A cold something iced in the room. Out in the far open a bird of prey screamed exultantly. Somewhere in the palace a gong was struck, three barbaric, ominous, bellowing notes.
Rukh gave no sign that he listened, but he listened. A child was being born.
They were silent.
No one spoke, no one moved. But Rukh smoked on quietly.
When the silence had lasted so long that all their English nerves were tortured, and cried for relief, any relief, Major Crespin broke it, trying to speak naturally, and failing.
“It surely,” he said, “can’t be so very far, since you had heard of the sentence passed on those assassins.”
The Raja smiled slightly. “I am glad, Major,” he said smoothly, “that you have so tactfully spared me the pain of re-opening that subject. We should have had to come to it sooner or later.”
There was another pause—an embarrassed pause. Rukh waited patient and imperturbable.
“When Your Highness”—Traherne spoke slowly, he was picking his words with care—“said they were your brothers, you were of course speaking figuratively. You meant your tribesmen.”
“Not at all,” the Raja replied; “they are sons of my father—not of my mother.”
Lucilla Crespin turned to him quickly, and he turned his eyes away from the unmistakable sympathy in hers. “And we,” she cried impulsively, “intrude upon you at such a time! How dreadful!” And the Raja of Rukh knew that the woman had spoken and not the hostage.
“Oh, pray don’t apologize,” he begged formally, smothering from his voice the inevitable Oriental gratitude that stirred at his heart. “Believe me, your arrival has given great satisfaction.”
“How do you mean?” Traherne demanded quickly. There had been nothing but menace and hardness in the Rukh’s last sentence.
“I’ll explain presently,” the Raja promised. “But first—”
Crespin interrupted rashly, blundering in the accredited British way. “First, let us understand each other—” and his tone and manner were crassly mandatory. “You surely can’t approve of this abominable crime?” he demanded—more as if Rukh had been his prisoner than he Rukh’s.
“My brothers,” the Raja said with an enigmatic smile, an ominous smoothness, “are fanatics, and there is no fanaticism in me.”
“How do they come to be so different from you?” Lucilla Crespin asked him, again speaking impulsively—and it was ill-advised.
But Rukh showed no resentment. Traherne wondered if he felt none. Perhaps—Oriental susceptibilities, though quicker and sharper, differ widely from ours.
“That is just what I was going to tell you,” Rukh answered. “I was my father’s eldest son, by his favorite wife. Through my mother’s influence (my poor mother—how I loved her!)”—Lucilla knew he said it sincerely; Traherne wondered if he did; and that he might never occurred to Crespin, who wished for the love of Mike the fellow’d cut the cackle and get to the horses—theirhorses!—“at her wish I was sent to Europe. If only our women knew what that does to us! My education was wholly European. I shed all my prejudices. I became the open-minded citizen of the world whom I hope you recognize in me—” That was part sarcasm, part vanity, part a child’s truckling for applause. The true Oriental is always a child. However old he lives, he whom the gods of the East love die young. “My brothers,” he continued, “on the other hand, turned to India for their culture. The religion of our people has always been a primitive idolatry. My brothers naturally fell in with adherents of the same superstition and they worked each other up to a high pitch of frenzy against the European exploitation of Asia.”
Traherne nodded; he was not altogether out of sympathy with that. But he said, “Had you no restraining influence upon them?”
The Raja smiled—it was not a sunny smile. “Of course I might have imprisoned them—or had them strangled—the traditional form of argument in our family. But why should I? As I said, I have no prejudices—least of all in favor of the British. My family is of Indian blood, though long severed from the Motherland—and I do not love her tyrants.”
Again out in the open the bird screamed its horrid gluttonous cry.
“In short, sir,” Crespin broke in—wine-fumes and fear both fuddling his mind, “you defend their devilish murder?”
“Oh, no,” Rukh answered softly; “I think it foolish and futile. But there is a romantic as well as a practical side to my nature, and, from the romantic point of view, I rather admire it.”
“Then, sir,” Crespin blustered, rising, “the less we intrude on your hospitality the better. If you will be good enough to furnish us with transport to-morrow morning—”
“That,” the Raja interrupted him suavely, “is just where the difficulty arises.”
“No transport, hey?” Crespin’s tone was bullying now. Oh, those English! Those English abroad!
“Materially it might be managed,” the Raja said with an amiable shrug; “but morally I fear it is—excuse the colloquialism, Madam—no go.”
“What the devil do you mean, sir?”
Still Rukh showed no resentment And Lucilla, trying to cover a little her husband’s blunder, asked gently, “Will Your Highness be good enough to explain?”
“I mentioned,” the Raja asked, turning to her with a pleasant smile, “that the religion of my people is a primitive superstition? Well, since the news has spread that three Feringhis have dropped from the skies precisely at the time when three princes of the royal house are threatened with death at the hands of the Feringhi government—and dropped moreover in the precincts of a temple—my subjects have got it into their heads that you have been personally conducted hither by the Goddess whom they especically worship.”
