“Tut, tut—most inconvenient,” he remarked languidly, not ill-naturedly. “And foolish on your part—for now, if my brothers should be reprieved, we cannot hear of it. What a pity—for you, perhaps. Otherwise—” he shrugged slightly—“the situation remains unchanged. We adhere to our program for to-morrow. The Major has only a few hours’ start of you.” And he turned on his heel, and passed out through the billiard-room, motioning something to the soldiers standing nearest Traherne.
When Lucilla Crespin looked up—it was not for some time—she was alone in the room with—her husband.
CHAPTER XXXIX
“I regret that I must offer you the services of a less well-trained ayah,” Rukh said, “but it is unavoidable. The woman who has waited on you had the bad taste to be greatly attached to her little—and, I must own, not one would think personally attractive—cockney husband. She is—just for the time being, of course—inconsolable. And her noisy grief—she’s of that irritating type—would disturb you. And too—she has learned—I regret it; but no autocrat can muzzle gossip, and such chatter flies in Rukh, and particularly fast in every palace, I think—she has learned how the inestimable, if sometimes indirect, Watkins came by his death. I could force her to attend you, but even I could not force or persuade her to do it civilly.”
Mrs. Crespin made no reply.
She sat on a wide stone bench, soft with cushions and fringed breadths of silks, in the garden that snuggled radiantly below the corridor windows—and the Raja of Rukh stood before her, his face to the palace towards which the carved bench was backed.
He had sent old Ak-kok to bring the English lady there from the snuggery, and Ak-kok had obeyed him sulkily, but had obeyed. Soldiers had gone with her to see that she did, and the old nurse had known from Rukh’s manner, even more than from his words, that in this she dare not disobey him. There were times and moods in which her prince humored and obeyed her. This was none. And when the soldiers had lifted the dead man’s body from where it lay, and carried it—not disrespectfully—away, and had indicated by unmistakable gestures that she might not follow them, Lucilla Crespin had turned listlessly and gone with Ak-kok. Why not? Nothing mattered now. There was no fret over little things left in her—the time was too short.
And so she sat on the bench to which the old Rukh woman took her, then turned and left her. And presently when they brought her food—men in the Raja’s white and gold and green liveries—and put it down near her, she ate and drank, because she wished to be strong to-morrow: strong to die quietly and proudly, if no help came, strong to live to reach her children—hers and Antony’s—if help from Amil-Serai swooped down on imprisoning Rukh. The men servants left her as soon as they’d served her, but a girl, evidently of the ayah class, stood near, as if in her service, her hands folded in her sari, her eyes, Lucilla thought, not fanatically inimical.
The Englishwoman was glad to be free of the palace walls—for a time; glad to sit here where she could not see it. She did not know that Rukh himself had moved the heavy seat so that its back was turned to the fortress-palace. And she was glad to know that all those thick walls stood impenetrable between her and what lay—it still must, she thought, the drop down had been so far and so sheer—in the gorge below the snuggery balcony. And of that too the Raja had thought.
She did not see the garden in which she sat, but perhaps some balm of its beauty and quiet stole to her and laved her.