But it was many a minute before the litter-bearers came.
The Raja turned to Crespin. “You were speaking of transport, Major—” then to Traherne, “Is your machine past repair, Dr. Traherne?”
“Utterly, I’m afraid.”
“Let us look at it,” the Raja suggested, and turning towards it he saw that his body-guard had broken rank, and all were clustered pell-mell on the path, looking in rather frightened amazement at the mangled plane. He gave a sharp, displeased word of command, and they scampered back into a sort of loose order, but even from the comparative distance they kept their anxious, puzzled eyes swung back to the aeroplane, and some of the boldest or less disciplined craned their bebeaded necks. “Ah, yes,” the Raja said after a near glance, “propeller smashed—planes crumpled up—”
“Under carriage wrecked,” Traherne prompted sadly.
“I’m afraid we can’t offer to repair the damage for you,” the Raja said, shaking his head.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” the doctor answered grimly.
“A wonderful machine!” the Raja said enthusiastically, still looking it over. “Yes,” he owned, “Europe has something to boast of. I wonder what the priest here thinks of it?” He turned with a laugh, and beckoned Yazok, and they spoke together in their own tongue, the Raja with a few short words, the priest with long guttural volubility profusely punctuated with deep salaams. It was evident that temporal power exceeded the gods’ in Rukh. The master dismissed the other almost as crisply as he had admonished the gaping body-guard, and turned with a smile of tolerance, if more contempt, again to Traherne. “He says,” he translated, “it is the great roc—the giant bird, you know, of our Eastern stories. And he declared that he plainly saw his Goddess hovering over you as you descended, and guiding you towards her temple.”
“I wish she could have guided us towards the level ground I saw behind your castle,” Traherne said grimly. He felt no compulsion to speak more ceremoniously of her Green Goddesship than the Raja himself had. “I could have made a safe landing there.”
“No doubt,” the Raja nodded; “on my parade ground—almost the only level spot in my domains.”
“These, I suppose,” Mrs. Crespin, tired of her cushions, asked as she joined them, and caught his words, “are your body-guard?”
“My household troops, Madam,” the potentate said with a bow.
“How picturesque they are!” she exclaimed.
The Raja laughed. “Oh,” he said easily, “a relic of barbarism, I know. I can quite understand the contempt with which my friend the Major is at this moment regarding them.”
Hearing him Crespin joined them too. “Irregular troops, Raja,” he said; “often first-class fighting men.”
“And you think,” the Raja said quickly, “that, if irregularity is the virtue of irregular troops, these—what is the expression, Watkins?”
“Tyke the cyke, Your ’Ighness,” the expatriated cockney supplied—but he kept his distance.
“That’s it—take the cake—that’s what you think, Major?”
“Well,” Crespin owned, too taking his cue and tone from the cosmopolitan Raja’s own, “they would be hard to beat, sir.”
“I repeat,” the ruler said gravely, “a relic of barbarism. You see, I have strong conservative instincts—I cling to the fashions of my fathers—and my people would be restive if I didn’t. I maintain these fellows as his Majesty the King-Emperor keeps up the Beefeaters in the Tower. But I also like to move with the times, as perhaps you will allow me to show you.” He lifted the silver whistle that hung at his coat, and blew on it two short blasts.
Instantly from behind every rock and shrub—from every bit of possible cover—there emerged a soldier, garbed in spick and span European uniform—almost identical with the uniform of a crack regiment of Imperial Russia—and faultlessly armed with the latest brand of magazine rifle. They saluted their prince, and then stood, their eyes on him, as immovable as statues at attention.
“Good Lord!” and Crespin added an involuntary whistle; and Traherne as involuntarily gasped, “Hallo!” But, if the Englishwoman shared their amazement she did not show it. She looked at the up-sprung troops quite calmly and casually. That surprised the Raja, and pleased him—quickened him even. There is no other quality that appeals to the high caste Oriental as inscrutability and imperturbability do—qualities of soul and of breeding that echo his own, and to which his own answer. He did not like Europeans, except an old friend or two of his English varsity days. But he felt that he could, if opportunity served, like this Englishwoman—and the Raja of Rukh was accustomed and skilled to swing opportunity into his line. He said to her concernedly, “I trust I did not startle you, Madam?”
“Oh, not at all,” she told him. “I am not nervous,” and she looked him frankly and squarely in the eyes, as she sat carelessly down again on her seat of cushions.
His dark eyes kindled an instant, then he said lightly, “You, of course, realize that this effect is not original. I have plagiarized it from the excellent Walter Scott:
‘These are the Clan-Alpine’s warriors true,And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!’
‘These are the Clan-Alpine’s warriors true,And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!’
