Could he answer it? Had he any right to bid her die, to let her die without strong protest from him, when she had even this chance of escape?
Up there in the beetling, brooding palace of Rukh, in her prison chamber, in the tortured night, Lucilla Crespin had faced that question, had canvassed it, had tried to weigh it sanely. And there alone with her own soul and her God, while the song and laughter of those who sharpened the swords and decked the place of slaughter came to her through the night, she had answered it.
She had answered it nobly. She had answered it in the only way that such an Englishwoman as she—her father’s child and her mother’s—could answer it perhaps.
But was that noble, womanly answer the noblest?
She had answered it—in her only way.
Basil Traherne was trying to answer it now.
His soul writhed, his very flesh, so soon to be nothing, ached with the pain and difficulty of answering the nearly unanswerable, loathsome, hideous question.
Standing here, dying even now, for help would have come long hours ago, if Crespin’s call had gone through, hearing again the horrible calls and shouts of the maddened throng out there, hearing the woman here with him moaning for her children, the question of right and wrong, of best or worst for her and for her fatherless children, beat at him like a flail of white-hot metal. And the thought of the white body he loved tortured and mangled out there—now—almost now—weighted his reasoning. It must. It must have done that.
He could not decide! He did not see.
“Are you sure you did right to refuse?” he repeated, and sweat colder than death broke on his face.