“It wasn’t luck,” she repeated contemptuously. “It was your skill that saved us,” she added, and the change in her voice, the quick, white flame on her face, was confession and challenge—challenge the more compelling, confession the more complete, because the woman had made them unconsciously.
“You are very good to me,” Traherne said in a voice not too well under control. The woman looked at him quickly. Their eyes met, as they had not met before. His face quivered a little. And then the man’s eyes fell—not Lucilla’s.
CHAPTER XIV
To say that Traherne and Crespin were less than intensely perturbed at the situation in which they found themselves, and still worse in which they had landed the woman who was dear to them both, would be to wrong their intelligence—or any even mediocre intelligence. And these men had each more than average intelligence, mental equipment more acute and deeper than Crespin often had been credited with—for we most of us make the common and crass mistake of thinking that a mind, an intelligence, totally different from our own, is not so fine. Antony Crespin had punished and soiled his once fine body, almost hopelessly now, but, except for sheer physical nervousness that drugged it sometimes, he had not deeply injured his mind. He had been no carpet-soldier. Again and again, on active service, he had “made good,” as soldier and as man. Traherne was the better man, but Crespin was the better soldier—which was as it should be. It was Major Crespin’s business to make wounds, it was Dr. Traherne’s business to heal them—unless the other had done his work so well that no chance or cause of help was left.
They were thoroughly frightened, but they took it lightly, of course: they were British. And but for the woman’s being with them, they might even have found tingle and excitement not altogether unpleasant in the undeniable predicament. Lucilla made all the difference—she and, to Crespin, the two babies in Pahari. He was thinking of them as he turned back from his fruitless mission. And his mouth set hard and sharp, and his tongue felt dry and thick. But he sauntered idly enough across the small flagged courtyard, and said with a careless shrug:
“It’s no use—he doesn’t understand a word of Hindustani. You know Russian, don’t you, Doctor?”
“A little.”
“We must be well on towards Central Asia,” Crespin declared. “Suppose you try him in Russian. Ask him where the hell we are, and who owns the shooting box up yonder.”
“Right-o,” Traherne nodded. “It’s worth trying at least.”
Lucilla and Crespin followed a little behind him as he moved to the temple priest. And when he said something in Russian they saw that the priest’s face kindled. He pointed to the rock-hung castle, pointed down to the ground, and then with one magnificent, wide, sweeping gesture that seemed to take in not only the whole country, but to indicate title-deed to all the world, exclaimed: