CHAPTER XLVII
It rained all the next day, and King-lo sat with his wife and read to her and talked with her of England and of Ruben. And they wrote letters home—letters that would be long in going; for runners must take them to a distant, but the nearest, treaty-port, before they could make any positive postal start.
Towards evening Sên Ya Tin sent for her grandson.
Ruby scarcely expected to see her husband for hours; but almost at once, as she sat crocheting, he came back, eager of pace and of face—and a soberly dressed man followed him to her side and bowed, crossed his hands, and stolidly waited, not looking at Mrs. Sên but carefully eyeing the silk jumper she was making.
Deft-fingered always, Ruby practically had discarded needlework—even its pretty playtime offshoots—since her marriage, no longer in need of her own industry to be always well-dressed. She had liked to sew well enough, partly, no doubt, because she did it so well; but she had hated the necessity, and she always had taken more pleasure in shopping than in making or mending.
But in Hongkong King-lo had warned her, “You may be dull some days—just at first—at the homestead, while it is all strange. Take along something to do, something you like doing.”
Mrs. Sên had laughed it to scorn, the suggestion that she could be dull, even for an hour, alone with him in China, with him in the wonderful place he’d called home as a boy. But he had repeated his words, even appealing to her, and to please him she had laid in a great store of ivory needles and silks. And already she was finding the advice she had laughed at good, for already she had found the life in the women’s quarters monotonous and deadly. She could quite understand why the painted and jewel-hung prisoners smoked so incessantly. She herself was smoking more cigarettes in a day here than she ever had smoked in London or Washington in a fortnight. One must do something, drug the discomfort of personal stagnation with some sedative motion, if only of one’s hands. One couldn’t smoke all the time—at least, she could not, so she had begun an elaborate jumper that she didn’t need and could not wear in Ho-nan over a stiffly embroidered Chinese coatee.
She looked up at King-lo with questioning eyes.
“He’s one of the tailors,” Lo told her. “Sên Ya Tin’s best one. She has sent him to you.”
“To me! What ever for?”
“To make you a habit.”
“A habit—what sort of habit?” Did she need more Chinese clothes, she thought rebelliously. Did they think she was going to stay here forever? Lo had promised to take her home. Didn’t they know that? Ruben was in England! Didn’t they care?
“A riding-habit,” King-lo told her.
“A Chinese riding-habit! I didn’t suppose there were any. Why must I wear it? When must I wear it?”
“No,” Sên said gently, “there are no Chinese riding-habits. An English riding-habit.”
“He couldn’t make one,” Mrs. Sên retorted with an unappreciative glance at the motionless tailor.
“He can make most things,” Sên laughed.
“Has he ever seen an English habit?” his wife demanded. She was not in the least convinced.
“Surely not,” King-lo owned, “nor any other sort of riding-habit, nor even any sort of a picture of one, I dare swear. But he’s a genius.”
“He doesn’t look it,” Mrs. Sên remarked crisply.
“Granted,” her husband agreed good-naturedly, “but you know the classic adage, ‘Things are not always what they seem’—not even Chinese things. ‘Skim milk’—you know the poem. This chap can do as he’s told.”
“But who’s to tell him?”
“You and I.”
Ruby giggled—she had not often done that of late. “You’re crazy, Lo,” she asserted. “I couldn’t tell him how to make one, and I’m sure you can’t.”
“Don’t be too sure,” King-lo advised her. “Ah, here come the stuffs for you to choose.”
Several half-grown Chinese boys had padded in as he spoke, each carrying a paper-wrapped roll of material—sober-eyed lads with far shaven foreheads and silk-tasseled queues hanging almost to the hems of their sober robes, the crest-badge of the Sêns on each blue-clad back.
“Master-artist Worth’s apprentices,” Sên pronounced them.
“Tell them to apprentice off then,” his wife commanded. “They look more like dummies than apprentices,” she added. “Tell them to go, Lo. I don’t want a habit—here—what should I do with it? We couldn’t even ride in Hongkong. Send them away.”
“Just a minute,” Sên King-lo begged. “The grandmother will be disappointed. She has planned it to give you pleasure. Two of the grooms are trying out a horse for you now, a splendid, gentle creature that my cousin Wang’s son often rides. The venerable one has commandeered it for you. It has never had a woman on its back, or a side-saddle, but it has a side-saddle now: the saddlers were up all last night, making it by candle-light. Sên Wo P’ing has seen Englishwomen ride in Shanghai on the Bubbling Well road, and he was with them all night—it was the grandmother’s command—directing them as they worked by candle and torch and lantern light. And they’ll be doing it again tonight. Ka’-ka’ is careering about now in the storm with a side-saddle on her back, but it is only a half-finished one. One groom is clutching and dancing at her bit, hanging there for grim life, the other is side-saddled on her back and looks like to break his neck—but he won’t do it. They all three are having the time of their lives, as we used to say in Washington. But tomorrow or the next day Ka’-ka’ ’ll be as tame as any rabbit. The old heart is set on it, and so is mine. Won’t you have her kindness, wifeling?”
