Few slept in Rukh that night. Over every mountain path eager peasants came from outlying hamlets and solitary, scattered huts. The horn lanterns they swung as they walked, swarmed the hill-ways like fireflies.
The place of sacrifices was burnished and garnished by the light of great flaring torches that temple girls, stripped to their slim, brown waists, held up, while the priests chattered and chanted, shifting dirt heaps into less conspicuous coigns, dusting the rough-hewn carvings, oiling and sharpening a knife, taking dead garlands down, putting fresher garlands up—bringing the blood-bowls out of the rock-crevice cupboards, shaking vestments out of their creases. The whole great place reeked of marigolds, cocoanut oil and resined torches. To-morrow it would reek of human blood. Yazok rubbed his hips itchingly, and he licked his lips, as he spat in a blood-bowl and rubbed it with a dirty oil-soaked rag till it shone anew.
In every hut-home preparations were making—festival garments being mended and shaken, flowers and feathers and tufts of fur woven into long necklaces, bracelets, anklets and head bands. Nuts and seeds were roasted and chewed, the lewd love songs of the amorous gods were sung by men and maidens, old crones and toddling baby-nakeds.
The palace teemed and throbbed. Servants with rapt, exalted faces moved about on tireless feet. Priests and soldiers crowded corridor and stairs. Savory smells belched up from the kitchens—children, in soft skin sandals, their plump groins and their slim ones swathed in gold, white and green, carried fruit-heaped trays in slim young arms, and on sure-poised heads, from store-rooms to pantries. Musicians cleaned and tuned and fresh-strung their instruments. Accoutrements, carpets and drapery were cleaned, and shaken and scented. The palace was as thick with sandal-wood smell as the sacrificial cave was of the stench of rotting flowers and leaves. Long ropes of blossoms were hung from jut to jut of every high carving. Peacocks’ feathers (carefully garnered in chests and closets—for they’d come from afar, and had cost a great price) were taken out in their splendid, iridescent thousands to deck rooms and corridors; paints and perfumes in lacquered boxes, tinseled and jeweled tissues, rainbow-silk and crêpes from Japan, laces from Ceylon and Persia were heaped and tangled on every harem floor. The children, even the new-born girl baby, had their nails fresh-tinted, and the women’s hands were rouged up to their knuckles.
Every posture-girl had new gauzy, tinsel-weighted garments, and at least one new ornament—nose-jewel or anklet or hair-plaque—and swayed on dancing feet with delight as she tried them on. Of all the palace, perhaps old Ak-kok was happiest. Her wrinkled parchment face was radiant, and in honor of to-morrow’s greatness she herself wrung its head from a young pigeon, tore out its hot heart, still beating, and rammed it into La-swak’s gaping mouth. He made a sick face at first, but then he found he liked it better than he’d thought, sucked it consideringly, then gave a sudden sick gulp, and the bird’s still hot, pulsing heart was down, hot and pulsing in La-swak. And old Ak-kok hugged him to her bony breast in ecstasy; for that the new-slaughtered vital had gone intact into the intestinal keeping of La-swak was unquestionable augury that he would live to be a great ruler, a mighty warrior and a favored priest of the Green Goddess.
Out of their byres and steep pasture-nooks (all the pasture places that the rough-hilled place afforded) the drowsy humped cattle were roused from their sleep by the laughing, shouting children that came to hang blossoms on their wrinkled necks. Two great steers chafed and pawed as agile men gilded their horns, avoiding them, the lowered horns, meanwhile as well as they could. Each horn-gilder had two other men beside him, protecting him with long bamboo poles, cruelly sharpened at one end, with which they prodded and bled the beast’s sides as often as it seemed too inclined to charge. The steers bellowed and lurched and bled, the men gilded and pricked and ran sweat—it ran rapidly down their brown faces—and dodged as skilfully, but not as gracefully as Spanish matadors, and the rabble of children circled about them, waving deodar wands, and posies, screaming and clapping their thin olive hands, applauding and urging on quite impartially the angry bulls and the reeking men. These steers would have great pride of place in the morrow’s spectacle, for theirs the office to trample the still warm sacrifices that were to be laid at the Goddess’s feet, and to drag away between the cheering tight-packed ranks of the worshipers the de-severed trunks of the Feringhis. When the horns shone out through the night gilded and burnished, then the hoof-gilding came, more difficult still, and greatly more perilous; then when the infuriated, switching tails had been paint-coated carmine and blue, the last finishing touch was given—great circles of green on each white heaving side, and the toilet was done. The gilders squatted down with grunts of relief—not too near—and mopped their faces with their sleeves, which they unwound for the purpose, and fell to kernel chewing or the smoking of long, green, Burmese-like cheroots. But the sacrificial steers were not allowed so to rest. The sharp bamboo poles still relentlessly kept them upright and firm on all fours, for they must neither squat nor relax till their fresh finery of gold-leaf and thick paint was quite dry.
