Emmeline Hamilton was silly—decadent even but she was far from stupid.
She made her move at once now, but she made it deftly and unbiased or
hampered by anything that Reginald had said or that he felt.
Rumor began to scratch and tear at Sên King-lo, and it did not leave Ivy
Gilbert quite unscotched—though, for a time, it left her unsmirched.
It was winter now, and November winds rattled leafless branches at
Arlington and on the hillside woods above old Fort Totten’s star-shaped
embankments and cherished parapets. The Potomac crawled gray and sullen
between ice-scummed shores. If gossip and scandal are rampant in the
capital’s summer-time, in winter they flourish like upas trees and leap
to maturity and detail like the Indian conjurer’s mango tree. Gossip
likes the fireside glow, and scandal’s a greedy drinker of afternoon
tea—likes its feet on the fender, and congenial cronies with light
heads and easy chairs close drawn.
Sên King-lo was a roué. There was a Chinese girl close-kept in a high-up
flat over a laundry, its front curtains never open night or day—and
there were others! He was the real proprietor of a select
gambling-place. He trafficked in opium—oh dear, yes. He got tipsy at
the Club—no one knew where he got the stuff, but he did. It had been
hushed up—though it wouldn’t have been for an American citizen—but
when it came to a heathen Chinaman! He had tried to marry Miss Hamilton,
but she wouldn’t look at him. The Snows ought to be more careful of
their young cousin, really they should. Of course, Sir Charles was a
busy man. But Lady Snow, one might think, might see what was up. Marry
Ivy Gilbert? Of course not. There were other endings than that to such
affairs, more lurid endings, my dear. They were together half the time
now, _and at all hours_. They went off together on horseback, miles and
miles. A groom behind them—an English groom? Oh dear, no—not always.
And what if he was? The tea-cups clacked on their saucers, and the
tongues clacked too—not all of them feminine tongues. Who had passed
that counterfeit bill at the Metropolitan Club? Why was it hushed up?
Who had hushed it, and how? Sên King-lo cheated at cards. But, dear old
bean, all Chinamen did that. Early in December the Chinese girl who
lived in the close-curtained flat over the laundry—no one seemed too
sure quite where—died. No doctor—no anything. The poor thing’s body
was taken out in the dead of night. All bumpty-bump in a box down the
laundry back stairs. Scandalous! Taken across the river in a rowboat.
What were the police about? And buried, or disposed of
somehow—somewhere—goodness only knows where! Isn’t it horrible? And
that very same night Sên King-lo had gone to the ball at General
Howard’s—the Howards of all people—who thought half the nicest people
in Washington not good enough to know their girls—and Lady Egerton had
danced with him—and so had Lucy Howard—and he’d danced with Lady Snow,
and he had danced twice with the Gilbert girl. There could be only one
end to it! Of course!
The rumors trickled, then swelled, and no one knew—or cared—who was
their source. And Sên King-lo was more talked of than ever and not run
after any the less. And Ivy was cold-shouldered a little—when Lady Snow
was not looking. You couldn’t slight _Lady_ Snow’s cousin when Lady Snow
was looking.
Every one heard it all—every one but Lady Snow herself and Ivy and Sên
King-lo. Lady Snow heard none of it. Ivy heard a good deal, but none of
the gossip that linked her name with Sên’s. All that was worst of it
reached Sên King-lo, but only the slightest whisper of what was said of
his acquaintance with Miss Gilbert.
Sên took no notice—except that he watched the English girl’s face with
speculative, careful eyes.
Their acquaintance still waxed—though still in his mind a flaw lingered
and rankled: Ivy’s unwomanly dislike of children.
Dr. Ray heard the unclean talk at her hotel and in several
drawing-rooms; heard it and invited Mr. Sên to dinner. Miss Townsend
heard it in her Rosehill fastness and crossed the purveyor off her
visiting list—and, after doing that two or three times, heard it no
more. Sir Charles Snow heard it all and urged Sên King-lo the oftener to
his board and encouraged him even more cordially to Blanche and Dick’s
nursery. Toys were costing Sên King-lo almost as much now as
lilies-of-the-valley in December were. Snow and Sên never spoke to each
other of the crawling gossip. But each knew that the other knew that
they both knew; and they smiled into each other’s eyes now and then—but
no plainer allusion passed between them, and Sên King-lo accepted
Charles Snow’s loyalty and faith as a matter of course, and quite
simply.
