Swollen and quivered with anger as they were, they both were startled at her beauty. Always rather more than good-looking, Lucilla Crespin had never looked like this before.
“Ah,” Traherne said, pulling himself together with an almost heroic effort, “here is Mrs. Crespin!”
The ayah—if that was her household rank—who had brought Lucilla into the room went quietly out, closing the door. And the three captives—the men at least knew it for that—stood alone in the vast, clamorous room.
Whatever fear was curdling the bloods of the men, the Englishwoman who shared their danger, and stood in a graver one of her own, seemed unperturbed and carefree. Certainly she was radiant, and superbly lovely as she stood there, the breathing, beautiful jewel to which the palace room, rich as it was, seemed but a humble setting, and the ermined mountain peaks and blue velvet sky beyond the wide loggia but background—background and subsidiary, though she faced it.
Crespin’s eyes filled, and Basil Traherne caught his breath painfully. They had seen her in the saddle, they knew how well she rode, and how it became her. They had seen her in the soft white gowns that such women wear in India. They had seen her dainty and exquisitely dressed—a wild-rose pink flush on her cheeks—at dozens of dances, in garden-party finery, in Government House splendor, in neat, simple linens cuddling her babies, in bib and apron mixing English cakes and scones for her Punjabi tea-table, they had seen her in tea-gowns and tweeds, seen her with her delicate patrician English face softened by the furs beneath it, and had seen her with the gems on throat and breast resparkling in her eyes—and the throat that each thought her utmost loveliness (and that women who disliked her called her one beauty) gleam like snow under the jewels that circled it, and needing them not, and Antony Crespin had seen her in the soft déshabillé that enhanced her most. But neither ever had seen her look as she looked now. Some lure of the East, some soul of the East, had transformed the girl of a Surrey garden into an Eastern queen—though perhaps she never before had looked, or felt, so intensely English.
If either husband or friend saw or sensed this dual quality gleaming in her as she stood there, as its colors gleam through an opal, neither was conscious that he did so. But her beauty hit and quivered them. The wild-rose tints were gone from her face; her pallor was radiant. Her hair, always beautiful—and Crespin knew how soft and long, and how uncontrived its rippling—was more elaborately dressed than was her custom, some experter hands than hers had tired it—for Mrs. Crespin, like many Englishwomen, was defter at handling bridle and reins and rackets than she was at toilet devisings and doings. Her dark filmy gown could not have been simpler or costlier; it was just cut from her throat, and its long sleeves slashed to hint more than they showed of her arms. Except for her wedding-ring and the engagement diamond beside it, her only ornament was a gold locket that she always wore fastened about her throat by a slender thread of chain. And she wore neither the rings nor the locket and chain for ornament. Wives of such wedlock as hers had proved feel more stigma than adornment in its symbols; and the locket was infinitely more than any gewgaw—it held her babies’ faces.
She appeared to have thrown off or have lost her moiety of the fear they three had shared. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips curved in a smile. Whatever else she had felt, Mrs. Crespin was enjoying sincerely her adventure now.
She stood and smiled at them. And the eyes and hearts of two men leapt to her—and she seemed to them both the core of all desire, and each—the two of such different instincts and tastes—thought her perfect, a human flower needing no added perfume, no other beauty of texture, tint or outline. A man loving a woman with all the tenderness and strength of his best manhood may see and know her faults and flaws, and love her for them none the less. But the man who desires sees no imperfections, sight and mind are as fevered and irresponsible as his aching blood is. The husband who had lost her, and the man who loved her as reverently as passionately, and, so, without hope or thought, and even without wish—except as our flesh and nerves wish in spite of us—that he ever might seek or claim or hold her—both desired her as she stood there in the sumptuous simplicity of the soft thing she wore, and beautiful and desirable as she never had seemed before. Traherne forgot where they were—for a moment—forgot the danger that menaced them; but he did not forget his best self or hers, and he did not forget a boy he had fagged for at Harrow, or the sore young tragedy that had been that schoolmate’s to bear, and his own to witness. And no treacherous thing lurked in his heart, no dishonorable thing showed in his eyes. Crespin too forgot where they were and what their plight, but he forgot nothing else—he remembered his wooing of her, his possession of her, and how he had lost her.
And Lucilla Crespin looked from one to the other, and smiled. She did not see how white their faces were; she had not caught their quarreling as she came in, for the sinking sun shone hard in her eyes, and their backs were to it.
“Ah, here is Mrs. Crespin!” Traherne said with an effort.
She took a few steps towards them, holding out her draperies a little, as gleefully as a child in new festival robes. “Behold the Paris model!” she bade them.
“My eye, Lu, what a ripping frock!” was Antony’s comment.
“Talk of magic, Major!” Traherne laughed, turning and speaking as if never a shadow of quarreling had hung over them. “There’s something in what our friend says.”
“What’s that? What about magic?” Mrs. Crespin demanded, accepting the chair that Crespin moved towards her.
“We’ll tell you afterwards,” her husband promised. “Let’s have your adventures first.” He spoke lightly, but he was anxious.
“No adventures precisely—only a little excursion into the Arabian Nights,” she laughed.
“Do tell us!” Traherne urged.
“Well,” she began, a little nervous now, Traherne thought, but evidently not without enjoyment of the experience, “my guide—the woman you saw—led me along corridor after corridor, and upstairs and downstairs, till we came to a heavy bronze door where two villainous looking blacks, with crooked swords, were on guard. I didn’t like the looks of them a bit; but I was in for it, and had to go on. They drew their swords and flourished a sort of salute, grinning with all their teeth. Then the ayah clapped her hands twice, some one inspected us through a grating in the door, and the ayah said a word or two—”
“No doubt, ‘Open Sesame!’” Traherne suggested.
