It was true.
Out in the sacred courtyard where all had been babel and noise, a
terrible stillness had come—every head thrown back, every startled
black eye strained to the sky. Through the silence—human noise
petrified by quaking fear of the unknown—came a faint, but rapidly
increasing whirr and throb, no more at first than the gossamer sound of
lazy dragon-fly wings, then more and more, till the air reeked with the
high-up grating sound.
Like a flight of dragon-flies—gray, far and filmy, the plane-birds
came, then like a school of black-bellied fish with backs of gold and
rose in the sunset glow, then like some flock of monster well-trained
birds, a battalion perhaps of the great rocs the mazed people believed
them, nearer and nearer they came, lower and lower they swooped.
Through the royal, blue blanket of the Asian sky England had peeped, and
whatever his priests and people thought, the Raja of Rukh—he’d not
altered his attitude, except to gaze steadily up, listening intently,
he’d not let his face or his eyes change—knew that England swooping
puissantly down had cried to him, “Hold! Enough!”
With a sob of relief, repeating again in a low, quivering voice, “The
aeroplanes—the aeroplanes!” Lucilla tottered to the door through which
Traherne had been pushed. The priests were too amazed to oppose or stay
her, as his guard had been to stay or oppose Traherne, and as she moved
seeking him, he came back seeking her—and they stood together in the
doorway, he leaning against it a little, still feeling the flay of the
fingers that had crippled him, looking up to the sky in which their help
had come.
The crowd found its voice again. Cries and squeals of consternation and
terror came like a sudden gust of storm from the gathered people.
The guard outside on the balcony at the end of the hall tore aside the
curtains violently, and pointing upward shouted madly to their prince,
and he moved to them slowly, and stood there looking out—and the
priests huddled, blubbering and jabbering strickenly, behind him.
“See,” Lucilla whispered, “see! They are circling lower and lower! Is it
true, Basil? Are we saved?”
“Yes, Lucilla,” he told her, in a voice that scarcely would sound, “we
are saved.” He repeated it, and his voice rang through the place. The
Raja heard.
“Oh, thank God! Thank God!” Lucilla moaned. “I shall see my babies
again!” she sobbed. She swayed, almost fainting, but Traherne caught
her, and held her leaning on him, as he leaned on the portal.
Was their Goddess performing another great miracle for her favored
people? Were her great rocs flinging them more white goats to gore at
her feet, the people wondered, “_Oo-ae, Oo-ae!_” Was it portend of
fortune or portend of doom?
“So,” the Raja said to the English woman and man, “the Major lied like a
gentleman! Good old Major! I didn’t think he had it in him.”
An excited guard called his attention to something, and the Raja looked
out again to where the man motioned. He stood watching, looking down
from the balcony, gave an order, at which several of the soldiers
hurried away, then turned and went to them who still were his prisoners.
“One of the machines has landed,” he told Traherne casually. “An officer
is coming this way—he looks a mere boy.”
“The conquerors of the air have all been mere boys,” Dr. Traherne
asserted.
The Raja smiled. “I have given orders,” he said, “that he shall be
brought here unharmed. Perhaps I had better receive him with some
ceremony—”
He went slowly back to his glittering chair of sovereign state, sat
himself down on it cross-legged, and settled his wonderful robes
carefully about him, commanded his priests to, and they ranged
themselves near him. And the Raja wondered if ever again he’d sit on the
throne, his almost from birth, the throne his fathers had sat on and
ruled from for long years. But the man was game. Give him his due.
“You said just now, Dr. Traherne,” he remarked after a moment, “that you
were saved. Are you so certain of that?”
“Certain?” Traherne echoed. His inflection was question, but even more
it was retort and proud assertion, and his tired eyes glowed. And the
woman whose hand clung in his felt the warmth of his fingers.
“How many men does each of these hummingbirds carry?” Rukh queried
skeptically.
“Probably two or three,” Traherne admitted, “a D. H. 10 can carry six to
eight people but—”
Rukh interrupted. “I counted six planes—say at the outside twenty to
thirty men. Even my toy army can cope with that number.”
The clamor outside was indescribable now. The Raja translated it
correctly, and gave a word of command to the priest guarding a door, and
the priest, with trembling hands threw it open wide.
