Watkins opened the door of the Raja’s snuggery, and withdrew as he ushered Crespin in, and Crespin came in sulkily enough. He looked about him quickly and apprehensively and finding himself quite alone, began wandering about aimlessly, nervous and irritable.
It was an uncommonly pleasant room—entirely European and modern, its comfort contrasting greatly with the old-fashioned and somewhat comfortless splendor of the great salon in which the Raja had entertained and mocked and sentenced them the night before. Everything was in exquisite order—the silver fittings on the fine writing table, the flowers in a vase and bowl or two—not too many—the papers and books, the pipes in their rack, and there was only one clock.
This room was high up in the great bastioned building; standing at the great open window, one seemed to be level with the distant high mountain peaks still rosy over their snow, across the narrow valley where sheep and goats, mere specks so far below, were browsing, and white, humped bullocks.
Crespin paid no respects to the scenery spread before him. The Alps could boast nothing to match this, but nothing in nature could appeal to Antony Crespin now. How could it? He grunted disconsolately. Then he stared at the doors, and counted them moodily. The doors appealed to him, if the scenic beauty did not. Doors whispered of escape. He tiptoed heavily to the large folding door that half filled one wall. He tapped it softly but carefully, with speculative, anxious fingers. It felt a particularly solid and formidable door. Very cautiously he tried it. It was locked. With another unhappy grunt he turned back, and roamed aimlessly about the room.
“What a hell of a lot of books,” he muttered disgustedly, “nothing but books. His Nibs must be a what-you-may-call-it, or want one to think he is.” And the cozy, homelike snuggery was very full of books. Low bookcases lined all the walls, wherever there was available space for them; they were filled with serious looking modern books, but Major Crespin did not investigate that. On the top of one bookcase stood a large beautifully executed bust of Napoleon—which the English Major recognized. Over another, facing the writing-table, hung an admirable black and white portrait of Nietzsche—which he did not recognize. A few good sporting prints—Leach at his best—caught his eye, and would have held and delighted him at a more normal time. There was not a small chair in the place; all were roomy and inviting and luxuriously padded, most of them covered in green morocco to match the great luxurious couch. Crespin twirled the revolving bookcase, that stood to hand by the writing-table, about, and frowned viciously at its contents: the Britannica and lesser but erudite books of reference.
But a tantalus with attendant syphon and glasses attracted his notice next. “Hello! Good-morning,” he told it. He hesitated unhappily a moment or two, looked over his shoulder stealthily, miserably; looked back at the whiskey-filled tantalus, and poured himself out a stiff peg. He held his glass up to the light, looking at it thirstily, gloatingly, put it down, and shuffled about the room once more. He bit his lip, looked back at the liquor, looked away from it quickly, and moved resolutely to another closed door. It opened readily. Crespin peeped into the inner room, and closed the door again, muttering, “Billiards, begad!” Back to the writing table he fingered its silver. He picked up a vase, and snuffed at its flowers. He took up a paper. It proved to beLa Vie Parisienne, and he threw it down with an insular and characteristic comment: “French muck!” Another paper lying on the couch caught his eye next. He went and got it—anything to keep his eyes and his fingers away from the tumbler in which the soda was going flat. This turned out to be printed in Russian. “My hat!” was his disgusted comment as he flung it down.
He hurried back to the revolving bookcase with the Encyclopedia, Roget’s “Thesaurus” and “Who’s Who” on its shelves, and cutglass and alcohol, alleviation and temptation, on its top, seized the tumbler he’d filled to the brim—the soda was dead, but that didn’t matter, he’d not put muchsodain it. His lips were twitching a little as he lifted to them the stimulant they craved. All his being craved it—needed it perhaps. On the point of drinking, the rim to his mouth, Antony Crespin hesitated again, shuddered a little, and hurried to the open window. “No,” the man muttered, and pitched the liquid out of the casement. Antony Crespin, after a border “shindy,” had been decorated and mentioned in despatches, for less than that. His face had paled when he put the glass back in its place. As he was doing it Traherne came into the room.
“There!” Crespin sniggered weakly, “you think you’ve caught me!”
“Caught you?”
“Lushing,” Crespin persisted. “But I haven’t been. I threw the stuff out of the window. God knows I wanted it, but for Lucilla’s sake, I must keep all my wits about me.” His voice cracked as he spoke, and at that, and the illness in his eyes, Traherne watching him wondered if he ought not to prescribe it. But instead he said cheerfully, “Yes, if we can all do that, we may pull through yet.”
“Did you sleep?” Crespin asked.
“Not a wink. And you?”
“Dozed and woke again fifteen times in a minute,” Crespin told him. “A hellish night.”
“Have you any news of Mrs. Crespin?”
Crespin nodded. “But only this. She sent me this chit.” He pulled the scrap of note-paper from his pocket, and offered it to Traherne.
Traherne took it, and read it slowly aloud. “‘Have slept and am feeling better. Keep the flag flying.’ What pluck she has!” he exclaimed as he handed it back.
“Yes,” Crespin said gravely, “she’s game—always was.”
“She reminds me,” the other told him, “of the women in the French Revolution. We might all be in the Conciergerie, waiting to hear the tumbrils.”
