CHAPTER LV
It had been an unflawed year of renewal and achievement. They had ridden a great deal—always gay and happy and near to each other when they rode together—with something of the surprise and enjoyment of their first ride together always recurrent and fresh in their last. Sên King-lo danced as willingly as ever and as well. He still made music for his wife whenever she bade him. Their congeniality held, and he was still her lover.
The “gentry” had proved far less dull than it had seemed at first. King-lo found and made many interests here, and Ruby found several amusements.
Sên King-lo became a sort of lord of the manor, unofficial but acknowledged and accredited, as respected as the official one who, through no fault of his own, was very deaf, a trifle gouty, and more than a trifle parsimonious. Mr. Sên was the more popular and the more consulted of the two. Half the children in the village brought their troubles to him, and so did the postmaster, the rector, the constables,—there were three there and thereabouts—and the sidesman; and more than once so did Lady Margaret Saunders.
Brent-on-Wold was a happier and a kindlier place, and a more awake and alive one, because a Chinese man had come to live there.
Ruby was entirely contented now, and she often chatted frankly, almost affectionately, of her days in China. Released from it, Ho-nan grew a very pleasant and interesting place in her memory and in her talk. She sometimes spoke of her bungalow on the Peak with a regret that was perfectly unaffected and sincere. Her husband was Chinese, and so was their name; but she did not mind in the least, because Lo was so thoroughly English.
If Sên King-lo had trod a ploughshare, he had trod it to good purpose; and, if he had, no one in England suspected it, unless Charles Snow did.
Snow caught a hint of terror in the younger man’s eyes now and then—or thought he did; for he was never quite sure.
Next to her husband, Ruby Sên loved her children, and even King-lo did not know that she sometimes wished that Ivy might, as she grew, grow a little more English in appearance.
“I don’t know how ever Ivy will bring herself to present little Ivy when she’s old enough,” Emma Snow had said to Sir Charles more than once. “I know I couldn’t.”
Sir Charles made no reply.
Debonair always, interested in everything that his wife cared for, boyishly ready to play tennis with her, to ride or sing with her, to help her entertain or be entertained, yet Sên King-lo found time to be alone sometimes and to spend a great deal of time with his children. Baby Ivy spent hours on her father’s knee—in some quiet garden nook when the day was warm enough.
The bond between the two was very close. Ruben’s chief love was for his mother.
Ivy—little Ivy—was a child of many moods, and she had a vein of quarrelsomeness. The two nurses found her a handful. Ruben gave no one any trouble ever; but he was an odd little fellow. He liked to be alone and would lie for hours on his stomach by the brookside, watching one flower, or flat on his sturdy back, gazing raptly at the changing clouds. His color came and went at the odor of a rose; his eyes would fill at the singing of a bird.
Ruben had a “temperament”; Ivy had a temper.
But it only broke out angrily upon her father once.
They were sitting in the garden, the baby and the man. His arms were close about her, and she was playing with his watch. The day was very still; they were quite alone. A linnet called to its mate. At the sound King-lo raised his face to the sycamore tree above him and quoted softly but aloud a Chinese line that Li Po had made for Kublai Khan’s daughter twelve hundred years ago. At the sound of the strange tongue she’d never heard before, the baby’s Chinese face was convulsed with sudden fury, and she tore her tiny hand from the bright yellow timepiece and struck her father in the face with all her angry might.
When Sên King-lo was alone now he was very quiet. Neither book nor work occupied him. He sat almost motionless, with his eyes on the trees or turned with a brooding hungry look towards the East. A man might have sat and seemed so who kept tryst with memories and with a self that had gone far away. And when he kept alone so, and the bell in the old village church chanced to ring, a strange wistful smile flickered slowly on his face.
It was May again. The snowballs were out, and the golden laburnum and the bluebells, and the early peas were hinting thinly in their pods. Sên King-lo knew what no one else suspected. He knew that his exile was nearly ended—unless indeed the angry gods of China would debar his very spirit from the East.
He feared it—but he hoped.
His bones would lie forever in the quiet churchyard here—for he had willed it so—until his ashes lived again in the petals of the flowers growing on his grave; but he knew that his soul would take its flight towards the East even while the English church-bells tolled his body’s passing to its English grave. But he thought, he dared to hope and think, that some time, after centuries of homeless wanderings, perchance, though forever banished from his kindred “on high,” the gods would give his spirit—at the Feast-of-Lanterns time, perhaps—leave to mingle with the spirits of his ancestors and be with them in Ho-nan, and look upon the living children of the Sêns as they came from the red-roofed homestead to the high hillside, to watch the long processions of the lanterns swaying, wending.
June had come. Sên King-lo was dying. He was dying as he had lived. He was dying in the garden, sitting easy in his cushioned wicker chair, a red rose on his knee, his eyes smiling into Ruby’s, his hand upon her hair.
So quietly had his release come to him that until a week ago no one had seen or heard it coming—no one but he.
A sudden spasm—here, too, in their garden—one afternoon had turned Ruby’s happy chatter to a cry of terror.
The clutching, grinding pain had gone almost as it came, but she had summoned doctors and wired to her cousin.
The doctors spoke of indigestion, and one who was a grandfather had patted Mrs. Sên upon her shoulder and told her that it was “quite all right.”