An English boy sauntered in—three of Rukh’s soldiers half escorting,
half guarding him. A fair, sunny-faced, blue-eyed youngster, trim and
straight in his khaki-drill, the shoes below his “slacks” shining like
polished, brown glass, two stripes on his epaulets, his black tie
beautifully done, one yellow wisp of curl almost coquettishly peeping
from under his immaculate service cap, and an avenue of ribbons cutting
across his tunic—the blue, white and yellow of the G. S., the rainbow
of the Victory, the red, white and blue of the 1914-15, of course, but
the white and purple diagonals of the D. F. C. were there too, and the
tiny rosette on the blue, dark-red and blue of his D. S. O. told that he
had won it doubly. And he looked, as he was, a “mother’s boy” and no end
of a wag. Truly, “the conquerors of the air have all been mere boys”!
“Who are you, sir?” the Raja demanded.
“One moment.” The English boy threw the word crisply over his shoulder
to the bedizened figure sitting cross-legged and sovereign on its
bedizened throne, and crossed to his countryman and woman, and
saluted—the R. A. F. do not uncover.
Lucilla held out both her hands—they had met before at Delhi and at
Simla. She was afraid to speak, almost afraid to look, lest she welcome
him with a torrent of womanish tears.
“Mrs. Crespin!” the young pilot said, as he took the hands she gave.
“I’m very glad we’re in time. Dr. Traherne, I presume? And,” when they
had shaken hands gravely, “Major Crespin?” he asked.
“Shot whilst transmitting our message,” Traherne told him.
“I’m so sorry, Mrs. Crespin,” the boy said gravely. “By whom?” he
demanded of Traherne.
Traherne pointed silently to the throne-seated Raja, who was watching
quite impassively.
But Rukh spoke now. “I am sorry,” he said, drawling his clear voice
lazily, “to interrupt these effusions, but—”
“Who are you, sir?” The English lad’s voice barked something like a gun.
“I am the Raja of Rukh,” the prince replied. “And you?”
“Flight-Lieutenant Cardew,” the boy-pilot said formally. “I have the
honor to represent His Majesty, the King-Emperor.”
Rukh looked uninterested. “The King-Emperor? Who is that, pray? We live
so out of the world here, I don’t seem to have heard of him,” he lied.
“You will in a minute, Raja,” the youth muttered back, “if you don’t
instantly hand over his subjects.”
“His subjects?” The Raja seemed puzzled. “Ah,” he exclaimed not
unindifferently, but as if a light had broken in, “I see you mean the
King of England. What terms does His Majesty propose?”
“We make no terms with cut-throats,” Cardew snapped. “If I do not
signal,” he added, looking at the watch on his wrist, “your submission
within three minutes of our landing—” If he finished his sentence, no
one heard it.
A great slithering noise crashed down from the air, and all Rukh seemed
to rock from the shock of a sudden explosion.
“Ah!” the Raja said idly. “Bombs!”
“Precisely,” Cardew confirmed him, as cool as he.
“I fancied,” Rukh remarked, “your Government affected some scruple as to
the slaughter of innocent civilians.”
“There has been no slaughter—as yet,” the Flight-Lieutenant returned.
“That bomb fell in the ravine, where it could do no harm. So will the
next one—”
The slithering, ripping sound again! It brayed nearer, heavier this
time. And the explosion felt to have shattered the Kingdom of Rukh to
tatters. The great hall rocked. Its horrid, heavy tapestries bellied and
sagged like the wind-driven sails of a storm-buffeted ship.
The two Englishmen and the white-faced Englishwoman neither started nor
stirred, nor did the Raja of Rukh. But the priests huddled together like
frightened sheep, and the poor simple people out in the courtyard wailed
like cattle in torment.
“—but the third”—the young airman went easily on, when he could expect
to be heard—“well, if you’re wise, you’ll throw up the sponge, and
there won’t be a third.”
But the Raja of Rukh _was_ game. “Throw up the sponge, Lieutenant—?” he
drawled indolently. “I didn’t quite catch your name?”
“Cardew.” The boy was brief.
“Ah, yes. Lieutenant Cardew. Why on earth should I throw up the sponge,
Mr. Cardew? Your comrades up yonder can no doubt massacre quite a number
of my subjects—a brave exploit!—but when they’ve spent their
thunderbolts, they’ll have just to fly away again—if they can. A bomb
may drop on this temple, you say? In that case, you and your
friends”—he inclined his head towards them graciously—“will escort
me—in fragments—to my last abode. (Or should we say, _next_
abode—interesting question.) Does that prospect allure you? I call your
bluff, Lieutenant Cardew.”
