“I’ll explain presently,” the Raja promised. “But first—”
Crespin interrupted rashly, blundering in the accredited British way. “First, let us understand each other—” and his tone and manner were crassly mandatory. “You surely can’t approve of this abominable crime?” he demanded—more as if Rukh had been his prisoner than he Rukh’s.
“My brothers,” the Raja said with an enigmatic smile, an ominous smoothness, “are fanatics, and there is no fanaticism in me.”
“How do they come to be so different from you?” Lucilla Crespin asked him, again speaking impulsively—and it was ill-advised.
But Rukh showed no resentment. Traherne wondered if he felt none. Perhaps—Oriental susceptibilities, though quicker and sharper, differ widely from ours.
“That is just what I was going to tell you,” Rukh answered. “I was my father’s eldest son, by his favorite wife. Through my mother’s influence (my poor mother—how I loved her!)”—Lucilla knew he said it sincerely; Traherne wondered if he did; and that he might never occurred to Crespin, who wished for the love of Mike the fellow’d cut the cackle and get to the horses—their horses!—“at her wish I was sent to Europe. If only our women knew what that does to us! My education was wholly European. I shed all my prejudices. I became the open-minded citizen of the world whom I hope you recognize in me—” That was part sarcasm, part vanity, part a child’s truckling for applause. The true Oriental is always a child. However old he lives, he whom the gods of the East love die young. “My brothers,” he continued, “on the other hand, turned to India for their culture. The religion of our people has always been a primitive idolatry. My brothers naturally fell in with adherents of the same superstition and they worked each other up to a high pitch of frenzy against the European exploitation of Asia.”
Traherne nodded; he was not altogether out of sympathy with that. But he said, “Had you no restraining influence upon them?”
The Raja smiled—it was not a sunny smile. “Of course I might have imprisoned them—or had them strangled—the traditional form of argument in our family. But why should I? As I said, I have no prejudices—least of all in favor of the British. My family is of Indian blood, though long severed from the Motherland—and I do not love her tyrants.”
Again out in the open the bird screamed its horrid gluttonous cry.
“In short, sir,” Crespin broke in—wine-fumes and fear both fuddling his mind, “you defend their devilish murder?”