CHAPTER XXX
It took pluck—to go through it without a whimper, without one flicker of the white feather for any inimical other to see and report, or even for the solitude and their own tortured souls to see—what they had to go through that night—three of them, each alone, at bay, well-nigh in absolute despair, imprisoned in a wild far-off, unknown place. It took pluck. But they had it.
When the ayah had gone—dismissed by a smile and a gesture of thanks—the native woman not, Lucilla Crespin thought, utterly pitiless—Lucilla knelt down by her bed. She knelt there a long time, keeping a tryst her father had taught her.
When she rose she stood a while at the wide window looking out at the golden-white night, her face twisted in torture, but kindled from prayer.
Nowhere else does the maiden-hair fern grow as it grows in Rukh, in such few soil-filled cracks as the great mountains carry on their sides. From where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped flowers here and there among them. A lump came in her throat—her father had cared so much for his maiden-hair ferns! She looked away from them. She counted three temples, snow-white in the moonlight. She shuddered. Should she live on through this night to die on a heathen temple floor? Or should she take the other way—now, if she could? Yes! No—they might escape it yet—and the babies!
She closed the silk-curtains, and went resolutely to bed. Her body was weary from the long flight, the crash, the harrowing incidents that had followed the forced landing, the worse that had followed—the strain in the salon, and at dinner, the terrible climax. Heavens, how tired she was! She would need the best use of her body to-morrow, if only to carry it bravely; wisest to rest it to-night. She might not be able to force her mind to rest—for, if her body was strained and tired, what of it!—but her muscles were hers still to command, and they should obey her, she’d lay them down, loosened, unfettered, and they at least should relax and rest.
She lay a long time, alone in that strange place, not knowing what might come to her there or when—she wished the native woman had stayed—why had she not detained her?—lay perfectly still, keeping tryst: tryst with her father, tryst with the old Surrey garden, tryst with her children, tryst with Antony as she had known and loved him before the knowing and love were spoiled, tryst with the first days she remembered—old dolls, old lessons, old games, old childish sorrows and joys. She kept tryst with her girlhood. She fed the pigeons again, she rode her first pony, and gave it an apple, a red wine-full one off the ribston tree near the garden pump, she gathered the roses from the bush she loved best and the heliotrope from her favorite bed. She kept tryst with her own faults, mistakes, failures—as we all must once in life at least. She kept tryst with her own soul there alone in that strange, luxurious room which was the prison cell from which she might pass to her terrible mangling death. And she kept tryst too with that red, knifed death itself—God!
She fell asleep.
She dreamed, and once she smiled in her sleep.
But when she woke her champa-perfumed pillow was wet. Too, she had wept in her sleep.
Crespin sat all night on his bed, and thought. He too kept tryst. In such times of crisis and testing every human soul must do that. He thought of his babies, snug asleep now in Pahari while their faithful ayah lay on the floor between the two little beds, and a sentry far off in the cantonment called to some late-comer who had given the password, “Pass, friend. All’s well.” He thought of his mother—the mother for whom his fond, boyish passion and loyalty never had dwindled—he slipped his hand again in hers, he held her close in his arms, holding her reverently, all love and no judgment of her in his heart. He chalked up a long account against himself. He knew how he’d stumbled. But, too, he knew how he’d tried! And perhaps God did—and counted it more than Crespin counted it.
Traherne came through it worst of all. Till day broke he paced the floor, forming plan after plan, rejecting them one after one—all but one—planning how to send the woman who was Crespin’s wife to a painless death, before he was put to death—if it came to that—to kill her with his own hand rather than leave her behind them, alone in Rukh; it must not come to that! It should not, he swore. But how? How? That was a difficult rub. The possibilities of escape for all three of them, and how they should seize upon and use them must be left to chance, if by any great fluke such chance came at all. It would be idle to speculate upon that now. But how to kill Lucilla, how and when? But it must be done, if the other chance never came. In all probability it must be done. He shook at the thought, but worse he sickened at the fear of its failure. He had a few drugs with him, a few simple remedies—he was too good an airman and physician to fly without lozenges and ointments—and his miniature case was still intact in his flying kit there on the floor—but there was not a human death in the lot. How? Sweat broke out on his forehead. How? Somehow! That much was fixed. He’d strangle her, if needs be, with his hands, rather than leave her alone to this Raja of Rukh. With his own hands that had trembled in spite of his will, if by chance they had touched but some garment of hers, an intimate belonging even! He looked down at them. How they were trembling now! With the hands that had ached to caress her, to take a lover’s right of her sweetness! Could they do it? And if she struggled—as the physician knew tortured human flesh must when agony gripped it, let the soul it housed be never so dauntless and fixed—if she struggled could he persist? He must—if it came to it. And his face fixed into tortured hardness, as might a surgeon’s, forced to perform, in the absence of Surgery’s holy handmaid and friend, Anæsthetic, a painful, major operation on his only child.
Traherne kept few trysts that night as he paced the floor of the palace room. But he registered a grim oath, never again, if he lived to escape from Rukh, to fly without either cyanide of potassium or chloroform. But he’d not fly again, he thought, if he lived to be free. That last fatal flight in which he had piloted the woman he loved to a hideous death—or worse—had turned him forever sick of air goings. He went to the window, and looked out at the night in its pageant and splendor, and he cursed the Himalayas. He cursed them with gibbering lips, and he shook his fist at the great beautiful mountains.
Down near the little white temple the wing of his broken aeroplane caught his eye where it stuck out from behind a crag of rock, etched clear and sharp by the radiant moonlight. And he cursed the aeroplane too—the craft he had mourned almost boyishly—cursed it low and long, as men curse the things their own wrong handling has ruined, from women to shirt-studs.
