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"That was a near thing," he said, looking up at Dupontel. There was actually color in his face. "Another fraction of a second and" His gesture completed the sentence. "My dear fellow!" remonstrated Dupontel. "That was the second," said the Prince. "First I nearly left my coin at home that was my servant's doing. Then the salt is all but spilled my friend does that.
Together they passed out between the great glass doors to the street. "You will walk?" inquired Dupontel. "As usual," said the Prince. It was his custom to pass the time between lunch and the hour when he was likely to find a game of bridge in strolling; it served for exercise. "But," suggested the young man, "you might meet a blind man! Wouldn't it be better to go straight to the club?"
You know good-natured, stout Dupontel, who looks like the type of a happy man, with his fat cheeks that are the color of ripe apples, his small, reddish moustache, turned up over his thick lips, with his prominent eyes, which never know any emotion or sorrow, which remind one of the calm eyes of cows and oxen, and his long back fixed onto two little wriggling, crooked legs, which obtained for him the nickname of corkscrew from some nymph of the ballet.
He surveyed it for a space of minutes with a face of discontent, then fell back on his pillows. "Thought it was raining," he remarked. "Something feels wrong about it. What time is it?" "It is twenty minutes past eleven, M'sieur le Prince," replied the servant. "I will fetch M'sieur le Prince's letters. And M. Dupontel has telephoned." "Eh?"
"What was he doing?" he asked, then. The Prince's wry smile showed again. "Doing?" he repeated, "why, he was feeling for me." Dupontel shrugged, but not in disapproval this time. His imagination was burdened with a new sense of his companion's life, complex with difficulties, haunted by portents like specters of good and evil fortune. "But, at all events, he did not touch you!" he said at last.
Dupontel at twenty-five, for all the boyishness that sometimes showed in him, had already his finished personal effect; and the Prince, white-haired, dark-browed, with a certain austerity of expression, was as complete a thing as a work of art. "Then what is it, exactly, that you fear from this Carigny?" asked Dupontel, when the Prince had told him of the letter.
You see, Monpavon, for the last five years I have been blind!" His voice, with its foreign accent rendering strange his precise and old-fashioned French, continued to explain. But Dupontel did not hear what it said. He was looking at the Prince. Save for an astonished knitting of the brows, he had not moved; he preserved, under those watching eyes, his attitude.
If I had a wife, I should expect to owe the third danger to her. Who will bring it to me, I wonder?" "You are extraordinary, with your signs and dangers," said Dupontel. "I never heard you speak like this before. And, in any case, you have averted two perils." "I have averted two," agreed the Prince. "You are right; that in itself is almost a sign. It it gives me hope for the third the blind man."
Dupontel, who had taken the trouble to be born, but not like the grand seigneurs whom Beaumarchais made fun of once upon a time, was ballasted with a respectable number of millions, as is becoming in the sole heir of a house that had sold household utensils and appliances for over a century.
"But the stakes you remember them?" He asked the question as if he would warn his adversary, and as if he himself were certain of the issue. He had the demeanor of a man who undertakes a problem of which he knows the answer. "Be careful," breathed Dupontel at the Prince's back. "You lost, let me see!" replied the Prince, unheeding Dupontel's whisper. "It was four hundred thousand francs, I think."
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