“Oh, very much more than that. In recognizing and identifying their moods—their thoughts even. There are subtle lines of trouble and the deep rings of anxious care quite as patent to the ear as to the sharpest eye sometimes.”
Elsie Bellmark shot a glance of curiously interested speculation to the face that, in spite of its frank, open bearing, revealed so marvellously little itself.
“If I had any dreadful secret, I think that I should be a little afraid to talk to you, Mr Carrados,” she said, with a half-nervous laugh.
“Then please do not have any dreadful secret,” he replied, with quite youthful gallantry. “I more than suspect that Louis has given you a very transpontine idea of my tastes. I do not spend all my time tracking murderers to their lairs, Mrs Bellmark, and I have never yet engaged in a hand-to-hand encounter with a band of cut-throats.”
“He told us,” she declared, the recital lifting her voice into a tone that Carrados vowed to himself was wonderfully thrilling, “about this: He said that you were once in a sort of lonely underground cellar near the river with two desperate men whom you could send to penal servitude. The police, who were to have been there at a certain time, had not arrived, and you were alone. The men had heard that you were blind but they could hardly believe it. They were discussing in whispers which could not be overheard what would be the best thing to do, and they had just agreed that if you really were blind they would risk the attempt to murder you. Then, Louis said, at that very moment you took a pair of scissors from your pocket, and coolly asking them why they did not have a lamp down there, you actually snuffed the candle that stood on the table before you. Is that true?”
Carrados’s mind leapt vividly back to the most desperate moment of his existence, but his smile was gently deprecating as he replied:
“I seem to recognize the touch of truth in the inclination to do anything rather than fight,” he confessed. “But, although he never suspects it, Louis really sees life through rose-coloured opera glasses. Take the case of your quite commonplace neighbour——”
“That is really what you came about?” she interposed shrewdly.
“Frankly, it is,” he replied. “I am more attracted by a turn of the odd and grotesque than by the most elaborate tragedy. The fantastic conceit of throwing stewed kidneys over into a neighbour’s garden irresistibly appealed to me. Louis, as I was saying, regards the man in the romantic light of a humanitarian monomaniac or a demented food reformer. I take a more subdued view and I think that his action, when rightly understood, will prove to be something quite obviously natural.”
“Of course it is very ridiculous, but all the same it has been desperately annoying,” she confessed. “Still, it scarcely matters now. I am only sorry that it should have been the cause of wasting your valuable time, Mr Carrados.”