Raffles: Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman by E. W. Hornung (love books to read .txt) đ
- Author: E. W. Hornung
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âYou didnât show him any?â
âMercy? With Faustina dead at my feet? I should have deserved none in the next world if I had shown him any in this! No, I just stood over him, with the revolver in both hands, feeling the chambers with my thumb; and as I stood he stabbed at me; but I stepped back to that one, and brought him down with a bullet in his guts.
ââAnd I can spare you two or three more,â I said, for my poor girl could not have fired a shot. âTake that one to hell with youâand thatâand that!â
âThen I started coughing and wheezing like the Count himself, for the place was full of smoke. When it cleared my man was very dead, and I tipped him into the sea, to defile that rather than Faustinaâs cave. And thenâand thenâwe were alone for the last time, she and I, in our own pet haunt; and I could scarcely see her, yet I would not strike a match, for I knew she would not have me see her as she was. I could say good-by to her without that. I said it; and I left her like a man, and up the first open-air steps with my head in the air and the stars all sharp in the sky; then suddenly they swam, and back I went like a lunatic, to see if she was really dead, to bring her back to life ... Bunny, I canât tell you any more.â
âNot of the Count?â I murmured at last.
âNot even of the Count,â said Raffles, turning round with a sigh. âI left him pretty sorry for himself; but what was the good of that? I had taken blood for blood, and it was not Corbucci who had killed Faustina. No, the plan was his, but that was not part of the plan. They had found out about our meetings in the cave: nothing simpler than to have me kept hard at it overhead and to carry off Faustina by brute force in the boat. It was their only chance, for she had said more to Stefano than she had admitted to me, and more than I am going to repeat about myself. No persuasion would have induced her to listen to him again; so they tried force; and she drew Corbucciâs revolver on them, but they had taken her by surprise, and Stefano stabbed her before she could fire.â
âBut how do you know all that?â I asked Raffles, for his tale was going to pieces in the telling, and the tragic end of poor Faustina was no ending for me.
âOh,â said he, âI had it from Corbucci at his own revolverâs point. He was waiting at his window, and I could have potted him at my ease where he stood against the light listening hard enough but not seeing a thing. So he asked whether it was Stefano, and I whispered, âSi, signoreâ; and then whether he had finished Arturo, and I brought the same shot off again. He had let me in before he knew who was finished and who was not.â
âAnd did you finish him?â
âNo; that was too good for Corbucci. But I bound and gagged him about as tight as man was ever gagged or bound, and I left him in his room with the shutters shut and the house locked up. The shutters of that old place were six inches thick, and the walls nearly six feet; that was on the Saturday night, and the Count wasnât expected at the vineyard before the following Saturday. Meanwhile he was supposed to be in Rome. But the dead would doubtless be discovered next day, and I am afraid this would lead to his own discovery with the life still in him. I believe he figured on that himself, for he sat threatening me gamely till the last. You never saw such a sight as he was, with his head split in two by a ruler tied at the back of it, and his great moustache pushed up into his bulging eyes. But I locked him up in the dark without a qualm, and I wished and still wish him every torment of the damned.â
âAnd then?â
âThe night was still young, and within ten miles there was the best of ports in a storm, and hundreds of holds for the humble stowaway to choose from. But I didnât want to go further than Genoa, for by this time my Italian would wash, so I chose the old Norddeutscher Lloyd, and had an excellent voyage in one of the boats slung in-board over the bridge. Thatâs better than any hold, Bunny, and I did splendidly on oranges brought from the vineyard.â
âAnd at Genoa?â
âAt Genoa I took to my wits once more, and have been living on nothing else ever since. But there I had to begin all over again, and at the very bottom of the ladder. I slept in the streets. I begged. I did all manner of terrible things, rather hoping for a bad end, but never coming to one. Then one day I saw a white-headed old chap looking at me through a shop-windowâa window I had designs uponâand when I stared at him he stared at meâand we wore the same rags. So I had come to that! But one reflection makes many. I had not recognized myself; who on earth would recognize me? London called meâand here I am. Italy had broken my heartâand there it stays.â
Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for a right appreciation of those last words. That they were no mere words I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, I did and do still believe. But I alone see him as I saw him then, the lines upon his face, and the pain behind the lines; how they came to disappear, and what removed them, you will never guess. It was the one thing you would have expected to have the opposite effect, the thing indeed that had forced his confidence, the organ and the voice once more beneath our very windows:
âMargarita de Parete,
era aâ sarta dâ eâ signore;
se pugneva sempe e ddete
pe penzare a Salvatore!
âMarâgaârĂŹ,
e perzo e Salvatore!
MarâgaârĂŹ,
Ma lâommo Ăš cacciatore!
MarâgaârĂŹ,
Nun ce aje corpa tu!
Chello châ Ăš fatto, Ăš fatto, un ne parlammo cchieĂč!â
I simply stared at Raffles. Instead of deepening, his lines had vanished. He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and alert as I remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of some madcap escapade. He was holding up his finger; he was stealing to the window; he was peeping through the blind as though our side street were Scotland Yard itself; he was stealing back again, all revelry, excitement, and suspense.
âI half thought they were after me before,â said he. âThat was why I made you look. I darenât take a proper look myself, but what a jest if they were! What a jest!â
âDo you mean the police?â said I.
âThe police! Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you can look me in the face and ask such a question? My boy, Iâm dead to themâoff their booksâa good deal deader than being off the hooks! Why, if I went to Scotland Yard this minute, to give myself up, theyâd chuck me out for a harmless lunatic. No, I fear an enemy nowadays, and I go in terror of the sometime friend, but I have the utmost confidence in the dear police.â
âThen whom do you mean?â
âThe Camorra!â
I repeated the word with a different intonation. Not that I had never heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret societies; but I failed to see on what grounds Raffles should jump to the conclusion that these everyday organ-grinders belonged to it.
âIt was one of Corbucciâs threats,â said he. âIf I killed him the Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so; it was like his cunning not to say that he would put them on my tracks whether or no.â
âHe is probably a member himself!â
âObviously, from what he said.â
âBut why on earth should you think that these fellows are?â I demanded, as that brazen voice came rasping through a second verse.
âI donât think. It was only an idea. That thing is so thoroughly Neapolitan, and I never heard it on a London organ before. Then again, what should bring them back here?â
I peeped through the blind in my turn; and, to be sure, there was the fellow with the blue chin and the white teeth watching our windows, and ours only, as he bawled.
âAnd why?â cried Raffles, his eyes dancing when I told him. âWhy should they come sneaking back to us? Doesnât that look suspicious, Bunny; doesnât that promise a lark?â
âNot to me,â I said, having the smile for once. âHow many people, should you imagine, toss them five shilling for as many minutes of their infernal row? You seem to forget thatâs what you did an hour ago!â
Raffles had forgotten. His blank face confessed the fact. Then suddenly he burst outlaughing at himself.
âBunny,â said he, âyouâve no imagination, and I never knew I had so much! Of course youâre right. I only wish you were not, for thereâs nothing I should enjoy more than taking on another Neapolitan or two. You see, I owe them something still! I didnât settle in full. I owe them more than ever I shall pay them on this side Styx!â
He had hardened even as he spoke: the lines and the years had come again, and his eyes were flint and steel, with an honest grief behind the glitter.
As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, the pick of our exploits, from a frankly criminal point of view, are of least use for the comparatively pure purposes of these papers. They might be appreciated in a trade journal (if only that want could be supplied), by skilled manipulators of the jemmy and the large light bunch; but, as records of unbroken yet insignificant success, they would be found at once too trivial and too technical, if not sordid and unprofitable into the bargain. The latter epithets, and worse, have indeed already been applied, if not to Raffles and all his works, at least to mine upon Raffles, by more than one worthy wielder of a virtuous pen. I need not say how heartily I disagree with that truly pious opinion. So far from admitting a single word of it, I maintain it is the liveliest warning that I am giving to the world. Raffles was a genius, and he could not make it pay! Raffles had invention, resource, incomparable audacity, and a nerve in ten thousand. He was both strategian and tactician, and we all now know the difference between the two. Yet for months he had been hiding like a rat in a hole, unable to show even his altered face by night or day without risk, unless another risk were courted by three inches of conspicuous crepe. Then thus far our rewards had oftener than not been no reward at all. Altogether it was a very different story from the old festive, unsuspected, club and cricket days, with their noctes ambrosianĂŠ at the Albany.
And now, in addition to the eternal peril of recognition, there was yet another menace of which I knew nothing. I thought no more of our Neapolitan organ-grinders, though I did often think of the moving page that they had torn for me out of my friendâs strange life in Italy. Raffles never alluded to the subject again, and for my part I had entirely forgotten his wild ideas connecting the organ-grinders with the Camorra, and imagining them upon his own tracks. I heard no more of it, and thought as little, as I say. Then one night in the autumnâI shrink from shocking the susceptible for nothingâbut there was a certain house in Palace Gardens, and when
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