CHAPTER XVIII
The Raja waited, cool, courteous and quite noncommittal. And after an instant Crespin advanced and saluted.
The Eastern inclined his head—did it so slightly that it accorded permission rather than returned or gave salutation. He was dignified, and he was not ridiculous, Traherne thought, for all his satins and silks and glut of hanging jewels, as he stood there in front of his temple where the goats’ heads still dripped sacrificial red, and his people about him.
“Does Your Highness speak English?” Crespin asked rather desperately—with almost a superior edge to his voice.
“Oh, yes, a little,” the Rukh said in English as English as Crespin’s own and in an accent even a little more irreproachable.
Crespin pulled himself together instantly, and said, speaking like a soldier and a man of breeding, “Then I have to apologize for our landing uninvited in your territory.”
“Uninvited; but I assure you not unwelcome.” The inclination of the bejeweled head was just a trifle more this time.
“We are given to understand,” the soldier went on, “that this is the State of Rukh.”
Just a hinted shadow of a smile touched the Raja’s fine lips—a smile in little akin to the twitch or grimace that does the West for smiling, but a half-flicker that sometimes falls for a moment on high-bred Eastern faces, just touching the mouth, but not made by it. “The Kingdom of Rukh,” the Raja said smoothly. “Major—if I rightly read the symbols on your cuff—”
“Major Crespin,” Antony stated, saluting again. “Permit me to introduce my wife.”
The Raja of Rukh saw Mrs. Crespin for the first time—apparently. He salaamed profoundly, his obeisance to her as immediate and deep as his bend of the head to her husband had been slow and perfunctory. “I am delighted, Madam,” he told her, “to welcome you to my secluded dominions. You are the first lady of your nation I have had the honor of receiving.”
“Your Highness is very kind,” Mrs. Crespin said, rising—Traherne was glad that she did that—and taking a half-step towards the glittering figure.
“And this,” Crespin gestured, “is Dr. Basil Traherne, whose aeroplane—or what is left of it—you see.”
The Raja smiled, more widely, more genially this time, and he and Traherne exchanged a direct, level look. “Dr. Traherne? The Doctor Traherne whose name I have so often seen in the newspaper? The Pasteur of Malaria?”
So this unexpected barbarian read the Statesman and the Pioneer! But of course, speaking the English he did, he would.
“The newspapers make too much of my work,” Traherne disallowed. “It is very incomplete.”
“Rome was not built in a day,” the Raja laughed, “or the Taj. But you are an aviator as well.”
“Only as an amateur,” Traherne insisted.
The Raja let that pass. “I presume it is some misadventure—a most fortunate misadventure for me—that has carried you so far into the wilds beyond the Himalayas?”
“Yes,” Traherne assented ruefully. “We got lost in the clouds. Major and Mrs. Crespin were coming up from the plains to see their children at a hill station—”
“Pahari, no doubt?”
“Yes, Pahari—and I was rash enough to suggest that I might save them three days’ traveling, by taking them up in my aeroplane.”
“Madam is a sportswoman, then?” The Raja turned to Lucilla.
“Oh, I have been up many times,” she replied.
“Yes,” Crespin said with a tinge of sarcasm under the words, “many times.”
If Lucilla caught it, she gave no sign, and did not let it serve to swerve her from the subject. “It was no fault of Dr. Traherne’s that we went astray,” she told the Raja. “The weather was impossible.”
A smile of a new significance came in the narrow black eyes, but was not allowed to touch his lips. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you have made a sensation here, I can assure you. My people have never seen an aeroplane. They are not sure, simple souls”—he was laughing at them but there was affection in it, Traherne thought—“whether you are gods or demons. But the fact of your having descended in the precincts of a temple of our local goddess”—he motioned his hand towards the idol—“allow me to introduce you to her—is considered highly significant.”
Traherne noted that he introduced them to the Green Goddess, and not her to them, and he wondered if this man with his priceless gew-gaws, his cosmopolitan breeding and information, his countless centuries of Eastern-ancestry, were as apart from the beliefs and idolatrous superstitions of his uncouth people as his words and light tone implied. Well, he would to heaven they could cut all this useless talk, and get down to the real issue now. Their fate still hung in the balance—his and Crespin’s—and Lucilla’s. It was not a comfortable feeling. It was very far from a comfortable situation. And he knew how scrupulous the politeness of an Oriental foe-to-the-death could be. But he knew too that they must bide this Raja man’s time and tune.
Antony Crespin knew it too, and Lucilla had the wit to take her cue from them. But Crespin glanced at the lowering sun, and ventured, “I hope, sir, that we shall find no difficulty in obtaining transport back to civ—to India.”
