“Do you take me for a fool,” he answered, “to trust such precious documents to the chances of desert travel, or possibly to the investigations of Arab thieves? No; they are safe enough in England.”
“Where you intend to use them for purposes of blackmail.”
“That is an ugly word, Rupert, but I will not quarrel with it, who, as I have remarked, must live.”
Now Rupert turned on him.
“I don’t believe,” he said, “that there is anything in your letters which either Edith or I need fear; I am sure that she would never commit herself too far with a man like you. Dick Learmer, you are a villain! You have been at the bottom of all the unhappy differences between Edith and myself. It was you, I have discovered from Tabitha and from letters which have reached me, who got me sent to the Soudan immediately after my marriage, as I believe—God forgive you!—in the hope that I should be killed. It was you, by your false information and plots, who subsequently blackened my character, and as soon as I was thought to be dead, tried to take my wife. Now, unless you can be bought off, you threaten to blacken hers also, and indeed, have already done so to some extent. I repeat that you are a villain. Do what you like; I will never speak to you again,” and lifting the palm riding switch which he held in his hand, Rupert struck him with it across the face.
With a savage curse Dick snatched at his revolver.
“Don’t draw that if you value your life,” said Rupert. “You are watched, and whether you succeed in murdering me or not, you will be instantly cut down. Take my advice; go for a few days’ shooting on the hills until your people can get the camels up from the far grazing lands, and then march. Be off now, and don’t attempt to speak to either Edith or myself again, or I will have you bundled into the desert, with your camels or without them.”
So Dick went with a face like the face of a devil, and with a heart full of hate, jealousy, and the lust of vengeance.
When he reached his house, it was reported to him that another of his people was very sick in a little outbuilding. He looked at him through the window-place, and after what the first man had told him—having refreshed his memory by reading up its symptoms in his handbook of medicine—had not the slightest difficulty in recognising a bad and undoubted case of plague, which, doubtless, had been contracted from the dragoman who recovered. Now Dick made up his mind at once that he would take Rupert’s advice and go on a three or four days’ shooting trip. Accordingly, he gave the necessary orders to start an hour before the dawn; then he sat down and thought a while, rubbing the red mark on his cheek where Rupert’s whip had struck him.
How could he be revenged? Oh! how could he be revenged? Of a sudden, a positive inspiration arose in his mind. Rupert was an amateur doctor; Rupert loved attending to the sick, and here was a case well worthy of his notice. Perhaps that Fate for which he had longed was appointing him, Dick, its instrument. He took a piece of paper and wrote this note: