CHAPTER XXII
The man had come in noiselessly, carrying a centerpiece for the dinner table, a silver elephant very beautiful in its workmanship, the howdah filled with fresh flowers—delicate filmy orchids, radiant and deep carnations and odorous violets. He put it down and turned to go, as he had come, but it was then that Crespin had seen, and Traherne had heard.
“Hullo!” Crespin hailed him. “Hullo! What’s your name? Just come here a minute, will you?”
“Meaning me, sir?” Watkins advanced a few steps, with a touch of covert insolence in manner and voice, his nervousness of an hour ago seemingly gone.
“Yes, you, Mr.—? Mr.—?” Crespin said, involuntarily speaking in his turn with a touch of contempt.
“Watkins is my name, sir,” the man told him.
“Right-o, Watkins.” Far wiser to be as hail-fellow as one could contrivably stomach with a fellow so near the person and the ear of the autocrat upon whom one’s fate actually depended. And after all this chap was English—the letter H was his hall-mark for that—not much English, but English, the only being of their own island-race within impassable miles of them probably. That counted for something! It always does in the wilds. “Can you tell us where we are, Watkins?”
“They calls the place Rukh, sir.”
Traherne, listening and watching, knew that the man was not to be drawn.
But Crespin persisted, “Yes, yes, we know that. But where is Rukh?”