Emmeline Hamilton lay on a pile of cushions heaped on the floor, one
hand under her head, her knees hunched up in what she thought a Chinese
attitude, a cigarette she tried to imagine was opium in her mouth, a
purple kimono, embroidered with blue chrysanthemums and red and gold
dragons and beetles and smaller bugs, flopped loosely about her. She
flattered the garment that it was ultra-Chinese, but it was merely an
atrocious libel on the women of Japan. It revealed an appalling stretch
of her amazingly thin legs and not only all her neck, but much that lies
below necks. But that was less exposure than it sounds—for Emmeline was
built as chastely flat as her mother: except for her nose and ears there
scarcely was a jut on Emmeline. She caved in here and there thinly, but
she nowhere bulged. A Chinese woman, even one whose profession was
frailty, would sooner have strangled or starved herself or have perished
by slow suffering inches than have exposed any part of her neck. But
Emmeline didn’t know that. Her mawkish but intense and tigerish
infatuation for Sên King-lo was no greater than her ignorance of his
people and their customs. Her furniture, which had cost enough to be
good, was a poor imitation of inlaid teak-wood. The room was thick and
sneeze-provoking with the smoke of joss-sticks that by chance _were_
Chinese, which the prints and _kakemonos_ on the walls were not, but the
prints were good of their sort, and the costumes they showed were the
garb of an older China—for Japan took her dress, as she’s taken most
she has that is best—from China centuries ago. The great gong that
stood conspicuously and inconveniently in the middle of the room hailed
from the Tottenham Court Road and had been made not far from that street
of “Horse-Shoe” and furniture for cash or time-payment. A porcelain bowl
of sweet-meats lay on the floor beside her, a pair of chop-sticks she
simply could not learn to manipulate crossed above the chocolates and
glacé fruits. She wore an oleander flower over one ear and a tiny
orange-colored fan over the other. She was well hung with jade—such as
it was—and the foot from which she had kicked its heelless sandal
showed that she wore white stockings made like mittens, with separate
compartments provided for flat great toes.
She had taken her flat for a year; and had furnished it, as she believed
(and said), in an absolutely Chinese way. And she lived here alone with
a maid old enough to be a duenna—but far too shrewd to attempt it.
Her brother sulked on a very uncomfortable stool—too high for
feet—very much too low for one’s legs to be conveniently or painlessly
disposed of. Emmeline had been crying; her eyes were redder than her
lightly rouged cheeks. Reginald looked thunderous. Each had close at
hand a cocktail—larger than cocktails usually are made. The
Reginald’s—he liked to be called so—was served in a champagne glass;
Emmeline’s in a small bowl which she called a Chinese wine cup—but Li
Po himself never drank wine out of any vessel half so ample, for it was
almost as large as a small afternoon tea-cup.
“I tell you it’s true!” the girl sobbed, between a whiff and a sip.
“I’ll not believe it!” Reginald liked the suggestion almost as little as
Miss Julia had—and by it his personal vanity was stung, which Miss
Julia Townsend’s had not been. “That low Chink——”
Emmeline threw out a dramatic hand, scattering ash into the embossed
scales of the purple kimono’s handsomest dragon. “Not here!” she hissed.
“No one that speaks with less than the deepest respect for Sên King-lo
shall dare speak it here. He is Celestial!” and she sank back with an
adoring moan on her prickly cushions—a stork’s leg rasped her
cheek—but she was too highly or abjectly Chinese to wince.
“Rot!” Reginald replied.
He turned to his cocktail; she pulled broken-heartedly at her cigarette.
She had a pretty collection of tiny pipes—Chinese and otherwise—but,
like the chop-sticks, they had mastered her, not she them. She
industriously kept them conspicuous, but she couldn’t manage to use
them.
“Reggie,” she said presently, “can’t we help each other, you and I?
Let’s.”
“How?” He spoke gloomily.
“We must think.”