Mrs. Crespin nodded. “The door was opened by a hideous, hump-backed old woman, just like the wicked fairy in a pantomime. She didn’t actually bite me, but she looked as if she’d like to—and we passed on. More corridors, with curtained doorways, where I had a feeling that furtive eyes were watching me—though I can’t positively say I saw them. But I’m sure I heard whisperings and titterings—”
“Good Lord!” Crespin broke in. “If I’d thought they were going to treat you like that, I’d have—”
“Oh,” his wife retorted, “there was nothing you could have done; and, you see, no harm came of it. At last the woman led me into a large sort of wardrobe room, lighted from above, and almost entirely lined with glazed presses full of frocks. Then she slid back a panel, and there was a marble-lined bathroom!—a deep pool, with a trickle of water flowing into it from a dolphin’s head of gold—just enough to make the surface ripple and dance. And all around were the latest Bond Street luxuries—shampooing bowls and brushes, bottles of essences, towels on hot rails and all the rest of it. The only thing that was disagreeable was a sickly odor from some burning pastilles—oh, and a coal-black bath-woman.”
“It suggests a Royal Academy picture,” Traherne observed. “‘The Odalisque’s Pool.’”
“Or a soap advertisement,” Crespin objected.
“Same thing,” Traherne said lazily.
“Well, I wasn’t sorry to play the odalisque for once,” Lucilla assured them, “and when I had finished, lo and behold! the ayah had laid out for me half-a-dozen gorgeous and distinctly risky dinner-gowns.” Traherne gnawed suddenly at his lip, Crespin frowned angrily, but neither spoke or moved, and Lucilla, not catching their common thought, went on, “I had to explain to her in gestures that I couldn’t live up to any of them, and would rather put on my old traveling dress. She seemed quite frightened at the idea—”
“She’d probably have got the sack—perhaps literally—if she’d let you do that,” Crespin said slowly, and a hard, fierce look came into the other man’s eyes.
But Lucilla still seemed unconscious of their thought, and continued quite cheerfully—Rukh a little in her blood now, Traherne thought—“Anyway, she at last produced this comparatively inoffensive frock. She did my hair—fancy her being able to do it like this!—and wanted to finish me off with all sorts of necklaces and bangles, but I stuck to my old locket with the babies’ heads.”
“Well,” her husband said discontentedly, “all’s well that ends well, I suppose. But if I’d foreseen all this ‘Secrets of the Zenana’ business, I’m dashed if I wouldn’t—”
Lucilla cut him short. “What were you saying about magic when I came in?”
“Only that this man, Watkins—he’s the husband of your ayah, by the way—says queer things go on here, and pretends to believe in magic.”
“Do you know, Antony”—Mrs. Crespin turned to her husband—“when the Raja was speaking about him—this man Watkins—down there, it seemed to me that his face was somehow familiar to me.”
Crespin sat bolt upright, and his tired face lit with interest. “There, Doctor!” he exclaimed. “What did I say? I knew I’d seen him before, but I’m damned if I can place him.”
“I wish I could get a good look at him,” Lucilla said thoughtfully. And as she spoke Watkins passed through the room again, carrying four blossoms which he took to the dinner table and laid on the folded serviettes; and Traherne saw him.
“That’s easy,” he told her. “There he is. Shall I call him in?”
Mrs. Crespin nodded eagerly. “Do! Say I want him to thank his wife from me.”
“Watkins!” Traherne called him.
“Sir?” Watkins responded instantly, but without moving from the table.
“Mrs. Crespin would like to speak to you.” And at that the man came at once, and stood waiting, inwardly curious, outwardly respectful.
“I hear, Watkins,” Mrs. Crespin told him, looking him well in the face—and wishing the light were not at his back, “that the ayah that so kindly attended to me is your wife.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Watkins said staunchly enough. Crespin wondered lazily if the cockney was fond—or even proud—of his native wife. Such things always interested Antony Crespin rather.
“She gave me most efficient assistance,” Mrs. Crespin said, speaking very deliberately, that she might study his face the longer, “and as she seems to know no English, I couldn’t thank her. Will you be good enough to tell her how much I appreciated all she did for me?”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” the valet said as if he meant it. “She’ll be proud to hear it.” And the man looked genuinely pleased. He was genuinely pleased; for the shifty little cockney was fond of his big dark wife, and proud of her too, as small men often are of wives that o’ertop them. And it was, as it chanced, the one good human spot in Samuel Watkins’ thin, brutal heart. “Is that all, ma’am?” he asked after a pause—for she still was looking at him as if she might have more to say.
But she could think of nothing else, and she believed that she had gained her point, so she nodded pleasantly, and dismissed him with a pleasant, “That’s all, thank you, Watkins.”
The man bowed, and went back to the loggia, but he passed now to the outer side of the dinner table, where, seeming to be studying it still, he stood watching them warily. They involuntarily drew closer together, but Traherne, seeming to be watching idly the kindling mountains and sky, was watching Watkins as narrowly as Watkins watched them.
“You’ve a good memory for faces, Lu,” the Major said to his wife. “Do you spot him?”
“Don’t let him see we’re talking about him,” she cautioned. “I believe I do know him, but I’m not quite sure. Do you remember,” she said slowly, “the first year we were in India, there was a man in the Dorsets that used often to be on guard outside the mess-room?”
Antony Crespin sprang to his feet. “By God,” he cried, “you’ve hit it!”
They all three were excited—even Traherne, though he scarcely showed it—and they drew closer together eagerly. What importance Mrs. Crespin’s discovery, if she was right, could be to them, or why it excited them, not one of them could have said; but in such threatening of shipwreck as theirs agitated human minds see in every straw a possible life-boat, and catch at it anxiously. They clustered together excitedly, Lucilla Crespin still in her seat, the two men standing close before her. Traherne’s face alert, the woman’s eyes sparkling, and Antony Crespin raised his voice exultantly. “By God, you’ve hit it, Lu!” he repeated.
“Take care!” Traherne cautioned him quickly, not looking at Major Crespin, but at the man out on the loggia. “He’s watching.”
Dr. Traherne was right; Watkins was watching stealthily, and too was straining his utmost to listen.
“You remember,” Mrs. Crespin almost whispered, “he deserted, Antony, and was suspected of having murdered a woman in the bazaar.”
“I believe it’s the very man,” Crespin muttered eagerly.
“It’s certainly very like him,” his wife insisted.
“And he swears he’s never been in India!” Crespin said with a nasty laugh.
“Under the circumstances,” Dr. Traherne said dryly, “he naturally would. I should.”
“At all events he’s not a man to be trusted,” Mrs. Crespin added regretfully.
“Trusted!” Crespin retorted impatiently, “who thought of trusting him? Who’d be such a fool? He with that damned Uriah Heep face of his, and a British man, if of the true cockney brand, an Englishman acting as a body servant to a native! Who’dthinkof trusting him!”
For all that same they all were disappointed, and they all knew it. Any port in a storm! And, if misery has to put up with strange bed-fellows, it very often seeks them. The valet was English, their countryman, and for that the thought of each of them had fastened upon him as a possible aid or means of escape. And Lucilla Crespin was honest enough to say so.
“I had for one,” she said frankly. “I liked his wife. He comes from home! It must mean something to him that we are his country-people. But now, of course—if I’m right, and I think I am—and especially if he thinks we’ve recognized him—he’d know you, Antony, of course.”
“Don’t you believe it, Lu, country and all that means nothing to such fellows,” Major Crespin interrupted. And Traherne shook his head.
“No, Mrs. Crespin, he won’t help us, whether he’s the fellow you think he is or not. I know his breed. I know the shape of his head. We must find another way out—that is, if we need one—which I hope we shan’t.”
“But you think we shall?”
“Yes,” he answered her gravely. “I think we shall.”
The Raja of Rukh was dressing for dinner. There was no tire-man with him, and he moved about his dressing-room as if very much in the habit of waiting upon himself—perhaps an old varsity habit that clung to him still here in his palace-fortress on his native hills. For he had kept no valet at Cambridge. A turban newly wound he wore on his head, but his low-cut pumps, his well-creased trousers, were quite European, and so were the silk braces that held them up to the waist line of his immaculate shirt. His waistcoat and dinner jacket still lay on a chair, but his studs were in, his collar was on, and his white tie was beautifully done—if he had tied it himself, his evening tie did him great credit. And he had. The Raja of Rukh was deft-fingered—he could dress himself from skin to button-hole rose without worry or accident; and he usually did—no fumbling, no searching for studs, no swear words, no beading of sweat, no butter fingers, neither a crease nor a care. Watkins looked the perfect valet, but Rukh himself had trained him for the part, and there was less of valet than of varlet in Watkins’ office, and very much more of deeper doing.
The Raja stood a long time at the low wide window, and looked out over Rukh. It was his, all that he saw was his. Not a wee white hill-mouse, not a jeweled-and-lacquered beetle, not a leaf, not a tiniest grain but was his. The people were his—the patient, plodding, excitable people. The cattle were his, sure-footed, mountain things that carried the water his people drew, that carried the wood his people hewed. The caravans that came and went on the long, periled mountain roads, now in snow and ice, now in pelting heat and thick flowered and perfumed underbush, a camel among them sometimes, but almost entirely tiny, sturdy, sagacious ponies, and sweat-dripping human beasts of burden, bringing him and his miniature but costly court every conceivable thing from marts distant and near—glass from Venice, enamels from Japan, lacquers from China, leathers from Russia, wines from France and Portugal, fabrics from everywhere, necessities and luxuries, tinned asparagus and turtle soup, linens from Belfast, flesh-pots for him, cotton cloths and grains for his people—all were his. And he loved it as a woman loves her young—a ruthless, iron-willed man, his heart was mother-soft to his peasant people. The little huts hanging there on the mountain edges, with the smoke from the dung fires curling out—telling that the evening meal of thin, flat cakes was cooking—were dearer to him than was this great, palace home of his own. He was very rich. The place looked poor enough (all but his own fortress coign) and the people were, but the hard, rocky place belched up daily wealth for his hidden coffers. Almost numberless coins of silver and of gold, sodden and grimed with the dust of ages, were buried beneath the palace, in a rock-cut fastness to which only he and one of his henchmen knew the way, or held the key, and the bale-and-sack-bent hill-men and the sure-footed creatures who toiled back and forth from Rukh to Bokhara and Kabul by night as by day, taking his products, bringing the price of them, never ceased. His spending was prodigal, but his income alone more than sufficed for it. And his buried treasure grew.
A woman came unceremoniously in, and he turned to her instantly, and stood and waited her pleasure. The woman was old, poorly though comfortably clad. There were many rings on her bare feet’s toes, but the rings were of little value, circlets of brass and of silver coarsely jeweled with uncut gems of the commoner pebble-like sorts, none of them “precious,” and all of them but fragments—and she wore no other ornament. Her wrinkled skin was exactly the color of the saffron stuff that formed her only visible garment, and the wrinkled saffron skin was as coarse as the saffron woolen stuff. Her white hair was uncovered, her strong eyebrows streaked her yellow brow like twin patches of persistent snow on some rough brown ledge of mountain rock; palpably a peasant woman, hill-born, hill-bred, untutored—though her hands, mottled and soft with age, looked to have done no work—and the Raja of Rukh smiled at her tenderly, and waited her pleasure, as meekly as a timid child who feared and anticipated punishment or, at the best, bitter scolding from an exigeant and petulant mother. And it was just that that he did expect and very much dreaded. She usually came here to berate him, and she never failed to do it, if she found him in European garments, or had heard that European guests were being harbored and entertained.
