“Shall I go on?”
He waited for her to say.
After an instant’s pause, she bowed her head.
“Do you think,” he cried, “it is with a light heart that I turn my back
upon the life of earth, and all it might have meant for you and me—for
you and me, Lucilla?”
“Yes,” the woman whispered, “Basil, for you and me.”
He reached down his hands, and she rose, letting him help her, and stood
beside him.
“Rather than live without you,” he told her, “I am glad to die with you;
but, oh, what a wretched gladness compared with that of living with you,
and loving you! I wonder if you have guessed what it has meant to me,
ever since we met at Dehra Dun, to see you as another man’s wife? It has
been hell—hell!”
“Yes,” she said, “I know, Basil. I have known from the beginning.”
“Oh, what do I care,” he cried passionately, “for a bloodless, shadowy
life—life in the abstract, with all the senses extinct? Better eternal
sleep!”
“Oh, Basil,” the woman said, “you are going back on your own wisdom.
Shall we not there—where we are going—”
“Wisdom!” he exclaimed with hot contempt. “What has wisdom to say to
love, thwarted and unfulfilled? You were right when you said that it is
a mockery to speak of love without hands to clasp, without lips to
kiss.”
“I, too,” the woman owned, “regret—perhaps as much as you—that things
were—as they were. But not even your love—”
A trumpet-blast interrupted her—a long, deep, wailing sound. And out in
the open behind the temple a pheasant rocketed up, with a scream of
fright.
“There is the signal!” Lucilla whispered—not without a shudder.
“Good-bye, dear love.”
She held out her hands to him. He drew her reverently into his arms, and
bent a passionate, quivering face to hers. And so, they who were about
to die, gave and took their first kiss. Lips lingered on lips, flesh
clung to flesh. Neither spoke again—but telling each other more than
words could say. They needed no words now, and they had none.
A crash of tom-toms and a low muttered chant came from behind the
curtains through which the Raja had gone when he’d left them. A moment
they clung the closer, then slowly and proudly drew the little apart
that English dignity bade, and stood hand-in-hand facing the doorway as
its curtains parted, and the death processional came in, moved upon
them.
“Basil,” she whispered, and he caught what she said, though her lips
scarcely moved, “kill me, kill me now!”
“Dear,” he whispered, “I have nothing—”
“Your hands!” she said. “Your hands are strong!”
Could he? he asked himself. He looked with stricken eyes at her pulsing
throat. Could he? It must be done quickly, if done. They would overpower
him at the first uplift of his hand. Why had he not thought of it
before, while yet there’d been time, when still they’d been here alone?
Fool! Wicked fool! But to have shortened so the short, short space of
their love’s fulfilment! It would have been hard.
“Not yet—” he murmured. And he knew he would attempt it presently—at
the last, last breath of moment left them.
Priests came first, chanting as they came, fantastically dressed, and
each wearing some indescribable demon, high up-standing head-dress.
Except the High Priest all were masked—the masks impossible, monstrous
devils and animals. After them the Raja of Rukh came, walking, with
folded arms, alone. He also wore now a priestly head-dress, richer, even
more grotesque than theirs, and a stole-like garment, and one shaped
like a cope, each a glittering jewel-mass. The long, flat, scarf-like,
wide strip of fur, brocade and jewels that fell from either side from
over his shoulders down to his ankles looked something a stole, the
azure arabesqued drapery below it looked something a cope—so oddly, in
surface things, do East and West often show to touch.
Behind him, walking abreast, came three dark-robed, sinister figures,
plainly masked and hooded, carrying heavy, shining swords. They were the
proudest men in Rukh to-day, for by right of their office well-performed
each would claim, and be accorded, privilege to send a girl-child to the
Rukh’s harem. Out there close by the great waiting Goddess, close to the
spot where the swords would swing and hack at the white offered necks,
the three little girls stood side by side dressed in the saffron-edged
magenta of brides, their dark little faces golden and shining with joy,
each eyeing the other two rather scornfully.
After the executioners followed musicians—in splendid, more secular
motley, their cheeks puffed out mump-like with the exertion that blew
weird notes through Rukh’s weird sacred reed and bamboo instruments.
When they reached it the priests grouped themselves about the throne,
salaaming to it twice, thrice to the Goddess that backed it.
