“I bet I can answer that too,” said the Saint. “She’d held out two or three more small pearls and sold them, and she was saving the money for a surprise present of some kind. Is that right, Consuelo?”
She lifted her head and looked at the Saint.
“No,” she said. “It is my own money. I earned it and saved it myself. I kept it from you, Ned. I did not want to spend quite all our money on the search for pearls. I thought, perhaps we will never find any pearls, but I would keep saving, and one day perhaps I could take you myself to see if you could be cured. That is the truth.”
Yarn lifted her up and kissed her.
“How blind can a man be?” he said huskily.
“Some people would give their eyes for what you’ve got,” Simon said.
“And I wish I had mine most so that I could see it. I know how beautiful she must be, but I would like to see her. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
“She is beautiful, Ned.”
“Please, you must both forgive me,” Consuelo said in a low voice. “Let us have some tequila.”
Simon looked down at the little heap of beads in his hand.
“What do you want me to do with the pearls?” he asked.
The blind man’s dark glasses held his gaze like hypnotic hungry eyes.
“Are they really valuable?”
“I’d say they were, but I’m not an expert,” Simon replied, improvising with infinite care. “They’d have to be sold in the right place, of course. As you may know, individual pearls don’t mean so much, unless they’re really gigantic. Most pearls are made into necklaces and things like that, which means that they have to be matched, and they gain in value by being put together. And then it’s a funny market these days, on account of all the cultured pearls that only an expert can tell from real ones. There are still people who’ll spend a fortune on the genuine article, but you don’t find them waiting on every jeweller’s doorstep. It takes work, and preparation, and patience — and time.”
“But — eventually — they should be worth a lot?”
“Eventually,” said the Saint soberly, “they may mean more to you than you’d believe right now.”
Ned Yarn’s breath came and went in a long sigh.
“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “I can wait some more. I guess I’m used to waiting.”
“Do you want me to take the pearls back to the States and see what I can do with them?”
“Yes. And Consuelo and I will go on fishing for more. At least we’ll know we aren’t wasting our time. Where’s that drink you were talking about, Consuelo?” She put the glass in his hand, and he raised it. “Here’s luck to all of us.”
“Especially to you two.” Simon looked at the woman over his glass and said, “Salud!”
He wrapped the beads carefully in a scrap of newspaper and tucked it into his pocket.
“Do you mind if Consuelo guides me back from here?” he asked. “I don’t want to get lost.”
“Of course, we don’t want that. And thank you for coming.”
The night was the same, perhaps a little cooler, perhaps a little more muted in its secret sounds. The woman’s heels tapped the same monotonous rhythm, perhaps a little slower. They walked quite a long way without speaking, as they had before, but now they kept silent as if to make sure that they were beyond the most fantastic range of a blind man’s hearing before they spoke.
Simon Templar was glad that the silence lasted as long as it did. He had a lot to think about, to weigh and balance and to look ahead from.
Finally she said, almost timidly, “I think you understand, señor.”
“I think so,” he said, but he waited to hear more from her.
“When he began to be discontented, we went out in the boat and began looking for pearls. For a long time that made him happy. But presently, when we found nothing, he was unhappy again. At last we found some oysters. Then again he had hope. But there were no pearls. So presently, after some more time, he was sad again. It hurt too much to see him despair. So at last I let him find some pearls. At first they were real, I think. I took them from some earrings that my mother gave me. And after that, they were beads.”
“And when you said you sold them—”
“I did sell the real ones, for a few pesos. The rest was money I had saved for him, like the five hundred dollars.”
“Did you mean what I heard you say — that if you could save enough, you meant to take him to a specialist somewhere who might be able to bring back his sight?”
There was a long pause before she answered.
“I would have done it when I had the courage,” she said. “I will do it one day, when I am strong enough. But it will not be easy. Because I know that when he sees me with his eyes, he will not love me any more.”
He felt it all the way through him down to his toes, like the subsonic tremor of an earthquake, the tingling realization of what those few simple words meant.
She was not blind, and she used mirrors. If she had ever deluded herself, it had not been for long. She knew very well what they told her. Homely and aged and scarred as she was, no man such as she had dreamed of as a young girl would ever love her as a young girl dreams of love. Unless he was blind. Even before the ageing had taken hold she had discovered that, and seen the infinite emptiness ahead. But one night, some miracle had brought her a blind man...
She had taken him in and cared for him in his sickness, finding him clean and grateful, and lavished on him all the frustrated richness of her heart. And out of his helplessness, and for her kindness and the tender beauty of her voice, he had loved her in return. She had used what money she could earn in any way to humour his obsession, to bring him back from despair, to encourage hope and keep alive his dream. And one day she believed she might be able to make at least part of the hope come true, and have him made whole — and let him go.
Simon walked slowly through a night that no longer seemed dark and sordid.
“When he knows what you have done,” he said, “he should think you the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“He will not love me,” she said without bitterness. “I know men.”
“Now I can tell you something. He has been blind for nearly ten years. There will have been too many degenerative changes in his eyes by this time. There is hardly any chance at all that an operation could cure him now. And I never thought I could say any man was lucky to be blind, but I think Ned Yarn is that man.”
“Nevertheless, I shall have to try one day.”
“It will be a long time still before you have enough money.”
She looked up at him.
“But the beads you took away. You told him they were worth much. What shall I tell him now?”
It was all clear to Simon now, the strangest crime that he had to put on his bizarre record.
“He will never hear another word from me. I shall just disappear. And presently it will be clear to him that I was a crook after all, as he believes you suspected from the start, and I stole them.”
“But the shock — what will it do to him?”
“He will get over it. He cannot blame you. He will think that your instinct was right all along, and he should have listened to you. You can help him to see that, without nagging him.”
“Then he will want to start looking for pearls again.”
“And you will find them. From time to time I will send you a few for you to put in the oysters. Real ones. You can make them last. You need not find them too often, to keep him hoping. And when you sell them, which you can do as a Mexican without getting in any trouble, you must do what your heart tells you with the money. I think you will be happy,” said the Saint.