CHAPTER LII
Ruby smiled in her sleep that night, lying in her tent, dreaming pleasantly and kindly of a Chinese concubine who had been loath to say “goodbye.”
At dawn King-lo left her still sleeping happily and went quietly out of their tent.
He turned back on their route and retraced his own steps of the day before. On a hillock not far from the tent his wife was in but standing back on their road of travel, nearer, if only a few rods nearer, to the homestead he had left—forever—he stood and looked back towards where the red roofs lay that he could not see—that he would not see again. His face was very calm, but its gaiety had gone. No need to wear a mask now!
This was his last turning back.
He knew that he would not turn back again. This should be his last self-indulgence, his last lingering alone with self. He was going into exile—exile self-made, self-inflicted. He would not falter in his courage, or, while they lived, fail Sên Ruby, the mother of his son. He had sown—and he would reap. He would reap a golden harvest and lay its rich, ripened sheaves at her feet—and she should never know. She could not be of his people; to his utmost he would be of hers. His inner soul, his spiritual core of being, was his own, an ownership no man could renounce. His soul was his and China’s for all time; but his heart should beat for the wife he had chosen and taken, and his daily doings should be as her country’s.
He dismissed it then—and stood alone with China; a proud flush dyed his cheeks; tears filled his eyes.
Sên King-lo lifted his hands and held them out with a gesture of farewell and of endless fealty and longing towards the dominion of the Sêns, the queendom of Ya Tin.
He gave a greeting, and he took one.
Then he turned—again—towards his tents.
When Mrs. Sên lifted the curtain of her sleeping-tent and came through it, King-lo was directing the servants who were spreading the breakfast meal. He was humming “Annie Laurie,” and he was clad in English clothes.
Why had he done that so soon? she wondered. When she spoke the question later, Sên replied, “Oh, we may as well now. The country here is quiet again. I was needlessly concerned before, I’m sure, and the coolies know us better now and understand.”
And that was true. He had been needlessly doubtful of his coolies and the servants, whose menace had been one of social dislike and spiritual disapproval, not of physical attack. The coolies and servants were good-natured on all the return journeying. Many of them lived in Hongkong, and several of them had left their wives and children in the narrow, crowded streets of Victoria City.
As soon as their morning meal was over, they pushed on—towards Hongkong and the West. Mrs. Sên would not delay the restart to change then. But when they halted again to dine, and for the night (they had not camped at noon, and lunch had been but a picnic) she laid aside silk trousers and tinseled satin coat—to her surprise a little regretfully. They were pretty, if odd, those costly Chinese garments that Lo had chosen and given her. They would make wonderful finery for Albert Hall charity gatherings or for some ducal function of masquerade, but Sên King-lo’s wife could not wear Chinese costume for “fancy dress.”
Lo was giving her deft aid over a dinner frock that “did up” in twenty places, most of them beyond her reach, when she put the troubled question to him in their tent.
“That’s up to you, dear,” he answered with a laugh, as he snapped a final “popper” behind a puff of ninon, for they were dining in some state tonight, al fresco in the wilderness. “They have served their purpose. You might make cushions and tea-cosies and those vanity-bag things you women like to swing out of them, I’d think, and take them home for presents,” he added. Then he gave the puff of silvery, smokey ninon another careful tweak and bent and kissed a dimpled shoulder.
“You are very good to me,” Ruby whispered with her hands upon his coat. “Lo, tell me, does it hurt you very much—to leave China?”
“Very much,” he told her, “but it would hurt me more to stay. I have loved being here as only Easterners love such things, I think; but I am ready to go home now, Ruby. I take my treasure with me, and we go back to the treasure we have left. My wife is my happiness and my contentment. I would not give her for a world ‘made of one entire and perfect chrysolite’!”
No one called on Mrs. Sên in Hongkong—few knew that they were back. King-lo scarcely left the bungalow, the few days they waited for a boat.
Men came to see him, and he completed with them the business things he had planned and come to do.
The day before they sailed, by the man who took a message and a greeting to Sên Ya Tin, his wife sent a letter and an offering to the venerable lady and a horde of costly Chinese garments to the concubine La-yuên. Perchance something of China’s quiet, whispered message had reached Sên Ruby after all!
She kept one of the lovely native costumes, to treasure it for memory. She kept all her stickpins and every Chinese bauble that Sên King-lo had given her, and with them a flower that he had gathered her in the forest, and one that he had fastened at her breast, in their bungalow garden, late the night before. It was then that she had told him—shared with him—what was coming in the English winter. And for answer he had put his hands about her face and kissed her slowly on her lips.
They stood together on the deck, as the great ship moved slowly from Hongkong.
Presently his wife made an excuse of something she wanted in the cabin—no, she’d rather find it herself—and left Sên King-lo to take his last look, say his last goodbye to China—alone.
Hongkong grew a blur. Sên King-lo’s face was very pale as he took his last look at his country; but his eyes were calm and steadfast, though his heart ached with a pain passing the pain of woman. And he thought that the gods of China made mouths at him.