Pregnant women in hut and on hillside were drinking hot gingered drams, and praying clamorously: for any child born as the death-horn sounded would bring with it into life great god-promised good-luck and strength and health, endless endurance, assured advancement—even a girl-child; for on her some man of the royal house’s eyes would fall with pleasure one day.
The Great Horn of Rukh—after its temples and palace the Kingdom’s first and deepest pride—was being obsequiously tended. Priests squatted about it incanting and chanting, wine was spilled on the fruit-and-grain-and-flower-piled crag it stood on, its great brazen throat was scoured and cleaned, and immense tribute of incense was burned about it.
Basil Traherne heard the execrable hubbub, and writhed in his thongs. He was well bound now; but twice in the night they brought him cups of warmed, strong wine, and he gulped it down, when held to his lips: he too resolved to husband his strength. Would the aircraft come? Had their message gone through? He feared. At the worst and last, would the Raja spare Lucilla’s life? He feared that most. He had no sleep.
Lucilla Crespin had none. She heard less of the din without and the movement within the palace than any other did—the Raja had contrived that as well as he could—but she heard enough. And she heard her own heart beat, and the chokes that strangled her throat. She thought she heard her nerves crack; she feared she was losing her nerve, her resolution and grip. Twice she heard her children cry. Once she heard her father call. No thong bound her, hands and limbs were unfettered, her couch was soft. But she knew that unseen black eyes were watching her vigilantly through some crack or crevice, she could not see either, and now and then she heard the sentries move as they changed guard. She tried to pray. But no prayer would shape or word in her tortured, trembling soul. But she thought that God knew. She lay on her rugs and pillows as motionless as she could—and waited. But when day smote the night, and dawn banished the dark, the night had marked her—let death come now, or life last long, that night had branded her for all time.
And no sleep came to the Raja of Rukh. His vigil was not the pleasantest kept. No reproach of conscience tormented him. He deemed the cruelty he was doing, and that that he intended to do when the sun next set, justice. His soul had no qualms. His Oriental mind had no doubt—no doubt of his full justification. The King could do no wrong, the venger of blood commit no unhallowed excess. But his thoughts had sour, sick qualms. Had the English Major’s wireless gone through? Did Amil-Serai know? If so, Rukhknew. And his pride had a hurt. What he desired he intended to take (if Amil-Serai did not send!) as far as he could. But he was powerless to take all; for the English woman would notgive. Would she ever come to give? He wondered. Could he win that? His absolutism could command and enforce. But could hewin? And his hookah tasted foul and sour as he sucked it. His swarthy face grew gray. His blood hungered, and the fine blue veins in his temples swelled and throbbed.
The man was afraid—not of what might come from Amil-Serai. He should dislike dethronement and banishment; but they were ever present possibilities in the heave and sag of Asian dynasties, and, if they came to him, he could face them as well as another, better than most—for he knew his way about on the continent of Europe, and could amuse himself there vastly. He knew how to secure a vast horde of treasure and jewels, how to get away with much of the horde of coins grimed under the bastioned palace. And no doubt La-swak would reign in his stead. No—he hoped that nothing would come from Amil-Serai, but, if it did, he—the Raja—knew how to meet and accept it. But the man was afraid—afraid of a personal defeat—defeat of a personal wish—an injury to personal pride and to personal vanity. His vanity was almost inordinate, and as sensitive as it was big, for his mind was too acute, his intelligence too fine for his vanity to be the thick, hidebound, invulnerable thing that it is at its happiest. His self-confidence had wider areas of attack than the skin of Achilles had.
He took no part now in the preparations for the bloody morrow. He had given his orders. They would be obeyed. And for the rest, he but waited—alone, as little unserenely as he could. He had no sleep.
Of the palace servants there was one, only one, who took no part in those wild and elaborate preparations—for the motionless sentries who guarded the human objects of slaughter, and the young ayah, who salaamed as she proffered food to Lucilla Crespin, participated in it most importantly.
When the night time was thickest, a huddled thing rose from the floor in the room that had been slept in by Watkins, the Raja’s English valet, and stole through corridors, archways and silent apartments, out of the palace, out through the walls, over the moat, out to the jungle: a half-naked, bleak-eyed woman.
