CHAPTER XLV
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
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been fixed.
Inconsistency in hyphenation has been retained.