The priest still apologized to the stone. The people still jabbered and watched. Crespin smoked on, and Traherne stood quietly studying the place—the lay of its land, the stand of the rocks, the length and strength of the castle walls.
“Do you think I could sit on this stone without giving offense to the deities?” Lucilla called to them over her shoulder.
Traherne answered her after a glance at the flat rock to which she pointed—a slab of flint quite without vestments of green or of paint.
“Oh, yes, that seems safe enough. I don’t know,” he continued, joining her where she sat, but not sharing her seat, and speaking in a tone that Crespin could not fail to hear, “how to apologize for having got you into this mess.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Dr. Traherne,” she answered cheerfully. “Who can foresee a Himalayan fog?”
“The only thing to do was to get above it, and then, of course, my bearings were gone.” He still spoke apologetically—and unconsciously he dropped his voice as he said it, as every man’s instinct is when he says even the most trivial things to the one woman. Crespin caught the tone’s lowering, and shifted about a little where he sat, and listened the more intently.
“Now that we are safe,” Lucilla’s voice was not lowered at all, “I should think it all great fun, if it weren’t for the children.”
“Oh, they don’t expect us for a week,” Crespin edged in, “and surely it won’t take us more than that to get back to civilization.” He spoke with more confidence than he felt.
And Basil Traherne felt less. The more he studied the place they’d landed on and the people, the less he thought of the chances of cordial hospitality or of quick and easy departure. But there was no use in saying so to Crespin here and now, and there was every reason for not saying or hinting it to Mrs. Crespin at all, unless a positive necessity compelled. But the next few days or hours might show brighter than his fears. God grant it! So he merely said, not too sanguine at heart, cheerful of voice, “Or at all events to a telegraph line,” and he marshaled a cheerful smile with his words. A man has a right to be cheerful as long as he can. And men of Traherne’s breed hold it a duty—a duty not to be shirked. If to borrow trouble is folly, to lend or impose it is crime.
“I suppose there’s no chance of flying back?” Mrs. Crespin asked more anxiously than she knew.
“Not the slightest, I’m afraid,” Traherne admitted. “I fancy the old bus is done for.”
“Oh, Dr. Traherne, what a shame! And you’d only had it a few weeks!” Her concern for the wrecked aeroplane was entirely sincere, but something bigger than that throbbed at her side and shook her voice just a little. The men were thoroughly frightened, and she sensed it and shared it. But her fear was far less than theirs; she knew Asia less, and she had two men beside her, men of her own race, one whom she trusted in all things, the other her husband. And only very small women can feel as sick a fear when companioned by men, as men feel who know themselves but inadequate protection for a woman who shares grave peril with them.
“And you’d only had it a few weeks,” she repeated.
“What does it matter so long as you are safe?” Traherne exclaimed with an uncontrollable impulse that his voice betrayed far more than the words did. It was love-making, his tone, and the woman is greatly loved to whom a strong man speaks with passionate tenderness at a time of desperate peril.
Lucilla threw up an instant barrier—for his protection, not for her own. And though she had no fear of Antony—such women do not fear the men they despise—she had intense fear of the shame of what he might say might cause her—and cause Traherne.
“What does it matter so long as we’re all safe?” she said quite lightly, almost gayly.
But Antony Crespin had caught the full significance of Traherne’s impulsive words. And, “That’s not what Traherne said,” he jibed bitterly. “Why pretend to be blind to his chivalry?”
Lucilla Crespin paled with anger, Traherne reddened with regret. He knew now that Crespin knew, and he knew that he had tortured him, inflicting a needless pain—the last blunder or malpractice any true physician should forgive himself. He tried to laugh it off—knowing how poor and tepid the poultice was.
“Of course I’m glad you’re all right, Major, and I’m not sorry to be in a whole skin myself. But ladies first, you know.”
But Crespin would not be balked. “The perfect knight errant, in fact!” he snarled.
“Decidedly errant!” Traherne laughed. He had himself well in hand now, and he meant that nothing should betray him again. It was enough that he had brought the woman into such acute and odious peril; she should be subjected to no petty annoyances through him. And he blamed himself, not Crespin. And Antony Crespin looked murderous now.
“Won’t youlookat the machine, and see if it’s quite hopeless?” Mrs. Crespin urged, and the look she gave was both an imperious command and an entreaty.
“Yes,” Traherne nodded, “at once.” And he went instantly, went towards the wreck of the aeroplane, and passed out of sight behind the rocks.
It is difficult for the Oriental mind to believe that a man of a race other than theirs is braver than they—and the hillsmen of Central Asia have little cause to believe it. The bleached man was going back to look at the terrible bird-beast; well, they would go too. If the thing wounded or dead, or merely resting even, would not harm him, it could not hurt them. He was only one, they were many. And they had their weapons. So they followed in the wake of his heels, not following too closely, not crowding upon him in the least—but they followed—too proud to show the excitement they felt, but inwardly quivering with curiosity—followed as close as their grim mountain pride would permit, intent upon the marvel of the great air-beast.
