The cheap curio dealers were in evidence with their wares cheap and bad; those quaint perambulating curio dealers, who, as a rule, only start business at sundown, and whose stock-in-trade include old top hats, old boots, old—anything—European. “Caw—caw—caw!” You look up, and see a great kite straining at its strings.
And then the umbrellas! Leslie had a good view of them, for he was head and shoulders taller than any one in the crowd. Red, pink, gray, gray-green, pink-and-white, blossom-bestrewn, stork-bestrewn, a shifting mass of color reflecting the sunlight.
But though he saw all this, and though the noise and bustle and laughter and general atmosphere of festivity fell in with his humor, his thoughts were far away at Osaka; he was wondering what George du Telle was doing, and what George du Telle would say in a day or so, and how he would look. He had never hated George du Telle really till now that he had determined to rob him of his wife.
Now that he was about to commit, or attempt to commit, a vile and abominable act against George du Telle, that person seemed to him the acme of all things vile and abominable.
Suddenly, through an opening in the crowd, Leslie caught a glimpse of a face, the face of a blind man, stolid, stony, with a flattened nose and wearing an indescribable expression of eld, weariness, and misfortune.
It was only a momentary glimpse, but revealed just for a moment, and contrasted with the shifting colored mass around him, with the noise and laughter, the sunlight and the movement of life, it was like a vision of death.
Leslie stood for a moment startled and chilled; the joyous exaltation in his mind a moment ago had vanished: it was as if a cloud had come between him and the sun.
Why were these things always occurring to fret his soul and trouble his imagination? This blind man was nothing but an ordinary blind man of Japan such as one might see any day. The broken lath that had troubled him all night was but a broken lath; the song of the mushi that had started that infernal sound in his head was but the sound of an insect buzzing; the azalea that had caused that frightful dream was but a flower.
These slight things, he told himself, acting on a brain made over-sensitive by opium, were not warnings, but simple causes of complex effects. And he passed on his way, cursing himself for a fool, till he reached the shop of Mr. Initogo.
That gentleman, for a wonder, was not making tea, but the sight of Leslie San instantly inspired the desire for his favorite beverage, caused him to clap his hands, and the tea-tray to appear in the hands of his wife almost instantly upon the sound.