But Ruby Sên had seen the attack which the doctors had not, and her alarm did not pass. And King-lo bent his will and his love to comfort her alarm rather than to disabuse it.
Before Snow reached them, or the great man from Harley Street that Ruby had ’phoned for, the local doctors could make nothing of the case, and the London physician told Sir Charles frankly that he could make no more.
No other attack of pain came; but each day Sên moved a little more slowly, and his gray pallor deepened.
He took no farewells. He gave no last directions, made no last requests. He neither kept his bed nor moped. He was ready, and all that he could do for those he was leaving was in readiness.
He kept his wife’s hand in his and was her lover to the last, because he loved her and because he knew that to have him that to the utmost moment of their comradeship would be the dearest, proudest memory he could give her.
But to Sir Charles, the day after Snow came, Sên King-lo lifted a corner of his curtain.
“I know,” Sên said as they sat together for an hour—the only hour that Ruby left him till he died—“that you will do all you can for Ruby—always.”
Her kinsman nodded.
“But there is something I am anxious to say to you. I cannot lay the burden on Ruby, and I cannot lay it down. I must pass it on.”
Snow held out his hand.
“Keep Ruben and Ivy in England—always—if you can. Build up to that. Life will go hard with them. They must pay the price I owe! But I believe that it will be a lighter price, and less galling, if they never know my people or my country. I wish that I might hope that neither my boy nor girl would marry.”
That was the strangest wish a Chinese father ever framed.
But Charles Snow understood, and again he merely nodded.
“ ‘The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ ” Sên King-lo quoted sadly. Then he said, “I fear least for Ruben, but I fear—terribly—for them both. Ruben is Chinese. He looks English, but he is thoroughly Chinese. If he marries, he should marry a woman of our people, a Chinese girl whose parents live here, just possibly. That will be so more and more, I believe. But I wish earnestly that he may not marry—or Ivy either. You know why. Teach Ruben to worship his mother, to garner his heart upon her, to live for her. It will not be difficult, I am sure, since his instincts are so intensely Chinese.”
Snow wondered if his cousin herself might not marry and hated himself for letting the thought come to him here and now. She was still so young and so full of life and of beauty.
But Sên King-lo knew that Ruby would be Sên Ruby while she lived. He knew.
“It is for Ivy,” King-lo went on, “that I fear most. Mere baby that she is, I know she is English. Yes, I am right. She is as English as Ruben is Chinese, more so perhaps. The mixture of race bloods has modified nothing racial for either of our children—fomented and intensified rather. Ivy is wholly English. I can see it every day. Sometimes when I have been alone, not often but sometimes, I have said something in Chinese—just to hear the Chinese words, just to taste them on my lips. I did, not long ago, when I was nursing her. She didn’t like it. She loathed it.”
That sounded fantastic—but Sir Charles did not think so. He had lived too long in China!
“An English girl with a Chinese face, an English soul and mind in a Chinese body! What she’ll probably have to live through! I beseech the gods that she may never marry!”
Sir Charles Snow noticed the plural.
“An English girl in a Chinese body!” Sên’s voice broke as he said it. And he said no more.
“I will do my best,” Snow told him.
It was enough.
The specialist came again from London the next day, and again he spoke alone with Snow after he had seen Sên King-lo.
“I am completely in the dark,” the great man said bitterly. “Mr. Sên is dying—I can’t say how soon—but dying, if I know anything at all about my business. We doctors have to doubt that now and then, unless we are complete asses. I know that Mr. Sên is dying, or I think I do, because I can see that there is no grip on life left in him; but I have not the remotest idea what is killing him, and that’s flat. There’s been a touch of heart trouble—no indigestion about it—but I suppose those fellows here had to call it something, and no wonder they barked up the wrong tree. I’ve been puzzled before—a doctor lives in one big maze of puzzle—but I never ran up against a puzzle like this before. Never! There has been a touch of heart trouble, but not enough to kill any man—scarcely enough to kill a mouse. I’d give a limb to know what is killing Mr. Sên.”
“Then I’ll tell you,” Snow said quietly, “if you will regard it as professional confidence.”
“Of course, of course. But—you know? Out with it, for Heaven’s sake, man!” But the physician’s eager voice was more skeptical than eager.
“Homesickness,” Snow told him.
“By Jove, you don’t believe that!” Dr. Foster was openly contemptuous. But, even so, he was interested. “Go on,” he commanded. “How do you make that out?”
“I know Sên King-lo well, and I know his race,” Snow replied.
“Well—well,” the physician said after a pause. “I wonder—we might have tried it—strange things turn out true ones sometimes—I wonder—we might have tried it—sending him back to China—but, I’m afraid it’s too late now. By Jove, I wish I’d been on the track of this case six months ago!”
“No,” Sir Charles Snow told him, “you might not have tried it. He would not go.”
“Tut! tut! A sick man must do what he’s told, to get well.”
Snow made no reply.
“I’d give a good deal to have been called in sooner—six months ago or more,” the physician repeated.
“You’d need to have been called in nearly five years ago,” Snow retorted, “and then you would have failed. I was on the case five years ago,” he added bitterly, “and I failed.”
“Indeed,” Dr. Foster remarked limply. Harley Street does not over-value or over-esteem lay practitioners.