But they had no need to hush their words, or to veil their interest. Basil Traherne took no heed of them. He stood beside his ruined toy and pride, and his hands knotted, and so did his throat. His mouth stiffened. His eyes filled. “What does it matter?” he had said to the woman; and there, on the other side of the absurd temple, with his eyes on her, and her eyes on his, it had not mattered at all. But it mattered now. It mattered terribly. He stood and looked down on his comrade and dead, and he was shaken as a sailor who sees his ship go down to the deep, as a soldier who holds his pistol to the horse that has borne him in many a battle, and still nozzles its master’s hand while the blood drips and clots from the panting flank the enemy’s shell has disemboweled. His poor old bus! His dear old bus! For the first time since the day he’d met her among the roses of Kathleen Agnew’s bamboo-shaded garden Lucilla Crespin was nothing to him. He had forgotten her. It is like that with men at such moments. And the women who know men best and value them most, resent it the least. Very wise women do not resent it at all. The sportsman to his sport! Such men make the staunch lovers, when love’s turn comes.
The clustering hillsmen followed Traherne, but Yazok, the temple priest, did not. His penance and oblations done at last, he stood immovable, his deep-set, inimical eyes fixed, cold and narrowed, on Crespin and Lucilla.
With eyes even more venomous Major Crespin watched Traherne out of sight. Then he seated himself with a bulky, determined assertion of a right—a proprietor’s right—beside his wife on the broad flat stone.
She took no notice.
“Well, Lucilla!” he said. There was insult in the tone, and there was pain and appeal. The insult was veiled; the pain and appeal were not. But the woman heard the accusation, and was deaf to the cry.
“Well?” she answered indifferently, and without looking at him.
He fumbled for another cigarette, saying, “That was a narrow squeak!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, still more indifferently. It lashed him and he winced, because he knew that her indifference was for him, and not for the accident or for their plight, and because he thought that she had meant him to know that it was. Crespin was wrong there—she did not care whether he knew, or what he knew, and she cared even less what he felt.
“All’s well that ends well, eh?” he persisted, looking at her ominously through gloomy, blood-shot eyes.
“Of course,” she said listlessly.
“You don’t seem very grateful to Providence.” He would not leave her alone.
“For sending the fog?” his wife returned contemptuously.
“For getting us down safely—all three,” Crespin corrected her, with a significant emphasis on the last two words.
Lucilla Crespin took the gauntlet up then. “It was Dr. Traherne’s nerve that did that,” she told him, looking him full in the face. He had been watching her narrowly, hungrily too, all the time, but she had not given him a glance till now. “If he hadn’t kept his head—”
“We should have crashed. I wish to God we had. One or other of us would probably have broken his neck; and, if Providence had played up, it might have been the right one.”
His wife swung round to him at that, as they sat, “What do you mean?” she demanded.
“It might have been me,” he told her in a harsh, smoldering voice. “Then you’d have thanked God right enough!”
The woman caught the insinuation and held it squarely. But the pain and the prayer she did not hear—or, if she heard, she scorned to heed. There is no other mercilessness so hard and cold as that of one ultra type of good woman. Lucilla Crespin was of that type—now. Her days of forgiveness and bending had passed—at least for him. Ancestry had so predisposed her, and the last bad years had frozen it in. Should her boy live to sin as his father had sinned, probably the flood-gates of understanding and pity would open again, and grief and womanliness sweeten her soul again—but never again for the man beside her. Had her heart stirred to him now, far as he’d gone, she might have saved and remanned him. But her heart was dead to him, as hard and unresponsive as the flint on which they sat.
That they quarreled here—for itwasquarrel bitter and violent, for all the yearning in him, for all her high-bred self-control—that theycouldquarrel here, after such an adventure and mishap as they had just shared, in the thick of such unfathomed peril as they were sharing, showed what the breach between them meant to them both—despair and soul-damnation to the man, love and comradeship quite dead to the woman. It was hopeless—the life-split and abyss, or else the hours they’d just come through, the peril they’d escaped, the less-known, and for that the more unnerving peril that menaced them now as they sat side by side on the stone, must have reunited and reconciled them.
Lucilla Crespin faced her husband squarely, more in unveiled contempt than in courage or in injured pride. “Why,” she complained impatiently, “will you talk like this, Antony? If I hadn’t sent Dr. Traherne away just now, you’d have been saying these things in his hearing.”
“Well, why not?” Crespin retorted hotly. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know all about the ‘state of our relations,’ as they say in the divorce court.”
