The Green Goddess
by Louise Jordan Miln · English · Gutenberg #48112 · 515,579 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Green Goddess
Author: Louise Jordan Miln
William Archer
Release date: January 30, 2015 [eBook #48112]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREEN GODDESS ***
* * * * *
[Illustration]
* * * * *
The Green Goddess
BY LOUISE JORDAN MILN
AUTHOR OF
_”Mr. Wu,” “The Feast of Lanterns,” “The Purple_
_Mask,” etc._
“And the Gods of the East made mouths at me.”
A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers New York
Published by arrangement with Frederick A. Stokes Company
Printed in U. S. A.
* * * * *
_Copyright, 1922, by_
Frederick A. Stokes Company
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_
_Printed in the United States of America_
* * * * *
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
CHAPTER XLII
CHAPTER XLIII
CHAPTER XLIV
CHAPTER XLV
* * * * *
“In men whom men proclaim divine,
I find so much of sin and blot,
In men whom men condemn as ill,
I find so much of goodness still;
I hesitate to draw the line
Between the two, where God has not.”
* * * * *
THE GREEN GODDESS
CHAPTER I
The Vicar was suffering—almost as much as he had suffered the night
that Helen, his wife, had died—and _because_ he was suffering he
dressed his fine cameo-like face in its sunniest smile. That was his
way—part of his creed-of-daily-life, an intrinsic part of his self.
A godly man, in the sweetest and strongest senses of that overused word,
Philip Reynolds had a wholesome flair for the things of earth that both
mellow human life and give it a tang. He liked his dinner, and he liked
it good. He loved his roses, and he was vastly proud of his turnips. His
modest cellar was admirably stocked. He enjoyed the logs that burned and
glowed on his wide hearths. He was fond of his books—both inside and
out. If he found a newly purchased book (he subscribed to no library)
little worth reading, he discarded it. He gave it away, if he held it
harmless; if he thought it a hurtful volume, he burned it. But his taste
was broad, and his charity—to books as well as to people—was wide. He
played a good hand of bridge—though Lucilla, his girl, played even a
better. But he could beat the county at whist, and most of it at chess.
He still could give a crack tennis player a game, and he could ride neck
and neck with the next—and so could Lucilla.
But all these things were so much to him only because they that he loved
were so greatly more. There were four big human loves in his being and
keeping. Three whom he loved were out in the churchyard—only one,
Lucilla, still lived. But he loved the three as actively now as he had
when they had been here in the vicarage with him. And the creature
things he cared for and cultivated—wine, food, games, flowers,
books—he cared for and appreciated most because he associated them with
the beings of his strong living love: his mother, his wife, Jack, his
boy, and Lucilla, his daughter.
He had one great friendship, and two or three more moderate, but staunch
and warm. His great friendship was with God. It amounted to reverent
intimacy. He felt more quickly alive to God’s nearness than to that of
most human creatures. His friendship with God filled his life. But his
human loves filled his heart. Philip Reynolds loved his God, and obeyed
Him loyally and gladly. But he knew that his love for the three in the
churchyard, and the girl whom he was giving up to another to-morrow was
a more passionate thing than the devoted affection he gave to his Maker
and Master. And he dared to think this no offense to the Supreme. God
who had granted them to him understood and did not blame, he thought.
He had no doubt of God’s personal existence, and never had had. As a
little child he had believed implicitly because his mother did, and as
he grew older, and came to live—as we all, even the most heart-bound
and interknit with close human intimacies must—a life somewhat of his
own, all that he saw, experienced, and came to think added a strong and
vivid conviction, a reasoned and constantly augmented conviction, to
what had been just acceptance and credulity. Everything convinced him
that there was a God, a gracious, humane and intensely personal God, in
whose image all men were made. The marvelous, masterly plan of the
universe, the exquisite creation of flowers, the flight and the song of
birds, the fitness and interfitting of all natural and unspoiled things,
the unerring instincts of animal life and of the vegetable
world—instincts of reproduction and of self-defending; these and a
myriad other daily “miracles” convinced him of a Master Workman
omnipotent and very near; gave him a conviction which never could be
shaken or threatened—an invincible, glowing, grateful faith. And it was
his strength. But his human loves were his inspiration; they flowed
through his being like rare wine in his veins, they colored his life,
sparkled his thought, and perfumed his world. He _knew_ God, and
worshiped Him, and gave Him a beautiful friendship. But his love, as he
understood “love”—life’s earthly stimulant and elixir—was for the
three in the churchyard and for the girl their going had left with him
behind them.
A son never had loved a mother more than Philip Reynolds had loved his;
but she held the fourth place in his heart. Helen, his wife, had held
the first, and after her he had loved Jack, their boy. Jack had died
almost immediately after Helen’s death, and Reynolds, because he so
exquisitely and deeply loved Helen, rejoiced more than he grieved. He
was glad to have Jack forever safe in their Father-God’s keeping,
radiantly glad that Helen should have the boy’s companionship and
keeping in that near Heaven where she waited his coming. The
parishioners marveled at their Vicar’s sunny serenity close on the loss
of his only son; one or two questioned it, even, not too approvingly.
Other priests held it his very great “grace.” But they were wrong, for
it was no saintship, but simply the supreme sincerity of his love of his
wife, making him _glad_ to give to her what he most of all things would
have wished to keep for himself: the daily and constant companionship of
Jack. And yet—were they wrong after all? Surely to love as this man
loved _is_ “grace,” a grace unto the grace of the Kingdom of Heaven.
His wife, his son, and his mother were as much an active part of his
daily life to-day as they ever had been; and Jack, the last to be laid
there, had lain in the old Surrey churchyard a full score of years. Each
day he went to their graves which no hand but his ever tended—it was
not far to go; only across the narrow country road—saw that their
flowers were fresh, and the bleakest winter’s day they had their
flowers, and passed on in to pray in the church where his mother and he
and Jack had been christened, and where his mother and Helen and he had
been married—then back to his home and his people, his tireless, gentle
ministering to good and to sinful, his sipping of good wine, his reading
of books, his games and his writing, and his care of Lucilla.
He could not remember his father; for the father had “gone down with his
ship” when Philip had been but a baby; and Lucilla could remember
neither her mother nor brother; for they had died when she was not
three.
Helen Reynolds was still remembered in the parish for her pretty face,
and her soft kind ways—remembered as “a nice little thing” with the
best heart in the world, but no special strength of mind or of will.
But that had not been so. Few women have ever had a stronger will, and
even fewer a more capable mind. Her intense gentleness had been a
dignity, not weakness. An entirely happy life had left her will
unruffled, and her really fine mind had been homekeeping, a trifle
proud, and more than a trifle scornful of the mental equipments—outside
of the vicarage itself—about her. A great many rich and leisured
people—quite a few of them with minor titles—had smart country
establishments in the purlieus of her husband’s parish, but they were
not intellectuals, they read more novels than quarterlies, attended more
race-meetings than academic lectures, were more steeped in fashions than
in philosophies, and the village folk were true to type, self-seeking,
self-absorbed, gossipy, curious, ordinary. They read the Surrey
_Comet_—some of them sometimes—abused the weather, asked alms directly
or indirectly, but industriously, of Vicar and Squire, and took a keen
rather than gracious interest in each other’s births and marriages, ups
and downs, debts and earnings, shortcomings and Sunday dinners. They had
not interested Helen Reynolds; which was not altogether to their
disadvantage. For the Vicar’s wife had a shrewder gift of analysis than
the Vicar had. He saw chiefly the good in every one. She saw the bad, as
quickly and surely as she did the good; and her sense of justice leaned
to severity rather than to mercy. She had been as devoted to Philip as
he to her. But he had deserved it. A faulty husband would have had short
shrift with Helen Reynolds, whose “sweetly pretty” face and soft,
rippling, girlish hair enhoused a relentless judgment, an exigeant taste
and unwavering determination. But she had a sweet, sunny spirit and a
quick, bubbling sense of humor. She rarely smiled, but she laughed
fairly often. And her wit was both pretty and trenchant.
The Vicar never made a joke in his life, and never failed to see
one—and, if it really was good, never failed to enjoy it greatly.
There was more lion, more indomitability, in wife than in husband, but
they were excellently matched in tastes, culture and breeding; and their
comradeship had been “perfect and entire, wanting nothing.” And death
did not separate them.
The daughter of such parents and of such a marriage came into life with
fine equipment. She had her mother’s mind, the good taste of the two, a
person less “pretty,” more distinguished than her mother’s. She had her
mother’s cool, clear head, her father’s big, loyal heart, her mother’s
sharp eyes, her father’s fine, firm hand on bridle or reins. She had his
genial liking of people, his love of fun, her mother’s resentment of all
that offended her taste, the tireless limbs of them both, the flair of
adventure and travel that they had shared almost equally. She was
fearless and exquisitely bred.
Philip Reynolds had traveled much in his younger days, and he still
roamed the world—in his study and in the easy chair by the drawing-room
fire. But since his wife’s death he had not spent a night out of the
sleeping-room that had also been hers. He still loved to travel—with
the book on his knee; but not for all the wonder-spots of earth would he
have foregone even once his daily tryst at the graves in the churchyard.
Lucilla Reynolds always had longed to travel, but had done it but
little. For her own sake her father had been unwilling to spare her—for
they had few relatives, and none to whom he cared to entrust his girl
often. But he was relinquishing her now. And she was going to travel
far. For Captain Crespin’s regiment was stationed in India. And they
were to be married to-morrow, Antony Crespin and Lucilla Reynolds.
CHAPTER II
The Vicar was suffering acutely. He knew he’d miss his daughter. And he
thought he should not see her again after to-morrow’s parting. So he
went into the breakfast-room, where he knew she’d be waiting for him as
she always was, wearing his brightest face. No shadow of his making
should dim the child’s last day at home with her father. There would be
time enough—all the rest of his life—to miss her in, and he did not
intend to do it to-day, in the least, or to anticipate it. This should
be a day of great and unbroken joy. And he didn’t intend to mope after
she’d gone. Not he! He had the churchyard, his people to shepherd, the
flowers in his garden, and good-fellow books on his shelves, and his one
great Friendship. And he was brave.
It was hard to let the child go—that of course—but the way of her
going contented him well. From the hour of her birth he had prayed that
Lucilla might marry. The new dispensation that made life so much more
interesting and varied for unmarried women had his cordial endorsement,
because it did, as he judged, make the world a pleasanter place for an
unmarried woman; but he was profoundly and acutely sure that marriage
was for every woman “the better part,” and in the increasing
preponderance of women to-day, making marriage a mathematical
impossibility for so awkwardly many, his prayer that his girl should
marry took on an unplacid quality of anxiety, almost a certain
feverishness that he owned to himself was less than becoming to so
spiritual an act as prayer.
He was glad when love found Lucilla out, and marriage beckoned and
claimed her. He liked and approved Antony Crespin. And he rejoiced that
her marriage was to take so far afield the daughter whose actual
presence he could so ill spare, and would, he knew, so sorely miss. He
knew that she—for all her sweet and unaffected happiness in it—had
begun to find the quiet, beaten Surrey path a trifle tame, a little same
and narrow. Because she was going so far, he thought that he should not
see her again; but he was glad that she was. India would fascinate her,
he thought; and the army life would amuse her. And of her happiness and
welfare he had no doubt; for Crespin was good all through, a sterling,
capable fellow, and Lucilla herself was as sane and sensible as she was
true and sweet. Antony had beyond his Captain’s beggarly pay, though a
bit less beggarly in an Indian regiment, of course, a decent private
income; not too much, but just enough. The prayer of Agar would be
answered for the husband and wife, and Philip Reynolds was sure that
“Grant me neither poverty nor riches” was one of the most sensible
petitions ever lifted up to God by man. Yes—it was a good match in
every sense. And, if to-morrow would be one of his sharp sorrow-days, it
too would be one of his gladdest.
Lucilla stood quietly radiant waiting for him at the breakfast table.
“Well, Daddy?” she said.
“Well, dear?”
“Sleep well?”
“Capitally! Capitally!”
It was their usual morning greeting. Then he kissed her, and she kissed
him, as kindly and gently as he had in that same room, on that same spot
every morning for years—but no more warmly, no more lingeringly than
they always had; with no added significance. Each had resolved that
to-day should be just like other days of theirs, to be cherished in
memory all the more tenderly because it had been just one of their days
of ordinary intimacy. And, though nothing had been said between them,
each knew that they shared the wish and the intention.
Her boxes were packed and locked—all packed, all locked, but the one
into which her wedding white would be laid when she came back from
church to-morrow. All that he had to say to her, advice, careful words
about marriage and about India, some of it said for himself, some said
in her mother’s stead, assurances that he would do capitally, capitally
without her, promises to neglect neither her collie nor her
carnations—all this had been said. None of it need be said again.
Nothing should be allowed to mark this day from the many other good days
they had shared together—except that each had told the parlor-maid
privately that they would be at home to no one to-day—if any one had
the ill tact to call; and as for the villagers, well, if any
parishioners were in sudden trouble or sickness they must shift with the
curate for once.
Not even Antony Crespin was to have admittance to-day, Lucilla had told
him, and Crespin had laughed, and understood, with a tender look in his
pleasant eyes, and had promised obedience with a cheerful “Right-o!”
The girl gave her father his coffee, and he gave her her kidneys.
She teased him a little when his cup came back the second time, and he
retorted with a reminder of what it probably had cost when she helped
herself to a second peach.
For more than an hour they strolled in the garden, as they always did
when it was fine, and often, though more briskly and briefly, when it
rained. They studied the roses and appraised the peas, counted the
chickens just hatched—one perking about with a white bubble of shell
still on its soft yellow back—praised the red wealth of the strawberry
beds, shook their heads at a pear tree’s blight; but nothing was said of
that they would not do it together again. All over the garden they
wandered, her hand on his sleeve, or his on hers; but they did this
almost every day.
When they went in he read his paper and she read hers.
After lunch they went back into the garden, he with a book, she with
some sewing, and under the big cedar just outside the drawing-room’s
open French window he sat in the big garden chair and read aloud, while
she sat on the big bench and worked.
She played to him after tea. Then he read her the sermon he’d finished
the night before while she and Antony had roamed the garden, and Lucilla
made a suggestion or two—as she often did, more because she knew he
liked her to than for anymore critical reason—and one suggestion he
liked and incorporated, and one he disdained and rejected.
They had a fire in the hall that night, as they always did when its heat
possibly could be borne. He won the game of cribbage; he usually did.
Then she sat on the wide hearth-curb, leaning back against the
ingle-nook’s paneling, her palms behind her head, and he lounged in his
great cushioned chair, and their lazy talk moved back and forth from
grave to gay.
The grandfather’s clock struck eleven. The Vicar got up and wound it,
she standing beside him. Then without a word he kissed her goodnight,
and patted her shoulder, and she kissed him, and said, “Till breakfast,
Daddy. Remember to put this light out,” and went up the broad, old
stairs, her pale dinner-gown trailing softly behind her. And her father
stood and watched her—not moving until he had heard her bedroom door
close.
Lucilla Reynolds closed her door—alone with the thoughts that such
girls think on such nights.
And the man sat alone by the fire till it died.
CHAPTER III
Out on the ocean Lucilla Crespin missed her father more than he, alone
now in the vicarage, missed her. He had been bereaved too often to feel
overwhelming or insupportable shock from bereavement, and he was at home
with his house, his books, his garden, his people, his usual work and
his usual pastimes, with his church and his churchyard—and, above all,
at home with himself.
Lucilla was scarcely at home yet with her new self—that was the chief
difference—and she was out on the new, unbeaten paths now, crossing the
wide world, alone on the ocean, alone for the rest of the long years to
come with a stranger—a devoted and perfectly charming stranger, who
loved her amazingly, and whom she loved excitingly—but a stranger. She
had felt so closely acquainted with her lover, even before he had spoken
his love, but she found that she felt oddly and shyly unacquainted with
her husband. It was fascinating, the queer strangeness she felt, and it
made the smallest, ordinary, everyday things wonderful, almost
hairbreadth-escape adventure—changing her shoes, fastening a blouse,
winding her watch, washing her hands. But it was a strangeness. Antony
was wonderfully good to her, beautifully considerate. She found
something new to like in him every day, and discovered, almost as often,
some unexpected trait or attainment to admire. She told him so shyly one
evening, and he laughed with his face against hers.
“‘’Tis not a year or two shows us a man,’” he told her teasingly.
And, “So I begin to suspect,” his wife retorted.
She was very happy. The ocean and the sky above it did not seem large
enough to hold her happiness; and, as for her own heart, it ached
sometimes with the throb and the crowding of her hew joy. But she missed
her father sorely, and each mile farther from England she missed him the
more.
The boat was full of Anglo-Indians, of course, a few going out for the
first time to take up new appointments, boys with their first
commissions, men exchanging into Indian regiments, civil servants; but
for the most, service folk and civil servants returning from leave.
Lucilla noticed that they grumbled a deal at the heat and the “grind”
they were going back to, but it seemed to her as she listened, keenly
interested in even stray words that might tell her something of the new
world in which she was going to live, that their grumbling was more a
convention than a sincerity, and that they one and all were looking
forward to India as what one happy-faced subaltern frankly called it, “a
jolly good spree—what.” There were two or three globe-trotters aboard,
an isolated and cold-shouldered missionary, and three or four business
men. But these scarcely tinged the gathering, for none of them in the
least penetrated into the “service” fold. It was almost a secret society
the “service” people formed, she found; and certainly a jealously kept
and guarded caste, and the army people sat on the higher seats.
If Mrs. Crespin was proud of her good-looking, soldierly husband,
Captain Crespin was openly vain of his tall, handsome, girlish wife. And
because he was vain of her he genially encouraged the acquaintance that
soon buzzed about her.
The women admired her frocks, and the men admired her eyes and the way
she walked, and both women and men liked her for her fresh girlishness.
And, if some of the women envied her it, not one of them did it
cattishly; and several, already sallowed from long Indian years, pitied
her too, knowing that what India had done to their skins it probably
would do to hers. And it takes a very sour woman, and a woman a little
bad at core, to feel unkindness towards a bride.
Lucilla Crespin looked younger than her twenty years, and, tall as she
was, securely as she carried herself, girlishness was her most instantly
and insistently obvious point. 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.
He, not Lucilla, had been the housekeeper. He had a flair for
housekeeping, and she had not. He engaged the servants, arranged the
menus as a rule, paid the bills and planned hospitalities. Lucilla had
had an ample allowance—Reynolds liked things well done, and he
perfectly knew that that required money—but she never exceeded, rarely
spent, all of it, and more often than not consulted her father about the
color and material of a new frock. The result had justified her—if it
had not altogether fitted her for the selection of her own wardrobe
which lay before her now. It was thanks chiefly to the Reverend Philip
Reynolds that the women on the big P. and O. so admired young Mrs.
Crespin’s gowns. He had taken far more interest in Lucilla’s trousseau
than she had—and it had cost him a great deal of money. Little as she
knew of money, the bills for that trousseau would have appalled Lucilla,
if she ever had seen them; but they had warmed the Vicar’s heart like
good wine, and he wrote the checks with a glowing face, and with a
complacent flourish at the end of his scholarly signature. There would
not be a great deal to leave his girl at his death, but he had no wish
that they should have a very great deal; and Antony had enough. And
Helen’s modest inheritance was secure for Lucilla.
All this had kept Lucilla Reynolds very young. She had had few tasks,
and no burdens. She never had gone to school. She had had expensive and
highly efficient governesses—the best that large salaries, great care,
and the Vicar’s good sense and fine taste could procure: estimable women
who also were charming. But none of them had lived at the vicarage.
Lured from London and Paris, one of the conditions of their engagement
always had been that they should find for themselves or allow Mr.
Reynolds to find for them apartments at a reasonable distance from the
vicarage, but by no means close to its gates. Their holidays had been
long, and their teaching hours rather short. They had had no
sinecure—the Vicar knew the value of money, and always insisted upon
getting the value of his—but none of Lucilla Reynolds’ governesses had
been overworked. And none of them had been encouraged to “mother” the
girl, and certainly none of them had had any reason to regard as the
most remote possibility a translation from governess to step-mother.
They had been handsomely paid to teach, and so wisely had they been
chosen that they had done it handsomely. They had loved the girl too;
and she had liked them all, but she had loved none of them. Lucilla
Crespin had felt love but twice: love for her father, and love for the
soldier who was taking her with him to India now. And she scarcely had
had a girl friend. If this last had narrowed her, it too had preserved
her. It had made her a poor hand at some sorts of “small talk,” but it
had kept her mind fresh and undiscolored.
