Lucilla Crespin came into sight first, but Traherne was first on the
ground. Crespin climbing down rather awkwardly hesitated a moment at a
difficult point, his foothold not too wide or secure, the available
foothold below an uncomfortable distance to a man of his weight. India
does not treat us all alike, we who invade her, not even our
soldier-men. Punjabi soldiering had not kept Antony Crespin fit. Lucilla
had known it for years; observant, clear-eyed, badly sensitive where
those who were hers were concerned, she had watched the sag and the
bloat come and gain almost day by day. But as she stood and looked at
him now, it struck her anew, and more sharply than it had done before,
sickened her even more than it had done in those two bitter hours of her
fresh wifehood’s disillusion when she had realized shudderingly the twin
rotten fissures in a husband’s being.
Women and wine! Both had branded and slackened him. She wondered which
had spoiled and twisted him most. She knew which had tortured her the
more. The “pegs” he had sipped and drained too often, too early, too
late, and too strong, had disgusted and “turned” her clean, wholesome
flesh the more. But the women had tortured her far more cruelly than his
cups had. They had “turned” her soul and poisoned her heart. The
drinking she held a weakness—contemptible but not unpitiable—innate,
inherited, uncontrollable perhaps, but the infidelities that had
affronted her pride, bowed her head, curdled the milk in her young
mother-breasts, she held a personal meanness and unforgivable crime, a
hideous responsibility that lay forever at his door. It is so that women
judge—forgiving, condoning every masculine folly and sin that is no
direct reflection and slight to her.
This was not the man she had married—that almost obese, flush-faced
Crespin standing irresolutely there a little above her. No. But it was
what had been he, and it was the human being to whom she was
indissolubly bound. The fetter cut into her being. But she kept her
pact—now as ever.
“Take care, Antony!” she cried brightly, as he was about to risk it and
jump. “Let Dr. Traherne give you a hand.”
“Yes!” Traherne echoed. He already had gained the lower ground,
surefooted and cool.
“Hang it all,” Crespin shook his wife’s suggestion and the other man’s
proffered assistance off with a testy impatience that spurred his own
faulty physical courage, “I’m not such a crock as all that.” He jumped
as he spoke, jumped heavily, but landed safely enough.
Lucilla gave a little sigh of relief; she scarcely could have told
herself how far it was sincere, how far acting—her wifehood was so
permeated by acting now.
Traherne turned away from Antony, and a something of pity passed across
the younger man’s eyes; he understood, as she did not, that Lucilla’s
words had hurt Crespin—and he pitied him. He still judged Antony more
fairly than Mrs. Crespin did, more fairly than she could, or many women
can.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crespin?” There was just enough concern in his
voice and in his glance, and not an iota too much. Less would have been
a boorishness, more must have been a caress. “Not very much shaken?”
“Not a bit!” she laughed.
“It was a nasty bump,” the pilot said ruefully.
“You managed splendidly,” the woman defended heartily.
“Come on, Lu,” Crespin interrupted; “sit on that ledge, and I can swing
you down.”
Perhaps Basil Traherne doubted it, for he too went a step nearer and
held out his hand, saying, “Let me—”
She put her hands impartially in theirs, and jumped lightly down,
sayings “Thanks,” as impartially.
The natives watching the strange newcomers with wonder and fear, began
to chatter eagerly among themselves. If the big bird of prey had seemed
uncanny and awesome, these strange creatures it had disgorged as it
dashed to its death, scarcely seemed less so. All three were protected
and disfigured with flying-helmets and leather aviation coats—odd
enough sights to European eyes when seen for the first time. What must
they not have looked to those untraveled natives of isolated, rock-bound
Rukh!
The priest turned and said a word to one of the gape-mouth crowd—a
lithe, sinewy youth more scantily clad than the others, a grotesque
cipher, picked out in red, green and ochre, branded on one gleaming
shoulder, and but for his rag of loin-cloth, stripped for his master’s
running, which was his office in life. The priest spoke, and the runner
instantly made off at great speed towards the distant castle.
