Mrs. Crespin looked Rukh full in the face, and at what he saw in hers
his eyes almost fell. But as she passed to the door of the billiard-room
he challenged her, “That is your answer?”
“The only possible answer,” she returned quietly, and went on into the
other room, and closed the door.
“But not the last word, my lady!” Rukh murmured to himself, as he stood
looking after her.
And neither then nor after did the Raja of Rukh purpose this woman’s
death. Up to the slaughter she should go, square up to the block and the
sword—if she would not yield before that—but not on to the
sword-severed end. His purpose was other than that. And her resistance
but whetted his purpose, steeled his will. If she yielded, would he keep
the promises he’d made her? Many men will promise much to gain their
end—when that end is a woman. Not all men fulfill such promises.
The Raja of Rukh had made Mrs. Crespin what he considered a very
handsome offer—as he saw it, a tempting offer. But he had meant all he
had said, had intended all he had promised. He had not forgotten La-swak
when he had promised to make another his heir. But something in this
Western woman had called him irresistibly. The light women “mostly from
Paris” who had been from time to time his “guests” scarcely had amused
him for an hour, not one of them had interested him for a moment. But
this woman of breeding and of character appealed to him, and affected
him strongly. To claim her as his, fascinated him. To have a woman
companion and friend—perhaps that appealed to him most. He was lonely.
And, perhaps unconsciously, he was homesick sometimes for things and
conditions he’d left behind him in Europe. Interesting as it had been,
his stay at Cambridge had not been all pleasant. He had been there,
prince and rich and brilliant though he was, on tolerance, and that had
been torment. But often here in his solitary, uncompanioned state, the
Raja of Rukh was more than half homesick for the old varsity—its life,
its human give-and-take, the town at its river-ribboned feet. For all
his retinue the man was a “solitary”; he longed for a friend. He dared
not leave Rukh now. He might lose Rukh, if he left it for long now. He
had no mind to lose Rukh—it had been his fathers’ for too long, it kept
him too richly, _and_ he loved it too well.
He prided himself that Europe had made a superficial but accomplished
cosmopolitan of him—he knew that at core he was all Oriental still. But
he was a little wrong there. The West had infused itself into him more
than he dreamed. Cambridge had made something of a half-caste of the
high-born, absolute ruler of Rukh—an intellectual half-caste. He had
studied a few Western masters profoundly, he had dabbled, and he still
dabbled, in abominably many. Your true cosmopolitan is born, not made.
He is very rare. Europe had given Rukh’s Raja Gogol and Herbert Spencer,
Byron and Aristotle, Goethe and Ben Jonson and Macaulay, the
philosophies of Greece and of England, the cultures of France and Spain,
the flairs of Mayfair and Rome, but it had taken away more than it had
given, had cramped even more than it had developed. It had not
expatriated him, but it had made him lonely.
The European side, grafted on him, and still growing green and strong,
the European in him, craved this exquisite and companionable English
gentlewoman even more, and more insistently than the Asian did. He would
win her in Eastern ways, if he must, but he would wear and keep her in
Western ways, if she liked—and as far as one might in Rukh.
He _had_ come to believe that the Superman of whom the new philosophers
prated almost as glibly as intricately and obscurely, would be generated
from some high fusion of East and West—a flabby, unwholesome belief,
but he held it, and since he himself could not be world-eminent as the
first Superman, he was keenly minded to beget him. But he had not
forgotten La-swak. La-swak should have a rich heritage, a gilded and
cushioned life, his other sons should be provided for nobly and
carefully, and his daughters should be given in marriage,
well-portioned, of course. As for his native wives, his new queen should
do with them as she pleased. But La-swak should keep a princely place,
always the favorite son; and Ak-kok should keep her place, her pleasure
and her ease.
Rukh admired the English more than he disliked them. And, too, in the
ordinary, human way, to which all flesh is heir he had fallen in
love—with, as it chanced, a Western woman.
Abortive, fantastic a dream as ever opium gave, but it brightened his
eyes, flushed his face, and set all his sensitive nerves dancing to
delicate music.