The Raja ruled Rukh—all there obeyed him abjectly—all but Ak-kok, the old peasant woman. She obeyed no one, and feared no one or thing, not even the Green Goddess, not the sacred serpents, not the man-eating beasts that prowled from the mountains and wilds to maul and devour. She obeyed no one, she feared nothing, and though she worshiped him fiercely, she bullied the Raja of Rukh in season and out. And he loved her and feared her, salaamed to her too, and called her “Mother,” caressed her when she would brook it—for she had suckled him, and the babe she had left to other care when she had come to the palace to do it had sickened and died. She had not seemed to care then, forbidding her heart to quicken or falter a single beat, forbidding her heart to feel or to know, lest it curdle her milk. And the babe had been her only one, and its father was newly dead. But when the baby prince was weaned, she had let her pent-up, drugged grief have its way. She had covered her face in her robe, and gone from the palace, wailing and beating her breasts—still sore from a festered teething-grip, sorer still for the babe lips that had been denied their milk—had gone to the place on the hillside where the burning-place stood, and had joined the mourners squatted about a reeking pile—a child’s as it chanced—and when the little skull had cracked open with that sound like which there is no other, and the mourners had sobbed and cried, Ak-kok had laughed, rent the air with her laughing, had torn her garments and strewn the pile with them, had danced, shrieking with laughter, had torn at her face and breasts till her blood ran, and then—for none dared stay her—had turned and tottered away, still lashing the day with her laughing. It was winter—and two nights and a day had passed before they found her, out in a desolate, desert place up on the mountains, nearly naked, raving and babbling.
We punish our insane; Orientals succor and tend them.
Tenderly they carried mad Ak-kok back to the palace, gently they laid her down, never they left her, never they chided or thwarted or vexed her. And—a year and more after—her wits (as we perhaps witlessly call our human sense of human ills) came back. And such work as she chose to do she did, such things as she bade were done. She chose to sew with the girls who embroidered and beaded. Never she spoke to a child, rarely she looked at one, except the prince whom she had suckled. Little by little her love crept back to him, and then her needles and silks and baskets of sorted beads, of tinsel threads, trays of seed-pearls and of beetles’ gold-and-emerald backs had filled less and less of her time, the royal boy more and more. And when he had wived she had disliked all his brides, but had established herself nurse-in-chief to the babies they had borne.
They were twenty-five now, the offspring of the Raja, the nurslings of Ak-kok. Not one had died. La-swak, a boy of two now, was the father’s favorite, and old Ak-kok loved La-swak more than she had loved aught else or all else before, even tenfold, more than the Raja and father did.
The Raja waited.
Ak-kok spoke his name hoarsely—no prefix, no gesture of respect, not even one of berating—just his name flung passionately out at him in the old woman’s peasant guttural.
The Raja salaamed, and waited her tirade.
But the woman took no heed of the long broadcloth trousers he wore, no heed of the cerise silk elastic that braced them, none of coat and vest on the chair. She had not seen them. And she spoke no word of rebuke. It was fear that convulsed her, not anger. A bead of blood came from her nostril, and trickled down on to her withered lip. She did not feel it.
Twice she tried to speak again, before she did.
“La-swak!” she moaned.
The Raja sprang to her, caught at her shoulder. He could not speak, but she mastered herself, and answered him.
“The cramp again. His limbs are stiff and cold. We cannot soothe him. He cries for you.” She gathered the man’s hand in hers, and led him from the room.
Hand in hand, the Raja, coatless and waistcoatless, the one gem in his turban flashing brilliantly in the waning afternoon light of the long, twisting corridors, his cerise braces streaking his white-shirted back, as if a broad thong had lashed it, her saffron cloth now russet-dark, now red-gold as they passed through the shadows great porphyry pillars threw, or into the light from open windows and arches. She led him, and he clung to her hand, as he had at twilight when he had done his first walking with her clasp for his stay and confidence.
It was a long, long way this that they took through the vast palace of Rukh; to him it seemed endless. At last she paused by a closed carven door. Two scimitared men on guard, drew aside and made obeisance.
Rukh caught his breath, smothering an oath. “Mother,” he sobbed, “will he die?”
Ak-kok lifted her thin old arms in caress and comfort to his face, and he caught her wrists and held them there.
“Now I have brought you, he will drink perhaps the cup I have made. If he drinks, the cramp may pass, and all may be well.”
The Raja motioned towards the heavy door, Ak-kok signaled one of the guards, the man ran and opened it, Rukh put up a trembling hand and lifted the curtain of broad-striped silk inside the door, and he and Ak-kok entered the room.
On a low native bed, ropes threaded across sides and ends of chased and beaten silver, a child lay moaning on a snow-leopard pelt. Charms—a tiger’s eye, a cheeta’s claw, a little jade god—hung in his flat embroidered cap of green silk, charms strung on a red silk cord hung about his neck, charms dangled over his acorn-shaped little belly, rich bangles clinked on his arms as he tossed them in pain, and jeweled anklets circled above each dimpled foot—and he wore nothing else. Toys strewed the silk floor-carpets, half a dozen serving women, wild-eyed and useless, cluttered the room—all but one who was kneeling down watching a saucepan that hummed on a low brazier. A girl richly robed, heavily jeweled, exquisitely beautiful, crouched on the floor weeping piteously but without a sound. She lurched a little towards Rukh as he passed her, not rising, just moving a little to lay her face on his shoe. He paid her no attention, but stumbled down by their child: La-swak, whom he loved more than he loved Rukh.
“The cramp is passing a little, my lord, I think,” the girl whispered. Still he gave her neither word nor glance. And she hid her face in her hands. She had seen his European clothes, if old Ak-kok had not, and she knew that when her husband and lord wore European clothes there were European women—or, a thousand times worse—a European woman; and a cramp worse than over-fed, sugar-plum-stuffed La-swak ever had felt, or ever would, writhed and twisted his mother.
