“You can go, bearer,” said Sir Dugald. “By the bye, we shall want Mr Kustendjian,” he added, and rose to call back Chanda Lal, but the stranger stepped before him, and laid a hand upon his arm.
“There is no need of an interpreter,” said Jahan Beg in English. “Haigh—Dugald Haigh—have you forgotten me?”
“Good heavens!” cried Sir Dugald, stepping back. “Can it be possible? You are John Bigg—the man who disappeared?”
“Exactly,” said Jahan Beg. “The man who disappeared, and made a nine days’ wonder for his friends at Tajpur, every one of whom had a separate discreditable theory to account for his disappearance.”
“That was quite unnecessary,” returned Sir Dugald, “for any one who knew you and knew Beatrice Wynn.”
“As you did? Well—by the bye, what has become of Beatrice Wynn?”
“Dead, years ago. Typhoid—in Assam somewhere.”
“And for years I have been dead in Ethiopia. Young men”—he turned suddenly to the staff, who had been endeavouring, with indifferent success, to get up an interest in conversation among themselves—“let me give you a warning. Never throw up everything for a woman’s sake. Never spoil your lives because you have been disappointed in love. There is not a woman on earth that’s worth it.”
“Present company always excepted, of course,” said Fitz, with a bow to Lady Haigh and Georgia. Jahan Beg looked at him with a grim smile.
“No woman will ever spoil your life,” he said, “though I don’t necessarily think the better of you for that. As for the rest of you, you are beyond the impressionable age, I think. You begin to see that there is something else to live for besides love. I was twenty-three when I threw aside as good prospects under the Public Works Department as a man need want, and cut myself off from my friends and my country, and all for the sake of a woman who had never cared a scrap for me. She was only amusing herself with me for a while—it’s a way they have. I can see now that she painted and dyed, and that she was years older than I was—she was a widow—but I didn’t see it then. I thought her as beautiful as an angel, and as good—heavens! how I did believe in that woman—and when she married the Commissioner, I chucked everything and left.”