CHAPTER LI
If they had given her courteous welcome, they gave her kindliest parting. They gave her many words, and she understood the kindness of their tones. And they gave her many gifts. Sên Ya Tin gave her jewels and a jeweled lute, a silver box of sweetmeats, her own face, painted before King-lo had been born, and a cape of peacocks’ feathers. The women gave her silks and embroidered crêpes and opal-tinseled gauze. Her husband’s kinsmen gave her ivories and jades, and the toddlers gave her flowers and splint-baskets of persimmons and lychees, and one gave her its favorite doll.
Sên Ya Tin gave them pleasant, tranquil speeding—at the outer door this time—and there was no hardness in her eyes.
And Sên King-lo went as he had come, with his hand on his wife’s litter, smiling lips and cheerful, happy eyes.
The red roofs of the homestead were dimming in the distance when a veiled and shrouded woman slipped from among the trees, and held out a tiny yellow hand to stay them.
At a gesture from lord Sên King-lo the bearers waited, and La-yuên came closer, throwing off her dark merino veiling as she did so. She held out to Mrs. Sên a long and slender parcel and another that was cube-shaped and not large, each swathed in rice paper that glistened silky in the daylight and each tied criss-cross and securely by thin, red cord-string.
Ruby took what La-yuên offered; but before she could frame words of thanks, or King-lo improvise them for her, the girl had shaken her clasped hands at Sên Ruby, made the k’o-tow of subservience to the lord Sên King-lo, and darted like a tottering lap-wing back towards the homestead through the shelter of the forest. But they both had seen that as she turned and sped away her eyes had filled with tears.
For the concubine had loved Sên Ruby and was loath to have her go.
“Ought she to have come?” his wife asked anxiously. “Will she get in trouble for having left the courtyard?”
“Undoubtedly,” Sên smiled as he said it, “if a eunuch sees her, or her baby cries before she gets back, and they hear and miss her. She’ll get a furious wigging—but not much more for this ‘first offense.’ She’ll not be beaten, have her stickpins taken away until the new moon, or get less soy with her evening rice, perhaps. She’ll not be lowered to the grade of the handmaidens. Po-Fang is very fond of La-yuên, and so is his Number-one. But I dare say she’ll worm back in as snugly as she wormed out. It’s a ‘capital offense,’ but I dare say she knows her wicked ropes—many of the concubines do—though I have heard the grandmother say that this girl was the most obedient of all the flowery quarter. It will be all right if her baby does not cry.”
“No—it is his nap-time now,” Ruby said more contentedly. “He is not apt to wake, and if he should, he’s got a stick of barley-sugar in his hand.”
“Sweet dreams!” Lo laughed. “You needn’t fret, dear. It will be all right, then, if the frog has got his suck-stick.”
“But if a eunuch does see her going back and your grandmother is told?”
“She will only shrug her shoulders, I think—today—and send the fellow about some other business; but she’ll not hear it, I am sure. It would be reported first to Po-Fang or to his Number-one. She has the right to hear it first, and she would only laugh and say she herself had sent the girl on an errand, and Sên Po-Fang would only wink at the eunuch and toss him a coin. Don’t you worry,” King-lo repeated as he motioned the bearers to move on.
It was very wrong of the lord Sên King-lo to be footing it across China while his woman rode in a padded, cushioned palanquin. But he had come much of the way so, he had entered and left the homestead of his people, on foot, with his hand on his English wife’s chair, and he was going as he’d come.
At dusk-fall they halted, and while their servants made their camp King-lo and Ruby feasted on the grass.
“Now,” she said, as she gave him her empty coffee cup, and nodded to him for a cigarette, “open the parcels La-yuên gave me. I want to see.”
“No.” Sên shook his head, as he struck her match. “You must not look at your last parting gift, given you after you had left the protection of the devil-screen. It will bring you bad luck for eleven moons, if you so much as peep, until your journey is over, until you are safe behind your own devil-screen of your own house door.”
“A devil-screen, in Kensington!” she tossed at him scornfully. “We haven’t got a devil-screen at our front door.”
“Oh—yes, we have.”
“What?” Ruby demanded.
“Love,” her husband told her.
“Yes,” she answered softly, “and we’ll trust it, outside as well as in. Cut those strings at once.”
When the rice-paper was pulled off it left a striped box of flat, gaily-colored straw, a box of tiny drawers which, when Ruby drew them out, showed each a saucer and a wee soft brush. Sên King-lo chuckled as he leaned over her shoulder. It was a paint-face outfit—white, carmine, rose and black, and a number of soft chamois “sop-rags” and “smooth-off cloths” all complete, that his cousin’s concubine had given his wife.
“There’s a hint,” he chaffed her.
“And here’s a poem!” Ruby exclaimed, pouncing on a slip of crimson paper lying unfolded on the little piles of chamois.
La-yuên could neither read nor write—the blind courtyard scribe must have made the characters of her message—but she knew that it was sin to deface, or even crease by folding, a printed, cut, or brushed word.
“Poem! More like a sermon!” Lo laughed as he took it from her.
“Read it to me,” Mrs. Sên commanded.
“ ‘Make thy face a garden of roses and lilies and find favor in thy honorable lord’s eyes,’ ” Lo translated carefully. “Now you know!”
Ivy took the crimson letter from him with a quiet smile and put it back. “Open the other one,” she ordered.
“You are a fearless woman,” Sên King-lo asserted as he obeyed. Then he shouted joyfully. La-yuên had sent his English wife a Chinese “back-scratcher,” but not such as you can buy any day in State Street in Chicago, or in Museum and Hart Streets in London: “scratchers” quite genuine in their not patrician way and useful enough, if you chance to need them; but sometimes their tiny hands are imitation ivory, and their long black handle-stems made of painted wood.
This tiny palm was of perfect, finest ivory as exquisitely molded and as perfect as Ruby’s own hand; each wee knuckle flashed an embedded jewel, very small but very good; and the sharpness of the minute finger-nails was considerately smooth. The long handle was of “green-moonlight” jade: an exquisite, costly toy, despite the raw suggestion of its useful purpose: an implement of self-indulgence fit to rasp discomfort even from the person of a red-button mandarin. And from the “chop” carved in the jade of the long handle, King-lo made little doubt that in other days it had done so; but he kept that surmise to himself.