The Raja bowed courteously, and he smiled slightly.
“But,” her voice broke, she was pleading now, “for their sakes won’t you instruct your agent to communicate with Simla and try to bring about an exchange—your brothers’ lives for ours?”
“I am sorry, Madam,”—he spoke regretfully—and, in spite of himself Basil Traherne believed that he was—and perhaps he was—“but I have already told you why that is impossible. Even if your Government agreed, it would assuredly take revenge on me for having extorted such a concession. No whisper of your presence here must ever reach India, or—again forgive the vulgarity—my goose is cooked.”
“The thought of my children does not move you?” she asked in a low, tearless voice.
“My brothers have children—does the thought of them move the Government of India?” Rukh answered gravely. “No, Madam, I am desolated to have to refuse you, but you must not ask for the impossible.”
His Oriental heart was adamant, but in it the Asian autocrat was sorry for the Englishwoman, standing before him there, her white hands knotted together, grief, torture, supplication, and a personal and racial pride scarcely less than his own in her eyes. She would not have believed it of him. Antony Crespin could not have believed it of him. But Dr. Traherne saw it, and believed it. And while he resented it he tried to weigh and assay it, wondering how it might be used in their defense—or, at best, in hers. But what defense could there be for her that did not include theirs too: Crespin’s and his—here alone in the Kingdom of Rukh?
The Raja pressed the bell.
“Does it not strike you,” Mrs. Crespin demanded fiercely, “that, if you drive us to desperation, we may find means of cheating your Goddess? What is to prevent me, for instance, from throwing myself from that loggia?” She flung her arm towards it as she spoke, and the shawl fell away from her shoulder, and lay between them on the floor, a huddled heap of splendid colors. The Raja let it lie.
“Nothing, dear lady,” he answered quietly, “except that clinging to the known, and shrinking from the unknown, that all of us feel, even while we despise it. Besides, it would be foolishly precipitate, in every sense of the word. While there is life there is hope. You can’t read my mind. For aught you can tell, I may have no intention of proceeding to extremities, and may only be playing a little joke upon you. I hope you have observed that I have a sense of humor. Ah”—as the native woman came in—“here is the ayah. Good night, Madam; sleep well.” He bowed.
Lucilla thought he was going to give her his arm again, and the thought choked her—it shook her limbs. And Traherne feared it too. But the Raja walked gravely beside her to the door, without speaking again, without offering his hand when she’d reached it, bowed ceremoniously, and when the ayah had followed her into the corridor, closed softly behind the two women the door he had opened.