But after the first year Kueilan came often. She had borne another child, a fourth son, and when he was a month old she brought him for Peony to see. Kueilan was proud that she had so many sons, but when the nuns went away and left her alone with Peony, she poured out her dislike of this new child.
“Look at him!” she exclaimed as the nurse stood and swayed with him in her arms. “Is he my child, Peony?”
Never could Kueilan remember to call her anything except this old name.
“You bore him,” Peony said, smiling. Heaven had made her Kueilan’s equal now, and she needed no more to call her Mistress.
Kueilan pouted. “He looks like his foreign grandmother.”
Peony could not but laugh. Indeed the tiny boy did look strangely like Madame Ezra. His big strong features did not fit his small face. She motioned to the nurse to let her hold the child. When he was on her lap she looked at his feet and hands. They were big, too. “He will be a big man,” she declared. “Look at his ears, how long the lobes are — that means boldness and wisdom. This son is a lucky one.”
So she consoled Kueilan, and Kueilan, feeling warm toward Peony, coaxed her thus: “Come and visit us again — why not? The maids do not listen to me as well as they did to you, Peony. My eldest son is lazy at his books and his father beat him for it yesterday and I cried and then he was angry with me. If you come, they will all listen to you, Peony, as they always did.”
But Peony, still smiling, shook her head and gave the baby back to his nurse.
“You are the same Peony, even if your head is shaven,” Kueilan coaxed.
Peony was startled. Did these words uncover her heart? Was it because she was shaven and a nun that she did not want David to see her? She grew grave, and by her silence Kueilan thought she had won her way. When she went home that day she told David that she had persuaded Peony to come and visit them for a day, and then he turned grave, too, and silent.
In her cell again, Peony cruelly examined her heart. It is true, she thought. I dread his eyes upon me.
There was no mirror in any nun’s room, but she filled her basin with clear water and she bent over it in the faint sunlight at the end of that day and she saw herself dimly. For the first time she saw her hair gone, and she thought herself ugly. Nothing else could she see, not her dark quiet eyes or her red lips or the smooth outlines of her young face. Her whole beauty, it seemed to her now, had been in her hair, in the braid she used to knot over one ear, in the flowers she had loved to wear in it. For one long moment she looked at herself. Then she lifted the basin and poured the water out of the open window upon a bed of lilies that grew beside the wall.
It is my punishment to let him see me, she told herself.
Yet she did not go for two full years more to the house of David. Kueilan bore her fifth child, this time a daughter, and had conceived her sixth, when one day a servant came in haste to the nunnery to beg Peony to come, because the eldest son of the house lay dying. She gave Peony a folded paper, and Peony opened it, and there David had written a few words.
“For my son’s sake, come.”
“I will come,” she told the maidservant, and she hastened to the Mother Abbess for permission. The Abbess had grown old and frail in the last few years and she never left her cell. To all she was kind, but Peony she loved exceedingly, as the daughter she had never had. Now she clasped Peony’s hand and held it a moment.
“The fire in you is quenched?” she asked.
“Yes, Mother,” Peony said.
“Then go, my child,” the Abbess replied, “and while you are away, I will pray for the boy’s life.”
So Peony went out that day from the refuge that was now her home, and as she walked along the street she quieted her beating heart with steady prayers, her rosary of brown satinwood twisted in her fingers. When she entered the familiar gate David was there waiting for her, and her heart quickened until her will commanded stillness. She looked at him fearlessly, determined that their eyes should not speak anything but cool friendship.
“Peony!” David cried, and she felt his eyes searching out the change in her.
“My name is Clear Peace,” she told him, smiling. No, she would not be afraid to smile.
“I think of you always as Peony,” David replied.
She did not answer this. “Where is your son?” she asked.
They were walking side by side now, she quieting her heart, her fingers busy with her rosary. She had forgotten how tall he was, how strong. The air of youth was gone, and he was a man powerful and grave. She took pride in him without feeling sin, and she looked up at him and met his eyes again. “You have not changed so much,” he said abruptly. “Well — except for your hair.”
“I have changed very much,” she said cheerfully. “Now take me to the child.”
“Ah, my son,” he sighed.
So they quickened their steps and went into the rooms where David and his two elder sons now lived. Each boy when he had reached the age of seven had left his mother’s courts and come to live with his father, and David led Peony into his room and there in his own bed lay the sick boy. He was no longer a child — that Peony saw at once. His tall slender frame lay outstretched on the bed. He was breathing but choking at every breath, and his face was flushed and his eyes were closed.
Peony took his wrist between her fingers and felt the pulse too swift to count. “We have no time to waste!” she exclaimed. “There is poisoned mucus in his throat.”
Now Peony, as all the nuns must, had been much with the sick, and she knew a disease had fallen upon the city this year, borne hither upon evil winds from the north. So she ordered a servant to bring a lamp with a strong wick, and another to cut a length of soft new bamboo and bring it to her. While she waited she dipped cloths in hot water and bound them about the boy’s throat to warm his muscles. As soon as she had the thin bamboo tube in her fingers, she bade David hold the boy hard, and set a manservant to hold his feet. Then delicately pressing the thumb and finger of her left hand to his jaw, she forced open his mouth and she put down the tube and sucked on it slowly. The boy choked and struggled but she persevered until a clot came up into the tube and he fell back with a great gasp.
“Burn this tube in fire,” she told the servant. “It is full of poison. And bring me wine to give him.”
She stood watching and motionless until the wine was brought and she poured some of it into the boy’s throat, and then she washed her own mouth with the wine, too, and spat it out into a silver cuspidor that stood by the bed.
“He is better!” David exclaimed with joy.
“He will live,” Peony said.
Nevertheless she did not leave the bedside until near dark, when the laws of the nunnery said she must return. The next day she came back, and every day indeed until the lad was well again.
By that time she knew that she must come often. David needed her sorely, for he was perplexed by growing children and impetuous sons and too many servants who were lazy and disobedient, and harassed because his own prosperous business took him much away. Peony saw clearly the years ahead when sons and daughters must be betrothed and weddings planned and all the life of a great and busy house be carried on to other generations. And she could come safely, for David loved his wife. This Peony saw with lingering pain. Indeed, she asked herself, why should there be any pain? Had she not brought Kueilan into this house? It was not Kueilan who had sent her out of it. The marriage she had fostered had flowered and borne seed. Between David and Kueilan now there was the close fleshly bond of house and home and children and prosperity, and all their life was entwined together. Was this not what she had hoped would be?