The heart of a man stood still; Sên’s face flooded with color.
The girl was bending over his roses. She did not know he was there and
her face was eloquent; C’hi Yamei whom he saw lovelier because she wore
her Chinese garments.
And Sên Ruben knew that the time had come for him to speak--not to
her, though he believed even that C’hi Ng Yelü, the adopter of Western
ways, might condone, but to C’hi Ng Yelü himself, sending Kow Li as
preliminary suitor and go-between.
He would approach the Chinese maiden as a Chinese should. No rougher,
Western wooing was possible between his love and hers. It was hard to
keep back the words that surged from his heart to his lips, but he
would do even that to show his reverence for C’hi Yamei, the jade of
his soul. Kow should approach C’hi Ng Yelü, and should come as the
matchmaker sent by Sên Ruby. That meant more delay, for his mother
might stay even a week longer with the new-come grandchild in the
nurseries that Ivy its mother had forsaken.
A week of seven eternities! But no less than the most would he offer to
C’hi Yamei the yellow jasmine of the world.
Sên Ruben saw the rose on her breast. It gave him a message. His nails
found the flesh of his palms as he clenched his hungry hands, and his
breath tangled in his throat.
He wanted her so!
The girl bent her head still lower over his roses. The smile that
curved her lips grew sweeter, more tender, and Ruben knew that if that
dear face touched those yellow roses he should stride across the long
room and snatch his happiness to him--before it was given.
Lest that temptation came--not to be mastered by human man who loved as
he did--Sên Ruben spoke quickly. He dared not stand watching longer her
lips almost caressing the roses he had sent her; he could not turn and
go.
“Good afternoon, Miss C’hi.” He steadied his voice almost to coldness,
and he prayed that he had steadied his eyes. “Good afternoon. Please
don’t turn me out; Mr. C’hi sent me up here to wait for him. He
promised that you would put up with me until he came back. He was
leaving the house as I came up the steps, but he will be home again in
an hour. I have strict orders to wait for him--here with you.”
He rarely spoke to C’hi Yamei in English when they were alone but he
had not dared speak in Chinese now.
The girl started at the sound of his voice--Ruben saw that; but what of
it? She probably would have started if Billings, the aldermanic butler,
had accosted her so unexpectedly. Had he been less busy with gripping
himself, he also might have seen that C’hi Yamei had paled a little at
the sound of his voice.
“May I come in?”
Miss C’hi smiled, turned away from the flower-decked Brinsmead, and
went to a seat near the far windows--the window that looked down on the
garden.
“I did not know that Father was going out,” she began. “Oh--yes,
though, I did--I forgot--he said something about it at lunch. Please
sit down.”
“Thanks. I wonder if Pling and Yolu are inciting poor little Burmese
fish to murder and suicide to-day.” He glanced at his wrist. “It is
just on the Hour of the Tiger at home. I hope my cousins are taking
their pleasure less ruthlessly than they did two years ago to-day.”
“I hope so,” Miss C’hi agreed.
So--he did remember.
She turned towards the window, for she felt that her face was flushing.
“I hope that my father had an umbrella,” the girl said lamely. “See, it
is raining.”
Sên rose and went to the window. “So it is. I did not notice that it
threatened to as I came.”
That was quite true. Ruben Sên had paid no attention at all to the
weather as he walked from Kensington to Westminster. And he had not
noticed whether Mr. C’hi had gone out armed with an umbrella or
coatless and hatless.
A fine thick drizzle was falling. Ruben liked it; it seemed like a veil
shutting them in here gently--almost a symbol.
“Now you can’t turn me out!” he laughed softly as he turned and faced
Miss C’hi. “It was not raining when I came in and I have no umbrella.”
“How careless!” the girl mocked him. “No sensible person ever goes out
in England without an umbrella; it is riding a tiger. But I can lend
you an umbrella, Mr. Sên.”
“Will you? One of your own?” His voice said, “I’ll not return it to you
ever; I’ll keep it as long as I live, Yamei.”
But he sat down again, as he spoke, facing her. Apparently he was not
braving the outside drizzle at once.
Miss C’hi played with her girdle.
For a time neither spoke.
The man had no wish to speak--no wish to break their companionable,
intimate silence. It was intimate.