Rukh paused an instant at the prisoners. “May I trouble you to move a
little aside?” he asked with insolent civility. “I am, for the moment,
not a king, but a priest, and must observe a certain holy dignity.
Ridiculous, isn’t it?”
They made way for him—but still the man held close in his own the
woman’s hand. And her fingers clung to his like twisted, writhed icicles
now.
He passed slowly on to the throne and, to a reiterated salvo of priestly
salaams and of shrilled flutes, took his seat.
The people screamed and moaned with delight and loyalty.
Rukh spoke again to the woman standing there waiting with her hand still
in her lover’s. Traherne was trembling almost violently now, Lucilla
Crespin was perfectly still.
“Must I do violence to my feelings, Madam,” the Raja-priest said, “by
including you in the approaching ceremony? There is still time.”
She took no other notice, but she met his eyes.
“We autocrats,” he added, “are badly brought up. We are not accustomed
to having our desires, or even our whims thwarted.”
“Will you never cease tormenting this lady?” Traherne cut in violently.
“Get on with your butchery!”
The Raja paid as little attention to Traherne as the Englishwoman had
paid to the Raja.
“Remember my power,” Rukh continued. “If I may not take you back to my
palace as my queen, I can send you back as my slave. . . . Have you
nothing to say? . . . I repeat my offer as to your children. . . .
Remember, too, that, if I so will it, you cannot save them by dying. I
can have them kidnapped—or—I can have them killed.”
She answered him then—with a wild, anguished shriek.
An Englishman’s endurance snapped. He threw Lucilla’s poor, cold hands
from his, and with an enfiended cry of, “Devil,” rushed on the throne,
and leapt at the Raja’s diamond-circled throat; did it so suddenly, so
quickly that before the startled priests could gather their bemazed wits
he had pinned the Raja against the back of his throne.
But instantly then the huddled priests flung on Traherne, pulled him
off—he was one, they were more than a score—pinioned him roughly, and
dragged him struggling away.
Fast and furiously the priests chattered together, and the Chief Priest
prostrated himself in hot supplication before the throne where the Raja
sat coldly smiling. He heard the Chief Priest gravely, then rose and
passed him with a word—pressed through the priests thronged near the
throne, they striving to dissuade him, and went to Traherne, whom
several of the priests who had seized him still held securely.
“Chivalrous but ill-advised, Dr. Traherne,” the Raja remarked. “I regret
it, and so will you. My colleagues here insist that, as you have laid
impious hands on the chief of their sacred caste, your death alone will
not appease the fury of the Goddess. They insist upon subjecting you to
a process of expiation—a ritual of great antiquity—but—” He broke off
significantly.
“You mean torture?” Traherne spoke calmly.
“Well—yes,” Rukh admitted regretfully.
Lucilla Crespin came towards them with a cry.
“Not you, Madam—not you—”
“I must speak to you—speak to you alone!” she gasped. “Send Dr.
Traherne away.”
Rukh looked at her searchingly.
Traherne understood her. “Lucilla!” he exclaimed, entreaty and command
in his tone. “What are you thinking of! Lucilla—!”
At a gesture from the Raja, the priests who were guarding Traherne bent
over him, and he crumpled up like a storm-buffeted autumn leaf, and his
voice trailed weakly, then died away. Japanese ju-jutsu is a thing of
feather, and slow and uncertain compared to the brutal knack that these
temple priests had practiced on Basil Traherne. Their theology may have
been as rotten and flabby as it was absurd and fanatic, but their
athletic skill and their fighting knowledge of human anatomy were fine.
“I beg you—I beg you!” the woman implored brokenly, wildly. “One
minute—no more!”
Rukh looked at her curiously, studying her searchingly, for a moment—a
sharp gleam in his narrowed eyes—shrugged his cope-covered shoulders,
and gave a terse order, and Traherne, inert and almost unconscious, was
dragged away, and out through the door through which he had been carried
into the temple hall.
In her desperation the woman had rushed up the steps of the throne. Now
in her exhaustion she sank down on one end of the actual throne
itself—sharing it crushed and abjectly with him—the broken suppliant
of an absolute king.
Rukh was watching her narrowly with a serpent-look in passion-full eyes.
He held his silence—and waited.
“Let him go,” she panted, when she could speak, “let him go, send him
back to India unharmed, and—it shall be as you wish.”