‘These are the Clan-Alpine’s warriors true,And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!’
‘These are the Clan-Alpine’s warriors true,
And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!’
But I think you’ll admit, Major, that my men know how to take cover!”
How typically Oriental, Traherne thought, incredible mixture of child and cool man of the world.
“By the Lord, sir,” Crespin answered heartily, “they must move like cats—for you can’t have planted them there before we arrived.”
“No,” the Raja reminded him with a laugh; “you had given me no notice of your coming.”
“Perhaps the Goddess did,” Lucilla said slyly.
Dr. Traherne felt a little anxious at that, but the Raja took her words in the best of good part. “Not she, Madam,” he assured her, letting his brown-black eyes smile into hers for a moment. “She keeps her own counsel. These men followed me down from the palace, and have taken position while we have been speaking.”
He gave one word of command, and the men, absolutely making no sound, rapidly assembled and formed in two ranks, an officer on their flank.
Crespin’s once soldierly face glowed with admiration. His wife thought she had not for years seen him look so nearly his old self. “A very smart body of men, Raja,” he said with blunt and evident admiration. “Allow me to congratulate you on their training.”
“I am greatly flattered, Major.” The Raja was delighted, and showed it gleefully—the child, so quick in every Oriental, hot on the surface. “I superintend it myself. . . . Ah, here comes the litter.”
Down the path it came, four bearers carrying it evenly. Two chairs, each borne by two men, swung along behind it. As its bearers put the litter down, the Raja offered his hand to Mrs. Crespin with, “Permit me, Madam, to hand you to your palanquin.”
As she rose she picked up her leather coat, and the newspaper dropped from its folds and fell to the ground. Traherne bit his lip. The Raja sprang to pick it up. “Pardon me, Madam,” he said quickly, almost in a tone of command, and began to scan it. “A newspaper only two days old! That is such a rarity that you must allow me to glance at it.” He opened it with a deferential gesture but with a determined hand, and a flick of something not too amicable glinted from his eyes as he saw that a strip had been torn from the back page. “Ah,” he said softly, “the telegraphic news gone! What a pity! In my seclusion, I hunger for tidings from the civilized world.”
Yazok the priest came closer and spoke to his prince eagerly, telling too in vivid pantomime Traherne’s burning of the paper, and then pointed to the little blur of ashes still on the ground. The Raja looked at them slowly, lifted his eyes, and asked Traherne, smiling, “You burned this column?”
“Unfortunately, I did.” Traherne had sensed rather than caught the dislike, and even almost threat, in the suave Eastern voice.
“Ah!” the Raja said with a significance he did not choose or trouble to veil. Then, after a pause no one else quite cared to break, he added, with a show of gratitude that was very well done, if he was not sincere, “I know your motive, Dr. Traherne, and I appreciate it. You destroyed it out of consideration for my feelings, wishing to spare me a painful piece of intelligence. That was very thoughtful—almost, if I may say it, Orientally so—but quite unnecessary. I already know what you tried to conceal.”
“You know!” and “Your Highness knows!” the two Englishmen said simultaneously, incredulously.
The Raja smiled slightly and bowed so. “Oh, I had not seen this excellent English journal—if I had, my eagerness to look at it would have been an indirection unworthy between friends, and quite unnecessary to me, I assure you—and I have not heard what comment the admirable editor of theLeadermakes—or his leader writers—but I know that three of my subjects, accused of a political crime, have been sentenced to death.”
“How is it possible—?” Traherne involuntarily began.
“Bad news flies fast, Dr. Traherne,” the Raja replied. “And too—this is Asia,” he added significantly. “But one thing you can perhaps tell me—is there any chance of their sentences being remitted?”
“I am afraid not, Your Highness,” Traherne answered reluctantly. And whatever reluctance he did or did not feel at the fact, he was most sincerely reluctant to tell it to the Raja of Rukh.
“Remitted?” Crespin broke in brashly. “I should rather say not. It was a cold-blooded, unprovoked murder!”
“Unprovoked, you think?” Rukh said evenly. “Well, I won’t argue the point. And the execution is to be—?”
He had asked it pointedly of Traherne, and Traherne replied, still more reluctantly than he had before—and smothering a strong desire to throttle Antony Crespin: “I think to-morrow—or the day after.” It might be worse than idle to lie to this man, who seemed uncannily provided with distant news.
“To-morrow, or the day after,” the Raja said musingly. “Yes.” Then, with even an added deference, he turned again to Lucilla. “Forgive me, Madam,” he begged; “I have kept you waiting.”
“Does Your Highness know anything of these men?” Traherne asked impulsively—and regretted instantly that he had.