“If he does, it’s not from me,” the wife said coldly, then added sourly: “No doubt he knows what the whole station knows.”
What the whole station knew! Aye, there was the rub—the blistering rub to her woman’s pride and shame, the galling, smarting rub to the man’s. How often life’s chasms could be bridged, even its cesspools purged and sweetened, if only no others knew. Lucilla said it not unnastily, all the more so for the high-bred quality of civility and self-control with which she spoke. A husband’s faults—not even the unbearable fault of infidelity—never in themselves bear on a woman so crushingly and painfully as does having others know of them. For a husband’s sins and malodorous peccadilloes are the damnable hall-mark of a wife’s failure, branded on her soul and her flesh in a festering sore that never heals, and that all can see. Thousands of women go to the scaffold of the divorce court because what others know compels them. Lucilla Crespin knew what it had cost her that the whole station knew, but she gave no thought at all to what it had cost Antony. Only the highest souls realize and accept that he who sins is far more to be pitied, aye, and loved, if love is what the highest human passion should be, than is the one against whom the sinner has sinned.
“And what does the whole station know?” Crespin demanded. His eyes blazed through their blear, and the hand on his knee trembled. “What does the whole station know? Why, that your deadly coldness drives me to drink!” His voice broke just a little. “I’ve lived for three years in an infernal clammy fog like that we’ve passed through. Who’s to blame if I take a whiskey peg now and then, to keep the chill out? Who?”
“Oh, Antony, why go over it all again?” She half rose, and then, as if it were not worth while to move, sank back as she’d been. “You know very well it was drink—and other things—that came between us; not my coldness, as you call it, that drove you to drink.”
“Oh,” Crespin cried in a rasping voice, “you good women! You patter after the parson, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against us.’ But you don’t know what forgiveness means. ‘Plaster saints’ every one of you, your vaunted Christianity to be shattered at the first hammer-tap of what you don’t like. Blind to every fault of your own, fiendish and merciless to every fault of another, if it happens to nick you on your own petty raw. Damn such ‘good women’ I say. You’ll make a fine show on Judgment Day when you file up one by one to have your sins forgiven even as you have forgiven us poor rotten scum that have trespassed against you. You—you don’t know your own faults, I tell you. You take them for virtues, even when they smell to heaven. You have no faults, you, you scourgers of others, not a fault of your own. Forgiveness! You don’t know what it means. You’re not fit to know!”
Never had Antony Crespin spoken to her so before. The force of his terrible passion reached her, but not its meaning. She heard the storm, and she saw its wreck: knotting muscles, quivering nostrils, wild, agonized eyes. But its pathos never reached her. He cried out to her for bread—new, clean, white bread, and she pitched a stone of contempt into his outstretched hand. Perhaps, if Basil Traherne had not been there behind the rock—perhaps, if she and Traherne had never met—Antony Crespin’s wife might have heard his appeal and responded to it in his hour of utmost need, utmost abasement—for that was what his outburst of rage and accusation was: shame, longing, the old, old cry for one more chance.
But Lucilla was dead now to any need or appeal of his. Well, he had earned it. Alas, for life’s heaviest tragedy—we usually have. We earn what we get—most of us—and, sweet heaven help us! we get it God does not always pay on Saturday—but He pays.
Mrs. Crespin, her eyes strained for what might come from the Raja’s castle, her ears strained to catch Traherne’s returning footsteps, answered his words, but only his words.
“What’s the use of it, Antony?” she said drearily. “Forgive? I have forgiven you. I don’t try to take the children from you, though it might be better for them if I did. But to forgive is one thing, to forget another. When a woman has seen a man behave as you have behaved, do you think it is possible for her to forget it, and to love afresh? There are women in novels, and perhaps in the slums, who have such short memories; but I am not one of them.”
“No, by God, you’re not!” And at the passion in the Englishman’s voice, Yazok the priest, still watching them steadily, moved a little. “So a whole man’s life is to be ruined—”
“Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?” She, too, moved as she spoke, and left an inch or two more space between them on the stone where they both still sat, Crespin too shaken to rise, she too indifferent.
He had forgotten where they were, forgotten their danger even. The woman had not. She thrust her chin in her palms, her elbows on her knees, and searched the path to the castle with anxious eyes. Her nerves were aching now with the strain of delay and uncertainty, and because her nerves ached so, she prodded back at him again with her vicious question, viciously asked, “Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?”
Crespin crouched over towards her like some jungle beast crouching to spring. “Ah!” he snapped. “There we have it! I’ve not only offended your sensibilities; I’m in your way. You love this other man, this model of all the virtues!”
His wife made no pretense of not understanding him. “You have no right to say that,” she said simply.