The Ranee of Rukh, and her sister wives, of whom this was the youngest, were fairly good friends. They ate their hearts out, and beat their ayahs when a white woman’s shadow fell on the palace floors. And Ak-kok went farther. She took the dance-girls for granted, saw to it often that they were fairly fed, and softly clad, but she, watching her chance, had beaten a French danseuse once till the dancer never would dance again.
Rukh flung himself down beside the child’s low bed; La-swak held out his arms, and smiled, and the half-clad Raja caught him and held him close—all that he loved most in the world, and loved most purely, cuddled and cuddling tenderly there, with little brown, jeweled-cap-crowned head pressed contentedly against the stiff-starched shirt and the cerise silk braces. La-swak put up a dark dimpled hand and snatched at the brilliant braces. His moaning had ceased. Ak-kok had taken the silver pannikin from the brazier, and stood at the open window pouring the liquid it held back and forth from pannikin and cup till it was cooled to satisfy her. She brought it now, and Rukh took the cup and held it to the child’s lips. La-swak shuddered a little, but he drank it all, while the father fondled and encouraged him—then gave back the cup.
“He is not very ill?” the Raja stated rather than asked.
“Not now,” old Ak-kok answered. “He will do now. He soon will sleep—better he be left alone now.”
One by one the others went out. The young mother went first, and the women followed her one by one. The girl mother rose reluctantly, and hesitated a moment, hoping her husband might give her a word or a glance; but he did not, and she went slowly out, hanging her head, veiling beneath their blue-veined lids the rage and pain in her great, black eyes. Rukh felt nothing but kindness for the girl: she had borne him La-swak, she had bored and had disappointed him less than any other of his women ever had, and he and her father were close-sworn friends—they had throttled a half-grown wild beast together, and speared a great snake, they had shared war and blood-feuds, and frolic and schemes; but Rukh was engrossed with his boy. He did not even see Ko-sak go, scarcely knew she’d been there.
The child dozed. Ak-kok tugged at Rukh’s arm, and he rose and too went quietly out, through the long, twisted corridors with the great columns and arches back to his own room.
Just before he left the harem quarters he came upon a girl, almost a child, sitting idly and alone, on the wide seat of a window’s embrasure, the gay strip of embroidered stuff she’d been working lying neglected where it had fallen from her listless fingers on to the mosaicked floor at her feet She caught his footfall, turned her head carelessly, flushed passionately, rose quickly, and salaamed deeply. Rukh was in no mood for such companionship now, and well could have spared the encounter—but he paused, and spoke to her kindly, laying his hands on her shoulders; for she was big with child. A wild rose stained the pale amber of her delicate face, the terror faded out of her dark childish eyes; and Rukh knew she would have pressed her face to him, and clung, staying him so, had she dared.
“Nay, Zu-kunl,” he told her soothingly, “it is not too much, it lasts not long, your midwife is skilful, the auguries are kind, and the joy that it brings is a woman’s sweetest and proudest.”
“My lord!” she whispered. “If the child should be but a girl?”
He shrugged indulgently. “Some must,” he said, “and if it is as fair, and as obedient as you, I will forgive it and thee.”
The girl caught his hand and bent her brow to it. Her eyes pleaded with him to stay with her a little, and he saw it. He touched her sheened hair fondly, as one pats a dog, nodded gayly, and went on his way.
The girl’s face quivered, and tears gathered in her big, frightened eyes. But she only salaamed again—it hurt—and whispered, “My lord!” meekly and softly. Should she ever see him again? He came to her but seldom, the lord she adored, the only man, save father and brothers, she had seen since her childhood, the only man she ever would see again though she lived to be as old as Ak-kok. Should she ever see him again? She had not seen him often. Would he come once more? Already she knew that her pain was on her. She waited, battling it where she stood, until the great outer door was closed and barred behind him, and then groped her way to the darkened inner room where the midwife waited, and all lay ready for her agony.
And the Raja of Rukh whistled happily as he went back to finish his dressing, happy because La-swak was well again.
And that was why the three English people waited so long alone in the room below, and the chef in the palace kitchen fumed, and would have given notice, or, at least, sworn, had he dared.
Rukh had thought of the English doctor below as he knelt by his child, and, had La-swak’s illness not gone as swiftly as it had come, would have summoned Traherne, and entreated his help. If he had, there’d have been a fine Oriental to-do in one harem room, and old Ak-kok would have achieved something little short of murder, or have gone raving mad again in attempting it. And this story need not have been told—for it would have ended there with handshakings and gifts, and safe escort homeward: for vicious, brutal, implacable, the Raja of Rukh would not have proved ungrateful: it was not in his Asian mountain blood.
The Raja finished his dressing leisurely, and went to his guests. But the great ruby no longer blazed in his turban. La-swak had demanded it, when he’d drunk, and Rukh had unfastened it, and it was close shut now in the sleeping baby’s little brown hand, and the osprey of diamond specks was spread out fan-like, sparkling brilliantly on La-swak’s fat little brown paunch.
But the Raja wore one jewel—he might have lost that too had he worn it to the sweetmeat-sick-room—the ribbon and star of a Russian order which only the anointed hand of the Little White Father could give, and did not give often. Alas for it now!
Much as they feared him, they were glad to see him: the uncertainty was growing increasingly intolerable, and, frankly, they all three were hungry.
He bowed to the men, and went to Mrs. Crespin. “Pray forgive me, Madam,” he said, “for being the last to appear. The fact is, I had to hold a sort of Cabinet Council—or shall I say a conclave of prelates?—with questions arising out of your most welcome arrival.”