The Raja, standing restless at a casement, saw her go, and smiled not unkindly. She’d not get there, but if she chose to try—perhaps to give her life in attempting it, it was nothing to him. He watched a moment, or two, then, “East and West, again!” he said with a shrug and turned on his heel. He had given no order that the thing down there a hundred feet below his snuggery’s balcony should be fetched for burial, or given any obsequies, even the roughest, there where it was. The way was too perilous. He’d not risk one ankle of any soldier who was still his own living asset. He had had use for Watkins living, he had none for him dead. And he knew that without his command no one in Rukh—bar the ayah—would give the English satellite aught better than a curse or an expectoration of hate. “East and West,” he repeated with a hard mirthless laugh.
Up towards the snow, down towards the jungle, on through the jungle she tore and broke her way, now meshed in branches and bramble and cobra-like vines, now perched and scrambling goat-like on the edge of a precipice, the sandals ribboned and cut from her feet by stones, her one coarse garment ripped by thorns, her long black hair hanging unkempt about her naked shoulders. A vulture cried, jungle things growled and hissed, tom-toms crashed down below her, and then from above, but the ayah who had been Watkins’ took no heed. Blood ran on her breasts where her own finger-nails had clawed them, blood caked on her mouth where her teeth had chewed it. Up in the lower snow-line a rivulet ran angrily, icy cold; she walked through it, her bleeding feet not feeling or shrinking its bitter, intense cold, as they would not have felt or shrunk had it boiled with heat as intense. The sharp prong of a down-hanging branch caught her ear, she tore it away, and the cartilage with it. On she went, now up, now down, heeding lynx-like where, not heeding how—seeking her dead. A geyser spring boiled up from red-hot stones, she went straight through it—it was the shortest way—neither slower nor faster. Up again to the higher place where the only footholds led her, the snow clogged her skirt—all that she wore—and its rough, unhemmed edge froze to her flesh—but it did not matter, since she did not know. Her hair and her forehead were smeared thick with ashes horridly mixed. She wore only her own matted hair, above her waist, below it only the rag of sackcloth. Her breath came in short, hard pants. Her sunken eyes burned red.
At last she found him—all that was left of him.
How she had beaten and clutched her way down the footholdless sides of that high ravine was unthinkable. No man could have done it, no goat without snapping its legs, scarcely a snake without peeling off its skin and losing its sinuous balance.
But she had, and she crouched down, and moaned piteously over the broken, mangled remains—all that was left of him—left of a derelict cockney.
If England with her quiet waysides, her cowslip-flecked pastures, her gardens of roses, her fragrance of hop-vines, her red baubled cherry-trees, her flushed-face apples, her peaceful churchyards, her ivied gray village churches, her carol of cathedral bells, her emerald lawns, her oak-trees, her ribbon-hung May-poles with young health and happiness circling dance-steps about them, the ring of her playing fields, the sheen and the wealth of her rivers, her red-coats and her boys in blue, her clucking hens, and her sleek, lowing kine, her firesides and her castles, Oxford and Windermere, her sea-washed feet and her crown of fog—and her London slums—had shown him no womanliness, suckled him with no milk o’ human kindness, given him no love, Asia had.
Had he been kind to her, the native woman, tossed to him soul and body, by a despot carelessly?
It looked like it.
It looked like it, as she knelt there moaning beside him, whispering tenderness and love words to him between her sobs—straightening his broken twisted limbs as well as she could, lifting his one hand—the other was red pulp-stripped bone—to her forehead.
When she had stolen from the palace she had held in one hand a cluster of marigolds. All the way she had come she had carried them carefully. She had them still. She held them against her breast for a moment, then gently pushed them into his hand, and laid it down.
The birds had been there before her—but not many, it was too far down, palled in darkness by the high walls of rock between which the strip of ravine lay so narrow. One hand—had it ever struck her?—was beaked and defiled, but not much else. Most of the human body she had loved, caressed and served lay there, horrid now, but hers.
A vulture cawed high up in a cypress. The woman heard, and crouched lower, like a hen over her chicks.
Out from some crack in the great wall of rock a lithe white-marked gray leopard peered. She heard its sudden purr of delight, and looked up at it, and its great green eyes glared down at them, ravished and famished. She heard the vulture’s wings flap. She looked up—still higher, and saw the scavenger-bird’s bald head thrust out, a vicious, fleshless skull in the dear moonlight above.
She saw. But she didn’t care. As well one way as any other.
But nothing should harm him, nothing should touch a hair of that battered head—first.
She covered the thing beside her with her body, and waited.