“The Goddess—?” Lucilla asked.
“Here”—the Raja turned and pointed to the statuette—“is her portrait on the mantelpiece—much admired by connoisseurs.”
Lucilla looked, and shuddered, although she tried not to.
“I need not say,” the Raja began, but broke off to count the gong-beats that came again, then went on with a slight good-humored shrug of contempt (it was only a girl) “need not say I am far from sharing the popular illusion. Your arrival is of course the merest coincidence—for me, a charming coincidence. But my people hold unphilosophical views. I understand—and indeed I observed—that even in England the vulgar are apt to see the Finger of Providence in particularly fortunate—or unfortunate—occurrences.”
“Then,” Crespin muttered impatiently, “the upshot of all this palaver is that you propose to hold us as hostages, to exchange for your brothers?”
“That is not precisely the idea, my dear sir.” The Raja spoke with great courtesy—almost exaggerated. “My theologians do not hold that an exchange is what the Goddess decrees. Nor, to be quite frank, would it altogether suit my book.”
“Not to get your brothers back again?” Lucilla exclaimed incredulously.
“You may have noted in history, Madam,” he replied with a smile, “that family affection is seldom the strong point of princes. Is it not Pope who remarks on their lack of enthusiasm for a ‘brother near the throne’? My sons are mere children, and, were I to die—we are all mortal—there might be trouble about the succession. In our family uncles seldom love nephews.”
“So you would raise no finger to save your brothers?” the Englishwoman asked him in horror.
“That is not my only reason,” Rukh said with a smile. “Supposing it possible that I could bully the Government of India into giving up my relatives, do you think it would sit calmly down under the humiliation? No, no, dear lady. It might wait a few years to find some decent pretext, but assuredly we should have a punitive expedition. It would cost thousands of lives and millions of money, but what would that matter? Prestige would be restored, and I should end my days in a maisonette at Monte Carlo. It wouldn’t suit me at all. Hitherto I have escaped the notice of your Government by a policy of masterly inactivity, and I propose to adhere to that policy.”
“Then,” Crespin broke in, “I don’t see how—”
And Traherne, speaking at the same time, said, “Surely you don’t mean—”
“We are approaching the crux of the matter,” Rukh returned, “a point you may have some difficulty in appreciating. I would beg you to remember that though I am what is commonly called an autocrat, there is no such thing under the sun as real despotism. All government is government by consent of the people. It is very stupid of them to consent—but they do. I have studied the question—took a pretty good degree at Cambridge, in Moral and Political Science—and I assure you that, though I have absolute power of life and death over my subjects, it is only their acquiescence that gives me that power. If I defied their prejudices or their passions, they could upset my throne to-morrow.”
Anthony Crespin was losing his head and his temper. “Will you be so kind as to come to the point, sir?” he stormed.
“Gently, Major!” Rukh said soothingly. “We shall reach it soon enough.” He turned to Lucilla, “Please remember, too, Madam, that autocracy is generally a theocracy to boot, and mine is a case in point. I am a slave to theology. The clerical party can do what it pleases with me, for there is no other party to oppose it. True I am my own Archbishop of Canterbury—‘but I have a partner: Mr. Jorkins’—I have a terribly exacting Archbishop of York. I fear I may have to introduce you to him to-morrow.”
Lucilla Crespin lifted a drawn face, but she looked him straight in the eyes—and there were both defiance and entreaty in hers. “You are torturing us, Your Highness,” she told him simply. “Like my husband, I beg you to come to the point.”
“The point is, dear lady,” the Raja answered her sadly, “that the theology on which, as I say, my whole power is founded, has not yet emerged from the Mosaic stage of development: It demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—”
There was a pause.
“—a life for a life.”
There was a pause—longer, tenser, a terrible hopeless pause. Crespin sagged in his chair, his miserable eyes fixed on his wife’s face, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing but her. She sat where she was, statue-like in her motionless horror. Traherne never lowered his look from Rukh’s expressionless face.
Again the wild bird cried, nearer now; they could hear the beat of its great angry wings.
Dr. Traherne spoke first. “You mean to say—”
“Unfortunately I do,” the Raja replied.
The great wings beat nearer. The cruel bird-cry came again.
“You would kill us—?” Lucilla panted hoarsely.
“Not I, Madam; the clerical party,” Rukh said suavely. “And only if my brothers are executed. If not, I will merely demand your word of honor that what has passed between us shall never be mentioned to any human soul—and you shall go free.”
“But,” Major Crespin exclaimed, “if your brother assassins are hanged—as assuredly they will be—you will put us to death in cold blood!”
“Oh, not in cold blood, Major,” the Raja interjected, the edge of a laugh on his smooth, level voice. “There is nothing cold-blooded about the clerical party when ‘white goats,’ as their phrase goes, are to be sacrificed to the Goddess.”
“Does your Goddess demand the life of a woman?” Traherne asked it sternly, and his eyes were scalpels.
