The rooms to which Mrs. Crespin and the two Englishmen had been
conducted were in as perfect taste as they were luxurious and were all
comfortable, hers even more all this than theirs, but all admirable and
irreproachable.
But the room to which they were taken, to await the Raja’s pleasure and
his dinner, left a good deal to be desired, displayed a good deal to
regret. In no way as bad as the usual State Apartments of a native
palace, it smacked of them in much. The room itself, and the costliness
of the deckings, would have discredited no princely house in Europe or
New York; a spacious and beautifully proportioned room, opening wide at
the back upon a wide loggia. Beyond the loggia rose the snow-clad peaks
of the distant mountains, rose-dappled now by the kiss of the late
afternoon sun, and with strips and spaces of blue and soft purple sky
between them.
The room itself was splendidly though dashingly and somewhat sparsely
furnished. Most of its furnishings old-fashioned now—no “new-art”
here—and some of it faded, but all the sightlier for that, because
colors and materials, insistently pronounced when new, time and wear had
softened and mellowed to a friendly, gracious exquisiteness that was
welcome and restful and kind. But the usual clocks were there, a dozen
or more, all of them ugly, several of them tawdry. Most of the actual
furniture was black, but for that it was admirable, rich, not heavy, the
black wood picked out delicately with gold, the upholstery covered with
yellow brocades. But the yellow damasks and the gold tracing did not
clash, for they had grown old and amiable together, and time had blended
them. The crystal chandelier was there, to be sure, but only one, and a
crystal chandelier with a difference. Its lines were graceful, its long
pendants winked and sparkled pleasantly; and it flooded the great room
without dominating it—a great, gorgeous, costly thing, but you could
forget it. It was not insistent—imperial without being impertinent;
old, dignified, in no way “new rich,” and no more garish than soft,
changeable silk is. A rounded ottoman—an inviting resting-place heaped
with soft cushions, neither buried nor crushed beneath them—stood under
the chandelier, placed there too mathematically. The marble fireplace
would have rejoiced an Athenian sculptor, or Robert Adam when he carved
and cut old London’s Adelphi into forms and lines of beauty; and the
mirror above it would have intrigued Marie Antoinette or the beauties of
Watteau.
In this room of his the Raja of Rukh, if he himself had selected and
directed its appointments, had mingled things from many lands and of
many times, but they did not blend, and not many of them suited the room
itself. Two crystal candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, echoed with
their pendants the iridescent note of the large chandelier, and between
them, the mantle’s only other ornament, stood exquisitely molded in
bronze, eighteen inches perhaps in height, but a small thing in the
room’s big space, a seemingly tiny reproduction of the six-armed goddess
in the temple.
The fireplace was ready piled with logs, but they were not lit. Electric
lights neither artistically nor cunningly fashioned were placed
conveniently here and there. A gramophone, as ugly as that modern
disfigurement usually is, stood obtrusively at one end of the room;
French and English books and reviews lay on several tables. There were
roses in bowls, and tulips in vases. There was scent of sandal-wood and
of lemon-verbena in the air, a smell of musk on the cushions. The
pictures on the wall were bad—but they had their right here, portraits
of handsome, gorgeously dressed Orientals—bad painting, if not bad
drawing, as Western canons go, flat-faced and over-detailed as the
craftsmanship of the Persian artists when Persia held pride of place in
the Asian art world; but the pictures, not crowded, were not too many,
and their carved camphor-wood frames were very beautiful. And they
spoke—they told a story; and despicable as was their brush-work, nil
their perspective, overdone and finicking their detail, peccable their
drawing, they had character—it was patrician. And similar as they all
were, each had its own clear individuality as differentiated as the
tissues and gems of their turbans. And wherever you went the eyes of
those pictured princes followed you, or rather drew your own eyes back
to the inscrutable painted lid-narrowed, dark eyes of those who had
ruled here before Rome had a Cæsar.
Traherne, coming in, looked at the room without much seeing it, for his
eyes were anxiously searching for the Crespins.
They were not there. No one was there. And again he marked time and
waited, for the very solid reason that no other course recommended
itself to him as wiser. He moved idly, but watchfully to the open side
of the room—even to look out over an open landscape might ease a trifle
his sense of imprisonment; but he stopped at the room edge of the
loggia, because he saw that three natives were there. He had no desire
for Rukh society, peasant or noble.
Two turbaned servants were there laying a table, a dignified old
major-domo directing them importantly. Traherne saw that they were
laying four covers, and that the table appointments were extremely
luxurious and entirely European. He turned at the slight sound of a door
opened quickly.
Crespin came in and looked about him apprehensively, and the servant who
had ushered him in, salaamed and went back closing the door behind him.
“Ah,” Crespin said with a tone of “thank goodness” in his voice, “there
you are, Doctor!”
“Hullo!” Traherne returned. He noticed how flushed the other looked, and
for all his flush how haggard. “How did you get on?”
“All right. Had a capital tub. And you?”
“Feeling more like a human being,” the doctor admitted. “And what about
Mrs. Crespin? I hope she’s all right?”
“She was taken off by an ayah as soon as we got in—” Crespin said
lamely—“in the women’s quarters presumably.” He did not find it
necessary to add that it was but hearsay information he passed on, and
that he had seen no more of his wife than Traherne himself had since she
had preceded them from the temple in her palanquin—and he did not meet
the other man’s glance, but shifted his eyes about the strange room
uneasily.
Basil Traherne’s face whitened, and his strong hands clenched angrily.
“And you let her go off alone?” he demanded violently.