The snow-leopard slunk, slowly, stealthily nearer.
The vulture craned its bleak bony head, and watched. It must wait—till the leopard had done.
And when day’s first apple-green slipped up from the East, the native woman slept on her last marriage bed.
It was very quiet.
It well might have been the wedding-day of heaven and earth, it was so lovely. There were scant wild flowers in Rukh, but each that there was lifted up a glad, gay face. There are few song-birds in the Himalayas, but a lark sang and swayed on the spear-shaped lace of a green bamboo, and a choir of thrushes throated up a silver carol of song from the full-berried rowans. Yellow sunshine lay in unbroken, imperial swathes everywhere. Children laughed and pranked, women sang at their tasks—none doing more than she must to-day—men smoked and walked about arm in arm.
All was ready—except the hour—and all were radiant, expectant and happy. There was feasting and love-making, goodwill and fellowship. And the priests moved about with an arrogant swing of their hips, and all the people salaamed at their approach, as if they’d been gods themselves, instead merely the servers of gods, and dressed in their best garb.
At the full of the mid-day heat a great hush fell. There was no breath of air, nothing moved. All Rukh seemed waiting in eager silence like some great beast poised to spring. The hours crawled seemingly stagnantly through the water clocks, and the green and blue dragon-flies seemed asleep on the down of the bronze and lemon thistles.
Lucilla grew calmer and braver as the slow moments went, because the end was nearer. It was something of stimulant, and something of narcotic too, that so soon it would be over—strain, fear, suspense gone forever.
Only the young ayah came near her—bringing her food and drink, silently offering her attendance. No message came from the Raja, and she sent him none. No message could have come, unless written, or brought by him himself—since none left in his service now could speak any word she’d understand.
Traherne felt turning to stone. He no longer was bound, but he scarcely moved. They brought too to him food and drink. He took what he could, and waited stonily—neither patient nor impatient. The long night had sapped his emotion. He was numb rather than tormented. Tension and regret (the air flight had been his suggestion) and pallid fear had mercifully gnawed away his power to feel or to suffer much.
They had not met since he’d been pinioned in the snuggery, and dragged roughly from it. No message—except thought’s throbbing wireless—had reached either from either. Neither had heard anything of the other.
But—however dulled their senses, however lulled their pain, each watched and wished for the sun to sink, and each listened ceaselessly with straining ears to catch the first distant throb of a far-off aeroplane’s engine.
None came.
The sun was sinking at last, slowly, surely.
And again expectant human noises and stir came in the palace and out in the rocky, mountainous open. And again hatred, blood-lust and fanaticism belched through the shimmering air, and the stench of marigolds and cocoanut oil, and the reek of lewd, guttural songs.
The Raja of Rukh strained hearing and nerves for the sound of English aeroplanes.
None came.
The sun sank lower.
A group of priests was gathered at the doorway of the great gloomy hall that opened on to the public open place of greatest and ceremonial sacrifice—as priests had gathered there for centuries at such times as this, when big tribal events called for special observation, of triumph, or defeat or peril quivered and bleated for special appeasement of their six-armed deity. Wild-eyed, four-footed, soft-skinned creatures had been slaughtered in their terrified, moaning hecatombs out there in that courtyard, and human lives had been offered in sacrifice there before this—the lives of miscreants who had angered a prince—but not often enemy lives—not nearly often enough: Rukh lay too far from other principalities, too remote, too rock-and-peak-bound, and the tribes that lay nearest were too strong and warlike, too as apt to give defeat as to meet it. And never before had the courtyard ground run red with white blood.
To-day was the supreme day of Rukh’s history. Not a man there, not a little child, not a woman giving suck as they waited, but thanked the gods for having been born, and having lived to see it.
To see the white man die, when the blood-red of the sunset came! They ached for that. And most of all they longed to see the Feringhi woman slaughtered, and her head laid at the feet of their Goddess. Not one here had ever seen a white woman die, not even the ancient few who had trapped and disemboweled human prey near the Khyber. Only one of them all ever had seen a Feringhi woman until two days ago when the great bird had thrown at the feet of their Goddess the Feringhi woman who was being decked now, up there in the palace, in her death robes.
It was the woman’s death they most longed to see—a white she-victim slain at the feet of the great green she-god! It was that that they craved with drunken, demented longing.
For a whisper had crept through the Kingdom of Rukh.
And the women there, waiting and lusting, longed for it most.
