“Well—yes,” Rukh admitted regretfully.
Lucilla Crespin came towards them with a cry.
“Not you, Madam—not you—”
“I must speak to you—speak to you alone!” she gasped. “Send Dr. Traherne away.”
Rukh looked at her searchingly.
Traherne understood her. “Lucilla!” he exclaimed, entreaty and command in his tone. “What are you thinking of! Lucilla—!”
At a gesture from the Raja, the priests who were guarding Traherne bent over him, and he crumpled up like a storm-buffeted autumn leaf, and his voice trailed weakly, then died away. Japanese ju-jutsu is a thing of feather, and slow and uncertain compared to the brutal knack that these temple priests had practiced on Basil Traherne. Their theology may have been as rotten and flabby as it was absurd and fanatic, but their athletic skill and their fighting knowledge of human anatomy were fine.
“I beg you—I beg you!” the woman implored brokenly, wildly. “One minute—no more!”
Rukh looked at her curiously, studying her searchingly, for a moment—a sharp gleam in his narrowed eyes—shrugged his cope-covered shoulders, and gave a terse order, and Traherne, inert and almost unconscious, was dragged away, and out through the door through which he had been carried into the temple hall.
In her desperation the woman had rushed up the steps of the throne. Now in her exhaustion she sank down on one end of the actual throne itself—sharing it crushed and abjectly with him—the broken suppliant of an absolute king.