CHAPTER VIII
Mrs. Sên knocked lightly on her girl’s door—knocked timidly.
But Ivy called, “Come in, Mother,” pleasantly.
A Chinese girl—in China—very much more ill than Ivy Sên, would have rushed to the door, would have opened it for the mother with grateful words and bending gesture of welcome. Ivy did not rise; but she turned her head a little as Mrs. Sên came up to her, and the mother was glad to see that her child’s grave eyes were not unkind.
The girl was sitting listlessly at an open window and her head lay wearily against the pillow behind it.
“It is after four, dear. Have you had any tea?” Mrs. Sên knew that Ivy’s luncheon tray had been refused at the door.
“I don’t want any.”
“I thought perhaps you’d let me have mine here with you. Don’t you think you could drink a cup, if I made it? Is your head no better?”
“Oh, yes—lots better. I’ve cried the stuffing out of it. Ring, if you like. I’ll drink two cups of tea, if it will please you, Mother.” The girl’s voice was a trifle tremulous, and utterly weary.
Mrs. Sên’s heart ached for Ivy; Ivy’s heart ached for her mother. Both presaged the talk that was coming, Ivy more clearly but less painfully than the woman did. They both knew that the talk had to come. Mrs. Sên had known that for a long time now. Ivy had intended that it never should come. What was the use? It would change nothing. What was, was. To thrash it out together would accomplish nothing but pain to her mother. But suddenly the girl knew that it had to come, and had to come now. They must talk it out this once or she would go mad, she thought.
When she had rung Mrs. Sên drew a chair to Ivy’s, and except to give the order, when Ivy’s maid came, they did not speak again until the tea things came. Mrs. Sên sat with a hand on the girl’s knee, and presently Ivy slipped her hand over her mother’s, and left it so until Mrs. Sên moved to busy herself at the little tea table.
Ivy kept her word. She always did. She drank two cups of tea and ate a little fruit.
“I ought to like tea, oughtn’t I?” she exclaimed ruefully as Parker took the tray away. “How I hate it!”
“Why not always have coffee, then?” Mrs. Sên spoke lightly, spoke very gently. But she paled a little. She knew what Ivy meant—knew why Ivy disliked tea. And she knew that it was coming now, the painful open disclosure of what had been so long and so bitterly pent up between them. Ruby Sên knew that she stood at the bar of justice and that the child she had borne was her accuser and her judge.
Ruby Sên had never been a coward. She came near to it now.
A culprit mother arraigned by her own child; judged and pre-condemned by the child she loves! There can be little in life harder than that.
But Mrs. Sên met it quietly, with nothing but love and motherliness on her placid face.
Ivy Sên hated herself for saying it, hated to say it. But she had to. It was coming out now, because it was stronger than she; because it had been pent up too long. It was all coming out now. It was bursting out now—bursting into wretched, futile hopeless battle. Even as she spoke she tried not to—“All Chinese like tea, don’t they, Mother? All but me.”
“Most of them do, I think, dear.”
Ivy knotted her tiny hands together tightly, and brooded down at them.
Mrs. Sên longed to lay her hand on Ivy; but the mother did not dare touch her daughter.
“We are going to a dance to-night, aren’t we?” Ivy asked wearily.
“Two—unless you’d rather stay at home—to the Graingers and then on to the Hillyards.”
“Do you care to take me? Do you like to take me about with you?”
“I love to, Ivy,” Mrs. Sên said gently.
“I should think you’d hate to! I wouldn’t do it, if I were you!”
“Your eyes are a little red, dear; but they won’t be when you have bathed them,” Mrs. Sên replied weakly.
Ivy laughed miserably. “I wasn’t thinking of my eyes. Because of my face, I mean.”
Mrs. Sên had known that, and she knew that Ivy had known that she did.
It had come now—the terror was on them; Mrs. Sên faced it squarely, praying as she did that she might find some word to soothe Ivy’s sore.
“Ivy, do you feel so badly about it? Can’t you conquer it, dear? It isn’t anything really. It’s just a prejudice.”
“It may not be anything but it spoils everything for me,” the girl answered with slow, quiet passion, very sad to hear in her young voice, terribly sad for a mother to hear. “It spoils my life utterly. I loathe myself. It may be nothing, but to me it is a hideous disgrace. I’d kill myself if I had the pluck. I think I may some day. Oh, I know how brutal it is of me to say all this to you. I know how good you are to me and how patient. But it has brutalized me, the shame and misery of it. Oh, Mother, I wish I had never been born! How I wish I had never been born!” The sincerity of the miserable, dragging voice was unmistakable. The very quiet with which the girl spoke was intense tragedy, unhappiness too great, too deep-seated, for vehemence.
