Guns of the Gods | Page 3

and surely the easiest, means of a perplexed diplomacy has been
to send a woman to undermine the policy of courts or steal the very
consciences of kings. Delilah is a case in point. And in India, where the
veil and the rustling curtain and religion hide woman's hand without in
the least suppressing her, that was a plan too easy of contrivance to be
overlooked.
In those days there was a prince in Moscow whose public conduct so
embittered his young wife, and so notoriously, that when he was found
one morning murdered in his bed suspicion rested upon her. She was
tried in secret, as the custom was, found guilty and condemned to death.
Then, on the strength of influence too strong for the czar, the sentence
was commuted to the far more cruel one of life imprisonment in the
Siberian mines. While she awaited the dreaded march across Asia in
chains a certain proposal was made to the Princess Sonia Omanoff, and

no one who knew anything about it wondered that she accepted without
much hesitation.
Less than a month after her arrest she was already in Paris, squandering
paper rubles in the fashionable shops. And at the Russian Embassy in
Paris she made the acquaintance of the very first of the smaller Indian
potentates who made the "grand tour." Traveling abroad has since
become rather fashionable, and is even encouraged by the
British-Indian Government because there is no longer any plausible
means of preventing it; but Maharajah Bubru Singh was a pioneer, who
dared greatly, and had his way even against the objections of a high
commissioner. In addition he had had to defy the Brahman priests who,
all unwilling, are the strong supports of alien overrule; for they are
armed with the iron-fanged laws of caste that forbid crossing the sea,
among innumerable other things.
Perhaps there was a hint of moral bravery behind the warrior eyes that
was enough in itself and she really fell in love at first sight, as men said.
But the secret police of Russia were at her elbow, too, hinting that only
one course could save her from extradition and Siberian mines. At any
rate she listened to the Rajah's wooing; and the knowledge that he had a
wife at home already, a little past her prime perhaps and therefore
handicapped in case of rivalry, but never-the-less a prior wife, seems to
have given her no pause. The fact that the first wife was childless
doubtless influenced Bubru Singh.
They even say she was so far beside herself with love for him that she
would have been satisfied with the Gandharva marriage ceremony sung
by so many Rajput poets, that amounts to little more than going off
alone together. But the Russian diplomatic scheme included provision
for the maharajah of a wife so irrevocably wedded that the British
would not be able to refuse her recognition. So they were married in the
presence of seven witnesses in the Russian Embassy, as the records
testify.
After that, whatever its suspicions, the British Government had to
admit her into Rajputana. And what politics she might have played,
whether the Russian gray-coat armies might have encroached into those
historic hills on the strength of her intriguing, or whether she would
have seized the first opportunity to avenge herself by playing Russia
false,--are matters known only to the gods of unaccomplished things.

For Bubru Singh, her maharajah, died of an accident very shortly after
the birth of their child Yasmini.
Now law is law, and Sonia Omanoff, then legally the Princess Sonia
Singh, had appealed from the first to Indian law and custom, so that the
British might have felt justified in leaving her and her infant daughter
to its most untender mercies. Then she would have been utterly under
the heel of the succeeding prince, a nephew of her husband,
unenamored of foreigners and avowedly determined to enforce on his
uncle's widow the Indian custom of seclusion.
But the British took the charitable view, that covering a multitude of
sins. It was not bad policy to convert the erstwhile Sonia Omanoff from
secret enemy to grateful friend, and the feat was easy.
The new maharajah, Gungadhura Singh, was prevailed on to assign an
ancient palace for the Russian widow's use; and there, almost within
sight of the royal seraglio from which she had been ousted, Yasmini
had her bringing up, regaled by her mother with tales of Western
outrage and ambition, and well schooled in all that pertained to her
Eastern heritage by the thousand-and-one intriguers whose delight and
livelihood it is to fish the troubled waters of the courts of minor kings.
All these things Yasmini told me in that scented chamber of another
palace, in which a wrathful government secluded her in