Philip Reynolds had “formed” his girl himself, he and the books he had
shared with her and the environment he had given her. And her actual
“education” he had officered even more than any of her paid teachers
had. Had their wills ever clashed or their tastes jarred, such constant
companionship might have rasped the girl. But their wills had been one,
and their tastes had too. Best of all, for her welfare, she never had
been able to feel for her father less than absolute respect. And she had
always had to be proud of him. She had never found her home life dull,
for the father had been a perfect playmate. It was small wonder that
she, whose girlhood had been so guarded, but never stagnant, and had
been so companioned—so rarely companioned—_was_ younger than her
years—and seemed even younger than she was. It was no wonder at all
that she missed her father. She missed him terribly.
* * * * *
There were a number of men and several women on board whom Captain
Crespin had known in India, had met in the hills, at Calcutta and in
leaves in Kashmir; but none of his regiment, or of his own station in
the Punjab. But at Malta two brother officers, returning from a shorter
leave than his, joined the ship. As a matter of course they “chummed up”
with the Crespins and Crespin with them.
They had heard of his marriage, and were not a little anxious to know
just what manner of girl was coming “on to their strength.” There were
only four women in the regiment—that is, actually in the station—just
now, and in the small station there was no other regiment, and no social
life whatever beyond what the regiment made for itself. Where the women
were so few it was distinctly important what manner of women they were:
how much to be liked, how far congenial and helpful. Two of the ladies
already with the regimental colors were dearly loved by every man in it;
two were not. The new Mrs. Crespin would make the preponderance for
social comfort or discomfort. Which? Bruce and Crossland wondered. They
didn’t say so to each other, of course. India’s a gossipy
place—Anglo-India—and in the Punjabi dearth even the soldier-men
“talk” over their tobacco. But only the “bounders” ever discuss the
women folk of brother officers, and there are very few bounders
commissioned into the British army, and the few that are are rather apt
to drift out: they are apt to find that there is not comfortable room
for them in their regiment.
Crossland and Bruce had never so much as hinted to each other their hope
and their fear as to how far Crespin’s wife might sweeten or bitter
their next few years. But both knew that (and what) both were hoping and
fearing somewhat acutely.
* * * * *
The sun was setting over Valetta as the great P. and O. swung and
throbbed back to her course. Malta lay rose and gold in the sunset, the
Church of St John looked gold inlaid with pink and amber, the old
_auberges_ where the Knights once kept their palaced state sparkled red
and gold in the heat of the sun’s dying radiance, and the exquisite
high-walled little gardens looked chips of garnet, emerald and topaz,
and even the carob-trees and prickly pears in the sparcer bare and rocky
valleys were jeweled and gay in the waning splendor. 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.
And this was the background against which, when they came on to the
deck, after hastily changing for dinner, Bruce and Crossland first saw
their regiment’s latest recruit—Captain Crespin’s girl-wife.
The Crespins too already were dressed to dine, and she, in her soft
frock of delicate blue, with touches here and there of vivid green
velvet, which the Vicar had proudly pronounced “most happy,” an inch of
silvery gray fur at its fluted hem, a great bunch of saffron and lemon
roses, that Crespin had bought her in Valetta’s fragrant flower market,
in her hands, and a rose—one of the deep ones—at her breast, and
loosely over her hair the shawl of black Maltese lace that Antony too
had bought as they wandered about the old, once Phœnician town of the
Hospitalers, looked for all her palpably English tea-rose face not
unlike some exquisite Maltese.
They were standing by the rail, watching the sunset city—the
Crespins—but Antony was more particularly watching her, his face turned
a little towards the deck, and he saw his brother officers, and hailed
them.
When he introduced them to “my wife,” Bruce, forgetting it was for her
to grant it, if she chose, not for him to ask it, impulsively held out
his hand—after all she was one of _them_ now—and Lucilla instantly and
cordially gave him hers; and when he let it go, not too quickly, she
held it out with a pretty friendly gesture, half girlish, half matronly
to Dr. Crossland, and said to them both, “How jolly! I thought I should
have to wait until we got to Sumnee before I knew any of you. This is
ever so much nicer.” And her big blue eyes, deep and clear as sapphires,
but softer under their curled fringe of long dark lashes, said shyly,
“Please like me.”
“By Jove, Mrs. Crespin”—she was not very used yet to being called so,
and she flushed deliciously, and a dimple trembled at one corner of her
bow-shaped red mouth—“By Jove, it is ripping of you to say so,” Bruce
stammered delightedly. And Crossland looked what Bruce had said.
They saw without looking the relief in each other’s faces.
Crespin saw it too, and laughed aloud.
“What is it?” Lucilla demanded.
“Ask them,” Antony chuckled, and sauntered off, leaving the three alone.
“What was Tony laughing at?” the girl persisted.
Dr. Crossland smiled sagely, but shook his head decidedly.
“I’ll tell you some day, if I dare, Mrs. Crespin,” Bruce promised her.
“Wouldn’t dare tell you now, don’t you know. My hat, I’m glad we’ve
hopped on to your boat—no end a _tamasha_ we’ll have getting out to our
306-in-the-shade paradise. I say, don’t you let Crespin give us the slip
in Calcutta, will you?”
“Why _did_ he laugh? What was funny? Do tell me.”
But neither man would do that.
But they each fell very industriously to making particularly good
friends with Antony Crespin’s wife.
And that night in the stateroom they shared each made a cryptic remark,
one to his hair-brush, one to the shoe he kicked off.
“Thank the Lord!” Tom Bruce told his shoe audibly.
George Crossland, under his breath said to his brush, frowning at it,
“Poor girl!”
CHAPTER IV
“Shall I like India, Captain Bruce?”
“Sure to—all women do. But you’ll jolly well hate Sumnee. It’s the
jumping-off place.”
“Shall I?” Mrs. Crespin repeated, turning a little to Crossland.
“Like India, Mrs. Crespin? Most women do, more than like it. Bruce is
right there. But I’m not sure about you.”
“Why?”
“You are different,” he said simply.
“Why shall I dislike Sumnee?” she asked them both.
“Good Lord!” Bruce answered.
“My hat!” Crossland said.
“As bad as all that?” Lucilla said gayly.
“Worse,” they both answered her instantly.
“Why didn’t you tell me, Tony?” Mrs. Crespin asked severely.
“You mightn’t have come,” her husband told her, “and I rather wanted you
to.”
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?”
“Scorching!”
“Go on,” she prompted.
“Well—there’s nothing to tell—really there isn’t. There’s nothing to
describe, because there’s nothing there. There’s scarcely a tree.”
“I shall make a garden at once, if we haven’t one.”
“You will not,” Bruce murmured.
“Go on, Dr. Crossland. There must be something to tell me.”
“And there isn’t a decent house.”
“But there must be. We don’t live in tents, do we?”
“We live in mud huts,” Bruce said softly, “and live on goat.”
“But roast kid is perfect. Daddy and I particularly like it.”
“In Sumnee it is—imperfect,” Bruce remarked grimly.
But though they railed, Lucilla Crespin caught a warm undercurrent of
affection, of pleasant memories and zesty anticipations in the raillery.
Every woman owns to liking India greatly; most men pose as disliking
it—while they are there; but ask the Anglo-Indian “home now for good,”
when you run across him in the Strand, just there at Charing Cross where
we all meet each other sooner or later—and he’ll tell you, if he’s
English-honest, that he is _homesick_ for India, rains, droughts,
natives and all; and watch the face of the long-service Anglo-Indian
going home for the last time, going home to inheritance, increased
fortune and ease perhaps—watch his face and his eyes as the P. and O.
or troop-ship pulls off from Bombay or Madras or down the Hugli, and he
takes his long last look at the sweltering East! You will not need to
ask him.
They were having afternoon tea on deck, Malta two days behind them—the
sun-awnings were up now, and ices were served at eleven and three—and
Crespin said as he held his cup up for her to fill it again, “Never
mind, Lu, you _shall_ have a garden of sorts, and these blighters shall
dig it, while you and I sit under the veranda punkah and eat mango-ices
and stone-cold pumelos. You shall have all the comfy home things, every
one of them. And perhaps you won’t quite hate poor old rotten Sumnee. I
shall like Sumnee _now_.”
“You, you lucky beggar—of course you will. Who wouldn’t, in your
shoes?” Bruce grumbled. “But perhaps we’ll like it better too—now—” he
added more cheerfully. “And we’ll teach you how to play parlor polo, and
how to make toothsome _chupatties_ out of mud and cocoanut fat, and how
to eat mangoes without a bib on, and, if you’ll let us, come to tea
every day, and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner quite often, we’ll give you
curly daggers and beetle-work lace curtains and bunches of cactus
dahlias and crushed torquoise things from the Vale of Kashmir, Lucknow
enamels—fish-pattern ones, Bokhara cloths, Poona trays, Benares
brass-work, Deccan snakes (tin, not live ones) and peacock-feather fans,
thousands and thousands of peacock feathers, painted leather Bikanir
vases and glass bangles, and tin toe-rings to make your drawing-room
beautiful.”
“But, you mustn’t,” Lucilla Crespin told him firmly. “I intend our home
to be absolutely English. There shall not be even one thing in it that
isn’t quite English, not one that hasn’t come from home.”
“Right-o!” Bruce consented. “We’ll forgive you, so long as you ask us to
tea every day and tiffin on Sundays, and dinner very often. And you and
I will sit on the veranda under the punkah, and eat mango-ices and
chilled pumelos, while Crespin and Crossland dig your garden and swear
at each other.”
“I shall not have a punkah,” Mrs. Crespin said severely. “I shall have
nothing, I tell you, that we do not have at home. Our home is going to
be an English home.”
“You’ll have a punkah, dear,” said Crespin softly. “You’ll have
several.”
“My hat, you will!” Bruce exclaimed. “And you’ll have a few other things
that are not strictly English—what. White ants in the sugar,
silver-fish and lizards—single spies and whole battalions of them—on
your walls and out for a ride on the train of your dinner-gown, and
centipedes, and cheetahs grinning in at the windows, jackals serenading
you every night, and goat to eat, I repeat, which will _not_ taste like
infant Southdown, _and_ native servants. You may like the native
servants, and you may not. It’s a matter of taste.”
But Lucilla only laughed. “I’m not afraid, Captain Bruce,” she said.
“You can’t frighten me.”
Crossland said nothing, but he studied the waves gravely as they foamed
and beat at each other in ocean play, and his eyes were cloudy. So
another English woman was coming to India to live in it apart from its
peoples and beauties and wisdoms—to hold her skirts aside from India.
He thought it a pity. He’d seen it so often—and he believed it the most
dangerous of the several rocks upon which the ship of Empire might some
day split and go down.
CHAPTER V
Lucilla Crespin did not like Sumnee. She liked her life there fairly
well. She loved her home there. She loved Antony. She liked some of his
friends. She loved her happiness, and nourished and cherished it. She
liked the English Club measurably; she liked the tennis court palely—it
was better than none, but it was a poor imitation of tennis courts in
Surrey. She did make a garden, verbenas in flower-pots mostly, and she
tried to like it; and when they came she worshiped her babies. But she
did not like Sumnee. She did not even like India.
But she was happy in Sumnee. Not every one can be happy in a place they
dislike; but there are some so equipped for happiness that they can
find, or, not finding, make it, almost anywhere, and it requires far
less personal balance and natural joyousness than Lucilla had, to be
happy in London (or even in Berlin) when one would far rather live in
New York, if one is young, radiantly well, comfortably pursed (one _can_
buy a deal of happiness) and loves and is loved. Mrs. Crespin was happy
in Sumnee—at first. And the years passed. But her years taught her much
that “her days never knew”—for a while.
It is said that all English women like India, and very much like living
there. Most of them do—but there are exceptions.
Two classes of European women like and enjoy India very much: the first
and greatly preponderant class are the have-a-good-time ones, by no
means bad sorts, as a rule, but brave, gay things who like to wear
frilly white gowns, and give much time and care to dressing their hair,
tree their boots and slippers and shoes, read “The Queen” and “La Monde”
(if they can, and if they can’t, study its plates), and are particularly
proud of their afternoon tea-table pretties of silver and lace. They
like the punkahs, the abundance of servants—servants who rarely “give
notice,” and never sulk—mango-ices and picnics by moonlight. They even
enjoy making both ends meet—no one too much minds being poor in the
East; at least, if one has some sort of entrée to Government House, and
one’s man’s in the Army. Viceroys are not poor, as a rule—they would
find it inconvenient, for big as their “screw” is, it isn’t enough; but
Commanders-in-Chief have been poor enough before now, and, if one has to
skimp, one has the satisfaction of doing it in the best of company, and
in the best good-fellowship in the world. But there are women—the
have-a-good-time-and-take-care-of-your-man ones—who like India but
never know or sense it. Young Mrs. Crespin was not one of these, but she
had several of their insular traits, and lived no little of their life.
The other class (it is very small) are caught by the lure of the real
India. Its story appeals to them, its peoples and its myriad wonders and
beauties. They feel her marvel. And they catch the throb of her heart
beneath the impenetrable mask, and respond and are grateful. Mrs.
Crespin was not one of these.
There is a third class—a very powerful and beautiful class, which
includes some of the other two: women who follow the drum, sometimes to
Simla and other pleasant, cool hill places, sometimes to desolate,
sun-baked spots where the ice often gives out, and nothing ever happens,
and who take it all, and the make-shifts of outlandish frontier stations
with quiet good humor; women whose courage and unselfishness are very
fine, and very womanly. They are a great racial asset, the strength and
the solace of their men folk; and, if they spared of the devotion they
lavish on those same British soldier-men one tithe to the brown human
peoples that live about them, and minister to them so loyally, they
would be a greater asset of permanent and successful Empire than any in
Whitehall.
One of these Lucilla might have been—she shaped towards it at
first—but circumstances (fate, if you like) balked it.
India, great gold and rose India, marbled, carved, mosaicked, caravaned,
with its bazaars and temples and its lonely peasant huts, its seas of
quivering bamboo and its music of glass and silver bangles and anklets,
its beautiful naked, plump _butchas_, its sacred _purdahs_, its mingled
perfumes of lotus and wild yellow hyacinths, of pink jasmine and red,
red roses, its dark-eyed, wrinkled, patient cattle with ropes of
marigold slung between their snow-white and cream-colored humps, its
storied rivers—and the Himalayas, might have appealed to her as the
Vicar had thought it would, could she have seen it with him, or in other
guidance as cordial and fit. But she saw it through the dry choking dust
of a hot, arid, flat Punjabi station, sensed it through the chatter of
an English Club—and, so, neither saw nor sensed it at all. She never
touched its people. Her syce was merely a servant, so impersonal that
she never knew or asked his name, her house servants were nothing to her
but “boys,” and even the ayah who tended upon her deftly and faithfully,
and saved her baby’s life when croup and convulsions nearly killed it,
was only an ayah. Mrs. Crespin, as sweet at heart as the roses in the
Surrey vicarage garden, never knew her ayah’s name, never thought of her
as having one, never knew where she lived, what she ate, or thought, or
believed; never wondered what were her joys and sorrows, never wondered
if she ever had ache or pain; never knew, or cared to know, whether the
native woman was married or not, or widowed, or whether she had a child
of her own.
But she was happy at Sumnee—at first. She had Antony, and Antony was
enough.
Her homesickness never quite ceased to ache, and she missed riding and
games. She had both at Sumnee, but both were poor substitutes for those
she had at “home.” Always athletic, she was not fully satisfied at
playing at sports, and gymkanas bored her almost as much as church
bazaars had, and the Vicar of Oxlea always had rather discouraged church
bazaars. Womanly, yet she was not a woman’s woman—and life in an
out-of-the-way one-regiment station in the plains is apt to be hard on a
woman who does not greatly care for feminine society, but has no
coquetry in her. But she had Antony, and she was happy, and when the
promise of motherhood pulsed she was more than happy. And, if many of
her hours were alone ones, she had many books, and she read hour after
hour almost every day.
Twice the Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth—great chunks of
fragrant deodar that Lucilla garlanded with ribbons; the heat they made
in December in the plains was appalling, but Lucilla Crespin would not
keep Christmas without them. And they ate their plum-pudding hot and
flaming; and there’s no dearth of holly in India, if you know where to
send for it. Twice her Yule-log burned on her bungalow hearth. And then
the crash came.
CHAPTER VI
Armistice Day and its solemn celebrations had passed—but not its deep
thanksgiving—when the regiment was ordered to Dehra Dun, a more
interesting, less narrowed station in itself and less service-bound.
There was civilian life in Dehra Dun, and Mrs. Crespin was not sorry to
know a few civilians again. She made several interesting such
acquaintances there, and the most interesting of them all turned out to
be an old schoolmate of Major Crespin’s.
The Great War had irked Crespin—because in it he had been debarred from
the active service he craved to be sent on in Europe, or even in Egypt
or Mesopotamia, and had been kept relentlessly in India—and hurt him as
only a soldierly soldier can be hurt, and by that one thing: having to
“stand-by” and do the “damned cushy” jobs, when other chaps—“lucky
devils”—were losing legs and eyes and lives in Flanders and
Gallipoli—but also it incidentally made him a Major, and a really fine
wireless expert.
He did his “bit,” of course, and he did it well. But who did not do
their bit from the August of 1914 till Armistice Day, and a little
longer! He did his bit, but he chafed and swore, and came near breaking
his heart.
Basil Traherne—the celebrated Dr. Traherne now—and Antony Crespin had
been at Harrow together, fag and fag-master. But they had not met since,
and Crespin seemed less glad to reencounter his onetime fag than might
have been natural; for Traherne had been a good and a devoted fag, and
the boys had been really good friends.
But—there—that was over twenty years ago—Crespin was thirty-eight
now, and Traherne was thirty-three—and a good deal changes in most of
us, as well as around us, in twenty years. And friendships that never
are fed by so much as a letter must be the exceptional friendships of
very exceptional people, if they lose nothing in twenty years. How many
ever have?
Mrs. Crespin liked Traherne immediately, and he returned her liking
cordially—and was grateful for it. And Major Crespin was more glad to
have the physician “amuse the wife” than he was to see much of him
himself, or with anything of an old intimacy that time had shrunk and
withered.
Traherne interested Lucilla Crespin at once—they seemed to like and to
dislike (a surer test of sympathy) the same people, things and books.
And when she heard that he not only was the perhaps greatest living
authority on malaria, and certainly the coming doctor-man as far as
Oriental disease was concerned, but also was “mad on flying,” was no
mean pilot, and had a “bus” of his own, she actually clapped her hands,
and said, “Oh, Dr. Traherne—I never have been—_will_ you take me up?”
And several men, Colonel Agnew among them, who saw and heard, who always
had known that she was decidedly good-looking, discovered for the first
time that she was positively lovely. And the Colonel was vastly pleased
that “Crespin’s wife had found something to wake her up again, something
to interest her, don’t you know, and make a fad of. Every woman needs a
fad—such a safety-valve and pick-me-up to ’em, God bless ’em, as polo,
or whist or the _Times_ is to us, by Jove.”
Colonel Agnew—Crespin’s C. O.—had a cold blue eye, a terrible temper,
as curry-hot as any in Anglo-India (you can’t say more than that), and a
heart of soft warm gold. He admired Mrs. Crespin more than any woman he
knew, and loved her almost as much as he did Kathleen, his own
motherless girl. He wouldn’t have liked her so well if his wife, who had
not died until two years after Lucilla joined the regiment, had not
liked her very much indeed, and approved her warmly, and if Kathleen did
not—and he was no worse a man and no worse a soldier for that. But he
was not cut very strictly to pattern in it, or in several other
respects. He held Mrs. Crespin very high. And he was fatherly-fond of
her. And he was grateful to her. At first he had warmed to her because
he felt that she, and her good-looks and poise, did the regiment credit.
Then he had liked her for her more intimate self, and because Mary and
Kathleen did. To do the regiment the smallest good-turn, to enhance it
in any way directly or indirectly, was for Colonel Agnew instantly to
write himself down very much in your debt: if you were a small drummer
boy who drummed well and loyally, a _matranee_ who swept the sergeant’s
mess out as a sergeant’s mess should be swept, or a visiting general who
gave the men and officers their due. Too, Agnew was grateful to Mrs.
Crespin for a service not exactly regimental; for it was she who under
God had coaxed Kathleen back into her senses when that blithering young
ass Bob Grant had made such a silly goat of himself—before Colonel
Agnew had contrived a way to get the fool transferred. The old soldier
felt that he owed Mrs. Crespin more than he could hope ever to pay. And
he had been sore at heart over her this many a day now. And when he saw
her eyes sparkle, and her old rose color come at Traherne’s “flying”
talk, he vowed hotly then and there (but not aloud) that she should “go
up,” if she liked, and as often as she liked, and he was damned if
Crespin should prevent it.
