Old women’s ignorant, unscientific tales, silly peasant chatter—English
tales, English chatter—ribaldry lurched threateningly to her
recollection. Laughed at, turned from in disgust, when she had heard
them, they half distracted her now—and she had been near enough
distraction without their sudden menace. What if . . .
Trembling violently, she crouched still lower on the ground and hid her
face on the old tree’s trunk.
King-lo, coming to find her, heard her wild sobbing long before he saw
her.
He quickened his pace; but he came very quietly, and when he reached her
he knelt down and laid his hand upon her shoulder and left it there
without a word.
And as he waited for the rougher paroxysm of her grieving to wear itself
a little out, he saw that it was an old apple-tree that lay upon the
ground, an apple-tree struck down by some raging storm of China, in one
of those fury times when the Yellow Sorrow lashed and churned its low
banks into wide, endless miles of hideous flooded wreckage and of
seaweed thick with stark and twisted floating human bodies, and when
angry winds mowed peasant homes and huts of mat and reeds as sickles mow
the ripened grass; but that, so stricken, the tree still lived and grew
and bore, its good roots still holding securely in the earth. His face,
already tender for his stricken woman, took an added softness and an
added strength. So, he thought, a man knocked to the ground might hold
with steadfast fibers to the foundations and nourishment of being, still
grow and give.
He knew the old tree well. He had climbed it and rifled it of its
tasteless, rosy, scented apples often when a boy.
He saw the veil of white and pink its blossoms scarfed upon the grass.
He saw the little wild flowers blowing near it—the June wild flowers of
Virginia, and he remembered. He saw love’s confession and its shyness
come in a girl’s dark English eyes. He held her surrender and her
dearness in his arms.
He knew that he would remember this old apple-tree, its courage and its
beauty, this _one_, selfsame apple-tree, in China and Virginia, with its
rosy, hopeful, perfumed signal on the ground, its sturdy triumph of
endurance and persistence in prostration, its dual message and its dual
memory, the little wild flowers smiling at the ferns beside it; he saw
in it a token and a commandment, and he knew that it would live with him
while he lived and that living it would link—in his spirit—East and
West.
He laid his hand upon his wife’s.
Ruby stirred to the touch and let him lift her to his arms.
“It’s my head,” she told him, choking back her sobs. “It has ached all
day”—as indeed it had. “I wish you hadn’t found me while I was so
foolish.”
“I am very glad I did,” he answered.
“The pain made me cry,” she whispered brokenly. “I won’t cry any more.”
Sên King-lo had never seen her cry before. But he only said quietly, as
he soothed her hair, “Cry it out, dear.”
But she was made a little of his own metal, and she laughed through her
dwindling sobbing and dried her face upon his sleeve.
He held her close, and she seemed glad to nest so. And they stayed
together in the quiet, while a squirrel bounced softly back and looked
them up and down.
“It will be better soon now,” Ruby said presently. “It is better
already.”
“We must try to cure it soon, Ivy.” He had never called her that before.
“Rest a little longer, sweetheart, then let me take you back and bathe
it while you try to sleep. I cannot take a sick girl the long trail that
is waiting for us, and I had hoped that we might start tomorrow.”
“Start—” She dared not say the rest, but he felt the pulse leap in her
wrist.
“—for home, dear,” he finished for her. “It is time we went.”
She made no answer. She could not trust her voice, and she was trying
desperately to keep some of the joy from her face.
“Are you not rested a little?” Lo asked her before long. “Shall we go,
slowly, now?”
“Quite rested—and very much ashamed,” Ruby told him.
Sên lifted her and led her beside him, with his arm about her shoulder.
When they saw the red roofs in the distance, the red up-curling roofs of
his birthplace, Ruby drew away from him and faced him.
“Lo,” she asked, “are you sure that you are ready? Is there any hurry?
Lo—tell me—do you want to go?”
“Want to go!” Sên mocked her, laughing down at her, and his eyes laughed
with his lips, “want to go _home_—and to Ruben!”
And his wife believed him.
It was the first lie Sên King-lo had ever told her.