“Shall I go on?”
He waited for her to say.
After an instant’s pause, she bowed her head.
“Do you think,” he cried, “it is with a light heart that I turn my back upon the life of earth, and all it might have meant for you and me—for you and me, Lucilla?”
“Yes,” the woman whispered, “Basil, for you and me.”
He reached down his hands, and she rose, letting him help her, and stood beside him.
“Rather than live without you,” he told her, “I am glad to die with you; but, oh, what a wretched gladness compared with that of living with you, and loving you! I wonder if you have guessed what it has meant to me, ever since we met at Dehra Dun, to see you as another man’s wife? It has been hell—hell!”
“Yes,” she said, “I know, Basil. I have known from the beginning.”
“Oh, what do I care,” he cried passionately, “for a bloodless, shadowy life—life in the abstract, with all the senses extinct? Better eternal sleep!”
“Oh, Basil,” the woman said, “you are going back on your own wisdom. Shall we not there—where we are going—”
“Wisdom!” he exclaimed with hot contempt. “What has wisdom to say to love, thwarted and unfulfilled? You were right when you said that it is a mockery to speak of love without hands to clasp, without lips to kiss.”
“I, too,” the woman owned, “regret—perhaps as much as you—that things were—as they were. But not even your love—”
A trumpet-blast interrupted her—a long, deep, wailing sound. And out in the open behind the temple a pheasant rocketed up, with a scream of fright.
“There is the signal!” Lucilla whispered—not without a shudder. “Good-bye, dear love.”
She held out her hands to him. He drew her reverently into his arms, and bent a passionate, quivering face to hers. And so, they who were about to die, gave and took their first kiss. Lips lingered on lips, flesh clung to flesh. Neither spoke again—but telling each other more than words could say. They needed no words now, and they had none.
A crash of tom-toms and a low muttered chant came from behind the curtains through which the Raja had gone when he’d left them. A moment they clung the closer, then slowly and proudly drew the little apart that English dignity bade, and stood hand-in-hand facing the doorway as its curtains parted, and the death processional came in, moved upon them.
“Basil,” she whispered, and he caught what she said, though her lips scarcely moved, “kill me, kill me now!”
“Dear,” he whispered, “I have nothing—”
“Your hands!” she said. “Your hands are strong!”
Could he? he asked himself. He looked with stricken eyes at her pulsing throat. Could he? It must be done quickly, if done. They would overpower him at the first uplift of his hand. Why had he not thought of it before, while yet there’d been time, when still they’d been here alone? Fool! Wicked fool! But to have shortened so the short, short space of their love’s fulfilment! It would have been hard.
“Not yet—” he murmured. And he knew he would attempt it presently—at the last, last breath of moment left them.
Priests came first, chanting as they came, fantastically dressed, and each wearing some indescribable demon, high up-standing head-dress. Except the High Priest all were masked—the masks impossible, monstrous devils and animals. After them the Raja of Rukh came, walking, with folded arms, alone. He also wore now a priestly head-dress, richer, even more grotesque than theirs, and a stole-like garment, and one shaped like a cope, each a glittering jewel-mass. The long, flat, scarf-like, wide strip of fur, brocade and jewels that fell from either side from over his shoulders down to his ankles looked something a stole, the azure arabesqued drapery below it looked something a cope—so oddly, in surface things, do East and West often show to touch.
Behind him, walking abreast, came three dark-robed, sinister figures, plainly masked and hooded, carrying heavy, shining swords. They were the proudest men in Rukh to-day, for by right of their office well-performed each would claim, and be accorded, privilege to send a girl-child to the Rukh’s harem. Out there close by the great waiting Goddess, close to the spot where the swords would swing and hack at the white offered necks, the three little girls stood side by side dressed in the saffron-edged magenta of brides, their dark little faces golden and shining with joy, each eyeing the other two rather scornfully.
After the executioners followed musicians—in splendid, more secular motley, their cheeks puffed out mump-like with the exertion that blew weird notes through Rukh’s weird sacred reed and bamboo instruments.
When they reached it the priests grouped themselves about the throne, salaaming to it twice, thrice to the Goddess that backed it.
Rukh paused an instant at the prisoners. “May I trouble you to move a little aside?” he asked with insolent civility. “I am, for the moment, not a king, but a priest, and must observe a certain holy dignity. Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
They made way for him—but still the man held close in his own the woman’s hand. And her fingers clung to his like twisted, writhed icicles now.
