CHAPTER XXIII
Swollen and quivered with anger as they were, they both were startled at her beauty. Always rather more than good-looking, Lucilla Crespin had never looked like this before.
“Ah,” Traherne said, pulling himself together with an almost heroic effort, “here is Mrs. Crespin!”
The ayah—if that was her household rank—who had brought Lucilla into the room went quietly out, closing the door. And the three captives—the men at least knew it for that—stood alone in the vast, clamorous room.
Whatever fear was curdling the bloods of the men, the Englishwoman who shared their danger, and stood in a graver one of her own, seemed unperturbed and carefree. Certainly she was radiant, and superbly lovely as she stood there, the breathing, beautiful jewel to which the palace room, rich as it was, seemed but a humble setting, and the ermined mountain peaks and blue velvet sky beyond the wide loggia but background—background and subsidiary, though she faced it.
Crespin’s eyes filled, and Basil Traherne caught his breath painfully. They had seen her in the saddle, they knew how well she rode, and how it became her. They had seen her in the soft white gowns that such women wear in India. They had seen her dainty and exquisitely dressed—a wild-rose pink flush on her cheeks—at dozens of dances, in garden-party finery, in Government House splendor, in neat, simple linens cuddling her babies, in bib and apron mixing English cakes and scones for her Punjabi tea-table, they had seen her in tea-gowns and tweeds, seen her with her delicate patrician English face softened by the furs beneath it, and had seen her with the gems on throat and breast resparkling in her eyes—and the throat that each thought her utmost loveliness (and that women who disliked her called her one beauty) gleam like snow under the jewels that circled it, and needing them not, and Antony Crespin had seen her in the soft déshabillé that enhanced her most. But neither ever had seen her look as she looked now. Some lure of the East, some soul of the East, had transformed the girl of a Surrey garden into an Eastern queen—though perhaps she never before had looked, or felt, so intensely English.
If either husband or friend saw or sensed this dual quality gleaming in her as she stood there, as its colors gleam through an opal, neither was conscious that he did so. But her beauty hit and quivered them. The wild-rose tints were gone from her face; her pallor was radiant. Her hair, always beautiful—and Crespin knew how soft and long, and how uncontrived its rippling—was more elaborately dressed than was her custom, some experter hands than hers had tired it—for Mrs. Crespin, like many Englishwomen, was defter at handling bridle and reins and rackets than she was at toilet devisings and doings. Her dark filmy gown could not have been simpler or costlier; it was just cut from her throat, and its long sleeves slashed to hint more than they showed of her arms. Except for her wedding-ring and the engagement diamond beside it, her only ornament was a gold locket that she always wore fastened about her throat by a slender thread of chain. And she wore neither the rings nor the locket and chain for ornament. Wives of such wedlock as hers had proved feel more stigma than adornment in its symbols; and the locket was infinitely more than any gewgaw—it held her babies’ faces.
She appeared to have thrown off or have lost her moiety of the fear they three had shared. Her eyes sparkled, and her lips curved in a smile. Whatever else she had felt, Mrs. Crespin was enjoying sincerely her adventure now.
She stood and smiled at them. And the eyes and hearts of two men leapt to her—and she seemed to them both the core of all desire, and each—the two of such different instincts and tastes—thought her perfect, a human flower needing no added perfume, no other beauty of texture, tint or outline. A man loving a woman with all the tenderness and strength of his best manhood may see and know her faults and flaws, and love her for them none the less. But the man who desires sees no imperfections, sight and mind are as fevered and irresponsible as his aching blood is. The husband who had lost her, and the man who loved her as reverently as passionately, and, so, without hope or thought, and even without wish—except as our flesh and nerves wish in spite of us—that he ever might seek or claim or hold her—both desired her as she stood there in the sumptuous simplicity of the soft thing she wore, and beautiful and desirable as she never had seemed before. Traherne forgot where they were—for a moment—forgot the danger that menaced them; but he did not forget his best self or hers, and he did not forget a boy he had fagged for at Harrow, or the sore young tragedy that had been that schoolmate’s to bear, and his own to witness. And no treacherous thing lurked in his heart, no dishonorable thing showed in his eyes. Crespin too forgot where they were and what their plight, but he forgot nothing else—he remembered his wooing of her, his possession of her, and how he had lost her.
And Lucilla Crespin looked from one to the other, and smiled. She did not see how white their faces were; she had not caught their quarreling as she came in, for the sinking sun shone hard in her eyes, and their backs were to it.