“Damn him!” Dick murmured.

“There are so many ways—­snakes—­poison—­daggers in the dark—­”

“What do you suggest?” he asked her.  “Leave Sialpore?”

“Yes, but with me!  I know a safe place.  She should come with me.”

“When?”

“Tonight!  Before dawn.”

“How?”

“By camel.  I had horses and Gungadhura took them all, but his brain was too sotted to think of camels, and I have camels waiting not many miles from here!  I shall take my horse from your stable and ride for the camels, bringing them to the house of Mukhum Dass.  Let your wife meet me there one hour before dawn.”

“Dick!” said Tess, with her arm around him.  “I want to go!  I know it sounds crazy, and absurd, and desperate; but I’m sure it isn’t!  I want you to let me go with her.”

They reached the house before he answered, he, turning it over and over in his mind, taking into reckoning a thousand things.

“Well,” he said at last, “once in a while there’s the strength of a man about you, Tess.  Maybe I’m a lunatic, but have it your own way, girl, have it your own way!”

Chapter Ten

In odor of sweet sanctity I bloom,
With surplus of beatitude I bless,
I’m the confidant of Destiny and Doom,
I’m the apogee of knowledge more or less. 
If I lie, it is to temporize with lying
Lest obliquity should suffer in the light. 
If I prey upon the widow and the dying,
They withheld; and I compel them to do right. 
I am justified in all that I endeavor,
If I fail it is because the rest are fools. 
I’m serene and unimpeachable forever,
The upheld, ordained interpreter of rules.

“Discretion is better part of secrecy!”

Some of what follows presently was told to Yasmini afterward by Sita Ram, some of it by Tom Tripe, and a little by Dick Blaine, who had it from Samson himself.  The rest she pieced together from admissions by Jinendra’s fat priest and the gossip of some dancing girls.

Sir Roland Samson, K. C. S. I., as told already, was a very demon for swift office work, routine pouring off him into the hands of the right subordinates like water into the runnels of a roof, leaving him free to bask in the sunshine of self-complacency.  But there is work that can not be tackled, or even touched by subordinates; and, the fixed belief of envious inferiors to the contrary notwithstanding, there are hours unpaid for, unincluded in the office schedule, and wholly unadvertised that hold such people as commissioners in durance vile.

On the night of Yasmini’s escape Samson sat sweating in his private room, with moths of a hundred species irritating him by noisy self-immolation against the oil lamp-whose smoke made matters worse by being sucked up at odd moments by the punkah, pulled jerkily by a new man.  Most aggravating circumstance of all, perhaps, was that the movement of the punkah flickered his papers away whenever he removed a weight.  Yet he could not study them unless he spread them all in front of him; and without the punkah he felt he would die of apoplexy.  He had to reach a decision before midnight.