CHAPTER XXXV
Sên King-lo did not sleep that night, torn between two vibrant emotions—sorrow at the impending separation from his wife and joy to go home again.
Perhaps Ruby Sên caught in her sleep something of his double strain, for she woke as the first light filtered through their loose-drawn curtains; and her waking was sharp and instant, wide-eyed at once, which it rarely was. Usually she stirred and dozed, coming back very gradually to the life of brazened day, as the convolvulus sleepily unfurls its twisted spiral to the dawn. She was fast asleep—then, wide awake.
Sên King-lo turned and took her in his arms, and told her where he was going, when and why.
Her dark eyes sparkled with quick pleasure. But she exclaimed chidingly, “And that was what was in those two letters you had from China by the first post yesterday! And you’ve only told me now! A whole day wasted, and with all the packing to do in no time at all! Lo, you are simply wicked.”
“Since when have you done my packing, Mrs. Sên? And I seem to remember that I not unfrequently have done yours. My mistake no doubt.”
Ivy giggled and tried to shake him. There was an interlude.
“I shall not take much luggage,” Lo told her.
“Your luggage!” his wife retorted contemptuously. “Two handkerchiefs and a razor and a book of poems—I know your luggage. But you don’t imagine that I and Baby and Nurse are going half-way across the world with only one suitcase between us, do you?”
“Dear,” her husband said very gently, “we couldn’t take Baby. It’s too far, the way too hard, whole weeks of discomfort, if not worse—for you and him, I mean. I shall enjoy every rod of it, with my goat-legs—and home at the end of the journey. I never am ill, and, if I were, the smell of Ho-nan would be all the medicine I needed. But we can’t take our frogling off of the doctors’ beats.”
“No!” the frogling’s mother instantly agreed. “Oh—Lo—I shan’t like leaving him behind. But—of course—for his own sake—but, oh! Lo—how shall we do it!”
“Of course not,” he answered her quickly, with a hand on her hair, “so you’ll have to stay with him, mother-girl.”
Ruby Sên slipped from her husband’s arms, thrust them gently but firmly away, and sat up on the pillows, eying her husband.
“I am going with you, Lo,” she told him quietly.
“No,” he said, a little tensely, “not this time. I can’t take you to China now, heart of my heart.”
“Why?”
“The time isn’t ripe. You wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“I should be with you.”
Sên King-lo thanked her with his eyes and with the touch of his hands. They were lovers still, these two who had ventured the perilous marriage.
But he persisted, “I cannot take you, dear. I’d rather give it up than do that.”
“You want to go, don’t you?” she asked quietly. “And you think that you ought?”
“I know that I ought. And I want to go more than I could tell you.”
“But not to have me with you?”
“Always that. But not to take you with me. I must not.”
Ruby studied the yellow flowers on the blue eiderdown a moment and then turned her eyes again to her husband’s and searched his face, laying her hand, and keeping it there, on his hand that lay on the lace below her throat. She said, “Are you ashamed to take me to China, Lo? Ashamed to have me there with you?”
Sudden color flooded the face of the Chinese man; but he answered her truthfully and fairly, as he always had and always would do.
In every marriage there must be something of sacrifice—and always it must be so, because the bonds that fetter human souls one from the other are eternal set—always have been and always must be—till we cross the River; and it is in the higher wedlock, the happiest union, most nearly perfected, that that sacramental sacrifice is the greatest and costliest. In the sacrifices to come it might be laid upon him to keep from her unsaid some of the thoughts that welled to his heart and vexed his mind—indeed already he had done so once or twice, eagerly willing to bear tenfold any trouble alone rather than to share it with her. But he never had lied to his wife in small things or great, and it did not occur to him to do it now in this hour of their intimate mutual testing. And though he would instantly, ungrudgingly, have sacrificed to her his life and things far dearer than life, he could not sacrifice even to her his word—and truth was a very part of his loyalty. There were white-skinned women in London—a few—who pitied Mrs. Sên, even while they sought her and made much of her—pitied her because she was the wife of an Eastern—but there were sadly few who might not have envied her had they known the quality of her husband’s loyalty—exquisite and absolute.
“Ashamed!” he repeated. “Never that! Need you ask?”
“What is it then?”
“Afraid. Afraid for you, dearest.”
“Of what?” She would not let him off.
And he went on simply and bravely and left no blank in this confession. “Afraid of slights and slurs. They might not come, but they might.”
“Need we care?” she demanded, pressing a little the fingers under hers. “ ‘Where MacGregor sits is the head of the table.’ ”
Sên King-lo made no reply.
“Slights from whom, Lo?”
“From my own people, perhaps.”
She bent over him then, and something as a mother might. “ ‘Thy people shall be my people,’ ” she crooned, “ ‘and whither thou goest there also will I go.’ ”
Sên King-lo gathered his wife down to his breast and held her there. Neither spoke. The room was very quiet.