“Thou wilt cleave to her then, my son?” Ya Tin asked gravely, as they
sat alone at midnight conference.
“While I live,” Sên King-lo answered.
“Yet it tortures thee to go.”
“It tortures me,” he said.
“When do you wish to go?” Ya Tin asked calmly.
“Soon,” King-lo pleaded. “Dismiss me soon, O Mother, I entreat thee. The
lingering is hard.”
“And if I will _not_ dismiss thee—will not dismiss thee ever, Sên
King-lo, or release thee from the obedience and fealty thy ancestors
have sworn of thee? But chain thee to my side, and to thy place of
heritage where thou belongest, where thy spirit will be, no matter where
or how thy bones will go? What then?”
Sên King-lo held her eyes with his, but he made no other answer, neither
spoke nor moved.
They sat so while the water-clock dripped slowly in their silence.
At last the Chinese grandam laughed, leaning a little towards him,
mocking him with her eyes; a grim, gray crackle of laughing.
“Thou wilt disobey me, if I forbid thee go! And I am Sên Ya Tin, and
thou art Sên King-lo!”
Still he neither spoke nor moved. But his soul gave her soul answer, and
her stern soul met his and hailed it.
Still a time she let the water-clock drip and the silence keep between
them as they sat with nothing else between them but the tiny, low table
of her pipes’ lacquered tray.
“Enough!” she spoke at last. “Go! And go in peace, Sên King-lo,
first-born of my first-born. I have other sons of our race. But thou
shalt go richer than thou camest. Much of thy heritage shall go with
thee. Nay!”—as his lips moved to frame a word, his hand gestured
towards protest—“it is my will. I will not brook it otherwise; for thou
art the son of the dearest thing I ever suckled or quietened in my arms,
and it is punishment enough for thee that thou must go, must go from
China.”
Sên’s face quivered.
“But,” she added quickly, “thou art right to go, King-lo, and I would
not have it otherwise. I am shamed that thou must lie in the barbarian
land, shamed that thou mayst not dwell _here_, as thou shouldst, with
thy Chinese wives about thee and thy small-footed concubines and thy
scores of slave-girls. My honorable lord had many—more than he could
count, or cared to—but I counted them all, and I ruled them well. All
the province knew what a Number-one I was, and they heard it and spoke
of it in the Vermilion Palace at Pekin. My lord, thy father’s father,
boy, took no heed: he cared more for the stickpins in my hair than for
all the painted roses on his under-women’s faces; but I took great heed
of all his women and their children and of all that was his. And I burn
in flame that no such state as he kept thou shalt keep—in thy celestial
native land. But thou art right. I applaud. Did I forbid, thou wouldst
disobey,”—again the crackled chuckle—“and it pridens me that thou
wouldst. A Sên must pay his score at the inn of life. Thou hast made a
marriage-bargain with a foreign woman and made it in her own barbarian
way. It was thy weakness and thy sin. But now the tally-hour has come,
and thou must pay. The man who cheats a woman, or mocks her with a
payment in coin she does not value, is lower than the vermin that feeds
on putrid shellfish, fattens on the slime-bellied scavengers of the
ocean. Go—when thou wilt. And I will raise a _pai-fang_ for thy pardon
of our gods; I will build a great temple on the hill where the peach
trees cram the melons on its slope and the cypresses wear the winter
snow on its crest; and I will make the old temple, where thou madest thy
young play as a child, a riot of blooming flowers, a hymn of running
water. The nightingale and the kingfisher shall join in its song, and I
will cram the temple hall with jades and yellow roses. That shall be thy
penance here in China, as loneliness and longing shall be thy penance in
England—the England of thy wife; and perchance the gods will accept my
bounty and thy pain, and thou shalt come again to thy people in the
garden of on high. We will not often send message or courier to each
other, I and thou, for it is ill to scald a sore; but thou shalt think
of me, and I shall think of thee, across the oceans and the years. I
shall hold my pride in thee for the sacrifice thou makest and the troth
thou keepest even to the end; for it proves thee worthy of the milk I
gave thy father, O, babe of my babe. Greatness is built on sacrifice,
always it is so. I bless thee, and I bless thy sacrifice, Sên King-lo.”
He rose, unsteadily, and then k’o-towed before her slowly; once, again,
and then again. Then he slipped to her feet and laid his hand upon her
girdle and his face against her knees. And Sên Ya Tin laid her palms on
his hair and smoothed it softly.
At last she sent him to his rest, for the day was breaking, and as he
moved to go, she held his sleeve a moment, and said, “I like thy woman,
the girl with thy mother’s milk-name. She is a woman of the barbarians,
but she is a sash-wearer, Sên King-lo; I like thy English woman. And she
too shall have a taper and a crimson slip of silk-paper prayer in the
temple I will build, and another in the hall of the old temple over
yonder beyond the oak-trees where thou used to make thy playing in the
courtyard. And her name shall not be taboo or coarsely spoken in the
harem-courtyards of thy kindred. For she has worn a girdle of thorns
under her inner garments here, Sên King-lo, and she has borne it quietly
and bravely like the sash-wearer that she is. She has neither scratched
nor whimpered. If she bears thee a girl-child, I charge thee then to
send me word, for it shall have my stomacher of diamonds and my
gold-lacquered tobacco-box with the lizard of rubies on its lid.”
Then he left her, and she sat alone while the old water-clock dripped
the morning hours away.
And Sên King-lo lay a little on his mat, in the room that he’d used so
as a boy—lay down on his mat because Sên Ya Tin had commanded him.
Soon he rose, and when he had bathed and perfumed his hands, he lit a
taper before the ancestral tablet in the _ko’tang_ and went out through
the courtyard and the twisting yellow paths, till he stood alone beneath
the cypress-trees on the eastern hill.