Then she paused and presently flung her words at him, few and swift and straight.
“I come, Rupert, to ask you to answer the riddle which that blind old dervish has been amusing himself by putting to you at such length. Will you return to your duty and your deserted wife? Or will you stop here, as the—the friend of that shameless person and head-priest of her barbarians?”
“Please, Edith,” said Rupert, “be a little milder in your language. These people are peculiar, and my power here is limited; if you apply such names to Tama, and they come to understand them, I cannot answer for the consequences.”
“I did not ask you to answer for the consequences, I asked you to answer my question,” replied Edith, biting her white lips.
“It seems to require some thought,” said Rupert sadly.
Then he lifted his hand and addressed the audience, who were watching what passed with wondering eyes.
“Brothers and sisters,” he said, “a wonderful thing has happened. In speaking to you to-day about the crimes that have been done in Tama, I told you my own story for an example. Then the teacher yonder showed me how weak and evil I really was, and put a question to me as to whether, should she appear and ask it, I would take back the wife of that story, she that had wrought me evil in the past. Now this wife stands before me, and demands the decision which I said I would give when the time came. It has come—that evil day has dawned upon me who never thought to see it, forgetting that things have changed in the matter of my fortunes across the sea. Yet, my brethren, shall I be wrong if I ask for a while to think? If, for instance, I say that when we meet again as is our custom on this same day of the next month, I then decide, and not before?”
“No, no, you will be right, Zahed,” they murmured, the blind old mystic leading them with his shrill voice. “We will have it so.” More, great men among them stood up here and there and shouted that he should not go, that they would gather their servants and guard the pass, and if need be, keep him prisoner, or—and they looked viciously at Dick and his companions.
Achmet translated their remarks, adding, on his own account: “This people in damned nasty temper—very private people and very fierce who love Zahed. You must not make them angry, or perhaps they kill us all. I came here to interpret, not to have throat cut.”
Dick also seizing the situation with remarkable swiftness, was equally urgent and out-spoken.