Rukh was watching her narrowly with a serpent-look in passion-full eyes. He held his silence—and waited.
“Let him go,” she panted, when she could speak, “let him go, send him back to India unharmed, and—it shall be as you wish.”
CHAPTER XLIV
Outside the waiting people were eating oily sweetmeats and greasier cakes and water-lily seeds, drinking sickly fermented goats’ milk, and watching now sacred snakes tearing living birds to bleeding pieces—a priest-granted sight both to whet and hold in leash their maddened blood-thirst for the greater slaughter to come—so soon to come now; for the sun had not ceased to sink; and here in the dark, terrible hall the tawny prince in gauds of satins and gems, and the white-skinned woman in a plain tweed gown, bartered and played for a man’s life, a woman’s soul and body. A Raja staked a whim and a lust, an Englishwoman staked her all.
They staked and threw.
And the sun sank lower.
“Soho!” Rukh said at last, all the kindness real or assumed gone from his voice, the wicked light of a primitive, angry feeling disfiguring his eyes, “you will do for your lover—to save him a little additional pain—what you would not do to have your children restored to you! Suppose I agree—would he accept this sacrifice?”
“No,” the woman said quickly, “no, he wouldn’t—but he must have no choice. That is part of the bargain. Send him—bound hand and foot, if need be—down to Kashmir, and put him over the frontier—”
“You don’t care what he thinks of you?” Rukh broke in.
“He will know what to think,” the woman said.