COMPLETE RAFFLES SERIES & SHERLOCK HOLMES ADVENTURES - COLLECTOR'S EDITION. E. W. Hornung

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СКАЧАТЬ they wouldn't promise to keep me by myself. We ought to see about it before they shove in some alien. In any case we shall have to get out of this."

      For a quartermaster had entered the wheelhouse, and even while we had been speaking the pilot had taken possession of the bridge; as we descended, the tender left us with flying handkerchiefs and shrill good-bys; and as we bowed to Miss Werner on the promenade deck, there came a deep, slow throbbing underfoot, and our voyage had begun.

      It did not begin pleasantly between Raffles and me. On deck he had overborne my stubborn perplexity by dint of a forced though forceful joviality; in his cabin the gloves were off.

      "You idiot," he snarled, "you've given me away again!"

      "How have I given you away?"

      I ignored the separate insult in his last word.

      "How? I should have thought any clod could see that I meant us to meet by chance!"

      "After taking both tickets yourself?"

      "They knew nothing about that on board; besides, I hadn't decided when I took the tickets."

      "Then you should have let me know when you did decide. You lay your plans, and never say a word, and expect me to tumble to them by light of nature. How was I to know you had anything on?"

      I had turned the tables with some effect. Raffles almost hung his head.

      "The fact is, Bunny, I didn't mean you to know. You—you've grown such a pious rabbit in your old age!"

      My nickname and his tone went far to mollify me, other things went farther, but I had much to forgive him still.

      "If you were afraid of writing," I pursued, "it was your business to give me the tip the moment I set foot on board. I would have taken it all right. I am not so virtuous as all that."

      Was it my imagination, or did Raffles look slightly ashamed? If so, it was for the first and last time in all the years I knew him; nor can I swear to it even now.

      "That," said he, "was the very thing I meant to do—to lie in wait in my room and get you as you passed. But—"

      "You were better engaged?"

      "Say otherwise."

      "The charming Miss Werner?"

      "She is quite charming."

      "Most Australian girls are," said I.

      "How did you know she was one?" he cried.

      "I heard her speak."

      "Brute!" said Raffles, laughing; "she has no more twang than you have. Her people are German, she has been to school in Dresden, and is on her way out alone."

      "Money?" I inquired.

      "Confound you!" he said, and, though he was laughing, I thought it was a point at which the subject might be changed.

      "Well," I said, "it wasn't for Miss Werner you wanted us to play strangers, was it? You have some deeper game than that, eh?"

      "I suppose I have."

      "Then hadn't you better tell me what it is?"

      Raffles treated me to the old cautious scrutiny that I knew so well; the very familiarity of it, after all these months, set me smiling in a way that might have reassured him; for dimly already I divined his enterprise.

      "It won't send you off in the pilot's boat, Bunny?"

      "Not quite."

      "Then—you remember the pearl you wrote the—"

      I did not wait for him to finish his sentence.

      "You've got it!" I cried, my face on fire, for I caught sight of it that moment in the stateroom mirror.

      Raffles seemed taken aback.

      "Not yet," said he; "but I mean to have it before we get to Naples."

      "Is it on board?"

      "Yes."

      "But how—where—who's got it?"

      "A little German officer, a whipper-snapper with perpendicular mustaches."

      "I saw him in the smoke-room."

      "That's the chap; he's always there. Herr Captain Wilhelm von Heumann, if you look in the list. Well, he's the special envoy of the emperor, and he's taking the pearl out with him."

      "You found this out in Bremen?"

      "No, in Berlin, from a newspaper man I know there. I'm ashamed to tell you, Bunny, that I went there on purpose!"

      I burst out laughing.

      "You needn't be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was rather hoping you were going to propose the other day on the river."

      "You were HOPING it?" said Raffles, with his eyes wide open. Indeed, it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much more ashamed than I felt.

      "Yes," I answered, "I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn't going to propose it."

      "Yet you would have listened to me the other day?"

      Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not brazenly, you understand; not even now with the gusto of a man who savors such an adventure for its own sake, but doggedly, defiantly, through my teeth, as one who had tried to live honestly and failed. And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that record was written only in one's own soul. It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it.

      Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of checkers; why not reconcile one's self to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My conclusion he considered absurd.

      "But you err in good company, Bunny, for all the cheap moralists who preach the same twaddle: old Virgil was the first and worst offender of you all. I back myself to climb out of Avernus any day I like, and sooner or later I shall climb out for good. I suppose I can't very well turn myself into a Limited Liability Company. But I could retire and settle down and live blamelessly ever after. I'm not sure that it couldn't be done on this pearl alone!"

      "Then you don't still think it too remarkable to sell?"

      "We might take a fishery and haul it up with smaller fry. It would come after months of ill luck, just as we were going to sell the schooner; by Jove, it would be the talk of the Pacific!"

      "Well, we've got to get СКАЧАТЬ