CHAPTER LIV
Ruby Sên did not hate her Chinese baby. And because she did not King-lo loved her with an added love.
Ruby loved her baby. It was hers—and Lo’s!
Ruby Sên had a valiant soul, and something of Sên King-lo’s valor and sweetness had crept into hers.
Mrs. Sên loved her wee daughter very much.
Sên King-lo loved his baby girl almost as tenderly as he loved the mother he had never seen. Once, in the demanding day of early wifehood when Ruby had asked him, as wives foolishly will, pathetically must, if his love of her was his great love, he had told her simply, bravely, “No Chinese loves any one else as he does his mother.”
They all grew to love her—except Emma Snow—she never did.
They named their daughter “Ivy.” Sên King-lo would have it so. But her signature was written on her face—a Chinese signature. Lady Snow had been right in that. Little Sên Ivy was unmistakably Chinese. Both Sên himself and Sir Charles Snow knew that they never had seen a being that looked more typically or more intensely Chinese. She had not a trace of Europe on her; but almost from the first Sên King-lo suspected that she had almost no trait of China in her, that—except for that outer sheath of Chinese beauty—she was all a Western.
Luckily for both the babies, Ruben was delighted with his sister and vastly proud of her—though he called her, as soon as he could talk, “funny Ivy!”
But in one thing Emma Snow was wrong. Baby Ivy was very lovely, in her vivid, flower-like Eastern way: a lovely, laughing, pomegranate child. She was lovely from the first. New-born babies are not often beautiful, unless to mother eyes. Most of them have a smudged, unfinished look, and they come red-raw and wrinkled into life. But Baby Ivy’s loveliness came with her, and it grew as she grew. Sir Charles Snow sometimes thought that, had she lived in China in the old imperial days, her face might have gained her the yellow chair of an Emperor’s first wife and the throbbing desire of any countryman that ever saw her. The Trojan war was not fought for a woman; but wars have been fought so in Asia, and Snow smiled grimly, more than once, thinking that her Surrey birthplace had perhaps spared Asia bloodshed.
Soon after Christmas the Snows left Brent-on-Wold. Emma was due in Devon where their children had been holidaying with her mother, and Sir Charles was wanted at the Foreign Office. M. P.s and Barristers and even mere peers may take and make themselves long and frequent holidays, but woe betide us all if the Foreign Office took a breather! That Whitehall bulwark of Empire must, like Tennyson’s brook, go on forever—though not often so tranquilly.
They stayed for the christening, and then the Sêns were left alone in their new home.
The baby throve, and Ruby was vigorous and active again. And Lo promised that she should ride with him soon.
Both secretly wondered if the local gentry was going to call, and, except for the other, neither cared.
The gentry was wondering the same thing and was both more interested and exercised about it than were Mr. and Mrs. Sên.
Several ladies, younger ones, wished to call; several others, older ones, preferred to avoid the necessity. But that had nothing to do with it. None of them would dare to call, or to receive Mrs. Sên, unless Lady Margaret Saunders did; and, if Lady Margaret did, no other matron of Brent-on-Wold’s upper-circle would presume not to do so.
Lady Margaret Saunders ruled Brent-on-Wold and its adjacent small estates, as completely and autocratically as Sên Ya Tin ruled in a coign of Ho-nan, and she ruled far less amiably, far more erratically. Sên Ya Tin was tyrannical but easy-going. There was nothing easy-going about Lady Margaret Saunders. She hectored the village shopkeepers, of whom her patronage was small; she alternately cajoled and abused the rector and almost invariably prescribed his texts; she had driven two curates away and sent one to the milder rule of the county asylum. She controlled the relieving officer, the cottage hospital, and the tennis club—although she’d never had a racquet in her hand. She directed the procedure of the cricket and football clubs and dictated the number of the buns and the strength of the tea with which they regaled visiting teams, though she had neither sons nor grandsons to bowl or to kick the national balls. She was the local flower-show, though the glass at “the big house” was not much and the grounds were more occupied with broccoli and potatoes than with roses and carnations. She had “early closing” changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays. And not even the cottage women who “went out to oblige” ever defied her.
No one defied Lady Margaret Saunders. She was not pleasing to look at and less pleasing to converse with. She had a German face, which was a libel on her ancestors, and an enormous Jewish nose, which was a crueler libel on the Hebrew people. All her forebears were Yorkshire. She sniffed in public and nagged in private. No one liked her. No one disputed or challenged her acid authority. She ruled.
Why? Because it was her nature to rule. Dominance was her being, and her dominance was as direct and relentless as Niagara. Her force was Titanic, and her bad manners were irresistible.
But she was not only obeyed, she was courted. And Lady Margaret was not only courted, but reverenced.
The “gentry” was her creature, disliked her to a woman, and feared her to a man.
Lady Brewster was the woman most nearly admitted to her intimacy.
General Saunders had left a leg in the Kyber, and his other leg’s foot as well. He spent his days now in a wheel chair. His wife called him “Polly,” and paid very little attention to him—in public.
They were childless.
Lady Margaret Saunders called on Mrs. Sên, and then the “gentry” rushed to do the same.
The gentry of Brent-on-Wold was two doctors, the rector, a scattering of army officers—many of them retired, others still on the “List,” and serving at Aldershot, Farnborough, Camberly and the War Office—a well-to-do musician who could neither play nor compose, a retired architect (who wished he hadn’t), a novelist who did write but didn’t seem to publish, and a veritable millionaire who had wandered in from Leadenhall Street (and escaped from Bayswater) in a Rolls Royce and a sable coat, with a chef, a maître d’hôtel and three footmen in his wake. Then there were a dozen others, neither rich nor poor, who owned their own homes and each paid a cook and parlor-maid, did nothing for a living, and dressed for dinner—with, of course, their families.
Sên King-lo had not chosen the locality of their new home for its society. He had chosen it for its roses and the beauty of its hills and vistas. Nightingales had a leafy stronghold in the woods and gardens of Brent-on-Wold. The house suited them rather more than moderately. It was not too far from London for people who had as good a car as theirs was. Sên King-lo did not in any way intend that Ruby should be cut off from London or from London friends, or that he should even stay permanently in the countryside, if she should prove to dislike it. For himself he craved a little rest, or, rather, he felt that he must have it. It was rest, not rust, he craved and thought he needed: not to slack his industriousness but to slake it in a hill-set garden. He liked “Ashacres”; Ruby liked it when he took her to see it; and, almost best of all, its purchase and occupation were immediately available. So he bought it, and they furnished it and moved in in less than a fortnight from the day that Ruby first saw it. Money in sufficiency can speed up most human sloths—even lawyers and furniture dealers.
But they did not dismantle their Kensington house, or even close it, for Ruby should have her old home ready and waiting whenever she chose to go there.
Lady Margaret Saunders had not intended to call on Mrs. Sên, and Lady Margaret was almost as little given to changing her mind as Sên Ya Tin was. But she had a nephew at the Foreign Office whom she loved better than she liked him, and when she heard that Sir Charles and Lady Snow were staying at “Ashacres” and that the influential diplomat was Mrs. Sên’s cousin, she thought she’d think it over. Then Lady Brewster had the presumption to assume that Lady Margaret Saunders would not call on Mrs. Sên, and that settled it.
Lady Margaret called at once. She liked young Mrs. Sên, and she liked Chinese Mr. Sên, a perfect gentleman, and intelligent, very much indeed, and she said so steadily for several days.
Mr. and Mrs. Sên were as pleasantly established in Brent-on-Wold as they’d been in London.