CHAPTER XIV
From East and from West the sea-covered wires ran with alarm and twanged with suspense for a week or more. Something like international crises threatened, and quivered the diplomatic air. Officials were suspiciously polite to those of other countries, and spoke to those of their own in crisp, bothered sentences. And the press in a dozen countries girded its loins, strained its ears, sharpened its imaginations, and looked carefully to its ink-wells.
Then the small “affair” passed—as happily sometimes it does—and Washington shook itself good-humoredly as after some spring drizzle that had had more notice than it deserved, but had done no particular harm; and got back to play—cotillions, tennis and moonlit river picnics.
And Sên found time to call on Lady Snow, and found her alone.
She was glad to see him, and said so.
“I am fortunate to find you at home this tempting day,” he returned. “You are quite well again?”
“Perfectly, thanks. It was nice of you to send twice to ask. You are about the only man who has troubled whether we were dead or alive—my ankle and me—these last ten days. I’ve scarcely seen a soul; and Sir Charles has about lived at the silly old Embassy—and not heard what I’ve said half the time when he has been here. And I suppose you have too; it was nice of you to think to send to ask after the kiddies and me.”
“But I could not forget to do that.”
“Couldn’t you? Several—that we’ve known longer than we have you—could. You’ve been desperately busy and excited, of course?”
“I’m a very small fish in the international sea—calm or troubled,” her guest insisted. “I wonder if you will let me——”
“Please, no!” his hostess cried, dramatically, her hands over her ears. “I know that you and Japan, and poor little Korea—you ought to be well ashamed of yourselves, both of you, for the way you’ve played battledore and shuttlecock with Korea—have been hoping to cut each other’s throats—but you cut lower down than throats, don’t you?”
“On occasions,” Sên admitted.
She gave him no time to say more, but caught her breath up where it had failed her—“and Germany planning to murder us all in our beds again, and Switzerland having the army photographed——”
“Miniatured, I should think,” he interjected.
“—and all the rest of it. But I decline to hear any details. I hate the lot of you. Why can’t you sit still, and be good, this terrifically hot weather? I’m desperately tired of State secrets.”
A white line gleamed between Sên’s lips. He had no intention of pressing Legation or Consulate secrets on Lady Snow, and he did not believe that Sir Charles surfeited her with State secrets.
“I should not have presumed to make that appalling blunder,” he said. “I was going to say that I wondered if you would let me see your children, Lady Snow. May I?”
He saw the flippancy fall from her face as snow fades in a sudden deluge of sunshine.
“You would like to see Dick and Blanche? Truly? I like you, Mr. Sên. Of course, you shall see them! And the dear little monkeys are worth seeing and knowing. I’m very proud of my babies; and I’ve a right to be. But not today. They’re gone to Rosehill with my cousin. Charlie’s at the Embassy, of course. He half promised to get home for tea—but he won’t! Just look at that clock. Do ring! We’ll have ours now. Dawson ought to have brought it ages ago. But probably I told them not to, until I rang—Sir Charles said he might come.”
Sên King-lo lingered a courteous length of time, after his second cup of tea. He took sugar and cream in it here. Lady Snow paid nearly two dollars a pound for her tea, but Sên King-lo thought that all such tea needed all the sugar and cream it could get.
Sir Charles did not come. Sên left a greeting for him, reminded Lady Snow of his wish to meet her children, repeated his pleasure at having seen her again, and went away.
He did not go home, or to his club. He crossed the Potomac. He had not seen Miss Townsend for several days; and not only she allowed him to call at any odd hour; but he knew that she liked him to do that. So, late as it was, and far afield, he went from Massachusetts Avenue to Rosehill.
“Yes, sar,” Uncle Lysander told him, his mistress was at home and certain sure he could go in—Lysander knew his standing orders, and knew better than to disobey them. But Dr. Elenore Ray caught a sultry tone in the old black’s voice as he announced at the open drawing-room door that “Mr. Swing”—an impertinence of mispronunciation in which he indulged himself now and then—“has done come to see you, Miss Julia, ma’am.”
“Have you lost your watch, or come to supper?” Miss Julia demanded bitingly. But her bright old eyes welled with welcome.
“Both!” Sên instantly lied.
“I suppose I shall have to give you your supper, then,” she complained—Miss Julia was in highest good humor. “I’m not sorry to see you,” she added. “I want you to know Dr. Elenore Prescott Ray. Elenore, may I present my friend, Mr. Sên King-lo?”
And Sên, having bowed, looked down at the face of the woman seated near Miss Townsend—a wonderful face, he thought; the finest, sweetest, and strongest face he ever had seen.
It was.
