CHAPTER XXIX
They drew closer together—one, not three in their sudden hope, which tingled through the very room vibrantly as the telegraphist’s speaking wire’s words tingle through the air or ocean they charge.
“If we could get control of the wireless for five minutes,” Crespin muttered, “and call up the aerodrome at Amil-Serai—”
“What then?” Lucilla whispered wildly.
“Why, we’d soon bring the Raja to his senses,” Crespin told her.
“If—” Dr. Traherne said under his breath.
“Where do you suppose the installation is?” Mrs. Crespin asked her husband.
“Somewhere overhead, I should say,” Crespin replied. And they hung on his simple words. The specialist had come into his own. The wife who had discarded and judged him, the friend who had despised and pitied, looked at him with quick respect. He was in command now. Their peril and his special equipment made them look up to him. It is human nature to hold as a god every possible friend in dire need. Any port in such storm!
“We must go very cautiously, Major,” Traherne reminded him, with a note of deference in his voice. “We must on no account let the Raja suspect that we know anything about wireless telegraphy, else he’d take care we should never get near the installation.”
“Right you are, Traherne,” was the cheerful reply. “I’ll lie very low.”
Suddenly noticing it, and remembering, Mrs. Crespin flung the costly Eastern shawl from her. “And how,” she demanded, “are we to behave to this horrible man?”
“We must keep a stiff upper lip, and play the game,” Crespin insisted.
“You mean pretend to take part in his ghastly comedy of hospitality and politeness?” his wife protested.
“If you can,” Traherne urged quickly, “it would be wisest. We must play the game indeed, and not lose a trick we can possibly help. His delight in showing off his European polish is all in our favor. But for that he might separate us and lock us up. We must avoid that at all costs.”
“Oh, yes, yes—” Her eyes widened with horror at the suggestion, and her words were almost a sob.
“You’ve always had plenty, of pluck, Lu,” Crespin said proudly, but the hand he laid again on her shoulder trembled in spite of him. But his grave voice was steady. “Now’s the time to show it.”
She met his eyes more kindly than she often had of late, and nodded firmly. “You can trust me,” she told him. She drew the shawl carefully over her shoulders again, a cold smile on her mouth, and her hands did not tremble. “The thought of the children knocked me over at first, but I’m not afraid to die,” she added simply. It was perfectly true. She came of stock that never had been afraid to die. And, a little narrow in some ways, but good and sound in all, such women as this have no need to be afraid to die. “Hush!” she whispered suddenly, “the noise has stopped.” And the cluttering sound had ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and the lights had gone up as suddenly.
“Yes,” Crespin said, “they’ve left off transmitting, and ceased to draw on the electric current.”
“He’ll be back presently, then,” Traherne warned, flinging himself in an easy chair. “Don’t let us seem to be consulting.”
Lucilla leaned back luxuriously on the ottoman cushions, and readjusted a fold of the shawl—a lazy smile on her pallid face. Perhaps she felt its pallor, for she crushed and pinched it quickly with strong determined fingers. Crespin watched her proudly, as he selected and lit a cigar, and took the place where the Raja had stood with his back to the fire. It was devilish bad to be in the hellish fix they were in, but it was good to have such a wife—staunch and sporting all through. Then his face darkened with a new dismay. “Curse it!” he groaned, “I can’t remember the wave-length and the call for Amil-Serai. I was constantly using it at one time.”
“It’ll come back to you,” Traherne assured him encouragingly.
“I pray to the Lord it may!” Major Crespin muttered, as Rukh came back into the room.
“I promised you news,” he said, more briskly than he often spoke, “and it has come.” His quickened voice was perfectly calm, but his eyes were glittering with something their drooping lids could not hide.
“What news?” Major Crespin inquired casually.
“My brothers’ execution is fixed for the day after to-morrrow,” Rukh replied slowly.
The Englishmen showed nothing, but their nerves twanged. And Mrs. Crespin half rose, then sank back a little limply, as she exclaimed nervously, “Then the day after to-morrow—?”
“Yes,” the Raja answered her gravely, “at sunset.”