The crowd at the edge of the courtyard seethed and pushed. And silk-clad, veil-and-shawl-shrouded figures glided down from the palace-harem, some in their litters, some on foot, squeezed in among the crowding, packed peasants, harem ladies, royal-born or bought for great price. Their jewels jingled and flashed under their shawls and veils, and they scented the day with attar of roses.
A priest with an unscabbarded sword in his hand guarded the opening into the great hall, but the Chief Priest stood just inside it, holding the curtains that hung there slightly apart, peering out at the waiting, exultant people—he liked them well, as he saw them—and scanning the path that came down from the castle.
There are several halls not unlike this back of the Himalayas; there is none in the Punjab.
Great columns of wood, rudely carved with distorted animal and human figures, supported the high roof. The walls too were of wood—it was rarer and costlier in Rukh than stone—carved as rudely and grotesquely, and they were pierced, higher by several feet than a tallest man’s head, by a rough clerestory—a series of oblong slits through which the deep blue sky, just changing to sunset’s splendid motley, showed like a velvet drop-cloth of some magnificent theatric spectacle. Roofs and walls and pillars were a dead, dull, dark brown—somber, foreboding—but here and there the interstices between the repellent carvings were washed a dull red. At one side of the hall a high curtained doorway, the curtain a terrible tapestry of human slaughter and gods’ amours, led into the awful disrobing room, where priests put on their costliest vestments, and victims their garlands of sacrifice. An opposite door was heavily barred, but an oblong hole, when its sliding shutter was slid, made a hagioscope through which the guard within could inspect whoever approached it from without. At the far end of the hall heavy curtains, similar indecent tapestries, covered a wide opening.
The late afternoon light, burning in through the clerestory slits, dappled the somber floor.
A rhythmic, subdued murmur swayed through the expectant crowd, and as slow figures came down the castle-path swelled into a tossing sea-like storm of deep and hushed execration, but the women smiled as they cursed, the children still sucked at their long sticks of sweet-cane and painted sugars, and the downy babies still sucked at the brown breasts of their mothers.
Tom-toms crashed, drums echoed, pipes screeled, skin and reed implements sounded tunelessly. A woman sobbed in ecstasy—others caught it up and chorused it.
The guard at the bolted door, a tiger-faced, panther-pelt-clad bronze giant, slipped back the “squint’s” shutter and looked through it, then unbolted and swung open the door.
Two lusty soldiers carried in and set down a rude mountain chair. Two other soldiers guarded it on either side, and in it, tight-lipped, proud-eyed, strapped to it securely, sat the English doctor, Basil Traherne.
Timed to the second, the Raja of Rukh appeared at the opposite door as the chair was borne in. His cloth-of-gold and rose and green satin robes, but shaped like a priest’s, barely showed through the barbaric blaze of the jewels that encrusted them. The autocrat-priest gestured, and the soldier-bearers put down the chair; he motioned again and the four soldiers drew away to the courtyard’s edge.
And victim and tyrant-judge eyed each other silent and grim.
Then Rukh smiled slightly and spoke. “Well, Doctor,” he said in his slow, velvet voice, “it doesn’t appear that any ‘god from the machine’ is going to interfere with our program.”
“You are bringing a terrible vengeance upon yourself,” the Englishman said sternly. But it sounded as if he scarcely troubled to say it at all.
“Think, my dear Doctor,” the Raja retorted lightly. “If, as the Major said, he did not get your S.O.S. through, I have nothing to fear. If he lied, and did get it through, nothing can ultimately save me, and I may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.”
“You might have spared me this!” the Englishman said, writhing, in spite of himself, in his bonds.
“A ritual detail, Doctor,” Rukh said deprecatingly; “not quite without reason. Persons lacking in self-control might throw themselves to the ground, or otherwise disarrange the ceremony.”
“I am not without self-control,” the physician told him haughtily.
The Raja bowed, smiling slightly; then gave a curt order, at which the bearers hastened back and cut the thongs, and as Traherne strode, still a little cramped, from the chair, carried it away.
Traherne looked about him hurriedly—but what he hoped and feared to see was not there.
“What have you done with Mrs. Crespin?” he demanded.
“Don’t be alarmed,” was the smooth reply; “she will be here in due time.”
“Listen to me, Raja,” Traherne said in a low, earnest voice, going very close to the other, almost laying his hand on Rukh’s sleeve. “Do what you will with me, but let Mrs. Crespin go. Send her to India or to Russia, and I am sure, for her children’s sake, she will swear to keep absolute silence as to her husband’s fate and mine.”
“You don’t believe, then, that I couldn’t save you if I would?” Rukh demanded.
“Believe it?” Traherne scoffed. “No!”