But Major Crespin had no wish to do that. He was only too glad to have
any pleasure fall to his wife. And so Mrs. Crespin went up with
Traherne, and very much more than once. Crespin went with them once or
twice, but he did not care for it greatly, and he didn’t mind saying so.
Usually Traherne and Mrs. Crespin flew alone—with or without a
mechanic. They did not fly very far, and they did not fly over-often,
and Traherne took no risks when his friend’s wife was with him. But
Lucilla Crespin liked it keenly; she talked about it, and thought about
it a great deal, far less silent now than she had been since before the
war, and a happier light crept into her eyes, and a soft glow on her
face. And Crespin was as gratified as the Colonel himself was. Antony
Crespin was as glad to have Lucilla go as she was to go, and as Dr.
Traherne was to take her.
Once or twice Captain Bruce went up with them, and they made several
attempts to take the Colonel.
But the Colonel swore at the very suggestion. He had the V. C. and he
had earned it. He was cheerfully (and profanely) ready to shoot promptly
any one who called him a coward, but there was just one thing he
wouldn’t do either for King or Country—he wouldn’t go monkeying about
in the air like a loon; and Kathleen shouldn’t do it either.
There are no tête-à-têtes in the air—none at least in which the pilot
shares. But they shared an exhilaration, a splendid new experience, and
a pastime that they almost equally liked. And they mutually knew that
they liked to share it all, and enjoyed and treasured it more because
they shared it. And the very silences it enforced fed the intimacy that
grew between them.
When they came back, and landed, it was natural that more often than not
Dr. Traherne took Mrs. Crespin to her bungalow, and that when they had
reached it he followed her in for tiffin or tea. They found a great deal
to say to each other, about books and people and things in England. He
knew he was welcome; she knew that he liked to be there. And Traherne’s
visits at the Crespins’ bungalow gradually grew more frequent and
longer. And Major Crespin stayed at home more and more, strolled off to
mess or club less and less when Traherne was in the drawing-room or on
the veranda. And something of the old, cordial relation between them at
Harrow came back to the two men at Dehra Dun. Lucilla and Traherne did
the most of the talking when they three were together. And often Antony
Crespin scarcely knew what they were talking about; but he liked to
listen—and sometimes to guy as he lounged near and played with Iris and
Ronald—and they liked to have him there with them, listening and
guying.
Traherne played with the youngsters often too. They were attractive
children—not ayah-spoiled yet, and the bachelor physician was very fond
of children. And little Iris and Ronald Crespin soon came to claim him
as very much a possession of their own.
If his regiment was at once Colonel Agnew’s weakness and strength,
equally her babies were Lucilla Crespin’s—her weakness and her
strength. Iris was four now, Ronald was two. And Antony Crespin loved
them both almost as much as he loved his wife.
All the regiment knew, and as good as all of the station, that there was
an ugly, desperate rift in the Crespins’ lute.
Major Crespin drank.
And he had not been faithful.
Every one blamed him fiercely. And no one in the least blamed Mrs.
Crespin for anything that had come or might come—no one but Basil
Traherne.
He blamed them both, and pitied them both. He believed that Mrs. Crespin
could have handled the tragedy more wisely and more usefully than she
did. He believed that she, unconsciously, withheld help and rescue which
she, but no one else, might have given, and Antony seized. 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.
He saw the rift as clearly as any—deplored it more than most, and knew,
what no one else but Antony himself did, that because of it and of what
had made it, Major Crespin suffered and regretted even more intensely
than the woman did.
Dr. Traherne believed that some, not much, but some, of the fault was
Lucilla Crespin’s. And that he did, proves him as fine in manhood as he
was in physicianship; for, before he had known her a month Traherne knew
that he loved Antony Crespin’s wife. He had never loved a woman
before—or even thought that he had. He believed he never could care for
another. And Dr. Traherne was thirty-six.
CHAPTER VII
Colonel Agnew was furious, splutteringly, dementedly furious, and at the
same time coldly, and determinedly furious. No one ever had seen him so
angry before. Kathleen, who ruled and teased and mocked him openly,
poured out his coffee, and passed him the ginger-jam silently and
abjectly. And a few moments after breakfast she fled from his
presence—her own Daddy darling’s—determined to avoid it for the rest
of that day.
When Satan, his four-footed pal, sat up and begged for his
after-breakfast lump the master had refused it, and thundered, “Go to
hell!” No one ever had known Agnew to lose his temper with Satan, and
the terrier flounced down on all paws, and slunk sugarless out of the
room.
“Prayers, Daddy?” Kathleen said, as naturally as she could, when they’d
pushed back their chairs. The Colonel was a staunch churchman, but no
cut-and-dried one; usually he read a chapter to his girl after
breakfast, and they said “Our Father” together, and then, if it wasn’t
too late, he’d bid her sing some hymn her mother had loved and
sung—usually, but not always, and it was Kathleen Agnew’s daily
duty—almost her only enforced one—to ask if it was a “prayers” day,
and to follow him into his den, and find the place in the Bible, if it
was.
“Prayers, Daddy?” she asked gently.
“Prayers be damned!” was the terrible reply she got, and all she
got—not even a glance—as the Colonel stalked prayerless out of the
room.
It was then she’d beaten her retreat “Poor Daddy!” she thought. “How
terribly he’s feeling it!” She shook her pretty, yellow head sadly after
his grim, gaunt gray one, and then smiled rather brokenly. For she
thought there had been a lump in his throat—of course Daddy couldn’t
read prayers with a lump in his throat, poor dear. And Kathleen knew
what it all was about. It was early morning yet, but all the regiment
knew, and by tiffin all the station would know. And Whitehall would know
by the very next mail home.
It was all up with Major Crespin now. He’d have to send in his papers
this time. Every man in the regiment knew it, every native regimental
servant. Every servant in the Colonel-sahib’s bungalow knew it. Native
women filling their jars at the wells were talking it over. Iris and
Ronald’s ayah and bearer had known it hours ago. The Parsi money changer
who lived near the native bazaar, in the old house off of whose thick
walls most of the magenta paint had cracked and gone, and Ali Lal, the
melon-seller who drove his best trade in the despised Eurasian quarter,
knew it too. Such news is no laggard in India; it flies faster than
kites.
It was this:
At mess the night before Major Crespin had befouled and disgraced the
regiment. And it had been guest night. A bishop from Bangalore, a
general (almost a commander-in-chief) from the Madras Presidency, and—a
thousand times worse, more bitter—an American officer of high rank, and
Dr. Traherne had been the guests.
Crespin had had a fagging day, the Adjutant had looked at him
suspiciously once or twice, and when the dinner hour came Major Crespin
had had almost enough. When sweetbreads followed the fish he had had
enough. And he grew offensive before the game. He came dangerously near
contradicting the General twice. He mentioned a woman’s name—one of the
regimental ladies—and, in what he said, quite unobjectionably, but a
woman’s name is not mentioned in the officers’ mess. You may think of
her there—subalterns have owned to having done it—but you may not
voice her name. It isn’t done. He had spilled claret, and he had offered
the Bishop a warm letter of personal introduction to the première
danseuse of a French Company crowding a Calcutta theater just then—an
artiste notoriously as frail of virtue as she was shameless in posture
and skilful of feet. He had made—to the American—an unpardonable
remark about Lee and Grant. It was all covered up, or attempted to be.
The affronted guests all were not only gentlemen but jolly good fellows,
and two of them had met Mrs. Crespin. It was smothered, talked under and
shunted; and Traherne, the American officer, and the Bishop more than
half hoped that Agnew, at the other end of the table from Crespin, had
not noticed or realized. He had given no sign, and Crespin had purred
his impertinences a little thickly, not shouted them, or pronounced them
too clearly.
But at “Gentlemen, the King,” as Agnew lifted his glass, Major Crespin,
swaying a little on his feet, clutched at the back of the chair,
hiccuped painfully, looked about him with a bleary smile, and collapsed
half onto his chair, half onto the table.
There was nothing to be hoped then. There was nothing that could be
done.
No more need be said.
It was final.
* * * * *
And now it was the next morning, that terrible, pitiless next morning
that always comes, and always must, unless God grants the mercy of Death
before the dawn.
It was the next morning and Antony Crespin, twitching and sick, lay wide
awake on Traherne’s bed.
He was suffering exquisite bodily torture. Traherne had done what he
could. But that debt has to be paid. And it’s an I.O.U. that no friend’s
purse can take up. The debtor himself has to pay.
But his mental torment was more than his quivering of fevered flesh and
frightened trembling of sick, circling stomach. And his sorrow and shame
of spirit were more than his wife’s were, lying tearless, face down on
her own bed. And Doctor Traherne—glass in hand—sensed that it was so,
and pitied Crespin even more than he pitied Lucilla, even more than he
pitied unconscious, happy Iris and Ronald.
But an ounce of help is worth more than a pound of pity any day—and
most especially is this true “the next morning.” Traherne slid his
strong arm carefully under Crespin’s head, and held the glass deftly to
his mouth. The champagne was vintage and extra sec.
In spite of himself, in spite of his despair—it was almost absolute
despair this time—the wine tasted good. Champagne usually does taste
good to those who relish it. Perhaps it stands as firmest friend and
kindest nurse to the very desperately seasick, but its second-best play
of its magic trick probably is made “the next morning.”
Crespin drained the glass, and even put up a trembling hand to tilt it
farther and longer that he should miss no last drop. And he looked
around to see where the bottle was.
There was no bottle in sight.
“You’ve had it all, old chap,” Traherne told him, “a pint of it. Now try
to rest a bit.”
“Rest!” Crespin moaned.
“Lie perfectly still. That will help. I won’t be long.”
“You’re not going to leave me!”
“Must,” Traherne told him, pulling the _chick_ a little closer. “Sorry,
but must. I’ve something to see to that won’t keep. I’ll be back as soon
as I can. And I’ll tell Abdul what to do for you, and to see that you’re
not disturbed.”
“Traherne, you must not leave me.” There’s never a time so miserable
that the sound and sight of a friend—the right friend—cannot ease it.
“Look here,” Traherne said with his hand on the other’s arm, “I must. I
wouldn’t, if any one else could do what I’ve got to, but no one can. I
must attend to it myself, and I must attend to it now. Keep quiet—that
will help you most. And I’ll get back as soon as I can.”
Crespin called weakly after him as he was leaving the room.
“I suppose—my wife—knows.”
Traherne evaded, as doctors sometimes must.
“She knows you slept here last night. I sent her a chit when we came
in.”
“Came in, I supporting your staggering steps, I suppose,” Crespin said,
with the sick attempt at humor that often comes with the stale
after-fumes.
“We came in together,” Traherne said affectionately.
“O Lord,” Crespin told him, “you’re the real stuff, Traherne!”
“Of course I am—to you. Now I _am_ off. So long!”
But he was not off just yet.
“I say,” Crespin pleaded anxiously, “can I have another drink?”
“Not yet,” Traherne told him. “You shall, when I get back, with
something to eat——”
“Don’t!” the sick man groaned. “Give me a smoke then, before you go, and
for God’s sake don’t be long.”
Traherne found him the cigarettes, and took him the matches.
“Smoke if you like,” he said, “but I wouldn’t smoke yet, if I were you.”
Crespin put his hand out for a cigarette, but even his hand was sick,
and fell back from the effort.
Doctor Traherne put a cigarette in his hand, and struck a match and held
it. But Major Crespin couldn’t smoke.
Traherne left him then, closing the door of the darkened room with
careful quiet.
And Antony Crespin was alone with his creditor.
CHAPTER VIII
Doctor Traherne was _persona grata_ at Colonel Agnew’s bungalow, if any
one was; and several were. Their people at home in England were
neighbors and friends, and for that Agnew would have welcomed him, if
there had been nothing else. But there was a great deal else. It was not
often that Agnew liked a civilian, or saw anything in one to like. He
didn’t see what use they were anyway. The world was made for warfare,
scientific, deliberated warfare, he had no doubt whatever of that. Most
especially was it made for the British Army, and above all for _his_
regiment. He was a staunch old Tory, of course—there _are_ some still,
and more than a few of them are in India—but he never troubled to read
the speeches in the House, not even those of the Lords, unless they
directly bore on His Majesty’s Forces. He had no respect for any calling
but his own—and almost as little intelligent knowledge as respect. He
had gone in for fisticuffs in his cradle, and though his schoolmasters
had not, among themselves, pronounced him startlingly brainy, none of
them denied him considerable place as a tactician. He was an emphatic
churchman—far more emphatic than devout—but he respected the church
rather than its officers: he had no respect for any profession but his
own. And this fact he rarely concealed. He reverenced his King—but
most, it may be suspected, because His Majesty was the Head of the Army.
Even the somewhat civilian adjuncts of the Service, doctors and padres
and such, he held rather coldly. He liked most women, and reverenced
them all. But he had no doubt that God had made them to bear soldiers,
and to be loved by the soldier-fathers of soldiers, and he pitied
acutely any woman who had to make do with the caresses of less than a
soldier-man or who brought forth any men children who failed to crawl
through Sandhurst or Woolwich exams, and bolt enthusiastically into the
fighting forces. He thought more of a private than he did of a
Viceroy—and said so. And he’d gladly have given Kathleen to that
blithering young jackass Bob Grant rather than to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, or to a royal bridegroom who was not in the Service. No
German warlord ever thought more of himself than Colonel Agnew thought
of the British Army.
But there were soldierly qualities of mind and person in Basil Traherne
to which the fine old specialist had had to respond. And if Doctor
Traherne had not served with the Colors (Agnew simply refused to
consider Volunteers) he had served _the_ regiment well. He had
disinfected and healed a diseased drain under the floor of the canteen
when Crossland hadn’t even suspected it, he had fought enteric through
more than one epidemic, and had turned a cholera camp into a refreshed
place of rest and frolic as innocuous as a kindergarten suffering
placidly a slight visitation of mild German measles. And now Doctor
Traherne had declared war upon malaria, and it looked as if that enemy
of the British Army in the East was going to be defeated at
last—defeated by the batteries of the English doctor’s knowledge,
patience and skill. It wasn’t in Agnew to steel his heart or shut his
respect and camaraderie against the man who was doing that, even if he
didn’t wear the uniform.
And at the Colonel’s bungalow Doctor Traherne came and went as he would;
always welcomed, always regretfully sped. But that bungalow door was
practically shut in his face this morning.
The Colonel Commander Sahib was writing his English chits; no one could
see him. And when the khansamah had said it he deliberately, though
obsequiously, barred the way. Traherne could not get past Ali Halim
without knocking him down, that was clear, and Traherne would not do
that except in the last resort, for Halim was old, and they were most
excellent friends. And at the far end of the hall—unlike most of its
ilk, the Colonel’s bungalow had a hall—the physician saw an orderly
waiting outside Agnew’s den. No doubt the orderly was armed; and
Traherne was not.
But he was going to see the Colonel, and have considerable speech of him
too, before the English mail went.
How?
He looked about him and thought: not a bad brace of trumps to play when
in such doubt of means as his.
“Right-o, then,” he said cheerfully, “but I’ll wait here a bit, and
cool, before I go. I’ve been walking fast”—which was true—“and I’m
confoundedly hot and tired”—which was not true.
Ali Halim salaamed, and Doctor Traherne sat himself down in a very
beautiful and big chair, which Kathleen Agnew had coveted and the
Colonel paid for, in Lahore, standing now beside a very ugly hall table
which the Colonel had admired in a catalogue, and had had sent out all
the way from the Tottenham Court Road.
How?
A gong, a disk of hammered brass, slung in a frame of carved and inlaid
camphor-wood, which Kathleen also had coveted somewhere and with the
usual result, stood beside a bowl of magnolia buds on the Tottenham
Court table. It never was used. Not even Kathleen Agnew dared use it.
For the master of the bungalow detested noise, except bugle-calls,
regimental bands and drill and parade orders, and the mighty music of
battle, almost as much as he despised civilians. Even the clocks in his
bungalow had to tick softly, and were not allowed to strike above a
whisper. No bell rang for meals here, and certainly no gong was struck.
“A damned impertinent way of telling a gentleman his food was ready—of
course it was ready, when it was the precise moment at which it should
be ready.” Meals were not even announced under Colonel Agnew’s rule. You
went in to a second on time—and the meal _was_ ready, ready _then_,
neither before nor after. More than one English woman, visiting India,
and the Agnews’ guest for a day or a meal, wondered how her host would
have adjusted himself to the post-war servants of London. Kathleen could
have told them that he would not have done so, but that in all human
probability they would have adjusted their post-war selves to him—or,
if they didn’t, he’d “cook the stuff himself.”
The gong was not for use. It stood on the table in the hall because
Kathleen liked to see it there. And the Colonel and father didn’t care a
brass farthing who saw it, or where they saw it, so long as no one ever
hit it. And no one ever had from the day he paid for it till now.
Doctor Traherne used it now.
He picked up the mallet, and whacked that gong as if he’d suddenly gone
gong-beating mad.
Ali Halim clutched at him. The khansamah almost knelt at his feet, and
tears of sheer fright brimmed in the old native’s eyes. Private Grainger
stood soldierly stock-still on guard, waiting outside his Colonel’s
door. But the irreproachable buttons on his tunic shook, his neck
rippled and turned purple with mirth. But the private did not stir. He
had been told to see that no one came in to the Commandant’s room; he
had not been told to do anything else, and if a Bengal Tiger and the Taj
Mahal had come into the hall, and begun waltzing together, Private
Grainger would not have stirred—but not a white ant could have passed
by him in to the Colonel.
But the Colonel passed by him—violently.
“What the hell!” he raged as he wrenched the door open, and nearly
wrenched it off.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Traherne said nicely, laying down the mallet.
“But I _must_ see you. And Halim would neither let me go in, or tell you
I was here.”
“Quite right,” was the gruff reply. “Come back to-morrow.”
“I must see you now,” Traherne insisted.
The Colonel’s neck grew as purple as the private’s.
“‘Must’ be damned!” the Colonel spluttered. “Go away. And don’t come
back here—to-morrow or ever!”
Doctor Traherne went the length of the hall, and laid his hand on the
older man’s arm. “It is positively necessary, sir,” he urged quietly. “I
must speak to you now—and alone.”
Colonel Agnew made a sound, a pronounced sound, but it was quite
inarticulate.
A tear rolled down to the old khansamah’s white beard, and Private
Grainger was praying—praying that he wasn’t going to explode. In the
first place, he did not wish to explode, and, in the second place, he
intensely wished to live to get back to the canteen, and tell the story.
It ought to be worth several pints of Poona best. He had seen “the old
man hot in the collar before,” but never as mad as this.
“What’s it about?” the irate Colonel demanded. “You’ll have to wait, I
tell you!”
“That’s just what I can’t do, sir,” Doctor Traherne assured him, “and we
can’t discuss it here.”
“Discuss! Discuss be blowed!” the Colonel snorted.
“And I can’t tell you here.”
Agnew gave the physician’s face a shrewd, searching glance.
“Cholera worse at Meean Mir?” he said a trifle more quietly. “You’re not
going off there, are you? We want to finish those hospital plans, you
know.”
“No—not cholera anywhere. Let us go into your own room, sir——”
“You go sit down somewhere else, and have a drink. I’ll see you after
I’ve finished a dispatch—to catch the home mail—if it’s as important
as that,” Agnew told him.
“I’m sorry, Colonel Agnew,” Traherne said respectfully, “but I must
speak to you _before_ you send anything to the out post.”
The old soldier’s thick white eyebrows gathered themselves into storm
clouds, and he cleared his throat with an oath. But he was weakening.
“You seem to think yourself in command,” he blustered.
“No,” Traherne denied, “or I’d not need to disturb you, sir.”
“You’ll have to be damned quick,” Agnew said surlily as he turned back
to his room.
“As damned quick as you like,” the doctor assented, following him.
Colonel Agnew threw an order at the old khansamah over Traherne’s
shoulder. “Throw that bally thing out to the crows!” he commanded. Halim
took the gong up in one trembling hand, the mallet in his other. But he
gathered his courage to say, “The Miss-Sahib think very great deal of
it, sir.”
“You heard my order!” Colonel Agnew thundered. “Hide the damned things,
or give them to one of your wives, or your grandmother.”
“It isn’t likely to happen again, sir,” Traherne said gently. “I was
desperate. And Miss Agnew will be angry won’t she? Scold you, perhaps.”
