“We are approaching the crux of the matter,” Rukh returned, “a point you may have some difficulty in appreciating. I would beg you to remember that though I am what is commonly called an autocrat, there is no such thing under the sun as real despotism. All government is government by consent of the people. It is very stupid of them to consent—but they do. I have studied the question—took a pretty good degree at Cambridge, in Moral and Political Science—and I assure you that, though I have absolute power of life and death over my subjects, it is only their acquiescence that gives me that power. If I defied their prejudices or their passions, they could upset my throne to-morrow.”
Anthony Crespin was losing his head and his temper. “Will you be so kind as to come to the point, sir?” he stormed.
“Gently, Major!” Rukh said soothingly. “We shall reach it soon enough.” He turned to Lucilla, “Please remember, too, Madam, that autocracy is generally a theocracy to boot, and mine is a case in point. I am a slave to theology. The clerical party can do what it pleases with me, for there is no other party to oppose it. True I am my own Archbishop of Canterbury—‘but I have a partner: Mr. Jorkins’—I have a terribly exacting Archbishop of York. I fear I may have to introduce you to him to-morrow.”
Lucilla Crespin lifted a drawn face, but she looked him straight in the eyes—and there were both defiance and entreaty in hers. “You are torturing us, Your Highness,” she told him simply. “Like my husband, I beg you to come to the point.”
“The point is, dear lady,” the Raja answered her sadly, “that the theology on which, as I say, my whole power is founded, has not yet emerged from the Mosaic stage of development: It demands an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—”
There was a pause.
“—a life for a life.”
There was a pause—longer, tenser, a terrible hopeless pause. Crespin sagged in his chair, his miserable eyes fixed on his wife’s face, seeing nothing, thinking of nothing but her. She sat where she was, statue-like in her motionless horror. Traherne never lowered his look from Rukh’s expressionless face.
Again the wild bird cried, nearer now; they could hear the beat of its great angry wings.
Dr. Traherne spoke first. “You mean to say—”