CHAPTER XXIII
Swollen and quivered with anger as they were, they both were startled at her beauty. Always rather more than good-looking, Lucilla Crespin had never looked like this before.
“Ah,” Traherne said, pulling himself together with an almost heroic effort, “here is Mrs. Crespin!”
The ayah—if that was her household rank—who had brought Lucilla into the room went quietly out, closing the door. And the three captives—the men at least knew it for that—stood alone in the vast, clamorous room.
Whatever fear was curdling the bloods of the men, the Englishwoman who shared their danger, and stood in a graver one of her own, seemed unperturbed and carefree. Certainly she was radiant, and superbly lovely as she stood there, the breathing, beautiful jewel to which the palace room, rich as it was, seemed but a humble setting, and the ermined mountain peaks and blue velvet sky beyond the wide loggia but background—background and subsidiary, though she faced it.
Crespin’s eyes filled, and Basil Traherne caught his breath painfully. They had seen her in the saddle, they knew how well she rode, and how it became her. They had seen her in the soft white gowns that such women wear in India. They had seen her dainty and exquisitely dressed—a wild-rose pink flush on her cheeks—at dozens of dances, in garden-party finery, in Government House splendor, in neat, simple linens cuddling her babies, in bib and apron mixing English cakes and scones for her Punjabi tea-table, they had seen her in tea-gowns and tweeds, seen her with her delicate patrician English face softened by the furs beneath it, and had seen her with the gems on throat and breast resparkling in her eyes—and the throat that each thought her utmost loveliness (and that women who disliked her called her one beauty) gleam like snow under the jewels that circled it, and needing them not, and Antony Crespin had seen her in the soft déshabillé that enhanced her most. But neither ever had seen her look as she looked now. Some lure of the East, some soul of the East, had transformed the girl of a Surrey garden into an Eastern queen—though perhaps she never before had looked, or felt, so intensely English.
If either husband or friend saw or sensed this dual quality gleaming in her as she stood there, as its colors gleam through an opal, neither was conscious that he did so. But her beauty hit and quivered them. The wild-rose tints were gone from her face; her pallor was radiant. Her hair, always beautiful—and Crespin knew how soft and long, and how uncontrived its rippling—was more elaborately dressed than was her custom, some experter hands than hers had tired it—for Mrs. Crespin, like many Englishwomen, was defter at handling bridle and reins and rackets than she was at toilet devisings and doings. Her dark filmy gown could not have been simpler or costlier; it was just cut from her throat, and its long sleeves slashed to hint more than they showed of her arms. Except for her wedding-ring and the engagement diamond beside it, her only ornament was a gold locket that she always wore fastened about her throat by a slender thread of chain. And she wore neither the rings nor the locket and chain for ornament. Wives of such wedlock as hers had proved feel more stigma than adornment in its symbols; and the locket was infinitely more than any gewgaw—it held her babies’ faces.
She appeared to have thrown off or have lost her moiety of the fear they three had shared. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips curved in a smile. Whatever else she had felt, Mrs. Crespin was enjoying sincerely her adventure now.
She stood and smiled at them. And the eyes and hearts of two men leapt to her—and she seemed to them both the core of all desire, and each—the two of such different instincts and tastes—thought her perfect, a human flower needing no added perfume, no other beauty of texture, tint or outline. A man loving a woman with all the tenderness and strength of his best manhood may see and know her faults and flaws, and love her for them none the less. But the man who desires sees no imperfections, sight and mind are as fevered and irresponsible as his aching blood is. The husband who had lost her, and the man who loved her as reverently as passionately, and, so, without hope or thought, and even without wish—except as our flesh and nerves wish in spite of us—that he ever might seek or claim or hold her—both desired her as she stood there in the sumptuous simplicity of the soft thing she wore, and beautiful and desirable as she never had seemed before. Traherne forgot where they were—for a moment—forgot the danger that menaced them; but he did not forget his best self or hers, and he did not forget a boy he had fagged for at Harrow, or the sore young tragedy that had been that schoolmate’s to bear, and his own to witness. And no treacherous thing lurked in his heart, no dishonorable thing showed in his eyes. Crespin too forgot where they were and what their plight, but he forgot nothing else—he remembered his wooing of her, his possession of her, and how he had lost her.
And Lucilla Crespin looked from one to the other, and smiled. She did not see how white their faces were; she had not caught their quarreling as she came in, for the sinking sun shone hard in her eyes, and their backs were to it.
“Ah, here is Mrs. Crespin!” Traherne said with an effort.
She took a few steps towards them, holding out her draperies a little, as gleefully as a child in new festival robes. “Behold the Paris model!” she bade them.
“My eye, Lu, what a ripping frock!” was Antony’s comment.
“Talk of magic, Major!” Traherne laughed, turning and speaking as if never a shadow of quarreling had hung over them. “There’s something in what our friend says.”
“What’s that? What about magic?” Mrs. Crespin demanded, accepting the chair that Crespin moved towards her.
“We’ll tell you afterwards,” her husband promised. “Let’s have your adventures first.” He spoke lightly, but he was anxious.
“No adventures precisely—only a little excursion into the Arabian Nights,” she laughed.
“Do tell us!” Traherne urged.
“Well,” she began, a little nervous now, Traherne thought, but evidently not without enjoyment of the experience, “my guide—the woman you saw—led me along corridor after corridor, and upstairs and downstairs, till we came to a heavy bronze door where two villainous looking blacks, with crooked swords, were on guard. I didn’t like the looks of them a bit; but I was in for it, and had to go on. They drew their swords and flourished a sort of salute, grinning with all their teeth. Then the ayah clapped her hands twice, some one inspected us through a grating in the door, and the ayah said a word or two—”
“No doubt, ‘Open Sesame!’” Traherne suggested.
