CHAPTER XXI
The rooms to which Mrs. Crespin and the two Englishmen had been conducted were in as perfect taste as they were luxurious and were all comfortable, hers even more all this than theirs, but all admirable and irreproachable.
But the room to which they were taken, to await the Raja’s pleasure and his dinner, left a good deal to be desired, displayed a good deal to regret. In no way as bad as the usual State Apartments of a native palace, it smacked of them in much. The room itself, and the costliness of the deckings, would have discredited no princely house in Europe or New York; a spacious and beautifully proportioned room, opening wide at the back upon a wide loggia. Beyond the loggia rose the snow-clad peaks of the distant mountains, rose-dappled now by the kiss of the late afternoon sun, and with strips and spaces of blue and soft purple sky between them.
The room itself was splendidly though dashingly and somewhat sparsely furnished. Most of its furnishings old-fashioned now—no “new-art” here—and some of it faded, but all the sightlier for that, because colors and materials, insistently pronounced when new, time and wear had softened and mellowed to a friendly, gracious exquisiteness that was welcome and restful and kind. But the usual clocks were there, a dozen or more, all of them ugly, several of them tawdry. Most of the actual furniture was black, but for that it was admirable, rich, not heavy, the black wood picked out delicately with gold, the upholstery covered with yellow brocades. But the yellow damasks and the gold tracing did not clash, for they had grown old and amiable together, and time had blended them. The crystal chandelier was there, to be sure, but only one, and a crystal chandelier with a difference. Its lines were graceful, its long pendants winked and sparkled pleasantly; and it flooded the great room without dominating it—a great, gorgeous, costly thing, but you could forget it. It was not insistent—imperial without being impertinent; old, dignified, in no way “new rich,” and no more garish than soft, changeable silk is. A rounded ottoman—an inviting resting-place heaped with soft cushions, neither buried nor crushed beneath them—stood under the chandelier, placed there too mathematically. The marble fireplace would have rejoiced an Athenian sculptor, or Robert Adam when he carved and cut old London’s Adelphi into forms and lines of beauty; and the mirror above it would have intrigued Marie Antoinette or the beauties of Watteau.
In this room of his the Raja of Rukh, if he himself had selected and directed its appointments, had mingled things from many lands and of many times, but they did not blend, and not many of them suited the room itself. Two crystal candlesticks on the fireplace mantle, echoed with their pendants the iridescent note of the large chandelier, and between them, the mantle’s only other ornament, stood exquisitely molded in bronze, eighteen inches perhaps in height, but a small thing in the room’s big space, a seemingly tiny reproduction of the six-armed goddess in the temple.
The fireplace was ready piled with logs, but they were not lit. Electric lights neither artistically nor cunningly fashioned were placed conveniently here and there. A gramophone, as ugly as that modern disfigurement usually is, stood obtrusively at one end of the room; French and English books and reviews lay on several tables. There were roses in bowls, and tulips in vases. There was scent of sandal-wood and of lemon-verbena in the air, a smell of musk on the cushions. The pictures on the wall were bad—but they had their right here, portraits of handsome, gorgeously dressed Orientals—bad painting, if not bad drawing, as Western canons go, flat-faced and over-detailed as the craftsmanship of the Persian artists when Persia held pride of place in the Asian art world; but the pictures, not crowded, were not too many, and their carved camphor-wood frames were very beautiful. And they spoke—they told a story; and despicable as was their brush-work, nil their perspective, overdone and finicking their detail, peccable their drawing, they had character—it was patrician. And similar as they all were, each had its own clear individuality as differentiated as the tissues and gems of their turbans. And wherever you went the eyes of those pictured princes followed you, or rather drew your own eyes back to the inscrutable painted lid-narrowed, dark eyes of those who had ruled here before Rome had a Cæsar.
Traherne, coming in, looked at the room without much seeing it, for his eyes were anxiously searching for the Crespins.
They were not there. No one was there. And again he marked time and waited, for the very solid reason that no other course recommended itself to him as wiser. He moved idly, but watchfully to the open side of the room—even to look out over an open landscape might ease a trifle his sense of imprisonment; but he stopped at the room edge of the loggia, because he saw that three natives were there. He had no desire for Rukh society, peasant or noble.
Two turbaned servants were there laying a table, a dignified old major-domo directing them importantly. Traherne saw that they were laying four covers, and that the table appointments were extremely luxurious and entirely European. He turned at the slight sound of a door opened quickly.
Crespin came in and looked about him apprehensively, and the servant who had ushered him in, salaamed and went back closing the door behind him.
“Ah,” Crespin said with a tone of “thank goodness” in his voice, “there you are, Doctor!”
“Hullo!” Traherne returned. He noticed how flushed the other looked, and for all his flush how haggard. “How did you get on?”
“All right. Had a capital tub. And you?”
“Feeling more like a human being,” the doctor admitted. “And what about Mrs. Crespin? I hope she’s all right?”
“She was taken off by an ayah as soon as we got in—” Crespin said lamely—“in the women’s quarters presumably.” He did not find it necessary to add that it was but hearsay information he passed on, and that he had seen no more of his wife than Traherne himself had since she had preceded them from the temple in her palanquin—and he did not meet the other man’s glance, but shifted his eyes about the strange room uneasily.
Basil Traherne’s face whitened, and his strong hands clenched angrily. “And you let her go off alone?” he demanded violently.