The travelers had taken off their helmets now, and a new murmur of
wonder ran through the little cluster, while a half look of intelligence
just showed on the priest’s face.
“That last ten minutes was pretty trying,” Major Crespin said, in the
tone of a man who half apologizes, half defends some premeditated deed
he knows apt to be censured. “I don’t mind owning that my nerves are all
of a twitter.” He fumbled inside his thick leather coat, and pulled out
a flask. “Have a mouthful, Traherne?” he asked with a nonchalance a
shade overdone, as he unscrewed it and poured out a generous dram.
“No, thank you,” Traherne said easily, helping Mrs. Crespin out of her
coat.
“You won’t, I know,” Crespin said to his wife with a feebly jocular turn
of the flask-top—now a cup—in her direction. “I will!” he drank off
the brandy. “That’s better!” He refilled the cup and drank again. “And
now, where are we, Doctor?”
“I have no notion,” Traherne confessed as he threw off his own coat.
“Let’s ask the populace,” Crespin suggested cheerfully. Traherne nodded,
not too encouragingly, and Crespin went up to the still chattering
crowd—in which the priest alone stood silent and grimly observant,
watching the pale intruders intently through narrowing eyes. The natives
shrank back in open fear as Crespin came up to them—all but the priest;
he stood his ground, and even, at the half salutation the Englishman
gave, salaamed slightly, but almost contemptuously.
Crespin spoke—in Hindustani—but it drew a blank. It was evident that
Hindustani was as useless here as English or Norse. The priest listened
blankly, and then in his turn poured forth a speech of some
length—almost as long as it was guttural, voluble and heated, pointing
dramatically now to the dusky incarnadined temple, now to the beetling
palace.
Perhaps Mrs. Crespin and Dr. Traherne expected little from Crespin’s
embassy, perhaps they were willing to wait patiently to hear from him
its result. For they made no steps to follow him, and paid little
attention, but stood together just where he left them.
“You were splendid all through,” Traherne said in a low, tense voice
that said more than his words.
“I had perfect faith in you,” the woman answered, her eyes full and
frank on his.
And his eyes thanked her. But he only said regretfully, “If I’d had
another pint of petrol I might have headed for that sort of esplanade
behind the castle up there. . . .”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“. . . and made an easy landing. But I simply had to try for this place,
and trust to luck.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Lucilla said quickly, “but your skill that saved us.”
The sudden blood rushed over Traherne’s wind-browned face. It was more
than she had said to him ever before—not the simple, conventional
words, but the pride in him that pulsed in them, pride in him, and
something too of a claiming. She did not know that, and he knew that she
did not. But he heard and understood, and his heart lashed at his ribs,
and was hurt. In all the few hard years of his service to her, man’s
service never stinted, never underlined, no such open recognition of the
hidden thing that lay between them had ever been told. He had
known—from the first. But he had hoped and believed that she did not.
Was he glad or sorry? He was both. His loyalty and friendship regretted,
but his man’s nature leapt and was glad. When he had tried to hide
Antony’s weakness from her, and to shield her from it—to keep it out of
her presence, to drive it from her thoughts, when together they had
strained and schemed, as they constantly had, to save Crespin from
himself, and her and her children from the present shame and coming
consequences of his sick misdoings, no word, no sign, had been let slip
from him to her, or from her to him, acknowledging why he stood to her
side. She often had spoken to him of Antony’s good qualities, never of
Antony’s faults.
But now a barrier was down—only one of many, the others still held, but
one—and she had let it fall. It usually is the woman who lets it fall.
“It wasn’t luck,” she repeated contemptuously. “It was your skill that
saved us,” she added, and the change in her voice, the quick, white
flame on her face, was confession and challenge—challenge the more
compelling, confession the more complete, because the woman had made
them unconsciously.
“You are very good to me,” Traherne said in a voice not too well under
control. The woman looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, as they had
not met before. His face quivered a little. And then the man’s eyes
fell—not Lucilla’s.