“What the hell could I do?” Crespin retorted, more resentfully than he
felt. “I couldn’t thrust myself into the women’s quarters.”
Traherne swung towards him with a smothered oath. “And I tell you you
ought to have thrust yourself in anywhere—heaven or hell! And you
should have kept her with you! You could have kept her with you,”
Traherne cried passionately.
“Do you think she would have stayed?” Crespin demanded nastily. “And,
come to that, what business is it of yours?”
“It’s any _man’s_ business to be concerned for a woman’s safety,”
Traherne pounded back.
“Well, well—all right,” Crespin muttered weakly. He had come into the
room “considerably bucked,” but the courage he’d found in a drink or two
after his tub, was evaporating fast, and he wished, ’pon his soul he
did, that Traherne wouldn’t rave so. “Well, well. But there was nothing
I could have done, or that she would have let me do. And I don’t think
there’s any danger.”
Traherne’s mouth twitched with the disgust he felt. And this was her
husband! “Let us hope not,” he said coldly.
Crespin ignored the sneer in the other’s voice. He preferred to—he felt
in no shape for a scrap just now, and there might be scrap enough of
another and deadlier sort to face soon—and that would have to be faced
no matter in what shape he felt. He sat down heavily in a big chair by
the fireplace. “It’s a vast shanty, this,” he said fumblingly, looking
about him vaguely.
“It’s a palace and fortress in one,” Traherne replied, but in no
friendly tone.
Crespin did not wish to talk, but he clung to the change of subject
desperately, and said, “A devilish strong place before the days of big
guns. But a couple of howitzers would make it look pretty foolish.”
“No doubt; but how would you get them here?” snapped Traherne.
That was unanswerable, and Crespin made no attempt to answer it.
“I wish to God we had them here though!” the physician added
passionately, not looking at the man he spoke to, but with tortured eyes
hard on the door, his ears strained to catch a woman’s step in the hall.
“I wish we had,” Major Crespin assented dejectedly. He pulled himself
out of the armchair, levering himself up by its arms, and moved to the
loggia. “My hat!” he exclaimed, and whistled in surprise and approval as
the dinner table met his gaze. “I say—it looks as if our friend were
going to do us well.”
A servant came in with a large wine-cooler and put it down. Traherne
paid him no attention, but Crespin watched him narrowly, and as soon as
the native had gone as he’d come, and closed the door behind him,
Crespin pulled a bottle up from the ice, and inspected its label. He
whistled again, and his bloodshot eyes glistened. “Perrier Jouet,
nineteen-o-six, by the Lord!” He ran an affectionate tremulous fat
finger over the already beading gold-foiled neck of the bottle
thirstily. Even poor Crespin’s fingers were thirsty. He was one big
thirst, and the sight of the vintage wine almost maddened him. He rammed
it back into its ice pack, and strolled over to the ottoman, and sank
into its cushions. “It’s a rum start this, Traherne,” he murmured. “I
suppose you intellectual chaps would call it romantic.”
Traherne took his eyes from the door for a moment. “More romantic than
agreeable, I should say,” he muttered, as he picked the small goddess up
from the mantle. “I don’t like the looks of this lady,” he added as he
put it down.
“What is she?” Crespin asked sleepily.
“The same figure we saw in the little temple, where we landed,” Traherne
told him.
Both were talking to lift a little, if they could, the strain of the
tension that both were feeling, and of the bitterness that surged in
each against the other.
“How many arms has she got?” Crespin demanded, regarding her lazily.
“Six.”
“She could give you a jolly good hug, anyway,” Crespin said with a
mirthless and slightly tipsy laugh.
Traherne shot him a sharp look. “You wouldn’t want another,” he said
darkly, and turned away to watch the door.
For a time there was silence. Neither man spoke or moved and from the
outer stillness no stir of life came. Traherne’s face grew like a death
mask, sweat gathered on Crespin’s forehead, and specked his red face.
A jackal called.
Some deeper-throated thing answered or challenged it out on the
mountains.
“Where do you suppose we really are, Traherne?” Crespin asked
unsteadily.
“On the map, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, in the never-never land,” Traherne answered without moving his eyes
from the door. “Somewhere on the way to Bokhara. I’ve been searching my
memory for all I ever heard about Rukh. I fancy very little is known,
except that it seems to send forth a peculiarly poisonous breed of
fanatics.”
“Like those who did poor Haredale in?” Crespin asked, referring to the
crime for which the newspapers had reported the perpetrators were to be
hanged.
“Precisely.”
“D’you think,” Crespin asked, shifting unhappily on his seat, “our host
was serious when he said they were his brothers? Or was he only pulling
our leg, curse his impudence?”
“He probably meant caste-brothers, or simply men of his race,” the
doctor surmised. “But even so, it’s awkward.”
“I don’t see what these beggars, living at the back of the north wind,
have got to do with Indian politics,” Crespin grumbled. “We’ve never
interfered with them.”
“Oh, it’s a case of Asia for the Asians,” the other solved it. “Ever
since the Japanese beat the Russians, the whole continent has been
itching to kick us out.”
“So that they may cut each other’s throats at leisure, eh?” Crespin
asked almost quarrelsomely.
Traherne answered no less so. Any pretext or none would have served them
for dire quarrel now—only a woman’s peril held them in leash. “We
Westerners never cut each other’s throats, do we?” he snarled.
But still he watched the door.
Crespin began a retort, but cut it short, as he saw that the English
valet was in the room, and Traherne turning expectantly at the sound saw
Watkins too, and though disappointed was glad. Both the gentlemen were
glad to see the serving man. Any interruption was welcome, any human
third a real relief.