The grizzled mustache twitched. “It won’t happen _twice_ again,” Colonel
Agnew promised grimly. “Here, you, put the damned thing down where it
was—and get about your business!”
Ali Halim held his hands up to Allah in gratitude as the Colonel’s door
closed again, and Private Grainger permitted himself a broad grin and a
wide chuckle.
It must not be implied that Colonel Agnew swore more than most men. As a
rule he did not, but he saw red to-day, had seen so red all night that
he had not slept at all. Both man and soldier he was hideously
upset—and when that was so nothing so nearly relieved him as a good
splutter of oaths. When well-nigh hysterical with anger he used “damns”
as hysterical women use smelling-salts.
“I can’t give you so much as five minutes,” he said, as he seated
himself at his writing-table, and Dr. Traherne sat down on the other
side of it. “No,” looking at his watch. “I’ll give you exactly two. Go
ahead.”
“It’s about Crespin,” Traherne said at once.
Agnew’s lips stiffened ominously. “There is nothing to be said about
Major Crespin,” he interposed sharply. “You might have spared your legs,
and my time.”
“I’ve come to ask you to give him one more chance, sir,” Traherne
persisted.
“No!” the Colonel blurted.
“I speak as his physician,” the other man said.
“Speak as his grandmother, for all I care—but speak somewhere else. I
have definitely decided what to do about Major Crespin, and I wish to
catch the post. I intend to catch it,” and the Colonel took up his pen
significantly, and pulled towards him an unfinished letter that the gong
in the hall had interrupted.
“You promised me two minutes,” Traherne reminded him.
“Then I’ll give them to you,” the soldier snapped, “but I will not hear
one word about Crespin.”
“He can’t help it, sir, it is disease.”
“All the more reason to boot him out of the service. A soldier can help
doing any damned thing that is unsoldierly. If he can’t—he’s no
soldier.”
“He can’t help it—alone. I want you to let me help him to help it. I
want you to give him a chance, and to give me a chance. I may fail: let
me try though. There is a great deal that is fine in Tony Crespin.”
“Don’t you suppose I know that?” the other growled. “I’m his colonel!”
“And because you are, sir, you will help me to help him.”
“I wish to God I could,” Agnew groaned. “But he’s made that impossible
this time. Don’t say any more, Traherne. I know what you want. You want
me—heaven knows what’s it to you—to let him send in his papers. It
can’t be done. I have my duty to do. I respect my commission, and the
uniform I’ve the honor to wear, if that poor devil doesn’t. And Major
Crespin is going to be dismissed from the service. He must.”
“Let him send in his papers?” Traherne ignored the worse that had
followed. “I want more than that, sir!”
“Oh—you do, do you?” Agnew growled.
“Very much more, sir. I want you to let it pass.”
The Colonel threw down his pen, and sank back in his chair, speechless.
Traherne pressed on. “If he has to leave the Army, his case will be
hopeless.”
Agnew found his voice. “The Service will be hopeless, if we officer it
with drunkards.”
“It is not quite hopeless, I think—and I’ll be on the job for all I’m
worth, if you’ll let me have it my way, sir. Let him stay on with you.
Give him leave—not too long, and I’ll take him off after game or
butterflies, or any old thing. I’ll make him come. Or, if he won’t for
me, he will for you!” Agnew looked down, his eyelids blinked. “And bring
him back with the stuff out of his blood. And when I have, I’ll stick to
him like a leech, and a brother and a doctor. I want to _cure_ him. I
believe that I may be able to do it—with your help, sir.”
“I’m no doctor!”
“I’m not so sure, sir,” Traherne replied with a quiet smile. “I’ve seen
you in cholera camp, remember. And I’ve a theory that every great
soldier is a pretty fine sort of physician as well.”
“Cut the blarney,” Agnew snapped—but he was pleased. “Why are you so
set on it, man? It wouldn’t be a pleasant job. Stick to malaria, there’s
more in it.”
“I’ll stick to both,” Traherne replied.
“But why in thunder do you want to do it? That’s what I want to know.
No—no—I don’t,” the old man had suddenly flushed like a girl,
“—didn’t mean that. None of my business.”
Traherne smiled again. “It isn’t for Mrs. Crespin that I want to do it,
Colonel,” he said simply; “not half so much for her as for him.”
To cover his confusion, Agnew looked at his watch. When he had he swore.
“You’ve made me miss the mail,” he said hotly, “you’ve tricked me into
it! I’ll wire. Do as well.”
“I did not try to make you miss the mail,” Dr. Traherne said, looking
full in the other’s angry eyes.
“I beg your pardon,” Colonel Agnew said.
CHAPTER IX
Colonel Agnew got out of his chair heavily, and spoke to the man outside
the door. “You needn’t wait,” he said.
“Traherne,” he said, as he sat down again, “don’t you think that I
haven’t tried to help Crespin. I have again and again. I’ve tried all I
knew. We all have. It breaks my heart to have one of my boys go wrong.
My men are my sons—I’ve only Kathleen, you know—the regiment’s my
sons. When Tony Crespin came out to us, he was only a boy. I fathered
him, and, by God, I mothered him too. I never had a likelier
subaltern—until——” Colonel Agnew broke off abruptly and sat drumming
wretchedly on the table.
“He did well in the War, I’ve heard,” Traherne remarked, both to give
the other time and to make a point for Crespin.
“He did damned well in the War,” Agnew said sharply. “And the War pretty
well broke his heart. It did mine! We stuck here, sucking sugar-cane and
ghee, with the greatest war in history going on over there—and pretty
nearly going to blazes, and every fool regiment in the British army in
the beautiful thick of it—some of ’em not fit to rub up our buttons or
learn the goose-step! Damn it—but I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Some one had to stay here, I suppose,” Traherne said conciliatingly.
“Who the hell said they didn’t? But it needn’t have been the best
regiment in the British Army, need it?” Agnew blazed. “Yes, yes,—poor
Crespin did his mothers’-meeting, curate-to-tea bit, and he did it well.
Wireless! Wireless—do-re-me-fa-sol! for a full-blooded man who aches
and itches, and curses his guts out to be in at the fun——Oh, well——”
he pushed the cigars towards Traherne, and took one himself. “May as
well,” he said sadly as he struck a match. “I _need_ something, and it’s
too early for pegs, and now I’ve let the mail slip, half an hour won’t
matter.” Dr. Traherne wondered ruefully how much it was mattering to
Tony Crespin!—but he lit his cigar. He was up against the most
difficult thing he’d ever tackled, and he knew it. He must not push
Agnew too hard, he must bide Agnew’s time, and wear his determination
out gently—if he could wear it out. “Yes, he did well in the War. What
he don’t know about wireless no one does. But, Lord, how he felt it—not
going over there. He cried about it, talking to me about it one
day—when he was half sprung, poor lad—the only time I saw him much the
worse for it while the War was on. Traherne,” the old soldier leaned
over the table, and whispered, “I cried! with the rage and shame and
homesickness for it all—I stuck here nursing sweepers to keep ’em
‘loyal’, _I cried_,—and I wasn’t drunk.”
The physician understood—and honored. But he couldn’t think what to
say.
“You did get to the front!” the old soldier said enviously.
“Pretty well,” Traherne admitted. “There was plenty for doctors to do
there.”
“Doctors and surgeons,” Colonel Agnew amended.
“And surgeons,” Traherne said gravely.
They smoked in silence for a moment or two.
Agnew spoke first “I did all I could for Crespin, as long as I could.
Did it because he was one of ours, because there was a good officer in
him once, if ever I saw one, because of his people—mine know some of
them at home—and because of his wife. Lord, Traherne, I could forgive
him all the rest—all but last night—but not how he’s treated his
wife!”
“He is very fond of her,” Traherne interposed.
“Tell that to the marines!” the Colonel growled.
“He is, sir,” the other insisted.
“Taken a rotten way of showing it,” Agnew grunted.
“Very rotten,” Dr. Traherne agreed sadly.
“A sweeter woman never breathed. As nice a woman, and as good a woman
too, as God ever made!”
“She is all that,” Basil Traherne said softly.
“I wish you’d seen her when she first came to us.”
“I can imagine her.”
“We lost our heads and our hearts to her. There wasn’t a man in the
regiment that didn’t love her, and rejoice in her—and, by Jove! there
wasn’t a woman that disliked her. Not one! I’ve been here some time, an’
I never knew _that_ to happen before. I never expect to see it happen
again. She was a perfectly happy, fearless, confident girl. Well—she’s
fearless now! But where are her happiness and her confidence?
Whiskey-poisoned, and wanton-killed. I’ve seen men die in battle—pretty
badly mangled some of them—but a man can ask for nothing better than to
die in battle! I’ve seen men hanged, I’ve seen men shaken and twisted
_and maddened_ by plague, and cholera. I’ve seen a white man eaten off
by leprosy, a joint at a time, till there wasn’t much left of him but
his middle. But the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen was the hardening of
Lucilla Crespin—to watch her eyes stiffen, an’ that low, sweet voice of
hers, to feel her grow cold. It was bad enough when a look of terror
began to creep into her eyes—it was a thousand times worse when it
changed, and settled to a frozen, still despair. And her smile! She
never smiled much in the old days, but it was worth seeing when she did.
She laughed oftener than she smiled. Her laugh, was a thing to hear, but
it was her smile that fetched you—a dimple, and then a light! By Jove!
You’ve seen Kathleen smile?” Traherne nodded. “Much the same thing.
Sweet and glad, every bit of it! Now, that woman’s smile is the
bitterest, saddest thing I know.”
“Not when she smiles at her children!”
“Gad, no!” the Colonel admitted. “The young motherhood of her has not
been spoiled the least, thank God!”
“You can’t spoil such motherhood,” the doctor asserted.
“Yes, you can,” Agnew retorted. “I’ve seen it done—in India. Well, she
never gave a sign, not once, that I ever saw or heard of, through it
all. She just froze—died, as it were, and lived on dead. I wonder how
much of it all you know, Traherne, or have heard?” he broke off.
“I’ve heard very little. I’ve avoided hearing, as much as I could. But I
can read between the lines a bit—it is one of the tricks of my trade,
you know.”
“Well, you’re going to hear it now, man, what I know of it—and I know
enough to turn an Eskimo sick. And when you’ve heard, I don’t think
you’ll ask me to be easy on Major Crespin.”
Dr. Traherne smoked on in silence.
“It seems Crespin took too much once or twice when he was a subaltern,
but only once or twice, and not so very much, and it never got to me.
Always liked the stuff, I suppose. Crossland had suspicions of that from
the first—so I learned later. Soon after he got his company Crespin
went home on long leave, and when he came back he brought his wife with
him. I’m always a bit anxious when one of my youngsters does that. Tony
Crespin must have been thirty-one or -two then. I’m always anxious till
I see how it works. Marriage is a damned queer thing—the queerest I
know. Sometimes it sinks; sometimes it smashes; sometimes it jogs on in
a dull dog-trot; sometimes it glides on oil. That was what their
marriage did at first. Couldn’t ask for a better husband, and no woman
in her senses would ask for a more devoted. No nonsense about it—slops
are loathsome, of course—but just downright happiness and the very best
sort of good-understanding. Then”—the old soldier’s mouth
hardened—“I’m damned if he didn’t begin to tilt it up—and then went
right off the deep end in B. and S., and fizz and Johnnie Walker. She
was the last to know it, of course. Crossland got the wind up first it
seems—and did his best. I saw it, when no old fool could help seeing
it—and I did my damnedest. What I haven’t said to Tony Crespin on the
subject wouldn’t be of much use in a temperance campaign. Try! Oh, we
tried. Stand by him? We stood by him. He pulled up, then he slid back.
Not once, not twice—again and again. We were with her, my wife and I,
when the cable came saying her father had died. It ought to be against
the law for such news to be sent by cable. I’d make it a criminal
offense, if I could. She didn’t say a word—it isn’t her way—just read
the blamed thing over two or three times, then laid it down on the
tea-tray, and pushed the cups and saucers about a bit. But her face! I
shall not forget her face. Mary, at the look of that girl’s face, just
took up that blasted cable and read it, and then she handed it to me,
and I read it. Mary didn’t ask any permission, or make any apology, and
no more did I; for I knew whatever Mrs. Agnew had done was the thing to
do—and I don’t think she’d have heard us, no matter what we’d said, or
how loud. We didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t often my wife didn’t know
what to do—but she owned, on the way home, that she was properly
stumped that time. We didn’t know what to do. We knew she didn’t want us
to stay, didn’t want any one near her, and we couldn’t bear to leave
her. She was delicate then. Mary said something to her—don’t remember
what. I was tongue-tied, I can tell you. She didn’t seem to hear my
wife. But presently she said, ‘Where is Tony? Please find him for me. I
want Tony.’ And just as she’d said it, Crespin lurched in—_lurched_.
Not half-seas over, but drunk! So drunk—he reeked—and when he saw me
he giggled. And that was how she learned it.”
Colonel Agnew pushed his chair back angrily, and went to the window.
Kathleen Agnew’s garden was the show place of Dehra Dun. Even for India
it was almost surprisingly beautiful. How she’d contrived it in her few
years only she and the _mahlis_ knew. Colonel Agnew said all his pay
went to pay the _mahlis_. Except a clump of neam chameli, keeping their
stately beauty apart in a corner, and drenching the place for many yards
with the scent of their lovely cream tube-shaped blossoms, none of the
giant trees of India were there. But sweeter far, though desperately
heavy, was the odor of the love-sacred champa. A grove of mock-oranges
(we miscall them syringa) always reminded Lucilla Crespin of her
father’s garden in Surrey—but the emerald, ruby-billed, blue-tailed,
pink-throated parrots who kept house in them did not. There was a long
avenue of roses—all the colors, all the sweetnesses of roses. There was
a wilderness of roses, jungles of roses. There was green sward
velvet—more English-seeming than Indian. Stephanotis bloomed pink
beneath the delicate bamboos, begonias edged the once sacred tank where
the lotus still floated. Maidenhair ferns grew everywhere, plants of it,
thickets and walls of it. Yellow honeysuckles and yellower jasmine
looked lemon-pale beside the venusta’s flaming orange. Peacocks strutted
and fanned between pink camellias and velvet iris, and wise-faced
monkeys flung and chattered among the oleanders. And the lithe bronze
_mahlis_, naked but for brown loin-cloths, crooned as they worked and
pottered.
But Colonel Agnew, gazing at it all, saw none of it. Presently he said,
without turning even his head, “And her baby—the girl—was born that
night.”
Basil Traherne neither moved nor spoke.
Agnew pitched his cigar out on the jasmine, came back to his chair, and
lit another. “She forgave him, of course, or I suppose she did. I tell
you, all along she never has said a word nor given a sign. I’ve often
wondered if she ever has even to him. He kept straight for a bit after
that. And, if ever a man was proud of a child, Crespin was proud of that
baby. The boys used to chaff him, and ask if he wouldn’t like to bring
it on to parade. And he’d say, he would.”
Traherne nodded.
“He kept straight, but he didn’t keep on keeping straight. Every once
and again, he’d break out—and, whenever he did, Crossland did his
prettiest, and I did my damnedest.”
Dr. Traherne smiled slightly, but Colonel Agnew did not see it—perhaps
that was as well.
“I don’t say he went the whole hog often. He didn’t. But he sipped and
sipped—a damned sight more than was good for him—or the rest of us—or
for her. I’ve told you how that poor child learned she’d married a
downright hard boozer. The way she found out about women wasn’t much
pleasanter.”
“I’d rather——” Traherne began.
The Colonel ignored it. “It was in Pindi. He had a month’s leave, and
for some reason—I forget, if I knew—they spent it, of all places in
the world, at Pindi—had a bungalow there. There was a show there just
then, as if Pindi was not hot and uncomfortable enough without
theater-going. Some of the troupe put up at the Dak Bungalow—among them
a Jezebel they called ‘the leading lady.’ You’ve heard of Terése
Carter?”
“No.”
“Thought every one had. Hadn’t much reputation as an actress, but more
than enough as a—woman. But I ought not to say that—probably not her
fault—sorry I did. One morning, early, Mrs. Crespin had been making her
own bazaar, and she went into the Dak to ask about a dhursi’s character.
She got Crespin’s instead. The rooms open off of the dining-room; Terése
Carter, in a thin sort of thing, with all her red hair loose about her,
and her door pretty well open, the cotton curtain drawn back—I suppose
for the cool, not that there ever is any at Pindi—was sprawled on her
bed, and Crespin was sitting—half-sitting on it—on the bed, with a lot
of the woman’s red hair held up to his face, and a sick-sheep look in
his damned eyes. Mrs. Crespin stood stock-still, Mrs. Lawson said—Dick
Lawson’s wife was with her, and saw it all, they’d been making bazaar
together—and watched them, then just moved on, and did her errand. She
never said a word to Mrs. Lawson, or let her say one word to her—and
nobody knew what she said to Crespin afterwards—if she did. I know what
pattern most men are cut, Traherne; wouldn’t be much of a C.O. if I
didn’t, and you do too, or you’re not much of a doctor. But, damn it
all, I’d like to have the hanging of every man that plays that low-down
trick on a good wife. And when a scoundrel that does, lets her find him
out, in my opinion, that second villainy is worse than the other, by
God.”
“And in mine,” the physician said.
“At Sumnee there never had been any hint of that sort of thing in
Crespin. Couldn’t be. Not a white woman in Sumnee, you know, except
those in his own regiment—till the Dorsets came. Well, Miss Terése
Carter wasn’t the last. There have been others since—more or less
flagrant. One, at least, a Service woman. The Crespins came back from
Rawal Pindi a few days after that—on what terms I never knew. But we
could see the breach widen—and could only stand by, and watch it widen,
and the misery grow and grow stonier in her face. Now, Dr. Traherne,
what have you got to say for Major Crespin?” The Colonel brought his
clenched fist down on the table with a blow that sounded like an enraged
demand for arnica. “Rather a black, rotten story, eh?”
CHAPTER X
“Very—rotten,” Traherne replied, “and sad.”
“Got anything more to say for Major Crespin?”
“Yes. This. When I was a boy at Harrow, one of the small boys, about the
youngest there, Antony Crespin was my fag-master. He was jolly decent to
me. He wasn’t much at schools, but every one liked him, masters as well
as boys. He was prime at sports; and at everything he had the pluck of a
dozen, and he was absolutely straight, and scrupulously fair always. But
he always had a hunted look in his eyes. I saw it then, shaver though I
was, without understanding it in the least. I understand it now. And I
knew—I don’t know how I knew, but I did—that Crespin was unhappy.”
Colonel Agnew hitched impatiently in his chair. All this did not
interest him in the remotest. But he did not interrupt. Traherne had
listened to his story, he’d listen to Traherne’s. Colonel Agnew too was
scrupulously fair always. But he scowled, and his white eyebrows met in
their ominous beetling.
“And I knew one other thing about him. He almost never spoke of his
people. But I knew, don’t know how again, that he worshiped his mother,
and very much less than worshiped his father. He had a photo of Mrs.
Crespin—his mother—over his bed. I believe he said his prayers to that
picture, and, if he didn’t, he said them about it. It was the photograph
of a very beautiful woman, “Mother”—only that—written across one
corner. He used to write to her all the time—oftener than any other boy
wrote to any one. I used to post his letters often—mostly they were not
thin ones—not those to his mother, and I didn’t often have any others
to post for him. She came to see him two or three times while he and I
were both there—he left long before I did. He was older than I, and
going into the Army, of course—they never stay at public school long,
as you know. I used to think he half lived for those visits. His joy
when he knew that she was coming, and his pride and devotion when she
did come—I remember it! She was as beautiful as her picture, sir—and
she seemed as fond and proud of him as he was of her. He took me home
with him for a week-end once. His people’s place was not very far. They
gave me a ripping time—the Saturday. We got there early Saturday
morning. I didn’t take to Mr. Crespin—couldn’t have said why not: he
was decent to me. But I thought there was an undertone of boorishness in
the way he spoke to his wife, a mean look in his eyes—nothing much,
couldn’t put my finger on it—I was pretty much of a kid—but I seemed
to get it. And I felt sure that Tony and his mother were happier
together when Mr. Crespin was not there. And the half-impression I’d got
at Harrow that Tony had no special love for his father was considerably
deepened, and I gathered too—couldn’t have said how, and couldn’t
now—that the boy did not respect the man. Sunday was all right—till
dinner. Mrs. Crespin looked queer when she came into the drawing-room,
her hair was beautifully done, I remember, kid as I was, wondering how
long it had taken her maid to do it, and her gown was A-1, and she
smelled of some delicious scent as she moved—almost too much of it, and
I thought she had too much powder on, and oughtn’t to have used any, her
skin was so beautiful—just like milk, I’d noticed, out in the sunshine
when we’d played tennis. By the time we’d finished fish her _face_ was
red, and Tony’s was the color of chalk. He talked, how he talked, poor
devil!—and I can see the love in his eyes now when he looked at his
mother. Mr. Crespin scarcely spoke, but made a capital meal, and watched
his wife with a bad smile on his face all the time. Before the poultry
was served, I understood—couldn’t help it. Her voice was thick, her
hand unsteady, and her face flamed. She didn’t eat much, but she
drank—I know now that she couldn’t help it—and her husband twice
reminded the butler to fill her glass! When she pushed back her chair,
and rose to leave us, she lurched. Tony drew his mother’s arm through
his, and led her from the room as if she had been a queen! He didn’t
come back till very late. When he did, he didn’t stay long. And he
didn’t sleep that night, as he had the night before, in the room I did.
