The Black Mask - E. W. Hornung (10 best books of all time txt) 📗

said, but the perspiration on my body seemed already to have turned into a skin of ice. Then I caught the faint reflection of my own face in the casing of the fresco, and it frightened me into some semblance of myself as Raffles joined me with his hands in his pockets. But my fear and indignation were redoubled at the sight of him, when a single glance convinced me that his pockets were as empty as his hands, and his mad outrage the most wanton and reckless of his whole career.

“Ah, very interesting, very interesting, but nothing to what they have in the museum at Naples or in Pompeii itself. You must go there some day, Bunny. I’ve a good mind to take you myself. Meanwhile⁠—slow march! The beggar hasn’t moved an eyelid. We may swing for him if you show indecent haste!”

“We!” I whispered. “We!”

And my knees knocked together as we came up to the chatting attendants. But Raffles must needs interrupt them to ask the way to the Prehistoric Saloon.

“At the top of the stairs.”

“Thank you. Then we’ll work round that way to the Egyptian part.”

And we left them resuming their providential chat.

“I believe you’re mad,” I said bitterly as we went.

“I believe I was,” admitted Raffles; “but I’m not now, and I’ll see you through. A hundred and thirty-nine yards, wasn’t it? Then it can’t be more than a hundred and twenty now⁠—not as much. Steady, Bunny, for God’s sake. It’s slow march⁠—for our lives.”

There was this much management. The rest was our colossal luck. A hansom was being paid off at the foot of the steps outside, and in we jumped, Raffles shouting “Charing Cross!” for all Bloomsbury to hear.

We had turned into Bloomsbury Street without exchanging a syllable when he struck the trap-door with his fist.

“Where the devil are you driving us?”

“Charing Cross, sir.”

“I said King’s Cross! Round you spin, and drive like blazes, or we miss our train! There’s one to York at 10:35,” added Raffles as the trap-door slammed; “we’ll book there, Bunny, and then we’ll slope through the subway to the Metropolitan, and so to ground via Baker Street and Earl’s Court.”

And actually in half an hour he was seated once more in the hired carrying chair, while the porter and I staggered upstairs with my decrepit charge, for whose shattered strength even one hour in Kew Gardens had proved too much! Then, and not until then, when we had got rid of the porter and were alone at last, did I tell Raffles, in the most nervous English at my command, frankly and exactly what I thought of him and of his latest deed. Once started, moreover, I spoke as I have seldom spoken to living man; and Raffles, of all men, stood my abuse without a murmur; or rather he sat it out, too astounded even to take off his hat, though I thought his eyebrows would have lifted it from his head.

“But it always was your infernal way,” I was savagely concluding. “You make one plan, and yet you tell me another⁠—”

“Not today, Bunny, I swear!”

“You mean to tell me you really did start with the bare idea of finding a place to hide in for a night?”

“Of course I did.”

“It was to be the mere reconnoitre you pretended?”

“There was no pretence about it, Bunny.”

“Then why on earth go and do what you did?”

“The reason would be obvious to anyone but you,” said Raffles, still with no unkindly scorn. “It was the temptation of a minute⁠—the final impulse of the fraction of a second, when Roberto saw that I was tempted, and let me see that he saw it. It’s not a thing I care to do, and I shan’t be happy till the papers tell me the poor devil is alive. But a knockout shot was the only chance for us then.”

“Why? You don’t get run in for being tempted, nor yet for showing that you are!”

“But I should have deserved running in if I hadn’t yielded to such a temptation as that, Bunny. It was a chance in a hundred thousand! We might go there every day of our lives, and never again be the only outsiders in the room, with the billiard-marking Johnnie practically out of earshot at one and the same time. It was a gift from the gods; not to have taken it would have been flying in the face of Providence.”

“But you didn’t take it,” said I. “You went and left it behind.”

I wish I had had a Kodak for the little smile with which Raffles shook his head, for it was one that he kept for those great moments of which our vocation is not devoid. All this time he had been wearing his hat, tilted a little over eyebrows no longer raised. And now at last I knew where the gold cup was.

It stood for days upon his chimneypiece, this costly trophy whose ancient history and final fate filled newspaper columns even in these days of Jubilee, and for which the flower of Scotland Yard was said to be seeking high and low. Our constable, we learnt, had been stunned only, and, from the moment that I brought him an evening paper with the news, Raffles’s spirits rose to a height inconsistent with his equable temperament, and as unusual in him as the sudden impulse upon which he had acted with such effect. The cup itself appealed to me no more than it had done before. Exquisite it might be, handsome it was, but so light in the hand that the mere gold of it would scarcely have poured three figures out of melting-pot. And what said Raffles but that he would never melt it at all!

“Taking it was an offence against the laws of the land, Bunny. That is nothing. But destroying it would be a crime against God and Art, and may I be spitted on the vane of St. Mary Abbot’s if I commit it!”

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