Ommony turned his back, walked to the heap of blankets by the wall, and sat down.
“Would you know him sitting?” he asked casually; and suddenly it occurred to Dawa Tsering that he was being questioned in his own tongue.
“Thou!” he exclaimed. “Well, may the devils destroy the place! Art thou then a magician?” He sniffed three times. “Not even the smell is the same! Was it the Jew who worked the magic? Art thou truly Ommonee?”
“No, I’m changed. I’m Gupta Rao. If you ever call me Ommony again without my permission, I will bring to pass a change in your affairs that you will remember! Do you understand?”
“Gupta Rao—huh? A change—eh? Hmm! And that is not a bad idea. Change me, thou! There are many garments in this place—buy me some of them. That Lama played a dirty trick on me. He has vanished. I found his chela Samding, and I told him the Lama owes me two months’ pay; and I said ‘Where is the Lama?’ But Samding, standing by a covered bullock-cart (but the cart was empty, for I looked) laughed at me and said nothing. I would have killed him if I had not thought of that letter, which you said the Lama must receive. So I slapped Samding’s face with the letter, and threw it on the ground in front of him, and bade him pick it up and find the Lama or take the consequences. And he said, with that mild voice of his, that I had become very reckless all at once, so I hustled him a time or two, hoping to make him strike me, that I might with justice strike him back. But he has no fight in him. He picked up the letter, holding it thus, because there was dirt on it and he hates to soil his hands. And he said to me, ‘The Lama has no further use for you!’ Do you hear that, thou—what is thy new name?—Gupta Rao? Did you ever hear the like of it for impudence? You wonder, I suppose, why I didn’t smite Samding there and then, so that the Lama would have no further use for him. Trust me, I would have done; but two great devils of Tibetans came out of a doorway and seized me from behind. Lo, before I could draw my knife they had hurled me into a party of Sikh soldiers who were passing, so that I broke up their formation, they blaming me for it, which is just like Sikhs. And it isn’t wise to argue with too many Sikhs, so I ran. Now—what is thy name again? Gupta Rao? Well—it would now be fitting to disguise me, so that I may come on that Lama and his chela and the whole brood of them unawares. Then let us see what one man can do to half-a-dozen!”
Ommony got up and began to pace the floor again. It would be difficult to disguise Dawa Tsering, even if that were advisable, for the man had a swagger that was as much a part of him as his huge frame, and a simplicity that underlay and would inevitably shine through all cunning. Yet the man would be useful, since he knew more than a little about the Lama’s goings and comings; and, once in the Hills, where a man without an armed friend has a short life and a sad one as a rule, he would be almost indispensable.
He had not made up his mind what to do when one of Benjamin’s assistants hammered on the shop-door and announced Maitraya. Dawa Tsering sat down beside Diana, who seemed to have decided he was tolerable, and Maitraya entered stagily, as if he thought he were a god, or wished other people to believe him one. He was not a very big man, but he had a trick of filling up the doorway and pausing there before he strode into the room to seize by instinct the most conspicuous position and command all eyes.
His face was rather wrinkled, but he was richly clothed in new Tussore silk, with a gorgeous golden cummerbund,[[16]] and his gallant bearing tried to give the lie to fifty years. There were marks on his handsome face that suggested debauch, but might have been due to former hardship; his manner on the whole was one of dignity and conscious worthiness. One could tell at a glance what were his views on the actor’s art and on the position that actors should hold in the community; in another land he would have pestered the politicians for a knighthood. A pair of gorgeous black eyes, that he knew how to use with effect, glowed under a heavy lock of black hair that he had carefully arranged to fall in apparent carelessness beneath his turban.
“You wished to see me, Benjamin?”
His voice was tragic, his language Urdu, his diction refined to the verge of pedantry. Benjamin signed to him to be seated on a heap of blankets, but he declined the invitation like Cæsar refusing a throne (except that Cæsar could not have done it with such super-modesty).