CHAPTER III
The Marriage Journey
WU LI CHANG enjoyed his wedding very much. He enjoyed all of it (except the enforced parting with his young wife)—the wonderful journey to Peichihli, brightened by anticipation; the more wonderful return journey, not a little dulled by homesickness for his bride and by the near-drawing of his voyage to England; the six weeks’ stay in the palace of the Lis; and most of all—decidedly most of all—his wife.
He would have been ingratitude itself if he had not enjoyed his visit at his father-in-law’s. Never went marriage bells more happily. Never was bridegroom more warmly welcomed or more kindly entertained. The wedding ceremonies interested him intensely; they went without a hitch, and never in China was bridal more gorgeous. The honeymoon was best of all—if only it might have been longer!—and had but one jar. (Most honeymoons—at least in Europe—have more.) The one in Wu Li Chang’s and Wu Lu’s honeymoon was acute and plaintive: it was the day that his wife had the colic and wailed bitterly. Wu Li Chang had colic too—in sympathy, the women said, but James Muir suspected an over-feed of stolen bride-cake, gray and soggy, stuffed with sugared pork fat and roasted almonds. Probably the women were right, for Wu Li Chang was not a gluttonous boy, and he had eaten sugared pork fat with impunity all his life; but, caused no matter by what, the colic was real enough, and Wu Li Chang could have wailed too, had such relief been permissible to a Chinese gentleman.
The cavalcade started at dawn on an auspicious day in early spring, when the nut trees were just blushing into bloom and the heavy buds of the wistaria forests were showing faint hints of violet on their lips. The return journey was made when the short summer of Northern and North Central China was turning towards autumn, and the great wistarias creaked in the wind and flung their purple splendor across the bamboos and the varnish trees, and the green baubles of the lychees were turning pink and russet.
The marriage ceremonial took quite a month, for the mandarins would skimp it of nothing; and a Chinese wedding of any elegance is never brief. The engagement had been unprecedentedly brief—made so by the exigencies of Wu Ching Yu’s plans—and to have laid on the lady the further slight of shabby or hurried nuptials would have been unthinkable, and most possibly would have been punished by three generations of hunchbacked Wus.
Mandarin Wu kept his own soothsayer, of course, and equally of course that psychic had pronounced for the brevity of the engagement, and himself had selected the day of the bridegroom’s departure and the marriage days. His commandments had synchronised exactly with his patron’s desire. The mandarin’s wishes and the necromancer’s pronouncements almost invariably dovetailed to a nicety; and when they did not the mandarin took upon himself the rôle of leading seer, and then changed his fortune-teller. It had only happened once, and was not likely to happen again. Wu Ching Yu was a very fine clairvoyant himself.
The prospective parents-in-law were old and warm friends, Wu Li’s senior by thirty years. The older mandarin had dreamed a dream one night, just a year ago, and in the morning had sent a runner to Pekin with a letter to his friend:
“Thy honorable wife, who has laid at thy feet so many jeweled sons, will bear to thy matchless house a daughter when next the snow lies thick upon the lower hills of Han-yang. Thy contemptible friend sues to thee for that matchless maiden’s incomparable golden hand to be bestowed upon his worm of a grandson and heir”—and several yards more to the same effect, beautifully written on fine red paper.
The offer had been cordially (but with Mongol circumlocution) accepted. The match was desirable in every conceivable way. And when Li Lu was born she was already as good as “wooed and married and a’” to the young Wu, at that moment teaching James Muir a new form of leap-frog.
The cavalcade formed at daybreak, and Wu—both Wus—and the tutor came out of the great house’s only door, mounted their horses, and the journey began. It was a musical start, for each saddle horse wore a collar of bells that the pedestrians might be warned to stand aside.