He passed slowly on to the throne and, to a reiterated salvo of priestly salaams and of shrilled flutes, took his seat.
The people screamed and moaned with delight and loyalty.
Rukh spoke again to the woman standing there waiting with her hand still in her lover’s. Traherne was trembling almost violently now, Lucilla Crespin was perfectly still.
“Must I do violence to my feelings, Madam,” the Raja-priest said, “by including you in the approaching ceremony? There is still time.”
She took no other notice, but she met his eyes.
“We autocrats,” he added, “are badly brought up. We are not accustomed to having our desires, or even our whims thwarted.”
“Will you never cease tormenting this lady?” Traherne cut in violently. “Get on with your butchery!”
The Raja paid as little attention to Traherne as the Englishwoman had paid to the Raja.
“Remember my power,” Rukh continued. “If I may not take you back to my palace as my queen, I can send you back as my slave. . . . Have you nothing to say? . . . I repeat my offer as to your children. . . . Remember, too, that, if I so will it, you cannot save them by dying. I can have them kidnapped—or—I can have them killed.”
She answered him then—with a wild, anguished shriek.
An Englishman’s endurance snapped. He threw Lucilla’s poor, cold hands from his, and with an enfiended cry of, “Devil,” rushed on the throne, and leapt at the Raja’s diamond-circled throat; did it so suddenly, so quickly that before the startled priests could gather their bemazed wits he had pinned the Raja against the back of his throne.
But instantly then the huddled priests flung on Traherne, pulled him off—he was one, they were more than a score—pinioned him roughly, and dragged him struggling away.
Fast and furiously the priests chattered together, and the Chief Priest prostrated himself in hot supplication before the throne where the Raja sat coldly smiling. He heard the Chief Priest gravely, then rose and passed him with a word—pressed through the priests thronged near the throne, they striving to dissuade him, and went to Traherne, whom several of the priests who had seized him still held securely.
“Chivalrous but ill-advised, Dr. Traherne,” the Raja remarked. “I regret it, and so will you. My colleagues here insist that, as you have laid impious hands on the chief of their sacred caste, your death alone will not appease the fury of the Goddess. They insist upon subjecting you to a process of expiation—a ritual of great antiquity—but—” He broke off significantly.
“You mean torture?” Traherne spoke calmly.
“Well—yes,” Rukh admitted regretfully.
Lucilla Crespin came towards them with a cry.
“Not you, Madam—not you—”
“I must speak to you—speak to you alone!” she gasped. “Send Dr. Traherne away.”
Rukh looked at her searchingly.
Traherne understood her. “Lucilla!” he exclaimed, entreaty and command in his tone. “What are you thinking of! Lucilla—!”
At a gesture from the Raja, the priests who were guarding Traherne bent over him, and he crumpled up like a storm-buffeted autumn leaf, and his voice trailed weakly, then died away. Japanese ju-jutsu is a thing of feather, and slow and uncertain compared to the brutal knack that these temple priests had practiced on Basil Traherne. Their theology may have been as rotten and flabby as it was absurd and fanatic, but their athletic skill and their fighting knowledge of human anatomy were fine.
“I beg you—I beg you!” the woman implored brokenly, wildly. “One minute—no more!”
Rukh looked at her curiously, studying her searchingly, for a moment—a sharp gleam in his narrowed eyes—shrugged his cope-covered shoulders, and gave a terse order, and Traherne, inert and almost unconscious, was dragged away, and out through the door through which he had been carried into the temple hall.
In her desperation the woman had rushed up the steps of the throne. Now in her exhaustion she sank down on one end of the actual throne itself—sharing it crushed and abjectly with him—the broken suppliant of an absolute king.
Rukh was watching her narrowly with a serpent-look in passion-full eyes. He held his silence—and waited.
“Let him go,” she panted, when she could speak, “let him go, send him back to India unharmed, and—it shall be as you wish.”
Outside the waiting people were eating oily sweetmeats and greasier cakes and water-lily seeds, drinking sickly fermented goats’ milk, and watching now sacred snakes tearing living birds to bleeding pieces—a priest-granted sight both to whet and hold in leash their maddened blood-thirst for the greater slaughter to come—so soon to come now; for the sun had not ceased to sink; and here in the dark, terrible hall the tawny prince in gauds of satins and gems, and the white-skinned woman in a plain tweed gown, bartered and played for a man’s life, a woman’s soul and body. A Raja staked a whim and a lust, an Englishwoman staked her all.
They staked and threw.
And the sun sank lower.
