Mr. and Mrs. Sên

by Louise Jordan Miln

Her disgust and self-revulsion because she had turned in personal affection—emotion even—to a man so set from her by race quite slipped away, and only her shame at loving unloved and unsought remained.

Again she found it hard to remember that Sên was Chinese—less of her own race than a Spaniard or Russian was. It was he, his personality that appealed to and pleased her, and she did not realize that his race was a strong and essential part of both, and that in both he was intensely Chinese. To her he was merely the man, because so much the man.

And when she did think about it—that he was Chinese, she English—it gradually grew to her a lesser and almost negligible thing. Chinese and English of gentle birth did not marry. But was it a sound decency or only a cheap and sorry prejudice that barred the way? Inherited reason said “decency,” but her heart and her own estimate of Sên, her own satisfaction and ease in his companionship, leaned to the other answer. She ceased to feel any shame that she had given her love—for she was relentlessly frank with herself as to that—to an Asian. But that she had let herself care for a man who gave her no thought of that sort in return shamed her cruelly. And she guarded her secret well—now that she knew it herself. Her ignorance had been her danger-time. It was past. She guarded it so well that she deceived eyes sharper to the thing she hid than were the eyes of unsuspecting Sên King-lo. And he had no need to guard. It is easy enough to hide what does not exist. Even Lady Snow began to think that her alarm had barked up a phantom tree, and laughed at herself—and was glad. And Sir Charles laughed up his sleeve at his fanciful wife, and Miss Julia laughed scornfully up hers at Elenore Ray. And only Dr. Ray was not deceived—and said nothing. She saw it all—saw even what neither Ivy nor Sên did. And things went on between Sên King-lo and the English girl as they had—but they went; they did not stand quite stock still. Things are not apt to do that between a man and a maid in springtime. He told her more and more of China than he had, and she learned how to write her second name in Chinese, and one day—it was almost May—Sên King-lo filled the blank he had left in the confession-book. And Ivy locked the book away—not to be written in again, she intended. But she took it out and looked in it sometimes.

In April the spring was coming. Soft sticky things showed on the leaf-bare trees, if you looked close enough. The grass was reasserting itself. Poor people slacked their fires. Fruit from “down South” was cheaper. Stuffs in the drygoods shops were thinner and paler. The skies gave a promise of summer. The moon laughed again, and some days at noontide the Potomac laughed back at the sun. The magnolia on Miss Julia’s sunniest wall hinted of buds, and then the buds began to swell, and Lysander and Dinah sorted out turkey-wings and long-handled brooms of peacocks’ feathers against the coming of flies, and spoke of “them ornery niggah’s summer cloes,” and dreamed at night of big watermelons and green peas.

Ivy just glanced at the house on the other side of the street as she and Sên passed it as they were walking together one late April day. She knew from the number that he lived over there and, from what Emma had said, which were his sitting-room windows, but she never had happened to pass it on foot and in day-time. She had sent notes to him there, but she was not a girl who would go to look where a man friend lived. She made no remark about it now, and neither did he.

“I think you are wrong,” he was saying. “As I read it, Ruskin meant——”

Ivy caught his arm and gave a cry.

Two small spotted ponies had dashed madly around the corner from M Street, not quite missing the sharp curb; ponies she usually drove herself when the children would go and Watkins could not be spared. A very small groom with a very white face was seesawing wildly at the reins, just the one thing to infuriate the already crazily maddened ponies. Who had trusted Buttons to drive? Where was Charlie? Was Emma mad? Justine should go for this. Blanche was sobbing and screaming betimes. Dick seemed in scarcely manlier shape, and just as Sên dashed towards the ponies and caught their bridles as in a vise, Dick screamed, and jumped. Buttons gave a superhuman wrench at the reins—one rein broke—and the low phaeton lurched over. Both the children were pinioned under its wreck.

The maddened ponies squealed with fear and rage. They were trembling violently, but they moved on not an inch more. Sên King-lo was holding them. He dared not leave their heads, but Ivy, steeling herself to go to him, saw the agony on his face as he looked at the turned-over trap under which the children lay. The boy driver sat on the sidewalk crying weakly.

“Can you pull the whip out from under there—it is under the wheel—and give him a cut?” Sên asked.