In the evenings he became a beggar. It took an elaborate make-up to disguise the fact that Monica Varing would have needed to beg for anything, but for him it was easier. A few skilful lines to put ten years on his face, a slack vacancy of expression, a pair of dark glasses, and he was half-dressed for the part. An old suit, picked up at a Halstead Street pawnshop, a white cane, a battered hat, a tin cup and a sheaf of pencils, and a few smears of grime artfully applied to his face — for a blind man cannot use a mirror — and he was ready to pass any scrutiny. Hoppy lounged by at intervals to check with him, and continued his practice in the art of spitting BBs. He found it more satisfactory now to work with living targets, as he strolled along the streets, and his aim was improving prodigiously.
And then there were lunches with Monica Varing, and superbly wasted afternoons, and late suppers after the theatre; and quite naturally and in no time at all it became accepted that it must be lunch again tomorrow and supper again that night, and the same again the day after tomorrow and the day after that.
So three days went by much faster than they sound, too fast, it seemed, sometimes; and while they talked a lot about the King of Beggars, a very different community of interest began to supersede him as the principal link between them.
It was Mrs Laura Wingate who brought the Saint luck. Or perhaps it was Stephen Elliott, though the grey-haired philanthropist was not the one who dropped a coin in Simon’s cup.
“You poor dear man,” a treacly voice said sympathetically. “I always feel so sorry for the blind. Here.”
She was a woman out of a Mary Petty drawing, protruding fore and aft, with several powdered chins and a look of determined charity. The man was a nonentity beside her, spare and white-haired and silent, his gaze fixed abstractedly on the far distances and his fingers fumbling with the watch-chain stretched across his vest.
“Thank you,” the Saint mumbled. “God bless you, ma’am.”
“Oh, you’re welcome,” the treacly voice said, and, startlingly, giggled. “I always feel I must give to the poor unfortunates.”
“What?” The man let go of his watch chain. “Laura, we’ll be late.”
“Oh, dear. Of course—”