For a perceptible, painful pause no one spoke. Lucilla Crespin sagged a little where she sat, the palm-leaf pattern on the shawl about her quivered a little. The men did not move, still gave no sign.
“But, meanwhile,” Rukh continued, “I hope you will regard my poor house as your own. This is Liberty Hall. My tennis courts, my billiard-room, my library are all at your disposal.” It was less cruelly meant than that he could not, even in the shadow of the impending doom he’d just pronounced, refrain from boasting. “I should not advise you,” he went on, “to pass the palace gates. It would not be safe, for popular feeling, I must warn you, runs very high. Besides, where could you go? There are three hundred miles of almost impassable country between you and the nearest British post.”
“In that case, Raja,” Traherne asked perplexedly, “how do you communicate with India? How has this news reached you?” His perplexity was admirably done.
“Does that puzzle you?” Rukh asked indulgently.
“Naturally,” the English physician admitted.
“You don’t guess?” the Raja persisted.
“We have been trying to,” Traherne said frankly. “The only thing—” he hesitated, almost as if apologizing for so far-fetched a suggestion, “we could think of was that you must be in wireless communication?”
Was that wise? Crespin wondered; and Lucilla was appalled. But Dr. Traherne had weighed his words well—and if he had spent fewer years in Asia than the English soldier had, he was the deeper versed, the better skilled in human psychology.
“You observed nothing to confirm the idea?” Rukh insinuated, watching Traherne narrowly, watching them all.
Dr. Traherne shook his head densely. “Why no,” he affirmed.
“Did you not notice that the lights suddenly went down?”
“Yes,” Traherne owned promptly, but still clearly at sea, “and at the same time we heard a peculiar hissing sound.”
“None of you knew what it meant?”
“No.” The doctor made the admission as if half-ashamed of it. No mere Englishman—as Rukh perfectly knew—cares to be found lacking in omniscience itself, let alone average intelligence (one reason perhaps of the old dislike that the English once bore the quicker French).
“Then you have no knowledge of wireless telegraphy?”
“None,” Traherne replied disgustedly. And that well done self-disgust entirely convinced the Raja of Rukh—and he boasted again.
“I may tell you, then,” he said with a sort of suave, princely truculence, “that that hissing is the sound of the wireless transmission. I am in communication with India.”
“You have a wireless expert here then?” Crespin asked incredulously—taking up Traherne’s cue at last.
“Watkins”—the Raja laughed—“that invaluable fellow—he is my operator.”
“And with whom do you communicate?” Traherne asked, as if he, for his part, did not believe a word of the fairy tale.
“Do you think that quite a fair question, Doctor?” Rukh retorted with a smile. “Does it show your usual tact? I have my agents—I can say no more.”
No one made any comment, or seemed inclined to keep the ball, or any ball, rolling.
The Raja waited a courteous moment or two, and then turned to Mrs. Crespin, and asked her, “Shall I ring for the ayah, Madam, to see you to your room?”
“If you please,” she told him. She longed to stay or to go with her husband and their countryman—to be with them through the hideous strain of the night; but she thought it wiser not to make the request. Dr. Traherne would make it, if he deemed it advisable or worth while to venture it. But neither Traherne nor her husband spoke, and she rose almost immediately, as if to go. But as Rukh’s finger was on the bell, she went to him quickly, staying his hand with a gesture of hers. “No,” she begged him, “wait a moment. Raja, I have two children. If it weren’t for them, don’t imagine that any of us would beg a favor at your hands.” It was bravely said, and Antony Crespin had never admired her more, but Basil Traherne bit his lip. It was ill-advised of her, no doubt of that. But if English men proverbially blunder and aggravate their own dilemma when they stand with their backs to a wall and fight against overwhelming odds, an English woman may be forgiven for doing it now and then. And Lucilla Crespin’s English blood was up.
The Raja bowed courteously, and he smiled slightly.
“But,” her voice broke, she was pleading now, “for their sakes won’t you instruct your agent to communicate with Simla and try to bring about an exchange—your brothers’ lives for ours?”
