The fireplace was ready piled with logs, but they were not lit. Electric lights neither artistically nor cunningly fashioned were placed conveniently here and there. A gramophone, as ugly as that modern disfigurement usually is, stood obtrusively at one end of the room; French and English books and reviews lay on several tables. There were roses in bowls, and tulips in vases. There was scent of sandal-wood and of lemon-verbena in the air, a smell of musk on the cushions. The pictures on the wall were bad—but they had their right here, portraits of handsome, gorgeously dressed Orientals—bad painting, if not bad drawing, as Western canons go, flat-faced and over-detailed as the craftsmanship of the Persian artists when Persia held pride of place in the Asian art world; but the pictures, not crowded, were not too many, and their carved camphor-wood frames were very beautiful. And they spoke—they told a story; and despicable as was their brush-work, nil their perspective, overdone and finicking their detail, peccable their drawing, they had character—it was patrician. And similar as they all were, each had its own clear individuality as differentiated as the tissues and gems of their turbans. And wherever you went the eyes of those pictured princes followed you, or rather drew your own eyes back to the inscrutable painted lid-narrowed, dark eyes of those who had ruled here before Rome had a Cæsar.
Traherne, coming in, looked at the room without much seeing it, for his eyes were anxiously searching for the Crespins.
They were not there. No one was there. And again he marked time and waited, for the very solid reason that no other course recommended itself to him as wiser. He moved idly, but watchfully to the open side of the room—even to look out over an open landscape might ease a trifle his sense of imprisonment; but he stopped at the room edge of the loggia, because he saw that three natives were there. He had no desire for Rukh society, peasant or noble.
Two turbaned servants were there laying a table, a dignified old major-domo directing them importantly. Traherne saw that they were laying four covers, and that the table appointments were extremely luxurious and entirely European. He turned at the slight sound of a door opened quickly.
Crespin came in and looked about him apprehensively, and the servant who had ushered him in, salaamed and went back closing the door behind him.
“Ah,” Crespin said with a tone of “thank goodness” in his voice, “there you are, Doctor!”
“Hullo!” Traherne returned. He noticed how flushed the other looked, and for all his flush how haggard. “How did you get on?”
“All right. Had a capital tub. And you?”
“Feeling more like a human being,” the doctor admitted. “And what about Mrs. Crespin? I hope she’s all right?”
“She was taken off by an ayah as soon as we got in—” Crespin said lamely—“in the women’s quarters presumably.” He did not find it necessary to add that it was but hearsay information he passed on, and that he had seen no more of his wife than Traherne himself had since she had preceded them from the temple in her palanquin—and he did not meet the other man’s glance, but shifted his eyes about the strange room uneasily.