William Archer

“ When the ayah had gone—dismissed by a smile and a gesture of thanks—the native woman not, Lucilla Crespin thought, utterly pitiless—Lucilla knelt down by her bed. She knelt there a long time, keeping a tryst her father had taught her.
When she rose she stood a while at the wide window looking out at the golden-white night, her face twisted in torture, but kindled from prayer.
Nowhere else does the maiden-hair fern grow as it grows in Rukh, in such few soil-filled cracks as the great mountains carry on their sides. ”

“ And Traherne was thinking of a boy at Harrow he had greatly respected.
Rukh turned back into the hall as the English left it. He strolled across to the throne his blood had owned for so many ages, and stood regarding it for a long time. He sighed, then laughed—a little sadly—in the hideous face of the Goddess that backed the throne, drew his case from the pouch in his jeweled sleeve, and lit a cigarette at the sacred brazier, drew its first fragrant whiff, standing there before his well-nigh lost throne, and went slowly out onto the balcony. ”

“ Traherne loved Lucilla Crespin with the one man-love of his life; but he did not overrate her, and still less did he credit her with attributes and abilities that nature had denied her. For Major Crespin Traherne had little love left perhaps—but he had some, and far more than a meaner soul could have understood—and he had big, yearning pity. No matter how tender such men are to all womanhood, the wreck of manhood always must seem to such men as Traherne a deeper tragedy than any feminine suffering. ”

“ He gave no thought to the Englishwoman alone in her prison-chamber, none to the two Englishmen. He was in Abdulabad keeping their death-watch with his brothers. Oriental thought travels and visualizes, as the thought of no Western can. He was with them in their gaol. Their failure and capture galled him, the ignominy of the death by rope shamed him.
The Raja of Rukh had told Mrs. Crespin the truth. He loved himself first—if so small, so wormlike a thing as self-centered selfishness may be called by so big a name; and his children—above all La-swak—came next, his people third. ”

“ Rukh retorted with a short, ugly laugh, “know what to think.” Kneeling—there was nothing of supplication about it—with one knee on the throne, he caught her shoulders in his delicate, sinewy olive hands, and turned her face to him. “Come, look me in the eyes,” he ordered, “and tell me that you honestly intend to fulfill your bargain! . . . I knew it!” For her eyes had flinched. “You are playing with me! But the confiding barbarian is not so simple as you imagine. No woman has ever tried to fool me that has not repented it. ”

“ The sunset glow faded, great stars pulsed green, white and gold in the strip of purple sky between the o’ertopping, high, snow-covered mountains. Dessert in great cut-gold bowls was put on the table. Watkins came and touched a switch, and when the table sparkled with electric lights among the flowers on it, and others above it, came and stood behind his master’s chair. The old major-domo and his white-clad satellites with the Raja’s livery of gold, silver and green twisted in their turbans hovered watchfully round. ”

“ Crespin scowled and smoked on moodily, but made no reply. Some men, and not bad sorts at that, who knew him as Traherne did, might have felt inclined to throttle him as he sat there, surly, quarrelsome and ungrateful—a positive menace to them all in their grave predicament, the man who had ruined the life of the woman Traherne loved—as far as one human being can wreck the life of another—who had spoiled her joy, sullied her mind, and made of her radiant young wifehood a sour memory that ached and reeked ”

“ Suddenly Lucilla Crespin smiled a little.
“Why,” he asked incredulously, “do you smile?”
“At a thought that came to me,” she told him; “the thought of poor Antony as a filmy and purified spirit. It seems so unthinkable!”
Traherne—even here—wished she had not said it. But he always had been fairer to Antony Crespin than, for years, the disillusioned wife had been able to be. “Why unthinkable?” he argued. “Why may he not still exist, though he has left behind him the nerves, the cravings, that tormented him—and you. ”

“ Lucilla Crespin asked him in a low voice. (How like deep blue stars her eyes were! both he and Traherne thought.) “That seems to me—forgive me, Raja—the last word of impiety.”
“Possibly, Madam,” the Raja of Rukh said with a grave laugh. “How my esteemed fellow-creatures were ever bluffed into piety is a mystery to me. Not,” he added, “that I’m complaining. If men could not be bluffed by the Raja above, how much less would they be bluffed by us rajas below. And though life is a contemptible business, I don’t deny that power is the best part of it.” ”

“ They were the proudest men in Rukh to-day, for by right of their office well-performed each would claim, and be accorded, privilege to send a girl-child to the Rukh’s harem. Out there close by the great waiting Goddess, close to the spot where the swords would swing and hack at the white offered necks, the three little girls stood side by side dressed in the saffron-edged magenta of brides, their dark little faces golden and shining with joy, each eyeing the other two rather scornfully. ”

