“Have you seen David?” she now demanded.
“I seldom see him in the morning,” Ezra replied. “Moreover, I have been at the teahouse since I rose from my bed. I had promised to meet Kung Chen there.”
He coughed behind his large smooth brown hand. “What a clever merchant!” he said with admiration. “He and I — we’re a pair. We respect each other. One day he has the best of me and the next day I have the best of him. But the end is coming now — we are almost agreed. Naomi, if I bring this contract to conclusion, as surely I will after the caravan comes, I shall have an outlet through the House of Kung for all my imports of ivory, porcelain, peacocks, western trinkets, and musical instruments — in short, for all foreign goods. Through their shops I shall pour my merchandise.”
The two bondmaids, Wang Ma and Peony, had taken their usual places. Wang Ma stood behind Madame Ezra and Peony behind Ezra. They were as little noticed as though they were pieces of furniture, but this they took as a matter of course. Ezra leaned on the table. “Naomi, I have something to propose to you. Now be patient—”
“Well?” Madame Ezra’s voice was edged with impatience.
“Kung Chen has a daughter, sixteen, very pretty—”
“How do you know?” Madame Ezra demanded.
“Well — hm — I saw the child, quite accidentally, the other day. He had asked me to come to his house — very unusual. But we wanted to talk privately about the contract. She was there in the main hall. Of course, she left instantly. But Kung said she was his daughter.”
Madame Ezra contained herself with difficulty. She pressed her lips together and gazed furiously at her husband. “I suppose you are about to suggest that I accept this Chinese girl as my daughter-in-law?” she asked bitterly.
Ezra shrugged and spread out his big hands, palms upward. “Well, my dear, you see the advantages. I am an importer of foreign goods, he is a merchant with shops in a dozen big cities, you see. After all, we are living in China.”
“I see nothing except that you are asking a monstrous thing!” she cried.
“Eh?” Ezra lifted his shaggy eyebrows.
“You know that David must marry Leah!” Madame Ezra’s rich voice threatened tears.
“Now, Naomi,” Ezra began. “You can’t mean that you are going to insist on that, after all these years!”
“I do insist!” Madame Ezra retorted. “All the more after all these years!”
Ezra spoke with persuasive gentleness. “But a foolish promise, Naomi, made by two sentimental women over their children’s cradles!”
“A sacred promise,” Madame Ezra declared, “made before Jehovah, to preserve our people pure!”
“But Naomi—”
“I insist!”
“It’s a little late to talk about purity. My own mother was Chinese,” Ezra said.
“Don’t remind me of her!” Madame Ezra screamed.
Ezra lost his temper suddenly and completely. His face purpled. He rose to his feet. But Wang Ma was quicker. She stepped in front of him and she pushed him to his chair, her hands on his arms.
“Master, Master,” she remonstrated.
He sank back. Wang Ma poured a bowl of tea and gave it to him with both hands and glanced at Madame Ezra. Ezra took the bowl and set it down abruptly before his wife.
“Drink tea, Naomi,” Ezra said shortly.
Now Wang Ma filled Ezra’s tea bowl and presented it to him. Peony drew a white silk fan from her wide sleeve and began to fan him gently. He sighed, relaxed in his chair, and lifting his turban, he wiped his face and head with his silk handkerchief and put the turban on again.
“Perhaps we had better send for David,” he suggested at last.
“There is no use in sending for him until you agree with me,” Madame Ezra said.
“But perhaps he will help us to agree,” Ezra retorted.
“I will not have you mention this Chinese girl to him,” Madame Ezra replied.
“No, no,” Ezra said, “that I promise! But we could find out how he feels about any marriage. That, at least—”
“Why at least?” Madame Ezra broke in. “It is the most important, not the least.”
Ezra slapped his knees. “Peony!” he shouted. “Go and fetch my son!”
“Yes, Master,” Peony whispered. She moved out of the room, noiseless and graceful. Wang Ma filled the tea bowls again.
Madame Ezra went on, “I will not grant that David can decide this matter.”
“You wouldn’t want him to marry a woman he hates, Naomi,” Ezra said more mildly.
“Who could hate Leah?” Madame Ezra rejoined. “She is a beautiful girl — and so good.”
“Certainly,” Ezra agreed.
“What our old rabbi would have done without her—” Madame Ezra said.
“His son is good for little,” Ezra said with sarcasm.
“Aaron is still a child.”
“Only a year younger than Leah.”
“She seems much older.”
“Yes,” Ezra agreed absently. He fell silent.
He had in fact told his wife a lie. It was not he who had seen the pretty daughter of Kung, but David. But how could he have explained to his wife that he had purposely sent David to the house of Kung? He had sent him with a message to Kung Chen at the exact hour when the ladies of a house are freshly dressed and wandering about the courts for change and exercise. When David came back he had said teasingly, “Why are your eyes so bright, my son? What have you seen?”
David had blushed as a young man should and had shaken his head. “Here is the answer, Father,” he had replied shortly, and had put Kung Chen’s letter on the table.
Now Ezra closed his eyes, sat back in his chair, and circled his thumbs slowly one about the other. Behind the veil of his eyelids his acute and restless mind worked busily, sorting out the threads of his emotions. He was not confused so much as complex. In his veins ran the blood of two hearty strains. Half of the blood was nearly pure, but his father had taken as a second wife a young Chinese woman of strength and beauty, and he was her son. Outwardly his mother had seemed to adopt all the ways of his father’s house. But Ezra, her son, alone knew how untouched was her heart. In her own room, in the secrecy of her being, she had laughed at the foreigners with whom she lived. While she had enjoyed the pleasures of being a rich man’s wife and had eaten until she had in her age grown immensely fat, her pretty features sunk in mounds of rosy flesh, she had actually given up nothing of her own ways, and had even influenced the man she had married. Old Israel ben Abram, as the years passed, had begun to neglect the feast days once carefully observed in the house, and compromise became his habit. But when his Chinese wife died, leaving his son Ezra a boy of fifteen, in an excess of remorse and smitten conscience he had betrothed him to Naomi, daughter of a leader of the little colony of Jews in the Chinese city.
Ezra, at that time indolent and romantic, had yielded. Naomi was handsome and there was something fascinating in her cool young strength. After their marriage, he found the habit of compromise, taught him by his Chinese mother, a practical weapon. Naomi was too strong. It was with compromise that his brain was now busy.
Madame Ezra spoke suddenly. “Ezra, open your eyes — you look foolish.”
“Certainly, my dear,” he replied. He opened his eyes.
“Not so wide, stupid!” Madame Ezra said impatiently.
He drooped his lids and his lips twitched with secret laughter. She threw him a sharp look and he caught it as though it were a glass ball and threw it back at her. She looked away.
“David is a long time in coming,” she remarked.
“He may have been on the street somewhere, Lady,” Wang Ma hastened to reply. Every servant in the house rallied to the defense of the young lord.