Peony: A Novel of China (29 page)

So passionate was this old man in his lonely murmuring to the dead girl that the little maid grew frightened and went away and Peony was left. She was frightened too, but she pitied the father. “Come and rest, Old Teacher,” she said sweetly, and she took the edge of his sleeve and pulled it.

At the sound of her voice the Rabbi turned on her. His blind eyes opened wide and his long white beard quivered. “Who are you, woman?” he cried in a loud voice.

Peony stood unable to move. This tall old man, towering above her, drove terror into her soul.

His great voice shouted suddenly above her head. “God hath deprived this woman of wisdom! Neither hath he imparted to her understanding! She seeketh her prey and her eyes are afar off. Where the slain are, there is she.”

He stretched out his arms as though to seize her, and Peony, seeing those great thin hands, beautiful and terrible in their strength, turned and fled as though she were indeed pursued.

The Rabbi heard her flying footsteps. He listened and a smile of cunning pleasure passed over his face. “Depart from me, ye workers of iniquity,” he muttered. He lifted his eyes and seemed to look about triumphantly. Then he sighed and with difficulty he felt his way about the room. Around and around he went, and then he came unaware to the coffin again and he felt it carefully up and down and he put in his hand and touched Leah, her feet and knees, and her cold hands. When he found the candle he took it away and threw it on the ground. Then very slowly with trembling horror on his face and agony in his finger tips he felt her wounded throat and then her thin blood-drained face. He had been told that Leah had lifted the sword against herself. Ezra had told him but he had not understood. Now the knowledge came into him and it was too much. He fell down upon the stone floor, unconscious, and so he was found, hours later, when the burial women came to fill the coffin with lime and the carpenter to close the lid. They lifted the old man up and placed him on a couch and went to tell Ezra and Madame Ezra.

“Let Aaron be brought,” Madame Ezra commanded.

But no one could find Aaron. Rachel declared that he had not come home the whole night before. There was nothing to do but tend the old man back again, and under Madame Ezra’s direction this was done. He was carried to his bed in the house and laid upon it.

It was Madame Ezra who first perceived what fresh disaster had befallen. The old Rabbi came back. He sighed, a groan burst from his lips, and he struggled as though he fought some unseen spirit. Wang Ma was watching him and she ran to call Madame Ezra. When she entered the room he opened his eyes. Madame Ezra spoke very gently. “Father, I am here.”

But the Rabbi’s sightless eyes only stared.

Wang Ma cried out in terror, “Oh, Mistress, his soul is lost!”

So indeed it was. For days the Rabbi did not speak at all. He lay on his couch, he took food, but he was silent. Even to pray he did not speak. When one day, without cause, he opened his mouth, it was to speak without knowledge. His soul was gone forever. He knew no one and remembered nothing except the days when Leah was a child, and her mother had been in the house with him.

Thus the Rabbi entered into Heaven before he died, and Ezra in the great kindness of his heart said to his servants, “Prepare a place for him. I will take care of him as long as he lives.”

He spoke without thought of his own goodness, but Madame Ezra’s heart was shaken. When the servants were gone she turned to her husband and humbled herself as she had never done before.

“You are so good,” she sobbed. They stood side by side and she put out one hand to feel for his and covered her eyes with the other. “I wish I had been better to you, Ezra.”

“Why, you have been very good, my dear,” he said pleasantly. He took her hand and held it.

“No, I have often been bad-tempered with you,” she sobbed.

“I know how often I have tried you, Naomi,” Ezra replied.

“I shall be better,” Madame Ezra promised.

“Do not be too good, my wife,” Ezra said, trying to make a joke for her comfort. “Else how can I be your match? I like to have a little temper sometimes.”

“You are good—you are good,” she insisted, and knowing her intensity, he let this pass. He drew her hand through his arm and led her out of the room, talking cheerfully as they went.

“Now, my Naomi, we must remember that our son lives, and that we have our duty to mend his life and make him happy. Little children must be born here again, and we must forget the past.”

So he talked, pressing her heart toward the future, and she subdued herself and tried to be dutiful.

“Yes, Ezra,” she murmured, “yes, yes—you are right.”