“ And the Raja of Rukh told it well. “And meanwhile,” he pressed it on, “you are only on the threshold of the best years of your life. You would pass them, not as a memsahib in a paltry Indian cantonment—I don’t see you there—but as the absolute queen of an absolute king. I do not talk to you of romantic love. I respect you too much to think you accessible to silly sentiment. But that is just it: I respect as much as I admire you; and I have never pretended to respect any other woman. ”

“ Traherne thought of but one thing: Lucilla.
The Raja of Rukh too kept tryst as the far moon rode higher and higher, gilding the goat-tracks and the thin hill-rills, turning the temples and roofs to silver and gold, splashing the mountains with silver and gold, turning the gray rock crags into copper, the brown into russet and bronze. He sat alone, loose-robed, cross-legged on a nest of great cushions, his hands on his knees, his face turned to the Southwest where he knew Abdulabad lay. ”

“ There were scant wild flowers in Rukh, but each that there was lifted up a glad, gay face. There are few song-birds in the Himalayas, but a lark sang and swayed on the spear-shaped lace of a green bamboo, and a choir of thrushes throated up a silver carol of song from the full-berried rowans. Yellow sunshine lay in unbroken, imperial swathes everywhere. Children laughed and pranked, women sang at their tasks—none doing more than she must to-day—men smoked and walked about arm in arm. ”

“ He pitied Lucilla and grieved for her, but his pity and grief for the husband were more. For his science told him that the recreant man’s plight and misery were greater than the guiltless woman’s. The physician knew. And he was true to his vocation—the vocation than which earth has none higher and finer. Traherne knew what Crespin’s lifelong handicap had been—ancestral taint, youth misguided and unprotected, and he did not judge the other who had succumbed to a strain and propensities that he himself, so circumstanced and tainted, might have succumbed to as completely and more. ”

“ But Rukh laughed unruffled. He read her. “Forgive me,” he said, “if I smile at your tactics. You want to goad me to chivalry. If every man were a coward who took life without risking his own, where would your British sportsmen be?”
“I beg your pardon,” the woman retorted with a sort of superb insolence; “a savage is not necessarily a coward.” The Raja just flushed at that. “And now,” she ended, rising again, “let me go to my husband.”
“Not yet, Mrs. Crespin,” he stayed her again. “One more word. You are a brave woman, and I sincerely admire you.” ”

“ Such prolonged absence as this Asian prince had allowed himself well might have cost him his throne. Scarcely a monarch of Europe—with cables and cinemas to remind them—would dare to leave his people so long, and it seems a far rasher thing for a prince to risk whose kingship and throne lay on the more quickly shifting sands where every prime minister is a would-be supplanter, almost every half-brother a usurper at core. But Rukh had known whom to trust and entrust, and had known when to go, and when to come back. ”

“ Traherne did, and he scanned Antony Crespin with a gentleness that was both masculine and splendid—and, because of his passion of heart, soul and body for the other’s wife, was heroic and fine. Lucilla Crespin would have been amazed could she have known how the scales of Traherne’s judgment weighed her and Antony against each other; and, being a woman, her resentment would have been more than her surprise. ”

“ No one else saw or thought anything of the sort—Lucilla Crespin least of all. But it’s a habit and gift able physicians have: to see into things. Each finger a scalpel, each pore a magnifying glass; exquisite manhood, a vigilant brain, a great sympathetic heart, an absolute balance and sense of justice, and an intelligence that cannot be tricked—and that is what good doctors are made of! Basil Traherne was a very great physician. ”

“ Back of and over the city of Valetta, with its queer, steep, twisted streets and its picturesque and magnificent buildings—more flowers, more great and varied architecture, and more human beings and homes are packed into Malta’s teeming ninety-five square miles than are in the same space anywhere else—hung the sunset’s gorgeous curtain of ever-changing amethyst and gold, crimson and rose and apple-green and fire-shot lemon, and here in front of the island at her feet the great blue ocean rippled and spread like a tremulous carpet woven of blue and green gems. ”

“ His diamonds were good—the big blue one that winked on his forehead were hard to match anywhere; his emeralds were fine—they lay, a green, snake-like rope, on his richly furred, coral and jewel buttoned satin coat, and cascaded down to the knees of his wide velvet trousers; the aigrette in his cap-like turban was worth a great deal, and it must have plumed the head of a wonderfully virile bird, or else have been marvelously wired, for its every delicate thread stood erect in spite of the jewel that topped and weighted it; and the great turquoise from which it rose was almost a plaque. ”