Ruby Sên longed to cry out in her pain; she would have given her life to help her girl and she knew that she was helpless. One small thing only there was that she could do: she could let Ivy say it all; give the relief of open confession, each word of it a stab in the heart of the mother that listened.
“Ivy, darling, do you think you’d feel it less in China? Shall we go to China, and live there—you and I?”
“China!” The venom in the girl’s voice was sickening; her voice cracked with her loathing of the word she spoke—the name of her father’s country. “Never! I’d throw myself into fire before I’d do that, before I would even see the place. I’d rather be a pariah here as I am—oh! yes I am, Mother—than even see the place for a day.”
Mrs. Sên covered her shivering face with her hands.
Even in her own pain, Ivy Sên pitied the mother she was mauling; tried to stop; and could not.
“Why did you do it, Mother? Why did you do it?”
“Because I loved him very dearly, Ivy,” the mother said gently, but proudly too; and as Sên King-lo never had failed her while he lived, her memory of him did not fail her now, but came to her aid, braced and supported her. She was looking at Ivy now, tenderly and pityingly but calmly. “I married your father because I loved him, and because he was the finest man I had ever known. Your father was the noblest human creature I ever have known, Ivy.”
“A noble Chink!” the girl hissed the offensive word.
But Sên King-lo’s widow was patient still. “That ridiculous street word cannot touch him, little girl,” she said softly. “No one who knew him ever doubted that he was a noble man.”
“Thank God, I can’t remember him!”
“Ivy!”
“I mean it, Mother. I hate him, I loathe the thought of him, with a yellow, monkey face like mine.”
Ruby Sên’s eyes flashed fire. And she rose from her seat, the accuser now, no longer the culprit.
“Hush! You shall not speak so outrageously of your father in my presence—or in his house. Do you know what I was when he married me—and gave me everything? A nursery governess, living on your Cousin Charles’ charity, and on Emma’s good-nature—pretending to earn my living by teaching Blanche and Dick! Never enough clothes, never pocket money that I dared spend as I chose. Fed at their table, waited on by their servants, warmed at their fires. Your father gave me everything—and he gave me self-respect and happiness. All that you have he gave you, or made me able to give. I was earning one hundred pounds a year in Washington. Ruben has one thousand at Cambridge. He gave you everything, Ivy!”
“Including my face!”
“A very beautiful face, my child. All the Sêns are beautiful. And they are nobles, older than any in Europe. You have no cause to be ashamed of your Chinese blood. You ought to be very proud of it—if you knew what the Chinese are—such families as ours. I made no mésalliance, Ivy; but your father did!”
Ivy rose too and stood facing her mother.
“And you never regretted it? Never once?”
“Never once.” Ruby Sên believed it was true. She forgot a few days she had spent in China. They had been wiped out by a man’s invincible manliness, a Chinese husband’s forbearance and loyalty and lasting charm.
“Do you not regret it now?”
“Ten thousand times no!”
“And you would do it again—knowing what it has cost me? You love me, Mother!”
Mrs. Sên’s face changed piteously. “Little girl—little girl, what am I to say to you! Oh, Ivy, I don’t know—I can’t answer that. For me it was perfect. He made it so. It breaks my heart to see you suffer. I believe that it hurts me more than it does you that you see it as you do. I think that you are wrong, Ivy; but that has nothing to do with it, really. Every human creature has to see things from his own individual angle; and you are not one of the sort that can ever change your viewpoint. But even for you—if I could have the choice—I do not know if I should give up my memories or undo the past. They are so precious, so infinitely sweet.”
The girl put her hands closely on her mother’s shoulders, and held her so.
They stood so, searching each other’s eyes. Ivy’s eyes were hard; the mother’s slowly filled with tears that did not fall. It was a long, hard moment.
Gently the girl pushed her mother down into a low chair and knelt beside her.
“I cannot understand you, Mother.”
“I think you will some day. And I understand you, Ivy.”
“Did no one warn you?”
“Every one.”
“But you took your way!”
“I took my way—as probably you will take yours some day.”
“You were in China with him, lived there for nearly a year once before I was born, didn’t you?”
“For some months.”
“Did you like it, Mother? Were you happy there? Did you like China—like being the wife of a Chinese there?”
Slow red smirched Mrs. Sên’s pallor, but she gave no other sign and she did not evade Ivy’s question. “After we left Hong Kong—not altogether. It was all very strange to me up in Ho-nan, in the country, and I was young and callow, and very selfish then.”
“You met his people?”
“We stayed with them.”
“Oh! And they were horrible?”
