If they had given her courteous welcome, they gave her kindliest
parting. They gave her many words, and she understood the kindness of
their tones. And they gave her many gifts. Sên Ya Tin gave her jewels
and a jeweled lute, a silver box of sweetmeats, her own face, painted
before King-lo had been born, and a cape of peacocks’ feathers. The
women gave her silks and embroidered crêpes and opal-tinseled gauze. Her
husband’s kinsmen gave her ivories and jades, and the toddlers gave her
flowers and splint-baskets of persimmons and lychees, and one gave her
its favorite doll.
Sên Ya Tin gave them pleasant, tranquil speeding—at the outer door this
time—and there was no hardness in her eyes.
And Sên King-lo went as he had come, with his hand on his wife’s litter,
smiling lips and cheerful, happy eyes.
The red roofs of the homestead were dimming in the distance when a
veiled and shrouded woman slipped from among the trees, and held out a
tiny yellow hand to stay them.
At a gesture from lord Sên King-lo the bearers waited, and La-yuên came
closer, throwing off her dark merino veiling as she did so. She held out
to Mrs. Sên a long and slender parcel and another that was cube-shaped
and not large, each swathed in rice paper that glistened silky in the
daylight and each tied criss-cross and securely by thin, red
cord-string.
Ruby took what La-yuên offered; but before she could frame words of
thanks, or King-lo improvise them for her, the girl had shaken her
clasped hands at Sên Ruby, made the k’o-tow of subservience to the lord
Sên King-lo, and darted like a tottering lap-wing back towards the
homestead through the shelter of the forest. But they both had seen that
as she turned and sped away her eyes had filled with tears.
For the concubine had loved Sên Ruby and was loath to have her go.
“Ought she to have come?” his wife asked anxiously. “Will she get in
trouble for having left the courtyard?”
“Undoubtedly,” Sên smiled as he said it, “if a eunuch sees her, or her
baby cries before she gets back, and they hear and miss her. She’ll get
a furious wigging—but not much more for this ‘first offense.’ She’ll
not be beaten, have her stickpins taken away until the new moon, or get
less soy with her evening rice, perhaps. She’ll not be lowered to the
grade of the handmaidens. Po-Fang is very fond of La-yuên, and so is his
Number-one. But I dare say she’ll worm back in as snugly as she wormed
out. It’s a ‘capital offense,’ but I dare say she knows her wicked
ropes—many of the concubines do—though I have heard the grandmother
say that this girl was the most obedient of all the flowery quarter. It
will be all right if her baby does not cry.”
“No—it is his nap-time now,” Ruby said more contentedly. “He is not apt
to wake, and if he should, he’s got a stick of barley-sugar in his
hand.”
“Sweet dreams!” Lo laughed. “You needn’t fret, dear. It will be all
right, then, if the frog has got his suck-stick.”
“But if a eunuch does see her going back and your grandmother is told?”
“She will only shrug her shoulders, I think—today—and send the fellow
about some other business; but she’ll not hear it, I am sure. It would
be reported first to Po-Fang or to his Number-one. She has the right to
hear it first, and she would only laugh and say she herself had sent the
girl on an errand, and Sên Po-Fang would only wink at the eunuch and
toss him a coin. Don’t you worry,” King-lo repeated as he motioned the
bearers to move on.
It was very wrong of the lord Sên King-lo to be footing it across China
while his woman rode in a padded, cushioned palanquin. But he had come
much of the way so, he had entered and left the homestead of his people,
on foot, with his hand on his English wife’s chair, and he was going as
he’d come.
At dusk-fall they halted, and while their servants made their camp
King-lo and Ruby feasted on the grass.
“Now,” she said, as she gave him her empty coffee cup, and nodded to him
for a cigarette, “open the parcels La-yuên gave me. I want to see.”
“No.” Sên shook his head, as he struck her match. “You must not look at
your last parting gift, given you after you had left the protection of
the devil-screen. It will bring you bad luck for eleven moons, if you so
much as peep, until your journey is over, until you are safe behind your
own devil-screen of your own house door.”
“A devil-screen, in Kensington!” she tossed at him scornfully. “We
haven’t got a devil-screen at our front door.”
“Oh—yes, we have.”
“What?” Ruby demanded.
“Love,” her husband told her.
“Yes,” she answered softly, “and we’ll trust it, outside as well as in.
Cut those strings at once.”
When the rice-paper was pulled off it left a striped box of flat,
gaily-colored straw, a box of tiny drawers which, when Ruby drew them
out, showed each a saucer and a wee soft brush. Sên King-lo chuckled as
he leaned over her shoulder. It was a paint-face outfit—white, carmine,
rose and black, and a number of soft chamois “sop-rags” and “smooth-off
cloths” all complete, that his cousin’s concubine had given his wife.
“There’s a hint,” he chaffed her.
“And here’s a poem!” Ruby exclaimed, pouncing on a slip of crimson paper
lying unfolded on the little piles of chamois.
La-yuên could neither read nor write—the blind courtyard scribe must
have made the characters of her message—but she knew that it was sin to
deface, or even crease by folding, a printed, cut, or brushed word.
“Poem! More like a sermon!” Lo laughed as he took it from her.
“Read it to me,” Mrs. Sên commanded.
“ ‘Make thy face a garden of roses and lilies and find favor in thy
honorable lord’s eyes,’ ” Lo translated carefully. “Now you know!”
Ivy took the crimson letter from him with a quiet smile and put it back.
“Open the other one,” she ordered.
“You are a fearless woman,” Sên King-lo asserted as he obeyed. Then he
shouted joyfully. La-yuên had sent his English wife a Chinese
“back-scratcher,” but not such as you can buy any day in State Street in
Chicago, or in Museum and Hart Streets in London: “scratchers” quite
genuine in their not patrician way and useful enough, if you chance to
need them; but sometimes their tiny hands are imitation ivory, and their
long black handle-stems made of painted wood.
This tiny palm was of perfect, finest ivory as exquisitely molded and as
perfect as Ruby’s own hand; each wee knuckle flashed an embedded jewel,
very small but very good; and the sharpness of the minute finger-nails
was considerately smooth. The long handle was of “green-moonlight” jade:
an exquisite, costly toy, despite the raw suggestion of its useful
purpose: an implement of self-indulgence fit to rasp discomfort even
from the person of a red-button mandarin. And from the “chop” carved in
the jade of the long handle, King-lo made little doubt that in other
days it had done so; but he kept that surmise to himself.