CHAPTER XVII
Emma Snow took alarm first.
“Do you want Ivy to marry Sên King-lo?” she suddenly asked her husband one morning.
“Damn! Hell!” the phlegmatic Englishman cried hotly. He was shaving, and he’d cut himself rather badly. (He had a dressing-room of his own, and used it but rarely.) He sopped off the blood as well as he could, then flung about on his wife more angry and ruder than she ever had seen him.
“Don’t be disgusting!” he snapped.
“I see what I see,” she retorted smoothly.
“I decline to listen to preposterous, lying, nauseating vulgarity,” Snow growled, his mouth twitching angrily. “Such a hideous idea never entered, or could, any head but yours.”
“I see what I see,” she repeated good-humoredly. She was sorry for Charlie.
“Blow what you see!” Rage, and perhaps a subconscious sick fear, obsessed him, made him forget himself in their torturing grip.
“Use your eyes!” his wife advised him more coldly. And, not unjustly incensed, she finished her own toilet in silence, and went down to the breakfast-room without a glance or a word more.
Dr. Ray saw it next.
The physician was still in Washington. Independent now of her large Chicago practice, she took more and more time each year for the travel and study she loved; and few years passed in which she did not make at least one stay of weeks, if not months, in Washington.
“Do you want pretty Miss Gilbert to marry Sên King-lo?” she asked Miss Julia as they sat one morning at breakfast.
Miss Julia was furious. Her old hands trembled so that she dropped the cup she was lifting. It had been in the Townsends’ possession only goodness and the gods of the South knew how long; and she didn’t give it a look as it crashed in fragments on the floor, nor a glance to the pools of hot coffee staining the breakfast damask and her crisp morning-gown. She didn’t say “Damn,” and she didn’t say “Hell”; but for all that, she answered her friend very much as Sir Charles Snow had answered his wife.
The physician took it in perfect good part. But she stood her ground.
“I can’t help thinking that this is just what it is shaping towards, Julia.”
“You are horrible,” Miss Townsend moaned sickly. “It couldn’t be.”
“Why not?” Dr. Ray demanded gently.
Julia Townsend shrank back in her chair—speechless. She could not have been more surprised, dismayed, disappointed if Jefferson Davis had proved a traitor or Robert E. Lee disgraced his uniform—not half so much so if Mexico’s gulf had submerged her beloved South. She felt soiled by the tongue of a friend.
“Why not?” Dr. Ray insinuated.
“Why not! Because the bare suggestion is abominable,” Miss Julia exclaimed. “I’d kill Sên King-lo if I believed that he even could harbor the vile thought—which I know he could not.”
“I do not believe that he has thought of it yet,” Dr. Ray said, helping herself to the omelette Miss Julia made no motion to offer. “I am sure they have not thought of it yet—either of them. People usually marry first, and think after, I’ve noticed. And I believe they will do it—marry each other.”
Miss Julia, with a thin old hand that shook violently under its burden of gems, pushed a silver dish of fast-cooling sweetbreads farther afield, as if she feared the other might take food she’d grudge her. She did it automatically.
“They might do worse—perhaps,” the guest said musingly. “But I know you wouldn’t like it.”
“My God!” Julia Townsend moaned. “And you—you a Southern woman! A Southern woman—and my friend! You used to be my friend!”
“I do not like it either,” Dr. Ray said quietly—too true a physician to be incensed at nerves. “But, Julia, the world moves. We can’t shut our eyes to that. At least, I can’t.”
Poor Miss Julia shuddered, a green shadow lay on her trembling mouth. She was nauseated, soul and body. But the physician went on, “cruel to be kind,” as such physicians do:
“I know a very nice girl in Chicago who has married a Chinaman—several years ago it was. They are perfectly happy. He is kind and generous to her. He has a sort of delicatessen shop and curio shop mixed—food on one side, dishes and vases and Joss-sticks and Jacob’s-ladders on the other. He works from dawn to dusk, and must be worth a good deal by this—but he never lets her do a hand’s turn, and her silks and furs and rings—good rings—are a scandal. And their baby——”
“Hush!” Miss Julia ordered in a terrible voice. Her eyes were ablaze.
“But they both are peasants—at least she certainly is—and I often have wondered how such a marriage would result between husband and wife, both of gentle birth. It would be very interesting——”
But Julia Townsend could bear no more. She covered her face in her coffee-sodden napkin and broke into sobs.
Elenore Ray shook her head sadly. If Julia took the uncorroborated hint like this, how would she take the accomplished fact—if it eventuated?
Emma Snow had warned Sir Charles; Dr. Ray had warned Miss Julia. Except that each had angered and disgusted, neither had made the slightest impression.
Sên King-lo came and went at the Massachusetts Avenue house and at Rosehill as before, and both Snow and Miss Julia scorned to notice how, or how often, he and Ivy spoke to each other. Dr. Ray held her peace and so did Lady Snow.
But that was more than Washington did. Would it be a match? Men made bets at the clubs, and women “Oh”-ed and “Ah”-ed and “My dear”-ed over tea-cups and cocktails—in Turkish Baths, and even in whispers at church. Had Sên King-lo been caught at last? Was he going to marry Ivy Gilbert? What did the Chinese Minister think about it?
That, the Chinese Minister did not state.
Washington is a gossipy place—it gossips in many languages, and from several angles. There is even more talk in Washington than there is in Simla. But Washington rarely had a more diverting theme than this. “Ivy Gilbert and Sên King-lo” were on every tongue. But, oddly enough, not a word of it had reached either. No thought of marriage, not even of “love,” had occurred most remotely to the Chinese man or to the English girl.
But she wore his perfumed lily-bells now—and they came more and more often. And Emma Snow knew what the florist himself could have told her, if she had not, that to no other woman, not even to Miss Julia, did Sên King-lo ever send lilies-of-the-valley. And the florist could have confirmed Lady Snow’s belief that to no other girl did Sên King-lo ever send a flower. But the florist kept lips as close as the Chinese Minister’s own. But while others guessed and wondered, the florist had not the slightest doubt of how it would end.
The friendship begun by a common aversion to kissing, a jade-green frock, and a bunch of dangling crimson peppers grew—and more than once it pulsed.