“They were extremely kind to me, Ivy. Their ways, their dress, all that was very strange to me; but they were charming, refined people. The old home was very beautiful, a larger estate than you have ever seen. My memories of all the Sêns are tender. And I often think of that old homestead, and wish that I had realized then, as I do now, how wonderful and lovely it was. It is the most sumptuous place I have ever seen. Compared to it our little place in Surrey is a village cottage with a patch of ill-kept garden in front of it and a dustbin at the back door. And your father’s people were the kindest, the most considerate I have ever met—very great aristocrats.”
Ivy shuddered.
Ruby Sên waited miserably for Ivy to go on, for she herself could find nothing to say that she felt would help at all.
They stayed silent for several long unhappy moments before Ivy spoke.
Then, trying not to say the words that blurted out—“Do you know why I do not like to come into your own rooms?”
“I’m afraid I do.” Mrs. Sên spoke gently, but the quiet words writhed through ashen lips.
“Because there is a picture of him in each of them! Oh, Mother, Mother, how could you? You—an English girl! And it was not for his money! I know that. It would not have hurt me quite so much, if it had been!”
“His money had nothing at all to do with it.”
“Oh! how I hate him! I hate him—I loathe him!”
“Ivy!” the mother sobbed.
Ivy broke into bitter, passionate weeping, huddled on the floor, her face buried on her mother’s knee. Mrs. Sên was crying too; their grieving shook them both. Ivy’s sobs were hardest, but perhaps the mother’s were the bitterer.
“I am a beast to hurt you! But I can’t help it, I can’t help it!” the girl sobbed.
“I don’t want you to help it, dear.”
Ivy sat up suddenly with her elbows on the other’s knees—searching her mother’s face again after she had dragged her loose sleeve across her eyes. “Do you suppose any Englishman—any nice Englishman—will ever wish to marry me?”
“Many.” Ruby Sên smiled down at her girl tenderly.
“I don’t! But I have lots of money—or will have—that you can’t keep from me. Some adventurer will, perhaps. I shall marry the first man that asks me to—if he is English.”
“Ivy! My little Ivy!”
“I will, Mother!”
“Don’t punish me that way, dear.”
“You are punishing me!”
“Punishing you, Ivy—now!”
“Yes!—Mother, will you marry Lord Whitmore—for me? That would help me—make life so much easier for me.”
“I cannot do that. I never will do that, Ivy.” Mrs. Sên spoke kindly, but the firmness of her will in that was unmistakable.
Ivy laughed—harder for the mother to hear than the storm of weeping had been. “Then you are going to go on punishing me!” Ivy Sên got up with a shrug, and began to pace the floor, up and down, like the discontented caged thing she was—caged behind bars she could not break—that nothing ever could break; the cruel bars of distorted, disconsonant race.
“I will do anything that I can for you, Ivy. But even for you I will not marry again, for it could not be marriage; for I am your father’s wife to-day as much as I was the day you were born. All the world is less to me, even you and Ruben, than my memory of him.”
In her hurt and rage Ivy turned to her mother to say—hating to say it—“Ruben hates it as much as I do, only he won’t tell you so. You sacrificed Ruben too.” But she kept the words back; conquered her impulse to be cruel this time; and all her life will be glad that she did.
It is something—a sop to conscience, a tonic to self-respect—to be able to remember that once when we were cruel to one we loved we refrained from giving “the unkindest cut of all.”
Ivy Sên continued her miserable pacing up and down. Her eyes were bad. Her face was hard.
But in the very whirl and surge of her pain she was suffering for her mother.
Mrs. Sên was suffering for her child.
Again the mother waited, while she could.
“Ivy!”
Ivy paused and turned.
Ruby Sên held out her arms; a mother at bay; arraigned, pallid from both their pains—but not resentful; unyielding but meek; experience and love patient with youth.
Ivy hesitated, faltered—then went to the mother, threw herself down at her mother’s knees.
“I wish I had the pluck to kill myself!”
Mrs. Sên made no protest. The only reply she made was the touch of her hand on Ivy’s hair.
“We must dress now, dear,” Ivy said after a moment—a moment of infinite closeness and union. “We’d better dress before dinner, if we are going on to two places. It’s getting late. Lucky we’ve got two maids, and won’t have to share one.”
“Do you care to go—to-night?” Mrs. Sên asked.
“Of course! I’m going to be such a good girl now—as long as ever I can. You watch and see what a good time I have to-night. And I am going to look ever so nice—almost as lovely as my beautiful mother.” She gave Mrs. Sên a generous hug, then jumped up and pulled her to her feet “Off you go!” she ordered. “Make tracks and make lovely. Your daughter is going to dazzle two London functions to-night. She is going to be the rage! Parker! Parker! We’ve got to be quick!” she cried, as she ran into the bedroom, laughing at her mother over her shoulder as she ran.