Peony: A Novel of China by Pearl S. Buck Page B

because of Madame Ezra’s new command, but partly it was to test David. Alas, he had not sent for her, and when she went to bed she wept a while. In the morning she woke to reproach herself, and she had gone early to his rooms to take him tea, and if he were awake to ask him where he had been and why he had not finished the poem he had begun. But he was asleep and he had not waked, even when she parted the curtains of his bed and looked. He lay there, deep in sleep, his right arm flung above his head, and she had gazed at him a long moment, her heart most tender, and then she had gone away again.
    “Bid Wang Ma wake him,” Madame Ezra now commanded. “And where is my son’s father?”
    “I have not seen him, Mistress,” Peony replied, “but I heard Wang Ma say that he expects the caravan today, and therefore he went out early to the city gates to wait for it.”
    “The caravan would come this day!” Madame Ezra exclaimed. “Now David will think of nothing else.”
    Peony looked sad, to please Madame Ezra. “Shall Wang Ma bid him come here to you before the caravan comes?” she asked.
    “Let her do so,” Madame Ezra said. “I will put off going to the kitchens, and meanwhile tell Leah to come to me.”
    She opened an inlaid box and took out some embroidery, and Peony left her. Outside the door she met Wang Ma, and she said, as though Madame Ezra had commanded it, “You are to take the young lady to our mistress, and I am to go and wake our young lord. Make haste, Elder Sister!”
    She ran on, but not to David’s room. She went to his schoolroom, now empty, and at the table in haste she took up the writing brush, put off its cover, and then made a little ink. She had kept the unfinished poem in her breast, and now she drew it out. Thinking fast and drawing her brows together, she quickly wrote three lines more upon the empty sheet.
    “Forgive me, David,” she whispered, and replacing pen and ink, she ran back to her own room. Opening a secret drawer in her desk, she took out a purse with money in it, the gifts that guests gave her and the coins that Ezra tossed her sometimes when he was pleased with her. Putting this too into her bosom, she slipped through passageways to the Gate of Peaceful Escape at the very back of the compound, that little secret gate which all great houses have, so that in time of the anger of the people, when they storm the front gates of the rich, the family itself can escape by it.
    Through this gate Peony now went, keeping to quiet alleyways, away from the streets, until she came to another small gate like the one she had left. This opened into the compound of the Kung family, and here she knocked. A gardener drew back the bar and she said, “I have a message for the family.”
    He nodded and pointed a muddy finger over his shoulder, and she went in.
    The house of Kung was an idle, pleasure-loving place, and no one rose from bed before noon. Chu Ma, the nurse, was only just stirring about her room, yawning and scratching her head with a silver hairpin, when Peony opened the door a little.
    “Ah, you, Elder Sister!” Peony whispered.
    Chu Ma opened the door wide. “You?” she said. “Why are you here?”
    “I must make haste,” Peony said. “No one knows I have left the house, except the young master himself, who bade me bring this quickly to your young mistress—and let me know if there is an answer.”
    This was a house that she knew a little, for once Ezra had sent her here with some treasure for Kung Chen that he dared not entrust to a servant only, and she had met Chu Ma, the eldest woman servant, and at New Year’s time Chu Ma had gone to pay her good wishes and Peony had come here to return her own, in the careless easy fashion between two houses whose elders had some business together. Madame Ezra, it is true, had no friendships here, but Ezra and Kung Chen were very thick in trade.
    “What does it say?” Chu Ma asked, staring at the paper.
    Standing there in the