“It would be more endurable if we were,” Major Crespin muttered huskily—“were in prison. It’s this appearance of freedom—the scoundrel’s damned airs of politeness and hospitality—that makes the thing such a nightmare.” Mechanically he took up the tantalus again, and quite mechanically mixed himself another whiskey and soda. “Do you believe we’re really awake, Traherne? If I were alone, I’d think the whole thing a nightmare; but you and Lucilla seem to be dreaming it too.” His voice husked again as he said it, and he raised the glass quickly. But again he remembered when it was just at his lips, and crashed the glass down. “Damn it!” The cut glass was thick, and it did not break.
“Some day,” Dr. Traherne said wistfully, “we may look back upon it as on a bad dream.”
Crespin shook his head moodily. “He does you well, curse him,” he cried. “They served me a most dainty chota hazri this morning, and with it a glass of rare oldfine champagne.”
“Yes,” Traherne commented, “the Orientals know how to refine cruelty to thenth degree, when they choose. Where does that door lead?” he asked, pointing.
“To a billiard-room. Billiards!” Crespin laughed—and at the laugh’s quality the physician looked at him anxiously.
“And this one?” he went on, in a moment, again pointing.
Crespin shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s locked—and a very solid door, too.”
“Do you know what I think?” Traherne drew a step nearer, and spoke low.
“Yes,” Crespin replied instantly; “and I agree with you.”
“Opening off the fellow’s own sanctum,” Traherne went on.
Crespin nodded. “It’s probably the wireless room,” he said still lower.
They stood and looked at each other, steadily, significantly—saying nothing. There was no need.
“And what’s out here?” Traherne was pointing to the window.
“Take a look,” Crespin told him tersely.
Traherne crossed the room, and leaned over the window’s sill. He whistled. “A sheer drop of a hundred feet,” he pronounced slowly.
“And a dry torrent below,” Major Crespin added insinuatingly. “How if we were to pick up our host, Traherne, and gently drop him on those razor-edged rocks?”
Traherne’s eyes glittered hungrily, but he shrugged his shoulders discouragingly, and said, “As he remarked last night, they’d tear us to pieces the quicker.”
“If it weren’t for Lucilla, I’m damned if I wouldn’t do it all the same,” Major Crespin muttered.
Again they stood and stared into each other’s faces—sharing a thought, baffled, at bay, but not “all in” yet, not defeated yet.
Several moments passed, and neither moved, neither spoke again, neither lowered his eyes.
They stood so—still, grim, determined, but not yet seeing their way—when Rukh strolled into the room, debonnaire, spick and span in the latest Bond Street Rotten Row attire.
He accosted them instantly, jauntily, and hospitably. “Good-morning, Major! Good-morning, Doctor! How do you like my snuggery? I hope you have slept well?” Neither answered him. “No? Ah, perhaps you find this altitude trying? Never mind. We have methods of dealing with insomnia.”
Antony Crespin answered him then. “Come now, Raja,” he complained lustily; “a joke’s a joke, but this cat-and-mouse business gets on one’s nerves. Make arrangements to send us back to the nearest British outpost, and we’ll give you our Bible oath to say nothing about the—pleasantry you’ve played on us.”
“Send you back, my dear Major?” The Raja held up slim horror-shocked hands, but under their lowered lids his dark eyes danced wickedly. “I assure you, if I were ever so willing, it would be as much as my place is worth. You don’t know how my faithful subjects are looking forward to to-morrow’s ceremony. I have just come in from my morning ride, and in all my experience of them, I have never before been so acclaimed, met with such bubbling enthusiasm, such gratitude. They are children, and they are demented with their childish joy and anticipation of to-morrow. If I tried to cancel it, there would be a revolution. You must be reasonable, my dear sir.” He spoke in a low purring voice—a caress in it even—more vindictive, more implacable than any explosive show of hatred and malice could have been, and seated himself carelessly at his writing-table.
Crespin turned on him furiously.
“Do you think we would truckle to you, damn you, if it weren’t for my wife’s sake? But for her we’ll make any concession—promise you anything.”
“What can you that is worth a brass farthing to me?” Rukh retorted. “No.” He spoke vehemently now, pent up ferocity storming out from angry voice, hate-full eyes and eloquent, quivering hands. “Asia,” he hissed, “has a long score against you swaggering, blustering, whey-faced lords of creation, and, by all the gods! I mean to see some of it paid to-morrow!” His show of storm ceased as suddenly as it had come. He added suavely, “But in the meantime there is no reason why we shouldn’t behave like civilized beings. How would you like to pass the morning? I’m sorry I can’t offer you any shooting. I mustn’t lead you into temptation. What do you say to billiards? It soothes the nerves. Here is the billiard-room,” he told them, and opened the door. “I have a little business to attend to, but I’ll join you presently.”
“Of all the infernal, purring devils—!” Crespin broke out, beside himself with fury and impotence.
The Raja laughed indulgently. “Dignity, Major, dignity!” he reminded him with intolerable good-nature.
Crespin, almost demented, raised a threatening hand, but Dr. Traherne interposed himself determinedly between the seething Englishman and the still smiling native, laid a firm reminding hand on Crespin’s shoulder, and pushed and shepherded him across the floor, through the door, and into the billiard-room. And almost at once, Rukh, listening, heard the steady click of the billiard-balls.
They were playing the game again—and the Raja’s face lit with an admiring smile. He liked their grit.