Over his shoulder, looking Traherne full in the eyes, handing Mrs. Crespin carefully into the waiting litter, the Raja said very simply, “Know them? Oh, yes—they are my brothers.” Then, without giving time for comment or commiseration, and in a manner that unmistakably but delicately brooked none, he seated himself in his own litter, and clapped his hands twice. The bearers lifted the litters and moved away with them slowly. Lucilla Crespin’s went first, the Raja’s close after, the well-trained regular soldiers lining the way in single rank, and saluting as the litters passed. Watkins the valet followed close at heel to his master’s.
The Englishmen seated themselves in the chairs—there was no alternative.
“His brothers?” Crespin said uneasily as they did so. “What did he mean?”
“Heaven knows!” Traherne replied, shrugging his shoulders.
“I don’t half like our host, Traherne,” the Major grumbled from his chair. “There’s too much of the cat about him.”
“Or of the tiger,” the other rejoined grimly. “And how the devil had he got the news?”
They were anxious—Basil Traherne the more so. And Lucilla Crespin’s heart knocked oddly as she rode in her queen-like litter. But she sat at ease with an easy smile on her face—going to, as she perfectly well understood, what might prove either the most interesting experience of her life or a funeral march.
As the two chairs moved after the litters the two ranks of soldiers closed round them. The ramshackle irregulars, and the bizarre retinue, the dancing negro first, the musicians next, the rest pell-mell, brought up the ragged rear, and the gesticulating, still curious populace followed the retinue.
Only Yazok the priest remained, prostrating himself in thanksgiving before the Green Goddess, staying prostrate so, till slow hours had sped and the stark goat heads at her feet grew newly red in the last crimson rays of the fast sinking sun.
The quick Asian twilight came, and as it came was gone. The great stars came out in the crinkling sky, a baby moon laughed down on the temple precincts and the rotting marigolds. And still Yazok the high priest prostrated himself before the six-armed Goddess.
What were they to do? They were all three wondering that. There was nothing for them to do but mark time—and watch with alert eyes, ears open, and placid faces. They all realized it, and realizing it, did it thoroughly, like the Britons they were.
On and up the procession went to the palace gate, but with every rod they made the distance between the palanquins and the chairs was lengthened. It was not far, as that proverbial crow goes, but the way was hard and steep, it twisted, turned, zig-zagged and circled about itself like the railroad to Darjeeling, and like it went down almost as often as it went up, making the actual gain in ascent very gradual. Except for the rocks on either side, and the rose and snow-crested peaks beyond them there was little to see. But here and there a tiny hovel-like home clung desperately to the brown rocks, and twice where the rocks spread apart a little to flatness great lily-tanks had been contrived. They really were water-lily farms, the plants grown and tended for the food they supplied. The first and larger tank was snow-white, for theNymphæa nelumbo—queen perhaps of all wild water-lilies—was in full blooming now, and, because it was between mid-day and sunset, every wonderful flower-cup was opened wide. When they died away in a few weeks their seed capsules would grow thousands of acorn-shaped, edible kernels, delicious when gathered green and roasted, valuable as winter food-store, to be dried and eaten as nuts, or ground into flour for the lily-cakes upon which the people largely lived. The tank higher up was densely crowded with singara lilies, the water so hidden under the great green leaves that it looked a delicate sward flecked with brilliant snow blossoms. The singara nuts raw were a great delicacy, second—if second—only to the half-ripe beans of the lotus and tender leaf-stalks boiled and seasoned, and singara flour was a staple of peasant life.
Something animal was scrambling slowly, cautiously down a far mountain’s knife-like edge—a caravan of the miracle-footed hill-ponies bringing luxuries from half the globe to the King of Rukh.
The long, twisted palace, when they reached it, was even larger and more impressive than Mrs. Crespin had thought. Whatever the interior might prove, the exterior was not unbeautiful; the details of the great open arches, some scalloped, some sharply pointed, no two quite alike, yet all in harmony with the others and with the splendid and panoramic mountain site, were beautiful and significant—they told a story of years of lavish labor and thought; and through several of the open arch spaces exquisite vistas of courtyards and pools, colonnades and gray, intricate walls showed cool and inviting.
The Raja helped the Englishwoman out of her litter as deferentially as he had assisted her into it. Servants hurried to meet them at the opened door—women among them, and at a flicker of the ruler’s hand, one more handsomely dressed than the others came to Lucilla and salaamed before her.
“She will attend you to your apartments, Madam,” the Raja said, “and wait upon you. She has my command to obey you in all things, and she will. You will find her not unskillful, and she is trustworthy. She is yours.”
Mrs. Crespin looked at the native woman searchingly, afraid to go, afraid to refuse to do so. The woman, uncommonly tall and most decidedly handsome, had a comfortable, not unkind face, Lucilla decided. But she temporized.