“Well,” the Raja of Rukh said with slow significance, “on that point she might not be too exacting. ‘On trouve avec le Ciel des accommodements.’ If Madam would be so gracious as to favor me with her—society—”
Lucilla Crespin gazed at him speechless, for a moment, then realized fully his meaning, and sprang up with a cry of rage and anger.
The Raja smiled.
“Scoundrel!” Traherne hurled the word at him.
The Raja smiled.
Crespin sprang to the side of his wife, threw one hand on her quivering shoulders, drew and leveled his revolver. “Another word, and I shoot you like a dog,” he hissed. Antony Crespin was sober now.
The Raja laughed.
“Oh, no, Major—that wouldn’t help a bit,” he said genially—almost, too, as if he deprecated the fact. “You would only be torn to pieces instead of being beheaded. Besides, I have had your teeth drawn. That precaution was taken while you were at your bath.”
Crespin took his hand from Lucilla’s shoulder, and examined his revolver carefully and flung it down with an oath.
Again the gong sounded. It bleated through the night mournfully. A girl had died in child-bed. Rukh counted the strokes. “That’s a pity,” he said as the last faded away, and he lit a fresh cigarette.
The Englishwoman turned to her men. “Promise me,” she said almost fiercely, “promise you won’t leave me alone! If we must die, let me die first—” and her voice broke on the words.
They nodded. Neither could speak.
But the Raja spoke. “The order of the ceremony, Madam,” he said with courteous, princely insolence, “will not be at these gentlemen’s choice.” She hid her face in her hands, and stood cowering in distraught despair. “But do not be alarmed. No constraint shall be put upon your inclinations. Dr. Traherne reproached me with lack of consideration for your sex, and I then hinted, if you so pleased, your sex should meet with every consideration. I gather that you do not so please? Well, I scarcely hoped you would—I do not press the point. None the less, the suggestion remains open. And now, I’m afraid I’ve been talking a great deal. You must be fatigued,” he added solicitously.
At that moment the major-domo stood at a door, holding a salver with a slip of paper folded on it. The Raja gestured him nearer, advanced to meet him, and took up the paper, and scanned it thoughtfully. But his face did not change.
“Ah, this is interesting!” he told them. “If you will wait a few minutes, I may have some news for you. Excuse me.” He bowed as he left them, and the old major-domo followed him from the room.
The clocks ticked almost a minute away.
They stayed as if frozen, where he had left them, and gazed at each other in speechless horror. The men thought that they heard the woman’s heart beat.
“And we were saved this morning—only for this!” Lucilla sobbed brokenly at last.
“Courage!” Traherne said, with his soul in his eyes, his heart in his voice. “There must be some way out.”
“The whole thing’s a damned piece of bluff!” Crespin cried with a gust of hysterical laughter. “And the scoundrel almost took me in.”
Bluff! They looked at him in pitying amazement. They both pitied him then. And they knew it was no bluff.
Lucilla caught suddenly at her throat, catching her locket convulsively in her icy fingers. “Oh,” she sobbed, stumbling down on to the big ottoman in a passion of grief, “my babies! Oh, my babies! Never to see them again!” Crespin’s face twisted. “To leave them all alone in the world! My Ronny! My little Iris! What can we do? Antony! Dr. Traherne! Think of something—something—”
Crespin sat down beside her, and took her hands in his. And she did not repulse him now. He wastheirfather. She forgot his cups, that had shamed her, forgot the infidelities that had stung and infuriated her womanhood and pride. In this unspeakable peril he was her husband again. And she turned to him with an agony of entreaty in her terrified eyes.
“Yes, yes, Lu,” he said tenderly, “we’ll think of something—”
“There’s that fellow Watkins,” Traherne suggested desperately; “we might bribe him—”
“Oh,” Lucilla gasped, “offer him every penny we have in the world!”
“I’m afraid he’s a malicious scoundrel,” Traherne reflected aloud, dismally. “He must have known what was hanging over our heads, and, looking back, I seem to see him gloating over it.”
“But, he is English,” Lucilla said fiercely.
“Yes,” Traherne said dully, “heisEnglish.”
“And a damneder cur than the ‘master’ whose feet he washes, if you ask me,” Crespin muttered gloomily.
“Still—still—” his wife persisted, “perhaps he can be bought. Antony! Think of the children! Oh, do let us try!”
“But even if he would,” Crespin told her gently, “he couldn’t guide us through the woods.”
“Oh,” she answered passionately, “he could hire some one else!”
“I don’t believe,” Traherne said thoughtfully, “we can possibly be so far from the frontier as he makes out.”
“How far did he say?” Lucilla exclaimed eagerly.
“Three weeks’ journey,” Traherne told her. “Yet they know all about things that happened less than a week ago.”
Crespin bent down, and picked up thoughtfully the revolver he’d thrown down in his rage. At least it would serve to brain one native, he reflected.