He was alarmed at such submission and anxious lest she were ill. Then he reasoned with himself that it would not last. She was a hearty woman and time would bring back her temper and her health, and so he let her say what she would. But Madame Ezra’s heart was sore with sorrow and bewildered with the downfall of all her plans and the loss of all her hopes. She grew weak, for the moment at least.

“Ezra,” she quavered when he had led her to her own rooms and had helped her into her chair, “what shall we do with our son?” This was the question that had been tearing at her thoughts ever since she saw Leah lying dead.

Ezra stood above his weeping wife, and for the first time in their life he knew himself master of this woman whom in his fashion he had loved, and he knew that now he truly loved her. He took her plump hand in his and caressed it. “Let us think only of his happiness, my dear,” he coaxed. “Let us have the wedding as quickly as possible.”

She raised wet and humble eyes to his. “You mean—” She faltered.

He nodded. “I mean the pretty child he loves, the daughter of Kung Chen. I will go to the father and we will set the day and we will bring joy into the house again.”

“But Leah—” Madame Ezra began.

Ezra spoke quickly, as though he had already decided everything. “She will be buried tomorrow, and we will allow a month’s mourning. By then David will be well.”

Madame Ezra could not answer this. A month! She bowed her head and drew away her hand.

Ezra stood for a moment longer. “Are you willing, my wife?” he asked in a full strong voice.

Madame Ezra nodded. “Yes, I am willing.” Her voice was weary and she no longer rebelled, and Ezra bent and kissed her cheek and went away without another word.

Upon the day of Leah’s burial it rained and Ezra forbade David to leave his bed. This made grief, for David had sworn himself able to get up. Leah dead had laid hold on his thoughts as Leah alive had not been able to do. He felt guilt in himself that he could not fathom. He said to himself that had he been more patient that last day she would never have lost her reason so wholly and he might have saved her. Now it seemed to him that he must follow her body to the grave.

But Ezra would not hear to it, and David was astonished by the strength in his father’s face and voice and by the power of his determination. Moreover, his mother did not speak to differ. David looked to her to take his part, but what she said astonished him still more.

“My son, obey your father,” she said.

With the two of them thus united against him, David could not contend further, and so he only rose and went to the room where Leah’s closed coffin lay. There he stood leaning on a manservant and Peony was beside him to watch lest he faint, and he stood and waited until he was left behind. The bearers lifted the heavy coffin and the few mourners followed. The Rabbi was there, wondering and smiling, but Aaron was not. Until this day Aaron had not been found, and Ezra said that he must have run away from the city.

“When all our trouble is over, I will find him and bring him back,” he told Madame Ezra. “As it is, who misses him? The Rabbi has forgotten everything, and Leah is gone.”

David stood watching and sorrowful while the little procession went through the court and out of the gate, and then he turned and went back to his bed again. There he lay with his eyes closed and Peony was too wise to speak to him. She sat beside him, letting him feel her presence in silence. David did not speak and Peony did not rouse him. She knew that sorrow must be spent before joy can take its place, but well she knew that sorrow passes, too.

Outside the city, in the lot of ground upon a hill that was the resting place of the Jews, Leah was put into the earth beside her mother. The Rabbi, her father, stood between Ezra and Madame Ezra, smiling and blind in the cool autumn sunshine. But when Ezra spoke, unexpectedly he obeyed.

“Pray, Father,” Ezra commanded in a loud voice at his ear.

The old Rabbi lifted his face to the sky. “How warm is the sun,” he murmured. And then after an instant he began thus to pray:

“Look down from heaven, and behold from the habitation of Thy holiness and Thy glory! Doubtless Thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledges us not. Thou, O Lord, art our Father. Thy name is from everlasting. We are thine …” And then the Rabbi imagined that he was in the synagogue, and from habit he spread out his hands and cried out. “The Lord God, Jehovah, the One True God!”

Around them passers-by had stopped in curiosity to watch and stare, and the Chinese coffin bearers stood wondering in the strange presence of this old man.

Thus unwittingly did the Rabbi pray over his dead child’s grave. Ezra saw Madame Ezra weep, and he stepped between them and supported them both, and when the grave was filled and the sod packed hard upon the earth, he led them away and took them home.

