CHAPTER XXX
It took pluck—to go through it without a whimper, without one flicker of the white feather for any inimical other to see and report, or even for the solitude and their own tortured souls to see—what they had to go through that night—three of them, each alone, at bay, well-nigh in absolute despair, imprisoned in a wild far-off, unknown place. It took pluck. But they had it.
When the ayah had gone—dismissed by a smile and a gesture of thanks—the native woman not, Lucilla Crespin thought, utterly pitiless—Lucilla knelt down by her bed. She knelt there a long time, keeping a tryst her father had taught her.
When she rose she stood a while at the wide window looking out at the golden-white night, her face twisted in torture, but kindled from prayer.
Nowhere else does the maiden-hair fern grow as it grows in Rukh, in such few soil-filled cracks as the great mountains carry on their sides. From where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped flowers here and there among them. A lump came in her throat—her father had cared so much for his maiden-hair ferns! She looked away from them. She counted three temples, snow-white in the moonlight. She shuddered. Should she live on through this night to die on a heathen temple floor? Or should she take the other way—now, if she could? Yes! No—they might escape it yet—and the babies!
She closed the silk-curtains, and went resolutely to bed. Her body was weary from the long flight, the crash, the harrowing incidents that had followed the forced landing, the worse that had followed—the strain in the salon, and at dinner, the terrible climax. Heavens, how tired she was! She would need the best use of her body to-morrow, if only to carry it bravely; wisest to rest it to-night. She might not be able to force her mind to rest—for, if her body was strained and tired, what of it!—but her muscles were hers still to command, and they should obey her, she’d lay them down, loosened, unfettered, and they at least should relax and rest.
She lay a long time, alone in that strange place, not knowing what might come to her there or when—she wished the native woman had stayed—why had she not detained her?—lay perfectly still, keeping tryst: tryst with her father, tryst with the old Surrey garden, tryst with her children, tryst with Antony as she had known and loved him before the knowing and love were spoiled, tryst with the first days she remembered—old dolls, old lessons, old games, old childish sorrows and joys. She kept tryst with her girlhood. She fed the pigeons again, she rode her first pony, and gave it an apple, a red wine-full one off the ribston tree near the garden pump, she gathered the roses from the bush she loved best and the heliotrope from her favorite bed. She kept tryst with her own faults, mistakes, failures—as we all must once in life at least. She kept tryst with her own soul there alone in that strange, luxurious room which was the prison cell from which she might pass to her terrible mangling death. And she kept tryst too with that red, knifed death itself—God!
She fell asleep.
She dreamed, and once she smiled in her sleep.
But when she woke her champa-perfumed pillow was wet. Too, she had wept in her sleep.