Blue Hand quotes

“Well, sir, it’s not for me to like him or dislike him,” he replied. “Personally, I’ve no use for that kind of person.

The only excuse a man of thirty can produce for not having been in the war, is that he was dead at the time.

”

“Faith? What is faith to a detective?” asked the startled Salter.

“ ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.’ ”

Jim quoted the passage almost solemnly, and for a long time Mr. Salter did not speak. Then he took up a slip of paper on which he had scribbled some notes, and passed it across to Jim.

Jim’s meeting with her had been in the very room in which they were now sitting. The hangings at the window had accidentally caught fire, and Jim, in extinguishing them, had burnt his hand. It was Eunice Weldon who had dressed the injury.

A service rendered by a man to a woman may not lead very much farther to a better acquaintance. When a woman helps a man it is invariably the beginning of a friendship.

Women are suspicious of the services which men give, and yet feel responsible for the man they have helped, even to the slightest extent.

Suppose his mother died, he thought, and the question of a will arose? Suppose Estremeda got hold of her, her testimony in the courts of law might destroy the value of his mother’s earlier will and bring him into the dock at the Old Bailey.

It was an axiom of his that great criminals are destroyed by small causes.

The spendthrift who dissipates hundreds of thousands of pounds, finds himself made bankrupt by a paltry hundred pounds, and the clever organizer of the Thirteen who had covered his traces so perfectly that the shrewdest police in the world had not been able to associate …

It was a lesson of which he was not slow to take advantage. Every day and night she was watched and the drug was kept from her.

With it she was a slave to her habit; without it she was a slave to Digby. He preferred the latter form of bondage.

Mr. Septimus Salter had not arrived when Jim had reached the office that morning, and he waited, for he had a great deal to say to the old man, whom he had not seen for the better part of the week.

She was nearly in tears when she went into her room and shut the door behind her. She walked to her dressing-table and looked in the glass, long and inquiringly, and then she shook her head.

“I wish he wasn’t so good,” she said, “or else more of a hero!”

“Were you sorry not to see me?”

“The days I have not seen you are dead, and wiped off the calendar,” said Jim.

“Oh, before I forget,” said Eunice, “Mrs. Weatherwale has gone.”

“It is not customary for bachelors to give tea-parties to young females,” he said.

“I’m sure it is”⁠—she waived aside his objection. “I’m perfectly certain it happens every day, only they don’t speak about it.”

The flat delighted her and she took off her coat and busied herself in the little kitchenette.

To Jim, stretched in his big chair, she was a thing of sheer delight. He wanted no more than to sit forever and watch her flitting from room to room.

The sound of her fresh voice was a delicious narcotic

, and even when she called him, as she did, again and again, to explain some curio of his which hung in the hall, the spell was not broken.

“Your friend has the key of your flat because she has no telephone of her own, didn’t you say, Jim?”

“I never thought you would lie to me,” she said, and he watched her disappear down the staircase with an aching heart.

He had hardly reached his room and flung himself in his chair by the side of the tea-table, when Lady Mary followed him into the room.

“The law, my boy, is greater than Digby Groat, and greater than you or I.

Sometimes ignorant people laugh at it, sometimes they sneer at it, generally they curse it.

But there it is, the old dilatory machinery, grinding slow and grinding exceedingly small. It is not confined to the issue of search warrants, of arrest and judgments.

She heard Digby curse as he caught his foot in his skirt, and at any other time she might have laughed at the picture she conjured up of this debonair man, in his woman’s dress. But now she was too terrified to be even amused.

But she had that courage which goes with great fear. The soul courage which rises superior to the weakness of the flesh.

Once Digby stopped and listened. He heard nothing but the patter of the rain and the silvery splash of the water as it ran from the bushes.

“Put that pistol away,” and he obeyed the impulse, as with profit he had obeyed a hundred others.

Men who fight in the air and who win their battles in the great spaces of the heavens are favoured with instincts which are denied to the other mortals who walk the earth.

He had time to slip the pistol in his pocket and pull the goggles down over his eyes before the door opened and Villa sleepily surveyed him in the half-light.

“You’d make him speak!” she said scornfully. “You don’t know the man you’re dealing with. I don’t think you’ve ever met that type in the drawing-rooms you visited during the war.

The real men were away in France, Digby Groat. They were running the risks you shirked, facing the dangers you feared.

If you think you can make Jim Steele talk, go along and try!”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he said, white to the lips, for her calculated insult had touched him on the raw. “I can make him scream for mercy.”

“You judge all men by yourself,” she said, “and all women by the poor little shopgirls you have broken for your amusement.”

“Do you know what you’re saying?” he said, quivering with rage. “You seem to forget that I am—”

“We are losing valuable time,” said Digby fretfully.

“It is better to lose time than to lose your liberty,” said the philosophical captain.

Digby clutched the rail and his heart turned to water, as the searchlight of the warship again swung round. But fortune was with them.