Crespin disregarded her protest—if it was protest she had deigned to make—as he must have disregarded any interruption now that was less than some yielding, some warming of hers.
“He’s a paragon!” he pounded on. “He’s a wonder! He’s a mighty microbe-killer before the Lord; he’s going to work heaven knows what miracles, only he hasn’t brought them off yet. And you’re cursing the mistake you made in marrying a poor devil of a soldier-man instead of a first-class scientific genius. Come! Make a clean breast of it! You may as well!”
One word from her—just one word of denial—would have healed and helped him, and she knew, at least, that it would have slaked his angry fever. But she did not give that cup of cold water; perhaps because she held truth too sacred—the virtues are an almost supreme asset, but they can be terribly cruel, and they should not be made of cast-iron—perhaps because she had for him too little kindness left.
“Come on, Lu,” he urged. “Tell me. Do.”
“I have nothing to answer,” she returned without troubling to look at him even. “While I continue to live with you, I owe you an account of my actions—but not of my thoughts.”
“Your actions? Oh, I know very well you’re too cold—too damned respectable—to kick over the traces. And then you have the children to think of.”
“Yes,” the wife said sadly. “I have the children to think of. I have the children.”
“Besides,” Crespin went on, torturing himself, which is the success that often crowns our efforts to torture others, “there’s no hurry. If you only have patience for a year or two, I’ll do the right thing for once, and drink myself to death.”
A year or two more of his cups! That would be hard and long to bear. Again and again she had felt that she had reached her tether’s taut-pulled length—and then again and again she had tried once more. Why was Traherne so long? She had asked him to look at the crashed aeroplane, not to build a new one. Or, was it possible, the wreck was less hopeless than he’d thought, and already he was seeing a way to patch and repair? When would some word or move be made from the great sullen castle-place, with its gray turrets and scalloped arches turning to silver and pink now as the Asian sun slipped down the sapphire sky? A year or two more! And the children, still babies of course, were growing so. What might not Ronny notice and understand in another two years? Two years more! She never had measured before in her mind the probable stretch of the bad time still before her—and only for one instant did the thought come to her now—and Antony himself had put it there. His death was the one way out she never had thought of. And she would not think of it now. And even she spoke a little more kindly than she had done for some time—at least when they had been alone—and she turned and looked at him with almost a friendly look in her eyes, as she said:
“You have only to keep yourself a little in hand to live to what they call ‘a good old age.’”
The friendliness in her eyes maddened him anew—it was not her friendship he wanted—but even so he was grateful for it, it was so much better than nothing to go on with—and he pressed his hurt and anger out of sight, and, leaning away from her the better to watch her face, said slowly:
“’Pon my soul, I’ve a mind to try to, though goodness knows, my life is not worth living,” for he had caught the distraction on her face; she was listening, but not most to him. “I was a fool to come on this crazy expedition——”
“Why, it was yourself that jumped at Dr. Traherne’s proposal,” his wife reminded him.
“I thought we’d get to the kiddies a week earlier. They’d be glad to see me, poor little things. They don’t despise their daddy.”
Something of what he felt, something of what he stillwas—in spite of whatever he’ddone—reached Antony Crespin’s wife then. He had always loved his children—there was no doubt of that. It had not served him for strength enough, even as his love of her had not, but he always had loved them, invariably he had been tender to them. And Lucilla remembered it now.
“It shan’t be my fault, Antony,” she told him gently, “if they ever do.” And then she spoilt it, soured the grace she had shown, by adding with a weary sigh, “But you don’t make it easy to keep up appearances.” O curse of woman’s tongue!
Antony Crespin rose to his feet, and stood before her. He saw the natives clustered just over there, screening the projecting wing of the broken aeroplane; he saw Yazok watching, sentineling too, perhaps; he saw the greatpuissantfortified castle, he recalled where they were, he knew their peril—but for all that, for all that or more, he gave not one damn. . . . He stood there before her, alone in the world with his wife, all his imperfections on his back, and put up his plea.
“Oh, Lu, Lu,” he begged, “if you would treat me like a human being—if you would help me, and make life tolerable for me, instead of a thing that won’t bear looking at except through the haze of drink—we might retrieve the early days. God knows I never cared two pins for any woman but you——”
It was the acutest moment of Antony Crespin’s life. And his wife turned him down.
“No,” she said, “the others, I suppose, only helped you, like whiskey, to see the world through a haze. I saw the world through a haze when I married you; but you have dispelled it once for all.” She saw his face blanch, she saw his fingers knot, she saw his shoulders sag; but she went on. “Don’t force me to tell you how impossible it is for me to be your wife again. I am the mother of your children—that gives you a terrible hold over me. Be content with that.”
