Swollen and quivered with anger as they were, they both were startled at
her beauty. Always rather more than good-looking, Lucilla Crespin had
never looked like this before.
“Ah,” Traherne said, pulling himself together with an almost heroic
effort, “here is Mrs. Crespin!”
The ayah—if that was her household rank—who had brought Lucilla into
the room went quietly out, closing the door. And the three captives—the
men at least knew it for that—stood alone in the vast, clamorous room.
Whatever fear was curdling the bloods of the men, the Englishwoman who
shared their danger, and stood in a graver one of her own, seemed
unperturbed and carefree. Certainly she was radiant, and superbly lovely
as she stood there, the breathing, beautiful jewel to which the palace
room, rich as it was, seemed but a humble setting, and the ermined
mountain peaks and blue velvet sky beyond the wide loggia but
background—background and subsidiary, though she faced it.
Crespin’s eyes filled, and Basil Traherne caught his breath painfully.
They had seen her in the saddle, they knew how well she rode, and how it
became her. They had seen her in the soft white gowns that such women
wear in India. They had seen her dainty and exquisitely dressed—a
wild-rose pink flush on her cheeks—at dozens of dances, in garden-party
finery, in Government House splendor, in neat, simple linens cuddling
her babies, in bib and apron mixing English cakes and scones for her
Punjabi tea-table, they had seen her in tea-gowns and tweeds, seen her
with her delicate patrician English face softened by the furs beneath
it, and had seen her with the gems on throat and breast resparkling in
her eyes—and the throat that each thought her utmost loveliness (and
that women who disliked her called her one beauty) gleam like snow under
the jewels that circled it, and needing them not, and Antony Crespin had
seen her in the soft déshabillé that enhanced her most. But neither ever
had seen her look as she looked now. Some lure of the East, some soul of
the East, had transformed the girl of a Surrey garden into an Eastern
queen—though perhaps she never before had looked, or felt, so intensely
English.
If either husband or friend saw or sensed this dual quality gleaming in
her as she stood there, as its colors gleam through an opal, neither was
conscious that he did so. But her beauty hit and quivered them. The
wild-rose tints were gone from her face; her pallor was radiant. Her
hair, always beautiful—and Crespin knew how soft and long, and how
uncontrived its rippling—was more elaborately dressed than was her
custom, some experter hands than hers had tired it—for Mrs. Crespin,
like many Englishwomen, was defter at handling bridle and reins and
rackets than she was at toilet devisings and doings. Her dark filmy gown
could not have been simpler or costlier; it was just cut from her
throat, and its long sleeves slashed to hint more than they showed of
her arms. Except for her wedding-ring and the engagement diamond beside
it, her only ornament was a gold locket that she always wore fastened
about her throat by a slender thread of chain. And she wore neither the
rings nor the locket and chain for ornament. Wives of such wedlock as
hers had proved feel more stigma than adornment in its symbols; and the
locket was infinitely more than any gewgaw—it held her babies’ faces.
She appeared to have thrown off or have lost her moiety of the fear they
three had shared. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips curved in a smile.
Whatever else she had felt, Mrs. Crespin was enjoying sincerely her
adventure now.
She stood and smiled at them. And the eyes and hearts of two men leapt
to her—and she seemed to them both the core of all desire, and
each—the two of such different instincts and tastes—thought her
perfect, a human flower needing no added perfume, no other beauty of
texture, tint or outline. A man loving a woman with all the tenderness
and strength of his best manhood may see and know her faults and flaws,
and love her for them none the less. But the man who desires sees no
imperfections, sight and mind are as fevered and irresponsible as his
aching blood is. The husband who had lost her, and the man who loved her
as reverently as passionately, and, so, without hope or thought, and
even without wish—except as our flesh and nerves wish in spite of
us—that he ever might seek or claim or hold her—both desired her as
she stood there in the sumptuous simplicity of the soft thing she wore,
and beautiful and desirable as she never had seemed before. Traherne
forgot where they were—for a moment—forgot the danger that menaced
them; but he did not forget his best self or hers, and he did not forget
a boy he had fagged for at Harrow, or the sore young tragedy that had
been that schoolmate’s to bear, and his own to witness. And no
treacherous thing lurked in his heart, no dishonorable thing showed in
his eyes. Crespin too forgot where they were and what their plight, but
he forgot nothing else—he remembered his wooing of her, his possession
of her, and how he had lost her.
And Lucilla Crespin looked from one to the other, and smiled. She did
not see how white their faces were; she had not caught their quarreling
as she came in, for the sinking sun shone hard in her eyes, and their
backs were to it.
“Ah, here is Mrs. Crespin!” Traherne said with an effort.
She took a few steps towards them, holding out her draperies a little,
as gleefully as a child in new festival robes. “Behold the Paris model!”
she bade them.
“My eye, Lu, what a ripping frock!” was Antony’s comment.
“Talk of magic, Major!” Traherne laughed, turning and speaking as if
never a shadow of quarreling had hung over them. “There’s something in
what our friend says.”
“What’s that? What about magic?” Mrs. Crespin demanded, accepting the
chair that Crespin moved towards her.
“We’ll tell you afterwards,” her husband promised. “Let’s have your
adventures first.” He spoke lightly, but he was anxious.
“No adventures precisely—only a little excursion into the Arabian
Nights,” she laughed.
“Do tell us!” Traherne urged.
“Well,” she began, a little nervous now, Traherne thought, but evidently
not without enjoyment of the experience, “my guide—the woman you
saw—led me along corridor after corridor, and upstairs and downstairs,
till we came to a heavy bronze door where two villainous looking blacks,
with crooked swords, were on guard. I didn’t like the looks of them a
bit; but I was in for it, and had to go on. They drew their swords and
flourished a sort of salute, grinning with all their teeth. Then the
ayah clapped her hands twice, some one inspected us through a grating in
the door, and the ayah said a word or two—”
“No doubt, ‘Open Sesame!’” Traherne suggested.
