“I will say nothing to show where I am,” she pleaded eagerly, “or what has happened to me. You shall read it yourself.”
At the misery in her eyes, and the entreaty, at the white loveliness of her, at the queenly quality of her, at the call of her suffering motherhood, and too, at the call of her nearness, he was so stirred, so almost tempted to yield, that he answered her almost roughly.
“An ingenious idea!” He said it a little mockingly. “You would have it come fluttering down out of the blue upon your children’s heads, like a message from a Mahatma. But, the strength of my position, you see, is that no one will ever know what has become of you. You will simply disappear in the uncharted sea of the Himalayas, as a ship sinks with all hands in the ocean. If I permitted any word from you to reach India, the detective instinct, so deeply implanted in your race, would be awakened, and the Himalayas would be combed out with a fine-tooth comb. No, Madam, I cannot risk it.”
“Cannot?” Lucilla said with cold scorn; all her calmness was recovered now, her pulsing emotion frozen back by Rukh’s hard refusal. “Cannot? You dare not! But you can and dare kill defenseless men and women. Raja, you are a pitiful coward!” Her cold, blue eyes scanned him tauntingly. She expected him to wince at that taunt. She had made it deliberately—playing the game now—as she gauged it. Appeal to his chivalry had failed, she was appealing to his vanity now.
But Rukh laughed unruffled. He read her. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I smile at your tactics. You want to goad me to chivalry. If every man were a coward who took life without risking his own, where would your British sportsmen be?”
“I beg your pardon,” the woman retorted with a sort of superb insolence; “a savage is not necessarily a coward.” The Raja just flushed at that. “And now,” she ended, rising again, “let me go to my husband.”
“Not yet, Mrs. Crespin,” he stayed her again. “One more word. You are a brave woman, and I sincerely admire you.”
“Please—please—” she interrupted him fiercely, hotly angered by the very sincerity that she could not doubt.
“Listen to me,” Rukh persisted firmly. “It will be worth your while. I could not undertake to send a letter to your children—” her face quivered again, but she stilled it, and shrugged her bitter contempt—“but it would be very easy for me to have them carried off and brought to you here.”
She sprang round to him, half stifling a cry, and faced him, her own face frankly quivering now, the veins in her throat swelling palpably.