CHAPTER XXVIII

Very slowly, but quite surely, Ruben won them--won even Sên Jo Hiêsen and the servitor who had begged to be sent to Hong Kong to assassinate the English intruder. Of them all, only An Pin never quite “took to” him--the phrase is as current in Ho-nan as it is in Dublin and Chicago. That one dislike persisted in direct descent of La-yuên’s smack far more than it existed against Sên Ruben himself.

There were days when Ruben Sên was homesick for England. You can’t nursery a boy, half English by blood to start with, in a Surrey garden, “breech him,” as it were, at Eton, give him his fresh young manhood at Cambridge, and thrust him across the world, and leave him alone in China for the most of a year--in a Chinese domain in far Ho-nan where few others even thought of Europe, where English news rarely came, and never an English book or newspaper--and have him take firm and satisfied root at once. Ruben Sên did take root, but in rooting there in the home of his people he had twinges of “growing pain”--some of them sharp ones. Not even China can quite wipe England out from the thought and longing of one who has lived in England as Ruben had. It seemed to him preposterous not to know whether his ’Varsity or the Oxford crew had won the race. He missed his mother and he wondered and worried a good deal about Ivy.

But, on the whole, he was happier here in China than he ever had been before, for he knew that he should find _her_ some day, and his young masculine heart was confident that he should win her. And he knew also that but for his mother he never would leave Ho-nan again; not even for Ivy.

There were difficulties in his stay here, of course, his ingrowth in so unaccustomed a human environment. And there were social and personal quicksands that might have engulfed him, and might have divorced him entirely from the kin of his with whom he so earnestly wished to amalgamate. Kow Li had done wonders, but not even that astute and devoted “baby”--the old Chinese millionaire of Bloomsbury who after almost his lifetime of exile was fanatically Chinese--could give to the eager and quick-minded half-caste what thousands of years and cultured establishment, sacrosanct family conventions and, most potent of all, natural environment had given to the Sêns here in Ho-nan.

But La-yuên, the widowed concubine who neither could read nor write and did not know that China was a republic--or know what a republic was--constituted herself his mentor, philosopher and slave and kept near him always when she could--so unobtrusively that the Sêns scarcely noticed it. And La-yuên steered him past the snags and drew him away from the quicksands. Sên Ruben was the white son of her adoption and love, the last love of her loyal life. She guarded him at every point, and, although he never knew it, curbed and prompted him constantly.

For instance: Ruben never knew that it was something that La-yuên had said, as she knelt in the aviary path one day dusting the earth and the dew from his shoes with her sleeve, that caused him to say to Sên C’hian Fan, as they sat smoking in the moonlight among the musk-roses and globe-flowers that ran perfumed riot all over the marble terrace that circled the apricot hill, “What a wealth of heritage--this!”

So! It was coming at last. Well--he had known it would come; and it was but just, and the law, that it should.

“I knew that my father’s people were very rich, that their holding here in Ho-nan was almost a kingdom--”

“It is a kingdom, Sên Ruben. Every great patriarchal Chinese home-place is that,” C’hian Fan interpolated quietly.

“Oh--yes,” Ruben agreed, “and in a way and to an extent that even a Chinese who was born and always has lived in the West and largely among Westerns could not understand until he came back home.”

“Home? You mean _here_, Sên Ruben?”

“Assuredly. This is my home, Sên C’hian Fan, as truly, as deeply as it is yours. But I again must leave it, go back to exile, as my father