It took pluck—to go through it without a whimper, without one flicker
of the white feather for any inimical other to see and report, or even
for the solitude and their own tortured souls to see—what they had to
go through that night—three of them, each alone, at bay, well-nigh in
absolute despair, imprisoned in a wild far-off, unknown place. It took
pluck. But they had it.
When the ayah had gone—dismissed by a smile and a gesture of
thanks—the native woman not, Lucilla Crespin thought, utterly
pitiless—Lucilla knelt down by her bed. She knelt there a long time,
keeping a tryst her father had taught her.
When she rose she stood a while at the wide window looking out at the
golden-white night, her face twisted in torture, but kindled from
prayer.
Nowhere else does the maiden-hair fern grow as it grows in Rukh, in such
few soil-filled cracks as the great mountains carry on their sides. From
where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim
stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every
frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately
cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the
great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped
flowers here and there among them. A lump came in her throat—her father
had cared so much for his maiden-hair ferns! She looked away from them.
She counted three temples, snow-white in the moonlight. She shuddered.
Should she live on through this night to die on a heathen temple floor?
Or should she take _the other way_—now, if she could? Yes! No—they
might escape it yet—and the babies!
She closed the silk-curtains, and went resolutely to bed. Her body was
weary from the long flight, the crash, the harrowing incidents that had
followed the forced landing, the worse that had followed—the strain in
the salon, and at dinner, the terrible climax. Heavens, how tired she
was! She would need the best use of her body to-morrow, if only to carry
it bravely; wisest to rest it to-night. She might not be able to force
her mind to rest—for, if her body was strained and tired, what of
it!—but her muscles were hers still to command, and they should obey
her, she’d lay them down, loosened, unfettered, and they at least should
relax and rest.
She lay a long time, alone in that strange place, not knowing what might
come to her there or when—she wished the native woman had stayed—why
had she not detained her?—lay perfectly still, keeping tryst: tryst
with her father, tryst with the old Surrey garden, tryst with her
children, tryst with Antony as she had known and loved him before the
knowing and love were spoiled, tryst with the first days she
remembered—old dolls, old lessons, old games, old childish sorrows and
joys. She kept tryst with her girlhood. She fed the pigeons again, she
rode her first pony, and gave it an apple, a red wine-full one off the
ribston tree near the garden pump, she gathered the roses from the bush
she loved best and the heliotrope from her favorite bed. She kept tryst
with her own faults, mistakes, failures—as we all must once in life at
least. She kept tryst with her own soul there alone in that strange,
luxurious room which was the prison cell from which she might pass to
her terrible mangling death. And she kept tryst too with that red,
knifed death itself—God!
She fell asleep.
She dreamed, and once she smiled in her sleep.
But when she woke her champa-perfumed pillow was wet. Too, she had wept
in her sleep.
Crespin sat all night on his bed, and thought. He too kept tryst. In
such times of crisis and testing every human soul must do that. He
thought of his babies, snug asleep now in Pahari while their faithful
ayah lay on the floor between the two little beds, and a sentry far off
in the cantonment called to some late-comer who had given the password,
“Pass, friend. All’s well.” He thought of his mother—the mother for
whom his fond, boyish passion and loyalty never had dwindled—he slipped
his hand again in hers, he held her close in his arms, holding her
reverently, all love and no judgment of her in his heart. He chalked up
a long account against himself. He knew how he’d stumbled. But, too, he
knew how he’d tried! And perhaps God did—and counted it more than
Crespin counted it.
