The Amateur Cracksman E. W. Hornung (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

I think it gives one confidence. Yet it would be very awkward if anything went wrong; one might use it, and that’s not the game at all, though I have often thought that the murderer who has just done the trick must have great sensations before things get too hot for him. Don’t look so distressed, my dear chap. I’ve never had those sensations, and I don’t suppose I ever shall.”

“But this much you have done before?” said I hoarsely.

“Before? My dear Bunny, you offend me! Did it look like a first attempt? Of course I have done it before.”

“Often?”

“Well⁠—no! Not often enough to destroy the charm, at all events; never, as a matter of fact, unless I’m cursedly hard up. Did you hear about the Thimbleby diamonds? Well, that was the last time⁠—and a poor lot of paste they were. Then there was the little business of the Dormer houseboat at Henley last year. That was mine also⁠—such as it was. I’ve never brought off a really big coup yet; when I do I shall chuck it up.”

Yes, I remembered both cases very well. To think that he was their author! It was incredible, outrageous, inconceivable. Then my eyes would fall upon the table, twinkling and glittering in a hundred places, and incredulity was at an end.

“How came you to begin?” I asked, as curiosity overcame mere wonder, and a fascination for his career gradually wove itself into my fascination for the man.

“Ah! that’s a long story,” said Raffles. “It was in the Colonies, when I was out there playing cricket. It’s too long a story to tell you now, but I was in much the same fix that you were in tonight, and it was my only way out. I never meant it for anything more; but I’d tasted blood, and it was all over with me. Why should I work when I could steal? Why settle down to some humdrum uncongenial billet, when excitement, romance, danger and a decent living were all going begging together? Of course it’s very wrong, but we can’t all be moralists, and the distribution of wealth is very wrong to begin with. Besides, you’re not at it all the time. I’m sick of quoting Gilbert’s lines to myself, but they’re profoundly true. I only wonder if you’ll like the life as much as I do!”

“Like it?” I cried out. “Not I! It’s no life for me. Once is enough!”

“You wouldn’t give me a hand another time?”

“Don’t ask me, Raffles. Don’t ask me, for God’s sake!”

“Yet you said you would do anything for me! You asked me to name my crime! But I knew at the time you didn’t mean it; you didn’t go back on me tonight, and that ought to satisfy me, goodness knows! I suppose I’m ungrateful, and unreasonable, and all that. I ought to let it end at this. But you’re the very man for me, Bunny, the⁠—very⁠—man! Just think how we got through tonight. Not a scratch⁠—not a hitch! There’s nothing very terrible in it, you see; there never would be, while we worked together.”

He was standing in front of me with a hand on either shoulder; he was smiling as he knew so well how to smile. I turned on my heel, planted my elbows on the chimneypiece, and my burning head between my hands. Next instant a still heartier hand had fallen on my back.

“All right, my boy! You are quite right and I’m worse than wrong. I’ll never ask it again. Go, if you want to, and come again about midday for the cash. There was no bargain; but, of course, I’ll get you out of your scrape⁠—especially after the way you’ve stood by me tonight.”

I was round again with my blood on fire.

“I’ll do it again,” I said, through my teeth.

He shook his head. “Not you,” he said, smiling quite good-humoredly on my insane enthusiasm.

“I will,” I cried with an oath. “I’ll lend you a hand as often as you like! What does it matter now? I’ve been in it once. I’ll be in it again. I’ve gone to the devil anyhow. I can’t go back, and wouldn’t if I could. Nothing matters another rap! When you want me, I’m your man!”

And that is how Raffles and I joined felonious forces on the Ides of March.

A Costume Piece

London was just then talking of one whose name is already a name and nothing more. Reuben Rosenthall had made his millions on the diamond fields of South Africa, and had come home to enjoy them according to his lights; how he went to work will scarcely be forgotten by any reader of the halfpenny evening papers, which revelled in endless anecdotes of his original indigence and present prodigality, varied with interesting particulars of the extraordinary establishment which the millionaire set up in St. John’s Wood. Here he kept a retinue of Kaffirs, who were literally his slaves; and hence he would sally, with enormous diamonds in his shirt and on his finger, in the convoy of a prizefighter of heinous repute, who was not, however, by any means the worst element in the Rosenthall mélange. So said common gossip; but the fact was sufficiently established by the interference of the police on at least one occasion, followed by certain magisterial proceedings which were reported with justifiable gusto and huge headlines in the newspapers aforesaid.

And this was all one knew of Reuben Rosenthall up to the time when the Old Bohemian Club, having fallen on evil days, found it worth its while to organize a great dinner in honor of so wealthy an exponent of the club’s principles. I was not at the banquet myself, but a member took Raffles, who told me all about it that very night.

“Most extraordinary show I ever went to in my life,” said he. “As for the man himself⁠—well, I was prepared for something grotesque, but the fellow fairly took my breath away. To begin