Indeed, it scarcely could be said that he did not also like—as individuals—the two men in there whom he certainly purposed to put to death the next day. He hated the thing they stood for, he resented their presence in Asia—because of what it signified and exampled, but he had no actual dislike either of Dr. Traherne or of Major Crespin. He had intense bias, unalterable convictions, but, in telling Lucilla Crespin that he had no prejudices, if he had boasted, he had but boasted a fact. And he had too acute a mind, and had lived and seen too much to bear ill-grudge for expressions of dislike and contempt wrung out of his prisoners by the torture of their dire plight. They were not Orientals—it was their misfortune, not their fault—and it was not to be expected that they should bear either anguish of mind or anguish of body with the suave dignity that an Oriental both by instinct and by the teaching of precedent would. “No man is bound to impossibilities.” That, he remembered, was an old axiom of the Roman law—and of Nature’s law too. The game went on—the last billiards the players would ever play—were they thinking of that? The even, careful click of the ivory balls came steadily in to him here. They were whispering, scheming planning, of course, though no sound of it readied him where he sat at the writing-table. Let them. They were welcome to plan what they would. They were powerless to do anything but meet with what fortitude of bearing they could the death he had decreed them—had decreed, and tomorrow at sunset would enforce.
Rukh drew a pad of paper a little nearer his hand, picked up a pencil, pressed the bell beside him, and fell to thinking how he should word what he was about to write.
“Your ’Ighness rang?” Watkins said, in a few moments, at the door.
“Come in, Watkins,” the white servant’s brown master ordered without looking up. “Just close the billiard-room door, will you?”
The valet glanced into the billiard-room as he was obeying. “They’re good plucked ’uns, sir; I will say that,” he blurted out admiringly as he came to the Raja’s side.
“Yes,” the ruler agreed, “there’s some satisfaction in handling them. I’m glad they’re not abject—it would spoil the sport.”
“Quite so, sir,” was the grim response.
“But it has occurred to me, Watkins,” Rukh looked up for the first time, “that perhaps it’s not quite safe to have them so near the wireless room. Their one chance would be to get into wireless communication with India. They appeared last night to know nothing about wireless, but I have my doubts. Most British service officers know something of it now. Tell me, Watkins, have they made any attempt to bribe you?”
“Not yet, sir,” Watkins said cryptically.
“Ha, that looks bad,” the Raja observed regretfully. “It looks as if they had something else up their sleeves, and were leaving bribery to the last resort. I want to test their ignorance of wireless. I want you, in their presence, to send out some message that is bound to startle or enrage them, and see if they show any sign of understanding it.”
“That’s a notion, sir,” Watkins exclaimed with a grin of applause. His manner when he and Rukh were alone was no less respectful—he knew that his head answered for that—but it was less wooden and servant-impersonal than it was before others. And when alone they invariably spoke English, as indeed they usually did at other times.
Rukh grinned back at Watkins. The child in him liked applause and sucked it, even from an inferior he despised.
“But,” he said with a bothered frown, rising and moving aimlessly towards the wireless room, “I can’t think of a message.”
If that was an appeal, Watkins ignored it. He made no attempt to help the prince to a sufficiently effective and stinging message. Sage Watkins obeyed orders implicitly; he never assumed responsibility. If the Raja of Rukh fumbled and waited for a cue, the valet did not feel it his place to give it. And he had volunteered more now than he often volunteered. He stood perfectly still and waited—waited perfectly.
At the door of the wireless-room the Raja paused suddenly, and fingered the lock, making sure that it was well secure. And as he stood doing it the ayah opened the corridor door, and Mrs. Crespin passed by her into the snuggery. She did not see either Rukh or Watkins until she was well inside the room, and the ayah had reclosed the door she had opened, and had disappeared. It was too late to retreat, Lucilla knew, so she merely paused, and held her ground. She again wore the plain tweed frock she had worn in the aeroplane, the locket again at her throat, as it had been when she’d waked, the wide silk scarf hanging carelessly over her shoulders. Her face was pale, but her eyes were feverishly bright, and she held her head—she had dressed it today, simply—proudly.
Rukh heard the door close, turned, and came to her quickly.
“Ah, Mrs. Crespin,” he said cordially, “I was just thinking of you. Think of angels and you hear their wings. Won’t you sit down?”
Lucilla Crespin ignored it all.
“I thought my husband was here,” she said coldly.
“He’s not far off,” Rukh replied. “Just wait in there for a few minutes,” he told Watkins, pointing to the wireless-room, “I may have instructions for you.”
Watkins went at once, unlocking the door of the wireless-room with a key on his own ring, and closed it carefully behind him.
Then the Raja continued.
“Do, pray, sit down.” She had not moved since she had seen that Rukh was in the room she had entered. “I want so much to have a chat with you,” he urged her. At that—it seemed to her best—she sat down in silence, neither looking at him, nor seeming to avoid doing so. “I hope you had everything you required?” Rukh persisted, solicitously, as he reseated himself.
“Everything,” she replied indifferently.
“The ayah?” he still persisted.
“Was most attentive,” Mrs. Crespin said briefly.
“And you slept—?”
“More or less,” she said with light contempt.
“More rather than less, if one may judge by your looks,” the Raja of Rukh told her with something of warmth and emphasized admiration in eyes and tone. Lucilla Crespin did not trouble to meet his eyes, but she heard the tone.
