CHAPTER XXXIV
Mrs. Crespin looked Rukh full in the face, and at what he saw in hers his eyes almost fell. But as she passed to the door of the billiard-room he challenged her, “That is your answer?”
“The only possible answer,” she returned quietly, and went on into the other room, and closed the door.
“But not the last word, my lady!” Rukh murmured to himself, as he stood looking after her.
And neither then nor after did the Raja of Rukh purpose this woman’s death. Up to the slaughter she should go, square up to the block and the sword—if she would not yield before that—but not on to the sword-severed end. His purpose was other than that. And her resistance but whetted his purpose, steeled his will. If she yielded, would he keep the promises he’d made her? Many men will promise much to gain their end—when that end is a woman. Not all men fulfill such promises.
The Raja of Rukh had made Mrs. Crespin what he considered a very handsome offer—as he saw it, a tempting offer. But he had meant all he had said, had intended all he had promised. He had not forgotten La-swak when he had promised to make another his heir. But something in this Western woman had called him irresistibly. The light women “mostly from Paris” who had been from time to time his “guests” scarcely had amused him for an hour, not one of them had interested him for a moment. But this woman of breeding and of character appealed to him, and affected him strongly. To claim her as his, fascinated him. To have a woman companion and friend—perhaps that appealed to him most. He was lonely. And, perhaps unconsciously, he was homesick sometimes for things and conditions he’d left behind him in Europe. Interesting as it had been, his stay at Cambridge had not been all pleasant. He had been there, prince and rich and brilliant though he was, on tolerance, and that had been torment. But often here in his solitary, uncompanioned state, the Raja of Rukh was more than half homesick for the old varsity—its life, its human give-and-take, the town at its river-ribboned feet. For all his retinue the man was a “solitary”; he longed for a friend. He dared not leave Rukh now. He might lose Rukh, if he left it for long now. He had no mind to lose Rukh—it had been his fathers’ for too long, it kept him too richly, and he loved it too well.
He prided himself that Europe had made a superficial but accomplished cosmopolitan of him—he knew that at core he was all Oriental still. But he was a little wrong there. The West had infused itself into him more than he dreamed. Cambridge had made something of a half-caste of the high-born, absolute ruler of Rukh—an intellectual half-caste. He had studied a few Western masters profoundly, he had dabbled, and he still dabbled, in abominably many. Your true cosmopolitan is born, not made. He is very rare. Europe had given Rukh’s Raja Gogol and Herbert Spencer, Byron and Aristotle, Goethe and Ben Jonson and Macaulay, the philosophies of Greece and of England, the cultures of France and Spain, the flairs of Mayfair and Rome, but it had taken away more than it had given, had cramped even more than it had developed. It had not expatriated him, but it had made him lonely.
The European side, grafted on him, and still growing green and strong, the European in him, craved this exquisite and companionable English gentlewoman even more, and more insistently than the Asian did. He would win her in Eastern ways, if he must, but he would wear and keep her in Western ways, if she liked—and as far as one might in Rukh.
He had come to believe that the Superman of whom the new philosophers prated almost as glibly as intricately and obscurely, would be generated from some high fusion of East and West—a flabby, unwholesome belief, but he held it, and since he himself could not be world-eminent as the first Superman, he was keenly minded to beget him. But he had not forgotten La-swak. La-swak should have a rich heritage, a gilded and cushioned life, his other sons should be provided for nobly and carefully, and his daughters should be given in marriage, well-portioned, of course. As for his native wives, his new queen should do with them as she pleased. But La-swak should keep a princely place, always the favorite son; and Ak-kok should keep her place, her pleasure and her ease.
Rukh admired the English more than he disliked them. And, too, in the ordinary, human way, to which all flesh is heir he had fallen in love—with, as it chanced, a Western woman.
Abortive, fantastic a dream as ever opium gave, but it brightened his eyes, flushed his face, and set all his sensitive nerves dancing to delicate music.