What was she doing? How was it faring with her? Was she safe even now? At the thought and its fear he grew faint—the room swam—the mountains swayed. And he could do nothing! He sickened violently, actually, at the thought of what might be befalling her even now—while he stood here agape at a moon, and a theatrical painted scene of mountains and stones and sky!—and the thought of what she must be suffering in her solitude, even if diabolical revenge still left it inviolate, maddened him only less.
Antony Crespin and Lucilla, his wife, thought of many things as the hideous night hours wore away. But Basil Traherne thought only of one. Of the three he suffered the most—perhaps because his pain was concentrated. No thought of a career blasted, cut short, no regret for ambitions nipped and thwarted, crossed his mind for an instant. He no more thought of Science—mistress and wife, mother and child to him till Lucilla had come, not to usurp but to share its throne—than he did of the Elgin Marbles or the Odes of Horace. Science had been his meat and his drink, the food of his soul, his motif of life. And if he had thought of that Science now, he would have cursed it too, as he had cursed the poor broken plane and the great snow-wrapped mountain peaks. Traherne thought of but one thing: Lucilla.
The Raja of Rukh too kept tryst as the far moon rode higher and higher, gilding the goat-tracks and the thin hill-rills, turning the temples and roofs to silver and gold, splashing the mountains with silver and gold, turning the gray rock crags into copper, the brown into russet and bronze. He sat alone, loose-robed, cross-legged on a nest of great cushions, his hands on his knees, his face turned to the Southwest where he knew Abdulabad lay. He kept no tryst with the girl-wife newly dead over there in the harem, the women wailing about her, strewing rose-leaves and incense and aguru over her garments, gave no thought to their new-born child. He gave no thought to the Englishwoman alone in her prison-chamber, none to the two Englishmen. He was in Abdulabad keeping their death-watch with his brothers. Oriental thought travels and visualizes, as the thought of no Western can. He was with them in their gaol. Their failure and capture galled him, the ignominy of the death by rope shamed him.
The Raja of Rukh had told Mrs. Crespin the truth. He loved himself first—if so small, so wormlike a thing as self-centered selfishness may be called by so big a name; and his children—above all La-swak—came next, his people third. For his sons’ sake, above all for La-swak’s, his regret at his brothers’ capture was more than tinged with relief. It cut a troublesome knot of his own, it left La-swak’s succession comparatively safe. Masterly inactivity was his fixed conviction and purpose. He had no intention of rousing a British hornet’s nest to buzz and sting about the fortress and huts of Rukh. He intended to keep his inheritance, his ease, his absolutism and his own skin intact. But, too, he loved his brothers. He suffered their pain, he shared their plight. Boyhood’s friendliness, theirs and his, before he’d been sent to England, gripped and griped him. The Raja of Rukh kept their death-watch with his brothers, and mist gathered and thickened in his somber eyes.
He was in Abdulabad, and he did not hear a woman enter, or see her until she came close before him and salaamed more than once, salaamed a little insistently at last.
Rukh glanced up slowly, and nodded to the ayah—Watkins’ “wife”—to speak.
“She sleeps, Supreme One,” the woman said. “I have brought it.”
Rukh held out his hand, and the ayah, salaaming again, laid a little gold locket in his palm.
“Sleeps?” he questioned. “Is she drugged?”
“Nay,” the woman told him. “I watched through the lattice, as Your Greatness commanded. Nothing has passed the Feringhi woman’s lips since she left the great salon.”
“No syringe? Her arm?”
“Not so, Royal Master, nothing.”
“Who watches her now?” Rukh demanded.
“Po-nunk, Powerful One.”
“So she sleeps! That is pluck! True pluck!” The Raja of Rukh liked pluck—it was the one masculine quality he approved of in a woman. So the Englishwoman slept! He liked her for that. It might be just utter exhaustion, of course, trying to knit up the raveled sleeve of her long, hard day’s care. But he believed it was pluck of character far more than fatigue of body. He believed it was pluck. And he preferred to think it that. He liked her for it! The brave, delicate one!
He opened the locket, and scrutinized its pictures thoughtfully.
“She bears beautiful children,” he said with a thoughtful smile, as he handed it back. “Put it back again where it was. See that you do not wake her,” he commanded.
As the ayah closed the door, he repeated softly, cruelly too, “She bears beautiful children.”
He rose and rang a bell.
Watkins came—but not at once.
“Well?” the Raja demanded, speaking in English, “do they sleep?”
“Like hornets on the war-path, Your ’Ighness.”
Rukh laughed.
“Good!” he said. “Has the Major asked for liquor?”
“For nothink, Your ’Ighness. Neither of ’em ’as asked for nothink.”
“Remember not to stint them, if they do,” the Raja ordered. “Make them perfectly comfortable—especially the Major. I rather like the Major, Watkins. That is all.”
“Very good, Your ’Ighness, thank you,” Watkins replied colorlessly, and left the room so quietly that he seemed to fade away.
Watkins went back to his divided watch deliberately—almost as if he took little satisfaction in it, and there was no truculence on his mean, bad face as he went. He was not much English, but he was English. Old memories—not very pleasant ones though—were stirring a little, and presently, not knowing that he did, under his breath he whistled, rather in dirgelike time and color, a few bars of “The Old Kent Road.”
Rukh stood in his casement, and looked out towards the Southwest, where Abdulabad lay behind the mountains. “You who are about to die, I salute you,” he said. “Well,” he added, “Kismet!” Then he crossed back to his cushions, loosened his robes still more, threw off his girdle, lay down on the comfortable pillows. And as the day broke over Rukh, washing the great snow-capped Himalayas with carmine and rose and violet and beryl-green, its Raja slept like a child.