It was perfectly true. There had been grave talk in the Council Chamber of Rukh, before the Raja had left it to lay off his native dress, and “change for dinner.”
Before Mrs. Crespin could answer, the Major said eagerly, “May we hope, Raja, that you were laying a dawk for our return?”
Rukh laughed pleasantly. “Pray, pray, Major, let us postpone that question for the moment. First let us fortify ourselves; after dinner we will talk seriously. If you are in too great a hurry to desert me, must I not conclude, Madam, that you are dissatisfied with your reception?”
“How could we possibly be so ungrateful, Your Highness,” she said. “Your hospitality overwhelms us.”
Rukh swept his eyes over her slowly, as she stood before him—she had risen at his entrance—and then he said deferentially, “I trust my Mistress of the Robes furnished you with all you required?”
The Englishmen frowned a little at his question—they did not dare go beyond that—but Lucilla smiled gravely, and told him brightly, “With all and more than all. She offered me quite a bewildering array of gorgeous apparel.”
“Oh, I am glad.” There was just a caressing note in the Raja’s voice, more than a hint of velvet, as there so often is in the high-bred Asiatic voice when it speaks a foreign tongue. And again the long, close-lidded Oriental eyes swept her slowly with a something of appraisement. Traherne saw it, and chafed, but what could he do?—“I had hoped that perhaps your choice might have fallen on something more—” his eyes indicated “décolleté” even more than the graceful gesture of his slender olive hand. It was delicately done, but his unspoken meaning was unmistakable. Traherne threw an ugly quick look to Major Crespin, but Crespin had strolled to the loggia opening, and seemed to have seen or heard nothing. Had he gone to be nearer the big wine-cooler? Traherne wondered viciously. But again what could Crespin do? Nothing that would not aggravate their peril. “But no,” the soft silken voice said on, “I was wrong—Madam’s taste is irreproachable.”
A white-clad servant, with the Raja’s livery of green and silver and gold twisted in hispuggree, came in bringing cocktails. Lucilla Crespin was glad of the interruption, and made the man’s approach serve for that. She shook her head at the salver he proffered her, and moved away to a table, and picked up a book.
The men drank. Traherne’s throat felt as dry as Crespin’s for once, but when Rukh put down his glass he followed Mrs. Crespin, and glanced at the yellow paper-bound volume she held.
“You see, Madam,” he said to her, “we fall behind the age here. We are still in the Anatole France period. If he bores you, here”—he offered her another book—“is a Maurice Barrés that you may find more amusing.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Crespin told him, as she took it—she had to take it—“I too am in the Anatole France period, I assure you.” She glanced a little apprehensively at the titled back of the newer book, and a shade of relief touched her face. “‘Sur la Pierre Blanche’—isn’t that the one you were recommending to me, Dr. Traherne?” she asked over her shoulder.
“Yes, I like it better than some of his later books,” Traherne replied, joining them at the book-covered table.
The Raja spoke again to Lucilla. “Are you fond of music, Mrs. Crespin? But, of course, you are!”
“Why?” she demanded gayly.
Rukh looked into her eyes. “It is written—there,” he told her softly. “Suppose we have some during dinner.” He went, as he spoke, to the gramophone in the corner, and began turning over a stack of records that lay beside it, and put one of them carefully on the top of the pile, just as Watkins came noiselessly in from a door, and the major-domo as silently from another. “Watkins, just start that top record, will you. Ah!”—the native servant, salaaming had spoken—“Madame est servie!Allow me—”
And Mrs. Crespin laid her white hand on the brown man’s black-sleeved arm.
“I can recommend this caviare, Major,” Rukh said when they were seated—“and you’ll take a glass of maraschino with it—Russian fashion?”
Crespin would.
The gramophone reeled out its first, slow bars, and a wonderful sunset flooded the loggia.
“Oh, what is that?” Lucilla asked after she’d listened a moment.
“Don’t you know it?” Rukh questioned.
“Oh, yes, but I can’t think what it is.”
“Gounod’s ‘Funeral March of a Marionette,’” the Raja said in an odd voice, an odd look in his narrowed eyes—“a most humorous composition. May I pour you a glass of maraschino, Madam?”
The dinner was sumptuous; better still, it was perfect. What a magician wealth was, Traherne mused; and Major Crespin enjoyed it immensely. The Raja was a jolly good fellow, whatever the color of his skin, damned if he wasn’t. Any chap who did one as well as that was a man and a brother: the excellent food, the exquisite and welcomer wines, had lulled to fast sleep the English soldier’s every fear. He was at peace with all the universe, Asia and Germany included, especially Asia: to hell with silly race-distinctions!—good fizz knew none.
TheFuneral Marchpulsed through the loggia. The sky was the color of blood. When the record was finished, Rukh called for no other—Watkins waiting at the gramophone had a sinecure.
Antony Crespin was drinking too much. Traherne watched him through angry eyes; Rukh, not seeming to look, with an inscrutable smile. Lucilla was nervous and wretched. Surely he could have spared her this—here! He might have controlled his craving until he had reached his own room, and have asked there for what he craved—he would only have needed to ask in this palace of sumptuous and pressed hospitality.
But Crespin could not wait.He was doing his best. And, Traherne thanked heaven for it, he was eating heartily.
Traherne ate well too—doing it in careful fore-thought of what might be before him to do—or to attempt. And Lucilla Crespin ate as much as she could. She too was doing her best.
The Raja ate sparingly, without seeming to do so, and drank very little. But he chatted entertainingly all the time: the perfect host, considerate and quietly cordial—and if the woman who sat on his right hand received most of his attention, and all his deference, he, in that, paid their own European custom the sincere flattery of imitation.