The Raja smiled. “You are quite right, my dear Doctor. I am not a High Priest for nothing. I might work the oracle. I might get a command from the Goddess to hurt no hair upon your heads.”
“Then,” Traherne asked, “what devilish pleasure do you find in putting us to death?”
“Pleasure?” Rukh echoed. “The pleasure of a double vengeance. Vengeance for to-day—my brothers—and vengeance for centuries of subjection and insult. Do you know what brought you here?” he said with sudden smothered passion. “It was not blind chance, any more than it was the Goddess. It was my will, my craving for revenge, that drew you here by a subtle, irresistible magnetism. My will is my religion—my god. And by that god I have sworn that you shall not escape me. Ah,” he broke off, speaking calmly, as wild yells broke from the now frenzied crowd outside, “they are bringing Mrs. Crespin.”
For a moment Traherne shielded his eyes with his hands, they were trembling, then he mastered himself—and looked.
A priest was unbolting the door through which they had carried him, and when it was opened wide, as he had been brought, she was brought, through the door, into the grim, dark hall.
But she had come in more state. Her chair was rich and gilded, and cushioned. She too was bound, but the thongs that roped her were lightly twisted flowers—the rarest blooms of the palace gardens and glass.
The woman’s face was white and fixed, but her glowing eyes were brave.
The Raja went to her at once, and bent as he said, “I apologize, Madam, for the manners of my people. Their fanaticism is beyond my control.”
She met his eyes, but she did not speak.
At a word from him her chair was lowered steadily to the ground. And the Raja did not intervene when Traherne held out his hand to steady her as she stepped from the palanquin—but as the European hands met he smiled.
“How long have we left?” Traherne asked, as the men were taking the empty palanquin away.
Rukh answered at once, “Till the sun’s rim touches the crest of the mountains. A blast of our great mountain-horn will announce the appointed hour, and you will be led out to the sacred enclosure. You saw the colossal image of the Goddess out yonder?” he pointed behind him.
As the chair-carriers had borne the Englishwoman in, four priests—it had needed four—had pulled aside the heavy tapestries at the hall’s far end. Beyond the opening two broad steps led to a wide tribune or balcony. Over the balustrade that backed it loomed, some fifty yards away, the head and shoulders of a colossal image of the Green Goddess. On the tribune itself was, on a dais of two steps, a wide, gorgeous and fantastic throne formed of barbaric filigrees, enormous elephants’ tusks heavily jeweled, great writhing gold and silver snakes with grinning monkey heads, and far-spread tails of gem-made peacocks’ feathers. The throne-seat itself was low and cushioned, not much more than a great, wide cushion, with other cushions for arms; and for back—it had no other—another figure of the Goddess carved in high relief, with barbaric traceries about her, behind her, and on her robes. From great, flat brow to square, rectangular feet she was green—a violent, virulent, hideous green—but in her great, rough-hewn ornaments, her massive crown and in the squirmed and unsymmetrical traceries there were touches of gold—wide daubs and swathes some, some but glimmering hair-lines. A low brazier rested on the ground fronting the throne, and an acrid odor came from the light green smoke that curled up from the brazier.
Traherne barely glanced to where the Raja pointed. The woman neither turned her head nor moved her eyes—they did not leave Traherne’s face.
“Will you grant us one last request?” the Englishman asked.
“By all means,” was the native’s instant, suave reply, “if it is my power. In spite of your inconsiderate action of yesterday—”
“Inconsiderate—?” Traherne blurted.
“Watkins, you know—poor Watkins—a great loss to me! Butà la guerre comme à la guerre! I bear no malice for a fair act of war. I am anxious to show you every consideration.” He spoke to Dr. Traherne, but he included Mrs. Crespin by a deferential gesture, and his tone was for her.
“Then,” Traherne said quickly and earnestly, “you will leave us alone for the time that remains to us?”
“Why, by all means,” Rukh returned as quickly. “And oh, by the way, you need have no fear of the—ceremony—being protracted. It will be brief and—I trust—painless. The High Church Party are not incapable of cruelty; but I have resolutely set my face against it.”
He paused a moment, irresolute, debating with himself. Then he quietly stepped close to Lucilla Crespin. She had stood gazing stonily into space while he and Traherne had been speaking, and she stood so still, took no notice of him as he came to her, none when he spoke to her.
“Before I go, Madam,” he said, “may I remind you of my offer of yesterday? It is not too late.” She took no notice. “Is it just to your children to refuse?” he urged. Traherne saw her hands tremble, and she looked in Rukh’s eyes, meeting them with a look of stone. But she did not speak, and her fixed and rigid face gave no sign—only her hard, cold eyes looked his through.