“ Their jewels jingled and flashed under their shawls and veils, and they scented the day with attar of roses.
A priest with an unscabbarded sword in his hand guarded the opening into the great hall, but the Chief Priest stood just inside it, holding the curtains that hung there slightly apart, peering out at the waiting, exultant people—he liked them well, as he saw them—and scanning the path that came down from the castle.
There are several halls not unlike this back of the Himalayas; there is none in the Punjab. ”

“ The Raja of Rukh was not unmoved. A warm heart beats always under the Oriental mask. Antony Crespin’s widow, there in her peril and loneliness, in his garden, the blossoms she’d filched from it in her hand, had reached it. ”

“ From where she stood they looked to feather a world of imperial snow and grim stone exquisitely with filmy green. The light was so clear, that every frond showed—and often the fronds were a foot long, but as delicately cut as those in English ferneries. At the base of the crag where the great horn stood a very meadow of them grew—with great trumpet-shaped flowers here and there among them. ”

“ Many a country priest’s motherless daughter—especially an only daughter—looks and seems very much older than her years. But in no sense had Mrs. Crespin ever been “her father’s curate,” or the villagers’ “mother.” Parochial administration and fad-philanthropy had never attracted her, and she had firmly left them alone. They had not sat too heavily on Philip Reynolds himself, and had shadowed the Vicar but little, and had shadowed the vicarage life and Lucilla not at all. He was always readier with half-crowns than with soup or jellies, and he prayed for his flock more than he fussed it. ”

“ We punish our insane; Orientals succor and tend them.
Tenderly they carried mad Ak-kok back to the palace, gently they laid her down, never they left her, never they chided or thwarted or vexed her. And—a year and more after—her wits (as we perhaps witlessly call our human sense of human ills) came back. And such work as she chose to do she did, such things as she bade were done. She chose to sew with the girls who embroidered and beaded. Never she spoke to a child, rarely she looked at one, except the prince whom she had suckled. ”

“ Crespin’s discovery, if she was right, could be to them, or why it excited them, not one of them could have said; but in such threatening of shipwreck as theirs agitated human minds see in every straw a possible life-boat, and catch at it anxiously. They clustered together excitedly, Lucilla Crespin still in her seat, the two men standing close before her. Traherne’s face alert, the woman’s eyes sparkling, and Antony Crespin raised his voice exultantly. ”

“ Lucilla blushed.
“Don’t mind us,” Bruce said encouragingly.
Dr. Crossland looked out over the water.
But it was to him that she said, “Please tell me about Sumnee.”
“Well,” he began, “it’s hot.”
“Of course,” Lucilla interrupted him scornfully, “it’s India. Even I know that. Even in Surrey we have heard that it is warm in the Punjab.”
“You have heard no lie,” Bruce said stoutly. “Surrey! Good Lord—to be in Surrey when the marrow’s in bloom and the cabbage in fruit, and the starch stands to its collar! Hot! Hot isn’t the word.”
“It is not,” Crespin agreed.
“Is Sumnee so very hot, Dr. Crossland?” ”

“ Many men will promise much to gain their end—when that end is a woman. Not all men fulfill such promises.
The Raja of Rukh had made Mrs. Crespin what he considered a very handsome offer—as he saw it, a tempting offer. But he had meant all he had said, had intended all he had promised. He had not forgotten La-swak when he had promised to make another his heir. But something in this Western woman had called him irresistibly. The light women “mostly from Paris” who had been from time to time his “guests” scarcely had amused him for an hour, not one of them had interested him for a moment. ”

“ It looked a little like a high-carried boat; and not a little like a grotesque howdah, one corner of its canopy-roof upheld by a glittering, bright blue monkey, one by a writhing green-eyed vermilion snake, one by a twisted white and pink pelican, the other by an elaborate square pillar of sandal-wood, whose carvings simulated bamboos and tulips. It looked something like a super pantomime-chair; and it looked, as it was, a thing of great cost, and of the almost lifelong labor of many skilled and patient craftsmen. ”

“ You will simply disappear in the uncharted sea of the Himalayas, as a ship sinks with all hands in the ocean. If I permitted any word from you to reach India, the detective instinct, so deeply implanted in your race, would be awakened, and the Himalayas would be combed out with a fine-tooth comb. No, Madam, I cannot risk it.”
“Cannot?” Lucilla said with cold scorn; all her calmness was recovered now, her pulsing emotion frozen back by Rukh’s hard refusal. “Cannot? You dare not! But you can and dare kill defenseless men and women. Raja, you are a pitiful coward!” ”