Sên King-lo did not sleep that night, torn between two vibrant
emotions—sorrow at the impending separation from his wife and joy to go
home again.
Perhaps Ruby Sên caught in her sleep something of his double strain, for
she woke as the first light filtered through their loose-drawn curtains;
and her waking was sharp and instant, wide-eyed at once, which it rarely
was. Usually she stirred and dozed, coming back very gradually to the
life of brazened day, as the convolvulus sleepily unfurls its twisted
spiral to the dawn. She was fast asleep—then, wide awake.
Sên King-lo turned and took her in his arms, and told her where he was
going, when and why.
Her dark eyes sparkled with quick pleasure. But she exclaimed chidingly,
“And that was what was in those two letters you had from China by the
first post yesterday! And you’ve only told me now! A whole day wasted,
and with all the packing to do in no time at all! Lo, you are simply
wicked.”
“Since when have you done my packing, Mrs. Sên? And I seem to remember
that I not unfrequently have done yours. My mistake no doubt.”
Ivy giggled and tried to shake him. There was an interlude.
“I shall not take much luggage,” Lo told her.
“_Your_ luggage!” his wife retorted contemptuously. “Two handkerchiefs
and a razor and a book of poems—I know _your_ luggage. But you don’t
imagine that I _and_ Baby _and_ Nurse are going half-way across the
world with only one suitcase between us, do you?”
“Dear,” her husband said very gently, “we couldn’t take Baby. It’s too
far, the way too hard, whole weeks of discomfort, if not worse—for you
and him, I mean. I shall enjoy every rod of it, with my goat-legs—and
home at the end of the journey. I never am ill, and, if I were, the
smell of Ho-nan would be all the medicine I needed. But we can’t take
our frogling off of the doctors’ beats.”
“No!” the frogling’s mother instantly agreed. “Oh—Lo—I shan’t like
leaving him behind. But—of course—for his own sake—but, oh! Lo—how
shall we do it!”
“Of course not,” he answered her quickly, with a hand on her hair, “so
you’ll have to stay with him, mother-girl.”
Ruby Sên slipped from her husband’s arms, thrust them gently but firmly
away, and sat up on the pillows, eying her husband.
“I am going with you, Lo,” she told him quietly.
“No,” he said, a little tensely, “not this time. I can’t take _you_ to
China _now_, heart of my heart.”
“Why?”
“The time isn’t ripe. You wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“I should be with you.”
Sên King-lo thanked her with his eyes and with the touch of his hands.
They were lovers still, these two who had ventured the perilous
marriage.
But he persisted, “I cannot take you, dear. I’d rather give it up than
do that.”
“You want to go, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “And you think that you
ought?”
“I know that I ought. And I want to go more than I could tell you.”
“But not to have me with you?”
“Always that. But not to _take_ you with me. I must not.”
Ruby studied the yellow flowers on the blue eiderdown a moment and then
turned her eyes again to her husband’s and searched his face, laying her
hand, and keeping it there, on his hand that lay on the lace below her
throat. She said, “Are you _ashamed_ to take me to China, Lo? Ashamed to
have me there with you?”
Sudden color flooded the face of the Chinese man; but he answered her
truthfully and fairly, as he always had and always would do.
In every marriage there must be something of sacrifice—and always it
must be so, because the bonds that fetter human souls one from the other
are eternal set—always have been and always must be—till we cross the
River; and it is in the higher wedlock, the happiest union, most nearly
perfected, that that sacramental sacrifice is the greatest and
costliest. In the sacrifices to come it might be laid upon him to keep
from her unsaid some of the thoughts that welled to his heart and vexed
his mind—indeed already he had done so once or twice, eagerly willing
to bear tenfold any trouble alone rather than to share it with her. But
he never had lied to his wife in small things or great, and it did not
occur to him to do it now in this hour of their intimate mutual testing.
And though he would instantly, ungrudgingly, have sacrificed to her his
life and things far dearer than life, he could not sacrifice even to her
his word—and truth was a very part of his loyalty. There were
white-skinned women in London—a few—who pitied Mrs. Sên, even while
they sought her and made much of her—pitied her because she was the
wife of an Eastern—but there were sadly few who might not have envied
her had they known the quality of her husband’s loyalty—exquisite and
absolute.
“Ashamed!” he repeated. “Never that! Need you ask?”
“What is it then?”
“Afraid. Afraid for you, dearest.”
“Of what?” She would not let him off.
And he went on simply and bravely and left no blank in this confession.
“Afraid of slights and slurs. They might not come, but they might.”
“Need we care?” she demanded, pressing a little the fingers under hers.
“ ‘Where MacGregor sits _is_ the head of the table.’ ”
Sên King-lo made no reply.
“Slights from whom, Lo?”
“From my own people, perhaps.”
She bent over him then, and something as a mother might. “ ‘Thy people
shall be my people,’ ” she crooned, “ ‘and whither thou goest there also
will I go.’ ”
Sên King-lo gathered his wife down to his breast and held her there.
Neither spoke. The room was very quiet.