Mrs. Crespin nodded. “The door was opened by a hideous, hump-backed old
woman, just like the wicked fairy in a pantomime. She didn’t actually
bite me, but she looked as if she’d like to—and we passed on. More
corridors, with curtained doorways, where I had a feeling that furtive
eyes were watching me—though I can’t positively say I saw them. But I’m
sure I heard whisperings and titterings—”
“Good Lord!” Crespin broke in. “If I’d thought they were going to treat
you like that, I’d have—”
“Oh,” his wife retorted, “there was nothing you could have done; and,
you see, no harm came of it. At last the woman led me into a large sort
of wardrobe room, lighted from above, and almost entirely lined with
glazed presses full of frocks. Then she slid back a panel, and there was
a marble-lined bathroom!—a deep pool, with a trickle of water flowing
into it from a dolphin’s head of gold—just enough to make the surface
ripple and dance. And all around were the latest Bond Street
luxuries—shampooing bowls and brushes, bottles of essences, towels on
hot rails and all the rest of it. The only thing that was disagreeable
was a sickly odor from some burning pastilles—oh, and a coal-black
bath-woman.”
“It suggests a Royal Academy picture,” Traherne observed. “‘The
Odalisque’s Pool.’”
“Or a soap advertisement,” Crespin objected.
“Same thing,” Traherne said lazily.
“Well, I wasn’t sorry to play the odalisque for once,” Lucilla assured
them, “and when I had finished, lo and behold! the ayah had laid out for
me half-a-dozen gorgeous and distinctly risky dinner-gowns.” Traherne
gnawed suddenly at his lip, Crespin frowned angrily, but neither spoke
or moved, and Lucilla, not catching their common thought, went on, “I
had to explain to her in gestures that I couldn’t live up to any of
them, and would rather put on my old traveling dress. She seemed quite
frightened at the idea—”
“She’d probably have got the sack—perhaps literally—if she’d let you
do that,” Crespin said slowly, and a hard, fierce look came into the
other man’s eyes.
But Lucilla still seemed unconscious of their thought, and continued
quite cheerfully—Rukh a little in her blood now, Traherne
thought—“Anyway, she at last produced this comparatively inoffensive
frock. She did my hair—fancy her being able to do it like this!—and
wanted to finish me off with all sorts of necklaces and bangles, but I
stuck to my old locket with the babies’ heads.”
“Well,” her husband said discontentedly, “all’s well that ends well, I
suppose. But if I’d foreseen all this ‘Secrets of the Zenana’ business,
I’m dashed if I wouldn’t—”
Lucilla cut him short. “What were you saying about magic when I came
in?”
“Only that this man, Watkins—he’s the husband of your ayah, by the
way—says queer things go on here, and pretends to believe in magic.”
“Do you know, Antony”—Mrs. Crespin turned to her husband—“when the
Raja was speaking about him—this man Watkins—down there, it seemed to
me that his face was somehow familiar to me.”
Crespin sat bolt upright, and his tired face lit with interest. “There,
Doctor!” he exclaimed. “What did I say? I knew I’d seen him before, but
I’m damned if I can place him.”
“I wish I could get a good look at him,” Lucilla said thoughtfully. And
as she spoke Watkins passed through the room again, carrying four
blossoms which he took to the dinner table and laid on the folded
serviettes; and Traherne saw him.
“That’s easy,” he told her. “There he is. Shall I call him in?”
Mrs. Crespin nodded eagerly. “Do! Say I want him to thank his wife from
me.”
“Watkins!” Traherne called him.
“Sir?” Watkins responded instantly, but without moving from the table.
“Mrs. Crespin would like to speak to you.” And at that the man came at
once, and stood waiting, inwardly curious, outwardly respectful.
“I hear, Watkins,” Mrs. Crespin told him, looking him well in the
face—and wishing the light were not at his back, “that the ayah that so
kindly attended to me is your wife.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Watkins said staunchly enough. Crespin wondered
lazily if the cockney was fond—or even proud—of his native wife. Such
things always interested Antony Crespin rather.
“She gave me most efficient assistance,” Mrs. Crespin said, speaking
very deliberately, that she might study his face the longer, “and as she
seems to know no English, I couldn’t thank her. Will you be good enough
to tell her how much I appreciated all she did for me?”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” the valet said as if he meant it. “She’ll be
proud to hear it.” And the man looked genuinely pleased. He was
genuinely pleased; for the shifty little cockney was fond of his big
dark wife, and proud of her too, as small men often are of wives that
o’ertop them. And it was, as it chanced, the one good human spot in
Samuel Watkins’ thin, brutal heart. “Is that all, ma’am?” he asked after
a pause—for she still was looking at him as if she might have more to
say.
But she could think of nothing else, and she believed that she had
gained her point, so she nodded pleasantly, and dismissed him with a
pleasant, “That’s all, thank you, Watkins.”
The man bowed, and went back to the loggia, but he passed now to the
outer side of the dinner table, where, seeming to be studying it still,
he stood watching them warily. They involuntarily drew closer together,
but Traherne, seeming to be watching idly the kindling mountains and
sky, was watching Watkins as narrowly as Watkins watched them.
“You’ve a good memory for faces, Lu,” the Major said to his wife. “Do
you spot him?”
“Don’t let him see we’re talking about him,” she cautioned. “I believe I
do know him, but I’m not quite sure. Do you remember,” she said slowly,
“the first year we were in India, there was a man in the Dorsets that
used often to be on guard outside the mess-room?”
Antony Crespin sprang to his feet. “By God,” he cried, “you’ve hit it!”