“Oh, Mrs. Crespin,” Traherne called before they saw him clambering down from the rocks where the ruined bus lay. “I’ve found,” he called as he came in sight, “in the wreck the newspaper you spoke of—you were right about Rukh.”
Major Crespin pulled himself up roundly, he was not of the breed to show his hurt to the other man. “What does it say?” he asked briskly, as Traherne came up to them with the paper in his hand.
Traherne unfolded it, found the place, and read, “‘Abdulabad, Tuesday. Sentence of death has been passed on the three men found guilty of the murder of Mr. Haredale. It appears that these miscreants are natives of Rukh, a small and little-known independent state among the northern spurs of the Himalayas.’”
“Yes,” Lucilla nodded, “that’s what I read.”
“This news isn’t the best possible passport for us in our present situation,” Traherne said gravely, and his face was graver than his words.
“But,” Mrs. Crespin protested reassuringly, “if we’re hundreds of miles from anywhere, it can’t be known here yet.”
“One would think not,” Traherne assented.
“In any case, they wouldn’t dare to molest us,” Major Crespin said nonchalantly across the fresh cigarette he was lighting.
Traherne shot him a sharp look. Did Crespin for one moment believe that? Or was he trying to reassure his wife? The latter no doubt, Traherne concluded.
“All the same,” the physician said—and following Crespin’s lead by saying it lightly, “it might be safest to burn this paragraph, in case there’s anybody here that can read it.” And he suited action to words, lighting at Crespin’s cigarette the strip of paper he tore out carefully, watching it burn until it licked at his fingers, and he had to drop the flaming fragment. But he watched it burn to the last ash, and then stamped upon that. Lucilla watched it too—they all did, and Yazok the priest watched most intently of all.
Mrs. Crespin held out her hand for the rest of the newspaper, and when Traherne gave it she went and put it with her leather coat where it lay on a rock as Traherne had placed it.
“Hullo!” Crespin held up a hand.
Strange ululations, mingled with the throb of tom-toms and the clash of cymbals were faintly heard from the distance—faint, but growing clearer and clearer, from the mountain-path up which the runner had sped at the priest’s command.
“Hullo!” the Major repeated. “What’s this?”
“Sounds like the march of the Great Panjandrum,” Traherne murmured.
It certainly did; and it looked even more than it sounded, when it swept and pranced into sight.
The natives all ran to the point where the path debouched on the open space. All their lives they had seen their Raja come, as had their fathers, and theirs before them, and as often as not keeping just such state, but they never tired of the spectacle, and it never failed to move them. The rustle of satisfaction which is the Oriental equivalent of our “loud cheering,” and, by the way, very much more eloquent, swept through them like a gust of gentle wind in a field of well-ripe corn; then, as their prince came nearer, they prostrated themselves on each side of his way. They were delighted to see him, and exquisitely proud of his gorgeous and noised display, but not a face relaxed, all were inordinately grave, as too were the harlequin mobbery that preceded and followed his litter. Except in China and Burmah, merriment is not the Asian’s idea of enjoyment, and very rarely its expression. Even the babies are grave. But, for all that, the tatter-demalion Rukh populace were enjoying themselves intensely.
It was a wild procession that came down the mountain path. A gigantic negro, flourishing two great naked sabers, and gyrating in a barbaric war-dance, headed it. His sole garment was a tiger’s skin slung over one shoulder and falling apron-wise over one breast down to a little below his waist, his sole ornament a wide head-band of brass in which one great red stone burned. Six music-men followed him, beating their tom-toms and clashing their cymbals till the very air winced. They wore less than the ebon major-domo did, but what their crimson loin cloths lacked in quantity they made up in color, and they were flaked with chips of purple, green and yellow glass, and the musicians’ great, sinewy arms were hung with bells. And most of the runners who padded lightly behind them tinkled too as they walked. The short-distance runners, sent only about the capital itself, to and fro from the palace on the Raja’s errands, wore no bells, but the many more who were sent all over the kingdom, and even beyond it, each wore many tiny but noisy bells; for all Asia knows that wild beasts fear the sound of bells as they fear nothing else, and will flee from the path of the panting runner who tinkles and rings as he goes.
A half score of men, clad to their heels in spotless flowing white, each with a flat hat with wide, tightly rolled brim, each hat of a different costly brocade, came next, and close behind them was carried the Raja’s palanquin. It looked something like a Chinese bride-chair, but its gauze-hung sides were not opaque; it looked something like a Burmese pagoda, for its gilded, pointed roof rose above it on much the same lines as does the great pile at Mulmien. It looked a little like a high-carried boat; and not a little like a grotesque howdah, one corner of its canopy-roof upheld by a glittering, bright blue monkey, one by a writhing green-eyed vermilion snake, one by a twisted white and pink pelican, the other by an elaborate square pillar of sandal-wood, whose carvings simulated bamboos and tulips. It looked something like a super pantomime-chair; and it looked, as it was, a thing of great cost, and of the almost lifelong labor of many skilled and patient craftsmen.