We left at an unearthly hour on Monday—had to, of course—and I didn’t
see Mrs. Crespin to say good-by.”
Colonel Agnew cleared his throat. “Do you mean?” he began. “Do you
believe——”
“I believe, sir, that Antony Crespin’s mother was a nice woman who
needed help she didn’t get, or a chance and peace to help herself in, as
I believe that Major Crespin needs help that I can perhaps give him and
help him to help himself—which is the only help that amounts to
anything in such cases——”
“I tell you——” Agnew broke in hotly.
But the physician in his own turn too interrupted. “That you and
Crossland have given him every possible chance, done your best, and done
it generously? I am sure of that, sir. But the thing is very difficult.
No ailment, except insanity, is less understood, or more persistently
bungled—by doctors, the best of them,” he added quickly.
The Colonel smiled grimly. “But you wouldn’t bungle it?”
“God knows,” Dr. Traherne said humbly. “I’d try not.”
“Isn’t it hopeless always?”
“Not always. Even insanity is healed, fairly often, in spite of
criminally wrong treatment.”
“You think he inherited it?”
“I think he inherited a tendency, perhaps, or—more probably a
possibility. I do not believe that it is congenital. I do not for one
moment believe that that poor lady drank until something drove her to
it—after her marriage, and probably after her boy’s birth. And I think
it very likely that Tony Crespin took his first drink too much when he
heard of his mother’s death.”
“And the _women_? Inherited from the other side, I suppose?”
“I can’t say, sir. Alcohol itself fathers that lapse very often. And the
thing itself is rather too common to lay it overconfidently at any one
father’s door.”
“Yes,” Agnew agreed sadly. “Did he say anything?”
“Tony? To me, about what had happened at his home, sir? Not one word—on
the way back to Harrow, or after. But—I saw him suffer—then and after.
Once a lot of fellows were talking—were talking about the thousand and
one things that boys at school do—and got on to what ought to be
forgiven, and what, if anything, ought not—no matter how repented and
all that. Crespin did not join in and, of course, I didn’t. I was
fagging, making their toast and so on. But after they’d gone, he said to
me that there was one thing he’d kill for. And when I said, ‘What?’ he
said he’d _kill_ any one, no matter who it was, that ever said or
thought a rough word of his mother. And there was murder in his eyes,
sir. I thought he meant it as a warning to me. I think it was. He
needn’t have done it. I took an oath to myself that Monday morning on
the train, going back to school, that no word of it’d ever pass me, and
that I’d do my best to forget it. No word ever has before, and I’ve told
it now for him.”
“Ever see her again?” Agnew asked, as he again marched off stiffly to
the open window.
“Twice,” Traherne told him. “She came to Harrow twice after that before
Tony went to Sandhurst. If Tony had treated her like a queen on her
other visits, I can’t describe how he treated her those two times. I
couldn’t help feeling that _he_ was trying to apologize to her—to make
up to her for it. Colonel Agnew, Antony Crespin loved his mother with a
love very few women ever get—a love that ought to make up to a woman
for almost _anything_.”
Colonel Agnew, with his back to Traherne, drew out his handkerchief,
and—sneezed.
CHAPTER XI
Dr. Traherne waited for Agnew to speak.
“I almost wish,” the older man said slowly, after a time, “that his wife
knew—what you’ve just told me.”
Traherne nodded. “But we can’t tell her, sir. And Major Crespin never
will. And probably no one in India knows but you and me and him—perhaps
no one else living now, knows or remembers. But his Colonel _knows_ now,
sir,” he added rising and going to the man at the window.
Agnew swung round on him. “What do you want me to do, doctor? What the
blue blazes can I do? Guest night! Damn!”
“I ask you to pass it over, sir—this once more—to give Major Crespin a
goodish long leave—not too long—and leave the rest to me—let me try
out my plan.”
“Two generals—one from the U. S. A.!” Colonel Agnew almost bleated.
“Yes—awkward,” Traherne admitted.
“Damned awkward,” the Colonel said curtly.
“But they’ll not say a word, sir. They were eating your salt. Let me
tackle them. General Harland is awkward, I’ll admit. I wish he hadn’t
been there.”
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” the Colonel said miserably.
“Yes! But General Harland is not in command of your district, sir. You
can’t ask him to wink at your not reporting it. But I can. I think I can
get him to _ask_ you not to report it. And you are in command here,
sir.”
“You think you can do a lot, don’t you?” Agnew snorted.
“I can speak as a _physician_, sir,” Traherne said persuasively. “And
the General is no end of a good fellow—every one says so. And then I’ll
tackle the Bishop—”
“Oh, damn the Bishop!” the Colonel said. “No—I’ll consult General
Harland myself, Traherne. It’s up to me. I don’t give a damn which of us
tackles the Bishop. But General Tyler—our American guest—that’s what
_hurts_, Traherne—that an officer of another service saw—one of
mine—what General Tyler saw last night!”
“Yes, I know, sir. But he _was_ your guest. He’s one of the best too.
It’s safe forever with him.”
“Oh, Lord,” the Colonel chuckled wretchedly, “and America’s just gone
dry!”
“General Tyler hasn’t gone particularly dry, sir,” Dr. Traherne reminded
him. “He took claret at dinner. And His Majesty’s health went down him
in fizz. And he had a stiff peg with me at two o’clock this morning.”
“Good Lord, Traherne! Where?”
“At my digs, sir. General Tyler and I took Major Crespin home—to my
bungalow, and saw to him, both of us. General Tyler was no end sorry
about it. He was sorry for you, sir. He was sorrier for Crespin. Said
so. He’s all-wool-and-a-yard-wide—a saying of his own countrymen’s,
sir.”
There was a pause.
Colonel Agnew went back to the writing-table, and took up the dispatch,
and tore it into very small bits before he threw it into the big
waste-paper basket. Then he kicked the basket.
“Boy!” he bellowed.
“Topee,” he snapped when the bearer appeared. “You go prescribe for the
Bishop, if you like,” he said to Traherne. “I’m off to eat humble pie to
the General—General Harland. After tiffin, I’ll call on General Tyler,
and ask him to come to the Club and lick me at poker.”
“He will, sir,” Traherne laughed.
“By God, he shall,” Colonel Agnew said.
* * * * *
And a few days later Traherne and Crespin went off after game.
Sometimes Traherne thought he was winning, or, as he put it, that
Crespin was. At others he thought he was losing.
Crespin came back to his regiment, and back to old failures and stumbles
sometimes. But neither man ever quite gave it up. Colonel Agnew looked
the other way more than once. He grumbled and threatened a great deal.
And he prayed—but that he kept strictly to himself.
Lucilla Crespin grew whiter and colder. Iris and Ronald grew bonnier and
chubbier—and their mother loved them more and more, gay and tender
always with them, their beloved saint and tireless playmate. And
Traherne, as he watched her with them, had almost more in his heart, and
his strong tingling man’s blood, than his resolve and endurance could
match. But they held. He often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what he
felt—guessed it at all, any of it—but the woman, if she did, gave no
sign.
Crespin recovered and lapsed—lapsed and recovered. And the regiment,
watching, wondered how long the “old man” was going to put up with
it—and so did the entire station.
And the Colonel wondered himself, and told Dr. Traherne so, more than
once. And always the physician pleaded, “A little longer, sir!”
“How is it going to end?” Agnew demanded one day.
“Before long, in one of two ways,” Traherne said, “assuredly. He will
win out now, or he’ll die. He is very much better of his failing. But
his nerves are about frazzled, and his body won’t stand too much more.
Let him keep his uniform, sir. I’ll see that he doesn’t openly disgrace
it. I promise you that. Let him _fit_ it once more, or let him die in
it. That will mean a great deal to him. Take it from him, and I give you
my word his game is up.”
At which Colonel Agnew “damned” Dr. Traherne, and yielded to him.
Agnew, too, often wondered if Mrs. Crespin knew what Traherne felt
towards her. The Colonel had no doubt.
Whether Mrs. Crespin knew all, little or nothing, Major Crespin knew
now; and, knowing his own handicap and the other man’s worthiness, was
bitterly, blackly jealous.
That mended nothing, helped nothing, and retarded and impeded much.
The children and their ayah and bearer had been sent to Pahari about a
month before Major Crespin’s leave was due, nearly two years after the
American General had broken Colonel Agnew’s regiment’s bread, and
honored its salt. Dr. Traherne watching, without seeming to, thought he
saw a breakdown threatening. At such times to get Crespin away and out
of sight was always his first concern; it sometimes averted, and—the
next best thing—it always hid.
Traherne had a new “bus,” a costly, beautiful “flyer,” of which he was
boyishly proud. There was a good deal of boy still in Dr. Basil Traherne
in spite of his natural gravity and his thirty-five years. The boy
persists longest in the biggest men.
He urged the Crespins to let him fly them to Pahari, where they proposed
to spend their not long leave with Iris and Ronald in the cool of the
hills. Mrs. Crespin was eager to fall in with Traherne’s suggestion, and
Major Crespin, a little to their surprise, agreed to it placidly; for
the last two years scarcely had improved things between Crespin and
Traherne, and had distinctly made them worse between husband and wife.
And Major Crespin had almost as little flair for aircraft adventure as
his Colonel had.
It is said that the offender never forgives. Certainly it is quite
explicitly hard for the one in the wrong to do so. And it takes more
spiritual asset than continued alcohol often leaves. Antony Crespin was
not ungrateful to Dr. Traherne for the physician’s ministrations that
“next morning,” and on several others that had followed it. But the
memory rankled. And he made it harder and harder for the physician to
succor and brace him, or to keep up the show of a cordial friendship,
which in India Crespin never much had felt, and which Traherne on his
part found wearing steadily thin. The physician’s interest in his “case”
never slackened or wavered, but the man’s liking for the man very nearly
went. He stood to his merciful professional guns undauntedly—but he did
it not a little grimly.
The curly-cue thing that your doctor writes at the head (or if he’s a
“big man,” has printed there—to save him the trouble) of the
prescription he instructs you to have made up at the chemist’s, and take
inside you three times a day before meals, is a prayer to Apollo. “Grant
health, O Apollo!” It seems almost a scandal, a medical lapse and
neglect, that every physician does not write it himself, and put his
thought and heart into it as he does; and seems too a trifle surprising
in these piping days of spiritual-healing and
psycho-all-sorts-of-things. Every physician aims to give the same
professional devotion—of course!—to the patient who does not attract
his personal liking as to the patient who does. But, because doctors are
only human, even the most truly vocated rarely quite succeed. Dr.
Traherne tried determinedly to give Crespin the same care and help that
he had while his old affection for him still held—and the physician
succeeded as well as the man could. But Crespin’s continued, though
perhaps on the whole rarer and less, misconducts and his growing
surliness and peevishness, rasped Traherne’s patience and turned his
once sincere liking to a feeling very different. And his growing love
and longing for the woman whom Crespin’s name still claimed, and whose
coldness and aloofness towards her husband visibly grew from month to
month, made any real feeling of friendship for Crespin impossible now to
Basil Traherne. His memory of Tony Crespin, Harrow boy and fag-master,
was tender and beautiful still. But it grew faint, or, at least, more
remote, and even a little blurred—and rarely vividly associated with
the heavy, flushed, dulled-eyed Major Crespin whose wife Traherne pitied
and desired.
That is how it stood with them, as the new aeroplane imperceptibly rose
from the flat beyond the parade-ground, into the velvet-blue, and flew
towards the Himalayas.
CHAPTER XII
Odd places and peoples lie—for the most part unsuspected by the rest of
the world—tucked away solitary and secure in the uncharted wilds beyond
the Himalayas: tiny isolated kingdoms, each knowing naught but itself,
and unknown of all others, strongholds of primitive peoples and of old
primitive ways, elaborately customed, impregnably individual—wonderful,
incalculable domains to which few white travelers journey, from whose
sullen bourne none return.
The Himalayas are cut and gashed by a thousand fissures and natural
passes, and between those loopholes in the great mountain range lie many
a hidden principality, cupped in mountains and rocks as impenetrably as
the lair of some skilful outlaw often is safe from the utmost vigilance
of the police of the American Northwest.
Such was the Kingdom of Rukh: its prince keeping his state, his people
keeping their ways, exactly as they did long before the days of Genghis
Khan, speaking their own guttural language, worshiping their own gods,
obeying their prince in all ways and their priests in some—for their
prince was more to them, more loved, more feared, tenfold more obeyed
than all their small man-made heaven of gods. Who were they? What were
they? Whence had they come? What was their place in the great interknit
mosaic of mankind? None can say. To trace them quite definitely to any
outside kinship were hopeless. Yet most of their faces were somewhat
Mongolian, with here and there one more of Aryan type—always in some
tribesman of power and place.
It was an absolute monarchy, if ever earthly sway and power were
absolute—if the word “absolute” itself has any justification of
veracity.
The Raja of Rukh ruled with an unquestioned despotism no Western monarch
dreams of, and of which but few in the past ever have dreamed, and none
ever has attained.
So often is Asian princeship thus that it would call for no remark in
telling of Rukh, were it not for one odd fact. Of all the natives of
little Rukh, this almost omnipotent ruler was the sole one who had
smirched his birthright, and sinned against the more-than-religion of
the race. For the Raja had traveled, he had broken strange,
unconsecrated breads, eaten strange, polluted meats. He had lived in
Europe, and now in the fortress-home to which he had come back to his
own he in his own person mingled—superficially at least—ways of Europe
with the ways of his fathers. At this his people had wondered a little,
but not one had doubted or questioned, unless indeed Toluk Yap, the high
priest, doubted now and then. And not even Toluk Yap ever had
questioned. For the Raja was god in Rukh, and the gods but satellites of
his power and rank.
Too, all that he occasionally did, ate, or wore that might have hinted
to you or to me of Pall Mall or the Champs Elysées, seemed to his
enslaved, docile people but an eccentricity of his individuality. It
might have stood to them for defilement, his occasional aping of
European ways, and have disgruntled and lashed them to cut-throat fury
and open rebellion, had they sensed it for what it was. But that they
could ill do, since they did not know or suspect that there was a
Europe. He had been away, and he had come back to them; that was all
they knew; and that he had come back was all they cared.
He had brought back with him one grotesque curio at which they gaped for
a time, and then ignored with stolid disgust as far as they could: a
white ape of a man—if it was a man—who, little heed as they paid it,
gave them their first unformed film of idea that somewhere beyond the
mountains that bounded and ended their world there were places on the
earth that were bleached—where trees and reptiles, rocks and sky, if
trees, reptiles and stones and sky there were, all were bleached white
by the torture and misfortune of existing so far from Rukh, as the tawn
of the leopard was sometimes bleached by the lash of the high Himalayan
cold.
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.
Unknown to the geographers of the Occident, unsuspected in Whitehall and
Westminster, the Kingdom of Rukh lay snug in the mountains as it has,
perhaps, since Adam was young. And its despot’s rule was absolute. The
King could do no wrong. For the Royal House stood by the people, and the
people stood by the Royal House in the Kingdom of Rukh.
A grim and dun-colored place it was, a region of gaunt and almost
treeless mountains, all of them bleak, barren and gray of tone except
where the clear atmosphere lent them some tint of its hot blue. Clinging
fiercely to the fierce mountain wall, a mile or more away from the
temple precincts, was a vast barbaric palace, its long stretches of glum
unbroken masonry crowned and relieved by endless arcades and turrets;
not two alike, yet all in key and consonance—a fortress-palace telling
of centuries of human labor, of long generations of wealth and lordship.
How many brown hands had lifted it up stone by stone, how many brown
muscle-knotted backs had bent and strained at its making, is beyond
compute. Millions of peasants must have been born to its hewing and
heaving and making, and have died at it. Here in its desert of rocks,
its forest of mountains, it spoke of suzerainty irresistible and
unresisted as nothing in the West, and little in the East, does, a
suzerainty so enormous, impossible ever in Europe, almost unprecedented
in Asia, that it well-nigh told a human power the one thing that human
power never is: omnipotent.
In almost the one level place in the principality was builded the
temple, and housed the gods. This level place was small, a scant
platform of earth wedged between two masses of rock. In the rock on the
East the cave-temple had been roughly hewn. The thick, ungainly pillars,
rudely carved, paint centuries old still showing faintly here and there,
served to divide the cave roughly into three parts. Between the pillars
in the middle section was a seated stone figure, a six-armed goddess,
forbidding, ferocious of aspect, colored face, arms and rough indicated
robes a dark and sinister green. On a low slab of altar before her feet
newly severed heads of six or seven goats still reeked from the priestly
knife, blood still warm clotting about them, and one—the last
knifed—still twitched and shivered in symbol of recent pain. Untidy and
moldering wreaths and handfuls of flowers decorated the temple’s
honeycombed walls, and lay on its spattered floor. Blood dripped on
marigolds, and bats flew cautiously here and there. How flowers had been
come by in this desolate place of gaunt, bare rock, it were hard to
guess. But the floral offerings were there. And there were gardens in
Rukh, almost miracles of one man’s compulsion and his people’s
persistence. The Raja had his gardens in the keeps of his palace, the
priests and a petted woman or two had theirs contrived in some split in
the mountains of rock, places of verdure and bloom as artificial as the
hanging gardens of Babylon, and much more surprising. And the Raja had
his runners. What the Raja of Rukh would, he commanded; what he
commanded was fulfilled.
The open space before the open temple formed between the two rock-masses
a rudely paved forecourt to the temple. It was bordered by a sparse
company of smaller idols, weather-proof, it’s to be hoped, and probably
too comparatively insignificant to be housed with the six-armed
monstrosity in the blood-spattered, bat-infested cave. Three
round-headed stone posts stood near the outer lesser gods, and were
painted green—whether in an economy of paint left over from the great
Green Goddess, or in the wearing of her livery, were idle guesswork for
a Westerner.
Mountain paths wound off behind the rock, and through the low, listless
shrubs that grew impassively beside them, long narrow paths winding in
every direction, that the overlord’s runners might hasten the quicker
and surer wherever he willed.
There were few words in Rukh as a rule. The people worked too hard to
talk overmuch. Their temple rites were nearly their only social
gatherings; and the temple rites watched and done, they were wont to
disperse almost in silence, lumbering stolidly back to labor, food or
sleep.
But to-day the worshipers were lingering excitedly in the courtyard,
watching wide-eyed something up in the air, a great gray and silver bird
of prey, a strange fish-like bird with amazing markings of blue and red
on its silver belly—only the ordinary identification of such birds, but
neither Arabic nor Roman numerals were common sights in Rukh—a horrible
monster bird of prey whose like they never had seen or heard tell of,
never had dreamed of when nightmares tossed their hard-earned sleep; and
it was swooping down on them with a hideous cracking whizz.
“Oo-ae!” a native cried.
“Oo-ae!” another sobbed.
“Oo-ae! Oo-ae!” they all cried then in mingled gutturals of dismay and
despair.
It was a pathetically hideous group of unkempt, squat, frightened
hillsmen, high-cheeked, rather Mongol in type, strong-limbed, stupid of
face (not Mongol in that), adding nothing of color to the dark drab
place, for their rough, almost unmade garments were somber and dark. A
man of higher stature and better garments stood amongst them, his skin
was lighter, his features more of Aryan type, his eye-sockets wider,
more open, an embroidered fur cap on his head, a marigold stuck in its
beads. He had some evident authority over them—Yazok the temple
priest—for when one turned to flee:
“Na-yam!” ordered the priest, and the man did not go. A braver raised
his weapon—they most of them were armed—and again Yazok commanded
“Na-yam!” and the fellow let his lifted arm and the weapon he held fall
to his side.
On and down swooped the monster bird. The priest watched it, silent and
motionless, but with a tense look of acrid dislike on his face, and a
glance of patient contempt now and then to the huddled, shivering group
which drew closer and closer together, pressing farther away to the edge
of the place, closer and closer to him, ejaculating, “Oo-ae! Oo-ae!”