Ruby Sên rose slowly, the silken jumper falling to the floor.
“She is very, very kind, your grandmother,” she said softly, and King-lo saw a mist in her eyes. “I shall love to ride here with you. Come, help me choose,” she bade him as she moved towards the stolid waiting urchins.
Sên King-lo’s face glowed. He was grateful to Sên Ya Tin, and he was grateful to Sên Ruby.
And, seeing them engrossed with soft cashmeres and stout tussores, the master tailor dropped on a surreptitious knee, then squatted squarely on the floor with his feet tucked in beneath him, and studied the fallen jumper eagerly.
“What is it, dear?” Sên asked her presently, when he saw a new perplexity a little wrinkling her forehead.
“Won’t my riding-skirt drive the mare crazy, Lo? You say she has never carried a lady?”
“Nor has she, but,” Sên chuckled, “you forget—Ka’-ka’ has carried many skirts—quite as long ones as the one you wear in the Row.”
His wife turned a sudden painful crimson. She had forgotten for a moment. Was she to ride with her husband riding beside her wearing petticoats?
Lo saw and understood. But he gave no sign and moved quietly to his wife’s writing-table, sat down and found a brush and dipped it.
“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Sên asked as she followed him.
“Make your riding-habit,” King-lo told her.
“Lo, you are wonderful!” she exclaimed, as the habit grew quickly on the pad, a habit perfect in every detail.
She had found a new talent in her Chinese man, and she leaned and watched him proudly with her hand upon his shoulder.
The tailor slipped up without a sound and came and watched the rapid brush-work too. And when it was finished, he drew a long tape from his sleeve and nodded without speaking.
“He says, ‘Can do,’ ” Sên told her, with a laugh.
And it was true, whether the man had said it or not. The new habit completed would have disgraced neither Rotten Row nor Bond Street.
Sên Ya Tin stood and watched them as they started for their first ride together in China, an odd, but not unkind, look in her sharp, agate-hard eyes. She smiled a little, grimly—she who had not smiled since this Sên’s father had died—smiled when King-lo held his hand under Ruby’s boot and mounted her so. And Ya Tin stood and watched them till they were out of sight, lost in the verdure of the far-off hillside; for the day was very clear, and Sên Ya Tin’s ageing eyes were very sharp.
When Lo had come to tell her that the horses were ready at the house door, Ruby had started a little and then had flushed; for King-lo’s riding clothes were as British as her own.
How would Madame Sên like this, Ruby wondered—if Madame chanced to know.
But, if Sên Ya Tin was surprised, she scorned to show it, and Ruby wondered if she’d already known and consented, for she knew that no innovation intruded into the queendom of Sên Ya Tin that did not come licensed by imperious Ya Tin.
It was the first of many rides, and they were the best and the most wholesome pleasures of Ruby Sên’s sojourn in the homestead of the father of her child.
When they galloped side by side through the quivering bamboos on the hillslopes, along the mossy banks of a rushing river, through avenues of vermilion roses, under fragrant, wax-flowered lemon-trees that met and roofed above them, some of the old springtime ecstasy and comradeship came back to her, and the charm of her man found and wrapped her again.
Her escort was as devoted and as careful of her as he’d been on the Potomac, his eyes as kind, his laugh as ready. But it was his breeding, the breeding of his race, the man’s loyalty to the woman who had trusted him and given her life into his keeping, the personal loyalty of his manhood and his being that laughed and chatted with her as they rode; for Sên King-lo was not with the English wife who rode beside him, Sên King-lo was back in China, his soul meshed in China’s, his heart torn, every nerve an ache, with the thought that again he must go, go from the flowers and skies of China, from her rainbowed loveliness and her barren rocky places and her wild and rushing torrents, from the customs of his people, the tombs of his ancestors, and the dingy, disregarded temples of their gods.
And when he drew his bridle, and slacked their pace, and pointed with his slender amber whip to some special bit or stretch of beauty, and called her attention to it in a quiet voice that almost trembled and that throbbed in his throat, Ruby scarcely saw, caught no message; because this was China, and China would forever leave her cold.
It is human blood and story that makes country, not architecture or flora, neither bleating polar cold nor seething equatorial heat.