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Then the baskets were cut open by the swords' points and they flung flowers at the dais, swamping it in jasmine and sweet-smelling buds, until the carpet was not visible. The same black-bearded veteran who had spoken first mounted the dais and hung garlands on Yasmini and her prince, and again the hall shook to the roar of acclamation and the sharp ringing of keen steel.
Utirupa and Yasmini claimed to have married themselves by Gandharva rite, and, had she chosen, she could have gone to live with him that minute. But that would not have paid her in the long run. The priests, for instance, whom she despised with all her character, would have been outraged into life-long enmity; and she knew their power.
Most of the time they rode horseback together, disguised as men and taking to the fields whenever other parties drew too close. But sometimes Yasmini left Tess on the elephant, and mingled freely with the crowd, her own resourcefulness and intimate knowledge of the language and the customs enough protection. Nights were the amazing time.
Hear this: "'The Princess Yasmini Omanoff Singh, "'Your Highness, "'Word has reached me frequently of late of pressure brought to bear on you from certain quarters, and hints have been dropped in my hearing that the object of the pressure is to induce you to disclose a secret you possess.
"Thump!" came the timber on the gate again, and even the hinges shook in their stone setting. "Listen!" said Yasmini. There was another noise up-street a rushing to and fro, and a trumpeting that no one could mistake. "I said that " "Thump!" came the baulk of timber not so powerfully as before. There was distraction affecting the team-work.
"Well I will take the hazard. Bring them in. But I will not feed them. And if you fail to come for them before dawn I will turn them out and it shall be all over Sialpore that the Princess Yasmini " "One moment, Mukhum Dass! If one word of this escapes your lips for a month to come, you shall go to jail for receiving stolen money in payment of a debt!
Tess, hardly understanding a word of what was said to her, was never made so much of in her life, sharing honors with Yasmini, almost as much a novelty as she a Western woman, spirited behind the purdah by the same new alchemy that made a girl of partly foreign birth, and so without caste in the Hindu sense of it, revive a royal custom with its antecedents rooted in the very rocks of time.
Yasmini kept close in her own palace. She, too, had her hands full with entertaining, for there were about a dozen of the wives of distant princes who had made the journey in state to attend the ceremony and watch it from behind the durbar grille to say nothing of the wives of local magnates.
But the man died speechless, and Ranjoor Singh could find no scrap of paper on him or no mark that would give any clue to his identity. "Come!" said Yasmini. "Lock the door on him. We will tell the general sahib, and the general sahib will send some one to bury him. Come!" "Not yet," said Ranjoor Singh. "Speak. When did you first know that these Germans had taken this vault to use?"
The guards were hard put to it, with their backs to the bridge end, for two or three minutes. But Ismail would not let him wait and watch from there. He dragged him down the tunnel and pushed him up on to a ledge where they could both see without being seen, through a fissure in the rock. For the space of five minutes Yasmini stood in the great hole, smiling and watching the struggle below.
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