“What the hell could I do?” Crespin retorted, more resentfully than he felt. “I couldn’t thrust myself into the women’s quarters.”
Traherne swung towards him with a smothered oath. “And I tell you you ought to have thrust yourself in anywhere—heaven or hell! And you should have kept her with you! You could have kept her with you,” Traherne cried passionately.
“Do you think she would have stayed?” Crespin demanded nastily. “And, come to that, what business is it of yours?”
“It’s any man’s business to be concerned for a woman’s safety,” Traherne pounded back.
“Well, well—all right,” Crespin muttered weakly. He had come into the room “considerably bucked,” but the courage he’d found in a drink or two after his tub, was evaporating fast, and he wished, ’pon his soul he did, that Traherne wouldn’t rave so. “Well, well. But there was nothing I could have done, or that she would have let me do. And I don’t think there’s any danger.”
Traherne’s mouth twitched with the disgust he felt. And this was her husband! “Let us hope not,” he said coldly.
Crespin ignored the sneer in the other’s voice. He preferred to—he felt in no shape for a scrap just now, and there might be scrap enough of another and deadlier sort to face soon—and that would have to be faced no matter in what shape he felt. He sat down heavily in a big chair by the fireplace. “It’s a vast shanty, this,” he said fumblingly, looking about him vaguely.
“It’s a palace and fortress in one,” Traherne replied, but in no friendly tone.
Crespin did not wish to talk, but he clung to the change of subject desperately, and said, “A devilish strong place before the days of big guns. But a couple of howitzers would make it look pretty foolish.”
“No doubt; but how would you get them here?” snapped Traherne.
That was unanswerable, and Crespin made no attempt to answer it.
“I wish to God we had them here though!” the physician added passionately, not looking at the man he spoke to, but with tortured eyes hard on the door, his ears strained to catch a woman’s step in the hall.
“I wish we had,” Major Crespin assented dejectedly. He pulled himself out of the armchair, levering himself up by its arms, and moved to the loggia. “My hat!” he exclaimed, and whistled in surprise and approval as the dinner table met his gaze. “I say—it looks as if our friend were going to do us well.”
A servant came in with a large wine-cooler and put it down. Traherne paid him no attention, but Crespin watched him narrowly, and as soon as the native had gone as he’d come, and closed the door behind him, Crespin pulled a bottle up from the ice, and inspected its label. He whistled again, and his bloodshot eyes glistened. “Perrier Jouet, nineteen-o-six, by the Lord!” He ran an affectionate tremulous fat finger over the already beading gold-foiled neck of the bottle thirstily. Even poor Crespin’s fingers were thirsty. He was one big thirst, and the sight of the vintage wine almost maddened him. He rammed it back into its ice pack, and strolled over to the ottoman, and sank into its cushions. “It’s a rum start this, Traherne,” he murmured. “I suppose you intellectual chaps would call it romantic.”
Traherne took his eyes from the door for a moment. “More romantic than agreeable, I should say,” he muttered, as he picked the small goddess up from the mantle. “I don’t like the looks of this lady,” he added as he put it down.
“What is she?” Crespin asked sleepily.
“The same figure we saw in the little temple, where we landed,” Traherne told him.
Both were talking to lift a little, if they could, the strain of the tension that both were feeling, and of the bitterness that surged in each against the other.
“How many arms has she got?” Crespin demanded, regarding her lazily.
“Six.”
“She could give you a jolly good hug, anyway,” Crespin said with a mirthless and slightly tipsy laugh.
Traherne shot him a sharp look. “You wouldn’t want another,” he said darkly, and turned away to watch the door.
For a time there was silence. Neither man spoke or moved and from the outer stillness no stir of life came. Traherne’s face grew like a death mask, sweat gathered on Crespin’s forehead, and specked his red face.
A jackal called.
Some deeper-throated thing answered or challenged it out on the mountains.
“Where do you suppose we really are, Traherne?” Crespin asked unsteadily.
“On the map, you mean?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, in the never-never land,” Traherne answered without moving his eyes from the door. “Somewhere on the way to Bokhara. I’ve been searching my memory for all I ever heard about Rukh. I fancy very little is known, except that it seems to send forth a peculiarly poisonous breed of fanatics.”
“Like those who did poor Haredale in?” Crespin asked, referring to the crime for which the newspapers had reported the perpetrators were to be hanged.
“Precisely.”
“D’you think,” Crespin asked, shifting unhappily on his seat, “our host was serious when he said they were his brothers? Or was he only pulling our leg, curse his impudence?”
“He probably meant caste-brothers, or simply men of his race,” the doctor surmised. “But even so, it’s awkward.”
“I don’t see what these beggars, living at the back of the north wind, have got to do with Indian politics,” Crespin grumbled. “We’ve never interfered with them.”
“Oh, it’s a case of Asia for the Asians,” the other solved it. “Ever since the Japanese beat the Russians, the whole continent has been itching to kick us out.”
“So that they may cut each other’s throats at leisure, eh?” Crespin asked almost quarrelsomely.
Traherne answered no less so. Any pretext or none would have served them for dire quarrel now—only a woman’s peril held them in leash. “We Westerners never cut each other’s throats, do we?” he snarled.
But still he watched the door.
Crespin began a retort, but cut it short, as he saw that the English valet was in the room, and Traherne turning expectantly at the sound saw Watkins too, and though disappointed was glad. Both the gentlemen were glad to see the serving man. Any interruption was welcome, any human third a real relief.