They had had many a golden jaunt together—a month in Venice, wonderful weeks in Spain, again and again a week in Paris—these married lovers and best of friends, before Ruben had come to call a halt to their journeying and make their London life more of a permanency than it had been. They had learned North Wales together and watched Windermere. No reasonable wife could have seriously asked more of marriage and husband than Sên King-lo had given her. And riant Mrs. Sên was a very reasonable and entirely contented woman.
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.”