It had been an unflawed year of renewal and achievement. They had ridden
a great deal—always gay and happy and near to each other when they rode
together—with something of the surprise and enjoyment of their first
ride together always recurrent and fresh in their last. Sên King-lo
danced as willingly as ever and as well. He still made music for his
wife whenever she bade him. Their congeniality held, and he was still
her lover.
The “gentry” had proved far less dull than it had seemed at first.
King-lo found and made many interests here, and Ruby found several
amusements.
Sên King-lo became a sort of lord of the manor, unofficial but
acknowledged and accredited, as respected as the official one who,
through no fault of his own, was very deaf, a trifle gouty, and more
than a trifle parsimonious. Mr. Sên was the more popular and the more
consulted of the two. Half the children in the village brought their
troubles to him, and so did the postmaster, the rector, the
constables,—there were three there and thereabouts—and the sidesman;
and more than once so did Lady Margaret Saunders.
Brent-on-Wold was a happier and a kindlier place, and a more awake and
alive one, because a Chinese man had come to live there.
Ruby was entirely contented now, and she often chatted frankly, almost
affectionately, of her days in China. Released from it, Ho-nan grew a
very pleasant and interesting place in her memory and in her talk. She
sometimes spoke of her bungalow on the Peak with a regret that was
perfectly unaffected and sincere. Her husband was Chinese, and so was
their name; but she did not mind in the least, because Lo was so
thoroughly English.
If Sên King-lo had trod a ploughshare, he had trod it to good purpose;
and, if he had, no one in England suspected it, unless Charles Snow did.
Snow caught a hint of terror in the younger man’s eyes now and then—or
thought he did; for he was never quite sure.
Next to her husband, Ruby Sên loved her children, and even King-lo did
not know that she sometimes wished that Ivy might, as she grew, grow a
little more English in appearance.
“I don’t know how ever Ivy will bring herself to present little Ivy when
she’s old enough,” Emma Snow had said to Sir Charles more than once. “I
know I couldn’t.”
Sir Charles made no reply.
Debonair always, interested in everything that his wife cared for,
boyishly ready to play tennis with her, to ride or sing with her, to
help her entertain or be entertained, yet Sên King-lo found time to be
alone sometimes and to spend a great deal of time with his children.
Baby Ivy spent hours on her father’s knee—in some quiet garden nook
when the day was warm enough.
The bond between the two was very close. Ruben’s chief love was for his
mother.
Ivy—little Ivy—was a child of many moods, and she had a vein of
quarrelsomeness. The two nurses found her a handful. Ruben gave no one
any trouble ever; but he was an odd little fellow. He liked to be alone
and would lie for hours on his stomach by the brookside, watching one
flower, or flat on his sturdy back, gazing raptly at the changing
clouds. His color came and went at the odor of a rose; his eyes would
fill at the singing of a bird.
Ruben had a “temperament”; Ivy had a temper.
But it only broke out angrily upon her father once.
They were sitting in the garden, the baby and the man. His arms were
close about her, and she was playing with his watch. The day was very
still; they were quite alone. A linnet called to its mate. At the sound
King-lo raised his face to the sycamore tree above him and quoted softly
but aloud a Chinese line that Li Po had made for Kublai Khan’s daughter
twelve hundred years ago. At the sound of the strange tongue she’d never
heard before, the baby’s Chinese face was convulsed with sudden fury,
and she tore her tiny hand from the bright yellow timepiece and struck
her father in the face with all her angry might.
* * * * *
When Sên King-lo was alone now he was very quiet. Neither book nor work
occupied him. He sat almost motionless, with his eyes on the trees or
turned with a brooding hungry look towards the East. A man might have
sat and seemed so who kept tryst with memories and with a self that had
gone far away. And when he kept alone so, and the bell in the old
village church chanced to ring, a strange wistful smile flickered slowly
on his face.
* * * * *
It was May again. The snowballs were out, and the golden laburnum and
the bluebells, and the early peas were hinting thinly in their pods. Sên
King-lo knew what no one else suspected. He knew that his exile was
nearly ended—unless indeed the angry gods of China would debar his very
spirit from the East.
He feared it—but he hoped.
His bones would lie forever in the quiet churchyard here—for he had
willed it so—until his ashes lived again in the petals of the flowers
growing on his grave; but he knew that his soul would take its flight
towards the East even while the English church-bells tolled his body’s
passing to its English grave. But he thought, he dared to hope and
think, that some time, after centuries of homeless wanderings,
perchance, though forever banished from his kindred “on high,” the gods
would give his spirit—at the Feast-of-Lanterns time, perhaps—leave to
mingle with the spirits of his ancestors and be with them in Ho-nan, and
look upon the living children of the Sêns as they came from the
red-roofed homestead to the high hillside, to watch the long processions
of the lanterns swaying, wending.
* * * * *
June had come. Sên King-lo was dying. He was dying as he had lived. He
was dying in the garden, sitting easy in his cushioned wicker chair, a
red rose on his knee, his eyes smiling into Ruby’s, his hand upon her
hair.
So quietly had his release come to him that until a week ago no one had
seen or heard it coming—no one but he.
A sudden spasm—here, too, in their garden—one afternoon had turned
Ruby’s happy chatter to a cry of terror.
The clutching, grinding pain had gone almost as it came, but she had
summoned doctors and wired to her cousin.
The doctors spoke of indigestion, and one who was a grandfather had
patted Mrs. Sên upon her shoulder and told her that it was “quite all
right.”