Mrs. Crespin nodded. “The door was opened by a hideous, hump-backed old woman, just like the wicked fairy in a pantomime. She didn’t actually bite me, but she looked as if she’d like to—and we passed on. More corridors, with curtained doorways, where I had a feeling that furtive eyes were watching me—though I can’t positively say I saw them. But I’m sure I heard whisperings and titterings—”
“Good Lord!” Crespin broke in. “If I’d thought they were going to treat you like that, I’d have—”
“Oh,” his wife retorted, “there was nothing you could have done; and, you see, no harm came of it. At last the woman led me into a large sort of wardrobe room, lighted from above, and almost entirely lined with glazed presses full of frocks. Then she slid back a panel, and there was a marble-lined bathroom!—a deep pool, with a trickle of water flowing into it from a dolphin’s head of gold—just enough to make the surface ripple and dance. And all around were the latest Bond Street luxuries—shampooing bowls and brushes, bottles of essences, towels on hot rails and all the rest of it. The only thing that was disagreeable was a sickly odor from some burning pastilles—oh, and a coal-black bath-woman.”
“It suggests a Royal Academy picture,” Traherne observed. “‘The Odalisque’s Pool.’”
“Or a soap advertisement,” Crespin objected.
“Same thing,” Traherne said lazily.
“Well, I wasn’t sorry to play the odalisque for once,” Lucilla assured them, “and when I had finished, lo and behold! the ayah had laid out for me half-a-dozen gorgeous and distinctly risky dinner-gowns.” Traherne gnawed suddenly at his lip, Crespin frowned angrily, but neither spoke or moved, and Lucilla, not catching their common thought, went on, “I had to explain to her in gestures that I couldn’t live up to any of them, and would rather put on my old traveling dress. She seemed quite frightened at the idea—”
“She’d probably have got the sack—perhaps literally—if she’d let you do that,” Crespin said slowly, and a hard, fierce look came into the other man’s eyes.
But Lucilla still seemed unconscious of their thought, and continued quite cheerfully—Rukh a little in her blood now, Traherne thought—“Anyway, she at last produced this comparatively inoffensive frock. She did my hair—fancy her being able to do it like this!—and wanted to finish me off with all sorts of necklaces and bangles, but I stuck to my old locket with the babies’ heads.”
“Well,” her husband said discontentedly, “all’s well that ends well, I suppose. But if I’d foreseen all this ‘Secrets of the Zenana’ business, I’m dashed if I wouldn’t—”
Lucilla cut him short. “What were you saying about magic when I came in?”
“Only that this man, Watkins—he’s the husband of your ayah, by the way—says queer things go on here, and pretends to believe in magic.”
“Do you know, Antony”—Mrs. Crespin turned to her husband—“when the Raja was speaking about him—this man Watkins—down there, it seemed to me that his face was somehow familiar to me.”
Crespin sat bolt upright, and his tired face lit with interest. “There, Doctor!” he exclaimed. “What did I say? I knew I’d seen him before, but I’m damned if I can place him.”
“I wish I could get a good look at him,” Lucilla said thoughtfully. And as she spoke Watkins passed through the room again, carrying four blossoms which he took to the dinner table and laid on the folded serviettes; and Traherne saw him.
“That’s easy,” he told her. “There he is. Shall I call him in?”
Mrs. Crespin nodded eagerly. “Do! Say I want him to thank his wife from me.”
“Watkins!” Traherne called him.
“Sir?” Watkins responded instantly, but without moving from the table.
“Mrs. Crespin would like to speak to you.” And at that the man came at once, and stood waiting, inwardly curious, outwardly respectful.
“I hear, Watkins,” Mrs. Crespin told him, looking him well in the face—and wishing the light were not at his back, “that the ayah that so kindly attended to me is your wife.”
“That’s right, ma’am,” Watkins said staunchly enough. Crespin wondered lazily if the cockney was fond—or even proud—of his native wife. Such things always interested Antony Crespin rather.
“She gave me most efficient assistance,” Mrs. Crespin said, speaking very deliberately, that she might study his face the longer, “and as she seems to know no English, I couldn’t thank her. Will you be good enough to tell her how much I appreciated all she did for me?”
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” the valet said as if he meant it. “She’ll be proud to hear it.” And the man looked genuinely pleased. He was genuinely pleased; for the shifty little cockney was fond of his big dark wife, and proud of her too, as small men often are of wives that o’ertop them. And it was, as it chanced, the one good human spot in Samuel Watkins’ thin, brutal heart. “Is that all, ma’am?” he asked after a pause—for she still was looking at him as if she might have more to say.
But she could think of nothing else, and she believed that she had gained her point, so she nodded pleasantly, and dismissed him with a pleasant, “That’s all, thank you, Watkins.”
The man bowed, and went back to the loggia, but he passed now to the outer side of the dinner table, where, seeming to be studying it still, he stood watching them warily. They involuntarily drew closer together, but Traherne, seeming to be watching idly the kindling mountains and sky, was watching Watkins as narrowly as Watkins watched them.
“You’ve a good memory for faces, Lu,” the Major said to his wife. “Do you spot him?”
“Don’t let him see we’re talking about him,” she cautioned. “I believe I do know him, but I’m not quite sure. Do you remember,” she said slowly, “the first year we were in India, there was a man in the Dorsets that used often to be on guard outside the mess-room?”
Antony Crespin sprang to his feet. “By God,” he cried, “you’ve hit it!”