“Does it matter?” she retorted scornfully.
“What can matter more than the looks of a beautiful woman?” the Raja asked softly.
“What’s that?” she exclaimed less listlessly, lifting her head suddenly, and listening.
“The click of billiard balls,” Rukh told her. “Your husband and Dr. Traherne are passing the time.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said ceremoniously, as she rose, “I’ll join them.”
But the man did not intend that. “Oh,” he said with mingled deference and insistence, “pray spare me a few moments. I want to speak to you seriously.”
She threw him a look then. There was nothing in it that he liked. But he only smiled back at her pleasantly. He could wait. The Raja of Rukh was skilled in waiting, as he was at most things.
Mrs. Crespin sat down listlessly. “Well—” she said wearily, “I am listening.”
“You are very curt, Mrs. Crespin,” Rukh said pleadingly, leaning his arm on the writing-table, as he seated himself at it again, and leaning his chin on his hand. “I’m afraid you bear me malice—you hold me responsible for the doubtless trying situation in which you find yourself.”
“Who else is responsible?” she demanded, and her voice was certainly curt—as curt as it was cold.
“Who?” the Raja echoed. “Why chance, fate, the gods, Providence—whoever, or whatever, pulls the strings of this unaccountable puppet-show. DidIbring you here? DidIconjure up the fog? CouldIhave prevented your dropping from the skies? And when once you had set foot in the Goddess’ precinct, it was utterly out of my power to save you—at any rate the men of your party.” The woman curdled at the significance he threw lightly but clearly into those last words, but she neither moved nor looked; her face was mask-like, expressionless, and her pallor took no change. “If I raised a finger,” Rukh went on evenly, but saying it all very earnestly, “to thwart the Goddess, it would be the end of my rule—perhaps of my life.”
“You know that is not true,” the woman flashed out at him, her very contempt firing her to retort—which she had meant not to do, let him say what he might. “You could easily smuggle us away, and then face the people out. What about your troops?” she demanded. She was not pleading—yet.
“A handful, dear lady—a toy army,” Rukh murmured regretfully, but vastly amused too. “It amuses me to play at soldiers. They could do nothing against priests and people, even if they were to be depended upon. And,” he added emphatically, “they, too, worship the Goddess.”
The woman smiled bitterly. “What you really mean, Raja,” she said, looking him full in the eyes, “is that you dare not risk it—you haven’t the courage.”
“You take a mean advantage, Madam,” the Raja sighed. “You abuse the privilege of your sex in order to taunt me with cowardice.”
“Let us say, then,” she replied bitterly, “that you haven’t the will to save us.”
He leaned across the corner of the writing-table, and with a beseeching gesture, begged, “Reflect one moment, Madam. Why should I have the will, at the risk of all I possess, to save Major Crespin and Dr. Traherne? Major Crespin is your husband—does that recommend him to me? Forgive me if I venture to guess that it doesn’t greatly recommend him to you.” Lucilla gave him a haughty, outraged stare, but he continued, as if he had not seen it. “He is only too typical a specimen of a breed I detest: pigheaded, bull-necked, blustering, overbearing.” Lucilla Crespin’s rings were cutting her fingers, but she gave him no sign. “Dr. Traherne is an agreeable man enough—I dare say a man of genius.”
“If you kill him,” Lucilla interrupted quickly, and the Raja saw her bosom rise and fall, a faint color tinge her cheeks, a look of life creep into her face. He had stirred her at last! “If you cut short his work—you’ll kill millions of your own race, whom he would have saved.”
The Raja smiled—a little at her new eagerness, though it stung him—more at what she had said. “I don’t know that I care very much about the millions you speak of,” he answered quietly—more intent in watching her, and in trying to cut some breach in her seeming composure, than in the words he used. “Life is a weed that grows again as fast as death mows it down. At all events, he is an Englishman, a Feringhi—and, may I add, without indiscretion, that the interest you take in him—” the woman stiffened, and blanched again, and Rukh saw a vein swell and beat in her throat—“oh, the merest friendly interest, I am sure—does not endear him to me. One is, after all, a man, and the favor shown to another man by a beautiful woman—”
Without glancing at him, Mrs. Crespin rose slowly, and moved calmly towards the room where the ivory balls still clicked; but there was blood oozed under her wedding-ring.
But the Raja rose swiftly, and faced her, standing between her and it before she reached the billiard-room door.
“Please, please, Mrs. Crespin,” he said entreatingly, and his eyes grew suddenly soft, “bear with me if I transgress your Western conventions. Can I help being an Oriental?” he asked with a slight, proud smile. “Believe me, I mean no harm; I wanted to talk to you about—” He broke off lamely, as if not knowing how to go on.
“Well?” she said imperiously, after a moment, a goad in her quiet tone, a taunt in her stern, angry eyes.
“You spoke last night,” Rukh said very gently, “of—your children—”
She turned away swiftly, her self-control was wavering at last. He had hit the woman below the belt! The bad blow had crumpled her. She turned away, and she swayed a little as she moved.
“I think you said—a boy and a girl,” the despot pushed his advantage home.
It was too much.
Every human mind, every human pride, every human courage; every human creature has its breaking point. Some may be spared ever reaching or knowing it. But always it is there. Lucilla Crespin had reached hers.
