In the miserable days that followed that day, Sên King-lo’s loyalty
never swerved, but his love reeled. He still loved his wife—love does
not die in an hour; only slow torture and persistent mal-usage can kill
love—but his contentment in her was maimed. But his loyalty held, for
he clung to it fast, and loyalty won.
He wooed her again, with no show of passion, but taxing every resource
of his splendid nature and subtle mind to draw her back to her old
confidence and contentment. His contentment was bruised and marred, but
his soul resolved that her contentment and ease should return. There
were men in England and America who ranked Sên King-lo high, as high in
ability and skill as in character—and they all were big men and wise,
and skilled in their weighing and gaging of manhood. But never before
had he been so nearly great as he was now, or so fine in method and
difficult achievement. He demanded nothing, pressed nothing, labored
nothing; but he heaped her comforts about her, anticipated her needs and
created them. And presently his charm reached her again (even through
the Chinese motley it wore) and steeped her again in warmth and
satisfaction. He wooed her again for himself and succeeded in his suit.
He wooed her, too, for China and failed, failed in the pictured
loveliness all about them, as he knew he perhaps was destined to fail
again in the teeming home of many people and old customs to which he was
taking her now.
She spoke of the beauty about them, its delicacy and majesty; tiny
flowers in the brookside moss, rivers of white light, torrents of shadow
on great crags and mountain forests—but she never _saw_ it. And Sên
King-lo knew; but he tended her gently and waited.
At night, when dusk and darkness curtained, he came to her tent, or
threw himself down by her side on the ferns gaily, wearing once more his
light English tweeds and carrying an English book in his hand, an
English jest on his lips, or gossip of cricket and golf. He longed to
read Yuan Mei (China’s garden genius of happiness, of thought, and of
singing) to her here where the world was steeped in all that had moved
Yuan Mei to song: longed to give her (because she was his, and he hers)
what Yuan Mei, Tu Fu, and Ou-Yang Hsin had given him, what China gave
him; but he bottled his longing up and read “Daniel Deronda,” or,
instead, a novel from Mudie’s, a _Morning Post_ leader, or verses from
_Punch_.
His heart ached, but his nerve never failed or his vigilance slacked.
And all the time China was calling him, claiming him, possessing him
wholly, as a child in the womb of his mother.
The child leapt.
But the man stood to his ploughshare, held to his bond.
And the fear in a woman’s eyes died.
The coolies sniffed at the verdure about them, as they shouldered the
chairs and boxes and trudged gaily on; for Chinese spring was turning to
Chinese summer.
They came on the edge of his home suddenly at noontide, a day of riotous
color and warmth. The half-mile from the outer gate to the wide-flung,
tulip-tinted dwelling looked but an easy breadth in the clear, ambient
radiance: a long, leisurely house, that looked a series of houses,
sprawled among persimmon trees and violet walks, the under-lip of each
up-curled roof elaborately carved, a house so much lower than the trees
beyond it that it looked, here from the hillside above it, like a
clumped growth of red and pinkish mushrooms crowding close together in a
nest of white and yellow lilies and ferns—for some of the roofs had
been newly painted and varnished or glazed, and blazed red in the
sunshine, and some were faded and blinked palely pink. A forest of
oak-trees stretched in the distance. A _pai-fang_ with markings of gold
and silver on its crimson lacquer stood spruce, graceful, and speckless
in a garden of tulips scarcely a stone’s throw from a small shabby
temple. Peasants—scantily clad, and clad too alike to show of what sex
at a distance—squelched in a great paddy field and chattered, so it
seemed—Ivy could not hear them so far—under their great sun hats as
they bent to their wet, oozing work. An old woman was carrying on her
back a bundle of faggots, larger than she, into a kiln-shaped outhouse;
an urchin who wore very little but ropes of marigolds—one on his head,
one on his hips, three round his neck—was perched impudently on a
great, patient buffalo, driving it round and round a dripping
water-wheel and thrashing it sternly with a long, harmless branch of
young, pliant willow. Peacocks promenaded the terrace. Ducks quacked
thirstily in a clovered meadow. A beautiful mare nuzzled the colt that
was nursing her and washed its back with a fondling tongue. A cow called
to her calf. A spinning-wheel hummed in a near mat-hut. Two graybeards
were playing backgammon under a mulberry-tree. Children were at play on
a far hillslope, for kites rose from it like a school of excited (if not
scandalously tipsy) butterflies. Dozens of tiny dogs scampered and
yapped on a mignonette field, and others slept in the sun. A cat was
chained to a sundial. And roses clotted everywhere; more roses and more
kinds of roses than ever grew in Virginia.
All the homestead place bristled and sang with human life; anvils rang,
chisels scratched, saws rasped, grain ran like noisy sand in the
man-made chutes and conduits; frail, busy smoke curled slowly up from
dozens of twisted chimneys; an employed, thriving, bustling world, the
home-hold of the Sêns. Beyond its low, stonewalled boundaries all was
wild and silent—a great active hive of human affluence, set in an
untouched wilderness of Nature’s holding.
Sên King-lo caught his breath, and his eyes filled with tears.
Ruby Sên’s eyes did not kindle. She smiled a little—and involuntarily a
word came in her alien thought: “Caravanserai.”
A servant came running, others ran at his heels. The high doorlike gate
was unchained, unbarred, and opened, and the guard-devils—or perhaps
they were gods—painted on it drew apart and aside, as if making
obsequious way for the Sên who had come home.
And Sên King-lo with his hand on his wife’s litter walked slowly on to
the house in which another Sên Ruby had borne him and died.
Sên King-lo’s soul flamed; but he leaned down to his wife as they
went—between prostrate retainers now—and spoke to her with as light
unconcern as he might have done at the Eastbourne or Windermere end of a
long day’s journey.