“I will wait until Major Crespin comes, I think, Your Highness.”
“By no means,” the potentate said smoothly, “See how far the gentlemen are behind us—and I cannot allow you to fatigue yourself farther than you already must have done to-day.”
Lucilla still hesitated. The chairs were far in the distance. If she showed the fear she felt, how might it not anger this now smiling man who spoke to her so courtly, whose power was so absolute?
“Until dinner, Madam,” he said, bowing low. But there was finality in his silken voice, and Lucilla Crespin, praying that she might choose of the perils swarming about her the least, turned and followed the swarthy ayah.
“Thank you,” she said, “until dinner then, sir.”
The Raja bowed his approval, and turned away in another direction. She wondered that he did not wait to welcome Antony and Traherne—it would have been princelier, she thought, since he had so bidden their coming, so pressed his hospitality upon them—but it was relief that he showed no intention of dancing unwelcome attendance upon her. That was something. She shivered a little, and quietly followed the native woman.
Crespin looked quickly about for his wife when at last his bearers put down his chair, and he lumbered out of it. She was nowhere to be seen.
But Watkins came forward.
“Madam is resting, sir,” he said, “until dinner.”
“I’ll go to her, then,” Major Crespin ordered.
Watkins bowed, and spoke to one of the servants waiting behind him.
“He knows no Henglish, sir,” Watkins said regretfully, “but he hunderstands gestures somethink surprising, and he knows a few words of the French tongue, hif you’ll be so good has to pronounce ’em slow, and one at a toime.”
Crespin nodded curtly, saw Traherne leaving his chair, hesitated an instant, and then motioned the man of a little French to show him the way. He’d find Lu, or he’d pull the bally old show down, he said to himself, and he meant it. No sense in making a fuss, or a mess, till he had to, till the right time came; but when it did he’d make the damnedest mess the Eastern hemisphere’d seen yet. So, he threw Traherne a nod, and followed the white-clad native.
Dr. Traherne searched the great entrance hall, looking for Mrs. Crespin beyond her husband. She was not in sight, nor was the Raja. Well, probably Antony Crespin knew where his wife was, had spoken to and was following her—the hall wound just beyond the stairs. He hoped it was so, intensely. And he checked an impulse to call Crespin back to question him. Apparently nothing was wrong yet—not openly wrong—or Crespin would not be trudging along so contentedly beside that squat image in the white silk, red-edged gown. There was nothing to gain and everything to risk in kicking up an impotent dust before one had to; above all, to show fear was the worst move one could possibly make when one played chess for heads with an Oriental. Odd the Raja was not here! Leading the way just ahead with Mrs. Crespin probably. That was right enough, with Crespin right behind them. So he moved on after the Major.
But Watkins stayed him.
“This way, hif you please, sir,” the valet said subserviently, indicating a quite different turn in the vast hall. “The ladies are that side of the ’ouse, sir, hand the military gentleman, because of his lidy, but your rooms are hover ’ere, sir, and this man will hattend you.”
Traherne nodded a little curtly but, as the others already had done, did as he was told. Best carry on, he reflected, none too reassured, and carry on warily and quietly.
They all separately had come to the same forced, uncomfortable conclusion.
Alone, lost in this no-white-man’s land, the three English just carried on. It seemed all they could do.
The rooms to which Mrs. Crespin and the two Englishmen had been conducted were in as perfect taste as they were luxurious and were all comfortable, hers even more all this than theirs, but all admirable and irreproachable.
But the room to which they were taken, to await the Raja’s pleasure and his dinner, left a good deal to be desired, displayed a good deal to regret. In no way as bad as the usual State Apartments of a native palace, it smacked of them in much. The room itself, and the costliness of the deckings, would have discredited no princely house in Europe or New York; a spacious and beautifully proportioned room, opening wide at the back upon a wide loggia. Beyond the loggia rose the snow-clad peaks of the distant mountains, rose-dappled now by the kiss of the late afternoon sun, and with strips and spaces of blue and soft purple sky between them.