“Soho!” Rukh said at last, all the kindness real or assumed gone from his voice, the wicked light of a primitive, angry feeling disfiguring his eyes, “you will do for your lover—to save him a little additional pain—what you would not do to have your children restored to you! Suppose I agree—would he accept this sacrifice?”
“No,” the woman said quickly, “no, he wouldn’t—but he must have no choice. That is part of the bargain. Send him—bound hand and foot, if need be—down to Kashmir, and put him over the frontier—”
“You don’t care what he thinks of you?” Rukh broke in.
“He will know what to think,” the woman said.
“And I too, Madam,” Rukh retorted with a short, ugly laugh, “know what to think.” Kneeling—there was nothing of supplication about it—with one knee on the throne, he caught her shoulders in his delicate, sinewy olive hands, and turned her face to him. “Come, look me in the eyes,” he ordered, “and tell me that you honestly intend to fulfill your bargain! . . . I knew it!” For her eyes had flinched. “You are playing with me! But the confiding barbarian is not so simple as you imagine. No woman has ever tried to fool me that has not repented it. You think, when you have to pay up, you will fob me off with your dead body. Let me tell you, I have no use for you dead—I want you with all the blood in your veins, with all the pride in that damned sly brain of yours. I want to make my plaything of your beauty, my mockery of your pride. I want to strip off the delicate English lady, and come down to the elemental woman, the handmaid and the instrument of man.” His passion had risen higher and higher with the words he’d fed it, and his now wide open eyes glowed like the eyes of a brute. The woman crouching there at the side of the barbaric throne, clutching it desperately for the support she desperately needed, looked at him dumbly and numb, her terror-stricken and fascinated eyes like those of some forest youngling the snake is poised to strike—powerless to move, powerless even to cry.
His tone changed, his voice fell a note. “Come now, I’ll make you a plain offer. I will put Dr. Traherne over the frontier, and, as they set him free, my people shall hand him a letter written by you at my dictation. You will tell him that you have determined to accept my protection and make this your home.” She bowed her head in bitter acquiescence. “Consequently you wish to have your children conveyed to you here—”
“Never—never—never!” She pelted it at him, her pallid face set and fixed, her dazed numbed eyes alight again, her broken body tense again. “I will make no bargain that involves my children.”
“You see!” Rukh laughed—a fiendish, ugly laugh. “You will give me no hostages for the fulfillment of your bond. But a pledge of your good faith I must have. For without a pledge, Madam, I don’t believe in it one little bit.” And as he paused he snapped his fingers delicately.
“What pledge?” she asked desperately.
“Only one is left—Dr. Traherne himself,” the Raja told her. “I may—though it will strain my power to the uttermost—save his life, while keeping him in prison. Then, when you have fulfilled your bond—fulfilled it to the uttermost, mark you!—when you have borne me a child—I will let him go free. But the moment you attempt to evade your pledge, by death or escape, I will hand him over to the priests to work their will with, and I will put no restraint upon their savage instincts.”
There are life-decisions to be made, that come to some, now and then, so hideous in their complexity, that the bravest soul, the clearest mind, the purest heart must shudder and sicken at the insupportable task—grope—hesitate—waver—faint. Knowing not what to do, but knowing that whatever one’s course, regret must be its long, hard aftermath, moral strength crumples up and is frail and trembling at such hideous crossroads of conduct—and right and wrong, highest virtue and lowest crime seem inextricably mixed. And however it wrings us, not one but must experience a measure of relief and thankfulness when such terrible deciding is by some overruling whipped out of our hands, and the befuddled wavering soul is left intense suffering merely, but spared responsibility and remorse.
This was the hardest moment of Lucilla Crespin’s life. She did not know how to decide. She could not decide. But she knew that she must. And she did have to—there was no possible escape for her, unless Heaven itself actually and now peeped “through the blanket of the dark” and threw down its verdict. And upon the woman’s deciding of this must rest the ultimate appraisement of her, of her character, and of the soundness and sweetness of her moral judgment. But two possible decisions lay for her choosing. No more choice than that was offered her. And by her decision between the terrible two her claim to the highest personal fineness, strength and nobility must stand or fall. Either way could be taken nobly, and in self-sacrifice—but one of the two led to the higher heights—one was supreme.
She did not know, as she cowered, huddled there, how she should decide. But she knew that in some way she would and must.
Rukh waited and watched her. But the sun was going, throwing its last gay pools of Tuscan gold on the hall’s dim floor, its angry pools of red on the courtyard, turning the feet of the gigantic Green Goddess to blood.