Rukh looked back into hers, and waited.
Still she gave no sign.
“Immovable?” he said at last. “So be it!” And he turned to go. But a great yell of triumphant hatred weltered up from the waiting people outside—such clamor and frenzy as they had not uttered yet—and the Raja turned back, and spoke to her once more.
“Your husband’s body, Madam,” he told her, watching her narrowly. “They are laying it at the feet of the Goddess.”
He had moved the Englishwoman at last.
“You promised me—” she began, and her voice and her face shook.
“That it should be burnt,” Rukh assented. “I will keep my promise. For a white foe’s body to lie at the foot of an Asian god, honors not dishonors it! I regret, if it pains you. But, you see, I had three, brothers—a head for a head.” He bowed slightly and passed slowly into the inner chamber from which he had come, and his priests, waiting till now by the curtains before the throne, clustered about him, and followed him.
But a guard remained. He waited by the now rebolted door they had been carried through; he took no step towards them—but he watched.
Lucilla sank down on the broad base of a pillar—her legs were trembling, and her heart felt queer and sick.
Traherne could not speak to her yet.
“So this is the end!” she said in a hard, toneless voice. She was not dressed for sacrifice—Rukh’s orders had spared her that—and she waited her butchery in the tweed in which she had landed.
“What offer did that devil make you?” he asked through stiffened lips.
“Oh,” she replied after a moment, “I didn’t mean to tell you, but I may as well. He is an ingenious tormentor,” she said with a pitiful shrug. “He offered yesterday to let me live, and to kidnap the children, and bring them here to me—you know on what terms.”
“To bring the children here?” Dr. Traherne said oddly, his eyes scanning her wonderingly, his hands crunched together.
“He said,” she went on, and her voice broke on her words a little, “in a month I might have them in my arms. Think of it! Ronny and Iris in my arms!”
Traherne turned away from her, as she crouched huddled and broken in her grief and hunger.
He could not look at her.
He stood so for some time—his back to her.
The populace screamed and shrieked. They did not hear them.
At last, still his back to her, Dr. Traherne said in a low and unsteady voice, “Are you sure you did right to refuse?”
All through the last night’s torture it had been his fear and his agony that, if no help came to them, she mightnotdie. Until now—here in the very presence of their impending murder, hisand hers, he had doubted that the Raja of Rukh would not accomplish by absolute force the purpose which he, Traherne, perfectly understood. But now, the death-preparations seemed too complete, the death-stroke too near, and he was convinced that as the sun sank to the Himalayan crests that head, bent in agony in an English mother’s trembling grief as he’d turned away from the sight of her, would roll in the dirt—between his and the severed head of Crespin’s corpse—at the feet of that monstrous idol out there, while the demonized people danced and shrieked about it—spat on it perhaps.
Should she let it come to that?
Was the price she must pay for life, ultimate escape to come after a time, perhaps, hideous, unspeakable as it was, not a price she ought to pay? Would not her very abhorrence of it make it clean, a sacrificial holiness rather than defilement?
It was a terrible question.
Could he answer it? Had he any right to bid her die, to let her die without strong protest from him, when she had eventhischance of escape?
Up there in the beetling, brooding palace of Rukh, in her prison chamber, in the tortured night, Lucilla Crespin had faced that question, had canvassed it, had tried to weigh it sanely. And there alone with her own soul and her God, while the song and laughter of those who sharpened the swords and decked the place of slaughter came to her through the night, she had answered it.
She had answered it nobly. She had answered it in the only way that such an Englishwoman as she—her father’s child and her mother’s—could answer it perhaps.
But was that noble, womanly answer thenoblest?
She had answered it—in her only way.
Basil Traherne was trying to answer it now.
His soul writhed, his very flesh, so soon to be nothing, ached with the pain and difficulty of answering the nearly unanswerable, loathsome, hideous question.
Standing here, dying even now, for help would have come long hours ago, if Crespin’s call had gone through, hearing again the horrible calls and shouts of the maddened throng out there, hearing the woman here with him moaning for her children, the question of right and wrong, of best or worst for her and for her fatherless children, beat at him like a flail of white-hot metal. And the thought of the white body he loved tortured and mangled out there—now—almost now—weighted his reasoning. It must. It must have done that.
He couldnotdecide! He did notsee.
“Are you sure you did right to refuse?” he repeated, and sweat colder than death broke on his face.
“Do you mean—?” the woman asked.
“Are you sure it is not wrong to refuse?” he asked almost harshly.
