An early guest or two were there already when Ruben reached the
drawing-room. He had delayed himself longer than he had realized
with Kow, and he had gone to the conservatory for a flower. Other
guests were announced as he shook hands with the Raeburns. Sên had
no opportunity to ask his mother even the names of the Chinese men
who were coming. Not that it mattered. Chinese surnames presented no
difficulties to him; he knew all the hundred of them by heart, knew
which was the home province of each, which were the most distinguished
in China’s history, and for what.
Whoever they were they would be welcome to him--but it would stir a
sore memory! Never mind; that would happen often, and be but a small
price to pay for the treasure that his memory held forever.
The girl he was chatting with laughed a trifle shrilly as Jenkins made
an announcement. Sên did not catch it.
Mrs. Sên called him to her; and Ruben turned to her and was face to
face with C’hi Yamei.
A cry, that neither four years at English public school nor centuries
of Chinese self-control so much as muffled, startled Ruby Sên--and
amused their English guests. C’hi Ng Yelü, standing just behind
his daughter, may have wondered what Sên meant, but two women knew
instantly.
Ruby Sên’s heart sank. She had heard the self-same note in Sên
King-lo’s voice years ago--when he had wooed her beside the blue
Potomac.
She admired her husband’s people enormously. Her own mixed marriage had
been unbrokenly happy. But--she was not ready to give Ruben up yet. And
she always had counted on Ruben marrying an English girl. How Ivy would
hate this! Nor, frankly, did she wish a Chinese daughter-in-law and
grandchildren preponderantly Chinese by blood.
It did not occur to Ruby Sên that, by any possibility, Ruben might fail
to win any girl he chose. And she believed that he would woo but one.
Miss C’hi seemed much less charming to Ruben Sên’s mother than she had
at Lady Sidley’s.
Sên made no gesture even to greet Mr. and Miss C’hi. He was ghastly
white and he had clutched at a chair-back, as a frightened girl might
have done. Speak any word he could not.
C’hi Yamei held out her hand, laughing lightly. “You are surprised to
see us, Mr. Sên? But we told you we were coming to London in April or
March, didn’t we, Father? Hadn’t Mrs. Sên told you that she had asked
us for to-night?”
Sên let her take his hand; it amounted to that.
As her hand slipped itself into his, color swept back into his face.
Her flesh was real and very sweet. This was no girl-ghost come to
him from bandit-infested An Mu-ti. Whatever the hideous mistake had
been--the mistake that had broken him, scorched all his manhood’s
future into ashes--this _was_ Yamei. She was clad in English clothes,
as he had not seen her in Ho-nan. And she spoke to him again in her
easy fluent English that had jarred him in the bamboo path and that she
had not again used in his hearing in Ho-nan. But this was the girl he
had worshiped in China, changed in nothing but a low-cut evening-gown,
hair that had neither stick-pins nor ointment, and a quiet prattle of
English small talk.
Sên murmured something in reply, speaking too low for even Mrs. Sên
and C’hi to catch it. Perhaps C’hi Yamei knew what he said--women are
clairaudient at such times--but certainly Ruben himself did not. But
he pulled himself together somewhat, though awkwardly, as a criminal
reprieved from the death-sentence might on the very scaffold, and made
shift to speak to C’hi who was waiting to greet their young host.
The touch of Yamei’s hand had told no message, but it had told great
news--she lived, and it had given him strength and social reassurance.
It was too late for Mrs. Sên to remake her dinner seating arrangements;
she regretted that it was.
“Why did it startle you so to see us again, Mr. Sên?” Yamei asked, as
they went towards the dining-room.
She felt his arm shiver a little under her glove, and she knew that he
did not look at her as he answered--for she was looking at him.
“I had heard that you were not living,”--his voice was
thick--“that--that you had been killed at An Mu-ti--in the woods near
the nunnery.”
“Oh! You heard it too, then! No Fee said that you had not. We were
at your kinsmen’s again, for a brief stay, as we went down to Hong
Kong--and--No Fee just happened to mention that you had heard nothing
of the rumor.”
The man’s heart leapt at the shyness that came into her voice.
“Thank God that it was only a rumor!”
“But it did happen,” Miss C’hi told him sadly, “but not to me. It was
another C’hi Yamei--a collateral kinswoman, Pin C’hi Yamei, not a near
cousin. If we were in China we should be keeping our year of mourning
for her, of course; but my father decided against our doing it over
here. White mourning would not have looked mourning here; and it would
have been a great inconvenience to my father--and rather absurd, too,
in the English clothes he prefers to wear over here. And black would
not have been mourning to us.”
