Rukh waited patiently. And at last she spoke to him in a low toneless voice—not turning her head, not moving her eyes.
“Is that all? Have you quite done?” she asked.
“I beg you to answer,” the Raja insisted.
“I can’t answer the greater part of what you have been saying,” she asserted uninterestedly, “for I have not heard it; at least I have not understood it. All I have heard is, ‘In less than a month you may have your children in your arms,’ and then, ‘Can God Himself give you back their childhood?’ Those words have kept hammering at my brain till”—she held out her handkerchief, there was blood on it, and for the first time looked at him—“you see—I have bit my lip to keep from shrieking aloud. I think the Devil must have put them in your mouth.”
“Pouf!” Rukh laughed lightly. “You don’t believe in those old bugbears.”
“Perhaps not,” she admitted curtly. “But there is such a thing as diabolical temptation, and you have stumbled upon the secret of it,” she added desperately.
“Stumbled!” the Raja protested.
“Mastered the art of it, if you like,” Lucilla conceded scornfully, “but not in your long harangue. All I can think of is, ‘Can God Himself give you back their childhood?’ and ‘In a month you may have them in your arms.’”
“Yes, yes,” Rukh prompted her eagerly, letting more of the genuine if foul feeling that swayed him show in voice and face than he yet had done, “think of that. In three or four weeks—I’ll not lose a day, not an hour; now, at once—in three or four weeks you may have your little ones—”
She shook off his words as if they’d been some unclean smothering garment, and rose to her slender height, interrupting him passionately, “Yes—but on what conditions? That I should desert my husband and my friend—should let them go alone to their death—should cower in some back room of this murderous house of yours, listening to the ticking of the clock, and thinking, ‘Now—now—the stroke is falling—now—now the stroke has fallen’—stopping my ears so as not to hear the yells of your bloodthirsty savages—and yet, perhaps, hearing nothing else to my dying day. No, Raja! You said something about not passing through the shadow of death; but if I did this I should not pass through it, but live in it, and bring my children into it as well. What would be the good of having them in my arms if I could not look them in the face?”