The bird had lit.
It had finished its flight just back of the temple. One terrible
talon—or was it the tip of its great wing?—projected threateningly
over the mass of rocks at the west. The aeroplane that had risen from
Dehra Dun so surely and lightly, while the band had played “Good-by, I’m
going to leave you now,” had made a forced landing on the inhospitable
slope of unknown Rukh, a landing so imperatively forced that almost it
might be termed a crash.
CHAPTER XIII
Lucilla Crespin came into sight first, but Traherne was first on the
ground. Crespin climbing down rather awkwardly hesitated a moment at a
difficult point, his foothold not too wide or secure, the available
foothold below an uncomfortable distance to a man of his weight. India
does not treat us all alike, we who invade her, not even our
soldier-men. Punjabi soldiering had not kept Antony Crespin fit. Lucilla
had known it for years; observant, clear-eyed, badly sensitive where
those who were hers were concerned, she had watched the sag and the
bloat come and gain almost day by day. But as she stood and looked at
him now, it struck her anew, and more sharply than it had done before,
sickened her even more than it had done in those two bitter hours of her
fresh wifehood’s disillusion when she had realized shudderingly the twin
rotten fissures in a husband’s being.
Women and wine! Both had branded and slackened him. She wondered which
had spoiled and twisted him most. She knew which had tortured her the
more. The “pegs” he had sipped and drained too often, too early, too
late, and too strong, had disgusted and “turned” her clean, wholesome
flesh the more. But the women had tortured her far more cruelly than his
cups had. They had “turned” her soul and poisoned her heart. The
drinking she held a weakness—contemptible but not unpitiable—innate,
inherited, uncontrollable perhaps, but the infidelities that had
affronted her pride, bowed her head, curdled the milk in her young
mother-breasts, she held a personal meanness and unforgivable crime, a
hideous responsibility that lay forever at his door. It is so that women
judge—forgiving, condoning every masculine folly and sin that is no
direct reflection and slight to her.
This was not the man she had married—that almost obese, flush-faced
Crespin standing irresolutely there a little above her. No. But it was
what had been he, and it was the human being to whom she was
indissolubly bound. The fetter cut into her being. But she kept her
pact—now as ever.
“Take care, Antony!” she cried brightly, as he was about to risk it and
jump. “Let Dr. Traherne give you a hand.”
“Yes!” Traherne echoed. He already had gained the lower ground,
surefooted and cool.
“Hang it all,” Crespin shook his wife’s suggestion and the other man’s
proffered assistance off with a testy impatience that spurred his own
faulty physical courage, “I’m not such a crock as all that.” He jumped
as he spoke, jumped heavily, but landed safely enough.
Lucilla gave a little sigh of relief; she scarcely could have told
herself how far it was sincere, how far acting—her wifehood was so
permeated by acting now.
Traherne turned away from Antony, and a something of pity passed across
the younger man’s eyes; he understood, as she did not, that Lucilla’s
words had hurt Crespin—and he pitied him. He still judged Antony more
fairly than Mrs. Crespin did, more fairly than she could, or many women
can.
“Are you all right, Mrs. Crespin?” There was just enough concern in his
voice and in his glance, and not an iota too much. Less would have been
a boorishness, more must have been a caress. “Not very much shaken?”
“Not a bit!” she laughed.
“It was a nasty bump,” the pilot said ruefully.
“You managed splendidly,” the woman defended heartily.
“Come on, Lu,” Crespin interrupted; “sit on that ledge, and I can swing
you down.”
Perhaps Basil Traherne doubted it, for he too went a step nearer and
held out his hand, saying, “Let me—”
She put her hands impartially in theirs, and jumped lightly down,
sayings “Thanks,” as impartially.
The natives watching the strange newcomers with wonder and fear, began
to chatter eagerly among themselves. If the big bird of prey had seemed
uncanny and awesome, these strange creatures it had disgorged as it
dashed to its death, scarcely seemed less so. All three were protected
and disfigured with flying-helmets and leather aviation coats—odd
enough sights to European eyes when seen for the first time. What must
they not have looked to those untraveled natives of isolated, rock-bound
Rukh!
The priest turned and said a word to one of the gape-mouth crowd—a
lithe, sinewy youth more scantily clad than the others, a grotesque
cipher, picked out in red, green and ochre, branded on one gleaming
shoulder, and but for his rag of loin-cloth, stripped for his master’s
running, which was his office in life. The priest spoke, and the runner
instantly made off at great speed towards the distant castle.
The travelers had taken off their helmets now, and a new murmur of
wonder ran through the little cluster, while a half look of intelligence
just showed on the priest’s face.
“That last ten minutes was pretty trying,” Major Crespin said, in the
tone of a man who half apologizes, half defends some premeditated deed
he knows apt to be censured. “I don’t mind owning that my nerves are all
of a twitter.” He fumbled inside his thick leather coat, and pulled out
a flask. “Have a mouthful, Traherne?” he asked with a nonchalance a
shade overdone, as he unscrewed it and poured out a generous dram.
“No, thank you,” Traherne said easily, helping Mrs. Crespin out of her
coat.
“You won’t, I know,” Crespin said to his wife with a feebly jocular turn
of the flask-top—now a cup—in her direction. “I will!” he drank off
the brandy. “That’s better!” He refilled the cup and drank again. “And
now, where are we, Doctor?”
“I have no notion,” Traherne confessed as he threw off his own coat.
“Let’s ask the populace,” Crespin suggested cheerfully. Traherne nodded,
not too encouragingly, and Crespin went up to the still chattering
crowd—in which the priest alone stood silent and grimly observant,
watching the pale intruders intently through narrowing eyes. The natives
shrank back in open fear as Crespin came up to them—all but the priest;
he stood his ground, and even, at the half salutation the Englishman
gave, salaamed slightly, but almost contemptuously.
Crespin spoke—in Hindustani—but it drew a blank. It was evident that
Hindustani was as useless here as English or Norse. The priest listened
blankly, and then in his turn poured forth a speech of some
length—almost as long as it was guttural, voluble and heated, pointing
dramatically now to the dusky incarnadined temple, now to the beetling
palace.
Perhaps Mrs. Crespin and Dr. Traherne expected little from Crespin’s
embassy, perhaps they were willing to wait patiently to hear from him
its result. For they made no steps to follow him, and paid little
attention, but stood together just where he left them.
“You were splendid all through,” Traherne said in a low, tense voice
that said more than his words.
“I had perfect faith in you,” the woman answered, her eyes full and
frank on his.
And his eyes thanked her. But he only said regretfully, “If I’d had
another pint of petrol I might have headed for that sort of esplanade
behind the castle up there. . . .”
“Yes, I saw it.”
“. . . and made an easy landing. But I simply had to try for this place,
and trust to luck.”
“It wasn’t luck,” Lucilla said quickly, “but your skill that saved us.”
The sudden blood rushed over Traherne’s wind-browned face. It was more
than she had said to him ever before—not the simple, conventional
words, but the pride in him that pulsed in them, pride in him, and
something too of a claiming. She did not know that, and he knew that she
did not. But he heard and understood, and his heart lashed at his ribs,
and was hurt. In all the few hard years of his service to her, man’s
service never stinted, never underlined, no such open recognition of the
hidden thing that lay between them had ever been told. He had
known—from the first. But he had hoped and believed that she did not.
Was he glad or sorry? He was both. His loyalty and friendship regretted,
but his man’s nature leapt and was glad. When he had tried to hide
Antony’s weakness from her, and to shield her from it—to keep it out of
her presence, to drive it from her thoughts, when together they had
strained and schemed, as they constantly had, to save Crespin from
himself, and her and her children from the present shame and coming
consequences of his sick misdoings, no word, no sign, had been let slip
from him to her, or from her to him, acknowledging why he stood to her
side. She often had spoken to him of Antony’s good qualities, never of
Antony’s faults.
But now a barrier was down—only one of many, the others still held, but
one—and she had let it fall. It usually is the woman who lets it fall.
“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:
“Rukh! Rukh! Rukh! Rukh!” in a herald voice that proclaimed that the
fortress-like castle was Rukh, the ground they stood on Rukh, the
cave-temple, the immense horn of metallic lacquer poised on a crag
beyond the castle—the most unique and surprising thing in all the
amazing picture—the sky above, all of creation that mattered or
counted—Rukh, imperial, incomparable Rukh—Rukh, the apex of the world.
But for all that his statement meant to them Crespin said disgustedly,
“What the deuce is he rooking about?”
“Goodness knows,” Traherne rejoined.
But the woman jumped to it.
“I believe I know!” she broke in. Crespin and Traherne gazed at her in
surprise—her husband incredulous, Traherne very curious. “Wait a
minute!” she commanded, searching her pockets excitedly—almost, in her
quiet, well-bred English way, as excited as Yazok himself. “I thought I
had the paper with me. I wish I could find it. But I did have it, and I
did read it. I know I did. I read it in the _Leader_ just before we
started, that the three men who murdered the Political Officer at
Abdulabad came from a wild region at the back of the Himalayas, called
Rukh.”
“Yes,” Traherne told them, “now that you mention it, I have heard of the
place.”
“Well, that’s something,” Crespin exclaimed. “Come, we’re getting on.”
“Perhaps,” the physician said under his breath, as he turned again to
Yazok the priest and accosted him once more in a few Russian words,
pointing interrogatively to the palace.
But the priest’s Russian was little, less than Traherne’s own, and Yazok
had no intention of being over-communicative.
“Raja Sahib,” he said—so he had some smattering of Hindustani after
all—“Raja Sahib,” he repeated several times; but that was all that he
would say.
But those two familiar words told them a good deal of what they wished
to know.
“Oh,” Crespin grunted, “it’s Windsor Castle, is it? Well, we’d better
make tracks for it. Come, Lucilla.” He put his hand on her arm, and they
turned to go.
But the priest barred their way, in a frenzy of excitement, pouring
forth a wild torrent of, to them, quite unintelligible language.
Traherne intervened, speaking again in Russian, and it served to calm
the hillsman measurably, though the native throng at his elbows still
muttered and gesticulated threateningly. But Yazok listened, if surlily,
and presently vouchsafed in reply a few Russian words which he spoke
slowly and with evident difficulty.
“His Russian is even more limited than mine,” Traherne told the others,
“but I gather that the Raja has been sent for, and will come here.”
“All right,” Crespin said wearily, “then we’d better await
developments,” and, lighting a cigarette, seated himself on one of the
green painted stones, and began to smoke with impatient patience.
Oriental Bedlam broke loose. Almost before the Englishman had gained his
hard seat Yazok rushed on him wildly, caught at his shoulders, and with
wild exclamations and fierce blazing eyes, hustled him off, and then,
disregarding utterly the amazed and furious Major, salaamed low and
penitentially to the stone, bent again and again with humble,
deprecatory gestures, and a frightened hurricane of propitiatory
formulas, an inchoate sing-song of throaty, guttural words that sounded
half wailing woe, half cringing prayer. And the people no longer shrank
away, but pressed towards Major Crespin brandishing fists and weapons,
and storming determinedly, “Oo-ae, oo-ae, gak-kok-oo-ae, gak-gak!”
Crespin’s red face turned white in his anger, his tired eyes stiffened
and flashed, and quicker than told his hand lay on his revolver-case. He
still smoked on imperturbably, but Yazok was nearer death than he ever
had been.
“Confound you, take care what you’re doing!” Crespin warned him,
snapping the words out coldly from between clenched teeth. “You’d better
treat us civilly or—”
Basil Traherne broke in. “Gently, gently, Major,” he begged with a hand
on Crespin’s right arm. “This is evidently some sort of sacred
enclosure, and you were sitting on one of the gods.”
“Well,” Crespin retorted with a vexed, contemptuous laugh, “damn him, he
might have told me!”
Lucilla smiled for the first time, and drew close to her husband, but
her eyes were frightened and her heart was pounding. But Lucilla Crespin
matched her pluck with theirs—she who had the most to live for, and the
most to make her welcome death.
“If he had,” Traherne expostulated, “you wouldn’t have understood. The
fellow seems to be the priest—you see, he’s begging the god’s pardon.”
“If I knew his confounded lingo I’d jolly well make him beg mine,”
Crespin retorted with a murderous scowl at the still penancing,
groveling priest, as oblivious of them in the stress of his penitential
perturbation as if they’d been three ants in a crack of the rocks.
“But you don’t know his lingo,” Mrs. Crespin said, rather as if she did
not regret it, and moving away cautiously but curiously towards the
other side of the enclosure.
“We’d better be careful not to tread on their corns,” Traherne urged.
“We have Mrs. Crespin to think of.”
Antony’s face knotted and crimsoned again. “Damn it, sir,” he growled
rudely, “do you think I don’t know how to take care of my wife?”
“I think you’re a little hasty, Major, that’s all,” Traherne replied
pleasantly. “These are evidently queer people, and we’re dependent on
them, you know, to get out of our hobble.”
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; the man whose bloated, degenerated being stood
the only barrier between Traherne and the woman he longed for, as only
clean, upright men of scrupulous life can long—if the roué but knew
what he misses of nature’s greatest impulse!—the man to whom Traherne
had ministered unflaggingly for hard, patient years, between whose self
and its worst parts and the impending consequences of ill-doing Traherne
had stood persistently. But Basil Traherne had no such impulse. Towards
Antony Crespin he had no harsher feeling than pity and sympathy. 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. And, too, Traherne knew—for he had
seen—as Lucilla willfully blind and incapacitated by nature never had
seemed to see—how heroically Antony again and again had stood naked in
Ephesus and fought his own soul beasts—knew and honored him for it. And
the physician knew, as no lay mind can, the terrible provocation of
torn, jumping nerves; and he sometimes, though without blaming her,
wondered that Mrs. Crespin had not realized at least something of this.
But nerves are the one part of masculine anatomy of which few women take
any account, and of which such women as Lucilla Crespin take less than
none—incapable always of intrinsic justice to the sex which they
somewhat arrogantly judge by their own imperious and narrowed, if
“nice,” standards, rather than by the measure nature has set. What
Antony had done to her and her children she computed hotly over and
over, but she gave less than a fair thought and pity to what he had done
to himself, and made no mark at all of what he’d resisted. Dr. 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.
Dr. 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. And one thing else weighed with him on Crespin’s
side of the balancing scales: Lucilla had and would hold the love and
admiration of their children; Antony would lose it, if he lived. And
Traherne sensed how intensely Crespin loved his youngsters. Lucilla did
not. The Edelweiss keeps its admirable purity high up in the cold of the
inscrutable Alps, the clover bloom is bruised and stained in the wayside
dirt; but why praise the Edelweiss, why, in Heaven’s name, blame the
clover “low i’ the dust”? Draggled and broken, the clover-head still
gives a perfume, shows a color the unsmirched flower in the ice and snow
forever lacks. And, if Traherne never forgot—what every physician
knows—that “to step aside is human,” he not only pitied Crespin for all
in the older man that was faulty and weak, he also liked and respected
him for what was strong and good. And there was much.
Antony Crespin’s wife was unhappy; she needed no added heartache, but
she might have been unhappier yet, had she seen her husband as Dr.
Traherne saw him.
Certainly the world would be a far duller place if we all were as
fair-minded as Basil Traherne, and if life carried no privilege and zest
of censure. You’d be less contented and comfortable, if you did not
think that you were better than I am, and I should be less comfortable
and contented, if I did not know that I am better than you are.
CHAPTER XV
The priest still apologized to the stone. The people still jabbered and
watched. Crespin smoked on, and Traherne stood quietly studying the
place—the lay of its land, the stand of the rocks, the length and
strength of the castle walls.
“Do you think I could sit on this stone without giving offense to the
deities?” Lucilla called to them over her shoulder.
Traherne answered her after a glance at the flat rock to which she
pointed—a slab of flint quite without vestments of green or of paint.
“Oh, yes, that seems safe enough. I don’t know,” he continued, joining
her where she sat, but not sharing her seat, and speaking in a tone that
Crespin could not fail to hear, “how to apologize for having got you
into this mess.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, Dr. Traherne,” she answered cheerfully. “Who can
foresee a Himalayan fog?”
“The only thing to do was to get above it, and then, of course, my
bearings were gone.” He still spoke apologetically—and unconsciously he
dropped his voice as he said it, as every man’s instinct is when he says
even the most trivial things to the one woman. Crespin caught the tone’s
lowering, and shifted about a little where he sat, and listened the more
intently.
“Now that we are safe,” Lucilla’s voice was not lowered at all, “I
should think it all great fun, if it weren’t for the children.”
“Oh, they don’t expect us for a week,” Crespin edged in, “and surely it
won’t take us more than that to get back to civilization.” He spoke with
more confidence than he felt.
And Basil Traherne felt less. The more he studied the place they’d
landed on and the people, the less he thought of the chances of cordial
hospitality or of quick and easy departure. But there was no use in
saying so to Crespin here and now, and there was every reason for not
saying or hinting it to Mrs. Crespin at all, unless a positive necessity
compelled. But the next few days or hours might show brighter than his
fears. God grant it! So he merely said, not too sanguine at heart,
cheerful of voice, “Or at all events to a telegraph line,” and he
marshaled a cheerful smile with his words. A man has a right to be
cheerful as long as he can. And men of Traherne’s breed hold it a
duty—a duty not to be shirked. If to borrow trouble is folly, to lend
or impose it is crime.
“I suppose there’s no chance of flying back?” Mrs. Crespin asked more
anxiously than she knew.
“Not the slightest, I’m afraid,” Traherne admitted. “I fancy the old bus
is done for.”
“Oh, Dr. Traherne, what a shame! And you’d only had it a few weeks!” Her
concern for the wrecked aeroplane was entirely sincere, but something
bigger than that throbbed at her side and shook her voice just a little.
The men were thoroughly frightened, and she sensed it and shared it. But
her fear was far less than theirs; she knew Asia less, and she had two
men beside her, men of her own race, one whom she trusted in all things,
the other her husband. And only very small women can feel as sick a fear
when companioned by men, as men feel who know themselves but inadequate
protection for a woman who shares grave peril with them.
“And you’d only had it a few weeks,” she repeated.
“What does it matter so long as you are safe?” Traherne exclaimed with
an uncontrollable impulse that his voice betrayed far more than the
words did. It was love-making, his tone, and the woman is greatly loved
to whom a strong man speaks with passionate tenderness at a time of
desperate peril.
Lucilla threw up an instant barrier—for his protection, not for her
own. And though she had no fear of Antony—such women do not fear the
men they despise—she had intense fear of the shame of what he might say
might cause her—and cause Traherne.
“What does it matter so long as we’re all safe?” she said quite lightly,
almost gayly.
But Antony Crespin had caught the full significance of Traherne’s
impulsive words. And, “That’s not what Traherne said,” he jibed
bitterly. “Why pretend to be blind to his chivalry?”
Lucilla Crespin paled with anger, Traherne reddened with regret. He knew
now that Crespin knew, and he knew that he had tortured him, inflicting
a needless pain—the last blunder or malpractice any true physician
should forgive himself. He tried to laugh it off—knowing how poor and
tepid the poultice was.
“Of course I’m glad you’re all right, Major, and I’m not sorry to be in
a whole skin myself. But ladies first, you know.”
But Crespin would not be balked. “The perfect knight errant, in fact!”
he snarled.
“Decidedly errant!” Traherne laughed. He had himself well in hand now,
and he meant that nothing should betray him again. It was enough that he
had brought the woman into such acute and odious peril; she should be
subjected to no petty annoyances through him. And he blamed himself, not
Crespin. And Antony Crespin looked murderous now.
“Won’t you _look_ at the machine, and see if it’s quite hopeless?” Mrs.
Crespin urged, and the look she gave was both an imperious command and
an entreaty.
“Yes,” Traherne nodded, “at once.” And he went instantly, went towards
the wreck of the aeroplane, and passed out of sight behind the rocks.
It is difficult for the Oriental mind to believe that a man of a race
other than theirs is braver than they—and the hillsmen of Central Asia
have little cause to believe it. The bleached man was going back to look
at the terrible bird-beast; well, they would go too. If the thing
wounded or dead, or merely resting even, would not harm him, it could
not hurt them. He was only one, they were many. And they had their
weapons. So they followed in the wake of his heels, not following too
closely, not crowding upon him in the least—but they followed—too
proud to show the excitement they felt, but inwardly quivering with
curiosity—followed as close as their grim mountain pride would permit,
intent upon the marvel of the great air-beast.
But they had no need to hush their words, or to veil their interest.