The Raja of Rukh smiled openly then, and his smile was frank and very sweet. “To civilization, you were going to say? Why hesitate, my dear sir? We know very well that we are barbarians. We are quite reconciled to the fact. We have had some five thousand years to accustom ourselves to it. This sword—” he laid a hand lightly on his carved and jeweled scimitar—“is a barbarous weapon compared with your revolver; but it was worn by my ancestors when yours were daubing themselves blue, and picking up a precarious livelihood in the woods.” He said it in the friendliest way, and broke off abruptly, and turned to Mrs. Crespin, “But Madam is standing all this time!” he exclaimed in dismay. “Watkins, what are you thinking of? Some cushions!”
Watkins made no reply, and his well-trained face did not change, but he took several cushions from his master’s litter, and came sleekly forward, and piled them into a seat for her.
“Another litter for Madam, and mountain chairs for the gentlemen, will be here in a few minutes. Then I hope you will accept the hospitality of my poor house.”
If the litter as well as the chairs already had been ordered, Watkins must have caught some other ciphered command in his master’s voice, for the valet turned softly and said something to one of the people, and another runner sped quickly away.
“We are giving a great deal of trouble, Your Highness,” Lucilla objected.
“A great deal of pleasure, Madam,” the Raja corrected her.
“But I hope, sir,” Crespin ventured again, “there will be no difficulty about transport back to—India.” He was feeling deucedly uneasy, was the English Major, but he managed to keep it out of his voice.
Basil Traherne was feeling much uneasier, but he said nothing, gave no sign—and waited.
“Time enough to talk of that, Major,” the Raja insisted gayly, “when you have rested and recuperated after your adventure. You will do me the honor of dining with me this evening? I trust you will not find us altogether uncivilized.” It was courtly invitation, social entreaty even, but too it was princely command. The Englishmen recognized it, and obeyed it with a bow. Their anxiety raged, but their knees bent.
The woman took it up lightly. “Your Highness,” she said to him, “will have to excuse the barbarism of our attire. We have nothing to wear but what we stand up in.” And she made a delicate mouth at her tumbled tweed skirt and her warm, stout boots.
“Oh, I think we can put that all right,” the Raja told her. “Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” Watkins came to heel.
“You are in the confidence of our Mistress of the Robes. How does our wardrobe stand?”
“A fresh consignment of Paris models came in only last week, Your ’Ighness.”
“Good! Then I hope, Madam, that you may find among them some rag that you will deign to wear.”
“Paris models, Your Highness!” she exclaimed, speaking as lightly as he had. “And you talk of being uncivilized!”
“We do what we can, Madam,” he returned with a bow. “I sometimes have the pleasure of entertaining European ladies”—Traherne turned aside as he bit at his lip, Crespin checked a frown—“though not, hitherto, Englishwomen—in my solitudes; and I like to mitigate the terrors of exile for them. Then as for civilization, you know, I have always at my elbow one of its most finished products. Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” the finished product said in a voice that would have been sulky, had it dared, and he came forward with again a hint of slinking in his cat-like tread. Evidently the valet disliked this limelight.
“You will recognize in Watkins, gentlemen,” the Raja explained, “another representative of the Ruling Race.” Watkins touched his hat miserably to Crespin and Traherne, but he did not look at them. His eyes studied his shoes. “I assure you he rules me with an iron hand—not always in a velvet glove. Eh, Watkins?”
“Your ’Ighness will ’ave your joke,” the valet said lamely.
But the master was merciless. “He is my Prime Minister and all my cabinet—but more particularly my Lord Chamberlain. No one can touch him at mixing a cocktail or making a salad. My entire household trembles at his nod; even my chef quails before him. Nothing comes amiss to him; for he is, like myself, a man without prejudices. You may be surprised at my praising him to his face in this fashion; you may see some danger of—what shall I say?—swelled head. But I know my Watkins; there is not the slightest risk of his outgrowing that modest bowler. He knows his value to me, and he knows that he would never be equally appreciated elsewhere. I have guarantees for his fidelity—eh, Watkins?”
“I know when I’m well off, if that’s what Your ’Ighness means,” the man said, still without looking up.
“I mean a little more than that,” the Raja said quietly; “but no matter. I have sometimes thought of instituting a peerage, in order that I might raise Watkins to it. But I mustn’t let my admiration for British institutions carry me too far. . . . Those scoundrels of bearers are taking a long time, Watkins.”
“The lady’s litter ’ad to ’ave fresh curtains, Your ’Ighness,” the servant explained. “They won’t be a minute now.” And desperately Watkins hoped it. He was the most impatient and not the least anxious there now.