CHAPTER XIII
As he walked his horse slowly back to his rooms, Sên King-lo, thinking the morning over, concluded that he liked the girl he had just ridden with very much indeed. And he began to suspect that she was more interesting than he had thought her. They had not said a great deal to each other this morning—and none of it even remotely profound. He had had to make all the conversational running at breakfast; and on horseback, when the pace is swift, as most of their long ride had been, is not provocative or well calculated for profound or subtle conversation. But a thought-straw or two from the chaff of her small talk had pointed, he thought, to a mental equipment less ordinary than he had suspected. And she had seemed even younger today—looked younger too, in the searching early light, though less Chinese in her businesslike English riding gear than she had to him before—and she had seemed to him intrinsically young each time they had met—as untraveled twenty-two usually does to traveled twenty-seven. Youth appealed to Sên King-lo. Being Chinese, deeply and typically so, he sincerely reverenced age, felt for it unaffected affection; but it did not lure him—and he was in no way un-Chinese in this. Her youth appealed to his. Next to beauty, what lured him most, as they most lure all of his race, were loyalty, breeding and pluck—probably the first and the last because they tune and key with the loyalty that is deep-grained in most Chinese, and with the pluck that is innate in them all. Her reserve had seemed to him from the first a trait of breeding, in no way a trait of shyness. In truth, Ivy Gilbert had less claim to the title of “sash-wearer” than he had—and less than he thought she showed. Her birth was far less aristocratic than his, not so much because his ancestors had been noble and distinguished for untarnished centuries when hers were wading wode-clad or wodeless in the unreclaimed marshlands of Thorney, as because many a plebeian ancestor had contributed to her being, and not one to his. So far back that she barely knew it, and thought of it as the long-off, hazy thing it was, there had been strawberry-leaves in Ivy Gilbert’s ancestry, but both they and their bar sinister smelt strongly of fish now—not the salt, fishy tang of scaled giants caught with peril and prowess, but the staler smell of fish in shrouds of parsley and ice on tradesmen’s marble slabs.
Ivy’s ancestry was as weird a patchwork as was ever a New England quilt. Sên King-lo’s was one almost royal blue. And it had no bar sinister. There are few bar sinisters in China. Perhaps the Chinese manage man’s wide-flung proclivities more wisely than we do. It could be argued. Certainly they punish little children for prenatal happenings less than we do. They suffer them all to come welcomed and desired into life, suffer them all to wear with untainted right their father’s name—and, not less a boon and a gladness, to love their mothers and be loved by their mothers unashamed. The twenty little flags of British preference and prejudice she’d fluttered out, scarcely with cause, each time they’d met, he took for a young and feminine display of a loyalty that was both sound and sweet. He liked her for it. Her open affection and pride for her cousin Charles, he liked her for, even more. Chinese loyalty has been for its thousands of years far more a thing of family and clan than of country or race—and Young China has had scant time to alter that yet; and it was not altered in Sên King-lo. Her good-natured and sunny treatment of him—so disliking him—he was very sure she disliked him—seemed to him both good-breeding and pluck.
To a point he was right. It had been both—at first. For some quirk or reason—he, try as he would, could not yet fathom what it was—she had ridden with him sorely against her inclination, and having done it of her own untrammeled determination—or freak—she had paid the small social debt it obligated in sunny, good humored companionship; too socially honest, too well-bred to default. Sên King-lo liked her for that. Her honesty appealed to him—true son that he was of a race that must, to a man, pay all its debts in full at least once a year. Of how many peoples can that be said? And again, Sên was right, up to a point. The girl was too well-bred, too socially honest, having gone with him voluntarily, to treat him sourly or over-stiffly, and not to do so had taken pluck—at first. And he liked her for riding so well, as any man who was horse-fond must have done.
Yes—he liked her. He liked her, of the women he knew here, next to Miss Julia Townsend, perhaps. And he certainly liked her very much more than he did even the least unlikeable of the unmarried girls and matrons who banded together to “run after” him—a free, if not easy, inter-racial attention that Sên King-lo valued the tawdry freak thing it was. It both had amused and had bored him. But it never had flattered him. For the quality of her liking, her friendship, her kindness, King-lo loved Miss Julia. But for no one else in Christendom had he ever felt any affection, until something of that feeling suddenly had sprung in him as he sat alone in the dining-room with Sir Charles Snow.
This young Chinese was as little given to sudden likings as the slow-to-decide Englishman was. But there are affinities of manliness and of tastes that brook no delay, that defy barriers. And the quick and sure Chinese intuition of the younger man had leapt to Snow’s worth and congeniality almost on the instant.
Now and then, across the stretch of East and West, there are hands that touch, and having touched, clasp.
Sên King-lo did not like Miss Gilbert—the girl with the Chinese-like flower names—the less because she was Charles Snow’s cousin, or that the cousinly bond between them so evidently was strong and close.
One thing, at least, Sên disliked in his new girl-acquaintance: the little she seemed to care for her small cousins. He had not seen her with them—or seen them at all—and he hoped her indifference to them was merely a verbal barrage to screen and defend from a stranger, a sentiment too exquisite to be shown to a passing acquaintance, above all not to one whom she disliked. He hoped that—for the sake of his new ride-born liking of her—but he rather doubted it. He thought her pluck was more than her artifice; her indifference had rung true enough. And to his Chinese thinking even the slight ailment that kept her little cousins prisoners in their own rooms would have been sufficient excuse for the kinswoman, who had an almost maternal office over them, to have denied herself to him altogether this morning, and have sent him and his horse away from the door. They might be suffering, the poor little tender things—and yet she had laughed and galloped, and her color had deepened joyously, and her brown eyes sparkled care-free and happy. Was she callous?
All Chinese adore all children. Nothing else in our West so repels them as that there are among us some that do not.