Basil Traherne took no heed of them. He stood beside his ruined toy and
pride, and his hands knotted, and so did his throat. His mouth
stiffened. His eyes filled. “What does it matter?” he had said to the
woman; and there, on the other side of the absurd temple, with his eyes
on her, and her eyes on his, it had not mattered at all. But it mattered
now. It mattered terribly. He stood and looked down on his comrade and
dead, and he was shaken as a sailor who sees his ship go down to the
deep, as a soldier who holds his pistol to the horse that has borne him
in many a battle, and still nozzles its master’s hand while the blood
drips and clots from the panting flank the enemy’s shell has
disemboweled. His poor old bus! His dear old bus! For the first time
since the day he’d met her among the roses of Kathleen Agnew’s
bamboo-shaded garden Lucilla Crespin was nothing to him. He had
forgotten her. It is like that with men at such moments. And the women
who know men best and value them most, resent it the least. Very wise
women do not resent it at all. The sportsman to his sport! Such men make
the staunch lovers, when love’s turn comes.
CHAPTER XVI
The clustering hillsmen followed Traherne, but Yazok, the temple priest,
did not. His penance and oblations done at last, he stood immovable, his
deep-set, inimical eyes fixed, cold and narrowed, on Crespin and
Lucilla.
With eyes even more venomous Major Crespin watched Traherne out of
sight. Then he seated himself with a bulky, determined assertion of a
right—a proprietor’s right—beside his wife on the broad flat stone.
She took no notice.
“Well, Lucilla!” he said. There was insult in the tone, and there was
pain and appeal. The insult was veiled; the pain and appeal were not.
But the woman heard the accusation, and was deaf to the cry.
“Well?” she answered indifferently, and without looking at him.
He fumbled for another cigarette, saying, “That was a narrow squeak!”
“Yes, I suppose so,” she said, still more indifferently. It lashed him
and he winced, because he knew that her indifference was for him, and
not for the accident or for their plight, and because he thought that
she had meant him to know that it was. Crespin was wrong there—she did
not care whether he knew, or what he knew, and she cared even less what
he felt.
“All’s well that ends well, eh?” he persisted, looking at her ominously
through gloomy, blood-shot eyes.
“Of course,” she said listlessly.
“You don’t seem very grateful to Providence.” He would not leave her
alone.
“For sending the fog?” his wife returned contemptuously.
“For getting us down safely—all three,” Crespin corrected her, with a
significant emphasis on the last two words.
Lucilla Crespin took the gauntlet up then. “It was Dr. Traherne’s nerve
that did that,” she told him, looking him full in the face. He had been
watching her narrowly, hungrily too, all the time, but she had not given
him a glance till now. “If he hadn’t kept his head—”
“We should have crashed. I wish to God we had. One or other of us would
probably have broken his neck; and, if Providence had played up, it
might have been the right one.”
His wife swung round to him at that, as they sat, “What do you mean?”
she demanded.
“It might have been me,” he told her in a harsh, smoldering voice. “Then
you’d have thanked God right enough!”
The woman caught the insinuation and held it squarely. But the pain and
the prayer she did not hear—or, if she heard, she scorned to heed.
There is no other mercilessness so hard and cold as that of one ultra
type of good woman. Lucilla Crespin was of that type—now. Her days of
forgiveness and bending had passed—at least for him. Ancestry had so
predisposed her, and the last bad years had frozen it in. Should her boy
live to sin as his father had sinned, probably the flood-gates of
understanding and pity would open again, and grief and womanliness
sweeten her soul again—but never again for the man beside her. Had her
heart stirred to him now, far as he’d gone, she might have saved and
remanned him. But her heart was dead to him, as hard and unresponsive as
the flint on which they sat.
That they quarreled here—for it _was_ quarrel bitter and violent, for
all the yearning in him, for all her high-bred self-control—that they
_could_ quarrel here, after such an adventure and mishap as they had
just shared, in the thick of such unfathomed peril as they were sharing,
showed what the breach between them meant to them both—despair and
soul-damnation to the man, love and comradeship quite dead to the woman.
It was hopeless—the life-split and abyss, or else the hours they’d just
come through, the peril they’d escaped, the less-known, and for that the
more unnerving peril that menaced them now as they sat side by side on
the stone, must have reunited and reconciled them.
Lucilla Crespin faced her husband squarely, more in unveiled contempt
than in courage or in injured pride. “Why,” she complained impatiently,
“will you talk like this, Antony? If I hadn’t sent Dr. Traherne away
just now, you’d have been saying these things in his hearing.”
“Well, why not?” Crespin retorted hotly. “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know
all about the ‘state of our relations,’ as they say in the divorce
court.”
“If he does, it’s not from me,” the wife said coldly, then added sourly:
“No doubt he knows what the whole station knows.”
What the whole station knew! Aye, there was the rub—the blistering rub
to her woman’s pride and shame, the galling, smarting rub to the man’s.
How often life’s chasms could be bridged, even its cesspools purged and
sweetened, if only no others knew. Lucilla said it not unnastily, all
the more so for the high-bred quality of civility and self-control with
which she spoke. A husband’s faults—not even the unbearable fault of
infidelity—never in themselves bear on a woman so crushingly and
painfully as does having others know of them. For a husband’s sins and
malodorous peccadilloes are the damnable hall-mark of a wife’s failure,
branded on her soul and her flesh in a festering sore that never heals,
and that all can see. Thousands of women go to the scaffold of the
divorce court because what others know compels them. Lucilla Crespin
knew what it had cost her that the whole station knew, but she gave no
thought at all to what it had cost Antony. Only the highest souls
realize and accept that he who sins is far more to be pitied, aye, and
loved, if love is what the highest human passion should be, than is the
one against whom the sinner has sinned.
“And what does the whole station know?” Crespin demanded. His eyes
blazed through their blear, and the hand on his knee trembled. “What
does the whole station know? Why, that your deadly coldness drives me to
drink!” His voice broke just a little. “I’ve lived for three years in an
infernal clammy fog like that we’ve passed through. Who’s to blame if I
take a whiskey peg now and then, to keep the chill out? Who?”
“Oh, Antony, why go over it all again?” She half rose, and then, as if
it were not worth while to move, sank back as she’d been. “You know very
well it was drink—and other things—that came between us; not my
coldness, as you call it, that drove you to drink.”
“Oh,” Crespin cried in a rasping voice, “you good women! You patter
after the parson, ‘Forgive us as we forgive those who trespass against
us.’ But you don’t know what forgiveness means. ‘Plaster saints’ every
one of you, your vaunted Christianity to be shattered at the first
hammer-tap of what you don’t like. Blind to every fault of your own,
fiendish and merciless to every fault of another, if it happens to nick
you on your own petty raw. Damn such ‘good women’ I say. You’ll make a
fine show on Judgment Day when you file up one by one to have your sins
forgiven even as you have forgiven us poor rotten scum that have
trespassed against you. You—you don’t know your own faults, I tell you.
You take them for virtues, even when they smell to heaven. You have no
faults, you, you scourgers of others, not a fault of your own.
Forgiveness! You don’t know what it means. You’re not fit to know!”
Never had Antony Crespin spoken to her so before. The force of his
terrible passion reached her, but not its meaning. She heard the storm,
and she saw its wreck: knotting muscles, quivering nostrils, wild,
agonized eyes. But its pathos never reached her. He cried out to her for
bread—new, clean, white bread, and she pitched a stone of contempt into
his outstretched hand. Perhaps, if Basil Traherne had not been there
behind the rock—perhaps, if she and Traherne had never met—Antony
Crespin’s wife might have heard his appeal and responded to it in his
hour of utmost need, utmost abasement—for that was what his outburst of
rage and accusation was: shame, longing, the old, old cry for one more
chance.
But Lucilla was dead now to any need or appeal of his. Well, he had
earned it. Alas, for life’s heaviest tragedy—we usually have. We earn
what we get—most of us—and, sweet heaven help us! we get it God does
not always pay on Saturday—but He pays.
Mrs. Crespin, her eyes strained for what might come from the Raja’s
castle, her ears strained to catch Traherne’s returning footsteps,
answered his words, but only his words.
“What’s the use of it, Antony?” she said drearily. “Forgive? I have
forgiven you. I don’t try to take the children from you, though it might
be better for them if I did. But to forgive is one thing, to forget
another. When a woman has seen a man behave as you have behaved, do you
think it is possible for her to forget it, and to love afresh? There are
women in novels, and perhaps in the slums, who have such short memories;
but I am not one of them.”
“No, by God, you’re not!” And at the passion in the Englishman’s voice,
Yazok the priest, still watching them steadily, moved a little. “So a
whole man’s life is to be ruined—”
“Do you think yours is the only life to be ruined?” She, too, moved as
she spoke, and left an inch or two more space between them on the stone
where they both still sat, Crespin too shaken to rise, she too
indifferent.
He had forgotten where they were, forgotten their danger even. The woman
had not. She thrust her chin in her palms, her elbows on her knees, and
searched the path to the castle with anxious eyes. Her nerves were
aching now with the strain of delay and uncertainty, and because her
nerves ached so, she prodded back at him again with her vicious
question, viciously asked, “Do you think yours is the only life to be
ruined?”
Crespin crouched over towards her like some jungle beast crouching to
spring. “Ah!” he snapped. “There we have it! I’ve not only offended your
sensibilities; I’m in your way. You love this other man, this model of
all the virtues!”
His wife made no pretense of not understanding him. “You have no right
to say that,” she said simply.
Crespin disregarded her protest—if it was protest she had deigned to
make—as he must have disregarded any interruption now that was less
than some yielding, some warming of hers.
“He’s a paragon!” he pounded on. “He’s a wonder! He’s a mighty
microbe-killer before the Lord; he’s going to work heaven knows what
miracles, only he hasn’t brought them off yet. And you’re cursing the
mistake you made in marrying a poor devil of a soldier-man instead of a
first-class scientific genius. Come! Make a clean breast of it! You may
as well!”
One word from her—just one word of denial—would have healed and helped
him, and she knew, at least, that it would have slaked his angry fever.
But she did not give that cup of cold water; perhaps because she held
truth too sacred—the virtues are an almost supreme asset, but they can
be terribly cruel, and they should not be made of cast-iron—perhaps
because she had for him too little kindness left.
“Come on, Lu,” he urged. “Tell me. Do.”
“I have nothing to answer,” she returned without troubling to look at
him even. “While I continue to live with you, I owe you an account of my
actions—but not of my thoughts.”
“Your actions? Oh, I know very well you’re too cold—too damned
respectable—to kick over the traces. And then you have the children to
think of.”
“Yes,” the wife said sadly. “I have the children to think of. I have the
children.”
“Besides,” Crespin went on, torturing himself, which is the success that
often crowns our efforts to torture others, “there’s no hurry. If you
only have patience for a year or two, I’ll do the right thing for once,
and drink myself to death.”
A year or two more of his cups! That would be hard and long to bear.
Again and again she had felt that she had reached her tether’s
taut-pulled length—and then again and again she had tried once more.
Why was Traherne so long? She had asked him to look at the crashed
aeroplane, not to build a new one. Or, was it possible, the wreck was
less hopeless than he’d thought, and already he was seeing a way to
patch and repair? When would some word or move be made from the great
sullen castle-place, with its gray turrets and scalloped arches turning
to silver and pink now as the Asian sun slipped down the sapphire sky? A
year or two more! And the children, still babies of course, were growing
so. What might not Ronny notice and understand in another two years? Two
years more! She never had measured before in her mind the probable
stretch of the bad time still before her—and only for one instant did
the thought come to her now—and Antony himself had put it there. His
death was the one way out she never had thought of. And she would not
think of it now. And even she spoke a little more kindly than she had
done for some time—at least when they had been alone—and she turned
and looked at him with almost a friendly look in her eyes, as she said:
“You have only to keep yourself a little in hand to live to what they
call ‘a good old age.’”
The friendliness in her eyes maddened him anew—it was not her
friendship he wanted—but even so he was grateful for it, it was so much
better than nothing to go on with—and he pressed his hurt and anger out
of sight, and, leaning away from her the better to watch her face, said
slowly:
“’Pon my soul, I’ve a mind to try to, though goodness knows, my life is
not worth living,” for he had caught the distraction on her face; she
was listening, but not most to him. “I was a fool to come on this crazy
expedition——”
“Why, it was yourself that jumped at Dr. Traherne’s proposal,” his wife
reminded him.
“I thought we’d get to the kiddies a week earlier. They’d be glad to see
me, poor little things. They don’t despise their daddy.”
Something of what he felt, something of what he still _was_—in spite of
whatever he’d _done_—reached Antony Crespin’s wife then. He had always
loved his children—there was no doubt of that. It had not served him
for strength enough, even as his love of her had not, but he always had
loved them, invariably he had been tender to them. And Lucilla
remembered it now.
“It shan’t be my fault, Antony,” she told him gently, “if they ever do.”
And then she spoilt it, soured the grace she had shown, by adding with a
weary sigh, “But you don’t make it easy to keep up appearances.” O curse
of woman’s tongue!
Antony Crespin rose to his feet, and stood before her. He saw the
natives clustered just over there, screening the projecting wing of the
broken aeroplane; he saw Yazok watching, sentineling too, perhaps; he
saw the great _puissant_ fortified castle, he recalled where they were,
he knew their peril—but for all that, for all that or more, he gave not
one damn. . . . He stood there before her, alone in the world with his
wife, all his imperfections on his back, and put up his plea.
“Oh, Lu, Lu,” he begged, “if you would treat me like a human being—if
you would help me, and make life tolerable for me, instead of a thing
that won’t bear looking at except through the haze of drink—we might
retrieve the early days. God knows I never cared two pins for any woman
but you——”
It was the acutest moment of Antony Crespin’s life. And his wife turned
him down.
“No,” she said, “the others, I suppose, only helped you, like whiskey,
to see the world through a haze. I saw the world through a haze when I
married you; but you have dispelled it once for all.” She saw his face
blanch, she saw his fingers knot, she saw his shoulders sag; but she
went on. “Don’t force me to tell you how impossible it is for me to be
your wife again. I am the mother of your children—that gives you a
terrible hold over me. Be content with that.”
CHAPTER XVII
“Oh, Mrs. Crespin,” Traherne called before they saw him clambering down
from the rocks where the ruined bus lay. “I’ve found,” he called as he
came in sight, “in the wreck the newspaper you spoke of—you were right
about Rukh.”
Major Crespin pulled himself up roundly, he was not of the breed to show
his hurt to the other man. “What does it say?” he asked briskly, as
Traherne came up to them with the paper in his hand.
Traherne unfolded it, found the place, and read, “‘Abdulabad, Tuesday.
Sentence of death has been passed on the three men found guilty of the
murder of Mr. Haredale. It appears that these miscreants are natives of
Rukh, a small and little-known independent state among the northern
spurs of the Himalayas.’”
“Yes,” Lucilla nodded, “that’s what I read.”
“This news isn’t the best possible passport for us in our present
situation,” Traherne said gravely, and his face was graver than his
words.
“But,” Mrs. Crespin protested reassuringly, “if we’re hundreds of miles
from anywhere, it can’t be known here yet.”
“One would think not,” Traherne assented.
“In any case, they wouldn’t dare to molest us,” Major Crespin said
nonchalantly across the fresh cigarette he was lighting.
Traherne shot him a sharp look. Did Crespin for one moment believe that?
Or was he trying to reassure his wife? The latter no doubt, Traherne
concluded.
“All the same,” the physician said—and following Crespin’s lead by
saying it lightly, “it might be safest to burn this paragraph, in case
there’s anybody here that can read it.” And he suited action to words,
lighting at Crespin’s cigarette the strip of paper he tore out
carefully, watching it burn until it licked at his fingers, and he had
to drop the flaming fragment. But he watched it burn to the last ash,
and then stamped upon that. Lucilla watched it too—they all did, and
Yazok the priest watched most intently of all.
Mrs. Crespin held out her hand for the rest of the newspaper, and when
Traherne gave it she went and put it with her leather coat where it lay
on a rock as Traherne had placed it.
“Hullo!” Crespin held up a hand.
Strange ululations, mingled with the throb of tom-toms and the clash of
cymbals were faintly heard from the distance—faint, but growing clearer
and clearer, from the mountain-path up which the runner had sped at the
priest’s command.
“Hullo!” the Major repeated. “What’s this?”
“Sounds like the march of the Great Panjandrum,” Traherne murmured.
It certainly did; and it looked even more than it sounded, when it swept
and pranced into sight.
The natives all ran to the point where the path debouched on the open
space. All their lives they had seen their Raja come, as had their
fathers, and theirs before them, and as often as not keeping just such
state, but they never tired of the spectacle, and it never failed to
move them. The rustle of satisfaction which is the Oriental equivalent
of our “loud cheering,” and, by the way, very much more eloquent, swept
through them like a gust of gentle wind in a field of well-ripe corn;
then, as their prince came nearer, they prostrated themselves on each
side of his way. They were delighted to see him, and exquisitely proud
of his gorgeous and noised display, but not a face relaxed, all were
inordinately grave, as too were the harlequin mobbery that preceded and
followed his litter. Except in China and Burmah, merriment is not the
Asian’s idea of enjoyment, and very rarely its expression. Even the
babies are grave. But, for all that, the tatter-demalion Rukh populace
were enjoying themselves intensely.
It was a wild procession that came down the mountain path. A gigantic
negro, flourishing two great naked sabers, and gyrating in a barbaric
war-dance, headed it. His sole garment was a tiger’s skin slung over one
shoulder and falling apron-wise over one breast down to a little below
his waist, his sole ornament a wide head-band of brass in which one
great red stone burned. Six music-men followed him, beating their
tom-toms and clashing their cymbals till the very air winced. They wore
less than the ebon major-domo did, but what their crimson loin cloths
lacked in quantity they made up in color, and they were flaked with
chips of purple, green and yellow glass, and the musicians’ great,
sinewy arms were hung with bells. And most of the runners who padded
lightly behind them tinkled too as they walked. The short-distance
runners, sent only about the capital itself, to and fro from the palace
on the Raja’s errands, wore no bells, but the many more who were sent
all over the kingdom, and even beyond it, each wore many tiny but noisy
bells; for all Asia knows that wild beasts fear the sound of bells as
they fear nothing else, and will flee from the path of the panting
runner who tinkles and rings as he goes.
A half score of men, clad to their heels in spotless flowing white, each
with a flat hat with wide, tightly rolled brim, each hat of a different
costly brocade, came next, and close behind them was carried the Raja’s
palanquin. It looked something like a Chinese bride-chair, but its
gauze-hung sides were not opaque; it looked something like a Burmese
pagoda, for its gilded, pointed roof rose above it on much the same
lines as does the great pile at Mulmien. 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.
The seated figure inside it showed but indistinctly through the gauzy
film of the litter’s curtains; a human figure undoubtedly, and in
perfect repose, but instinct with power—a blur of turquoise and rose,
of heliotrope and saffron, of silk and satin and tinsel and gems.
Immediately behind him came the strangest sight in Rukh—an English
valet, if ever one was in Mayfair—an immaculate, demure, correct valet
who might have strolled into the picture from St. James Street, and as
unmoved, detached and imperturbable there in the Eastern glare and din
as if the gyrating negro had been a white-gloved constable on
point-duty, the prostrate half-naked crowd a well-dressed, leisurely
mêlée of shoppers, or just come from Burlington House, and the musicians
before and the guards and rabble behind buses and taxis on Piccadilly
and Albemarle Street.
Behind Watkins, for his name was as English as his coat, came the Raja’s
bodyguard, or a considerable detachment of it—grim-faced, high-cheeked
men of all heights and shapes, dressed in the most fantastic and
parti-colored attire that men-at-arms ever wore yet: short sleeveless
jackets of velvet, jackets of silk that were all sleeves, pleated
petticoats of chintz and of shantung silk, trousers of red and yellow
woolens, bare brown, hairy legs, and legs spiraled with puttee-like
twistings, some of exquisite embroideries, some of time-tarnished rags.
Some wore upturned-toed sandals, some were shod but with studs on their
toes or a ring of jade on one ankle or on both. One wore a helmet, one
carried an umbrella, several wore caps—caps made of fur, of brocade or
of sheer white “chicken-work”—one bare head was perfectly bald, one
wore a dancing mop of densely oiled corkscrew curls. Several wore long
chains of barbaric beads that clacked as they moved, one wore a collar
of glass-jeweled tin; two were turbaned. All were armed with antique
match-locks, some of them with barrels six or seven feet long; and one
carried a tame, monster-sized rat on his naked shoulder, and three had
marigolds stuck behind their ears, which was where two carried cheroots.
