Ruby Sên did not hate her Chinese baby. And because she did not King-lo
loved her with an added love.
Ruby loved her baby. It was _hers_—and Lo’s!
Ruby Sên had a valiant soul, and something of Sên King-lo’s valor and
sweetness had crept into hers.
Mrs. Sên loved her wee daughter very much.
Sên King-lo loved his baby girl almost as tenderly as he loved the
mother he had never seen. Once, in the demanding day of early wifehood
when Ruby had asked him, as wives foolishly will, pathetically must, if
his love of her was his great love, he had told her simply, bravely, “No
Chinese loves any one else as he does his mother.”
They all grew to love her—except Emma Snow—she never did.
They named their daughter “Ivy.” Sên King-lo would have it so. But her
signature was written on her face—a Chinese signature. Lady Snow had
been right in _that_. Little Sên Ivy was unmistakably Chinese. Both Sên
himself and Sir Charles Snow knew that they never had seen a being that
looked more typically or more intensely Chinese. She had not a trace of
Europe on her; but almost from the first Sên King-lo suspected that she
had almost no trait of China in her, that—except for that outer sheath
of Chinese beauty—she was all a Western.
Luckily for both the babies, Ruben was delighted with his sister and
vastly proud of her—though he called her, as soon as he could talk,
“funny Ivy!”
But in one thing Emma Snow was wrong. Baby Ivy was very lovely, in her
vivid, flower-like Eastern way: a lovely, laughing, pomegranate child.
She was lovely from the first. New-born babies are not often beautiful,
unless to mother eyes. Most of them have a smudged, unfinished look, and
they come red-raw and wrinkled into life. But Baby Ivy’s loveliness came
with her, and it grew as she grew. Sir Charles Snow sometimes thought
that, had she lived in China in the old imperial days, her face might
have gained her the yellow chair of an Emperor’s first wife and the
throbbing desire of any countryman that ever saw her. The Trojan war was
not fought for a woman; but wars have been fought so in Asia, and Snow
smiled grimly, more than once, thinking that her Surrey birthplace had
perhaps spared Asia bloodshed.
Soon after Christmas the Snows left Brent-on-Wold. Emma was due in Devon
where their children had been holidaying with her mother, and Sir
Charles was wanted at the Foreign Office. M. P.s and Barristers and even
mere peers may take and make themselves long and frequent holidays, but
woe betide us all if the Foreign Office took a breather! That Whitehall
bulwark of Empire must, like Tennyson’s brook, go on forever—though not
often so tranquilly.
They stayed for the christening, and then the Sêns were left alone in
their new home.
The baby throve, and Ruby was vigorous and active again. And Lo promised
that she should ride with him soon.
Both secretly wondered if the local gentry was going to call, and,
except for the other, neither cared.
The gentry was wondering the same thing and was both more interested and
exercised about it than were Mr. and Mrs. Sên.
Several ladies, younger ones, wished to call; several others, older
ones, preferred to avoid the necessity. But that had nothing to do with
it. None of them would dare to call, or to receive Mrs. Sên, unless Lady
Margaret Saunders did; and, if Lady Margaret did, no other matron of
Brent-on-Wold’s upper-circle would presume not to do so.
Lady Margaret Saunders ruled Brent-on-Wold and its adjacent small
estates, as completely and autocratically as Sên Ya Tin ruled in a coign
of Ho-nan, and she ruled far less amiably, far more erratically. Sên Ya
Tin was tyrannical but easy-going. There was nothing easy-going about
Lady Margaret Saunders. She hectored the village shopkeepers, of whom
her patronage was small; she alternately cajoled and abused the rector
and almost invariably prescribed his texts; she had driven two curates
away and sent one to the milder rule of the county asylum. She
controlled the relieving officer, the cottage hospital, and the tennis
club—although she’d never had a racquet in her hand. She directed the
procedure of the cricket and football clubs and dictated the number of
the buns and the strength of the tea with which they regaled visiting
teams, though she had neither sons nor grandsons to bowl or to kick the
national balls. She _was_ the local flower-show, though the glass at
“the big house” was not much and the grounds were more occupied with
broccoli and potatoes than with roses and carnations. She had “early
closing” changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays. And not even the cottage
women who “went out to oblige” ever defied her.
