“How should I know?” demanded the real Madame Dompierre crossly. “This blind man himself, by chance.”
“You pay a poor compliment to your charming wife’s personality to imagine that one could forget her so soon,” put in Carrados. “And you a Frenchman, Dompierre!”
“You knew, Monsieur Carrados,” reiterated Dompierre, “and yet you ventured here. You are either a fool or a hero.”
“An enthusiast—it is the same thing as both,” interposed the lady. “What did I tell you? What did it matter if he recognized? You see?”
“Surely you exaggerate, Monsieur Dompierre,” contributed Carrados. “I may yet pay tribute to your industry. Perhaps I regret the circumstance and the necessity but I am here to make the best of it. Let me see the things Madame has spoken of, and then we can consider the detail of their price, either for myself or on behalf of others.”
There was no immediate reply. From Dompierre came a saturnine chuckle and from Madame Dompierre a titter that accompanied a grimace. For one of the rare occasions in his life Carrados found himself wholly out of touch with the atmosphere of the situation. Instinctively he turned his face towards the other occupant of the room, the man addressed as “Stoker,” whom he knew to be standing near the window.
“This unfortunate business has brought me an introduction,” said a familiar voice.
For one dreadful moment the universe stood still round Carrados. Then, with the crash and grind of overwhelming mental tumult, the whole strategy revealed itself, like the sections of a gigantic puzzle falling into place before his eyes.
There had been no robbery at the British Museum! That plausible concoction was as fictitious as the intentionally transparent tale of treasure trove. Carrados recognized now how ineffective the one device would have been without the other in drawing him—how convincing the two together—and while smarting at the humiliation of his plight he could not restrain a dash of admiration at the ingenuity—the accurately conjectured line of inference—of the plot. It was again the familiar artifice of the cunning pitfall masked by the clumsily contrived trap just beyond it. And straightway into it he had blundered!
“And this,” continued the same voice, “is Carrados, Max Carrados, upon whose perspicuity a government—only the present government, let me in justice say—depends to outwit the undesirable alien! My country; O my country!”