She threw herself down on the couch with a desperate cry. “My babies, my babies!” she sobbed.
Rukh winced. Give him his due—he was hurt for her grief. It did not budge him from his purpose. But for the moment, at least, his vengeance tasted sour in his mouth.
The billiard balls still clicked.
He let her weeping wear itself out.
At last as it almost ceased, and the woman’s sobs were but panted breath, he went a step nearer, and said earnestly, “I feel for you, Mrs. Crespin, I do indeed. I would do anything—”
She swung round where she sat, looked up at him, saw, though her smarting eyes were half blind from the tears they had shed, the sincerity in his eyes, as she had heard it in his voice. “Raja,” she cried, in a tone she had not used to him before, “if I write them a letter of farewell, will you give me your word of honor that it shall reach them?”
Rukh bit his lip. His hands were trembling a little. At that moment he came nearer loving a woman, with a passion worthy that word, than he ever had done—save for the so different love, the love apart, he had given his mother. He had thought when she turned to him that she was about to beg of him her own life, her freedom. And she had not. She had asked that a letter from her might go to her children. He had been in England when his mother had died.Shehad writtenhima letter when she knew that she was about to die. He had it yet. A rough lump gathered in the throat of Rukh’s Raja—and because his heart sickened at the refusal he must make—from his point of view hemust—he steeled his voice, and spoke more stiffly than he felt.
“Ah, there, Madam,” he said crisply, “you must pardon me! I have already said that the last thing I desire is to attract the attention of the Government of India.”
“I will say nothing to show where I am,” she pleaded eagerly, “or what has happened to me. You shall read it yourself.”
At the misery in her eyes, and the entreaty, at the white loveliness of her, at the queenly quality of her, at the call of her suffering motherhood, and too, at the call of her nearness, he was so stirred, so almost tempted to yield, that he answered her almost roughly.
“An ingenious idea!” He said it a little mockingly. “You would have it come fluttering down out of the blue upon your children’s heads, like a message from a Mahatma. But, the strength of my position, you see, is that no one will ever know what has become of you. You will simply disappear in the uncharted sea of the Himalayas, as a ship sinks with all hands in the ocean. If I permitted any word from you to reach India, the detective instinct, so deeply implanted in your race, would be awakened, and the Himalayas would be combed out with a fine-tooth comb. No, Madam, I cannot risk it.”
“Cannot?” Lucilla said with cold scorn; all her calmness was recovered now, her pulsing emotion frozen back by Rukh’s hard refusal. “Cannot? You dare not! But you can and dare kill defenseless men and women. Raja, you are a pitiful coward!” Her cold, blue eyes scanned him tauntingly. She expected him to wince at that taunt. She had made it deliberately—playing the game now—as she gauged it. Appeal to his chivalry had failed, she was appealing to his vanity now.
But Rukh laughed unruffled. He read her. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I smile at your tactics. You want to goad me to chivalry. If every man were a coward who took life without risking his own, where would your British sportsmen be?”
“I beg your pardon,” the woman retorted with a sort of superb insolence; “a savage is not necessarily a coward.” The Raja just flushed at that. “And now,” she ended, rising again, “let me go to my husband.”
“Not yet, Mrs. Crespin,” he stayed her again. “One more word. You are a brave woman, and I sincerely admire you.”
“Please—please—” she interrupted him fiercely, hotly angered by the very sincerity that she could not doubt.
“Listen to me,” Rukh persisted firmly. “It will be worth your while. I could not undertake to send a letter to your children—” her face quivered again, but she stilled it, and shrugged her bitter contempt—“butit would be very easy for me to have them carried off and brought to you here.”
She sprang round to him, half stifling a cry, and faced him, her own face frankly quivering now, the veins in her throat swelling palpably.
“What do you mean?” she gasped.
“I mean,” he told her slowly, saying it earnestly, “that, in less than a month, you may have your children in your arms, uninjured, unsuspecting, happy—if—”
“If?” the woman whispered hoarsely, and twisting the end of her long silk scarf in hysterical, trembling fingers.
“If—” Rukh answered gently, watching her narrowly—his eyes friendly and respectful—“oh, in your own time, of your own free will—you will accept the homage it would be my privilege to offer you.”
“That!”
It would have been answer enough for most men, it would have chilled the purpose of many, the purpose and any ardor behind it, the word as the English woman tossed it at him, with snaky venom in her blazing blue eyes. But Rukh went smoothly on, beating his terrible arguments in slowly and courteously. “You have the courage to die, dear lady—why not have the courage to live?”
She shuddered. That was her answer.
He waited a moment quietly, and then, “You believe,” he continued, “that to-morrow, when the ordeal is over, you will awaken in a new life, and that your children will rejoin you. Suppose it were so: suppose that in forty—fifty—sixty years, they passed over to you: would they be your children? Can God himself give you back their childhood? What I offer you,” he urged—and there was an odd sweetness in his Asiatic voice—“is a new life, not problematical, but assured; a new life, without passing through the shadow of death; a future utterly cut off from the past, except that your children will be with you, not as vague shades, but living and loving. They must be quite young; they would soon forget all that had gone before. They would grow to manhood and womanhood under your eyes; and ultimately, perhaps, when the whole story was forgotten, you might, if you wished it, return with them to what you call civilization.”