Six boys, wearing long yellow skirts but nothing above them, brought up
the rear. Two carried big, squat, lighted braziers, lest even in this
heat their lord be cold; four, lest he be warm, carried huge
long-handled fans of peacocks’ feathers and others of glass-sprinkled
braided sweetgrass.
The bearers put the litter down deferentially, directly in front of the
temple, and knelt down behind it with their faces to the ground.
Lucilla Crespin, for all her anxiety, wanted to laugh at this
raree-show. She’d seen it done better at a Drury Lane pantomime!
But Crespin and Traherne had less impulse to laugh, or to smile. They
suspected something of the strength that might lurk in the tigerish
claws underneath the ridiculous gloves of tinsel.
The man in Bond Street clothes came at once, with a padded, cat-like
tread to the side of the resting litter, parted its curtains, and held
down obsequiously a crooked broadcloth arm through which, as it rose,
the seated figure put a slim brown hand.
The Raja stepped out, released his servitor’s arm, and made just a step
towards the three Europeans, scanning the men lightly and in
silence—not seeming to see Mrs. Crespin.
He was tall, well-built, about forty, Traherne thought, and the two
Englishmen knew from his jewels that, whatever his people were, the Raja
of Rukh was fabulously rich. 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. The princely
shoes were a blaze of gems, one blue with sapphires, one red as a
pigeon’s blood with rubies finer than Burmah ever quarries. But all this
was little to the pearls. Tassels of pearls hung from his ears and his
sleeves and their cuffs. Seven great ropes of pearls hung about his neck
and over his shoulders—pearls such as Europe does not see over-often,
and never in such quantities; one rope fell below his long-skirted coat
almost to his trousers’ hem, one shorter strand was of pink pearls
perfectly matched; a necklace of “black” pearls lay gray and soft across
the breast of his turquoise blue coat, and from it hung one huge
pear-shaped pearl so radiantly pink that it almost looked red as it
touched the milk-white pearls below it—and every pearl of the many
hundreds gleamed with the rainbow-burnish that some pigeons show on
their jeweled necks.
The Raja’s face was intelligent, his hands were beautiful, his tiny
mustache had a silken look of Paris, his eyes were dark and inscrutable.
Mrs. Crespin thought him ridiculous, outrageously “trapped out” for even
an uncivilized man. Antony Crespin, with the British soldier-man’s
impenetrable insularity, set him down “a hell of a nigger—what.” But
Basil Traherne, skilled in faces, in human frames and in gaits, thought
that the Raja of Rukh had character and distinct and polished
personality.
CHAPTER XVIII
The Raja waited, cool, courteous and quite noncommittal. And after an
instant Crespin advanced and saluted.
The Eastern inclined his head—did it so slightly that it accorded
permission rather than returned or gave salutation. He was dignified,
and he was not ridiculous, Traherne thought, for all his satins and
silks and glut of hanging jewels, as he stood there in front of his
temple where the goats’ heads still dripped sacrificial red, and his
people about him.
“Does Your Highness speak English?” Crespin asked rather
desperately—with almost a superior edge to his voice.
“Oh, yes, a little,” the Rukh said in English as English as Crespin’s
own and in an accent even a little more irreproachable.
Crespin pulled himself together instantly, and said, speaking like a
soldier and a man of breeding, “Then I have to apologize for our landing
uninvited in your territory.”
“Uninvited; but I assure you not unwelcome.” The inclination of the
bejeweled head was just a trifle more this time.
“We are given to understand,” the soldier went on, “that this is the
State of Rukh.”
Just a hinted shadow of a smile touched the Raja’s fine lips—a smile in
little akin to the twitch or grimace that does the West for smiling, but
a half-flicker that sometimes falls for a moment on high-bred Eastern
faces, just touching the mouth, but not made by it. “The Kingdom of
Rukh,” the Raja said smoothly. “Major—if I rightly read the symbols on
your cuff—”
“Major Crespin,” Antony stated, saluting again. “Permit me to introduce
my wife.”
The Raja of Rukh saw Mrs. Crespin for the first time—apparently. He
salaamed profoundly, his obeisance to her as immediate and deep as his
bend of the head to her husband had been slow and perfunctory. “I am
delighted, Madam,” he told her, “to welcome you to my secluded
dominions. You are the first lady of your nation I have had the honor of
receiving.”
“Your Highness is very kind,” Mrs. Crespin said, rising—Traherne was
glad that she did that—and taking a half-step towards the glittering
figure.
“And this,” Crespin gestured, “is Dr. Basil Traherne, whose
aeroplane—or what is left of it—you see.”
The Raja smiled, more widely, more genially this time, and he and
Traherne exchanged a direct, level look. “Dr. Traherne? The Doctor
Traherne whose name I have so often seen in the newspaper? The Pasteur
of Malaria?”
So this unexpected barbarian read the _Statesman_ and the _Pioneer_! But
of course, speaking the English he did, he would.
“The newspapers make too much of my work,” Traherne disallowed. “It is
very incomplete.”
“Rome was not built in a day,” the Raja laughed, “or the Taj. But you
are an aviator as well.”
“Only as an amateur,” Traherne insisted.
The Raja let that pass. “I presume it is some misadventure—a most
fortunate misadventure for me—that has carried you so far into the
wilds beyond the Himalayas?”
“Yes,” Traherne assented ruefully. “We got lost in the clouds. Major and
Mrs. Crespin were coming up from the plains to see their children at a
hill station—”
“Pahari, no doubt?”
“Yes, Pahari—and I was rash enough to suggest that I might save them
three days’ traveling, by taking them up in my aeroplane.”
“Madam is a sportswoman, then?” The Raja turned to Lucilla.
“Oh, I have been up many times,” she replied.
“Yes,” Crespin said with a tinge of sarcasm under the words, “many
times.”
If Lucilla caught it, she gave no sign, and did not let it serve to
swerve her from the subject. “It was no fault of Dr. Traherne’s that we
went astray,” she told the Raja. “The weather was impossible.”
A smile of a new significance came in the narrow black eyes, but was not
allowed to touch his lips. “Well,” he said amusedly, “you have made a
sensation here, I can assure you. My people have never seen an
aeroplane. They are not sure, simple souls”—he was laughing at them but
there was affection in it, Traherne thought—“whether you are gods or
demons. But the fact of your having descended in the precincts of a
temple of our local goddess”—he motioned his hand towards the
idol—“allow me to introduce you to her—is considered highly
significant.”
Traherne noted that he introduced them to the Green Goddess, and not her
to them, and he wondered if this man with his priceless gew-gaws, his
cosmopolitan breeding and information, his countless centuries of
Eastern-ancestry, were as apart from the beliefs and idolatrous
superstitions of his uncouth people as his words and light tone implied.
Well, he would to heaven they could cut all this useless talk, and get
down to the real issue now. Their fate still hung in the balance—his
and Crespin’s—_and_ Lucilla’s. It was not a comfortable feeling. It was
very far from a comfortable situation. And he knew how scrupulous the
politeness of an Oriental foe-to-the-death could be. But he knew too
that they must bide this Raja man’s time and tune.
Antony Crespin knew it too, and Lucilla had the wit to take her cue from
them. But Crespin glanced at the lowering sun, and ventured, “I hope,
sir, that we shall find no difficulty in obtaining transport back to
civ—to India.”
The Raja of Rukh smiled openly then, and his smile was frank and very
sweet. “To civilization, you were going to say? Why hesitate, my dear
sir? We know very well that we are barbarians. We are quite reconciled
to the fact. We have had some five thousand years to accustom ourselves
to it. This sword—” he laid a hand lightly on his carved and jeweled
scimitar—“is a barbarous weapon compared with your revolver; but it was
worn by my ancestors when yours were daubing themselves blue, and
picking up a precarious livelihood in the woods.” He said it in the
friendliest way, and broke off abruptly, and turned to Mrs. Crespin,
“But Madam is standing all this time!” he exclaimed in dismay. “Watkins,
what are you thinking of? Some cushions!”
Watkins made no reply, and his well-trained face did not change, but he
took several cushions from his master’s litter, and came sleekly
forward, and piled them into a seat for her.
“Another litter for Madam, and mountain chairs for the gentlemen, will
be here in a few minutes. Then I hope you will accept the hospitality of
my poor house.”
If the litter as well as the chairs already had been ordered, Watkins
must have caught some other ciphered command in his master’s voice, for
the valet turned softly and said something to one of the people, and
another runner sped quickly away.
“We are giving a great deal of trouble, Your Highness,” Lucilla
objected.
“A great deal of pleasure, Madam,” the Raja corrected her.
“But I hope, sir,” Crespin ventured again, “there will be no difficulty
about transport back to—India.” He was feeling deucedly uneasy, was the
English Major, but he managed to keep it out of his voice.
Basil Traherne was feeling much uneasier, but he said nothing, gave no
sign—and waited.
“Time enough to talk of that, Major,” the Raja insisted gayly, “when you
have rested and recuperated after your adventure. You will do me the
honor of dining with me this evening? I trust you will not find us
altogether uncivilized.” It was courtly invitation, social entreaty
even, but too it was princely command. The Englishmen recognized it, and
obeyed it with a bow. Their anxiety raged, but their knees bent.
The woman took it up lightly. “Your Highness,” she said to him, “will
have to excuse the barbarism of our attire. We have nothing to wear but
what we stand up in.” And she made a delicate mouth at her tumbled tweed
skirt and her warm, stout boots.
“Oh, I think we can put that all right,” the Raja told her. “Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” Watkins came to heel.
“You are in the confidence of our Mistress of the Robes. How does our
wardrobe stand?”
“A fresh consignment of Paris models came in only last week, Your
’Ighness.”
“Good! Then I hope, Madam, that you may find among them some rag that
you will deign to wear.”
“Paris models, Your Highness!” she exclaimed, speaking as lightly as he
had. “And you talk of being uncivilized!”
“We do what we can, Madam,” he returned with a bow. “I sometimes have
the pleasure of entertaining European ladies”—Traherne turned aside as
he bit at his lip, Crespin checked a frown—“though not, hitherto,
Englishwomen—in my solitudes; and I like to mitigate the terrors of
exile for them. Then as for civilization, you know, I have always at my
elbow one of its most finished products. Watkins!”
“Your ’Ighness!” the finished product said in a voice that would have
been sulky, had it dared, and he came forward with again a hint of
slinking in his cat-like tread. Evidently the valet disliked this
limelight.
“You will recognize in Watkins, gentlemen,” the Raja explained, “another
representative of the Ruling Race.” Watkins touched his hat miserably to
Crespin and Traherne, but he did not look at them. His eyes studied his
shoes. “I assure you he rules me with an iron hand—not always in a
velvet glove. Eh, Watkins?”
“Your ’Ighness will ’ave your joke,” the valet said lamely.
But the master was merciless. “He is my Prime Minister and all my
cabinet—but more particularly my Lord Chamberlain. No one can touch him
at mixing a cocktail or making a salad. My entire household trembles at
his nod; even my _chef_ quails before him. Nothing comes amiss to him;
for he is, like myself, a man without prejudices. You may be surprised
at my praising him to his face in this fashion; you may see some danger
of—what shall I say?—swelled head. But I know my Watkins; there is not
the slightest risk of his outgrowing that modest bowler. He knows his
value to me, and he knows that he would never be equally appreciated
elsewhere. I have guarantees for his fidelity—eh, Watkins?”
“I know when I’m well off, if that’s what Your ’Ighness means,” the man
said, still without looking up.
“I mean a little more than that,” the Raja said quietly; “but no matter.
I have sometimes thought of instituting a peerage, in order that I might
raise Watkins to it. But I mustn’t let my admiration for British
institutions carry me too far. . . . Those scoundrels of bearers are
taking a long time, Watkins.”
“The lady’s litter ’ad to ’ave fresh curtains, Your ’Ighness,” the
servant explained. “They won’t be a minute now.” And desperately Watkins
hoped it. He was the most impatient and not the least anxious there now.
CHAPTER XIX
But it was many a minute before the litter-bearers came.
The Raja turned to Crespin. “You were speaking of transport, Major—”
then to Traherne, “Is your machine past repair, Dr. Traherne?”
“Utterly, I’m afraid.”
“Let us look at it,” the Raja suggested, and turning towards it he saw
that his body-guard had broken rank, and all were clustered pell-mell on
the path, looking in rather frightened amazement at the mangled plane.
He gave a sharp, displeased word of command, and they scampered back
into a sort of loose order, but even from the comparative distance they
kept their anxious, puzzled eyes swung back to the aeroplane, and some
of the boldest or less disciplined craned their bebeaded necks. “Ah,
yes,” the Raja said after a near glance, “propeller smashed—planes
crumpled up—”
“Under carriage wrecked,” Traherne prompted sadly.
“I’m afraid we can’t offer to repair the damage for you,” the Raja said,
shaking his head.
“I’m afraid not, sir,” the doctor answered grimly.
“A wonderful machine!” the Raja said enthusiastically, still looking it
over. “Yes,” he owned, “Europe has something to boast of. I wonder what
the priest here thinks of it?” He turned with a laugh, and beckoned
Yazok, and they spoke together in their own tongue, the Raja with a few
short words, the priest with long guttural volubility profusely
punctuated with deep salaams. It was evident that temporal power
exceeded the gods’ in Rukh. The master dismissed the other almost as
crisply as he had admonished the gaping body-guard, and turned with a
smile of tolerance, if more contempt, again to Traherne. “He says,” he
translated, “it is the great roc—the giant bird, you know, of our
Eastern stories. And he declared that he plainly saw his Goddess
hovering over you as you descended, and guiding you towards her temple.”
“I wish she could have guided us towards the level ground I saw behind
your castle,” Traherne said grimly. He felt no compulsion to speak more
ceremoniously of her Green Goddesship than the Raja himself had. “I
could have made a safe landing there.”
“No doubt,” the Raja nodded; “on my parade ground—almost the only level
spot in my domains.”
“These, I suppose,” Mrs. Crespin, tired of her cushions, asked as she
joined them, and caught his words, “are your body-guard?”
“My household troops, Madam,” the potentate said with a bow.
“How picturesque they are!” she exclaimed.
The Raja laughed. “Oh,” he said easily, “a relic of barbarism, I know. I
can quite understand the contempt with which my friend the Major is at
this moment regarding them.”
Hearing him Crespin joined them too. “Irregular troops, Raja,” he said;
“often first-class fighting men.”
“And you think,” the Raja said quickly, “that, if irregularity is the
virtue of irregular troops, these—what is the expression, Watkins?”
“Tyke the cyke, Your ’Ighness,” the expatriated cockney supplied—but he
kept his distance.
“That’s it—take the cake—that’s what you think, Major?”
“Well,” Crespin owned, too taking his cue and tone from the cosmopolitan
Raja’s own, “they would be hard to beat, sir.”
“I repeat,” the ruler said gravely, “a relic of barbarism. You see, I
have strong conservative instincts—I cling to the fashions of my
fathers—and my people would be restive if I didn’t. I maintain these
fellows as his Majesty the King-Emperor keeps up the Beefeaters in the
Tower. But I also like to move with the times, as perhaps you will allow
me to show you.” He lifted the silver whistle that hung at his coat, and
blew on it two short blasts.
Instantly from behind every rock and shrub—from every bit of possible
cover—there emerged a soldier, garbed in spick and span European
uniform—almost identical with the uniform of a crack regiment of
Imperial Russia—and faultlessly armed with the latest brand of magazine
rifle. They saluted their prince, and then stood, their eyes on him, as
immovable as statues at attention.
“Good Lord!” and Crespin added an involuntary whistle; and Traherne as
involuntarily gasped, “Hallo!” But, if the Englishwoman shared their
amazement she did not show it. She looked at the up-sprung troops quite
calmly and casually. That surprised the Raja, and pleased him—quickened
him even. There is no other quality that appeals to the high caste
Oriental as inscrutability and imperturbability do—qualities of soul
and of breeding that echo his own, and to which his own answer. He did
not like Europeans, except an old friend or two of his English varsity
days. But he felt that he could, if opportunity served, like this
Englishwoman—and the Raja of Rukh was accustomed and skilled to swing
opportunity into his line. He said to her concernedly, “I trust I did
not startle you, Madam?”
“Oh, not at all,” she told him. “I am not nervous,” and she looked him
frankly and squarely in the eyes, as she sat carelessly down again on
her seat of cushions.
His dark eyes kindled an instant, then he said lightly, “You, of course,
realize that this effect is not original. I have plagiarized it from the
excellent Walter Scott:
‘These are the Clan-Alpine’s warriors true,
And, Saxon, I am Roderick Dhu!’
But I think you’ll admit, Major, that my men know how to take cover!”
How typically Oriental, Traherne thought, incredible mixture of child
and cool man of the world.
“By the Lord, sir,” Crespin answered heartily, “they must move like
cats—for you can’t have planted them there before we arrived.”
“No,” the Raja reminded him with a laugh; “you had given me no notice of
your coming.”
“Perhaps the Goddess did,” Lucilla said slyly.
Dr. Traherne felt a little anxious at that, but the Raja took her words
in the best of good part. “Not she, Madam,” he assured her, letting his
brown-black eyes smile into hers for a moment. “She keeps her own
counsel. These men followed me down from the palace, and have taken
position while we have been speaking.”
He gave one word of command, and the men, absolutely making no sound,
rapidly assembled and formed in two ranks, an officer on their flank.
Crespin’s once soldierly face glowed with admiration. His wife thought
she had not for years seen him look so nearly his old self. “A very
smart body of men, Raja,” he said with blunt and evident admiration.
“Allow me to congratulate you on their training.”
“I am greatly flattered, Major.” The Raja was delighted, and showed it
gleefully—the child, so quick in every Oriental, hot on the surface. “I
superintend it myself. . . . Ah, here comes the litter.”
Down the path it came, four bearers carrying it evenly. Two chairs, each
borne by two men, swung along behind it. As its bearers put the litter
down, the Raja offered his hand to Mrs. Crespin with, “Permit me, Madam,
to hand you to your palanquin.”
As she rose she picked up her leather coat, and the newspaper dropped
from its folds and fell to the ground. Traherne bit his lip. The Raja
sprang to pick it up. “Pardon me, Madam,” he said quickly, almost in a
tone of command, and began to scan it. “A newspaper only two days old!
That is such a rarity that you must allow me to glance at it.” He opened
it with a deferential gesture but with a determined hand, and a flick of
something not too amicable glinted from his eyes as he saw that a strip
had been torn from the back page. “Ah,” he said softly, “the telegraphic
news gone! What a pity! In my seclusion, I hunger for tidings from the
civilized world.”
Yazok the priest came closer and spoke to his prince eagerly, telling
too in vivid pantomime Traherne’s burning of the paper, and then pointed
to the little blur of ashes still on the ground. The Raja looked at them
slowly, lifted his eyes, and asked Traherne, smiling, “You burned this
column?”
“Unfortunately, I did.” Traherne had sensed rather than caught the
dislike, and even almost threat, in the suave Eastern voice.
“Ah!” the Raja said with a significance he did not choose or trouble to
veil. Then, after a pause no one else quite cared to break, he added,
with a show of gratitude that was very well done, if he was not sincere,
“I know your motive, Dr. Traherne, and I appreciate it. You destroyed it
out of consideration for my feelings, wishing to spare me a painful
piece of intelligence. That was very thoughtful—almost, if I may say
it, Orientally so—but quite unnecessary. I already know what you tried
to conceal.”
“You know!” and “Your Highness knows!” the two Englishmen said
simultaneously, incredulously.
The Raja smiled slightly and bowed so. “Oh, I had not seen this
excellent English journal—if I had, my eagerness to look at it would
have been an indirection unworthy between friends, and quite unnecessary
to me, I assure you—and I have not heard what comment the admirable
editor of the _Leader_ makes—or his leader writers—but I know that
three of my subjects, accused of a political crime, have been sentenced
to death.”
“How is it possible—?” Traherne involuntarily began.
“Bad news flies fast, Dr. Traherne,” the Raja replied. “And too—this is
Asia,” he added significantly. “But one thing you can perhaps tell
me—is there any chance of their sentences being remitted?”
“I am afraid not, Your Highness,” Traherne answered reluctantly. And
whatever reluctance he did or did not feel at the fact, he was most
sincerely reluctant to tell it to the Raja of Rukh.
“Remitted?” Crespin broke in brashly. “I should rather say not. It was a
cold-blooded, unprovoked murder!”
“Unprovoked, you think?” Rukh said evenly. “Well, I won’t argue the
point. And the execution is to be—?”
He had asked it pointedly of Traherne, and Traherne replied, still more
re
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