All through the last night’s torture it had been his fear and his agony
that, if no help came to them, she might _not_ die. Until now—here in
the very presence of their impending murder, his _and hers_, he had
doubted that the Raja of Rukh would not accomplish by absolute force the
purpose which he, Traherne, perfectly understood. But now, the
death-preparations seemed too complete, the death-stroke too near, and
he was convinced that as the sun sank to the Himalayan crests that head,
bent in agony in an English mother’s trembling grief as he’d turned away
from the sight of her, would roll in the dirt—between his and the
severed head of Crespin’s corpse—at the feet of that monstrous idol out
there, while the demonized people danced and shrieked about it—spat on
it perhaps.
Should she let it come to that?
Was the price she must pay for life, ultimate escape to come after a
time, perhaps, hideous, unspeakable as it was, not a price she ought to
pay? Would not her very abhorrence of it make it clean, a sacrificial
holiness rather than defilement?
It was a terrible question.
Could he answer it? Had he any right to bid her die, to let her die
without strong protest from him, when she had even _this_ chance of
escape?
Up there in the beetling, brooding palace of Rukh, in her prison
chamber, in the tortured night, Lucilla Crespin had faced that question,
had canvassed it, had tried to weigh it sanely. And there alone with her
own soul and her God, while the song and laughter of those who sharpened
the swords and decked the place of slaughter came to her through the
night, she had answered it.
She had answered it nobly. She had answered it in the only way that such
an Englishwoman as she—her father’s child and her mother’s—could
answer it perhaps.
But was that noble, womanly answer the _noblest_?
She had answered it—in her only way.
Basil Traherne was trying to answer it now.
His soul writhed, his very flesh, so soon to be nothing, ached with the
pain and difficulty of answering the nearly unanswerable, loathsome,
hideous question.
Standing here, dying even now, for help would have come long hours ago,
if Crespin’s call had gone through, hearing again the horrible calls and
shouts of the maddened throng out there, hearing the woman here with him
moaning for her children, the question of right and wrong, of best or
worst for her and for her fatherless children, beat at him like a flail
of white-hot metal. And the thought of the white body he loved tortured
and mangled out there—now—almost now—weighted his reasoning. It must.
It must have done that.
He could _not_ decide! He did not _see_.
“Are you sure you did right to refuse?” he repeated, and sweat colder
than death broke on his face.
“Do you mean—?” the woman asked.
“Are you sure it is not wrong to refuse?” he asked almost harshly.
“Oh,” the tortured, cowering woman cried, “how can you—? Right? Wrong?
What are right and wrong to me now?” she sobbed. “If I could see my
children again, would any scruple of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ make me shrink
from anything that was possible?” she asked passionately. “But this is
so utterly, utterly impossible.”
He turned and went to her then. “Forgive me,” he begged. “You know it
would add an unspeakable horror to death, if I had to leave you here.
But I felt I must ask you whether you had fully considered—”
“I have thought of nothing else through all these torturing hours,” she
told him gravely.
“How brave you are!” he said in a choked voice. But his eyes were very
proud.
“Not brave, not brave,” she moaned. “If I could live, I would—there, I
confess it! But I should die of shame and misery, and leave my
children—to that man. Or, if I did live, what sort of a mother should I
be to them? They would be much better without me! Oh,” she sobbed, “my
precious, precious darlings!” She clasped her arms across her breast,
and rocked herself in agony.
The moments passed.
The slow sinking sun streaked its red warning through the clerestory
slits.
“Lucilla!” He laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Oh, Basil,” she looked up at him, “say you think it won’t be altogether
bad for them! They will never know anything of their father now but what
was good. And their mother will simply have vanished into the skies.
They will think she has flown away to heaven—and who knows but it may
be true? There may be something beyond this hell.”
“We shall soon know, Lucilla,” he answered gently.
“But to go away and leave them without a word—!” she moaned again.
“Poor little things, poor little things!”
“They will remember you as something very dear and beautiful,” he said,
as he knelt down beside her, and gathered her hands into his. “The very
mystery will be like a halo about you.”
“Shall I see them again, Basil?” she moaned. “Tell me that.”
There was a moment’s silence.
Then, “Who knows?” the man said gravely. “Even to comfort you, I won’t
say I am certain. But I do sincerely think you may.”
“You think,” she asked with a woeful smile, “there is a sporting
chance?”
“More than that,” was Traherne’s emphatic reply. “This life is such a
miracle—could any other be more incredible?”
“But even if I should meet them in another world,” she mourned, “they
would not be my Ronny and Iris, but a strange man and a strange woman,
built up of experiences in which I had had no share. Oh, it was cunning,
cunning, what that devil said to me! He said, ‘God Himself cannot give
you back their childhood.’”
“How do you know that God is going to take their childhood from you?” he
comforted her quickly. “You may be with them this very night—with them,
unseen, but perhaps not unfelt, all the days of their life.”
She shook her head sadly. “You are saying that to make what poor Antony
called a ‘haze’ for me—to soften the horror of darkness that is waiting
for us. Don’t give me ‘dope’ Basil—I can face things without it.”
“I mean every word of it,” the man said stoutly.
They kept silence a little then.
The man almost wished that the summons would come.
Suddenly Lucilla Crespin smiled a little.
“Why,” he asked incredulously, “do you smile?”
“At a thought that came to me,” she told him; “the thought of poor
Antony as a filmy and purified spirit. It seems so unthinkable!”
Traherne—even here—wished she had not said it. But he always had been
fairer to Antony Crespin than, for years, the disillusioned wife had
been able to be. “Why unthinkable?” he argued. “Why may he not still
exist, though he has left behind him the nerves, the cravings, that
tormented him—and you. You have often,” he reminded her gently, “told
me that there was something fine in the depths of his nature. I have
always known it. And you know how he showed it yesterday.”
“Oh, if I could only tell the children how he died!” Lucilla exclaimed
longingly.
“But,” Traherne said sadly, “his true self was hopelessly out of gear.
The chain is broken, the machine lies out there—scrapped. Do you think
that he was just that machine, and nothing else? _I_ tell you, No!”
“But I don’t know,” she said drearily. “Anyway, Basil—if Antony leaves
his—failings, you must leave behind your work. Do you want another life
in which there is no work for you to do—no disease to be rooted out?
Don’t tell me you don’t long to take your microscope with you wherever
you may be going.”
“Perhaps there are microscopes waiting me there,” Traherne said slowly.
“Spirit microscopes for spirit microbes? You don’t believe that, Basil.”
“I neither believe nor disbelieve,” he told her. “In all we can say of
another life we are like children blind from birth, trying to picture
the form and colors of the rainbow.”
“If,” she persisted sadly, “we are freed from all human selfishness,
shall I love my children more than any other woman’s? Can I love a child
I cannot kiss, that cannot look into my eyes, and kiss me back again?”
“Oh,” he cried roughly, springing up as he spoke, “Lucilla, don’t! Don’t
remind me of all we are losing! I meant to leave it all unspoken—the
thought of him lying out there seemed to tie my tongue. But we have only
one moment on this side of eternity. Lucilla, shall I go on?”