As he slipped it back in his belt, all the electric lights in the room went down suddenly, and as they did, a hissing and chittering sound buzzed faintly out unmistakably somewhere beyond the room.
“What is that?” Lucilla whispered, startled. “What an odd sound!”
“God!” Antony Crespin muttered hoarsely—a strange, eager look on his face.
“Major! Do you hear that!” Traherne cried.
“Do I hear it?” Crespin echoed exultantly. “I should say so!” and he sprang to his feet, listening, his head thrown back, his eyes glowing, and fixed on the ceiling.
“Wireless!” Traherne exclaimed.
“Wireless, by Jupiter!” Crespin swayed in his intense excitement—his voice danced.
“They’re sending out a message!”
“That accounts for it,” Traherne said.
“They’re in wireless communication with India!”
“Fools, not to have thought of it,” Crespin muttered. “He would be!”
“Antony knows all about wireless,” Lucilla panted, speaking to Traherne.
“Ought to!” the Major said grimly. “I should rather think so! Wasn’t it my job all through the War! If I could hear more distinctly now—and if they’re transmitting it clearly—I could read their message.”
“That may be our salvation!” Traherne said in a low, strained voice.
They drew closer together—one, not three in their sudden hope, which tingled through the very room vibrantly as the telegraphist’s speaking wire’s words tingle through the air or ocean they charge.
“If we could get control of the wireless for five minutes,” Crespin muttered, “and call up the aerodrome at Amil-Serai—”
“What then?” Lucilla whispered wildly.
“Why, we’d soon bring the Raja to his senses,” Crespin told her.
“If—” Dr. Traherne said under his breath.
“Where do you suppose the installation is?” Mrs. Crespin asked her husband.
“Somewhere overhead, I should say,” Crespin replied. And they hung on his simple words. The specialist had come into his own. The wife who had discarded and judged him, the friend who had despised and pitied, looked at him with quick respect. He was in command now. Their peril and his special equipment made them look up to him. It is human nature to hold as a god every possible friend in dire need. Any port in such storm!
“We must go very cautiously, Major,” Traherne reminded him, with a note of deference in his voice. “We must on no account let the Raja suspect that we know anything about wireless telegraphy, else he’d take care we should never get near the installation.”
“Right you are, Traherne,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll lie very low.”
Suddenly noticing it, and remembering, Mrs. Crespin flung the costly Eastern shawl from her. “And how,” she demanded, “are we to behave to this horrible man?”
“We must keep a stiff upper lip, and play the game,” Crespin insisted.
“You mean pretend to take part in his ghastly comedy of hospitality and politeness?” his wife protested.
“If you can,” Traherne urged quickly, “it would be wisest. We must play the game indeed, and not lose a trick we can possibly help. His delight in showing off his European polish is all in our favor. But for that he might separate us and lock us up. We must avoid that at all costs.”
“Oh, yes, yes—” Her eyes widened with horror at the suggestion, and her words were almost a sob.
“You’ve always had plenty, of pluck, Lu,” Crespin said proudly, but the hand he laid again on her shoulder trembled in spite of him. But his grave voice was steady. “Now’s the time to show it.”
She met his eyes more kindly than she often had of late, and nodded firmly. “You can trust me,” she told him. She drew the shawl carefully over her shoulders again, a cold smile on her mouth, and her hands did not tremble. “The thought of the children knocked me over at first, but I’m not afraid to die,” she added simply. It was perfectly true. She came of stock that never had been afraid to die. And, a little narrow in some ways, but good and sound in all, such women as this have no need to be afraid to die. “Hush!” she whispered suddenly, “the noise has stopped.” And the cluttering sound had ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and the lights had gone up as suddenly.
“Yes,” Crespin said, “they’ve left off transmitting, and ceased to draw on the electric current.”
“He’ll be back presently, then,” Traherne warned, flinging himself in an easy chair. “Don’t let us seem to be consulting.”
Lucilla leaned back luxuriously on the ottoman cushions, and readjusted a fold of the shawl—a lazy smile on her pallid face. Perhaps she felt its pallor, for she crushed and pinched it quickly with strong determined fingers. Crespin watched her proudly, as he selected and lit a cigar, and took the place where the Raja had stood with his back to the fire. It was devilish bad to be in the hellish fix they were in, but it was good to have such a wife—staunch and sporting all through. Then his face darkened with a new dismay. “Curse it!” he groaned, “I can’t remember the wave-length and the call for Amil-Serai. I was constantly using it at one time.”
“It’ll come back to you,” Traherne assured him encouragingly.
“I pray to the Lord it may!” Major Crespin muttered, as Rukh came back into the room.
“I promised you news,” he said, more briskly than he often spoke, “and it has come.” His quickened voice was perfectly calm, but his eyes were glittering with something their drooping lids could not hide.
“What news?” Major Crespin inquired casually.
“My brothers’ execution is fixed for the day after to-morrrow,” Rukh replied slowly.