But Ruby Sên had seen the attack which the doctors had not, and her
alarm did not pass. And King-lo bent his will and his love to comfort
her alarm rather than to disabuse it.
Before Snow reached them, or the great man from Harley Street that Ruby
had ’phoned for, the local doctors could make nothing of the case, and
the London physician told Sir Charles frankly that he could make no
more.
No other attack of pain came; but each day Sên moved a little more
slowly, and his gray pallor deepened.
He took no farewells. He gave no last directions, made no last requests.
He neither kept his bed nor moped. He was ready, and all that he could
do for those he was leaving was in readiness.
He kept his wife’s hand in his and was her lover to the last, because he
loved her and because he knew that to have him that to the utmost moment
of their comradeship would be the dearest, proudest memory he could give
her.
But to Sir Charles, the day after Snow came, Sên King-lo lifted a corner
of his curtain.
“I know,” Sên said as they sat together for an hour—the only hour that
Ruby left him till he died—“that you will do all you can for
Ruby—always.”
Her kinsman nodded.
“But there is something I am anxious to say to you. I cannot lay the
burden on Ruby, and I cannot lay it down. I must pass it on.”
Snow held out his hand.
“Keep Ruben and Ivy in England—always—if you can. Build up to that.
Life will go hard with them. They must pay the price I owe! But I
believe that it will be a lighter price, and less galling, if they never
know my people or my country. I wish that I might hope that neither my
boy nor girl would marry.”
That was the strangest wish a Chinese father ever framed.
But Charles Snow understood, and again he merely nodded.
“ ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set
on edge,’ ” Sên King-lo quoted sadly. Then he said, “I fear least for
Ruben, but I fear—terribly—for them both. Ruben is Chinese. He looks
English, but he is thoroughly Chinese. If he marries, he should marry a
woman of our people, a Chinese girl whose parents live here, just
possibly. That will be so more and more, I believe. But I wish earnestly
that he may not marry—or Ivy either. You know why. Teach Ruben to
worship his mother, to garner his heart upon her, to live for her. It
will not be difficult, I am sure, since his instincts are so intensely
Chinese.”
Snow wondered if his cousin herself might not marry and hated himself
for letting the thought come to him here and now. She was still so young
and so full of life and of beauty.
But Sên King-lo knew that Ruby would be Sên Ruby while she lived. He
_knew_.
“It is for Ivy,” King-lo went on, “that I fear most. Mere baby that she
is, I know she is English. Yes, I am right. She is as English as Ruben
is Chinese, more so perhaps. The mixture of race bloods has modified
nothing racial for either of our children—fomented and intensified
rather. Ivy is wholly English. I can see it every day. Sometimes when I
have been alone, not often but sometimes, I have said something in
Chinese—just to hear the Chinese words, just to taste them on my lips.
I did, not long ago, when I was nursing her. She didn’t like it. She
loathed it.”
That sounded fantastic—but Sir Charles did not think so. He had lived
too long in China!
“An English girl with a Chinese face, an English soul and mind in a
Chinese body! What she’ll probably have to live through! I beseech the
gods that she may never marry!”
Sir Charles Snow noticed the plural.
“An English girl in a Chinese body!” Sên’s voice broke as he said it.
And he said no more.
“I will do my best,” Snow told him.
It was enough.
* * * * *
The specialist came again from London the next day, and again he spoke
alone with Snow after he had seen Sên King-lo.
“I am completely in the dark,” the great man said bitterly. “Mr. Sên is
dying—I can’t say how soon—but dying, if I know anything at all about
my business. We doctors have to doubt that now and then, unless we are
complete asses. I know that Mr. Sên is dying, or I think I do, because I
can see that there is no grip on life left in him; but I have not the
remotest idea what is killing him, and that’s flat. There’s been a touch
of heart trouble—no indigestion about it—but I suppose those fellows
here had to call it something, and no wonder they barked up the wrong
tree. I’ve been puzzled before—a doctor lives in one big maze of
puzzle—but I never ran up against a puzzle like this before. Never!
There has been a touch of heart trouble, but not enough to kill any
man—scarcely enough to kill a mouse. I’d give a limb to know what is
killing Mr. Sên.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” Snow said quietly, “if you will regard it as
professional confidence.”
“Of course, of course. But—you know? Out with it, for Heaven’s sake,
man!” But the physician’s eager voice was more skeptical than eager.
“Homesickness,” Snow told him.
“By Jove, you don’t believe that!” Dr. Foster was openly contemptuous.
But, even so, he was interested. “Go on,” he commanded. “How do you make
that out?”
“I know Sên King-lo well, and I know his race,” Snow replied.
“Well—well,” the physician said after a pause. “I wonder—we might have
tried it—strange things turn out true ones sometimes—I wonder—we
might have tried it—sending him back to China—but, I’m afraid it’s too
late now. By Jove, I wish I’d been on the track of this case six months
ago!”
“No,” Sir Charles Snow told him, “you might not have tried it. He would
not go.”
“Tut! tut! A sick man must do what he’s told, to get well.”
Snow made no reply.
“I’d give a good deal to have been called in sooner—six months ago or
more,” the physician repeated.
“You’d need to have been called in nearly five years ago,” Snow
retorted, “and then you would have failed. I was on the case five years
ago,” he added bitterly, “and I failed.”
“Indeed,” Dr. Foster remarked limply. Harley Street does not over-value
or over-esteem lay practitioners.