The meal was long—not too long. The sunset glow faded, great stars pulsed green, white and gold in the strip of purple sky between the o’ertopping, high, snow-covered mountains. Dessert in great cut-gold bowls was put on the table. Watkins came and touched a switch, and when the table sparkled with electric lights among the flowers on it, and others above it, came and stood behind his master’s chair. The old major-domo and his white-clad satellites with the Raja’s livery of gold, silver and green twisted in their turbans hovered watchfully round.
A child cried somewhere—out in the mountain-pass open it sounded—and the Raja paused suddenly in what he was saying, a look of fear in his face, and dark as his skin was, it seemed to whiten and stiffen. Both Lucilla Crespin and Dr. Traherne saw and wondered—but Traherne made a quick note in his mind: he thought he had learned the tiger-man’s raw, vulnerable point—and he would not forget: the clue might be useful to them in their need. It all passed in an instant. The Raja laughed lightly, and went on with his story. La-swak’s room lay far on the other side of the palace; no sound from it could reach here. And, if aught again had ailed La-swak, Ak-kok would have come or have sent, though a bevy of Western kings had been dining, or even an Eastern god!
“What a heavenly night!” Mrs. Crespin murmured. The words were trite; and because they were trite they were lame and inadequate. It was starlight on the Himalayas. Every star hung out from the deep, velvet sky as if chiseled and cut from precious stones, and the snow of a hundred peaks and slopes literally reflected their jewel-colors, and the crisp night air was warm too by the fragrance of the “evergreens” that soaked it. The night was still, but it pulsed with its own beauty, and here and there where some stray eddy of soft wind caught it a tree on a lower slope was bending as if in prayer.
“Yes,” Rukh assented carelessly—careless of what was ordinary, not of her, or her words—“our summer climate is far from bad.”
“The air is like champagne,” she said with a long, slow breath of enjoyment. “Was she enjoying it?” Traherne asked himself. “Couldshe enjoy it here?”
“A little over frappé for some tastes,” the Raja suggested. “What do you say, Madam? Shall we have coffee indoors? There is an edge to the air at these altitudes, as soon as the sun has gone down.”
“Yes, I do feel a little chilly now,” she owned, and she shivered slightly.
“Watkins, send for a shawl for Madam,” Rukh said in quick concern, rising quickly. The others rose with him, of course. They had to play the social game with this native princelet upon whose whim so much depended for them. Traherne was playing the game very valiantly; Lucilla Crespin was not sorry to go back to the warmer room; and the Major felt something of actual deference to the host, no matter the shade of his skin, who had given him such a rippin’ dinner—and such wines! At a word from his master the major-domo touched a second switch in one of the pillars of the loggia opening, and the chandelier and wall-lamps of the salon burst into brilliant light. Rukh offered his arm to Mrs. Crespin, and again the Englishwoman had to take it.
“Let me find you a comfortable seat, Madam,” he said as he led her in, and bowed when he had guided her to a great lounge chair. “When the fire is lighted, I think you will find this quite pleasant. Take the other chair, Major. I must really refurnish this room,” he observed critically. “My ancestors had no notion of comfort. To tell the truth, I use the room only on state occasions, like the present”—again he bent to Mrs. Crespin. “I have a much more modern snuggery upstairs, which I hope you will see to-morrow.” It was quite courteously said, but there was invitation in his soft black eyes, a hint of it and of caress in his voice. Lucilla caught it, and so did Basil Traherne. She gave no sign, but Traherne still standing at the loggia opening, looking out into the night, clenched his strong, brown fingers until his nails cut the flesh. But he did not dare turn. And Crespin—poor chap—heard nothing, saw nothing. He was feeling a little sleepy, and quite full of content, and he smiled a lazy approval at the servants bringing in coffee, liqueurs, cigars and cigarettes.
“Star-gazing, Dr. Traherne?” the Raja asked him.
Traherne turned at that, and came to the others. “I beg your pardon,” he said.
“Dr. Traherne is quite an astronomer,” Lucilla told the Raja.
“As much at home with the telescope as with the microscope, eh?”
“Oh, no,” Traherne told him, “I’m no astronomer. I can pick out a few of the constellations,—that’s all.”
“For my part,” the Raja declared, “I look at the stars as little as possible. As a spectacle they’re monotonous, and they don’t bear thinking of. Ah, here it is!” He took the shawl the woman had brought, and placed it delicately about Mrs. Crespin’s shoulders.
“What an exquisite shawl!” she exclaimed, drawing an end of it through her fingers.
No self-respecting trousseau in affluent Christendom would have thought of lacking its “Indian shawl” fifty years ago, and one winter—just thirty-seven years ago to be exact (even at the risk of owning to old-age well reached) every well-dressed woman in Chicago had one of the costly things hacked up into cloaks and dolmans. And beautiful some of those “Indian shawls” were—and (more to their advertised point) probably most of them had been made in India. But this was a shawl not as those. It was warmer, softer and incomparably more thin. From the burning Indian red of its silky, sheeny center every color on the Asian palette blended and blurred into and accentuated all the others, and so did half a score of Oriental motifs—turquoise-blue, apple-green, orange and emerald touched milk-white and velvet-black, crimson, rose, ruby and scarlet, rippled like the notes of a scale masterly played, and the half-hinted motifs that patterned it as indescribably as the fallen snow patterns the panes it frosts in the Canadian midwinter, and the beautiful curves of the “pineapple” and “palm-leaf” ran through them all like its theme through a poem.
“It is the most beautiful made-thing I have ever seen,” Mrs. Crespin said.
“And most becoming.” Rukh smiled into her eyes as he spoke, his look not quite as light as his words. “Don’t you think so, Doctor?” he added a shade quizzically, for Traherne was gazing fixedly at Mrs. Crespin, with a look too inhiseyes. He flushed at the Raja’s words and shifted his glance without answering; Rukh laughed softly, and let it pass.