Cardew looked again at his watch, and grinned—significantly: a
public-schoolboy grin—and, as if it had known his grin for its cue, a
third bomb screamed and hit and burst: England’s anger weltering into
the very bowels of the Kingdom of Rukh.
It was very near. It was blastingly loud.
The people shrieked. Save the idols and the three English none there was
calm save the man cross-legged on the throne. From courtyard, temples
and castle came a sorry chorus of terror and despair. Even the cattle in
mat-sheds and byres bleated and cried, and wild jungle things off on
mountains scurried and were afraid. The people shrieked, and the priests
rushed to their master and flung themselves down at his feet in
panic-stricken supplication. He hesitated for a moment, then, with a
shrug half-indulgent, half contempt, continued to the English airman,
“My priests, however, have a superstitious dread of these eggs of the
Great Roc. They fear injury to the Sacred Image. For myself, I am always
averse to bloodshed. You may, if you please, signal to your squadron
commander my acceptance of your terms.”
“I thought you would come to reason,” Cardew returned, as he shook out
the flag he carried, and hurried across the courtyard to where the white
beam of a searchlight cut down between the great Green Goddess and her
shivering, stark-eyed people.
“This comes of falling behind the times,” the Raja said with a sigh not
untinged with blasé amusement. “If I had had anti-aircraft guns—”
“Thank your stars you hadn’t,” Traherne told him.
Cardew came back from the execution-ground. “All clear for the moment,
Raja,” he said. “You have no further immediate consequences to fear.”
“What am I to conclude from your emphasis on ‘immediate’” Rukh asked
lazily.
“I need scarcely remind you, sir,” the boy said coldly, “that you can
only hand over the body of one of your prisoners.”
“Major Crespin,” the Raja retorted, “murdered a faithful servant of
mine. His death at my hands was a fair act of war.”
“His Majesty’s Government will scarcely view it in that light,” Cardew
remarked.
“His Majesty’s Government,” Rukh said haughtily, “has to-day, I believe,
taken the lives of three kinsmen of mine. Your side has the best
transaction by four lives to one.”
Flight-Lieutenant Cardew ended the argument with a contemptuous lift of
his broad, young shoulder. “Will you assign us an escort through that
crowd?” he demanded.
“Certainly,” the Raja replied smoothly. And at a word from him an
officer of his regular troops hurried out. “The escort will be here in a
moment, Flight-Lieutenant.”
The Raja of Rukh rose and went to Mrs. Crespin. He stood a moment
looking at her quietly. Then he said, including Traherne by his manner,
“It only remains for me to speed the parting guest. I hope we may one
day renew our acquaintance”—he said pointedly to Lucilla Crespin—“oh,
not here,”—in reply to her shudder—“I plainly foresee that I shall
have to join the other Kings in Exile. Perhaps we may meet at Homburg or
Monte Carlo, and talk over old times. Ah, here is the escort.”
As the aeroplane rose in the gathering dusk, Lucilla Crespin turned her
face away from the Kingdom of Rukh. But Dr. Traherne fixed his eyes on
castle and temple as long as the sight of them held.
Neither was thinking of the other as their rescue-ship rose and clove
the air—the man and woman so terribly, so irrevocably betrothed. She
had no thought now but of two children to whom she was going—hers only
now. And Traherne was thinking of a boy at Harrow he had greatly
respected.
Rukh turned back into the hall as the English left it. He strolled
across to the throne his blood had owned for so many ages, and stood
regarding it for a long time. He sighed, then laughed—a little
sadly—in the hideous face of the Goddess that backed the throne, drew
his case from the pouch in his jeweled sleeve, and lit a cigarette at
the sacred brazier, drew its first fragrant whiff, standing there before
his well-nigh lost throne, and went slowly out onto the balcony.
When the plane rose slowly up from Rukh, the Raja still stood on the
balcony—and he watched it out of sight.
“Well, well,” he said, to the fresh cigarette he was lighting, “she’d
probably have been a damned nuisance.”
THE END
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER NOTES:
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.