Peony: A Novel of China Read Free Page A

had paused and then had gone on, “And while I speak, here is more—you are no longer to go to his room, for any cause, if he is there—or he to yours. Do you hear me?”
    “Yes, Mistress.” Peony had turned away to hide her tears, and Madame Ezra had relented.
    “I do not blame you, child, for growing up,” she announced. “But I teach you this: Whatever happens is always the woman’s fault.”
    “Yes, Mistress,” Peony had said again.
    “Oh, you know my mother,” David now grumbled.
    Peony darted a shrewd look at him. “She will scold you for wearing your robe tied around you like that. Only yesterday she told me I must help you to be neat—‘a bondmaid’s duty,’ she said.”
    She put the peach blossoms carefully on the ground as she spoke and went to him. He laughed a young man’s laughter, lazy, amorous, teasing, and standing beside her, he submitted to her nimble fingers. He was so tall that he shielded her from the house, but he threw a quick look over his shoulder.
    “Whose bondmaid are you?” he demanded.
    She lifted her long lashes. “Yours,” she said. Then her lips twitched. “That’s not to say I’m worth much! You know what I cost when they bought me for you—a hundred dollars and a suit of clothes.”
    “That was when you were a skinny thing of eight,” he teased. “Now you’re worth—let’s see—seventeen, pretty, but very disobedient and still a handful of a girl. Why, you must be worth ten times as much!”
    “Be still,” she commanded him. “This button is almost off. Come with me and I will sew it on.”
    “Come to your room?”
    She shook her head. “Your mother said that was to stop.”
    “You come to my room,” he urged.
    She shook her head, hesitated, and they heard a panel slide. Instantly he slipped into the twisting path behind a tall rock, and Peony stooped to pick up the peach blossoms. It was only Wang Ma, who came to sweep the threshold.
    “I saw you,” she said to Peony.
    “What of that?” Peony replied with impudence. She went into the huge shadowy hall and began to arrange the peach blossoms in two blue hawthorn-flowered vases that stood on the wall table. This morning the great hall was, to the casual eye, a Chinese family room. After last night’s feast the round table had been taken away and the other furniture had been placed again in the conventional Chinese way about the room. The long table was set against the wall facing the wide door into the garden, and against this table was set the square table of the same dark polished heavy wood. On either side of the square table were the two immense armchairs of the same wood. At intervals around the walls the small tables stood, each with a pair of chairs. Doorways were hung with red satin curtains and there were no windows except on the side toward the garden, which was set with sliding panels latticed with mother-of-pearl. Through the lattice the sunlight filtered, iridescent and pale upon the floor of smooth worn gray tile, on the white plastered walls, even on the high, beamed roof. Long ago the beams had been varnished an ox-blood red, and the color had grown rich and dark with age.
    To the discerning eye the room was not purely Chinese even today. Above the long wall table in the place of honor there hung an enormous satin tapestry. Upon its dull blue, Hebrew letters were embroidered in gold. Beneath this tapestry stood the two seven-branched candlesticks of brass, and in one corner of the room was an ancient Jewish prayer ark.
    Peony stepped back to see the effect of the blossoms. With her usual skill she had arranged them in the vases in such a manner that they formed a composite as lovely as a painting. She smiled, her head lifted slightly to one side. A look of sensuous pleasure came over her exquisite small face.
    “When the peach trees bloom then it is spring,” she murmured to Wang Ma. “What a mercy of heaven that our spring festival comes after their sorrowful foreign