Repair the waste of age and sickness: no,
It skills not! life’s inadequate to joy,
As the soul sees joy, tempting life to take.’
An exceedingly appropriate quotation! I forget where it comes from. Try to concentrate your mind, Mr Wood. Ah, now I know!—from Browning’s Cleon.”
Florian’s mellifluous voice broke the silence in the auditory. “This is wonderful!” he said, in his impressive tone, “most wonderful! miraculous! I never heard anything in my life to equal it.”
The Seer, noting his advantage, didn’t pause for a moment to answer the interruption, but, smiling a self-satisfied though invisible smile, which could be heard in his voice in spite of the dense darkness, went on still more rapidly, “Fifth envelope, Lady Martindale, a familiar quotation, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’ Somewhat hackneyed that, but easy enough to read on her brain for that very reason. . . . Sixth envelope, Sir Henry Martindale—I regret to say, a confirmed sceptic; Sir Henry didn’t believe I could read his thoughts, so he wrote down these rude words: ‘The performance is a sham, and the man’s a humbug.’ But the performance is not a sham, and the man’s a thought-reader. Sir Henry also wrote three words below in the Russian character, which he learnt in the Crimea. Now, I don’t know Russian, and I can’t pretend to read thoughts in languages I don’t understand, any more than I could pretend to repeat a conversation I happened to overhear on top of an omnibus in Japanese or Hottentot. But I can tell Sir Henry what he thought in English as he wrote those words; he thought to himself, ‘That’s a puzzler for him, that is; I’ll bet five quid that’ll beat the fellow.’ ”
The audience laughed at this unexpected sally. Sir Henry felt uncomfortable. But the Seer, unabashed, went on as before, without an instant’s pause, to the succeeding envelopes. He ran through them all in the same rapid manner, till he reached the last, “Miss Violet Farrar,—kindly concentrate your thoughts on the subject, Señorita,—Miss Farrar wrote a couple of lines from Swinburne:
‘Thou hast forgotten, O summer swallow,
But the world shall end when I forget.’
That’s the last I received!” He drew a deep sigh. Then without one instant interposed, “Turn up the lights, please,” he said. “To show all’s fair, I’ll return you your envelopes.”