No one defied Lady Margaret Saunders. She was not pleasing to look at
and less pleasing to converse with. She had a German face, which was a
libel on her ancestors, and an enormous Jewish nose, which was a crueler
libel on the Hebrew people. All her forebears were Yorkshire. She
sniffed in public and nagged in private. No one liked her. No one
disputed or challenged her acid authority. She ruled.
Why? Because it was her nature to rule. Dominance was her being, and her
dominance was as direct and relentless as Niagara. Her force was
Titanic, and her bad manners were irresistible.
But she was not only obeyed, she was courted. And Lady Margaret was not
only courted, but reverenced.
The “gentry” was her creature, disliked her to a woman, and feared her
to a man.
Lady Brewster was the woman most nearly admitted to her intimacy.
General Saunders had left a leg in the Kyber, and his other leg’s foot
as well. He spent his days now in a wheel chair. His wife called him
“Polly,” and paid very little attention to him—in public.
They were childless.
Lady Margaret Saunders called on Mrs. Sên, and then the “gentry” rushed
to do the same.
The gentry of Brent-on-Wold was two doctors, the rector, a scattering of
army officers—many of them retired, others still on the “List,” and
serving at Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberly and the War Office—a
well-to-do musician who could neither play nor compose, a retired
architect (who wished he hadn’t), a novelist who did write but didn’t
seem to publish, and a veritable millionaire who had wandered in from
Leadenhall Street (and escaped from Bayswater) in a Rolls Royce and a
sable coat, with a chef, a maître d’hôtel and three footmen in his wake.
Then there were a dozen others, neither rich nor poor, who owned their
own homes and each paid a cook and parlor-maid, did nothing for a
living, and dressed for dinner—with, of course, their families.
Sên King-lo had not chosen the locality of their new home for its
society. He had chosen it for its roses and the beauty of its hills and
vistas. Nightingales had a leafy stronghold in the woods and gardens of
Brent-on-Wold. The house suited them rather more than moderately. It was
not too far from London for people who had as good a car as theirs was.
Sên King-lo did not in any way intend that Ruby should be cut off from
London or from London friends, or that he should even stay permanently
in the countryside, if she should prove to dislike it. For himself he
craved a little rest, or, rather, he felt that he must have it. It was
rest, not rust, he craved and thought he needed: not to slack his
industriousness but to slake it in a hill-set garden. He liked
“Ashacres”; Ruby liked it when he took her to see it; and, almost best
of all, its purchase and occupation were immediately available. So he
bought it, and they furnished it and moved in in less than a fortnight
from the day that Ruby first saw it. Money in sufficiency can speed up
most human sloths—even lawyers and furniture dealers.
But they did not dismantle their Kensington house, or even close it, for
Ruby should have her old home ready and waiting whenever she chose to go
there.
Lady Margaret Saunders had not intended to call on Mrs. Sên, and Lady
Margaret was almost as little given to changing her mind as Sên Ya Tin
was. But she had a nephew at the Foreign Office whom she loved better
than she liked him, and when she heard that Sir Charles and Lady Snow
were staying at “Ashacres” and that the influential diplomat was Mrs.
Sên’s cousin, she thought she’d think it over. Then Lady Brewster had
the presumption to assume that Lady Margaret Saunders would not call on
Mrs. Sên, and that settled it.
Lady Margaret called at once. She liked young Mrs. Sên, and she liked
Chinese Mr. Sên, a perfect gentleman, and intelligent, very much indeed,
and she said so steadily for several days.
Mr. and Mrs. Sên were as pleasantly established in Brent-on-Wold as
they’d been in London.