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

with, he’s the most astounding brute to look at, well over six feet, with a chest like a barrel, and a great hooknose, and the reddest hair and whiskers you ever saw. Drank like a fire-engine, but only got drunk enough to make us a speech that I wouldn’t have missed for ten pounds. I’m only sorry you weren’t there, too, Bunny, old chap.”

I began to be sorry myself, for Raffles was anything but an excitable person, and never had I seen him so excited before. Had he been following Rosenthall’s example? His coming to my rooms at midnight, merely to tell me about his dinner, was in itself enough to excuse a suspicion which was certainly at variance with my knowledge of A. J. Raffles.

“What did he say?” I inquired mechanically, divining some subtler explanation of this visit, and wondering what on earth it could be.

“Say?” cried Raffles. “What did he not say! He boasted of his rise, he bragged of his riches, and he blackguarded society for taking him up for his money and dropping him out of sheer pique and jealousy because he had so much. He mentioned names, too, with the most charming freedom, and swore he was as good a man as the Old Country had to show⁠—pace the Old Bohemians. To prove it he pointed to a great diamond in the middle of his shirtfront with a little finger loaded with another just like it: which of our bloated princes could show a pair like that? As a matter of fact, they seemed quite wonderful stones, with a curious purple gleam to them that must mean a pot of money. But old Rosenthall swore he wouldn’t take fifty thousand pounds for the two, and wanted to know where the other man was who went about with twenty-five thousand in his shirtfront and another twenty-five on his little finger. He didn’t exist. If he did, he wouldn’t have the pluck to wear them. But he had⁠—he’d tell us why. And before you could say Jack Robinson he had whipped out a whacking great revolver!”

“Not at the table?”

“At the table! In the middle of his speech! But it was nothing to what he wanted to do. He actually wanted us to let him write his name in bullets on the opposite wall, to show us why he wasn’t afraid to go about in all his diamonds! That brute Purvis, the prizefighter, who is his paid bully, had to bully his master before he could be persuaded out of it. There was quite a panic for the moment; one fellow was saying his prayers under the table, and the waiters bolted to a man.”

“What a grotesque scene!”

“Grotesque enough, but I rather wish they had let him go the whole hog and blaze away. He was as keen as knives to show us how he could take care of his purple diamonds; and, do you know, Bunny, I was as keen as knives to see.”

And Raffles leaned towards me with a sly, slow smile that made the hidden meaning of his visit only too plain to me at last.

“So you think of having a try for his diamonds yourself?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“It is horribly obvious, I admit. But⁠—yes, I have set my heart upon them! To be quite frank, I have had them on my conscience for some time; one couldn’t hear so much of the man, and his prizefighter, and his diamonds, without feeling it a kind of duty to have a go for them; but when it comes to brandishing a revolver and practically challenging the world, the thing becomes inevitable. It is simply thrust upon one. I was fated to hear that challenge, Bunny, and I, for one, must take it up. I was only sorry I couldn’t get on my hind legs and say so then and there.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t see the necessity as things are with us; but, of course, I’m your man.”

My tone may have been halfhearted. I did my best to make it otherwise. But it was barely a month since our Bond Street exploit, and we certainly could have afforded to behave ourselves for some time to come. We had been getting along so nicely: by his advice I had scribbled a thing or two; inspired by Raffles, I had even done an article on our own jewel robbery; and for the moment I was quite satisfied with this sort of adventure. I thought we ought to know when we were well off, and could see no point in our running fresh risks before we were obliged. On the other hand, I was anxious not to show the least disposition to break the pledge that I had given a month ago. But it was not on my manifest disinclination that Raffles fastened.

“Necessity, my dear Bunny? Does the writer only write when the wolf is at the door? Does the painter paint for bread alone? Must you and I be driven to crime like Tom of Bow and Dick of Whitechapel? You pain me, my dear chap; you needn’t laugh, because you do. Art for art’s sake is a vile catchword, but I confess it appeals to me. In this case my motives are absolutely pure, for I doubt if we shall ever be able to dispose of such peculiar stones. But if I don’t have a try for them⁠—after tonight⁠—I shall never be able to hold up my head again.”

His eye twinkled, but it glittered, too.

“We shall have our work cut out,” was all I said.

“And do you suppose I should be keen on it if we hadn’t?” cried Raffles. “My dear fellow, I would rob St. Paul’s Cathedral if I could, but I could no more scoop a till when the shopwalker wasn’t looking than I could bag the apples out of an old woman’s basket. Even that little business last month was a sordid affair, but it was necessary, and I think its