The Englishmen showed nothing, but their nerves twanged. And Mrs. Crespin half rose, then sank back a little limply, as she exclaimed nervously, “Then the day after to-morrow—?”
“Yes,” the Raja answered her gravely, “at sunset.”
For a perceptible, painful pause no one spoke. Lucilla Crespin sagged a little where she sat, the palm-leaf pattern on the shawl about her quivered a little. The men did not move, still gave no sign.
“But, meanwhile,” Rukh continued, “I hope you will regard my poor house as your own. This is Liberty Hall. My tennis courts, my billiard-room, my library are all at your disposal.” It was less cruelly meant than that he could not, even in the shadow of the impending doom he’d just pronounced, refrain from boasting. “I should not advise you,” he went on, “to pass the palace gates. It would not be safe, for popular feeling, I must warn you, runs very high. Besides, where could you go? There are three hundred miles of almost impassable country between you and the nearest British post.”
“In that case, Raja,” Traherne asked perplexedly, “how do you communicate with India? How has this news reached you?” His perplexity was admirably done.
“Does that puzzle you?” Rukh asked indulgently.
“Naturally,” the English physician admitted.
“You don’t guess?” the Raja persisted.
“We have been trying to,” Traherne said frankly. “The only thing—” he hesitated, almost as if apologizing for so far-fetched a suggestion, “we could think of was that you must be in wireless communication?”
Was that wise? Crespin wondered; and Lucilla was appalled. But Dr. Traherne had weighed his words well—and if he had spent fewer years in Asia than the English soldier had, he was the deeper versed, the better skilled in human psychology.
“You observed nothing to confirm the idea?” Rukh insinuated, watching Traherne narrowly, watching them all.
Dr. Traherne shook his head densely. “Why no,” he affirmed.
“Did you not notice that the lights suddenly went down?”
“Yes,” Traherne owned promptly, but still clearly at sea, “and at the same time we heard a peculiar hissing sound.”
“None of you knew what it meant?”
“No.” The doctor made the admission as if half-ashamed of it. No mere Englishman—as Rukh perfectly knew—cares to be found lacking in omniscience itself, let alone average intelligence (one reason perhaps of the old dislike that the English once bore the quicker French).
“Then you have no knowledge of wireless telegraphy?”
“None,” Traherne replied disgustedly. And that well done self-disgust entirely convinced the Raja of Rukh—and he boasted again.
“I may tell you, then,” he said with a sort of suave, princely truculence, “that that hissing is the sound of the wireless transmission. I am in communication with India.”
“You have a wireless expert here then?” Crespin asked incredulously—taking up Traherne’s cue at last.
“Watkins”—the Raja laughed—“that invaluable fellow—he is my operator.”
“And with whom do you communicate?” Traherne asked, as ifhe, for his part, did not believe a word of the fairy tale.
“Do you think that quite a fair question, Doctor?” Rukh retorted with a smile. “Does it show your usual tact? I have my agents—I can say no more.”
No one made any comment, or seemed inclined to keep the ball, or any ball, rolling.
The Raja waited a courteous moment or two, and then turned to Mrs. Crespin, and asked her, “Shall I ring for the ayah, Madam, to see you to your room?”
“If you please,” she told him. She longed to stay or to go with her husband and their countryman—to be with them through the hideous strain of the night; but she thought it wiser not to make the request. Dr. Traherne would make it, if he deemed it advisable or worth while to venture it. But neither Traherne nor her husband spoke, and she rose almost immediately, as if to go. But as Rukh’s finger was on the bell, she went to him quickly, staying his hand with a gesture of hers. “No,” she begged him, “wait a moment. Raja, I have two children. If it weren’t for them, don’t imagine that any of us would beg a favor at your hands.” It was bravely said, and Antony Crespin had never admired her more, but Basil Traherne bit his lip. It was ill-advised of her, no doubt of that. But if English men proverbially blunder and aggravate their own dilemma when they stand with their backs to a wall and fight against overwhelming odds, an English woman may be forgiven for doing it now and then. And Lucilla Crespin’s English blood was up.
The Raja bowed courteously, and he smiled slightly.
“But,” her voice broke, she was pleading now, “for their sakes won’t you instruct your agent to communicate with Simla and try to bring about an exchange—your brothers’ lives for ours?”
“I am sorry, Madam,”—he spoke regretfully—and, in spite of himself Basil Traherne believed that he was—and perhaps he was—“but I have already told you why that is impossible. Even if your Government agreed, it would assuredly take revenge on me for having extorted such a concession. No whisper of your presence here must ever reach India, or—again forgive the vulgarity—my goose is cooked.”
“The thought of my children does not move you?” she asked in a low, tearless voice.
“My brothers have children—does the thought of them move the Government of India?” Rukh answered gravely. “No, Madam, I am desolated to have to refuse you, but you must not ask for the impossible.”