And he saw, and said, “Choose, my dear lady, choose!”
The moment had come.
She lifted her head wearily, clenched tighter on the jeweled edge of the throne, her lips moved difficultly to a word. “I choose—”
He bent nearer to catch her labored saying, his dark Eastern face tense and keen, his eyes excited, not unanxious. For he not only wanted his own way, but he intensely wished to have it in his own way.
“—then—to—”
Slowly her eyes left his face. Her words did not break or trail—they stopped. She lifted her face towards the clerestory slits, and listened. She listened—more intensely than ever at Lucknow a woman had listened—and an impalpable shimmer of hope dawned on Mrs. Crespin’s face.
The murmur of the crowd below sounded subdued. It broke, and ceased.
Were they listening too?
With a shriek of insane excitement, the wild overflow of self-control and despair undammed at last, the cowering woman sprang to her feet.
“Aeroplanes!” she cried. “The aeroplanes!” she shouted and laughed. “Basil! Basil! The aeroplanes!”
It was true.
Out in the sacred courtyard where all had been babel and noise, a terrible stillness had come—every head thrown back, every startled black eye strained to the sky. Through the silence—human noise petrified by quaking fear of the unknown—came a faint, but rapidly increasing whirr and throb, no more at first than the gossamer sound of lazy dragon-fly wings, then more and more, till the air reeked with the high-up grating sound.
Like a flight of dragon-flies—gray, far and filmy, the plane-birds came, then like a school of black-bellied fish with backs of gold and rose in the sunset glow, then like some flock of monster well-trained birds, a battalion perhaps of the great rocs the mazed people believed them, nearer and nearer they came, lower and lower they swooped.
Through the royal, blue blanket of the Asian sky England had peeped, and whatever his priests and people thought, the Raja of Rukh—he’d not altered his attitude, except to gaze steadily up, listening intently, he’d not let his face or his eyes change—knew that England swooping puissantly down had cried to him, “Hold! Enough!”
With a sob of relief, repeating again in a low, quivering voice, “The aeroplanes—the aeroplanes!” Lucilla tottered to the door through which Traherne had been pushed. The priests were too amazed to oppose or stay her, as his guard had been to stay or oppose Traherne, and as she moved seeking him, he came back seeking her—and they stood together in the doorway, he leaning against it a little, still feeling the flay of the fingers that had crippled him, looking up to the sky in which their help had come.
The crowd found its voice again. Cries and squeals of consternation and terror came like a sudden gust of storm from the gathered people.
The guard outside on the balcony at the end of the hall tore aside the curtains violently, and pointing upward shouted madly to their prince, and he moved to them slowly, and stood there looking out—and the priests huddled, blubbering and jabbering strickenly, behind him.
“See,” Lucilla whispered, “see! They are circling lower and lower! Is it true, Basil? Are we saved?”
“Yes, Lucilla,” he told her, in a voice that scarcely would sound, “we are saved.” He repeated it, and his voice rang through the place. The Raja heard.
“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” Lucilla moaned. “I shall see my babies again!” she sobbed. She swayed, almost fainting, but Traherne caught her, and held her leaning on him, as he leaned on the portal.
Was their Goddess performing another great miracle for her favored people? Were her great rocs flinging them more white goats to gore at her feet, the people wondered, “Oo-ae, Oo-ae!” Was it portend of fortune or portend of doom?
“So,” the Raja said to the English woman and man, “the Major lied like a gentleman! Good old Major! I didn’t think he had it in him.”
An excited guard called his attention to something, and the Raja looked out again to where the man motioned. He stood watching, looking down from the balcony, gave an order, at which several of the soldiers hurried away, then turned and went to them who still were his prisoners. “One of the machines has landed,” he told Traherne casually. “An officer is coming this way—he looks a mere boy.”
“The conquerors of the air have all been mere boys,” Dr. Traherne asserted.
The Raja smiled. “I have given orders,” he said, “that he shall be brought here unharmed. Perhaps I had better receive him with some ceremony—”
He went slowly back to his glittering chair of sovereign state, sat himself down on it cross-legged, and settled his wonderful robes carefully about him, commanded his priests to, and they ranged themselves near him. And the Raja wondered if ever again he’d sit on the throne, his almost from birth, the throne his fathers had sat on and ruled from for long years. But the man was game. Give him his due.
“You said just now, Dr. Traherne,” he remarked after a moment, “that you were saved. Are you so certain of that?”
