They all three were excited—even Traherne, though he scarcely showed
it—and they drew closer together eagerly. What importance Mrs.
Crespin’s discovery, if she was right, could be to them, or why it
excited them, not one of them could have said; but in such threatening
of shipwreck as theirs agitated human minds see in every straw a
possible life-boat, and catch at it anxiously. They clustered together
excitedly, Lucilla Crespin still in her seat, the two men standing close
before her. Traherne’s face alert, the woman’s eyes sparkling, and
Antony Crespin raised his voice exultantly. “By God, you’ve hit it, Lu!”
he repeated.
“Take care!” Traherne cautioned him quickly, not looking at Major
Crespin, but at the man out on the loggia. “He’s watching.”
Dr. Traherne was right; Watkins was watching stealthily, and too was
straining his utmost to listen.
“You remember,” Mrs. Crespin almost whispered, “he deserted, Antony, and
was suspected of having murdered a woman in the bazaar.”
“I believe it’s the very man,” Crespin muttered eagerly.
“It’s certainly very like him,” his wife insisted.
“And he swears he’s never been in India!” Crespin said with a nasty
laugh.
“Under the circumstances,” Dr. Traherne said dryly, “he naturally would.
I should.”
“At all events he’s not a man to be trusted,” Mrs. Crespin added
regretfully.
“Trusted!” Crespin retorted impatiently, “who thought of trusting him?
Who’d be such a fool? He with that damned Uriah Heep face of his, and a
British man, if of the true cockney brand, an Englishman acting as a
body servant to a native! Who’d _think_ of trusting him!”
For all that same they all were disappointed, and they all knew it. Any
port in a storm! And, if misery has to put up with strange bed-fellows,
it very often seeks them. The valet was English, their countryman, and
for that the thought of each of them had fastened upon him as a possible
aid or means of escape. And Lucilla Crespin was honest enough to say so.
“I had for one,” she said frankly. “I liked his wife. He comes from
home! It must mean something to him that we are his country-people. But
now, of course—if I’m right, and I think I am—and especially if he
thinks we’ve recognized him—he’d know you, Antony, of course.”
“Don’t you believe it, Lu, country and all that means nothing to such
fellows,” Major Crespin interrupted. And Traherne shook his head.
“No, Mrs. Crespin, he won’t help us, whether he’s the fellow you think
he is or not. I know his breed. I know the shape of his head. We must
find another way out—that is, if we need one—which I hope we shan’t.”
“But you think we shall?”
“Yes,” he answered her gravely. “I think we shall.”
The Raja of Rukh was dressing for dinner. There was no tire-man with
him, and he moved about his dressing-room as if very much in the habit
of waiting upon himself—perhaps an old varsity habit that clung to him
still here in his palace-fortress on his native hills. For he had kept
no valet at Cambridge. A turban newly wound he wore on his head, but his
low-cut pumps, his well-creased trousers, were quite European, and so
were the silk braces that held them up to the waist line of his
immaculate shirt. His waistcoat and dinner jacket still lay on a chair,
but his studs were in, his collar was on, and his white tie was
beautifully done—if he had tied it himself, his evening tie did him
great credit. And he had. The Raja of Rukh was deft-fingered—he could
dress himself from skin to button-hole rose without worry or accident;
and he usually did—no fumbling, no searching for studs, no swear words,
no beading of sweat, no butter fingers, neither a crease nor a care.
Watkins looked the perfect valet, but Rukh himself had trained him for
the part, and there was less of valet than of varlet in Watkins’ office,
and very much more of deeper doing.
The Raja stood a long time at the low wide window, and looked out over
Rukh. It was his, all that he saw was his. Not a wee white hill-mouse,
not a jeweled-and-lacquered beetle, not a leaf, not a tiniest grain but
was his. The people were his—the patient, plodding, excitable people.
The cattle were his, sure-footed, mountain things that carried the water
his people drew, that carried the wood his people hewed. The caravans
that came and went on the long, periled mountain roads, now in snow and
ice, now in pelting heat and thick flowered and perfumed underbush, a
camel among them sometimes, but almost entirely tiny, sturdy, sagacious
ponies, and sweat-dripping human beasts of burden, bringing him and his
miniature but costly court every conceivable thing from marts distant
and near—glass from Venice, enamels from Japan, lacquers from China,
leathers from Russia, wines from France and Portugal, fabrics from
everywhere, necessities and luxuries, tinned asparagus and turtle soup,
linens from Belfast, flesh-pots for him, cotton cloths and grains for
his people—all were his. And he loved it as a woman loves her young—a
ruthless, iron-willed man, his heart was mother-soft to his peasant
people. The little huts hanging there on the mountain edges, with the
smoke from the dung fires curling out—telling that the evening meal of
thin, flat cakes was cooking—were dearer to him than was this great,
palace home of his own. He was very rich. The place looked poor enough
(all but his own fortress coign) and the people were, but the hard,
rocky place belched up daily wealth for his hidden coffers. Almost
numberless coins of silver and of gold, sodden and grimed with the dust
of ages, were buried beneath the palace, in a rock-cut fastness to which
only he and one of his henchmen knew the way, or held the key, and the
bale-and-sack-bent hill-men and the sure-footed creatures who toiled
back and forth from Rukh to Bokhara and Kabul by night as by day, taking
his products, bringing the price of them, never ceased. His spending was
prodigal, but his income alone more than sufficed for it. And his buried
treasure grew.