His Oriental heart was adamant, but in it the Asian autocrat was sorry for the Englishwoman, standing before him there, her white hands knotted together, grief, torture, supplication, and a personal and racial pride scarcely less than his own in her eyes. She would not have believed it of him. Antony Crespin could not have believed it of him. But Dr. Traherne saw it, and believed it. And while he resented it he tried to weigh and assay it, wondering how it might be used in their defense—or, at best, in hers. But what defense could there be for her that did not include theirs too: Crespin’s and his—here alone in the Kingdom of Rukh?
The Raja pressed the bell.
“Does it not strike you,” Mrs. Crespin demanded fiercely, “that, if you drive us to desperation, we may find means of cheating your Goddess? What is to prevent me, for instance, from throwing myself from that loggia?” She flung her arm towards it as she spoke, and the shawl fell away from her shoulder, and lay between them on the floor, a huddled heap of splendid colors. The Raja let it lie.
“Nothing, dear lady,” he answered quietly, “except that clinging to the known, and shrinking from the unknown, that all of us feel, even while we despise it. Besides, it would be foolishly precipitate, in every sense of the word. While there is life there is hope. You can’t read my mind. For aught you can tell, I may have no intention of proceeding to extremities, and may only be playing a little joke upon you. I hope you have observed that I have a sense of humor. Ah”—as the native woman came in—“here is the ayah. Good night, Madam; sleep well.” He bowed.
Lucilla thought he was going to give her his arm again, and the thought choked her—it shook her limbs. And Traherne feared it too. But the Raja walked gravely beside her to the door, without speaking again, without offering his hand when she’d reached it, bowed ceremoniously, and when the ayah had followed her into the corridor, closed softly behind the two women the door he had opened.
Lucilla looked him in the eye slowly and squarely before she went, turned and threw a swift, brave smile to the two Englishmen who still stood waiting impotent in the salon. Crespin smiled back at her; but Basil Traherne could not.
The Raja turned back to them from the door. “Gentlemen,” he offered, “a whiskey and soda?” Major Crespin gestured his refusal, Traherne stared his blankly. “No?” He pressed another bell. “Then good-night, good-night,” he said as two servants almost instantly came into the room.
Traherne and Crespin without a word or a look, turned on their heels and went side by side through the opened door, the native servants beside them.
Neither spoke, until at a turning the Raja’s servitors indicated that the Englishmen separated there.
“Well, cheerio!” Crespin said.
“Cheerio!” Traherne replied.
They were English.
As their footsteps died in the stretch of the great corridor, Rukh went to the loggia opening, stood there a moment musing out into the snow-and-moonlit night, and came back to near the dark, almost dead fire. He took up a large electric torch from one of the tables, and switched on its powerful light, and when he had, switched off the lights of the room. The great salon was in total darkness now except for the moonlight and snowlight that poured in through the loggia, and for the one circle-pool of radiance that fell from the downheld torch on to the crimson center of the shawl on the floor.
Rukh moved to the mantel, and threw the strong light of the torch full upon the idol standing there, grinned at it slowly, made a low ironic salaam, and turned away, still smiling a little, lighting himself to the door. As he went the bird of prey screamed again, directly over the loggia now it sounded, so near that its wings might rasp against the roof—roosting there perhaps—an ugly, tuneless cry of an untamed, implacable thing, but lower and slower, more throated than it had sounded before—this sounded the monstrous gurgle of gluttony replete and content.
The great hovering beast-bird screamed once more. But the gong did not speak again.
It took pluck—to go through it without a whimper, without one flicker of the white feather for any inimical other to see and report, or even for the solitude and their own tortured souls to see—what they had to go through that night—three of them, each alone, at bay, well-nigh in absolute despair, imprisoned in a wild far-off, unknown place. It took pluck. But they had it.
When the ayah had gone—dismissed by a smile and a gesture of thanks—the native woman not, Lucilla Crespin thought, utterly pitiless—Lucilla knelt down by her bed. She knelt there a long time, keeping a tryst her father had taught her.
When she rose she stood a while at the wide window looking out at the golden-white night, her face twisted in torture, but kindled from prayer.
Nowhere else does the maiden-hair fern grow as it grows in Rukh, in such few soil-filled cracks as the great mountains carry on their sides. From where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped flowers here and there among them. A lump came in her throat—her father had cared so much for his maiden-hair ferns! She looked away from them. She counted three temples, snow-white in the moonlight. She shuddered. Should she live on through this night to die on a heathen temple floor? Or should she takethe other way—now, if she could? Yes! No—they might escape it yet—and the babies!
She closed the silk-curtains, and went resolutely to bed. Her body was weary from the long flight, the crash, the harrowing incidents that had followed the forced landing, the worse that had followed—the strain in the salon, and at dinner, the terrible climax. Heavens, how tired she was! She would need the best use of her body to-morrow, if only to carry it bravely; wisest to rest it to-night. She might not be able to force her mind to rest—for, if her body was strained and tired, what of it!—but her muscles were hers still to command, and they should obey her, she’d lay them down, loosened, unfettered, and they at least should relax and rest.