The Chinese Minister heard of all that was said. It was he that told
Sên; no other man could have dared—unless Snow had cared to or thought
it worth while. The Chinese Minister told it in all its ugly
grimness—but did not speak of Miss Gilbert—but his old eyes danced and
his sides shook with mirth.
Sên heard him gravely and made no comment beyond a cold smile and a
slight indifferent gesture.
As for Ivy she showed Mr. Sên a warmer, franker friendliness than she
had before; and Sên understood and was grateful and was only able to
refrain from telling her so because it was impossible to speak of such
things to a girl.
Then Emmeline Hamilton reloaded her dice and threw them again. She did
it twice.
A morning paper—not one of the best reputed—announced the engagement
of Sên King-lo and Miss Hamilton. No names were mentioned, but the
descriptions of “a prominent Chicago clergyman’s daughter and a socially
conspicuous young Chinese diplomat” were too well and accurately done to
be mistakable.
Washington tittered. And the Chinese Minister’s sides shook again.
So Sên King-lo had been playing with Miss Gilbert all the time—and
Emmeline Hamilton had won! For she herself had advertised her
infatuation too vividly and widely for any one at all _au fait_ with the
capital’s social swimmers not to know of it—no matter what they had
said a month ago. That was how most of the breakfast tables summed it
up. But =a handful= of other individuals did not accept the situation
so. Dr. Ray smiled sagely when her attention was called to the
paragraph—the journal was not one which she herself read—and then the
physician’s face grew grave.
“Poor girl,” she said to herself—not referring to Ivy. The erudite
Latin of an uncomfortable malady had crossed her thought. And she had
heard Joseph Hamilton preach—once. She had not called it “preach”; she
had called it “perform.”
Sên King-lo—like all of his race, always an early riser—chanced in at
the Club soon after breakfast, picked up the first sheet he saw, and
caught, not his own name but the clearly pointed lines. It was not a
journal taken in at the Chinese Legation.
Sên too smiled, even more coldly than Dr. Ray had, purloined the page
and went leisurely off towards Judiciary Square, and, his business there
done, walked a little more briskly to Massachusetts Avenue. He asked
neither for Lady Snow nor for Sir Charles, but for Miss Gilbert.
Would she ride? he asked, when she came down.
She shook her head. “I wish I could. But it’s the verb ‘to be’ and the
boundaries of the Sea of Marmora for me today.”
“Turn them over, lock, stock and barrel—verb, sea, children and all—to
Justine. It’s a perfect day, and I very much wish you’d come,” he urged.
“It is a tempting day,” Ivy owned.
“Do come.”
“Oh—well,” she yielded, “they learn as much when I don’t teach them as
when I do; and Justine shall hear them slaughter the verb ‘to be’ in
French. Marmora can wait a day.”
“It will wait, on all its four boundaries, for many a day, if I’m any
judge of Dick and Ba,” Sên asserted.
Ivy nodded and laughed. “Ring and order Wolf then, while I put on my
habit, will you?”
“Thank you,” Sên told her, as he opened the door.
Usually Sên King-lo asked her where they should ride, but today he took
the way. And Ivy wondered why he chose the streets he did, keeping some
time to the residential streets and circles before he turned towards the
country.
“What are we doing, Mr. Sên?” she demanded, as they passed by the
Sheridan house for the second time. “And why are we walking? Are you
trying to see some one?”
“No one, whom I do not see,” he answered lightly. “But one likes to be
seen sometimes.”
“You are going up and down the same streets,” she grumbled.
“I am taking a short cut,” Sên told her gravely. And then he laughed.
But after that the girl got her canter, and they lunched with Miss
Julia—Dr. Ray chanced to be lunching also—and rode back in the crisp
of the early sunset.
They had no groom with them today, as now they sometimes did not.
Miss Townsend scarcely approved of that—but she made no remark. It was
Lady Snow’s business, not hers. And Miss Julia was no poacher.
The two women stood at the door to see them go, and Elenore Ray noticed
that they were unattended—and smiled. Girls often rode so in Chicago.
But that was not why the Chicago physician smiled.
And she had smiled too at lunch, when Ivy had twitted Sên upon the slow
passing and repassing up and down the Washington streets he’d inflicted
upon them before he’d let them take the long over-river roads for which
she and their horses had longed. And again she demanded why.
But Sên King-lo only had laughed.