For all that same they all were disappointed, and they all knew it. Any port in a storm! And, if misery has to put up with strange bed-fellows, it very often seeks them. The valet was English, their countryman, and for that the thought of each of them had fastened upon him as a possible aid or means of escape. And Lucilla Crespin was honest enough to say so.
“I had for one,” she said frankly. “I liked his wife. He comes from home! It must mean something to him that we are his country-people. But now, of course—if I’m right, and I think I am—and especially if he thinks we’ve recognized him—he’d know you, Antony, of course.”
“Don’t you believe it, Lu, country and all that means nothing to such fellows,” Major Crespin interrupted. And Traherne shook his head.
“No, Mrs. Crespin, he won’t help us, whether he’s the fellow you think he is or not. I know his breed. I know the shape of his head. We must find another way out—that is, if we need one—which I hope we shan’t.”
“But you think we shall?”
“Yes,” he answered her gravely. “I think we shall.”
The Raja of Rukh was dressing for dinner. There was no tire-man with him, and he moved about his dressing-room as if very much in the habit of waiting upon himself—perhaps an old varsity habit that clung to him still here in his palace-fortress on his native hills. For he had kept no valet at Cambridge. A turban newly wound he wore on his head, but his low-cut pumps, his well-creased trousers, were quite European, and so were the silk braces that held them up to the waist line of his immaculate shirt. His waistcoat and dinner jacket still lay on a chair, but his studs were in, his collar was on, and his white tie was beautifully done—if he had tied it himself, his evening tie did him great credit. And he had. The Raja of Rukh was deft-fingered—he could dress himself from skin to button-hole rose without worry or accident; and he usually did—no fumbling, no searching for studs, no swear words, no beading of sweat, no butter fingers, neither a crease nor a care. Watkins looked the perfect valet, but Rukh himself had trained him for the part, and there was less of valet than of varlet in Watkins’ office, and very much more of deeper doing.
The Raja stood a long time at the low wide window, and looked out over Rukh. It was his, all that he saw was his. Not a wee white hill-mouse, not a jeweled-and-lacquered beetle, not a leaf, not a tiniest grain but was his. The people were his—the patient, plodding, excitable people. The cattle were his, sure-footed, mountain things that carried the water his people drew, that carried the wood his people hewed. The caravans that came and went on the long, periled mountain roads, now in snow and ice, now in pelting heat and thick flowered and perfumed underbush, a camel among them sometimes, but almost entirely tiny, sturdy, sagacious ponies, and sweat-dripping human beasts of burden, bringing him and his miniature but costly court every conceivable thing from marts distant and near—glass from Venice, enamels from Japan, lacquers from China, leathers from Russia, wines from France and Portugal, fabrics from everywhere, necessities and luxuries, tinned asparagus and turtle soup, linens from Belfast, flesh-pots for him, cotton cloths and grains for his people—all were his. And he loved it as a woman loves her young—a ruthless, iron-willed man, his heart was mother-soft to his peasant people. The little huts hanging there on the mountain edges, with the smoke from the dung fires curling out—telling that the evening meal of thin, flat cakes was cooking—were dearer to him than was this great, palace home of his own. He was very rich. The place looked poor enough (all but his own fortress coign) and the people were, but the hard, rocky place belched up daily wealth for his hidden coffers. Almost numberless coins of silver and of gold, sodden and grimed with the dust of ages, were buried beneath the palace, in a rock-cut fastness to which only he and one of his henchmen knew the way, or held the key, and the bale-and-sack-bent hill-men and the sure-footed creatures who toiled back and forth from Rukh to Bokhara and Kabul by night as by day, taking his products, bringing the price of them, never ceased. His spending was prodigal, but his income alone more than sufficed for it. And his buried treasure grew.
A woman came unceremoniously in, and he turned to her instantly, and stood and waited her pleasure. The woman was old, poorly though comfortably clad. There were many rings on her bare feet’s toes, but the rings were of little value, circlets of brass and of silver coarsely jeweled with uncut gems of the commoner pebble-like sorts, none of them “precious,” and all of them but fragments—and she wore no other ornament. Her wrinkled skin was exactly the color of the saffron stuff that formed her only visible garment, and the wrinkled saffron skin was as coarse as the saffron woolen stuff. Her white hair was uncovered, her strong eyebrows streaked her yellow brow like twin patches of persistent snow on some rough brown ledge of mountain rock; palpably a peasant woman, hill-born, hill-bred, untutored—though her hands, mottled and soft with age, looked to have done no work—and the Raja of Rukh smiled at her tenderly, and waited her pleasure, as meekly as a timid child who feared and anticipated punishment or, at the best, bitter scolding from an exigeant and petulant mother. And it was just that that he did expect and very much dreaded. She usually came here to berate him, and she never failed to do it, if she found him in European garments, or had heard that European guests were being harbored and entertained.
The Raja ruled Rukh—all there obeyed him abjectly—all but Ak-kok, the old peasant woman. She obeyed no one, and feared no one or thing, not even the Green Goddess, not the sacred serpents, not the man-eating beasts that prowled from the mountains and wilds to maul and devour. She obeyed no one, she feared nothing, and though she worshiped him fiercely, she bullied the Raja of Rukh in season and out. And he loved her and feared her, salaamed to her too, and called her “Mother,” caressed her when she would brook it—for she had suckled him, and the babe she had left to other care when she had come to the palace to do it had sickened and died. She had not seemed to care then, forbidding her heart to quicken or falter a single beat, forbidding her heart to feel or to know, lest it curdle her milk. And the babe had been her only one, and its father was newly dead. But when the baby prince was weaned, she had let her pent-up, drugged grief have its way. She had covered her face in her robe, and gone from the palace, wailing and beating her breasts—still sore from a festered teething-grip, sorer still for the babe lips that had been denied their milk—had gone to the place on the hillside where the burning-place stood, and had joined the mourners squatted about a reeking pile—a child’s as it chanced—and when the little skull had cracked open with that sound like which there is no other, and the mourners had sobbed and cried, Ak-kok had laughed, rent the air with her laughing, had torn her garments and strewn the pile with them, had danced, shrieking with laughter, had torn at her face and breasts till her blood ran, and then—for none dared stay her—had turned and tottered away, still lashing the day with her laughing. It was winter—and two nights and a day had passed before they found her, out in a desolate, desert place up on the mountains, nearly naked, raving and babbling.