A woman came unceremoniously in, and he turned to her instantly, and
stood and waited her pleasure. The woman was old, poorly though
comfortably clad. There were many rings on her bare feet’s toes, but the
rings were of little value, circlets of brass and of silver coarsely
jeweled with uncut gems of the commoner pebble-like sorts, none of them
“precious,” and all of them but fragments—and she wore no other
ornament. Her wrinkled skin was exactly the color of the saffron stuff
that formed her only visible garment, and the wrinkled saffron skin was
as coarse as the saffron woolen stuff. Her white hair was uncovered, her
strong eyebrows streaked her yellow brow like twin patches of persistent
snow on some rough brown ledge of mountain rock; palpably a peasant
woman, hill-born, hill-bred, untutored—though her hands, mottled and
soft with age, looked to have done no work—and the Raja of Rukh smiled
at her tenderly, and waited her pleasure, as meekly as a timid child who
feared and anticipated punishment or, at the best, bitter scolding from
an exigeant and petulant mother. And it was just that that he did expect
and very much dreaded. She usually came here to berate him, and she
never failed to do it, if she found him in European garments, or had
heard that European guests were being harbored and entertained.
The Raja ruled Rukh—all there obeyed him abjectly—all but Ak-kok, the
old peasant woman. She obeyed no one, and feared no one or thing, not
even the Green Goddess, not the sacred serpents, not the man-eating
beasts that prowled from the mountains and wilds to maul and devour. She
obeyed no one, she feared nothing, and though she worshiped him
fiercely, she bullied the Raja of Rukh in season and out. And he loved
her and feared her, salaamed to her too, and called her “Mother,”
caressed her when she would brook it—for she had suckled him, and the
babe she had left to other care when she had come to the palace to do it
had sickened and died. She had not seemed to care then, forbidding her
heart to quicken or falter a single beat, forbidding her heart to feel
or to know, lest it curdle her milk. And the babe had been her only one,
and its father was newly dead. But when the baby prince was weaned, she
had let her pent-up, drugged grief have its way. She had covered her
face in her robe, and gone from the palace, wailing and beating her
breasts—still sore from a festered teething-grip, sorer still for the
babe lips that had been denied their milk—had gone to the place on the
hillside where the burning-place stood, and had joined the mourners
squatted about a reeking pile—a child’s as it chanced—and when the
little skull had cracked open with that sound like which there is no
other, and the mourners had sobbed and cried, Ak-kok had laughed, rent
the air with her laughing, had torn her garments and strewn the pile
with them, had danced, shrieking with laughter, had torn at her face and
breasts till her blood ran, and then—for none dared stay her—had
turned and tottered away, still lashing the day with her laughing. It
was winter—and two nights and a day had passed before they found her,
out in a desolate, desert place up on the mountains, nearly naked,
raving and babbling.
We punish our insane; Orientals succor and tend them.
Tenderly they carried mad Ak-kok back to the palace, gently they laid
her down, never they left her, never they chided or thwarted or vexed
her. And—a year and more after—her wits (as we perhaps witlessly call
our human sense of human ills) came back. And such work as she chose to
do she did, such things as she bade were done. She chose to sew with the
girls who embroidered and beaded. Never she spoke to a child, rarely she
looked at one, except the prince whom she had suckled. Little by little
her love crept back to him, and then her needles and silks and baskets
of sorted beads, of tinsel threads, trays of seed-pearls and of beetles’
gold-and-emerald backs had filled less and less of her time, the royal
boy more and more. And when he had wived she had disliked all his
brides, but had established herself nurse-in-chief to the babies they
had borne.
They were twenty-five now, the offspring of the Raja, the nurslings of
Ak-kok. Not one had died. La-swak, a boy of two now, was the father’s
favorite, and old Ak-kok loved La-swak more than she had loved aught
else or all else before, even tenfold, more than the Raja and father
did.
The Raja waited.
Ak-kok spoke his name hoarsely—no prefix, no gesture of respect, not
even one of berating—just his name flung passionately out at him in the
old woman’s peasant guttural.
The Raja salaamed, and waited her tirade.
But the woman took no heed of the long broadcloth trousers he wore, no
heed of the cerise silk elastic that braced them, none of coat and vest
on the chair. She had not seen them. And she spoke no word of rebuke. It
was fear that convulsed her, not anger. A bead of blood came from her
nostril, and trickled down on to her withered lip. She did not feel it.
Twice she tried to speak again, before she did.
“La-swak!” she moaned.
The Raja sprang to her, caught at her shoulder. He could not speak, but
she mastered herself, and answered him.
“The cramp again. His limbs are stiff and cold. We cannot soothe him. He
cries for you.” She gathered the man’s hand in hers, and led him from
the room.