The room itself was splendidly though dashingly and somewhat sparsely furnished. Most of its furnishings old-fashioned now—no “new-art” here—and some of it faded, but all the sightlier for that, because colors and materials, insistently pronounced when new, time and wear had softened and mellowed to a friendly, gracious exquisiteness that was welcome and restful and kind. But the usual clocks were there, a dozen or more, all of them ugly, several of them tawdry. Most of the actual furniture was black, but for that it was admirable, rich, not heavy, the black wood picked out delicately with gold, the upholstery covered with yellow brocades. But the yellow damasks and the gold tracing did not clash, for they had grown old and amiable together, and time had blended them. The crystal chandelier was there, to be sure, but only one, and a crystal chandelier with a difference. Its lines were graceful, its long pendants winked and sparkled pleasantly; and it flooded the great room without dominating it—a great, gorgeous, costly thing, but you could forget it. It was not insistent—imperial without being impertinent; old, dignified, in no way “new rich,” and no more garish than soft, changeable silk is. A rounded ottoman—an inviting resting-place heaped with soft cushions, neither buried nor crushed beneath them—stood under the chandelier, placed there too mathematically. The marble fireplace would have rejoiced an Athenian sculptor, or Robert Adam when he carved and cut old London’s Adelphi into forms and lines of beauty; and the mirror above it would have intrigued Marie Antoinette or the beauties of Watteau.
In this room of his the Raja of Rukh, if he himself had selected and directed its appointments, had mingled things from many lands and of many times, but they did not blend, and not many of them suited the room itself. Two crystal candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, echoed with their pendants the iridescent note of the large chandelier, and between them, the mantle’s only other ornament, stood exquisitely molded in bronze, eighteen inches perhaps in height, but a small thing in the room’s big space, a seemingly tiny reproduction of the six-armed goddess in the temple.
The fireplace was ready piled with logs, but they were not lit. Electric lights neither artistically nor cunningly fashioned were placed conveniently here and there. A gramophone, as ugly as that modern disfigurement usually is, stood obtrusively at one end of the room; French and English books and reviews lay on several tables. There were roses in bowls, and tulips in vases. There was scent of sandal-wood and of lemon-verbena in the air, a smell of musk on the cushions. The pictures on the wall were bad—but they had their right here, portraits of handsome, gorgeously dressed Orientals—bad painting, if not bad drawing, as Western canons go, flat-faced and over-detailed as the craftsmanship of the Persian artists when Persia held pride of place in the Asian art world; but the pictures, not crowded, were not too many, and their carved camphor-wood frames were very beautiful. And they spoke—they told a story; and despicable as was their brush-work, nil their perspective, overdone and finicking their detail, peccable their drawing, they had character—it was patrician. And similar as they all were, each had its own clear individuality as differentiated as the tissues and gems of their turbans. And wherever you went the eyes of those pictured princes followed you, or rather drew your own eyes back to the inscrutable painted lid-narrowed, dark eyes of those who had ruled here before Rome had a Cæsar.
Traherne, coming in, looked at the room without much seeing it, for his eyes were anxiously searching for the Crespins.
They were not there. No one was there. And again he marked time and waited, for the very solid reason that no other course recommended itself to him as wiser. He moved idly, but watchfully to the open side of the room—even to look out over an open landscape might ease a trifle his sense of imprisonment; but he stopped at the room edge of the loggia, because he saw that three natives were there. He had no desire for Rukh society, peasant or noble.
Two turbaned servants were there laying a table, a dignified old major-domo directing them importantly. Traherne saw that they were laying four covers, and that the table appointments were extremely luxurious and entirely European. He turned at the slight sound of a door opened quickly.
Crespin came in and looked about him apprehensively, and the servant who had ushered him in, salaamed and went back closing the door behind him.
“Ah,” Crespin said with a tone of “thank goodness” in his voice, “there you are, Doctor!”
“Hullo!” Traherne returned. He noticed how flushed the other looked, and for all his flush how haggard. “How did you get on?”
“All right. Had a capital tub. And you?”
“Feeling more like a human being,” the doctor admitted. “And what about Mrs. Crespin? I hope she’s all right?”
“She was taken off by an ayah as soon as we got in—” Crespin said lamely—“in the women’s quarters presumably.” He did not find it necessary to add that it was but hearsay information he passed on, and that he had seen no more of his wife than Traherne himself had since she had preceded them from the temple in her palanquin—and he did not meet the other man’s glance, but shifted his eyes about the strange room uneasily.
Basil Traherne’s face whitened, and his strong hands clenched angrily. “And you let her go off alone?” he demanded violently.
“What the hell could I do?” Crespin retorted, more resentfully than he felt. “I couldn’t thrust myself into the women’s quarters.”
Traherne swung towards him with a smothered oath. “And I tell you you ought to have thrust yourself in anywhere—heaven or hell! And you should have kept her with you! You could have kept her with you,” Traherne cried passionately.
“Do you think she would have stayed?” Crespin demanded nastily. “And, come to that, what business is it of yours?”
“It’s anyman’sbusiness to be concerned for a woman’s safety,” Traherne pounded back.