Degrading, immoral—what you will, it had its points, the plan he unfolded. And the Raja of Rukh told it well. “And meanwhile,” he pressed it on, “you are only on the threshold of the best years of your life. You would pass them, not as a memsahib in a paltry Indian cantonment—I don’tseeyou there—but as the absolute queen of an absolute king. I do not talk to you of romantic love. I respect you too much to think you accessible to silly sentiment. But that is just it: I respect as much as I admire you; and I have never pretended to respect any other woman. Therefore I say you should be my first and only queen. Your son, if you gave me one, should be the prince of princes, my other sons should all bow down to him and serve him. For, though I hate the arrogance of Europe, I believe that from a blending of the flower of the East with the flower of the West, the man of the future—the Superman—may be born.”
Through all this Lucilla Crespin sat lax and motionless, gazing straight in front of her, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. And she gave no sign, none that the man could read, of what mark, if any, his words had made on her mind.
Rukh waited patiently. And at last she spoke to him in a low toneless voice—not turning her head, not moving her eyes.
“Is that all? Have you quite done?” she asked.
“I beg you to answer,” the Raja insisted.
“I can’t answer the greater part of what you have been saying,” she asserted uninterestedly, “for I have not heard it; at least I have not understood it. All I have heard is, ‘In less than a month you may have your children in your arms,’ andthen, ‘Can God Himself give you back their childhood?’ Those words have kept hammering at my brain till”—she held out her handkerchief, there was blood on it, and for the first time looked at him—“you see—I have bit my lip to keep from shrieking aloud. I think the Devil must have put them in your mouth.”
“Pouf!” Rukh laughed lightly. “You don’t believe in those old bugbears.”
“Perhaps not,” she admitted curtly. “But there is such a thing as diabolical temptation, and you have stumbled upon the secret of it,” she added desperately.
“Stumbled!” the Raja protested.
“Mastered the art of it, if you like,” Lucilla conceded scornfully, “but not in your long harangue. All I can think of is, ‘Can God Himself give you back their childhood?’ and ‘In a month you may have them in your arms.’”
“Yes, yes,” Rukh prompted her eagerly, letting more of the genuine if foul feeling that swayed him show in voice and face than he yet had done, “think of that. In three or four weeks—I’ll not lose a day, not an hour; now, at once—in three or four weeks you may have your little ones—”
She shook off his words as if they’d been some unclean smothering garment, and rose to her slender height, interrupting him passionately, “Yes—but on what conditions? That I should desert my husband and my friend—should let them go alone to their death—should cower in some back room of this murderous house of yours, listening to the ticking of the clock, and thinking, ‘Now—now—the stroke is falling—now—now the stroke has fallen’—stopping my ears so as not to hear the yells of your bloodthirsty savages—and yet, perhaps, hearing nothing else to my dying day. No, Raja! You said something about not passing through the shadow of death; but if I did this I should not pass through it, but live in it, and bring my children into it as well. What would be the good of having them in my arms if I could not look them in the face?”
She looked the Raja in the face.
Mrs. Crespin looked Rukh full in the face, and at what he saw in hers his eyes almost fell. But as she passed to the door of the billiard-room he challenged her, “That is your answer?”
“The only possible answer,” she returned quietly, and went on into the other room, and closed the door.
“But not the last word, my lady!” Rukh murmured to himself, as he stood looking after her.
And neither then nor after did the Raja of Rukh purpose this woman’s death. Up to the slaughter she should go, square up to the block and the sword—if she would not yield before that—but not on to the sword-severed end. His purpose was other than that. And her resistance but whetted his purpose, steeled his will. If she yielded, would he keep the promises he’d made her? Many men will promise much to gain their end—when that end is a woman. Not all men fulfill such promises.
The Raja of Rukh had made Mrs. Crespin what he considered a very handsome offer—as he saw it, a tempting offer. But he had meant all he had said, had intended all he had promised. He had not forgotten La-swak when he had promised to make another his heir. But something in this Western woman had called him irresistibly. The light women “mostly from Paris” who had been from time to time his “guests” scarcely had amused him for an hour, not one of them had interested him for a moment. But this woman of breeding and of character appealed to him, and affected him strongly. To claim her as his, fascinated him. To have a woman companion and friend—perhaps that appealed to him most. He was lonely. And, perhaps unconsciously, he was homesick sometimes for things and conditions he’d left behind him in Europe. Interesting as it had been, his stay at Cambridge had not been all pleasant. He had been there, prince and rich and brilliant though he was, on tolerance, and that had been torment. But often here in his solitary, uncompanioned state, the Raja of Rukh was more than half homesick for the old varsity—its life, its human give-and-take, the town at its river-ribboned feet. For all his retinue the man was a “solitary”; he longed for a friend. He dared not leave Rukh now. He might lose Rukh, if he left it for long now. He had no mind to lose Rukh—it had been his fathers’ for too long, it kept him too richly,andhe loved it too well.
He prided himself that Europe had made a superficial but accomplished cosmopolitan of him—he knew that at core he was all Oriental still. But he was a little wrong there. The West had infused itself into him more than he dreamed. Cambridge had made something of a half-caste of the high-born, absolute ruler of Rukh—an intellectual half-caste. He had studied a few Western masters profoundly, he had dabbled, and he still dabbled, in abominably many. Your true cosmopolitan is born, not made. He is very rare. Europe had given Rukh’s Raja Gogol and Herbert Spencer, Byron and Aristotle, Goethe and Ben Jonson and Macaulay, the philosophies of Greece and of England, the cultures of France and Spain, the flairs of Mayfair and Rome, but it had taken away more than it had given, had cramped even more than it had developed. It had not expatriated him, but it had made him lonely.