She lay a long time, alone in that strange place, not knowing what might come to her there or when—she wished the native woman had stayed—why had she not detained her?—lay perfectly still, keeping tryst: tryst with her father, tryst with the old Surrey garden, tryst with her children, tryst with Antony as she had known and loved him before the knowing and love were spoiled, tryst with the first days she remembered—old dolls, old lessons, old games, old childish sorrows and joys. She kept tryst with her girlhood. She fed the pigeons again, she rode her first pony, and gave it an apple, a red wine-full one off the ribston tree near the garden pump, she gathered the roses from the bush she loved best and the heliotrope from her favorite bed. She kept tryst with her own faults, mistakes, failures—as we all must once in life at least. She kept tryst with her own soul there alone in that strange, luxurious room which was the prison cell from which she might pass to her terrible mangling death. And she kept tryst too with that red, knifed death itself—God!
She fell asleep.
She dreamed, and once she smiled in her sleep.
But when she woke her champa-perfumed pillow was wet. Too, she had wept in her sleep.
Crespin sat all night on his bed, and thought. He too kept tryst. In such times of crisis and testing every human soul must do that. He thought of his babies, snug asleep now in Pahari while their faithful ayah lay on the floor between the two little beds, and a sentry far off in the cantonment called to some late-comer who had given the password, “Pass, friend. All’s well.” He thought of his mother—the mother for whom his fond, boyish passion and loyalty never had dwindled—he slipped his hand again in hers, he held her close in his arms, holding her reverently, all love and no judgment of her in his heart. He chalked up a long account against himself. He knew how he’d stumbled. But, too, he knew how he’d tried! And perhaps God did—and counted it more than Crespin counted it.
Traherne came through it worst of all. Till day broke he paced the floor, forming plan after plan, rejecting them one after one—all but one—planning how to send the woman who was Crespin’s wife to a painless death, before he was put to death—if it came to that—to kill her with his own hand rather than leave her behind them, alone in Rukh; it must not come to that! It should not, he swore. But how? How? That was a difficult rub. The possibilities of escape for all three of them, and how they should seize upon and use them must be left to chance, if by any great fluke such chance came at all. It would be idle to speculate upon that now. But how to kill Lucilla, how and when? But it must be done, if the other chance never came. In all probability it must be done. He shook at the thought, but worse he sickened at the fear of its failure. He had a few drugs with him, a few simple remedies—he was too good an airman and physician to fly without lozenges and ointments—and his miniature case was still intact in his flying kit there on the floor—but there was not a human death in the lot. How? Sweat broke out on his forehead. How? Somehow! That much was fixed. He’d strangle her, if needs be, with his hands, rather than leave her alone to this Raja of Rukh. With his own hands that had trembled in spite of his will, if by chance they had touched but some garment of hers, an intimate belonging even! He looked down at them. How they were trembling now! With the hands that had ached to caress her, to take a lover’s right of her sweetness! Couldtheydo it? And if she struggled—as the physician knew tortured human flesh must when agony gripped it, let the soul it housed be never so dauntless and fixed—if she struggled could he persist? He must—if it came to it. And his face fixed into tortured hardness, as might a surgeon’s, forced to perform, in the absence of Surgery’s holy handmaid and friend, Anæsthetic, a painful, major operation on his only child.
Traherne kept few trysts that night as he paced the floor of the palace room. But he registered a grim oath, never again, if he lived to escape from Rukh, to fly without either cyanide of potassium or chloroform. But he’d not fly again, he thought, if he lived to be free. That last fatal flight in which he had piloted the woman he loved to a hideous death—or worse—had turned him forever sick of air goings. He went to the window, and looked out at the night in its pageant and splendor, and he cursed the Himalayas. He cursed them with gibbering lips, and he shook his fist at the great beautiful mountains.
Down near the little white temple the wing of his broken aeroplane caught his eye where it stuck out from behind a crag of rock, etched clear and sharp by the radiant moonlight. And he cursed the aeroplane too—the craft he had mourned almost boyishly—cursed it low and long, as men curse the things their own wrong handling has ruined, from women to shirt-studs.
What was she doing? How was it faring with her? Was she safe even now? At the thought and its fear he grew faint—the room swam—the mountains swayed. And he could do nothing! He sickened violently, actually, at the thought of what might be befalling her even now—while he stood here agape at a moon, and a theatrical painted scene of mountains and stones and sky!—and the thought of what she must be suffering in her solitude, even if diabolical revenge still left it inviolate, maddened him only less.
Antony Crespin and Lucilla, his wife, thought of many things as the hideous night hours wore away. But Basil Traherne thought only of one. Of the three he suffered the most—perhaps because his pain was concentrated. No thought of a career blasted, cut short, no regret for ambitions nipped and thwarted, crossed his mind for an instant. He no more thought of Science—mistress and wife, mother and child to him till Lucilla had come, not to usurp but to share its throne—than he did of the Elgin Marbles or the Odes of Horace. Science had been his meat and his drink, the food of his soul, his motif of life. And if he had thought of that Science now, he would have cursed it too, as he had cursed the poor broken plane and the great snow-wrapped mountain peaks. Traherne thought of but one thing: Lucilla.