“Certain?” Traherne echoed. His inflection was question, but even more it was retort and proud assertion, and his tired eyes glowed. And the woman whose hand clung in his felt the warmth of his fingers.
“How many men does each of these hummingbirds carry?” Rukh queried skeptically.
“Probably two or three,” Traherne admitted, “a D. H. 10 can carry six to eight people but—”
Rukh interrupted. “I counted six planes—say at the outside twenty to thirty men. Even my toy army can cope with that number.”
The clamor outside was indescribable now. The Raja translated it correctly, and gave a word of command to the priest guarding a door, and the priest, with trembling hands threw it open wide.
An English boy sauntered in—three of Rukh’s soldiers half escorting, half guarding him. A fair, sunny-faced, blue-eyed youngster, trim and straight in his khaki-drill, the shoes below his “slacks” shining like polished, brown glass, two stripes on his epaulets, his black tie beautifully done, one yellow wisp of curl almost coquettishly peeping from under his immaculate service cap, and an avenue of ribbons cutting across his tunic—the blue, white and yellow of the G. S., the rainbow of the Victory, the red, white and blue of the 1914-15, of course, but the white and purple diagonals of the D. F. C. were there too, and the tiny rosette on the blue, dark-red and blue of his D. S. O. told that he had won it doubly. And he looked, as he was, a “mother’s boy” and no end of a wag. Truly, “the conquerors of the air have all been mere boys”!
“Who are you, sir?” the Raja demanded.
“One moment.” The English boy threw the word crisply over his shoulder to the bedizened figure sitting cross-legged and sovereign on its bedizened throne, and crossed to his countryman and woman, and saluted—the R. A. F. do not uncover.
Lucilla held out both her hands—they had met before at Delhi and at Simla. She was afraid to speak, almost afraid to look, lest she welcome him with a torrent of womanish tears.
“Mrs. Crespin!” the young pilot said, as he took the hands she gave. “I’m very glad we’re in time. Dr. Traherne, I presume? And,” when they had shaken hands gravely, “Major Crespin?” he asked.
“Shot whilst transmitting our message,” Traherne told him.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Crespin,” the boy said gravely. “By whom?” he demanded of Traherne.
Traherne pointed silently to the throne-seated Raja, who was watching quite impassively.
But Rukh spoke now. “I am sorry,” he said, drawling his clear voice lazily, “to interrupt these effusions, but—”
“Who are you, sir?” The English lad’s voice barked something like a gun.
“I am the Raja of Rukh,” the prince replied. “And you?”
“Flight-Lieutenant Cardew,” the boy-pilot said formally. “I have the honor to represent His Majesty, the King-Emperor.”
Rukh looked uninterested. “The King-Emperor? Who is that, pray? We live so out of the world here, I don’t seem to have heard of him,” he lied.
“You will in a minute, Raja,” the youth muttered back, “if you don’t instantly hand over his subjects.”
“His subjects?” The Raja seemed puzzled. “Ah,” he exclaimed not unindifferently, but as if a light had broken in, “I see you mean the King of England. What terms does His Majesty propose?”
“We make no terms with cut-throats,” Cardew snapped. “If I do not signal,” he added, looking at the watch on his wrist, “your submission within three minutes of our landing—” If he finished his sentence, no one heard it.
A great slithering noise crashed down from the air, and all Rukh seemed to rock from the shock of a sudden explosion.
“Ah!” the Raja said idly. “Bombs!”
“Precisely,” Cardew confirmed him, as cool as he.
“I fancied,” Rukh remarked, “your Government affected some scruple as to the slaughter of innocent civilians.”
“There has been no slaughter—as yet,” the Flight-Lieutenant returned. “That bomb fell in the ravine, where it could do no harm. So will the next one—”
The slithering, ripping sound again! It brayed nearer, heavier this time. And the explosion felt to have shattered the Kingdom of Rukh to tatters. The great hall rocked. Its horrid, heavy tapestries bellied and sagged like the wind-driven sails of a storm-buffeted ship.
The two Englishmen and the white-faced Englishwoman neither started nor stirred, nor did the Raja of Rukh. But the priests huddled together like frightened sheep, and the poor simple people out in the courtyard wailed like cattle in torment.
“—but the third”—the young airman went easily on, when he could expect to be heard—“well, if you’re wise, you’ll throw up the sponge, and there won’t be a third.”
But the Raja of Rukhwasgame. “Throw up the sponge, Lieutenant—?” he drawled indolently. “I didn’t quite catch your name?”