The European side, grafted on him, and still growing green and strong, the European in him, craved this exquisite and companionable English gentlewoman even more, and more insistently than the Asian did. He would win her in Eastern ways, if he must, but he would wear and keep her in Western ways, if she liked—and as far as one might in Rukh.
Hehadcome to believe that the Superman of whom the new philosophers prated almost as glibly as intricately and obscurely, would be generated from some high fusion of East and West—a flabby, unwholesome belief, but he held it, and since he himself could not be world-eminent as the first Superman, he was keenly minded to beget him. But he had not forgotten La-swak. La-swak should have a rich heritage, a gilded and cushioned life, his other sons should be provided for nobly and carefully, and his daughters should be given in marriage, well-portioned, of course. As for his native wives, his new queen should do with them as she pleased. But La-swak should keep a princely place, always the favorite son; and Ak-kok should keep her place, her pleasure and her ease.
Rukh admired the English more than he disliked them. And, too, in the ordinary, human way, to which all flesh is heir he had fallen in love—with, as it chanced, a Western woman.
Abortive, fantastic a dream as ever opium gave, but it brightened his eyes, flushed his face, and set all his sensitive nerves dancing to delicate music.
The billiard balls clicked again.
They had not interrupted their game for her, then.
He had sat down at his writing-table when Mrs. Crespin had left him, and now he drew a pad to him, and picked up the pencil again. He began to write; he had found the words he wanted.
“Watkins!” he called, not loudly.
“Yessir?” Watkins had come at once.
The Raja tore the sheet off the pad, and handed it to him.
The valet read it aloud softly. He always read aloud to his master any message he was to transmit, to assure reading and sending it correctly. He read, “‘The lady has come to terms. She will enter His Highness’s household.’ Quite so, sir,” the man said. “What suite will she occupy?”
“My innocent Watkins!” Rukh said twittingly. “Do you think it’s true? What have I to do with an unapproachable English woman? It’s only a bait for the Feringhis. You shall send it out in their hearing, and if either of them can read the Morse code, the devil’s in it if he doesn’t give himself away.”
“Beg pardon, sir,” Watkins said, with an appreciative grin. “I didn’t quite catch on.”
“If they move an eyelash I’ll take care they never see the inside of this room again,” Rukh asserted. Watkins made no comment; he did not doubt it.
“Am I to send this to India, sir?” he asked.
“To anywhere or nowhere,” Rukh told him cheerfully. “Reduce the current, so that no one can pick it up. So long as it’s heard in this room, that’s all I want.”
“But when am I to send it, sir?” the man inquired not unreasonably.
“Listen,” the Raja ordered. “I’ll get them in here on the pretext of a little wireless demonstration, and then I’ll tell you to send out an order to Tashkent for champagne. That’ll be your cue. Go ahead—and send slowly.”
“Shall I ask whether I’m to code it, sir?” Watkins was taking every precaution to do exactly as the Raja wished. It always was wisest—and safest also—to do that. But too the man was entering into the spirit of it now. He liked his job.
“You may as well,” Rukh assented. “It’ll give artistic finish to the thing.”
“Very good, Your ’Ighness. But,” he had more to ask, more to provide himself with precautions for, “afterwards, if, as you was saying, they was to try to corrupt me, sir—”
“Corrupt you?” The Raja held up a hand in horror. “That would be painting the lily with a vengeance.”
Watkins was incensed. Even a cockney blackleg has his sensitiveness—but he did not dare show it, and only a touch of annoyance crept into his voice, as he questioned again, “Suppose they tries to get at me, sir—what are your instructions?”
“How do you mean?” The Raja understood perfectly what Watkins meant, but it often pleased him—it did now—to put the cockney to the trouble of putting things into words very plainly.
“Shall I let on to take the bait?” the valet explained.
“You may do exactly as you please,” the master told him indifferently. “I have the most implicit confidence in you, Watkins.”
“You are very good, sir,” Watkins tried not to say it sulkily.
The Raja smiled. “I know that anything they can offer you would have to be paid either in England or in India, and that you daren’t show your nose in either country,” he remarked grimly. “You have a very comfortable job here—”
“My grateful thanks to you, sir,” the man said humbly.
“And you don’t want to give the hangman a job, either in Lahore or in London.”
“The case in a nutshell, sir,” Watkins said cheerfully. “But I thought if I was to pretend to send a message for them, it might keep them quiet-like.”
“Very true, Watkins,” the Raja approved. “It would not only keep them quiet, but the illusion of security would raise their spirits, which would be a humane action. I am always on the side of humanity.”
“Just so, sir,” the other replied dryly. “Then I’ll humor them.”
“Yes if they want to send a message,” Rukh agreed. “If they try to ‘get at,’ not only you, but the instrument, call the guard,” he stipulated, “and let me know at once.”
“Certainly, sir,” Watkins grinned.
“Now,” Rukh added briskly, “open the door and standby. You have the message?”
