A Thief in the Night - E. W. Hornung (phonics reader .TXT) 📗

you meet queer fish at the Imperial Boxing Club. You may remember that he telephoned to his man to prepare supper for us, and that you and he discussed telephones and treasure as we marched through the midnight streets. He was certainly bucking about his trophies, and for the sake of the argument you will be good enough to admit that you probably bucked about yours. What happens? You are overheard; you are followed; you are worked into the same scheme, and robbed on the same night.”

“And you really think this will meet the case?”

“I am quite certain of it, Bunny, so far as it rests wit us to meet the case at all.”

“Then give me another cigarette, my dear fellow, and let me push on to Scotland Yard.”

Raffles held up both hands in admiring horror.

“Scotland Yard!”

“To give a false description of what you took from that drawer in my wardrobe.”

“A false description! Bunny, you have no more to learn from me. Time was when I wouldn’t have let you go there without me to retrieve a lost umbrella⁠—let alone a lost cause!”

And for once I was not sorry for Raffles to have the last unworthy word, as he stood once more at his outer door and gayly waved me down the stairs.

The Spoils of Sacrilege

There was one deed of those days which deserved a place in our original annals. It is the deed of which I am personally most ashamed. I have traced the course of a score of felonies, from their source in the brain of Raffles to their issue in his hands. I have omitted all mention of the one which emanated from my own miserable mind. But in these supplementary memoirs, wherein I pledged myself to extenuate nothing more that I might have to tell of Raffles, it is only fair that I should make as clean a breast of my own baseness. It was I, then, and I alone, who outraged natural sentiment, and trampled the expiring embers of elementary decency, by proposing and planning the raid upon my own old home.

I would not accuse myself the more vehemently by making excuses at this point. Yet I feel bound to state that it was already many years since the place had passed from our possession into that of an utter alien, against whom I harbored a prejudice which was some excuse in itself. He had enlarged and altered the dear old place out of knowledge; nothing had been good enough for him as it stood in our day. The man was a hunting maniac, and where my dear father used to grow prize peaches under glass, this vandal was soon stabling his hothouse thoroughbreds, which took prizes in their turn at all the country shows. It was a southern county, and I never went down there without missing another greenhouse and noting a corresponding extension to the stables. Not that I ever set foot in the grounds from the day we left; but for some years I used to visit old friends in the neighborhood, and could never resist the temptation to reconnoiter the scenes of my childhood. And so far as could be seen from the road⁠—which it stood too near⁠—the house itself appeared to be the one thing that the horsey purchaser had left much as he found it.

My only other excuse may be none at all in any eyes but mine. It was my passionate desire at this period to “keep up my end” with Raffles in every department of the game felonious. He would insist upon an equal division of all proceeds; it was for me to earn my share. So far I had been useful only at a pinch; the whole credit of any real success belonged invariably to Raffles. It had always been his idea. That was the tradition which I sought to end, and no means could compare with that of my unscrupulous choice. There was the one house in England of which I knew every inch, and Raffles only what I told him. For once I must lead, and Raffles follow, whether he liked it or not. He saw that himself; and I think he liked it better than he liked me for the desecration in view; but I had hardened my heart, and his feelings were too fine for actual remonstrance on such a point.

I, in my obduracy, went to foul extremes. I drew plans of all the floors from memory. I actually descended upon my friends in the neighborhood, with the sole object of obtaining snapshots over our own old garden wall. Even Raffles could not keep his eyebrows down when I showed him the prints one morning in the Albany. But he confined his open criticisms to the house.

“Built in the late ’sixties, I see,” said Raffles, “or else very early in the ’seventies.”

“Exactly when it was built,” I replied. “But that’s worthy of a sixpenny detective, Raffles! How on earth did you know?”

“That slate tower bang over the porch, with the dormer windows and the iron railing and flagstaff atop makes us a present of the period. You see them on almost every house of a certain size built about thirty years ago. They are quite the most useless excrescences I know.”

“Ours wasn’t,” I answered, with some warmth. “It was my sanctum sanctorum in the holidays. I smoked my first pipe up there, and wrote my first verses.”

Raffles laid a kindly hand upon my shoulder.

“Bunny, Bunny, you can rob the old place, and yet you can’t hear a word against it?”

“That’s different,” said I relentlessly. “The tower was there in my time, but the man I mean to rob was not.”

“You really do mean to do it, Bunny?”

“By myself, if necessary!” I averred.

“Not again, Bunny, not again,” rejoined Raffles, laughing as he shook his head. “But do you think the man has enough to make it worth our while to go so far afield?”

“Far afield! It’s not