“If I tell you—things that I should not tell—what will you think of me?” he asked.
Ommony laughed abruptly. “Suppose I tell you first what I think you have in mind!” he said. “You old simpleton! Why do you suppose I came straight to you at this hour of the night?” (He glanced up at the wall behind him.) “You didn’t get that devil-mask in Delhi! It’s hanging there to inform some sort of Tibetans that they’ve come to the right place. I’ve known for more than nine years that you’re the business agent for a monastery in the Ahbor country. However, it’s your secret—you don’t have to tell me a thing you don’t want to.”
Benjamin stared at him—a rather scandalized, a rather astonished, a rather sly old Benjamin, with his turban a little to one side and his lower lip drooping. There was a hint of terror in his eyes.
“How much else do you know? You? Ommony!” he demanded.
“Nothing. That is—no more than a blind man who knew you intimately couldn’t help knowing. Shut up, if you want to. I don’t pry into my friends’ affairs, and you’re not like the Lama. You’ve kept nothing from me I was entitled to know.”
“Not—not like the Lama! Ommony—if you knew!”
Benjamin began mumbling to himself in Spanish, but there were Hebrew words interspersed with it. Ommony, knowing no Hebrew or Spanish, let him mumble on, frowning as if busy with his own thoughts. There was still an hour before dawn, when the stirring of a thousand other thoughts would inevitably break the chain of this one—plenty of time for Benjamin to outpour confidences—nothing to be gained by urging him.
“Tsiang Samdup the Lama is good—he is better than both of us!” Benjamin said at last emphatically. He seemed to be trying to convince himself. “God forbid that I should play a trick on him! But—but—”
Not a word from Ommony. To all appearance he was brown-studying over something else, twisting Diana’s ear, staring into the shadows beyond the lantern, so intent on his own thoughts that he did not move when a rat scurried over his feet. Benjamin burst into speech suddenly:
“Fifteen—nearly sixteen years, Ommony, I have been agent for the Lama Tsiang Samdup! You would never believe the things he buys! Not ordinary things! And he pays with bullion—gold bars! Wait—I show you!”