The girl could think of nothing to say.
The gathering rain tinkled the window panes, tapped on the glass like
fairy fingers.
“Thank you,” Ruben said at last in a queer low voice.
Miss C’hi looked a puzzled interrogation.
He moved a hand in salutation towards her embroidery-bordered sleeve.
“You are all Chinese to-day, C’hi Yamei, a Chinese flower wrapped
in Chinese silk,” Sên Ruben murmured in Chinese, “all of a Chinese
maiden’s lovely Chinese strewments”--his eyes swept from the little
padded shoes to the pretty dangling stick-pins--“all as it should be,
Lady C’hi Yamei, all but the face-paint.”
“I couldn’t find my face-paint box,” the girl explained; she would have
spoken more truly if she had said that she had no face-paint box here
in England. But she was making words to shut off a silence she feared,
catching up idle words carelessly to keep their talking safe.
She knew now what was coming, and she too wished her lover whom she
loved to say it to C’hi Ng Yelü. She wished it so, not because she
cared a Japanese _yen_--or one small cowrie shell--for the conventions
of East or of West, but because it would be easier to hear it first
from the father voice that had spoken all the intimate, tender words
she ever had heard. Moreover, though she herself cared not a jot now
for East or West, she was keenly sure that Sên Ruben cared everything
for China. C’hi Yamei was not minded that he should realize, as she
herself did, how little she now preferred Chinese ways and customs--if
she preferred them at all--to those of England; for she knew that he
would find it a flaw.
Moreover C’hi Yamei came of a race of women who for thousands of
years had only been wooed so before their wedding-day--wooed by the
go-between’s overtures and a father’s acceptance of them. Probably this
influenced her rather deeply, and made her share far more than she
suspected Sên’s conviction that his wooing of her in any but the old
accredited Chinese way would be a slighting of her.
The girl was deeply stirred and knew that she was. Almost she wished
that Sên would go. She felt shy of him--they alone here in “Reverence
Books” to which the servants would usher no chance caller, and she
in her Chinese garments, harem clothes that seemed to demand harem
seclusion for a Chinese maid who wore them. Décolleté at his mother’s
dinner-table, dancing a dozen times with his arm lightly about her,
laughing and chatting with him at dozens of functions--a little
less freely, though, than nice English girls would have done--Miss
C’hi never had felt at all shy with Mr. Sên. But she grew oddly and
naturally shy with Sên Ruben now, since they were Chinese and she in
Chinese dress. Worst of all she feared that at but a word of more
direct love-making she should cry. Her tears were near. To avoid what
she half thought might break from him, she said the first frivolous
and very English thing she could think of, rising and going towards the
other window as she spoke.
Ruben went with her of course.
The girl had jumped up quickly. Her stick-pins tinkled as she went, and
a tiny pack of apricot-colored flowers fastened not securely enough
over an apricot-colored ear loosened and shifted. Miss C’hi halted and
lifted a tiny jeweled hand to push the truant bunch of buds back to
where a girl’s hair-flowers should be. She lifted both hands, in case
the other little flower-bunch had slipped too, and accidentally her
impatient tiny fingers pushed back the little straight fringe of down
that lay like silken dust on her forehead.
“Now you are a wife, Yamei!”
It broke from Sên Ruben involuntarily as he devoured with leaping eyes
the strip of naked brow they should not have seen.
C’hi Yamei’s face had found its paint!
Her tunic rose and fell with the flesh that fluttered beneath it. In
spite of herself the girl’s eyes filled with tears.
But she laughed softly, a sound as silver and elfin as the
tinkle-tinkle of the jeweled stick-pins in her hair--a soft outburst of
mirth, that is a giggle, but should be described by a prettier word.
But it cannot.
The lover saw the rush of color painting her face; he saw the dimples
in the uplifted apricot-tinted arms from which the loose sleeves had
fallen; he saw the dew in Yamei’s black velvet eyes, saw her lashes
tremble, and the ring-jewels tremble from the trembling of her fingers;
he saw the girlish mouth quiver.
And Sên turned and fled.
He did not dare stay.
* * * * *
Sên knew that the time had indeed come for him to speak to C’hi Ng Yelü.