The seated figure inside it showed but indistinctly through the gauzy film of the litter’s curtains; a human figure undoubtedly, and in perfect repose, but instinct with power—a blur of turquoise and rose, of heliotrope and saffron, of silk and satin and tinsel and gems. Immediately behind him came the strangest sight in Rukh—an English valet, if ever one was in Mayfair—an immaculate, demure, correct valet who might have strolled into the picture from St. James Street, and as unmoved, detached and imperturbable there in the Eastern glare and din as if the gyrating negro had been a white-gloved constable on point-duty, the prostrate half-naked crowd a well-dressed, leisurely mêlée of shoppers, or just come from Burlington House, and the musicians before and the guards and rabble behind buses and taxis on Piccadilly and Albemarle Street.
Behind Watkins, for his name was as English as his coat, came the Raja’s bodyguard, or a considerable detachment of it—grim-faced, high-cheeked men of all heights and shapes, dressed in the most fantastic and parti-colored attire that men-at-arms ever wore yet: short sleeveless jackets of velvet, jackets of silk that were all sleeves, pleated petticoats of chintz and of shantung silk, trousers of red and yellow woolens, bare brown, hairy legs, and legs spiraled with puttee-like twistings, some of exquisite embroideries, some of time-tarnished rags. Some wore upturned-toed sandals, some were shod but with studs on their toes or a ring of jade on one ankle or on both. One wore a helmet, one carried an umbrella, several wore caps—caps made of fur, of brocade or of sheer white “chicken-work”—one bare head was perfectly bald, one wore a dancing mop of densely oiled corkscrew curls. Several wore long chains of barbaric beads that clacked as they moved, one wore a collar of glass-jeweled tin; two were turbaned. All were armed with antique match-locks, some of them with barrels six or seven feet long; and one carried a tame, monster-sized rat on his naked shoulder, and three had marigolds stuck behind their ears, which was where two carried cheroots. Six boys, wearing long yellow skirts but nothing above them, brought up the rear. Two carried big, squat, lighted braziers, lest even in this heat their lord be cold; four, lest he be warm, carried huge long-handled fans of peacocks’ feathers and others of glass-sprinkled braided sweetgrass.
The bearers put the litter down deferentially, directly in front of the temple, and knelt down behind it with their faces to the ground.
Lucilla Crespin, for all her anxiety, wanted to laugh at this raree-show. She’d seen it done better at a Drury Lane pantomime!
But Crespin and Traherne had less impulse to laugh, or to smile. They suspected something of the strength that might lurk in the tigerish claws underneath the ridiculous gloves of tinsel.
The man in Bond Street clothes came at once, with a padded, cat-like tread to the side of the resting litter, parted its curtains, and held down obsequiously a crooked broadcloth arm through which, as it rose, the seated figure put a slim brown hand.
The Raja stepped out, released his servitor’s arm, and made just a step towards the three Europeans, scanning the men lightly and in silence—not seeming to see Mrs. Crespin.
He was tall, well-built, about forty, Traherne thought, and the two Englishmen knew from his jewels that, whatever his people were, the Raja of Rukh was fabulously rich. His diamonds were good—the big blue one that winked on his forehead were hard to match anywhere; his emeralds were fine—they lay, a green, snake-like rope, on his richly furred, coral and jewel buttoned satin coat, and cascaded down to the knees of his wide velvet trousers; the aigrette in his cap-like turban was worth a great deal, and it must have plumed the head of a wonderfully virile bird, or else have been marvelously wired, for its every delicate thread stood erect in spite of the jewel that topped and weighted it; and the great turquoise from which it rose was almost a plaque. The princely shoes were a blaze of gems, one blue with sapphires, one red as a pigeon’s blood with rubies finer than Burmah ever quarries. But all this was little to the pearls. Tassels of pearls hung from his ears and his sleeves and their cuffs. Seven great ropes of pearls hung about his neck and over his shoulders—pearls such as Europe does not see over-often, and never in such quantities; one rope fell below his long-skirted coat almost to his trousers’ hem, one shorter strand was of pink pearls perfectly matched; a necklace of “black” pearls lay gray and soft across the breast of his turquoise blue coat, and from it hung one huge pear-shaped pearl so radiantly pink that it almost looked red as it touched the milk-white pearls below it—and every pearl of the many hundreds gleamed with the rainbow-burnish that some pigeons show on their jeweled necks.
The Raja’s face was intelligent, his hands were beautiful, his tiny mustache had a silken look of Paris, his eyes were dark and inscrutable.
