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Updated: August 5, 2024
Only as they passed under the yellow light shed by the solitary lantern on the iron bracket did Tess get an inkling of Yasmini's plan. Light glinted on the wrought hilt of a long Italian dagger, and her smile was cold- uncompromising shuddersome. Tess objected instantly. "Didn't you promise you'd kill nobody? If we'd a pistol we could fire it in the air and my husband would come in a minute."
In Yasmini's room he listened for hours to a lecture on Germany, delivered by a German who has British naturalization papers, whether forged or not is not yet clear. "After the lecture he had a private conversation lasting some minutes with the German who says he is an Englishman, and who, by the way, speaks Hindustani like a native.
How did you discover it?" "Not I." "Who then?" "Your husband did!" "My husband? Dick Blaine? But that can't be true; he never told me; he tells me everything." "Perhaps he would have told if he had understood. He hardly understands yet. Only in part a little." "Then how in the world ?" Yasmini's golden laugh cut short the question as she rose to her feet with a glance at the westering sun.
"Yasmini's!" said the general, at the end of a hundred yards; and the Sikh took a square, right-angle turn at full gallop with a neatness the Horse Artillery could not have bettered. There seemed to be no need of further instructions, for the Sikh pulled up unbidden at the private door that is to all appearance only a mark on the dirty-looking wall.
Know anything of my man Ismail?" "Sure! He's one of Yasmini's pets. She bailed him out of Ali's three years ago and he worships her. It was he who broke the leg and ribs of a pup-rajah a month or two ago for putting on too much dog in her reception room! He's Ursus out of Quo Vadis! He's dog, desperado, stalking horse and Keeper of the Queen's secrets!"
With a rug around his middle, there shot out then what a watching small boy described afterward as "a fat hill-rajah on his way to be fleeced." The carriage drove on, for coachmen who wait outside Yasmini's door are likely to be butts for questions. The door opened without any audible signal, and the man with the rug around his middle disappeared.
He picked a long stick out of the gutter and took his stand near by, frowning as he saw a carriage he suspected to be Yasmini's drive under the gate and come to a stand at the roadside, fifty or sixty yards away. "If the officers should recognize me," he growled to the German, though seeming not to talk to him at all, "I should be arrested at once, and shot later.
In spite of the Rangar's casual manner, Yasmini's reception room felt like the antechamber to another world, where mystery is atmosphere and ordinary air to breathe is not at all. He could sense hushed expectancy on every side could feel the eyes of many women fixed on him and began to draw on his guard as a fighting man draws on armor.
Her satire, and most of her metaphor if always set down as she phrased it, would scandalize as well as puzzle Western ears. This tale is of her youth, but Yasmini's years have not yet done more than ripen her.
And a little later on, being almost as inquisitive as they were careful for their major, the squadron delegated other men, in mufti, to watch for him at the foot of Yasmini's stairs, or as near to the foot as might be, and see him safely home again if they had to fight all Asia on the way.
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