CHAPTER XLV
When King-lo left his wife at the fragrant apartment’s outer entrance, he had gone to the outer gate again and waited there until Sên Ya Tin should summon him.
She sent for him soon.
She sat immovable on the great carved and inlaid chair on the red-covered daïs at the far end of the great k’o-tang, as Sên King-lo came through the opened panel and k’o-towed thrice to the floor. A slave in the outer room closed the panel again, and they two were alone in the great carved room.
Sên Ya Tin was not old as Western women count years now. But she looked very old, for life and her own flaming spirit had scorched and burnt her. Her face was as brown and crinkled as an autumn leaf that the lightest touch will flay into dust. Her black eyes—time had not dimmed them—glittered diamond-cold and hard, under her snow-white eyebrows which tweezers had shaped and torn into almost the sharp shape of the accent that crowned the proud name of Sên—narrow, almost thread-like eyebrows that were so silken that they glistened on the brown parchment of her wrinkled forehead like sun sparkled snow streaking a rough brown rock. Her hair was as white and as glistening as they, fantastically dressed, and bristling with costly stickpins. Her tiny brown hands—more claw-like than human with no look of age’s exquisite softness about them—were arrogantly wide-spread on her robe, every finger and one thumb covered from joint to knuckle with blazing gems, seven of the eight fingers tipped with heavy jeweled nail-protectors more than finger long.
It was a very tiny figure that sat bold upright in the huge chair. Her blunted scraps of feet just peeped arrogantly beneath the fur hem of her turquoise-tinted trousers, just resting on a cushioned teak-wood stool that was higher than most such footstools, or else the tiny woman’s tiny feet could not have reached it. Stripped of her heavy robes Ruby Sên might have lifted and carried her. But her embroidered robe of yellow brocade must have weighed as much as she. It was not the sacred imperial yellow, of course; but it was yellow, which it had no business to be. There is no sacred color in China now, alas, and perhaps not too much else that is sacred in the old imperial way. Alas, and alas! But that was not why Sên Ya Tin sat with jeweled yards of satin brocade about her. The lady Sên took little notice and no “stock” of Young China. She held with old ways, waited serenely for them to return, and kept them here as she always had. This was a learned woman. She could both read and write. The blind scribe that squatted by his low bamboo table in the fragrant courtyards and wrote for the wives of her sons, when those letterless ladies wished to write to the homes that had been theirs before marriage or purchase, never did personal service for Sên Ya Tin. She knew, too, her country’s history. She knew that, though individual insanity had been unknown until European intrusion had bred it there, China had suffered civic and national insanity before, and more than once—before the birth, nine centuries ago, of Wang Ah-shih, the poet father of Chinese socialism, and after that erratic Prime-Minister of the easy-going Emperor Shen Tsung had gone on high. But always the convulsion had been short. Socialism and peasant-franchise had strutted but a day. Then China had shaken the distemper off and returned to her state. Sên Ya Tin looked for China to do it again. The new Republic troubled Madame Sên as little as it concerned her, but she always had hugged a personal vein of wickedness of her personal own. And because she had no right to wear even a tinge of yellow, she often did, and often had since widowhood had made her supreme in the house of the Sêns. No one outside her gates would know, for no one within her gates would presume or dare to report.
A vase of almost inestimable value, a porcelain saucer of melon seeds, with a tiny-bowled, long-stemmed silver pipe, a tinder and a gold-lacquer box of fine tobacco and a tiny queenly fan lying near it, stood on a small, octagonal, carved teak-wood table beside her; a small, tight bouquet of mint and sage and musk lay on her lap; a tiny tame monkey, tethered by a silver chain, perched on the top of the tall, throne-like chair; and about her neck Sên Ya Tin wore, as she always did, the long mandarin chain of cornelian beads of her dead husband’s—as the widow of a British officer often wears his regimental badge.
She sat with her face square to the panel that had slid open for King-lo and slid close again behind him, and her unmoved face was a wrinkled, lifeless mask.
Three times Sên King-lo k’o-towed to the floor, then stood with downcast eyes and hands meek within his wide sleeves and waited for her to command.
She let him wait, neither pleasure nor love nor welcome in her adamant eyes.
The water-clock dripped a long minute away.
Sên King-lo did not lift his eyes. Sên Ya Tin did not move hers. She watched him stiffly through unwavering narrow lids—and so did the mouse-sized monkey, too.
“Approach!” she said in a cold, relentless voice.
Sên King-lo neared her by three slow steps; his padded Chinese shoes made no sound as he moved; his hands were still hid in his sleeves; his eyes were still on the floor. And then he k’o-towed again, and again three times, then stood and waited as before.
Again she let him wait—but not so long.
“Nearer!”
Three steps more he went, three more obeisances he made, and as he stood again erect he lifted his eyes to the face of his father’s mother. And Sên Ya Tin sent her eyes to his, steady old eyes, harder than age, that looked but told nothing, gave no hint or sign.
It was nearly twenty years since his eyes and hers had met; for she had been ill with smallpox when he had been in China last, and she had forbidden him—as her will and self-control had forbidden the smallpox to disfigure her. And boy and pox had obeyed.
She looked at him long, coldly. And he waited for her to signal or speak; to beckon or dismiss.
His eyes were the eyes of her father. A silver nail-protector studded with diamonds clattered a little against a pearl-studded one of gold. His mouth was the mouth of her favorite and first-born son. The cornelian beads moved a little on her bosom.
Slowly, very slowly Sên Ya Tin rose from her seat, came from the daïs, spurning the high footstool from her way, tottered across the glass-like mahogany floor on her tiny, tuber-like, satin-shod feet. Still Sên King-lo did not move. Her face broke up a little. His eyes leapt to her then. A cry that was only a whisper of sound breathed from her lips that scarcely moved. Sên King-lo took a step—another—two more, and she hid her working face on his coat. Her grandson’s arms were about her. They held her close, his head bent low to hers. Her hands fondled his sleeves. She was quivering now. He heard her heart beat under all its harness of silk and satin, embroidery and jewels, and she heard his. She was sobbing now.
Yam-Sin, the monkey, pounced on the porcelain saucer and gorged himself on melon seeds that snapped briskly between his strong, tiny teeth, his silver chain clank-clanking against the high chair’s inlaid wood; the tiny pipe of an august lady clattered to the floor; and the fine, silken tobacco streamed after it, raining down from an upset lacquer box.