written along the margin of the first page the following laconic message in Mahatma script (signed, but again no seal: much reduced here):—
“Him” presumably means Judge. The bearing of the threat will be intelligible to readers of the last Chapter. Certain rumours from Avenue-road made it intelligible also to Colonel Olcott. The Master of Wisdom, the unapproachable sage of the Himalayas, He-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed by Mrs. Besant and the whole Theosophical Society, had thrown off the mask of benignity. Here he was plainly adopting, as a weapon against his own unlucky president, that impossible accusation which represents the lowest point of ethical squalor yet touched, in this story at any rate, by Theosophic “brotherhood”! This was miching Mallecho, thought the Colonel; it meant mischief with a vengeance. The voice was the voice of the Mahatma, but again the Colonel thought it the hand of Judge. So he wrote with some natural heat to ask that gentleman what he meant by his “base insinuation.”
Only to receive, however, the blandly innocent reply:—
I have puzzled my head over your reference to “poison,” as if in one of mine; as I never referred to it I cannot catch on, and have given it up in despair.
After this the Colonel seems to have given the Mahatma up in despair, too. But the Mahatma, on his part, was busily pushing up a column to take the Colonel in the flank, and bring this story to a crisis.
Secure in the support of Mrs. Besant, he was to make the pusillanimous president resign his office, and to enthrone William Q. Judge in his place!