“Of course not!” Sên said quickly. It pleased him to hear C’hi Yamei
say it. And it pleased him to think the frock she wore--that any
English girl might have worn on such an occasion--was her concession
to C’hi Ng Yelü’s regrettable Europeanism, and not her own willing
acceptance of “low neck and short sleeves.”
He looked at her now and he saw that her lips trembled a little;
perhaps because she had been fond of the other Yamei who _had_ died at
bandit hands, or perhaps in recalled horror at the hideous cruelty of
that other Yamei’s death. And he spoke of something else as he seated
her at the long, glittering table. His quivering excitement calmed to a
manageable thing in his determined endeavor to banish a troubled memory
from her mind.
“The first time we have eaten together, isn’t it?--except picnic snacks
in the woods at home,” he said lightly. But he added, as significantly
as he dared, “I am glad that it is _here_.”
Miss C’hi nodded brightly. “You call it ‘home’--Ho-nan?”
“Always! It is my home,” he told her in Chinese, “and I am Ho-nan’s
loyal child, in exile. Do not you call China ‘home’ always, C’hi Yamei?”
The Chinese girl’s face flushed beautifully, and Ruben saw her black
eyes’ sudden softness. “Yes, Sên Ruben; no matter where we go, no
matter how long we stay in exile, always China is my home--my only
home. But,” she added in English--English that, except for the music
of her voice, was perfect English--“I like my exile in this jolly,
friendly England--your mother’s country, Mr. Sên. I find England
delightful and English men--and women--kind and charming.”
“Yes,” Sên admitted, “it was my mother’s country--until her marriage.”
C’hi Yamei smiled at Sên’s reminder and at its assertion. She liked him
that he would not compromise.
“You like English men better than you do English women, then, Miss
C’hi?”
“How have you jumped to that conclusion, Mr. Sên?”
“No--you told me.”
Miss C’hi denied it with a crinkled lip, and a questioning lift of her
delicate very black eyebrows, eloquent and unambiguous.
“But--yes; you did,” Sên insisted with a laugh. “You said, ‘I find
English men--and women--kind and charming.’ You hesitated before you
added ‘and women’ and your hesitation qualified it.”
“Are you a barrister, Mr. Sên? Such a gift is badly wasted, if you
are not. You would be deadly in cross-examination. Perhaps I have
liked English men even better than I have English women, but I have
not suspected that I did. I have met so many more men than women over
here,” Yamei laughed softly. “And I seem to have come more quickly in
touch with them, and more sincerely. I think it is because all nice
women in the West have to keep themselves a little ‘stand off,’ out in
the general world as they are; hold themselves a little aloof, making
so for themselves a high wall of dignity that at home we need not think
of, because our barred courtyard walls make it for us.”
“Which do you think the best way,” Sên asked gravely, “the women’s way
of living here, or at home?”
“At home,” C’hi Yamei answered promptly. “I enjoy my freedom here in
England and, because my father wills it, I do not question it. But I
take it and enjoy it as an episode--just a lark--as a Chinese lady
likes and is amused by her wide license at the Lanterns’ Feast once a
year. But I do not find it really ‘freedom,’ the living outside of the
courtyard as one does here. I do not find it really a freedom because
one must so be on one’s guard always. I find that I cannot quite
approve it, Mr. Sên, and it is not always that I am able to enjoy it.
I feel here that always I am on sentry duty outside the camp of my own
personality.”
“With me? Talking here with me, in my mother’s house?” Sên broke in.
“Of course,” the girl asserted with a tiny teasing laugh. “I believe,”
she added gravely, “that there is more true freedom in a Chinese _kuei_
than in any English drawing-room or at any Western function. Yes,” she
went back, speaking slowly, “perhaps I do like my English men friends
a little better than I do the English girls and older women I know.
Probably that is a sort of vanity; for I know that the men I meet here
like me better than the women do.”
Sên laughed softly.
Miss C’hi did not pretend not to understand him perfectly, for she said
at once, and quite seriously: “Yes; that, of course, is inevitable.
There can be no chance, because no cause, for jealousy in the Chinese
flowery quarters; while there must be jealousy, a strongly armed
neutrality, at best, among women who do not ‘stay at home’ and are not
‘shut in.’”
Sên Ruben had not thought of that ever. He considered it gravely for a
moment. It staggered him rather. Yet, as he threw his mind back to the
courtyards of his kinswomen at home, he saw C’hi Yamei’s point, and his
intimate memories of Sênland gave her startling argument strong support.
More freedom--for women--in a Chinese harem than in London society!
Distinctly that was a new thought. But Sên suspected that the more he
thought it over--presently at his leisure--the more convincing he would
find it.
And so it proved.