Yet who can shape an hour to his wish, or what lover knows how the hour will find even himself? For Yuan’s tongue, which shaped the words so easily upon the train, could shape nothing when the hour was come. The house was quiet when he came into its hallway, and only a servant stood there. The stillness struck him like a chill.
“Where is she?” he cried to the servant, and then remembering, he said more quietly, “Where is the lady, my mother?”
The servant replied, “They are gone to the foundlings home to see to a babe newly left there who is ill. They may be late, they said.”
So then Yuan could only cool his heart and wait. He waited and tried to turn his thoughts here or there, but his mind was not his own — it would turn back of its own will to the one great hope it had. Night came and still the two did not come, and when the servant called the evening meal, Yuan must go to the dining room and eat there alone, and the food was dry and tasteless on his tongue. Almost he hated the little child who so delayed the hour he had longed for all these weeks.
Then even as he was about to rise because he could not eat, the door opened and the lady came in, very weary and spent and downcast in her look, and Mei-ling with her, silent and sad as Yuan had never seen her. She looked at Yuan as though she did not see him and she cried out to him in a low voice, as though Yuan had not been away at all, “The little baby died. We did all we could, but she died!”
The lady sighed and sat down and said, grieving too, “You are back, my son? … I never saw a lovelier little newborn child, Yuan — left three days since on the threshold — not poor, either, for its little coat was silk. At first we thought it sound, but this morning there were convulsions, and it was that old ancient woe that curses newborn babes, and takes them before the tenth day is gone. I have seen the fairest, soundest children seized by it, as by an evil wind, and nothing can prevail against it.”
To this the maid sat listening, and she could not eat. Her narrow hands were clenched upon the table and she cried angrily, “I know what it is. It need not be!”
But Yuan, looking at her angry face, more moved than he had ever seen it, perceived her eyes were full of tears. That anger and those tears were ice upon his hot heart. For he saw they closed the maid’s mind against him. Yes, he thought of her and her only, but at this moment she did not dream of him; although he had been weeks away, she did not think of him. He sat and listened, therefore, and answered quietly questions that the lady mother put to him of his father’s house. But he could not but see that Mei-ling did not even hear the questions or how he answered them. She sat there strangely idle, her hands quiet in her lap, and though she looked from face to face, she said nothing at all. Only more than once her eyes were full of tears. And because he saw her mind was very far from him, on that night Yuan could not speak.
Yet how could he rest until he had spoken? All night he dreamed brokenly, strange dreams of love, but never love come clear.
In the morning he woke exhausted by his dreams. It was a grey day, too, a day when summer passes certainly into autumn. When Yuan rose and looked out of the window he saw nothing but greyness everywhere, a still smooth grey sky curved above the flat grey city and upon the grey streets the people moving sluggishly, small and grey upon the earth. His ardor seeped from him under this lifelessness, and Yuan wondered at himself that ever he could have dreamed of Mei-ling.
In such a mood he sat himself down to eat his breakfast, and while he ate listlessly, for the very food on this day seemed to him saltless and without flavor, the lady came in, too. She had not eaten or exchanged much more than morning greetings with Yuan before she saw something was wrong with him. So she began to press him gently with her questions. And he, feeling it not possible to speak of his new love, told her instead of how his father had borrowed so much silver of his uncle, and she was very taken back by this and cried out, “Why did he not tell me he was so hard pressed for money? I could have used less. I am glad I have used my own silver for Mei-ling. Yes, I had a sort of pride to do that, and my father left me enough, since he had no son, before he died, and he put his moneys in a good sound foreign bank where they have lain safely all these years. He loved me very well, and sold many of his inherited lands even, and turned them into silver for me. If I had known, I might have—”
But Yuan said dully, “And why should you have done it? No, I will seek out a place where what I have learned will serve me, and I will save my wage, as much as I can, and return it to my uncle.”
Then it came to him that if he did this, how could he have enough to wed on and set up his house and do all those things for which a young man hopes? In the old days the sons lived with the father, and son’s wife and son’s children ate from the common pot. But Yuan in his day could not bear to do this. When he thought of the courts where the Tiger lived and of that old mother who must be Mei-ling’s mother-in-law, he swore he would not live there with Mei-ling. They would have their own home somewhere, a home such as Yuan had learned to love, pictures on the walls and chairs easy to sit upon and cleanliness everywhere — and only they two in it to make it what they liked. And thinking of all this he fell into such longing before the lady’s very eyes that she said very kindly, “You still have not told me everything.”
Then suddenly Yuan’s heart burst from him and he cried, his face all red and his eyes so hot he could feel them burning underneath their lids, “I have more to tell — I do have more to tell! I have somehow learned to love her and if I do not have her I shall die.”
“Her?” asked the lady, wondering. “What her?” And she cast about in her mind. But Yuan cried, “And who but Mei-ling?”
Then the lady was full of astonishment, for she had not dreamed of such a thing, since Mei-ling was to her only a child yet, the child she had lifted up from the street one cold day and taken into her own home. Now she looked at Yuan and was silent for a while and she said thoughtfully, “She is yet young and full of her plans.” And then she said again, “Her parents are unknown. I do not know how it will be with your father if he knows she was a foundling.”
But Yuan cried in impatience now, “My father can say nothing on this thing. In this day I will not be bound by their old ways. I will choose for myself.”
The lady bore this mildly, being by now very well used to all such talk, since Ai-lan had cried it often, and she knew from talk with other parents that all young men and women said the same thing and their elders must bear it as they could. So she only asked, “And have you spoken to her?”
Then Yuan forgot his boldness straightway and he said, shy as any old-fashioned lover, “No, and I do not know how to begin.” And after a little thought he said, “It always seems as though her thoughts are set on some busy matter of her own. Other maids begin somehow with eyes or even touch of hands, or so I have heard, but she never does.”
“No,” the lady answered proudly, “Mei-ling never does.”
Now even as Yuan sat in his dejection this came to him. He would ask the lady to speak for him. And after all, his mind said swiftly to itself, it was really better so. Mei-ling would listen to the lady whom she so loved and honored and it would be something for him.