“Oh,” the tortured, cowering woman cried, “how can you—? Right? Wrong? What are right and wrong to me now?” she sobbed. “If I could see my children again, would any scruple of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ make me shrink from anything that was possible?” she asked passionately. “But this is so utterly, utterly impossible.”
He turned and went to her then. “Forgive me,” he begged. “You know it would add an unspeakable horror to death, if I had to leave you here. But I felt I must ask you whether you had fully considered—”
“I have thought of nothing else through all these torturing hours,” she told him gravely.
“How brave you are!” he said in a choked voice. But his eyes were very proud.
“Not brave, not brave,” she moaned. “If I could live, I would—there, I confess it! But I should die of shame and misery, and leave my children—to that man. Or, if I did live, what sort of a mother should I be to them? They would be much better without me! Oh,” she sobbed, “my precious, precious darlings!” She clasped her arms across her breast, and rocked herself in agony.
The moments passed.
The slow sinking sun streaked its red warning through the clerestory slits.
“Lucilla!” He laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, Basil,” she looked up at him, “say you think it won’t be altogether bad for them! They will never know anything of their father now but what was good. And their mother will simply have vanished into the skies. They will think she has flown away to heaven—and who knows but it may be true? There may be something beyond this hell.”
“We shall soon know, Lucilla,” he answered gently.
“But to go away and leave them without a word—!” she moaned again. “Poor little things, poor little things!”
“They will remember you as something very dear and beautiful,” he said, as he knelt down beside her, and gathered her hands into his. “The very mystery will be like a halo about you.”
“Shall I see them again, Basil?” she moaned. “Tell me that.”
There was a moment’s silence.
Then, “Who knows?” the man said gravely. “Even to comfort you, I won’t say I am certain. But I do sincerely think you may.”
“You think,” she asked with a woeful smile, “there is a sporting chance?”
“More than that,” was Traherne’s emphatic reply. “This life is such a miracle—could any other be more incredible?”
“But even if I should meet them in another world,” she mourned, “they would not be my Ronny and Iris, but a strange man and a strange woman, built up of experiences in which I had had no share. Oh, it was cunning, cunning, what that devil said to me! He said, ‘God Himself cannot give you back their childhood.’”
“How do you know that God is going to take their childhood from you?” he comforted her quickly. “You may be with them this very night—with them, unseen, but perhaps not unfelt, all the days of their life.”
She shook her head sadly. “You are saying that to make what poor Antony called a ‘haze’ for me—to soften the horror of darkness that is waiting for us. Don’t give me ‘dope’ Basil—I can face things without it.”
“I mean every word of it,” the man said stoutly.
They kept silence a little then.
The man almost wished that the summons would come.
Suddenly Lucilla Crespin smiled a little.
“Why,” he asked incredulously, “do you smile?”
“At a thought that came to me,” she told him; “the thought of poor Antony as a filmy and purified spirit. It seems so unthinkable!”
Traherne—even here—wished she had not said it. But he always had been fairer to Antony Crespin than, for years, the disillusioned wife had been able to be. “Why unthinkable?” he argued. “Why may he not still exist, though he has left behind him the nerves, the cravings, that tormented him—and you. You have often,” he reminded her gently, “told me that there was something fine in the depths of his nature. I have always known it. And you know how he showed it yesterday.”
“Oh, if I could only tell the children how he died!” Lucilla exclaimed longingly.
“But,” Traherne said sadly, “his true self was hopelessly out of gear. The chain is broken, the machine lies out there—scrapped. Do you think that he was just that machine, and nothing else?Itell you, No!”
“But I don’t know,” she said drearily. “Anyway, Basil—if Antony leaves his—failings, you must leave behind your work. Do you want another life in which there is no work for you to do—no disease to be rooted out? Don’t tell me you don’t long to take your microscope with you wherever you may be going.”
“Perhaps there are microscopes waiting me there,” Traherne said slowly.
“Spirit microscopes for spirit microbes? You don’t believe that, Basil.”
“I neither believe nor disbelieve,” he told her. “In all we can say of another life we are like children blind from birth, trying to picture the form and colors of the rainbow.”
“If,” she persisted sadly, “we are freed from all human selfishness, shall I love my children more than any other woman’s? Can I love a child I cannot kiss, that cannot look into my eyes, and kiss me back again?”
“Oh,” he cried roughly, springing up as he spoke, “Lucilla, don’t! Don’t remind me of all we are losing! I meant to leave it all unspoken—the thought of him lying out there seemed to tie my tongue. But we have only one moment on this side of eternity. Lucilla, shall I go on?”