Watkins drew the slip of paper from his waistcoat pocket, and began to read it aloud, “‘The lady has come to terms. She’—”
“Yes, that’s right,” Rukh cut him off sharply. “Oh, look here,” he added, as the man was opening the folding door, “when you’ve finished, you’d better lock the door again, and say, ‘Any orders, sir?’ If I say, ‘No orders, Watkins,’ it’ll mean I’m satisfied they don’t understand. If I think they do understand, I’ll give you what orders I think necessary.”
“Very good, sir,” the punctilious valet replied, as he softly threw back the folding doors that divided Rukh’s snuggery and the wireless-room: a small, plain, business-like, office-looking place—the operator’s seat in front of the apparatus of incredibly many instruments—and that was all—except an electric light in the ceiling, not lit now, of course. Not a wire showed on floor or wall—although all of “wireless” is done by means of wires!
The Raja rose and went to the door of the billiard-room, and when he had opened it said, “Oh, Major, you were saying you had no experience of wireless. If you’ve finished your game, it might amuse you to see it at work. Watkins is just going to send out a message. Would Mrs. Crespin care to come?”
“Yes,” Crespin answered, coming into the snuggery, “why not? Will you come, Lucilla?” he called over his shoulder.
She and Traherne followed Crespin in, not very eagerly—all three wearily polite, but scarcely interested, unless their faces and walk belied them. Rukh eyed them closely, with eyes so agile that he managed to watch all three of them at once. They had no chance to exchange one covert glance, had they cared to—but they were playing their own hands too carefully and well for that—and they understood each other too thoroughly to need to do so. They looked a little bored. And they looked shockingly tired. The bright day was near its high zenith now, and in its searching light they looked to Rukh to have aged perceptibly in the short time they had been in the billiard-room. He didn’t wonder at it.
“This,” he told them, pointing, “you see, is the apparatus. All ready, Watkins? Won’t you sit down?” He gave Mrs. Crespin a chair, and indicated others to the men. “You have the order for Tashkent, Watkins?”
“Yes, Your ’Ighness,” the valet said, producing the slip with the fake message on it, “but I haven’t coded it.”
“Oh, never mind,” Rukh ordered impatiently. “Send it in clear. Even if some outsider does pick it up, I daresay we can order three cases of champagne without causing international complications.”
Watkins put on his receivers, and sat down at the wireless set, with its many instruments in front of him, tapped the key, made an adjustment, and sat “listening in”—and waited.
“He’s waiting for the reply signal,” the Raja explained.
“Oh!” Crespin rejoined blankly. “May I take one of your excellent cigars, Raja?” he added with a better show of interest.
“By all means,” Rukh told him. He watched Crespin’s face and his hands as the Major lit the cigar. He credited both Traherne and Mrs. Crespin with enough finesse to cloak their thoughts and their emotions bafflingly well, but he made very sure of trapping the Major’s thoughts and emotions as they came. If Major Crespin knew anything at all of the wireless, Rukh made very sure that he would betray it, “chuck it” at him almost.
“I’ve got them,” Watkins announced after a suitable pause, and proceeded to send his message, slowly, very clearly: “The lady has come to terms,” the Morse code spelled very deliberately. Dr. Traherne and Mrs. Crespin understood none of it; Antony Crespin read it as if it had been large, clear print.
“May we speak?” he said in a low voice, bending a little towards Rukh.
“Oh, yes,” the Raja laughed; “you won’t be heard in Tashkent.”
“She will enter,” the valet’s fingers, and the disks on the wireless keyboard, spelled out carefully.
Crespin pulled his cigarette case out—what a stupid-looking face this Englishman had, the Raja thought. And he understood nothing of what the transmitter was saying—that was indubitable.
“His Highness’s household.”
Crespin held out the case to the doctor. “Have a cigarette, Traherne?”
“Thanks.” Traherne took one. Major Crespin struck a match—Watkins was repeating the message—Crespin held the match, saying, “Let us smoke and drink, for to-morrow we—” and he blew out the match, for the cigarette drew now. And the re-transmission ended.
“That’s how it’s done!” Rukh announced.
“How many words did he send?” Traherne inquired, with a show of interest that palpably was a little forced.
“What was it, Watkins?” the Raja demanded. “‘Forward by to-morrow’s caravan twelve cases champagne. Usual brand. Charge our account’—was that it?”
“That’s right, sir,” the man answered as he turned from the apparatus.
“Twelve words.” Rukh told Traherne, checking his count on his fingers.
“And can they really make sense out of those fireworks?” Crespin demanded a little rudely, and almost incredulously. Your Englishman always is incredulous of what he does not understand.
“I hope so—else we shall run short of champagne,” the Raja said with a laugh.
Traherne, blowing smoke-rings skilfully, knew that Rukh lied. A “show” run on such lines as this was would not get within but a few days’ supply of champagne. Dr. Traherne had understood nothing of what the keys had clicked out, but he was sure that it was something very different from what the Raja had translated—if it had been anything at all, or had gone anywhere. Dr. Traherne understood Rukh better than Rukh understood Crespin.
Watkins came into the snuggery, locked the folding door carefully, tried it, pocketed his key-ring, and turned to his master. “Any orders, Your ’Ighness?” he asked.
“No orders, Watkins,” the Raja told him lazily.
Major Antony Crespin had scored a point.