He let her weeping wear itself out.
At last as it almost ceased, and the woman’s sobs were but panted
breath, he went a step nearer, and said earnestly, “I feel for you, Mrs.
Crespin, I do indeed. I would do anything—”
She swung round where she sat, looked up at him, saw, though her
smarting eyes were half blind from the tears they had shed, the
sincerity in his eyes, as she had heard it in his voice. “Raja,” she
cried, in a tone she had not used to him before, “if I write them a
letter of farewell, will you give me your word of honor that it shall
reach them?”
Rukh bit his lip. His hands were trembling a little. At that moment he
came nearer loving a woman, with a passion worthy that word, than he
ever had done—save for the so different love, the love apart, he had
given his mother. He had thought when she turned to him that she was
about to beg of him her own life, her freedom. And she had not. She had
asked that a letter from her might go to her children. He had been in
England when his mother had died. _She_ had written _him_ a letter when
she knew that she was about to die. He had it yet. A rough lump gathered
in the throat of Rukh’s Raja—and because his heart sickened at the
refusal he must make—from his point of view he _must_—he steeled his
voice, and spoke more stiffly than he felt.
“Ah, there, Madam,” he said crisply, “you must pardon me! I have already
said that the last thing I desire is to attract the attention of the
Government of India.”
“I will say nothing to show where I am,” she pleaded eagerly, “or what
has happened to me. You shall read it yourself.”
At the misery in her eyes, and the entreaty, at the white loveliness of
her, at the queenly quality of her, at the call of her suffering
motherhood, and too, at the call of her nearness, he was so stirred, so
almost tempted to yield, that he answered her almost roughly.
“An ingenious idea!” He said it a little mockingly. “You would have it
come fluttering down out of the blue upon your children’s heads, like a
message from a Mahatma. But, the strength of my position, you see, is
that no one will ever know what has become of you. You will simply
disappear in the uncharted sea of the Himalayas, as a ship sinks with
all hands in the ocean. If I permitted any word from you to reach India,
the detective instinct, so deeply implanted in your race, would be
awakened, and the Himalayas would be combed out with a fine-tooth comb.
No, Madam, I cannot risk it.”
“Cannot?” Lucilla said with cold scorn; all her calmness was recovered
now, her pulsing emotion frozen back by Rukh’s hard refusal. “Cannot?
You dare not! But you can and dare kill defenseless men and women. Raja,
you are a pitiful coward!” Her cold, blue eyes scanned him tauntingly.
She expected him to wince at that taunt. She had made it
deliberately—playing the game now—as she gauged it. Appeal to his
chivalry had failed, she was appealing to his vanity now.
But Rukh laughed unruffled. He read her. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I
smile at your tactics. You want to goad me to chivalry. If every man
were a coward who took life without risking his own, where would your
British sportsmen be?”
“I beg your pardon,” the woman retorted with a sort of superb insolence;
“a savage is not necessarily a coward.” The Raja just flushed at that.
“And now,” she ended, rising again, “let me go to my husband.”
“Not yet, Mrs. Crespin,” he stayed her again. “One more word. You are a
brave woman, and I sincerely admire you.”
“Please—please—” she interrupted him fiercely, hotly angered by the
very sincerity that she could not doubt.
“Listen to me,” Rukh persisted firmly. “It will be worth your while. I
could not undertake to send a letter to your children—” her face
quivered again, but she stilled it, and shrugged her bitter
contempt—“_but_ it would be very easy for me to have them carried off
and brought to you here.”
She sprang round to him, half stifling a cry, and faced him, her own
face frankly quivering now, the veins in her throat swelling palpably.
“What do you mean?” she gasped.
“I mean,” he told her slowly, saying it earnestly, “that, in less than a
month, you may have your children in your arms, uninjured, unsuspecting,
happy—if—”
“If?” the woman whispered hoarsely, and twisting the end of her long
silk scarf in hysterical, trembling fingers.
“If—” Rukh answered gently, watching her narrowly—his eyes friendly
and respectful—“oh, in your own time, of your own free will—you will
accept the homage it would be my privilege to offer you.”
“That!”
