When they lingered together for a few moments after their guests were
gone--as it was their custom to do, and usually for longer than they
did to-night--Mrs. Sên did not mention either Mr. C’hi or his daughter
to her son. She had no need to ask, “How did you like my new Chinese
friends?” She knew; and she had no wish to hear Ruben say it.
And she sent him from her sooner than she wished, for she dreaded
sitting alone here in front of the gentle fire--sitting alone and
making the sharp stock-taking of life that she knew was hers to take
before she slept. She sent him away because her shrewd mother-eyes saw
that beneath his deep new happiness Ruben was strangely tired.
Ruben was tired. Small wonder that he was. Bravely as he had borne
it, the grind of the long weeks since the news of C’hi Yamei’s cruel
death had shattered him at the threshold of the _kuei_, had worn him
relentlessly. He had steeled himself to carry himself gaily, for
his mother’s sake. His devotion to her, his great pride in her and
his unquenchable enjoyment of her companionship had made even that
unselfishness and sacrifice not only a matter of course, but had made
it easier than it could have been to a different son of a different
mother. But his sorrow for Yamei and for his loss of her had gnawed him
ceaselessly; and the living grief that one hides, secreting it with
constant vigilance beneath smiling face and debonair manner, has a
sharper tooth than ingratitude.
To-night’s revulsion--the sudden flood of joy and hope--had whipped
him soul and body. He had been a widowed lover, a Chinese always to
be childless, when he had come into this drawing-room a few hours
ago. He had come in to know himself, almost instantly, again perhaps
bridegroom--husband--father. Great blows of intense joy are harder
to take quietly than the blows of sudden grief. Reprieve calls for
sterner, firmer self-control than does sentence. The descent from
the scaffold is more difficult, more fumbling, than the ascent.
Pride--the very relief of knowing that it all will be over in a moment
now--braces the criminal to the gallows. The sudden new lease of life
devastates him mind and body--frays his human nerves more sharply than
can the sight of the dangling rope.
Ruben had been, in mere good behavior and in respect of her, obliged
to meet C’hi Yamei--come back to him from the dead--conventionally, to
greet her almost casually--as soon as he could. It had not been easy.
Dinner had been almost as much of an ordeal as a pleasure. He was
not on sure ground with the C’his by any means. He dared not startle
the girl or affront her father. He had had to guard sternly his eyes
and voice--to watch his words. And he had had to avoid scrupulously
making the Chinese girl in any way conspicuous, by glance or tone of
his, at his mother’s English dinner table--conspicuous to a roomful of
quick-witted, observant English people. He had had to turn away from
her now and then and make small talk with the woman on his left--speak
social nothings in English while his mind was thinking riotously in
Chinese.
In the drawing-rooms after dinner he had had to leave her a good deal
of the evening, to mingle with his mother’s other guests, to be their
host. He had had to let her go with no more open emphasis of his regret
at her going than he had showed the others.
None of it had been easy. Sên was very tired.
He accepted his mother’s dismissal without reluctance--or pretense of
it.
“No,” Mrs. Sên told him, “I am not going up yet. Clark will begin to
undress me, whether I want her to or not, the moment she sees me; I
know Clark! Send her word to go to bed herself--or pop your head in my
door as you pass it, and tell her. I feel like toasting my toes here
alone for a bit--and I’m going to. I’ve some very serious things to
think out before I go to bed. I have tangled to-morrow rather, and I
must make up my troubled mind which important over-lapping engagements
I’ll keep and which I’ll break. Just give me my engagement book,
Rue--it’s down there, behind those carnations. I was grouching over it
when Jenkins announced the Palmers.”
Ruben laughed and brought the little social volume to her, kissed her
good-night, and left her unsuspiciously.
And if he had wondered a very little that she, who had told him so
enthusiastically that two Chinese were coming here to-night, had spoken
no word of them now, Ruben had been glad that she had not. Even to her
he longed not to speak of C’hi Yamei to-night.
He was not surprised to find Kow Li waiting for him in his room.
Kow Li had his mask off! The old man’s wrinkled yellow face was
coruscated with delight and triumph. If Sên Ruben had any doubt how it
was to end, Kow Li had none.
But he too saw that Ruben was tired. He had expected him to be.
Kow had known that the great Ta Jen C’hi Ng Yelü was to be Mrs. Sên’s
guest here to-night. It was that that had brought the old millionaire
from the curio shop to stand in servant-attendance behind a so noble
Chinese Ta Jen’s chair, to see that inferior English “rice” was
offered to a descendant of Mencius with decent ceremony. But Kow Li
had not known that the Chinese maiden whose portrait had hung at the
London Academy, and whom they--Lord Sên Ruben and he--had sought so
ceaselessly and so unavailingly, was a C’hi lady. He too had believed
_her_ gone on-High; for Sên Ruben had told him when first back from
Ho-nan, “Look for the perfect pearl-one no more, Kow Li. I have found
her, and I have lost her. Kwan Yin-ko has gathered her into her own
courtyard on-High.”
Only that once had she been mentioned between them.
Kow Li had known Sên Ruben’s grief; had grieved for it and had
respected it.
Nor was C’hi Yamei mentioned between them to-night.
Old Kow, wise in the blunders of rumor, had understood it all
accurately enough, if not its detail, the instant he had seen Sên Ruben
and the maiden of the picture together in the dining-room.
The details of Ruben’s mistake he might learn some day, or he might
not; it was of complete indifference to Kow Li, for it was of no
importance.
The flower-of-jade fact stood: Sên Ruben had found his heart’s desire.
As though his master were again a little child, old Kow Li undressed
and tended him. Kow Li tucked Ruben in lingeringly and left him.
It were difficult to say which was the happier--the young Sên sleepless
but dreaming, or the old yellow gray-beard padding softly with careful
quiet down the richly-carpeted stairs of the hushed house.
Probably Kow Li was. Ruben doubted and feared almost as much as he
hoped and loved. Kow Li neither doubted nor feared; his cup was full;
he was altogether jubilant.
Ruby Sên was not happy.
Sitting alone in the vast drawing-room, the red-bound engagement-book
she had not opened, a patch of brilliant color on the lemon of her
satin gown, for the first time since her early girlhood Mrs. Sên looked
her years; her face a little drawn, her brooding eyes heavy--not with
sleep--a restless toe tapping the steel fender, a nervous hand picking
at her skirt--watching a dying fire she did not see.
It was morning when Mrs. Sên rose wearily, left the little red book
unheeded where it fell, and dragged drearily up to her room.