The Raja of Rukh too kept tryst as the far moon rode higher and higher, gilding the goat-tracks and the thin hill-rills, turning the temples and roofs to silver and gold, splashing the mountains with silver and gold, turning the gray rock crags into copper, the brown into russet and bronze. He sat alone, loose-robed, cross-legged on a nest of great cushions, his hands on his knees, his face turned to the Southwest where he knew Abdulabad lay. He kept no tryst with the girl-wife newly dead over there in the harem, the women wailing about her, strewing rose-leaves and incense and aguru over her garments, gave no thought to their new-born child. He gave no thought to the Englishwoman alone in her prison-chamber, none to the two Englishmen. He was in Abdulabad keeping their death-watch with his brothers. Oriental thought travels and visualizes, as the thought of no Western can. He waswiththem in their gaol. Their failure and capture galled him, the ignominy of the death by rope shamed him.
The Raja of Rukh had told Mrs. Crespin the truth. He loved himself first—if so small, so wormlike a thing as self-centered selfishness may be called by so big a name; and his children—above all La-swak—came next, his people third. For his sons’ sake, above all for La-swak’s, his regret at his brothers’ capture was more than tinged with relief. It cut a troublesome knot of his own, it left La-swak’s succession comparatively safe. Masterly inactivitywashis fixed conviction and purpose. He had no intention of rousing a British hornet’s nest to buzz and sting about the fortress and huts of Rukh. He intended to keep his inheritance, his ease, his absolutism and his own skin intact. But, too, he loved his brothers. He suffered their pain, he shared their plight. Boyhood’s friendliness, theirs and his, before he’d been sent to England, gripped and griped him. The Raja of Rukh kept their death-watch with his brothers, and mist gathered and thickened in his somber eyes.
He was in Abdulabad, and he did not hear a woman enter, or see her until she came close before him and salaamed more than once, salaamed a little insistently at last.
Rukh glanced up slowly, and nodded to the ayah—Watkins’ “wife”—to speak.
“She sleeps, Supreme One,” the woman said. “I have brought it.”
Rukh held out his hand, and the ayah, salaaming again, laid a little gold locket in his palm.
“Sleeps?” he questioned. “Is she drugged?”
“Nay,” the woman told him. “I watched through the lattice, as Your Greatness commanded. Nothing has passed the Feringhi woman’s lips since she left the great salon.”
“No syringe? Her arm?”
“Not so, Royal Master, nothing.”
“Who watches her now?” Rukh demanded.
“Po-nunk, Powerful One.”
“So she sleeps! That is pluck! True pluck!” The Raja of Rukh liked pluck—it was the one masculine quality he approved of in a woman. So the Englishwoman slept! He liked her for that. It might be just utter exhaustion, of course, trying to knit up the raveled sleeve of her long, hard day’s care. But he believed it was pluck of character far more than fatigue of body. He believed it was pluck. And he preferred to think it that. He liked her for it! The brave, delicate one!
He opened the locket, and scrutinized its pictures thoughtfully.
“She bears beautiful children,” he said with a thoughtful smile, as he handed it back. “Put it back again where it was. See that you do not wake her,” he commanded.
As the ayah closed the door, he repeated softly, cruelly too, “She bears beautiful children.”
He rose and rang a bell.
Watkins came—but not at once.
“Well?” the Raja demanded, speaking in English, “do they sleep?”
“Like hornets on the war-path, Your ’Ighness.”
Rukh laughed.
“Good!” he said. “Has the Major asked for liquor?”
“For nothink, Your ’Ighness. Neither of ’em ’as asked for nothink.”
“Remember not to stint them, if they do,” the Raja ordered. “Make them perfectly comfortable—especially the Major. I rather like the Major, Watkins. That is all.”
“Very good, Your ’Ighness, thank you,” Watkins replied colorlessly, and left the room so quietly that he seemed to fade away.
Watkins went back to his divided watch deliberately—almost as if he took little satisfaction in it, and there was no truculence on his mean, bad face as he went. He was not much English, but hewasEnglish. Old memories—not very pleasant ones though—were stirring a little, and presently, not knowing that he did, under his breath he whistled, rather in dirgelike time and color, a few bars of “The Old Kent Road.”
Rukh stood in his casement, and looked out towards the Southwest, where Abdulabad lay behind the mountains. “You who are about to die, I salute you,” he said. “Well,” he added, “Kismet!” Then he crossed back to his cushions, loosened his robes still more, threw off his girdle, lay down on the comfortable pillows. And as the day broke over Rukh, washing the great snow-capped Himalayas with carmine and rose and violet and beryl-green, its Raja slept like a child.