It would have been answer enough for most men, it would have chilled the
purpose of many, the purpose and any ardor behind it, the word as the
English woman tossed it at him, with snaky venom in her blazing blue
eyes. But Rukh went smoothly on, beating his terrible arguments in
slowly and courteously. “_You have the courage to die_, dear lady—_why
not have the courage to live?_”
She shuddered. That was her answer.
He waited a moment quietly, and then, “You believe,” he continued, “that
to-morrow, when the ordeal is over, you will awaken in a new life, and
that your children will rejoin you. Suppose it were so: suppose that in
forty—fifty—sixty years, they passed over to you: would they be your
children? Can God himself give you back their childhood? What I offer
you,” he urged—and there was an odd sweetness in his Asiatic voice—“is
a new life, not problematical, but assured; a new life, without passing
through the shadow of death; a future utterly cut off from the past,
except that your children will be with you, not as vague shades, but
living and loving. They must be quite young; they would soon forget all
that had gone before. They would grow to manhood and womanhood under
your eyes; and ultimately, perhaps, when the whole story was forgotten,
you might, if you wished it, return with them to what you call
civilization.”
Degrading, immoral—what you will, it had its points, the plan he
unfolded. And the Raja of Rukh told it well. “And meanwhile,” he pressed
it on, “you are only on the threshold of the best years of your life.
You would pass them, not as a memsahib in a paltry Indian cantonment—I
don’t _see_ you there—but as the absolute queen of an absolute king. I
do not talk to you of romantic love. I respect you too much to think you
accessible to silly sentiment. But that is just it: I respect as much as
I admire you; and I have never pretended to respect any other woman.
Therefore I say you should be my first and only queen. Your son, if you
gave me one, should be the prince of princes, my other sons should all
bow down to him and serve him. For, though I hate the arrogance of
Europe, I believe that from a blending of the flower of the East with
the flower of the West, the man of the future—the Superman—may be
born.”
Through all this Lucilla Crespin sat lax and motionless, gazing straight
in front of her, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. And she gave no
sign, none that the man could read, of what mark, if any, his words had
made on her mind.
Rukh waited patiently. And at last she spoke to him in a low toneless
voice—not turning her head, not moving her eyes.
“Is that all? Have you quite done?” she asked.
“I beg you to answer,” the Raja insisted.
“I can’t answer the greater part of what you have been saying,” she
asserted uninterestedly, “for I have not heard it; at least I have not
understood it. All I have heard is, ‘In less than a month you may have
your children in your arms,’ and _then_, ‘Can God Himself give you back
their childhood?’ Those words have kept hammering at my brain till”—she
held out her handkerchief, there was blood on it, and for the first time
looked at him—“you see—I have bit my lip to keep from shrieking aloud.
I think the Devil must have put them in your mouth.”
“Pouf!” Rukh laughed lightly. “You don’t believe in those old bugbears.”
“Perhaps not,” she admitted curtly. “But there is such a thing as
diabolical temptation, and you have stumbled upon the secret of it,” she
added desperately.
“Stumbled!” the Raja protested.
“Mastered the art of it, if you like,” Lucilla conceded scornfully, “but
not in your long harangue. All I can think of is, ‘Can God Himself give
you back their childhood?’ and ‘In a month you may have them in your
arms.’”
“Yes, yes,” Rukh prompted her eagerly, letting more of the genuine if
foul feeling that swayed him show in voice and face than he yet had
done, “think of that. In three or four weeks—I’ll not lose a day, not
an hour; now, at once—in three or four weeks you may have your little
ones—”
She shook off his words as if they’d been some unclean smothering
garment, and rose to her slender height, interrupting him passionately,
“Yes—but on what conditions? That I should desert my husband and my
friend—should let them go alone to their death—should cower in some
back room of this murderous house of yours, listening to the ticking of
the clock, and thinking, ‘Now—now—the stroke is falling—now—now the
stroke has fallen’—stopping my ears so as not to hear the yells of your
bloodthirsty savages—and yet, perhaps, hearing nothing else to my dying
day. No, Raja! You said something about not passing through the shadow
of death; but if I did this I should not pass through it, but live in
it, and bring my children into it as well. What would be the good of
having them in my arms if I could not look them in the face?”
She looked the Raja in the face.