When they galloped side by side through the quivering bamboos on the hillslopes, along the mossy banks of a rushing river, through avenues of vermilion roses, under fragrant, wax-flowered lemon-trees that met and roofed above them, some of the old springtime ecstasy and comradeship came back to her, and the charm of her man found and wrapped her again.
Her escort was as devoted and as careful of her as he’d been on the Potomac, his eyes as kind, his laugh as ready. But it was his breeding, the breeding of his race, the man’s loyalty to the woman who had trusted him and given her life into his keeping, the personal loyalty of his manhood and his being that laughed and chatted with her as they rode; for Sên King-lo was not with the English wife who rode beside him, Sên King-lo was back in China, his soul meshed in China’s, his heart torn, every nerve an ache, with the thought that again he must go, go from the flowers and skies of China, from her rainbowed loveliness and her barren rocky places and her wild and rushing torrents, from the customs of his people, the tombs of his ancestors, and the dingy, disregarded temples of their gods.
And when he drew his bridle, and slacked their pace, and pointed with his slender amber whip to some special bit or stretch of beauty, and called her attention to it in a quiet voice that almost trembled and that throbbed in his throat, Ruby scarcely saw, caught no message; because this was China, and China would forever leave her cold.
It is human blood and story that makes country, not architecture or flora, neither bleating polar cold nor seething equatorial heat.
CHAPTER XLVIII
“Thou wilt cleave to her then, my son?” Ya Tin asked gravely, as they sat alone at midnight conference.
“While I live,” Sên King-lo answered.
“Yet it tortures thee to go.”
“It tortures me,” he said.
“When do you wish to go?” Ya Tin asked calmly.