“I am sorry, Madam,”—he spoke regretfully—and, in spite of himself Basil Traherne believed that he was—and perhaps he was—“but I have already told you why that is impossible. Even if your Government agreed, it would assuredly take revenge on me for having extorted such a concession. No whisper of your presence here must ever reach India, or—again forgive the vulgarity—my goose is cooked.”
“The thought of my children does not move you?” she asked in a low, tearless voice.
“My brothers have children—does the thought of them move the Government of India?” Rukh answered gravely. “No, Madam, I am desolated to have to refuse you, but you must not ask for the impossible.”
His Oriental heart was adamant, but in it the Asian autocrat was sorry for the Englishwoman, standing before him there, her white hands knotted together, grief, torture, supplication, and a personal and racial pride scarcely less than his own in her eyes. She would not have believed it of him. Antony Crespin could not have believed it of him. But Dr. Traherne saw it, and believed it. And while he resented it he tried to weigh and assay it, wondering how it might be used in their defense—or, at best, in hers. But what defense could there be for her that did not include theirs too: Crespin’s and his—here alone in the Kingdom of Rukh?
The Raja pressed the bell.
“Does it not strike you,” Mrs. Crespin demanded fiercely, “that, if you drive us to desperation, we may find means of cheating your Goddess? What is to prevent me, for instance, from throwing myself from that loggia?” She flung her arm towards it as she spoke, and the shawl fell away from her shoulder, and lay between them on the floor, a huddled heap of splendid colors. The Raja let it lie.
“Nothing, dear lady,” he answered quietly, “except that clinging to the known, and shrinking from the unknown, that all of us feel, even while we despise it. Besides, it would be foolishly precipitate, in every sense of the word. While there is life there is hope. You can’t read my mind. For aught you can tell, I may have no intention of proceeding to extremities, and may only be playing a little joke upon you. I hope you have observed that I have a sense of humor. Ah”—as the native woman came in—“here is the ayah. Good night, Madam; sleep well.” He bowed.
Lucilla thought he was going to give her his arm again, and the thought choked her—it shook her limbs. And Traherne feared it too. But the Raja walked gravely beside her to the door, without speaking again, without offering his hand when she’d reached it, bowed ceremoniously, and when the ayah had followed her into the corridor, closed softly behind the two women the door he had opened.
Lucilla looked him in the eye slowly and squarely before she went, turned and threw a swift, brave smile to the two Englishmen who still stood waiting impotent in the salon. Crespin smiled back at her; but Basil Traherne could not.
The Raja turned back to them from the door. “Gentlemen,” he offered, “a whiskey and soda?” Major Crespin gestured his refusal, Traherne stared his blankly. “No?” He pressed another bell. “Then good-night, good-night,” he said as two servants almost instantly came into the room.
Traherne and Crespin without a word or a look, turned on their heels and went side by side through the opened door, the native servants beside them.
Neither spoke, until at a turning the Raja’s servitors indicated that the Englishmen separated there.
“Well, cheerio!” Crespin said.
“Cheerio!” Traherne replied.
They were English.
As their footsteps died in the stretch of the great corridor, Rukh went to the loggia opening, stood there a moment musing out into the snow-and-moonlit night, and came back to near the dark, almost dead fire. He took up a large electric torch from one of the tables, and switched on its powerful light, and when he had, switched off the lights of the room. The great salon was in total darkness now except for the moonlight and snowlight that poured in through the loggia, and for the one circle-pool of radiance that fell from the downheld torch on to the crimson center of the shawl on the floor.
Rukh moved to the mantel, and threw the strong light of the torch full upon the idol standing there, grinned at it slowly, made a low ironic salaam, and turned away, still smiling a little, lighting himself to the door. As he went the bird of prey screamed again, directly over the loggia now it sounded, so near that its wings might rasp against the roof—roosting there perhaps—an ugly, tuneless cry of an untamed, implacable thing, but lower and slower, more throated than it had sounded before—this sounded the monstrous gurgle of gluttony replete and content.
The great hovering beast-bird screamed once more. But the gong did not speak again.