The Green Goddess

by Louise Jordan Miln; William Archer

Crespin sat all night on his bed, and thought. He too kept tryst. In such times of crisis and testing every human soul must do that. He thought of his babies, snug asleep now in Pahari while their faithful ayah lay on the floor between the two little beds, and a sentry far off in the cantonment called to some late-comer who had given the password, “Pass, friend. All’s well.” He thought of his mother—the mother for whom his fond, boyish passion and loyalty never had dwindled—he slipped his hand again in hers, he held her close in his arms, holding her reverently, all love and no judgment of her in his heart. He chalked up a long account against himself. He knew how he’d stumbled. But, too, he knew how he’d tried! And perhaps God did—and counted it more than Crespin counted it.

Traherne came through it worst of all. Till day broke he paced the floor, forming plan after plan, rejecting them one after one—all but one—planning how to send the woman who was Crespin’s wife to a painless death, before he was put to death—if it came to that—to kill her with his own hand rather than leave her behind them, alone in Rukh; it must not come to that! It should not, he swore. But how? How? That was a difficult rub. The possibilities of escape for all three of them, and how they should seize upon and use them must be left to chance, if by any great fluke such chance came at all. It would be idle to speculate upon that now. But how to kill Lucilla, how and when? But it must be done, if the other chance never came. In all probability it must be done. He shook at the thought, but worse he sickened at the fear of its failure. He had a few drugs with him, a few simple remedies—he was too good an airman and physician to fly without lozenges and ointments—and his miniature case was still intact in his flying kit there on the floor—but there was not a human death in the lot. How? Sweat broke out on his forehead. How? Somehow! That much was fixed. He’d strangle her, if needs be, with his hands, rather than leave her alone to this Raja of Rukh. With his own hands that had trembled in spite of his will, if by chance they had touched but some garment of hers, an intimate belonging even! He looked down at them. How they were trembling now! With the hands that had ached to caress her, to take a lover’s right of her sweetness! Could they do it? And if she struggled—as the physician knew tortured human flesh must when agony gripped it, let the soul it housed be never so dauntless and fixed—if she struggled could he persist? He must—if it came to it. And his face fixed into tortured hardness, as might a surgeon’s, forced to perform, in the absence of Surgery’s holy handmaid and friend, Anæsthetic, a painful, major operation on his only child.

Traherne kept few trysts that night as he paced the floor of the palace room. But he registered a grim oath, never again, if he lived to escape from Rukh, to fly without either cyanide of potassium or chloroform. But he’d not fly again, he thought, if he lived to be free. That last fatal flight in which he had piloted the woman he loved to a hideous death—or worse—had turned him forever sick of air goings. He went to the window, and looked out at the night in its pageant and splendor, and he cursed the Himalayas. He cursed them with gibbering lips, and he shook his fist at the great beautiful mountains.

Down near the little white temple the wing of his broken aeroplane caught his eye where it stuck out from behind a crag of rock, etched clear and sharp by the radiant moonlight. And he cursed the aeroplane too—the craft he had mourned almost boyishly—cursed it low and long, as men curse the things their own wrong handling has ruined, from women to shirt-studs.

What was she doing? How was it faring with her? Was she safe even now? At the thought and its fear he grew faint—the room swam—the mountains swayed. And he could do nothing! He sickened violently, actually, at the thought of what might be befalling her even now—while he stood here agape at a moon, and a theatrical painted scene of mountains and stones and sky!—and the thought of what she must be suffering in her solitude, even if diabolical revenge still left it inviolate, maddened him only less.

Antony Crespin and Lucilla, his wife, thought of many things as the hideous night hours wore away. But Basil Traherne thought only of one. Of the three he suffered the most—perhaps because his pain was concentrated. No thought of a career blasted, cut short, no regret for ambitions nipped and thwarted, crossed his mind for an instant. He no more thought of Science—mistress and wife, mother and child to him till Lucilla had come, not to usurp but to share its throne—than he did of the Elgin Marbles or the Odes of Horace. Science had been his meat and his drink, the food of his soul, his motif of life. And if he had thought of that Science now, he would have cursed it too, as he had cursed the poor broken plane and the great snow-wrapped mountain peaks. Traherne thought of but one thing: Lucilla.

The Raja of Rukh too kept tryst as the far moon rode higher and higher, gilding the goat-tracks and the thin hill-rills, turning the temples and roofs to silver and gold, splashing the mountains with silver and gold, turning the gray rock crags into copper, the brown into russet and bronze. He sat alone, loose-robed, cross-legged on a nest of great cushions, his hands on his knees, his face turned to the Southwest where he knew Abdulabad lay. He kept no tryst with the girl-wife newly dead over there in the harem, the women wailing about her, strewing rose-leaves and incense and aguru over her garments, gave no thought to their new-born child. He gave no thought to the Englishwoman alone in her prison-chamber, none to the two Englishmen. He was in Abdulabad keeping their death-watch with his brothers. Oriental thought travels and visualizes, as the thought of no Western can. He was with them in their gaol. Their failure and capture galled him, the ignominy of the death by rope shamed him.

The Raja of Rukh had told Mrs. Crespin the truth. He loved himself first—if so small, so wormlike a thing as self-centered selfishness may be called by so big a name; and his children—above all La-swak—came next, his people third. For his sons’ sake, above all for La-swak’s, his regret at his brothers’ capture was more than tinged with relief. It cut a troublesome knot of his own, it left La-swak’s succession comparatively safe. Masterly inactivity was his fixed conviction and purpose. He had no intention of rousing a British hornet’s nest to buzz and sting about the fortress and huts of Rukh. He intended to keep his inheritance, his ease, his absolutism and his own skin intact. But, too, he loved his brothers. He suffered their pain, he shared their plight. Boyhood’s friendliness, theirs and his, before he’d been sent to England, gripped and griped him. The Raja of Rukh kept their death-watch with his brothers, and mist gathered and thickened in his somber eyes.

He was in Abdulabad, and he did not hear a woman enter, or see her until she came close before him and salaamed more than once, salaamed a little insistently at last.

Rukh glanced up slowly, and nodded to the ayah—Watkins’ “wife”—to speak.