Mrs. Crespin thought him ridiculous, outrageously “trapped out” for even an uncivilized man. Antony Crespin, with the British soldier-man’s impenetrable insularity, set him down “a hell of a nigger—what.” But Basil Traherne, skilled in faces, in human frames and in gaits, thought that the Raja of Rukh had character and distinct and polished personality.
The Raja waited, cool, courteous and quite noncommittal. And after an instant Crespin advanced and saluted.
The Eastern inclined his head—did it so slightly that it accorded permission rather than returned or gave salutation. He was dignified, and he was not ridiculous, Traherne thought, for all his satins and silks and glut of hanging jewels, as he stood there in front of his temple where the goats’ heads still dripped sacrificial red, and his people about him.
“Does Your Highness speak English?” Crespin asked rather desperately—with almost a superior edge to his voice.
“Oh, yes, a little,” the Rukh said in English as English as Crespin’s own and in an accent even a little more irreproachable.
Crespin pulled himself together instantly, and said, speaking like a soldier and a man of breeding, “Then I have to apologize for our landing uninvited in your territory.”
“Uninvited; but I assure you not unwelcome.” The inclination of the bejeweled head was just a trifle more this time.
“We are given to understand,” the soldier went on, “that this is the State of Rukh.”
Just a hinted shadow of a smile touched the Raja’s fine lips—a smile in little akin to the twitch or grimace that does the West for smiling, but a half-flicker that sometimes falls for a moment on high-bred Eastern faces, just touching the mouth, but not made by it. “The Kingdom of Rukh,” the Raja said smoothly. “Major—if I rightly read the symbols on your cuff—”
“Major Crespin,” Antony stated, saluting again. “Permit me to introduce my wife.”
The Raja of Rukh saw Mrs. Crespin for the first time—apparently. He salaamed profoundly, his obeisance to her as immediate and deep as his bend of the head to her husband had been slow and perfunctory. “I am delighted, Madam,” he told her, “to welcome you to my secluded dominions. You are the first lady of your nation I have had the honor of receiving.”
“Your Highness is very kind,” Mrs. Crespin said, rising—Traherne was glad that she did that—and taking a half-step towards the glittering figure.
“And this,” Crespin gestured, “is Dr. Basil Traherne, whose aeroplane—or what is left of it—you see.”
The Raja smiled, more widely, more genially this time, and he and Traherne exchanged a direct, level look. “Dr. Traherne? The Doctor Traherne whose name I have so often seen in the newspaper? The Pasteur of Malaria?”
So this unexpected barbarian read theStatesmanand thePioneer! But of course, speaking the English he did, he would.
“The newspapers make too much of my work,” Traherne disallowed. “It is very incomplete.”
“Rome was not built in a day,” the Raja laughed, “or the Taj. But you are an aviator as well.”
“Only as an amateur,” Traherne insisted.
The Raja let that pass. “I presume it is some misadventure—a most fortunate misadventure for me—that has carried you so far into the wilds beyond the Himalayas?”
“Yes,” Traherne assented ruefully. “We got lost in the clouds. Major and Mrs. Crespin were coming up from the plains to see their children at a hill station—”
“Pahari, no doubt?”
“Yes, Pahari—and I was rash enough to suggest that I might save them three days’ traveling, by taking them up in my aeroplane.”
“Madam is a sportswoman, then?” The Raja turned to Lucilla.
“Oh, I have been up many times,” she replied.
“Yes,” Crespin said with a tinge of sarcasm under the words, “many times.”
If Lucilla caught it, she gave no sign, and did not let it serve to swerve her from the subject. “It was no fault of Dr. Traherne’s that we went astray,” she told the Raja. “The weather was impossible.”
A smile of a new significance came in the narrow black eyes, but was not allowed to touch his lips. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you have made a sensation here, I can assure you. My people have never seen an aeroplane. They are not sure, simple souls”—he was laughing at them but there was affection in it, Traherne thought—“whether you are gods or demons. But the fact of your having descended in the precincts of a temple of our local goddess”—he motioned his hand towards the idol—“allow me to introduce you to her—is considered highly significant.”
Traherne noted that he introduced them to the Green Goddess, and not her to them, and he wondered if this man with his priceless gew-gaws, his cosmopolitan breeding and information, his countless centuries of Eastern-ancestry, were as apart from the beliefs and idolatrous superstitions of his uncouth people as his words and light tone implied. Well, he would to heaven they could cut all this useless talk, and get down to the real issue now. Their fate still hung in the balance—his and Crespin’s—andLucilla’s. It was not a comfortable feeling. It was very far from a comfortable situation. And he knew how scrupulous the politeness of an Oriental foe-to-the-death could be. But he knew too that they must bide this Raja man’s time and tune.