Traherne came through it worst of all. Till day broke he paced the
floor, forming plan after plan, rejecting them one after one—all but
one—planning how to send the woman who was Crespin’s wife to a painless
death, before he was put to death—if it came to that—to kill her with
his own hand rather than leave her behind them, alone in Rukh; it must
not come to that! It should not, he swore. But how? How? That was a
difficult rub. The possibilities of escape for all three of them, and
how they should seize upon and use them must be left to chance, if by
any great fluke such chance came at all. It would be idle to speculate
upon that now. But how to kill Lucilla, how and when? But it must be
done, if the other chance never came. In all probability it must be
done. He shook at the thought, but worse he sickened at the fear of its
failure. He had a few drugs with him, a few simple remedies—he was too
good an airman and physician to fly without lozenges and ointments—and
his miniature case was still intact in his flying kit there on the
floor—but there was not a human death in the lot. How? Sweat broke out
on his forehead. How? Somehow! That much was fixed. He’d strangle her,
if needs be, with his hands, rather than leave her alone to this Raja of
Rukh. With his own hands that had trembled in spite of his will, if by
chance they had touched but some garment of hers, an intimate belonging
even! He looked down at them. How they were trembling now! With the
hands that had ached to caress her, to take a lover’s right of her
sweetness! Could _they_ do it? And if she struggled—as the physician
knew tortured human flesh must when agony gripped it, let the soul it
housed be never so dauntless and fixed—if she struggled could he
persist? He must—if it came to it. And his face fixed into tortured
hardness, as might a surgeon’s, forced to perform, in the absence of
Surgery’s holy handmaid and friend, Anæsthetic, a painful, major
operation on his only child.
Traherne kept few trysts that night as he paced the floor of the palace
room. But he registered a grim oath, never again, if he lived to escape
from Rukh, to fly without either cyanide of potassium or chloroform. But
he’d not fly again, he thought, if he lived to be free. That last fatal
flight in which he had piloted the woman he loved to a hideous death—or
worse—had turned him forever sick of air goings. He went to the window,
and looked out at the night in its pageant and splendor, and he cursed
the Himalayas. He cursed them with gibbering lips, and he shook his fist
at the great beautiful mountains.
Down near the little white temple the wing of his broken aeroplane
caught his eye where it stuck out from behind a crag of rock, etched
clear and sharp by the radiant moonlight. And he cursed the aeroplane
too—the craft he had mourned almost boyishly—cursed it low and long,
as men curse the things their own wrong handling has ruined, from women
to shirt-studs.
What was she doing? How was it faring with her? Was she safe even now?
At the thought and its fear he grew faint—the room swam—the mountains
swayed. And he could do nothing! He sickened violently, actually, at the
thought of what might be befalling her even now—while he stood here
agape at a moon, and a theatrical painted scene of mountains and stones
and sky!—and the thought of what she must be suffering in her solitude,
even if diabolical revenge still left it inviolate, maddened him only
less.
Antony Crespin and Lucilla, his wife, thought of many things as the
hideous night hours wore away. But Basil Traherne thought only of one.
Of the three he suffered the most—perhaps because his pain was
concentrated. No thought of a career blasted, cut short, no regret for
ambitions nipped and thwarted, crossed his mind for an instant. He no
more thought of Science—mistress and wife, mother and child to him till
Lucilla had come, not to usurp but to share its throne—than he did of
the Elgin Marbles or the Odes of Horace. Science had been his meat and
his drink, the food of his soul, his motif of life. And if he had
thought of that Science now, he would have cursed it too, as he had
cursed the poor broken plane and the great snow-wrapped mountain peaks.
Traherne thought of but one thing: Lucilla.
The Raja of Rukh too kept tryst as the far moon rode higher and higher,
gilding the goat-tracks and the thin hill-rills, turning the temples and
roofs to silver and gold, splashing the mountains with silver and gold,
turning the gray rock crags into copper, the brown into russet and
bronze. He sat alone, loose-robed, cross-legged on a nest of great
cushions, his hands on his knees, his face turned to the Southwest where
he knew Abdulabad lay. He kept no tryst with the girl-wife newly dead
over there in the harem, the women wailing about her, strewing
rose-leaves and incense and aguru over her garments, gave no thought to
their new-born child. He gave no thought to the Englishwoman alone in
her prison-chamber, none to the two Englishmen. He was in Abdulabad
keeping their death-watch with his brothers. Oriental thought travels
and visualizes, as the thought of no Western can. He was _with_ them in
their gaol. Their failure and capture galled him, the ignominy of the
death by rope shamed him.
