The child leapt.
But the man stood to his ploughshare, held to his bond.
And the fear in a woman’s eyes died.
The coolies sniffed at the verdure about them, as they shouldered the chairs and boxes and trudged gaily on; for Chinese spring was turning to Chinese summer.
They came on the edge of his home suddenly at noontide, a day of riotous color and warmth. The half-mile from the outer gate to the wide-flung, tulip-tinted dwelling looked but an easy breadth in the clear, ambient radiance: a long, leisurely house, that looked a series of houses, sprawled among persimmon trees and violet walks, the under-lip of each up-curled roof elaborately carved, a house so much lower than the trees beyond it that it looked, here from the hillside above it, like a clumped growth of red and pinkish mushrooms crowding close together in a nest of white and yellow lilies and ferns—for some of the roofs had been newly painted and varnished or glazed, and blazed red in the sunshine, and some were faded and blinked palely pink. A forest of oak-trees stretched in the distance. A pai-fang with markings of gold and silver on its crimson lacquer stood spruce, graceful, and speckless in a garden of tulips scarcely a stone’s throw from a small shabby temple. Peasants—scantily clad, and clad too alike to show of what sex at a distance—squelched in a great paddy field and chattered, so it seemed—Ivy could not hear them so far—under their great sun hats as they bent to their wet, oozing work. An old woman was carrying on her back a bundle of faggots, larger than she, into a kiln-shaped outhouse; an urchin who wore very little but ropes of marigolds—one on his head, one on his hips, three round his neck—was perched impudently on a great, patient buffalo, driving it round and round a dripping water-wheel and thrashing it sternly with a long, harmless branch of young, pliant willow. Peacocks promenaded the terrace. Ducks quacked thirstily in a clovered meadow. A beautiful mare nuzzled the colt that was nursing her and washed its back with a fondling tongue. A cow called to her calf. A spinning-wheel hummed in a near mat-hut. Two graybeards were playing backgammon under a mulberry-tree. Children were at play on a far hillslope, for kites rose from it like a school of excited (if not scandalously tipsy) butterflies. Dozens of tiny dogs scampered and yapped on a mignonette field, and others slept in the sun. A cat was chained to a sundial. And roses clotted everywhere; more roses and more kinds of roses than ever grew in Virginia.
All the homestead place bristled and sang with human life; anvils rang, chisels scratched, saws rasped, grain ran like noisy sand in the man-made chutes and conduits; frail, busy smoke curled slowly up from dozens of twisted chimneys; an employed, thriving, bustling world, the home-hold of the Sêns. Beyond its low, stonewalled boundaries all was wild and silent—a great active hive of human affluence, set in an untouched wilderness of Nature’s holding.
Sên King-lo caught his breath, and his eyes filled with tears.
Ruby Sên’s eyes did not kindle. She smiled a little—and involuntarily a word came in her alien thought: “Caravanserai.”
A servant came running, others ran at his heels. The high doorlike gate was unchained, unbarred, and opened, and the guard-devils—or perhaps they were gods—painted on it drew apart and aside, as if making obsequious way for the Sên who had come home.
And Sên King-lo with his hand on his wife’s litter walked slowly on to the house in which another Sên Ruby had borne him and died.