“Well, well—all right,” Crespin muttered weakly. He had come into the room “considerably bucked,” but the courage he’d found in a drink or two after his tub, was evaporating fast, and he wished, ’pon his soul he did, that Traherne wouldn’t rave so. “Well, well. But there was nothing I could have done, or that she would have let me do. And I don’t think there’s any danger.”
Traherne’s mouth twitched with the disgust he felt. And this was her husband! “Let us hope not,” he said coldly.
Crespin ignored the sneer in the other’s voice. He preferred to—he felt in no shape for a scrap just now, and there might be scrap enough of another and deadlier sort to face soon—and that would have to be faced no matter in what shape he felt. He sat down heavily in a big chair by the fireplace. “It’s a vast shanty, this,” he said fumblingly, looking about him vaguely.
“It’s a palace and fortress in one,” Traherne replied, but in no friendly tone.
Crespin did not wish to talk, but he clung to the change of subject desperately, and said, “A devilish strong place before the days of big guns. But a couple of howitzers would make it look pretty foolish.”
“No doubt; but how would you get them here?” snapped Traherne.
That was unanswerable, and Crespin made no attempt to answer it.
“I wish to God we had them here though!” the physician added passionately, not looking at the man he spoke to, but with tortured eyes hard on the door, his ears strained to catch a woman’s step in the hall.
“I wish we had,” Major Crespin assented dejectedly. He pulled himself out of the armchair, levering himself up by its arms, and moved to the loggia. “My hat!” he exclaimed, and whistled in surprise and approval as the dinner table met his gaze. “I say—it looks as if our friend were going to do us well.”
A servant came in with a large wine-cooler and put it down. Traherne paid him no attention, but Crespin watched him narrowly, and as soon as the native had gone as he’d come, and closed the door behind him, Crespin pulled a bottle up from the ice, and inspected its label. He whistled again, and his bloodshot eyes glistened. “Perrier Jouet, nineteen-o-six, by the Lord!” He ran an affectionate tremulous fat finger over the already beading gold-foiled neck of the bottle thirstily. Even poor Crespin’s fingers were thirsty. He was one big thirst, and the sight of the vintage wine almost maddened him. He rammed it back into its ice pack, and strolled over to the ottoman, and sank into its cushions. “It’s a rum start this, Traherne,” he murmured. “I suppose you intellectual chaps would call it romantic.”
Traherne took his eyes from the door for a moment. “More romantic than agreeable, I should say,” he muttered, as he picked the small goddess up from the mantle. “I don’t like the looks of this lady,” he added as he put it down.
“What is she?” Crespin asked sleepily.
“The same figure we saw in the little temple, where we landed,” Traherne told him.
Both were talking to lift a little, if they could, the strain of the tension that both were feeling, and of the bitterness that surged in each against the other.
“How many arms has she got?” Crespin demanded, regarding her lazily.
“Six.”
“She could give you a jolly good hug, anyway,” Crespin said with a mirthless and slightly tipsy laugh.
Traherne shot him a sharp look. “You wouldn’t want another,” he said darkly, and turned away to watch the door.
For a time there was silence. Neither man spoke or moved and from the outer stillness no stir of life came. Traherne’s face grew like a death mask, sweat gathered on Crespin’s forehead, and specked his red face.
A jackal called.
Some deeper-throated thing answered or challenged it out on the mountains.
“Where do you suppose we really are, Traherne?” Crespin asked unsteadily.
“On the map, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, in the never-never land,” Traherne answered without moving his eyes from the door. “Somewhere on the way to Bokhara. I’ve been searching my memory for all I ever heard about Rukh. I fancy very little is known, except that it seems to send forth a peculiarly poisonous breed of fanatics.”
“Like those who did poor Haredale in?” Crespin asked, referring to the crime for which the newspapers had reported the perpetrators were to be hanged.
“Precisely.”
“D’you think,” Crespin asked, shifting unhappily on his seat, “our host was serious when he said they were his brothers? Or was he only pulling our leg, curse his impudence?”
“He probably meant caste-brothers, or simply men of his race,” the doctor surmised. “But even so, it’s awkward.”
“I don’t see what these beggars, living at the back of the north wind, have got to do with Indian politics,” Crespin grumbled. “We’ve never interfered with them.”
“Oh, it’s a case of Asia for the Asians,” the other solved it. “Ever since the Japanese beat the Russians, the whole continent has been itching to kick us out.”
“So that they may cut each other’s throats at leisure, eh?” Crespin asked almost quarrelsomely.
Traherne answered no less so. Any pretext or none would have served them for dire quarrel now—only a woman’s peril held them in leash. “We Westerners never cut each other’s throats, do we?” he snarled.
But still he watched the door.
