The Traitor's Gate by Edgar Wallace — Read

His EXCELLENCY THE PRINCE OF KISHLASTAN sat cross-legged on a divan in his private room, his dark eyes staring into vacancy, his thin brown hands playing with a chain of emeralds that hung from his neck. From time to time he took from his pocket a small golden box, dipped his finger into the yellowish powder with which it was half filled, and touched finger to tongue before he snapped the box and put it away in the voluminous folds of his silken gown. By his side was a pad of press cuttings, and after a while, and with every evidence of disgust, he took up the packet and read one after the other of the printed slips.

Rikisivi, Prince of Kishlastan, had been educated in England at a great public school. His knowledge of English was perfect. Nevertheless, such was his antipathy to his overlords that he maintained the farce of conducting all his official conversations through an interpreter. His antipathy was a real one. He was the son of a hundred kings who had lorded it in the old days before the John Company had come to India, had given the law of life and death and had ruled, sometimes wisely, more often brutally, a debased population that had worshipped the members of his house as so many divinities. There was talk of deposition in the air, the putting down of one ruler and the exaltation of another. He might be asked to retire to Paris, the recipient of a government pension, whilst his successor handled the enormous riches that had accumulated through a thousand years. The offence that had brought him before the Governor of Pondicherry need not be described. There was murder in it, cold-blooded assassination, the torture of one woman, the disappearance of another.