. Sên’s had lost for years till now—a lovely flushing and paling of sex; and how was the man to know that it was not for him?
But perhaps the other man knew—the man that the wife thought was there.
How was an Englishman to know that they two were not alone there among the roses—he and the woman he loved?
But the woman knew and rejoiced. And the soft glow on her face, the throbbing sweetness her senses felt, were for him, standing there facing them, a Chinese man—no ghost—living and visible to the heart of a woman.
“Won’t you let me come into your castle—your castle of contentment—and live there with you?” the Englishman pleaded.
Before when he had urged it he had pressed upon her a dozen reasons that advocated it soundly: companionship for years of maturity and of age, common tastes, Ivy’s welfare and Ruben’s.
To-day he urged only his love, pleaded nothing of what such marriage might do for her and for her girl and boy, pleaded what it would be to him; promised nothing but love and fealty. All the rest he had promised before, and knew that she knew that promise would hold; now he pleaded selfishly, showing the selfishness, the overmastering urge of what he asked: the strongest appeal a man can make to a woman; the appeal that moves and flatters when all others fail.
“Don’t condemn me to spend the rest of my life in loneliness. You must not! Until I met you, I never knew what loneliness was. Since I met you, I have known nothing else, except when I have been with you. We are a long-lived lot, we Whitmores, and so are my mother’s people. I decline to let you sentence me to loneliness for, perhaps, another fifty years—to punish me so for loving you!”
“I wish you would love some one else, Lord Whitmore,” Mrs. Sên said a little wearily.
“Can’t oblige you—and wouldn’t if I could. You were the first; you’ll be the last. Oh,” he went on in retort to an odd little smile she gave him, “it is perfectly true. I was precious near forty when we met; and I never had asked a woman to be my wife, and I never had had the slightest thought of doing so—until I saw you. And I never have fooled about—not even as a boy. I have given you all my love.”
“And I gave mine—all mine—more than twenty years ago.”
“I know,” Whitmore said nicely, but he flushed slightly, in spite of himself. “But Mr. Sên is dead.”
“Not to me,” Ruby Sên said proudly.
He waited a moment. Then he laid his hand on hers, so quietly that a modern woman could not resent the hand of an old friend that touched hers so lightly, and asked, “Can you give me nothing at all for the everything that I have given you?”
Mrs. Sên sighed. She was so pitying—not Lord Whitmore, but some woman who had missed him. There were so many lonely women now! So many nice women who would have valued and cherished the splendid gift she would not take or touch. There were not too many men such as he; there were not enough good and charming husbands to go around. Mrs. Sên’s heart ached for some lonely woman who had missed this man. She knew so well what marriage could be.
But she was growing, selfishly, a trifle weary; it was so perfectly useless to fuss all this over again and even the man’s persistence revolted her taste a little. And she longed to be alone again in her little rose-walled castle. She did wish he’d take his No and go!
“Can you give me nothing?” the man repeated. His voice shook in his eagerness, and his hand tightened on hers.
The woman turned in her seat, faced him squarely and shook her head as she gently released her hand.
“Why?”
The question vexed Mrs. Sên. Surely she had told him why clearly, already.
“Is it because you can’t?” Whitmore demanded hotly, “or because you won’t?”
“Both. I cannot give you what my husband holds, and always will. I choose to keep my memories untarnished. You forget that I am a Chinese woman by right of marriage. A Chinese widow does not marry again,” she told him gravely and proudly. “Not women who are respected and who respect themselves. I do not often speak of my marriage, not because I forget it, but because I remember it so well. It was perfect. To me, Lord Whitmore, a second marriage would be bigamy. To me Mr. Sên is not dead. I am as much, as completely and as consciously his wife to-day as I was when I lived at his side. My husband has not left me. I shall not leave him.”
And Whitmore realized that that was final.
He accepted defeat gallantly.
“I will not trouble you again,” he promised quietly.
The brown fingers gave the white ones a friendly little grip.
How enormously she liked him! And she could have cried then for the nice girl who had missed him.
Whitmore chatted easily for a few moments before he got up and gathered himself a tea-rose bud. He threw her a quizzical smile as he drew it into his coat. Then he retrieved his panama and sauntered off cheerfully towards the house.
“Done in!” he said to himself grimly as he went, “done in by a dead Chinaman! My word!”
And Mrs. Sên stayed on in the rose-garden with her man who was with her there among their roses.