Crespin began a retort, but cut it short, as he saw that the English valet was in the room, and Traherne turning expectantly at the sound saw Watkins too, and though disappointed was glad. Both the gentlemen were glad to see the serving man. Any interruption was welcome, any human third a real relief.
The man had come in noiselessly, carrying a centerpiece for the dinner table, a silver elephant very beautiful in its workmanship, the howdah filled with fresh flowers—delicate filmy orchids, radiant and deep carnations and odorous violets. He put it down and turned to go, as he had come, but it was then that Crespin had seen, and Traherne had heard.
“Hullo!” Crespin hailed him. “Hullo! What’s your name? Just come here a minute, will you?”
“Meaning me, sir?” Watkins advanced a few steps, with a touch of covert insolence in manner and voice, his nervousness of an hour ago seemingly gone.
“Yes, you, Mr.—? Mr.—?” Crespin said, involuntarily speaking in his turn with a touch of contempt.
“Watkins is my name, sir,” the man told him.
“Right-o, Watkins.” Far wiser to be as hail-fellow as one could contrivably stomach with a fellow so near the person and the ear of the autocrat upon whom one’s fate actually depended. And after all this chap was English—the letter H was his hall-mark for that—not much English, but English, the only being of their own island-race within impassable miles of them probably. That counted for something! It always does in the wilds. “Can you tell us where we are, Watkins?”
“They calls the place Rukh, sir.”
Traherne, listening and watching, knew that the man was not to be drawn.
But Crespin persisted, “Yes, yes, we know that. But where is Rukh?”
“I understand these mountains is called the ’Imalayas, sir,” Watkins replied in a tone that said clearly that he merely passed on a rumor he’d heard, and in no way vouched for it.
“Damn it, sir, we don’t want a lesson in geography!” the Major snapped.
“No, sir?” Watkins seemed surprised, then added apologetically, “My mistake, sir,” but the insolence still lurked in the voice and manner.
“Major Crespin means that we want to know,” Traherne intervened, “how far we are from the nearest point in India.”
“I really couldn’t say, sir.” Well, Traherne had not expected that he would. “Not so very far, I dessay, as the crow flies.”
“Unfortunately we’re not in a position to fly with the crow,” Traherne retorted. “How long does the journey take?” He had no idea that Watkins knowingly would admit anything useful, but there was always the chance that the better and finer trained intelligence might trap the boorish and feebler.
“They tell me it takes about three weeks to Cashmere,” the valet said indifferently.
“They tell you!” Crespin almost snarled. “Surely you must remember how long it took you?”
“No, sir,” Watkins spoke meekly now, but something far from meekness lurked in his shifty eyes. “Excuse me, sir—I’ve never been in India.”
“Not been in India?” Crespin was openly incredulous. And he added, “I was just thinking, as I looked at you, that I seemed to have seen you before.”
“Not in India,” Watkins said quickly—too quickly, Dr. Traherne thought. “We might ’ave met in England, but I don’t call to mind having that pleasure.”
Crespin was too angry at that impertinence to allow himself to notice it, and only said, “But, if you haven’t been in India, how the hell did you get here?”
“I came with ’Is ’Ighness, sir, by way of Tashkent,” Watkins explained glibly—but Traherne thought that he said it anxiously too. “All our dealings with Europe is by way of Russia.”
“I daresay,” Crespin grunted, not too wisely.
“But it’s possible to get to India direct,” Traherne broke in, “and not by way of central Asia?”
“Oh, yes, it’s done, sir,” Watkins admitted; “but I’m told there are some very tight places to negotiate—like the camel and the needle’s eye, as you might say.”
“Difficult traveling for a lady, eh?” Traherne asked it, knowing the answer, but he wished to keep the man talking, on the chance of even one useful word that might be let slip; and he thought the prompting safer in his hands than in Crespin’s.
“Next door to himpossible, I should guess, sir,” the man said promptly.
Crespin groaned. “A nice lookout, Traherne!” Then he turned to Watkins, with, “Tell me, my man—is His Highness—h’m—married?”
Watkins permitted himself a respectful smile. “Oh, yessir—very much so, sir.”
“Children?”
“He has fifteen sons, sir.”
“The daughters don’t count, eh?” Crespin demanded.
“I’ve never ’ad a hopportunity of counting ’em, sir,” Watkins said as if gently correcting a not too excusable ignorance.
“He said,” Traherne slipped in, “the men accused of assassinating a political officer were his brothers—”
“Did ’e say that, sir?” the man asked quickly—evidently he was startled out of his well-trained impersonality. Clearly Watkins was excited.
“Didn’t you hear him? What did he mean?” Traherne said it carefully, not as if too much interested, watching Watkins narrowly though, and pressing swiftly into the possible opening.