I
N THE NINTH MOON
month, at a time when heat was gone and cold not yet come, the day of David’s marriage was set. It was the thirty-third day after Leah’s death, and the sod upon her grave was still green.

Thus David saw it when he first went to look upon that grave. He had acquiesced by silence when his father told him that the wedding had been decided upon and he had been silent when he heard that exchange of gifts had been made.

“Does this please you, my son?” Ezra had asked at last.

“Yes, Father, if it pleases you and my mother,” David had answered. He had recovered from his wound, but it had left a scar across his forehead that would be there until his skull was dust. Though his flesh was healed, his spirit had not recovered. He was listless for many hours of the day, and at night he slept ill, and his old healthy greediness for good food had not returned. All this Peony saw, but she said nothing. She tended him now as she had tended him in the old days when he was a child, and Madame Ezra did not forbid her any more.

“Tell me what will please you, my son,” Ezra said anxiously. He put his big hot hand on David’s thin one and David shrank from his father’s touch. He felt his father too eager and too pressing, overanxious and excessively hearty. His strength was not equal yet to meet his father’s love.

“I must marry, I know,” David said.

“You need not—you need not,” Ezra said. But his face fell.

“Yes, I must,” David said.

“Not if you do not love this daughter of Kung,” Ezra said.

“I do not love anyone yet, perhaps,” David said with a small smile.

Ezra was perturbed indeed. He sat back and put his hands on his knees. “I thought you were writing her poems!” he exclaimed.

“I was—but—” So David said.

“Did you leave off before—” Ezra asked, and could not go on to mention Leah.

“Before Leah died?” David said for him. “No—yes, I left a poem unfinished. That was because I met Leah—in the peach garden.”

“Do you mourn her?” Ezra demanded.

David considered long before he spoke. They were sitting in his father’s room, for Ezra had sent for him to tell him that the betrothal was completed.

“No,” David said at last. “I do not mourn. I wish she had not died—as she did. If she had lived—” He paused again.

Ezra’s hair prickled on his scalp and along his arms and legs. “Would you have wed her?” he demanded when David paused too long.

David shook his head slowly. When he did so he felt the scar upon his head ache. “No,” he said, and then with more vigor he said again, “No, Father, of that be sure. But had Leah lived I would have wed this other one with more joy. Can you understand that?”

Ezra’s jaw dropped and he stared back at his son and shook his head. It was beyond him.

“Poor Father,” David said tenderly. “Why should I trouble you? I will marry, and I will have sons and daughters, and I will do well with my life. After the wedding I will come back to the shop and everything will go as before, but better—much better.”

He rose, put a smile on his face, and bowed to his father and went away. Behind him Ezra sat doubtful for a long time, sighed, and then went to his shop, his underlip thrust out for the rest of the day and his temper bad.

As for David, he was restless and he was so irritable with Peony that she gave up trying to please him and she sat quietly and did her sewing. This was usually embroidery of some sort, but today she was not working on silks. She had a piece of fine white linen in her hands, shaped to the sole of a foot.

David watched her little fingers moving in and out of the cloth, drawing the needle up and down and through, and at last he asked her what she did.

“Your feet are tender from lying in bed,” she replied calmly. “I know that the socks the sewing maids make are painful for you. These I am sewing with flat seams, so that there is no seam inside to tear your skin.”

He did not reply to this but he continued to lounge in his chair and look at her idly. “I am to be married, Peony,” he said suddenly.

She lifted her eyes to look at him, and then her eyelids dropped again to the sewing. “I know,” she said.

“Are you pleased with me now?” he demanded.

“It is not for me to be pleased or displeased,” she said gently.

“You shall stay here, Peony, exactly as you have always,” he went on.

“Thank you,” she said. Then she added, “Young Master.”

He paid no heed to this. “I suppose you will want to marry, too, one day,” he said abruptly.

“When I do, I will tell you,” she replied. All this time her fingers were flying very fast, the needle piercing in and out. He was not thinking of her and well she knew it. His mind was wandering round itself. But she was not prepared for what came next from him.