"It is quite possible," said he to her, "that the King did mean you; I indeed am inclined to be of that opinion. But that does not alter the situation in any way whatever; in the first place, Munza insults us by not permitting us to accompany you; in the second, we cannot allow you to present yourself before him alone."
"But," she urged, "if this is a matter affecting our common interests, I am quite ready to run any risk. I am not afraid of anybody, and, besides, I have no reason to think that the King would behave otherwise than as a gentleman to any woman, to say nothing of my being an Englishwoman."
"We do not share your ideas on this subject," said Delange, firmly, "and, for my part, I absolutely refuse to let you enter that den alone. Have the kindness to come away with us, for we are off."
De Morin had by this time put himself at the head of the escort, and I, approaching the officer who had conveyed to us his master's orders, told him to inform the King that we were accustomed never to be separated from our sister, and that we were going away because he refused to receive us with her.
"What you have just done, gentlemen," said Miss Poles, as she followed us, "may turn out to be a serious business."
"It would have been far more serious," whispered de Morin, in my ear, "if we had sent her to the King, instead of Madame de Guéran. Munza would have scarcely thought the joke a good one, and he would have been right. But keep your eyes open all round, my dear fellow, whilst I look after the escort. At this very moment our reply is being communicated to the King, and he knows by this time that we are going away. He will be furious, and we have every reason to be afraid."
"That is so," said I. "A man accustomed to bend every will to his own, the demi-god of more than a million souls, will hardly believe that a handful of foreigners dare to refuse all obedience to him, and brave him even within the walls of his palace."
Happily, our fears were groundless, and we proceeded without the slightest contretemps across the open space which separated us from the palisading. The building occupied by Munza, wherein we had declined to set foot, remained in perfect silence. Nobody came out of it, either to order us to return or to give any instructions to the soldiers whom we could see on every side of us. We soon reached the gate, and a very few moments more saw us within our own encampment.
De Morin prudently forbade all straggling on the part of the men of the escort; he inspected their guns and, without actually serving out the ammunition, he opened our boxes of cartridges and had them in readiness for any emergency. The rest of our people, who, as Joseph had stated, placed very little confidence in the Monbuttoos, approved of these precautions. At the same time we removed the injunction laid, as I have already recorded, upon Nassar with reference to any conversation on the subject of the Baron de Guéran, and we now instructed him to mix with the natives, large and small, who surrounded our encampment throughout the day, and to endeavour to obtain incidentally from them whatever information he could as to a white man having passed through, or stayed in their country.
These measures of precaution having been put in force, we set ourselves to wait. It was clear to us that Munza would communicate with us in some way or other during the evening; a black man cannot wait, and he never puts anything off until to-morrow, except, indeed, his work.