“What do you mean?” she gasped.
“I mean,” he told her slowly, saying it earnestly, “that, in less than a month, you may have your children in your arms, uninjured, unsuspecting, happy—if—”
“If?” the woman whispered hoarsely, and twisting the end of her long silk scarf in hysterical, trembling fingers.
“If—” Rukh answered gently, watching her narrowly—his eyes friendly and respectful—“oh, in your own time, of your own free will—you will accept the homage it would be my privilege to offer you.”
“That!”
It would have been answer enough for most men, it would have chilled the purpose of many, the purpose and any ardor behind it, the word as the English woman tossed it at him, with snaky venom in her blazing blue eyes. But Rukh went smoothly on, beating his terrible arguments in slowly and courteously. “You have the courage to die, dear lady—why not have the courage to live?”
She shuddered. That was her answer.
He waited a moment quietly, and then, “You believe,” he continued, “that to-morrow, when the ordeal is over, you will awaken in a new life, and that your children will rejoin you. Suppose it were so: suppose that in forty—fifty—sixty years, they passed over to you: would they be your children? Can God himself give you back their childhood? What I offer you,” he urged—and there was an odd sweetness in his Asiatic voice—“is a new life, not problematical, but assured; a new life, without passing through the shadow of death; a future utterly cut off from the past, except that your children will be with you, not as vague shades, but living and loving. They must be quite young; they would soon forget all that had gone before. They would grow to manhood and womanhood under your eyes; and ultimately, perhaps, when the whole story was forgotten, you might, if you wished it, return with them to what you call civilization.”
Degrading, immoral—what you will, it had its points, the plan he unfolded. And the Raja of Rukh told it well. “And meanwhile,” he pressed it on, “you are only on the threshold of the best years of your life. You would pass them, not as a memsahib in a paltry Indian cantonment—I don’t see you there—but as the absolute queen of an absolute king. I do not talk to you of romantic love. I respect you too much to think you accessible to silly sentiment. But that is just it: I respect as much as I admire you; and I have never pretended to respect any other woman. Therefore I say you should be my first and only queen. Your son, if you gave me one, should be the prince of princes, my other sons should all bow down to him and serve him. For, though I hate the arrogance of Europe, I believe that from a blending of the flower of the East with the flower of the West, the man of the future—the Superman—may be born.”
Through all this Lucilla Crespin sat lax and motionless, gazing straight in front of her, her handkerchief pressed to her lips. And she gave no sign, none that the man could read, of what mark, if any, his words had made on her mind.