CHAPTER XIII
Lucilla Crespin came into sight first, but Traherne was first on the ground. Crespin climbing down rather awkwardly hesitated a moment at a difficult point, his foothold not too wide or secure, the available foothold below an uncomfortable distance to a man of his weight. India does not treat us all alike, we who invade her, not even our soldier-men. Punjabi soldiering had not kept Antony Crespin fit. Lucilla had known it for years; observant, clear-eyed, badly sensitive where those who were hers were concerned, she had watched the sag and the bloat come and gain almost day by day. But as she stood and looked at him now, it struck her anew, and more sharply than it had done before, sickened her even more than it had done in those two bitter hours of her fresh wifehood’s disillusion when she had realized shudderingly the twin rotten fissures in a husband’s being.
Women and wine! Both had branded and slackened him. She wondered which had spoiled and twisted him most. She knew which had tortured her the more. The “pegs” he had sipped and drained too often, too early, too late, and too strong, had disgusted and “turned” her clean, wholesome flesh the more. But the women had tortured her far more cruelly than his cups had. They had “turned” her soul and poisoned her heart. The drinking she held a weakness—contemptible but not unpitiable—innate, inherited, uncontrollable perhaps, but the infidelities that had affronted her pride, bowed her head, curdled the milk in her young mother-breasts, she held a personal meanness and unforgivable crime, a hideous responsibility that lay forever at his door. It is so that women judge—forgiving, condoning every masculine folly and sin that is no direct reflection and slight to her.
This was not the man she had married—that almost obese, flush-faced Crespin standing irresolutely there a little above her. No. But it was what had been he, and it was the human being to whom she was indissolubly bound. The fetter cut into her being. But she kept her pact—now as ever.
“Take care, Antony!” she cried brightly, as he was about to risk it and jump. “Let Dr. Traherne give you a hand.”
“Yes!” Traherne echoed. He already had gained the lower ground, surefooted and cool.
“Hang it all,” Crespin shook his wife’s suggestion and the other man’s proffered assistance off with a testy impatience that spurred his own faulty physical courage, “I’m not such a crock as all that.” He jumped as he spoke, jumped heavily, but landed safely enough.
Lucilla gave a little sigh of relief; she scarcely could have told herself how far it was sincere, how far acting—her wifehood was so permeated by acting now.
Traherne turned away from Antony, and a something of pity passed across the younger man’s eyes; he understood, as she did not, that Lucilla’s words had hurt Crespin—and he pitied him. He still judged Antony more fairly than Mrs. Crespin did, more fairly than she could, or many women can.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crespin?” There was just enough concern in his voice and in his glance, and not an iota too much. Less would have been a boorishness, more must have been a caress. “Not very much shaken?”
“Not a bit!” she laughed.
“It was a nasty bump,” the pilot said ruefully.
“You managed splendidly,” the woman defended heartily.
“Come on, Lu,” Crespin interrupted; “sit on that ledge, and I can swing you down.”
Perhaps Basil Traherne doubted it, for he too went a step nearer and held out his hand, saying, “Let me—”
She put her hands impartially in theirs, and jumped lightly down, sayings “Thanks,” as impartially.
The natives watching the strange newcomers with wonder and fear, began to chatter eagerly among themselves. If the big bird of prey had seemed uncanny and awesome, these strange creatures it had disgorged as it dashed to its death, scarcely seemed less so. All three were protected and disfigured with flying-helmets and leather aviation coats—odd enough sights to European eyes when seen for the first time. What must they not have looked to those untraveled natives of isolated, rock-bound Rukh!
The priest turned and said a word to one of the gape-mouth crowd—a lithe, sinewy youth more scantily clad than the others, a grotesque cipher, picked out in red, green and ochre, branded on one gleaming shoulder, and but for his rag of loin-cloth, stripped for his master’s running, which was his office in life. The priest spoke, and the runner instantly made off at great speed towards the distant castle.
The travelers had taken off their helmets now, and a new murmur of wonder ran through the little cluster, while a half look of intelligence just showed on the priest’s face.
“That last ten minutes was pretty trying,” Major Crespin said, in the tone of a man who half apologizes, half defends some premeditated deed he knows apt to be censured. “I don’t mind owning that my nerves are all of a twitter.” He fumbled inside his thick leather coat, and pulled out a flask. “Have a mouthful, Traherne?” he asked with a nonchalance a shade overdone, as he unscrewed it and poured out a generous dram.
“No, thank you,” Traherne said easily, helping Mrs. Crespin out of her coat.
“You won’t, I know,” Crespin said to his wife with a feebly jocular turn of the flask-top—now a cup—in her direction. “I will!” he drank off the brandy. “That’s better!” He refilled the cup and drank again. “And now, where are we, Doctor?”
“I have no notion,” Traherne confessed as he threw off his own coat.
“Let’s ask the populace,” Crespin suggested cheerfully. Traherne nodded, not too encouragingly, and Crespin went up to the still chattering crowd—in which the priest alone stood silent and grimly observant, watching the pale intruders intently through narrowing eyes. The natives shrank back in open fear as Crespin came up to them—all but the priest; he stood his ground, and even, at the half salutation the Englishman gave, salaamed slightly, but almost contemptuously.
Crespin spoke—in Hindustani—but it drew a blank. It was evident that Hindustani was as useless here as English or Norse. The priest listened blankly, and then in his turn poured forth a speech of some length—almost as long as it was guttural, voluble and heated, pointing dramatically now to the dusky incarnadined temple, now to the beetling palace.
Perhaps Mrs. Crespin and Dr. Traherne expected little from Crespin’s embassy, perhaps they were willing to wait patiently to hear from him its result. For they made no steps to follow him, and paid little attention, but stood together just where he left them.
“You were splendid all through,” Traherne said in a low, tense voice that said more than his words.
“I had perfect faith in you,” the woman answered, her eyes full and frank on his.
And his eyes thanked her. But he only said regretfully, “If I’d had another pint of petrol I might have headed for that sort of esplanade behind the castle up there. . . .”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“. . . and made an easy landing. But I simply had to try for this place, and trust to luck.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Lucilla said quickly, “but your skill that saved us.”
The sudden blood rushed over Traherne’s wind-browned face. It was more than she had said to him ever before—not the simple, conventional words, but the pride in him that pulsed in them, pride in him, and something too of a claiming. She did not know that, and he knew that she did not. But he heard and understood, and his heart lashed at his ribs, and was hurt. In all the few hard years of his service to her, man’s service never stinted, never underlined, no such open recognition of the hidden thing that lay between them had ever been told. He had known—from the first. But he had hoped and believed that she did not. Was he glad or sorry? He was both. His loyalty and friendship regretted, but his man’s nature leapt and was glad. When he had tried to hide Antony’s weakness from her, and to shield her from it—to keep it out of her presence, to drive it from her thoughts, when together they had strained and schemed, as they constantly had, to save Crespin from himself, and her and her children from the present shame and coming consequences of his sick misdoings, no word, no sign, had been let slip from him to her, or from her to him, acknowledging why he stood to her side. She often had spoken to him of Antony’s good qualities, never of Antony’s faults.
But now a barrier was down—only one of many, the others still held, but one—and she had let it fall. It usually is the woman who lets it fall.
“It wasn’t luck,” she repeated contemptuously. “It was your skill that saved us,” she added, and the change in her voice, the quick, white flame on her face, was confession and challenge—challenge the more compelling, confession the more complete, because the woman had made them unconsciously.
“You are very good to me,” Traherne said in a voice not too well under control. The woman looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, as they had not met before. His face quivered a little. And then the man’s eyes fell—not Lucilla’s.