Reginald acquiesced—if he did—by discreet silence, and waited for his
sister to do the thinking; a process more in her line than in his—as
they both knew, though Reginald rarely referred to the fact. He had but
two gifts, beauty of person and splendor of raiment. Emmeline Hamilton
was versatile and not without brains. Her silliness was a pose—his a
reality and an emptiness. She affected asceticism and languor. He
affected nothing but his surprising English accent. Even it he found no
small strain and fatigue. If she had been born a boy, she might have
attained to as successful and profitable a mountebankry as their
father’s. Success, except in an almost floral display of haberdashery,
was not for Reginald de Courcy Hamilton.
“You want to marry her?”
“Yep.” He rarely wasted his English _en famille_.
“You are determined? Perfectly? She hasn’t a cent.”
“I’m nothing of the sort. She won’t have me.”
“You’ve asked her?”
He nodded. No use not giving her the whole lay of the land, if she was
to work her wits on it to advantage. But he wasn’t going to dwell on
that part of it.
“When?”
“What’s that to do with it?”
“Probably everything. You answer; I’ll do the asking. When?”
“Plenty of times,” he muttered viciously.
“Since she’s seen so much of Sên King-lo?”
“Sên King-lo be blowed! I tell you he has nothing to do with it.”
“I tell you he has. Did you propose, the first time, since the last
Rosehill garden party? It was there they met. Mary Withrow told me so.
Was it after that that you proposed to Ivy Gilbert the first time?”
Reginald growled and nodded. His vanity was writhing. But as far as it
was in him to care for any one but himself, he cared for Ivy
Gilbert—and cared for her somewhat surprisingly for one of his type and
of his selfishness, since he wished to marry a penniless girl—which was
precisely what he always had purposed never to do. He wanted Ivy. And,
if Emmeline could help him to it, she’d have to have questions answered.
He saw that.
Emmeline lit a fresh cigarette and lay with her pale eyes darkly fixed
on the ceiling—hatching her plan.
“I have it! We must make him believe that she has jilted you.”
“Thank you!” Gratitude could not have sounded more thankless.
“If she could be made to believe that I was engaged to him, or had
been——”
“Look here, Em,” her brother broke in hotly, “I won’t listen to such
disgusting rot. You engaged, even in fun, to a Chink! Don’t you dare say
such a thing again, even to me!”
Emmeline laughed thinly. There was little she did not dare do—Reg was
the weaker vessel, quite without influence on the sister who, under a
trailing, floppy affectation of languor, was an intensely vital young
woman; and they both knew it. Their parents both consulted Emmeline
frequently and usually followed her advice when they sought it. More
than once she had had a strong finger in a sermon-pie of her father’s.
“If I were engaged to Sên King-lo it wouldn’t be in fun,” she remarked
with a hungry sigh.
“Stop it, I tell you!”
Miss Hamilton paid no attention to her brother’s rising wrath—a nearer
manliness than he often reached—and very little and cool attention to
his words.
“I’d bring a breach-of-promise suit against him,” she went on, “if I had
one iota to go on. But I haven’t. I haven’t a scratch of his pen. I’ve
written him notes about all sorts of things, but he telephoned the
skimpiest, formal answers—and rung off before I could get in three
words. Sên King-lo has never danced with me,” her words trailed off in a
smothered wail.
Reginald Hamilton was too disgusted to speak. He stood up roughly and
turned towards the door.
Emmeline rolled over on her big prickly cushions, face down on them, but
head held up, chin on folded arms; and she fixed her brother with an
imperious look from light, narrowed eyes.
“Sit down,” she commanded. “I’ve got it! Sit down.”
But for once Reginald Hamilton faced his manlier sister squarely. “I
won’t have you mixed up in it, Em. Anything else you like—but not your
name mixed up with that Chink’s.”
Perhaps Emmeline recognized the affection that lay in his brotherly
rage; for she said with another but not ill-natured sigh. “That’s all
right, old bean. It wouldn’t work; so it isn’t our game. But, I’ve got
it! Sit down.”
Reginald sat down.