But Watkins had remembered himself. “I’m sure I couldn’t say, sir,” he said colorlessly, permitting himself the slightest shrug. “’Is ’Ighness is what you’d call a very playful gentleman, sir.”
“But,” Traherne insisted, “I don’t see the joke in saying that.”
“No, sir?” the servant replied respectfully. “’P’raps ’Is ’Ighness’ll explain, sir,” he added significantly.
Dr. Traherne accepted the hint, and turned away his eyes and attention, giving them both again to the door.
There was a pause—the English “sahibs” busy each with his own thoughts, the English servant still, and patiently waiting, apparently interested in nothing on earth, and, if occupied or busy, entirely so with his own vacuity. As a matter of fact, Watkins gladly would have beat a soft-footed retreat, but he had had his orders, and he would obey them. For Watkins, as he had more than hinted in the courtyard of the Green Goddess’ temple, knew who buttered his bread, and knew acutely how sharp and sure the knife was by means of which that butter was spread.
Crespin broke the pause. Something the Raja of Rukh had said, down there by the temple, scarcely had struck him at the moment, but he had remembered it persistently, and the more he’d thought of it the more it had rankled, and he had been chewing it over in an impotent way ever since. He went at it now, “Your master spoke of visits from European ladies—do they come from Russia?” he questioned.
“From various parts, I understand, sir,” the man replied discreetly, but added tonelessly, “Mostly from Paris,” but an eye twitched slightly, as if it might under easier circumstances have winked not unlasciviously.
“Any here now?” Crespin asked roughly—and there was a rough lump in his throat—and Traherne knotted his hands, and went a stride nearer the door.
“I really couldn’t say, sir,” was all Watkins would own.
“They don’t dine with His Highness?” Traherne asked crisply.
“Oh, no, sir,” the valet assured him, adding, “’Is ’Ighness sometimes sups with them.”
“And my wife—Mrs. Crespin—?” Crespin began miserably—asking it because he was tortured indeed, and after all this bounder was British too.
“Make your mind easy, sir,” Watkins told him staunchly, speaking with a genuine something of kindness and more respectfully than he had before—perhaps because after all hewas, or at least had been, British—“the lady won’t meet any hundesirable characters, sir. I give,” he added a touch pompously, “strict orders to the—female what took charge of the lady.”
“She is to be trusted?” Traherne swung round as he spoke.
“Habsolutely, sir,” the man said proudly, with a bow. “She is—in a manner of speakin’—my wife, sir.”
“Mrs. Watkins, eh?” Crespin exclaimed, a little amused in spite of his growing anxiety. Thomas Atkins never did that. But apparently Watkins had. “Mrs. Watkins!”
“Yessir,” Watkins admitted, “I suppose you would say so.”
Traherne was neither amused by them nor interested in Watkins’ matrimonial ventures—church-blessed or nominal—and he had no idea whether the fellow was telling the truth or not. But he spoke to him again, “But now look here, Watkins,” he began, “you say we’re three weeks away from Cashmere—yet the Raja knew of the sentence passed on these subjects of his, who were tried only three days ago. How do you account for that?”
“I can’t, sir,” the man said stolidly. “All I can say is, there’s queer things goes on here.”
“Queer things?” Traherne asked quickly—he was drawing the sleek valet at last!—“What do you mean?”
“Well, sir,” came the slow, provoking answer, “them priests you know—they goes in a lot for what ’Is ’Ighness calls magic—”
“Oh, come, Watkins—you don’t believe in that!” Dr. Traherne jibed impatiently, with an oath just behind his lips.
“Well, sir, p’raps not,” the English valet said slyly. “I don’t, not to say believe in it. But there’s queer things goes on. I can’t say no more, nor I can’t say no less. If you’ll excuse me, sir, I must just run my eye over the dinner table. ’Is ’Ighness will be here directly.”
Clearly there was no more to be pulled out of Watkins. And they waited in moody silence, while he touched the table arrangements here and there, and then noiselessly left the room.
Then, “That fellow’s either a cunning rascal or a damned fool,” Crespin muttered. “Which do you think?”
“I don’t believe he’s the fool he’d like us to take him for.” Then as if some endurance had snapped, Traherne flung towards the door.
“I say,” Crespin halted him, “where are you going?”
“I’m going to find her!” Traherne said roughly.
Crespin rose to his feet. “Sit down!” he ordered. “That’s up to me—if I think it either necessary or wise; which I don’t! It’s not up to you!”
“It’s up to aman!” Basil Traherne said hotly, with a level look in Crespin’s eyes.
“Come back!” Antony Crespin commanded. “You—”
A moment more and they would have grappled it out there, grappling each other’s throats.
But the door opened softly, and the woman they loved came into the room.