The Raja of Rukh had told Mrs. Crespin the truth. He loved himself
first—if so small, so wormlike a thing as self-centered selfishness may
be called by so big a name; and his children—above all La-swak—came
next, his people third. For his sons’ sake, above all for La-swak’s, his
regret at his brothers’ capture was more than tinged with relief. It cut
a troublesome knot of his own, it left La-swak’s succession
comparatively safe. Masterly inactivity _was_ his fixed conviction and
purpose. He had no intention of rousing a British hornet’s nest to buzz
and sting about the fortress and huts of Rukh. He intended to keep his
inheritance, his ease, his absolutism and his own skin intact. But, too,
he loved his brothers. He suffered their pain, he shared their plight.
Boyhood’s friendliness, theirs and his, before he’d been sent to
England, gripped and griped him. The Raja of Rukh kept their death-watch
with his brothers, and mist gathered and thickened in his somber eyes.
He was in Abdulabad, and he did not hear a woman enter, or see her until
she came close before him and salaamed more than once, salaamed a little
insistently at last.
Rukh glanced up slowly, and nodded to the ayah—Watkins’ “wife”—to
speak.
“She sleeps, Supreme One,” the woman said. “I have brought it.”
Rukh held out his hand, and the ayah, salaaming again, laid a little
gold locket in his palm.
“Sleeps?” he questioned. “Is she drugged?”
“Nay,” the woman told him. “I watched through the lattice, as Your
Greatness commanded. Nothing has passed the Feringhi woman’s lips since
she left the great salon.”
“No syringe? Her arm?”
“Not so, Royal Master, nothing.”
“Who watches her now?” Rukh demanded.
“Po-nunk, Powerful One.”
“So she sleeps! That is pluck! True pluck!” The Raja of Rukh liked
pluck—it was the one masculine quality he approved of in a woman. So
the Englishwoman slept! He liked her for that. It might be just utter
exhaustion, of course, trying to knit up the raveled sleeve of her long,
hard day’s care. But he believed it was pluck of character far more than
fatigue of body. He believed it was pluck. And he preferred to think it
that. He liked her for it! The brave, delicate one!
He opened the locket, and scrutinized its pictures thoughtfully.
“She bears beautiful children,” he said with a thoughtful smile, as he
handed it back. “Put it back again where it was. See that you do not
wake her,” he commanded.
As the ayah closed the door, he repeated softly, cruelly too, “She bears
beautiful children.”
He rose and rang a bell.
Watkins came—but not at once.
“Well?” the Raja demanded, speaking in English, “do they sleep?”
“Like hornets on the war-path, Your ’Ighness.”
Rukh laughed.
“Good!” he said. “Has the Major asked for liquor?”
“For nothink, Your ’Ighness. Neither of ’em ’as asked for nothink.”
“Remember not to stint them, if they do,” the Raja ordered. “Make them
perfectly comfortable—especially the Major. I rather like the Major,
Watkins. That is all.”
“Very good, Your ’Ighness, thank you,” Watkins replied colorlessly, and
left the room so quietly that he seemed to fade away.
Watkins went back to his divided watch deliberately—almost as if he
took little satisfaction in it, and there was no truculence on his mean,
bad face as he went. He was not much English, but he _was_ English. Old
memories—not very pleasant ones though—were stirring a little, and
presently, not knowing that he did, under his breath he whistled, rather
in dirgelike time and color, a few bars of “The Old Kent Road.”
Rukh stood in his casement, and looked out towards the Southwest, where
Abdulabad lay behind the mountains. “You who are about to die, I salute
you,” he said. “Well,” he added, “Kismet!” Then he crossed back to his
cushions, loosened his robes still more, threw off his girdle, lay down
on the comfortable pillows. And as the day broke over Rukh, washing the
great snow-capped Himalayas with carmine and rose and violet and
beryl-green, its Raja slept like a child.