“My Mistress of the Robes has chosen well!” He motioned his beautiful, slim hands in noiseless applause to the ayah, who grinned, and went, as she’d come, not making a sound.
“Why won’t the stars bear thinking of, Raja?” Lucilla asked.
“Well, dear lady, don’t you think they’re rather ostentatious? I was guilty of a little showing off to-day, when I played that foolish trick with my regular troops. But think of the Maharaja up yonder”—he pointed up to the firmament outside—“who night after night whistles up his glittering legions, and puts them through their deadly punctual drill, as much as to say, ‘See what a devil of a fellowIam!’ Do you think it quite in good taste, Madam?”
The Punjabi mem-sahib was only veneered on the vicarage girl; Lucilla was shocked, and tried not to show it, playing the game, and with a forced, thin smile studied her shoe.
But Traherne laughed frankly. “I’m afraid you’re jealous, Raja! You don’t like having to play second fiddle to a still more absolute ruler.”
“Perhaps you’re right, Doctor,” the Rajah owned; “perhaps it’s partly that. But there’s something more to it. I can’t help resenting—”
He interrupted himself to urge Crespin to “try” the Kümmel a servant was offering him.
Lucilla bit her lip to keep back the, “Don’t, Antony, please don’t,” that she wanted to say.
“What is it you resent?” Traherne asked.
“Oh,” Rukh said, “the respect paid to mere size—to the immensity, as they call it, of the universe. Are we to worship a god because he’s big?”
“If you resent his bigness, what do you say to his littleness?” Traherne objected. “The microscope, you know, reveals him no less than the telescope.”
“And reveals him,” Rukh added, “in the form of death-dealing specks of matter, which you, I understand, Doctor, are impiously proposing to exterminate.”
“I am trying,” Traherne amended, “to marshal the life-saving against the death-dealing powers.”
“To marshal God’s right hand against his left, eh? orvice versa” the Raja demanded. “But I admit you have the better of the astronomers, in so far as you deal in life, not in dead mechanism.” He slapped a palm sharply down on the back of his other hand. “This mosquito that I have just killed—I am glad to see you smoke, Madam: it helps to keep them off—this mosquito, or any smallest thing that has life in it, is to me far more admirable than a whole lifeless universe. What do you say, Major?”
“I say, Raja,” Crespin replied lazily, and keeping his cigar alight, “that if you’ll tell that fellow to give me another glass of Kümmel, I’ll let you have your own way about the universe.”
He got his Kümmel.
“But what,” Mrs. Crespin asked, “if the mechanism, as you call it, isn’t dead? What if the stars are swarming with life?”
“Yes—” Traherne agreed, and pushed her argument on, “suppose there are planets, which of course we can’t see, circling round each of the great suns we do see? And suppose they are all inhabited?”
“I’d rather not suppose it,” Rukh asserted quickly. “Isn’t one inhabited world bad enough? Do we want it multiplied by millions?”
“But haven’t you just been telling us that a living gnat is more wonderful than a dead universe?” Lucilla check-mated, or thought that she had.
But the Raja slipped through. “Wonderful?” he said. “Yes, by all means—wonderful as a device for torturing and being tortured. Oh, I’m neither a saint nor an ascetic—I take life as I find it—I am tortured and I torture. But there’s one thing I’m really proud of—I’m proud to belong to the race of the Buddha, who first found out that life was a colossal blunder. ‘His word was our arrow, his breath was our sword,’” he quoted softly.
“Should you like the sky to be starless?” Lucilla Crespin asked him in a low voice. (How like deep blue stars her eyes were! both he and Traherne thought.) “That seems to me—forgive me, Raja—the last word of impiety.”
“Possibly, Madam,” the Raja of Rukh said with a grave laugh. “How my esteemed fellow-creatures were ever bluffed into piety is a mystery to me. Not,” he added, “that I’m complaining. If men could not be bluffed by the Raja above, how much less would they be bluffed by us rajas below. And though life is a contemptible business, I don’t deny that power is the best part of it.”
“In short,” Traherne said, “Your Highness is a Superman.”
“Ah, you read Nietzsche? Yes, if I weren’t of the kindred of the Buddha, I should like to be of the race of that great man.”
The last servant withdrew noiselessly. Till now they had hovered about with their trays of refreshments and tobacco.
Lucilla rose and moved to the loggia opening. “There is the moon rising over the snowfields,” she said. “I hope you wouldn’t banish her from the heavens?”
“Oh, no—I like her silly face”—he had followed Mrs. Crespin—“her silly, good-natured face. And she’s useful to lovers and brigands and other lawless vagabonds, with whom I have great sympathy. I am an Oriental, you know. Besides, I don’t know that she’s so silly, either. She seems to be forever raising her eyebrows in mild astonishment at human folly.”
Crespin stirred impatiently, and said, insistently, if a little thickly, “All this is out of my depth, Your Highness. We’ve had a rather fatiguing day. Mightn’t we—”
“To be sure,” Rukh replied agreeably—too agreeably, Dr. Traherne thought—“I only waited until the servants had gone. Now”—solicitously, always the perfect host—“are you all quite comfortable?”
“Quite,” Lucilla assured him, sitting down again.
Rukh turned to Traherne. “Perfectly, thank you,” the doctor said.
The Raja glanced to the Major, and Crespin echoed, “Perfectly.”
The Raja lit a fresh cigar slowly, then stood with his back to the fire. “Then,” he said leisurely, “we’ll go into committee upon your position here.”
“If you please, sir,” Crespin said.
“I’m afraid,” the Raja spoke regretfully, “you may find it rather disagreeable.”
“Communications bad, eh?” Crespin inquired more briskly than he altogether felt. “We have a difficult journey before us?”
The Raja of Rukh smoked a moment thoughtfully before he replied very, very slowly, a cryptic cold smile on his tawny face, “A long journey, I fear—yet not precisely difficult.”