“We have been having a delightful afternoon, Mr. Sên,” Dr. Ray told him. “A children’s party. It has just gone home. I wasn’t invited. It was in full swing when I chanced to call. You have only just missed it.”
The telephone bell rang in the hall, and Miss Julia rose and left them. She was not in the telephone book. She looked coldly on telephones, as on a number of other and even more modern inventions, but she found hers useful in speaking to Washington tradesmen; and usually she answered and used it herself—Uncle Lysander was sickly afeared of the ’phone, and Dinah, her next most trusted servant, at the ’phone could do nothing but giggle into the receiver.
Her other guest turned to Sên with a pleasant smile that lit up her face, almost without moving it—chiefly a smile in her fine clear eyes.
“I have known Miss Townsend since we were very small girls, but I saw a new side of my old friend today. It was very charming to hear her telling stories to the mites who were here. She did it delightfully. I can’t tell you how they loved it. And how she loved doing it! It was touching.”
“Very,” said Sên gently.
Elenore Ray gave him a scanning look, and, at something she read there, he had made her his friend. But she only said quietly—for she, too, was a sash-wearer—“They were nice children—the tots that were here.”
“Very nice children,” Miss Julia emphasized, catching the last words as she came—it had been a wrong-number call—“they do their mother and their governess great credit. Well-behaved children are a true refreshment in these mad days.”
“I,” the physician laughed, “find naughty children a tonic.”
“I do not,” Miss Julia said sadly.
“I do!” her friend repeated. “And I make more money out of them. You see, I am an avaricious doctor, Mr. Sên.”
Sên laughed. “Was it a large party, Madame?” he asked.
“Quality and not quantity,” Miss Julia answered. “I wish you had come earlier.”
“I wish I had,” Sên King-lo replied.
“You’d have made us the even half-dozen. We were an odd number—five.”
“Why count me?” Dr. Ray asked. “I was but a looker-on in Venice.”
“Only two children—but such nice little things,” Miss Julia told Sên. “The Snows’ boy and girl. Their cousin brought them to spend the day with me. You remember her, don’t you? Miss Gilbert? She stayed the night of the garden party.”
“Oh, yes, I remember Miss Gilbert.”
“Didn’t you like her?” Miss Townsend demanded abruptly. She had caught the reserve in his tone; so had Dr. Ray and had interpreted it differently.
“Could I say so?” he asked gaily. “But I do like Miss Gilbert—very much.”
His hostess looked at him a little regretfully. She liked those she liked to like each other—and she had mistrusted his tone. But Dr. Ray threw him a shrewder glance. She, too, mistrusted his tone, and her mistrust took a different trend. Able in all her craft, diagnosis was her forte. She rarely erred in it. It was a great physician, the slender patrician that almost lounged, so assured and easy her sitting, in Miss Townsend’s great-grandfather’s favorite chair, a long history of sorrow and service carved on the face in which time and life had cut many, but only beautiful lines. Soft waves of snow covered a graceful, queenly-held head, and the long, thin hands, lying loosely on the great chair’s big arm-knobs, were as masterful as they were lovely—the polished finger-nails as rosy and mooned as a girl’s. She was a great physician, adding distinction to the profession it had cost her a hard, bitter fight—and sometimes a tortured one—to enter. But the physician armed with a genius for absolute diagnosis should not find professional greatness too far or too difficult a cry. She gave Sên King-lo a long steady look.
“You don’t know the Snows, do you?” Miss Julia asked him—more to retreat from a cul-de-sac she felt a trifle rasped than because she cared to know.
“Yes, Madame, I do—Sir Charles and his wife. I have not had the pleasure of meeting the small ones yet.”
“Oh—yes—I suppose you diplomatic-staff people all know each other, more or less, whether you care to or not.”
“We are apt to meet.”
“And I daresay you know every one in Washington now,” Julia remarked, rather purringly. She was proud of the place her once cold-shouldered protége had gained in the capital’s society that she herself rather scorned.
“I know a good many.” And this time Dr. Ray thought that there was nothing forced in the indifference of his tone.
“Do you like them—the Snows?” Miss Julia questioned again. It was her habit, and Sên’s delight, that she always questioned him as she liked.
“Very much,” he told her cordially.
“I like him,” Miss Townsend said, with no uncertain emphasis on the pronoun.
Sên King-lo sprang to the defense of an absent woman on whose face he but now had seen maternity’s beautiful blazon. “I like Lady Snow, Madame,” he remarked. “I am sure there is a great deal more in her than the chic prettiness that one sees and the gay banter one hears.”
