He took the Emperor’s written edict from her hand and read out: “
“My father,” she replied, “sits on the edge of a stool, awaiting news. He would be a practical man, if we told him, and say that the birth of a son is a much more important matter than our marriage, and that our marriage can therefore await his impatience.”
Ah Lai laughed. “But you, Little Star, do not think that anything could be more important than our marriage, do you? Besides, it is not for your father to say, since the wishes of the Emperor come first.”
“You have latterly become a very conservative,” she said. “Now that you have the Emperor on our side, you defer to the Emperor. Before, you used to say ‘
Ah Lai returned: “Do not strive to make me too consistent. You would not like that. And if you go on talking it will soon be too late for us to sleep at all. Besides, you will not have the duty of explaining to your parents. Now that you are my wife, that duty devolves upon me, and I shall have no fear in telling them that you have had the good fortune to enter my distinguished family without the expensive ceremonies with which custom hinders the consummation of sense, and without endless discussions through commission-taking go-betweens regarding dowries, marriage settlements and other financial arrangements which matter not at all to us, standing here for the first time together without the need for dissimulation or subterfuge.”
“That makes it very different,” she agreed.
He went on: “Also, I would rather face your family with accomplished facts, for I believe that your father, at least, regards marriage as something lower than the friendship which one man has for another. Our more personal feelings are new-fashioned and fit ill with the general opinion of the times. That is all the more reason for telling your parents later, when there is no chance of their interposing difficulties. They are even capable of arguing about a thing so final as the Emperor’s edict. And now, have I talked enough for us to go to bed?”
She said: “Yes. But give me that paper first. I must put it in a safe place in order that I may show it to my mother tomorrow. It would not be right to do otherwise.” Then she smiled up at him and went on: “I am not afraid, now. I am glad that you have always felt like this.”
He laughed: “Not always.” Then he relented, and added: “Not before I met you at the Pavilion. That would have been too much to expect. Now, I believe that the things which husbands and wives usually say to each other begin: ‘Do you remember’ and so I ask if you remember how clumsy my fingers were when I buttoned your boy’s clothes upon you. Do you?”
“Only too well,” she replied, helping him.
Later, when the wind had died so that it no longer moved the piece of loose thatch on the wall by the gate, and it seemed that the line of the first light was breaking if anyone cared to look for it, there was a bustling and a hurrying in the rooms of the Lady of the Tapestry, and after a while a thin cry and then the sound of Peng Yen’s footsteps as he hastened round to his father’s room and, breaking into dreams of ancient ceremonies cried: “It is a son!”
But neither these noises nor the padding of Father Peng’s feet as, furred and waistcoated, he passed on his way to demand more certain proof, came into the consciousness either of the two who lay, clasped in each other’s arms upon too narrow a bed, nor of the Emperor as he slept with peace in his face and both hands still grasping a broken comb.
But when it was just light enough to see the clear outlines of her window, Winter Cherry woke. She woke slowly, luxuriously, and without a question in her mind. How strange it was to greet the morning thus, not alone! How curious to know at once, instinctively, that she had now a duty to rouse her husband and set him on his business for the Emperor. He would need hot broth, and then something a little more filling. . . .
She shivered, wholly with delight, and moved Ah Lai’s arm from her neck, laying it between them. He did not wake. She climbed out from under the rugs and skins and stepped carefully over his sleeping body to the floor. The embers in the narrow flue under their