“Yes. But she did it,” said Hannah Sanburn. “Can you name one instance in which Tsiang Samdup has failed to keep trust to the limit of his power?”
There followed a long silence, broken only by the faint murmur of singing in a hall across the rear courtyard, the falling of burned wood on the hearth, and the muttered barking of Diana chasing something in her dreams. It endured until Diana awoke suddenly, sat up and growled. There came a man’s voice from the front courtyard. Two or three minutes later there was a knock at the door and a toothless old Sikhimese watchman announced a visitor, mumbling so that Ommony did not catch the name. A moment later Sirdar Sirohe Singh strode into the room, greeted by thundering explosions from Diana, who presently recognized him and lay down again.
The sirdar without speaking bowed profoundly, once to Hannah Sanburn, once to Ommony, then crossed the room and sat down cross-legged on the floor, with his back to a corner of the fireplace at Hannah Sanburn’s right hand, where his own face was in shadow but he could see both hers and Ommony’s. Diana went up and sniffed him but he took no notice of her.
“I have word,” he said gruffly, at the end of three or four minutes’ silence.
He seemed to expect comment.
“From whom? About what?”
The sirdar’s amber eyes met Ommony’s. “You remember? When we met the first time I said I was at your disposal to escort you to another place.”
Ommony nodded.
“But I am not your superior.” (The sirdar used a word that conveys more the relationship of a guru to his chela than can be expressed by one word in English; but at that, the significance was vague.) “Do you wish to come with me?”
In the West it would have been the part of wisdom to ask when, why, whither? Twenty and odd years of India had given Ommony an insight into arguments not current in the West, however. He did not even glance at Hannah Sanburn.