CHAPTER XXXIV
It had worked so well that, when the Snows had come home a year ago, even Sir Charles had wondered if Sên King-lo might not prove to have been wiser than he—if only they stayed in England. He wondered often now what Sên thought of so English-looking a son, what he planned for Ruben’s future; but he himself—Sir Charles—saw some simplification of a vexatious problem, a sore racial complex, in the baby boy’s Anglo-Saxon fairness and features.
There was little that Charles Snow would not have given or done to have prevented the Sên marriage, and he still winced at it—English prejudice and preconceptions are sturdy moral weeds—but as soon as it was sealed he wished it only well, bent his strength to its support, and did all he knew to regain the old footing between his cousin and himself. He wrote to Ivy the day after her marriage as unforced a letter as he could, and he wrote several longer, easier letters after she had reached Europe. But she answered none of them, and she made no response to any message he sent in Emma’s friendly and cousinly letters.
He and Sên King-lo exchanged letters, not very frequently, but always cordially, though not with the verbal ardor of women. And when he and Lady Snow had come back to live in London and in the old place in Kent in which his mother and Ivy’s had been born, and he walked into his cousin’s drawing-room quite as if he knew she’d expect and wish him to, and simply would not be snubbed, she found it impossible to greet him as coldly as she thought he deserved. And after a first touch of frigid hauteur which he in perfectly good humor ignored, she took up their old friendliness, if not quite their oldtime friendship, again. And she soon found it easy enough to forgive him, almost to forget. It’s a mean victor who cherishes venom, and Ivy Sên was the least mean of women. She and Lo had made good. Dear old Charlie had written himself down a goose. Who could be too hard on a goose? Not the happiest, proudest woman in England. And when she saw the look in the two men’s eyes as they met, and saw the affectionate grip of their honest hands, her own eyes melted.
The four cousins had dined together at the Sêns’, and the two women were discussing chiffons and babies and the sins of chauffeurs over a drawing-room fire—there were two fires in Ivy’s long drawing-room—and the men were discussing tobacco, matters of international import, and a little whiskey in Sên’s den.
As King-lo leaned over the narrow table to refill the other’s tumbler, he said:
“It has come.”
“Has it? That’s enough soda. What has come?” But he knew before Sên told him, and Sên told him at once.
“The message from China. They want me at once. By rights, I should go next week. I haven’t told her yet. I don’t know how she’ll take it.”
“Thoroughbred,” Snow replied in a word.
“Superbly. But she won’t like being left.”
“You won’t take her?”
“Of course not. The time isn’t quite ripe, I think——”
Sir Charles Snow was sure that it was not even ripening and never would be, but he smoked on in silence.
“But,” King-lo added hurriedly, “I may be wrong there. But we couldn’t possibly take the young Lord Ruben home with us yet. Two messages came by the same post—this morning’s early one. It isn’t only that the bank needs me over there for a bit; but my grandmother tells me to come to her——”
“The devil she does,” thought Sir Charles Snow. He knew those Chinese grandmothers—he knew what their suzerainty was and the ruthless way they asserted and enforced it. China might be a republic, but twenty republics couldn’t clip the wings of one old hobble-gaited grand-dame who lived, shrill and impregnable, far off from the tourist-beaten paths.
“I might do the work at the banks by proxy, important as it is. But Sên Ya Tin must be obeyed.”
Snow nodded. He knew that.
“And I couldn’t think of taking the baby that journey. You know where we live. I don’t see my son on that trip! The Yangtze in flood as like as not, local troubles in at least two of the provinces between Hongkong and home, shotguns in full action, and not a cow for miles. No, Sên junior cannot accompany Sên. I must leave them here.”
He might or might not leave Sên Ruben, but her cousin felt sure that he was not destined to leave Mrs. Sên. But again he kept his opinion to himself. He had “looked in” on Ivy’s matrimonial affairs for the last time. It caused friction, and it availed nothing.
“I wish Ivy would come to us then,” was what he did say.
“I wish she would,” Sên replied. “It would be jolly for her in Kent with you. And splendid for the boy. But I don’t believe she will. I think she’ll wish to stay here in our own home and in the cottage.”
“Shall you be gone long?”
“Hard to say. Five or six months, if not longer, I’m afraid. I must give things a thorough overhauling at Hongkong. We have a number of ramifications now, you know—in six of the provinces, and I ought to go myself to the end of them all. Then it will take some time to get home and come back from there. And my grandmother does not say for how long she will keep me with her—a day or two, perhaps, or it might be longer—weeks perhaps. I can’t tell.”
Sir Charles Snow wondered. It might be months perhaps! The venerable Madame Sên could tell, he knew; and he knew that she would.
“I suppose you’ll tell Ivy as soon as Emma and I have gone?”
“No—in the morning,” Sên replied. “She won’t like it. I’d hate her to. And I don’t like it myself.”
“But you’ll be glad to see China again—to be in China again?”
A light grew in Sên King-lo’s face.
“Yes,” he said, “I shall be glad to be in China again—for a time. It hurts to go from this, even for a time. Ruben will cut a tooth—learn to crawl, perhaps to stand. And I shall not be here to see it. And—it means a good deal to me to leave my wife—more than it will to her—and she won’t like it. But she’ll have the boy. But I shall be glad to be in China again. I am glad that I am going back to China, to hear my own tongue spoken everywhere once more—once I’m well away from the polyglot treaty ports—to see the birds I used to know at their breakfast, to eat the old foods in the old way. I haven’t snapped a melon-seed between my teeth for years, or seen a mango that was a mango, or a lychee that wasn’t a petrified mummy—do you remember how the lychees taste when the wine of their ripeness is in them still?”
Snow nodded.
“And the mangosteens?”
“Only too well!”
“To see only Chinese faces once more—to be among my countrymen! Oh, I’ve been in exile, and sometimes I’ve found it bitter—often—until one day Miss Julia ‘gave a party’—and Ruby was there——”
Sir Charles’ face was very grave. He saw writing on the wall.
Sên King-lo went on with his home-going. “To see the silk-worms gorging on the mulberry-trees, to see the red poppies growing—not much use for opium, but you remember the sea of color they make, lakes and oceans of it—and the fire-weed—to hear the sound the mallets make when they strike the bells—the gongs too—in the old temple courtyards that used to be my playground when I was a boy—” He broke off and passed the decanter.