"You'd find it profitable. You'd be paid whatever the situation called for.
You needn't doubt that."
Tess, talking with a group of guests some little distance off, observed a look of battle in Tom Tripe's eye, and smiled two seconds later as the commissioner let fall his monocle. Two things she was certain of at once: Tom Tripe would tell her at the first opportunity exactly what had happened, and Samson would lie about it glibly if provoked. She promised herself she would provoke him. As a matter of fact Tom gave her two or three versions afterward of what his words had been, their grandeur increasing as imagination flourished in the comfortable warmth of confidence. But the first account came from a fresh memory:
"No money you'll ever touch would buy my dog's silence, let alone mine, sir! If you've a letter for the princess, send it along and I'll see she gets it. If she cares to answer it, I'll see the answer reaches you. As for dropping hints to the maharajah about my doing little services for the princess,—a gentleman's a gentleman, and don't need instruction— nor advice from me. If I was out of a job tomorrow I'd still be a man on two feet, to be met as such."
A man of indiscretion, and a diplomat, must have fireproof feelings. As Tess had observed, Samson blenched distinctly, but he recovered in a second and put in practise some of that opportunism that was his secret pride, reflecting how a less finished diplomatist would have betrayed resentment at the snub from an inferior instead of affecting not to notice it at all. As a student of human nature he decided that Tom Tripe's pride was the point to take advantage of.
"You're the very man I can trust," he said. "I'm glad we have had this talk. If ever you receive a small white envelope marked r. s. in the left-hand bottom corner, see that the princess gets it, and say nothing."
"Trust me, eh?" Tripe muttered as Samson walked away. "You never trusted your own mother without you had a secret hold over her. I wouldn't trust you that far!" He spat among the flowers, for Tom could not pretend to real garden-party manners. "And if she trusts you, letters or no letters, I'll eat my spurs and saber cold for breakfast."
Then, as if to console himself with proof that some one in the world did trust him thoroughly, Tom swaggered with a riding-master stride to where Tess stood talking with a Rajput prince, who had come late and threatened to leave early. The prince had puzzled her by referring two or three times to his hurry, once even going so far as to say good-by, and then not going. It was as if he expected her to know something that she did not know, and to give him a cue that he waited for in vain. She felt he must think her stupid, and the thought made her every minute less at ease; but Tom's approach, eyed narrowly by Samson for some reason, seemed to raise the Rajput's spirits.
"If only my husband were here," she said aloud, "but at the last minute— there was blasting, you know, and—"
The prince—he was quite a young one—twenty-one perhaps—murmured something polite and with eyes that smoldered watched Tom take a letter from his tunic pocket. He handed it to Tess with quite a flourish.
"Some one must have dropped this, ma'am."