“Cardew.” The boy was brief.
“Ah, yes. Lieutenant Cardew. Why on earth should I throw up the sponge, Mr. Cardew? Your comrades up yonder can no doubt massacre quite a number of my subjects—a brave exploit!—but when they’ve spent their thunderbolts, they’ll have just to fly away again—if they can. A bomb may drop on this temple, you say? In that case, you and your friends”—he inclined his head towards them graciously—“will escort me—in fragments—to my last abode. (Or should we say,nextabode—interesting question.) Does that prospect allure you? I call your bluff, Lieutenant Cardew.”
Cardew looked again at his watch, and grinned—significantly: a public-schoolboy grin—and, as if it had known his grin for its cue, a third bomb screamed and hit and burst: England’s anger weltering into the very bowels of the Kingdom of Rukh.
It was very near. It was blastingly loud.
The people shrieked. Save the idols and the three English none there was calm save the man cross-legged on the throne. From courtyard, temples and castle came a sorry chorus of terror and despair. Even the cattle in mat-sheds and byres bleated and cried, and wild jungle things off on mountains scurried and were afraid. The people shrieked, and the priests rushed to their master and flung themselves down at his feet in panic-stricken supplication. He hesitated for a moment, then, with a shrug half-indulgent, half contempt, continued to the English airman, “My priests, however, have a superstitious dread of these eggs of the Great Roc. They fear injury to the Sacred Image. For myself, I am always averse to bloodshed. You may, if you please, signal to your squadron commander my acceptance of your terms.”
“I thought you would come to reason,” Cardew returned, as he shook out the flag he carried, and hurried across the courtyard to where the white beam of a searchlight cut down between the great Green Goddess and her shivering, stark-eyed people.
“This comes of falling behind the times,” the Raja said with a sigh not untinged with blasé amusement. “If I had had anti-aircraft guns—”
“Thank your stars you hadn’t,” Traherne told him.
Cardew came back from the execution-ground. “All clear for the moment, Raja,” he said. “You have no further immediate consequences to fear.”
“What am I to conclude from your emphasis on ‘immediate’” Rukh asked lazily.
“I need scarcely remind you, sir,” the boy said coldly, “that you can only hand over the body of one of your prisoners.”
“Major Crespin,” the Raja retorted, “murdered a faithful servant of mine. His death at my hands was a fair act of war.”
“His Majesty’s Government will scarcely view it in that light,” Cardew remarked.
“His Majesty’s Government,” Rukh said haughtily, “has to-day, I believe, taken the lives of three kinsmen of mine. Your side has the best transaction by four lives to one.”
Flight-Lieutenant Cardew ended the argument with a contemptuous lift of his broad, young shoulder. “Will you assign us an escort through that crowd?” he demanded.
“Certainly,” the Raja replied smoothly. And at a word from him an officer of his regular troops hurried out. “The escort will be here in a moment, Flight-Lieutenant.”
The Raja of Rukh rose and went to Mrs. Crespin. He stood a moment looking at her quietly. Then he said, including Traherne by his manner, “It only remains for me to speed the parting guest. I hope we may one day renew our acquaintance”—he said pointedly to Lucilla Crespin—“oh, not here,”—in reply to her shudder—“I plainly foresee that I shall have to join the other Kings in Exile. Perhaps we may meet at Homburg or Monte Carlo, and talk over old times. Ah, here is the escort.”
As the aeroplane rose in the gathering dusk, Lucilla Crespin turned her face away from the Kingdom of Rukh. But Dr. Traherne fixed his eyes on castle and temple as long as the sight of them held.
Neither was thinking of the other as their rescue-ship rose and clove the air—the man and woman so terribly, so irrevocably betrothed. She had no thought now but of two children to whom she was going—hers only now. And Traherne was thinking of a boy at Harrow he had greatly respected.
Rukh turned back into the hall as the English left it. He strolled across to the throne his blood had owned for so many ages, and stood regarding it for a long time. He sighed, then laughed—a little sadly—in the hideous face of the Goddess that backed the throne, drew his case from the pouch in his jeweled sleeve, and lit a cigarette at the sacred brazier, drew its first fragrant whiff, standing there before his well-nigh lost throne, and went slowly out onto the balcony.
When the plane rose slowly up from Rukh, the Raja still stood on the balcony—and he watched it out of sight.
“Well, well,” he said, to the fresh cigarette he was lighting, “she’d probably have been a damned nuisance.”
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES:
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.