Antony Crespin knew it too, and Lucilla had the wit to take her cue from them. But Crespin glanced at the lowering sun, and ventured, “I hope, sir, that we shall find no difficulty in obtaining transport back to civ—to India.”
The Raja of Rukh smiled openly then, and his smile was frank and very sweet. “To civilization, you were going to say? Why hesitate, my dear sir? We know very well that we are barbarians. We are quite reconciled to the fact. We have had some five thousand years to accustom ourselves to it. This sword—” he laid a hand lightly on his carved and jeweled scimitar—“is a barbarous weapon compared with your revolver; but it was worn by my ancestors when yours were daubing themselves blue, and picking up a precarious livelihood in the woods.” He said it in the friendliest way, and broke off abruptly, and turned to Mrs. Crespin, “But Madam is standing all this time!” he exclaimed in dismay. “Watkins, what are you thinking of? Some cushions!”
Watkins made no reply, and his well-trained face did not change, but he took several cushions from his master’s litter, and came sleekly forward, and piled them into a seat for her.
“Another litter for Madam, and mountain chairs for the gentlemen, will be here in a few minutes. Then I hope you will accept the hospitality of my poor house.”
If the litter as well as the chairs already had been ordered, Watkins must have caught some other ciphered command in his master’s voice, for the valet turned softly and said something to one of the people, and another runner sped quickly away.
“We are giving a great deal of trouble, Your Highness,” Lucilla objected.
“A great deal of pleasure, Madam,” the Raja corrected her.
“But I hope, sir,” Crespin ventured again, “there will be no difficulty about transport back to—India.” He was feeling deucedly uneasy, was the English Major, but he managed to keep it out of his voice.
Basil Traherne was feeling much uneasier, but he said nothing, gave no sign—and waited.
“Time enough to talk of that, Major,” the Raja insisted gayly, “when you have rested and recuperated after your adventure. You will do me the honor of dining with me this evening? I trust you will not find us altogether uncivilized.” It was courtly invitation, social entreaty even, but too it was princely command. The Englishmen recognized it, and obeyed it with a bow. Their anxiety raged, but their knees bent.
The woman took it up lightly. “Your Highness,” she said to him, “will have to excuse the barbarism of our attire. We have nothing to wear but what we stand up in.” And she made a delicate mouth at her tumbled tweed skirt and her warm, stout boots.
“Oh, I think we can put that all right,” the Raja told her. “Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” Watkins came to heel.
“You are in the confidence of our Mistress of the Robes. How does our wardrobe stand?”
“A fresh consignment of Paris models came in only last week, Your ’Ighness.”
“Good! Then I hope, Madam, that you may find among them some rag that you will deign to wear.”
“Paris models, Your Highness!” she exclaimed, speaking as lightly as he had. “And you talk of being uncivilized!”
“We do what we can, Madam,” he returned with a bow. “I sometimes have the pleasure of entertaining European ladies”—Traherne turned aside as he bit at his lip, Crespin checked a frown—“though not, hitherto, Englishwomen—in my solitudes; and I like to mitigate the terrors of exile for them. Then as for civilization, you know, I have always at my elbow one of its most finished products. Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” the finished product said in a voice that would have been sulky, had it dared, and he came forward with again a hint of slinking in his cat-like tread. Evidently the valet disliked this limelight.
“You will recognize in Watkins, gentlemen,” the Raja explained, “another representative of the Ruling Race.” Watkins touched his hat miserably to Crespin and Traherne, but he did not look at them. His eyes studied his shoes. “I assure you he rules me with an iron hand—not always in a velvet glove. Eh, Watkins?”
“Your ’Ighness will ’ave your joke,” the valet said lamely.
But the master was merciless. “He is my Prime Minister and all my cabinet—but more particularly my Lord Chamberlain. No one can touch him at mixing a cocktail or making a salad. My entire household trembles at his nod; even mychefquails before him. Nothing comes amiss to him; for he is, like myself, a man without prejudices. You may be surprised at my praising him to his face in this fashion; you may see some danger of—what shall I say?—swelled head. But I know my Watkins; there is not the slightest risk of his outgrowing that modest bowler. He knows his value to me, and he knows that he would never be equally appreciated elsewhere. I have guarantees for his fidelity—eh, Watkins?”
“I know when I’m well off, if that’s what Your ’Ighness means,” the man said, still without looking up.
“I mean a little more than that,” the Raja said quietly; “but no matter. I have sometimes thought of instituting a peerage, in order that I might raise Watkins to it. But I mustn’t let my admiration for British institutions carry me too far. . . . Those scoundrels of bearers are taking a long time, Watkins.”
“The lady’s litter ’ad to ’ave fresh curtains, Your ’Ighness,” the servant explained. “They won’t be a minute now.” And desperately Watkins hoped it. He was the most impatient and not the least anxious there now.