“Do you?” From any one else the slight but patrician sniff would have sounded a rudeness. “I,” she continued, “know that there is very much more in Ivy Gilbert than shows on the surface. I am very fond of Ivy. I wish she had a gayer time. Girls should be gay. You liked Ivy, Elenore, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I liked her,” the other said promptly. “And I like her face.”
“I like all of her,” loyal Miss Julia insisted. “I shall ask the children here again. You must come, too, Mr. Sên.”
“Gladly. I asked Lady Snow today to let me see them. But, of course, she could not.”
“Because they were here. And that is why you came so late—when you knew they’d be gone! You must be anxious to meet them! So—you know Lady Snow well enough to call!”
“I was not sure they would be gone, Madame,” Sên said a little lamely.
“Humph!” Miss Julia commented.
Dr. Ray smiled at the carpet.
“I wish—yes, Lysander, we are coming,” for Lysander was bowing and grinning in the doorway, “I wish Ivy had a gayer time,” Miss Julia repeated as she led the way to the dining-room. “Every girl has a right to have a good time. As nice a girl as Ivy Gilbert has a right to a great deal of fun and gay good times. They need it,” she sighed softly, and Sên thought she looked sadly across her garden as they passed the hall’s wide windows. Her own girlhood had been defrauded of its gaiety-right—robbed by war’s seared and shriveled aftermath.
No pleasanter meal-time passed in Washington that night than passed at Miss Julia’s supper-table. The odd trio proved as congenial as it was odd. Of the two Southern women, one since babyhood had passed all her life here and a stone’s throw from here, and had lived all of it as her foremothers had lived in the old regnant Virginia days. The other was traveled, experienced, steeped in life’s up-and-downs, scarred and made taut by its jolts, chiseled fine by its jars, broadened and perfumed by the sacrifices it had called upon her for, and by the unfailing dignity and soul-loyalty, the supreme personal courage with which she never failed to make the sacrificial payment. Both the women wore time’s diadem of soft snow above their clear, clean foreheads, and God’s love in their hearts, God’s fellowship in their souls—one with the mind of a man and the heart of a woman, a woman of the world, chastened and puissant, a creature of dignity and of enormous force and charm; the other changed in little—in little that counts—from her earliest girlhood, a child still in much, as full of prejudice as she was of goodness and sweetness. Both caught now the slow music his scythe made as the Reaper garnered the human grain down by the cold, dark river. The man—an alien Chinese, far from the home he loved, was at ease here, as everywhere, but never at home, never to be at home save in the home of the wild white rose—still in his youth, ginger hot in his mouth, the cup as yet but just to his lip, his fight to come, his spurs to win, his soul girded but still very young, vowed to a cause some thought already lost—well, they too had seen their cause lost, their flag torn—never soiled—in defeat. He was seeking and striving for victory’s crown; one of them knew—for she had won and wore it—that defeat has the greater crown.
Dr. Ray was much interested to meet Sên King-lo, and to see and consider him in this easy, intimate way. She had known many Chinese—but not before a Chinese gentleman.
Almost greedy still, in her splendid, beautiful ageing, for new experiences, more and still more knowledge, she welcomed this experience and made her most of it.
Dr. Elenore Ray liked Sên King-lo. She liked his simplicity; a woman, she more than liked his deference; she liked his pleasant dignity, his unaffected repose, his good-humored reserve, and her quick, brilliant mind caught and rejoiced at the brilliance and quickness of his.
They talked more than they ate, at the well-spread and tempting table—they talked long and late on the porch afterwards.
Once Sên consulted the watch he had claimed to have lost, and turned to Dr. Ray and mentioned the hour. “May I serve you?” he asked.
“Not by seeing her home,” Julia answered. “She’s staying the night. I don’t see her so often that I let her go soon when she does come. And you need not go yet.”
But when she thought it was time for Sên King-lo to go, she said so; and he went.
“A very interesting man,” was Dr. Ray’s comment, as they heard the front door close. “I am very glad to have met him.”
“Sên King-lo called today,” Lady Snow told her husband at dinner that night. “He left regards and all that for you, Charlie, and he was perfectly sweet about the children. I think he came specially to see them—and he’s coming again. He was so disappointed that they were out. But, Ivy, he did not ask after you. I thought it so odd. Did you treat him badly the other day?”
“What day?”
“When you rode together.”
“Oh—then! No, I don’t suppose I did. For I had an exceptionally pleasant time, and I mean him to take me again.”
“Which, in my opinion, he will not, if you snub him,” Emma said sagely.
“Oh,” Ivy laughed, “I sha’n’t trouble to do that again. It isn’t worth it, and he rides too well.”
“He does most things well,” Sir Charles observed.