candour, 'we were getting on like a semi-detached house on fire! I burnt my fingers, I don't mind telling you; if I hadn't been what I am, Bunny, I might have taken my courage in all ten of 'em, and 'put it to the touch, to win or lose it all.''
'I wish you had,' I whispered, as he studied his paper upside down.
'Why, Bunny? What rot you do talk!' he cried, but only with the skin-deep irritation of a half-hearted displeasure.
'She's the only woman I ever met,' I went on unguardedly, 'who was your mate at heart—in pluck—in temperament!'
'How the devil do you know?' cried Raffles, off his own guard now, and staring in my guilty face.
But I have never denied that I could emulate his presence of mind upon occasion.
'You forget what a lot we saw of each other last Thursday in the rain.'
'Did she talk about me then?'
'A little.'
'Had she her knife in me, Bunny?'
'Well—yes—a little!'
Raffles smiled stoically: it was a smile of duty done and odds well damned.
'Up to the hilt, Bunny, up to the hilt is what you mean. I stuck it in for her. It's easily done, and it needed doing, for my sake if not for hers. Sooner or later I should have choked her off, so the sooner the better. You play them false, you cut a dance, you let them down over something that doesn't matter, and they'll never give you a dog's chance over anything that does! I got her to write and never answered. What do you think of that for a cavalier swine? I said I'd call before I went abroad, and only wired to say sorry I couldn't. I don't say it would or could have been all right otherwise; but you see it was all right for Teddy before I got back! Which was as it was to be. She would hardly look at me at first last week; but, Bunny, she wasn't above looking when that old Shylock was playing at giving me away before them all. She looked at him, and she looked at me, and I've got one of the looks she gave him, and another that she never meant me to see, bottled in my blackguard heart forever!'
Raffles looked dim to me across the narrow compartment; but there was no nonsense in his look or voice. I longed to tell him all I knew, all that she had said to me and he had unwittingly interpreted; that she loved him, as now at last I knew she did; but I had given her my word, and after all it was a word to keep for both their sakes as well as for its own.
'You were made for each other, you two!'
That was all I said, and Raffles only laughed.
'All the more reason to hook it round the world, Bunny, before there's a dog's chance of our meeting again.'
He opened his paper the proper way up at last. The train rushed on with flying sparks, and flying lights along the line. We were getting nearer Dover now. My next brilliant remark was that I could 'smell the sea.' Raffles let it pass; he had been talking of the close-of-play scores in the stop-press column, and I thought he was studying them rather silently. Or perhaps he was not studying them at all, but still thinking of Camilla Belsize, and the look from those brave bright eyes that she had never meant him to see. Then, suddenly, I perceived that his forehead was glistening white and wet in the lamplight.
'What is it, Raffles? What's the matter?'
He reversed his paper with a shaky hand, and thrust it upon me without a word, merely pointing out four or five ill-printed lines of latest news. This was the item that danced before my eyes:
TRAGIC DEATH OF FAMOUS MONEYLENDER
Mr. Daniel Levy, the financier, reported shot dead at front gates of his residence in Thames Valley at 5.30 this afternoon, by unknown man who made good his escape.
I looked up into a ghastly face.
'It was half-past five when I left him, Bunny!'
'You left him—'
I could not ask it. But the ghastly face had given me a ghastlier thought.
'As well as you are, Bunny!' so Raffles completed my sentence. 'Do you think I'd leave him for dead at his own gates?'
Of course I denied the thought; but it had come to haunt me none the less; for if I had sailed so near such a deed, what about Raffles under equal provocation? And what such motive for the very flight that we were making with but a moment's preparation? It all fitted in, except the face and voice of Raffles as they had been while he was speaking of Camilla Belsize; but again, the fatal act would indeed have made him feel that he had lost her, and loosened his tongue upon his loss as something had done without doubt; and as for voice and face, there was no longer in either any lack of the mad excitement of the hunted man.
'But what were you doing at his gates, A.J.?'
'I saw him home. It was on my way. Why not?'
'And you say you left him at half-past five?'
'I swear it. I looked at my watch, thinking of my train, and my watch is plumb right.'
'And you heard no shot as you went on?'
'No—I was hurrying. I even ran. I must have been seen running! And now I'm like Charley's Aunt,' he went on with his sardonic laugh, 'and bound to stick to it until they catch me by the leg. Now you know what Mackenzie was doing down there! The old hound may be on my track already. There's no going back now.'
'Not for an innocent man?'
'Not for such dubious innocence as mine, Bunny! Remember all we've been up to with poor old Levy for the last twenty-four hours.'
He paused, remembering everything himself, as I could see; and the human compassion in his face should have been sufficient answer to my vile misgivings. But there was contrition in his look as well, and that was a much rarer sign in Raffles. Rarer still was a glance of alarm almost akin to panic, alike without precedent in my experience of my friend and beyond belief in my reading of his character. But through all there peeped a conscious enjoyment of these new sensations, a very zest in the novelty of fear, which I knew to be at once signally characteristic, and yet compatible either with his story or with my own base dread.
'Nobody need ever know about that,' said I, with the certainty that nobody ever would know through the one other who knew already. But Raffles threw cold water upon that poor little flicker of confidence and good hope.
'It's bound to come out, Bunny. They'll start accounting for his last hours on earth, and they'll stick ominously in the first five minutes working backwards. Then I am described as bolting from the scene, then identified with myself, then found to have fled the country! Then Carlsbad, then our first row with him, then yesterday's big cheque; my heavy double finds he was impersonated at the bank; it all comes out bit by bit, and if I'm caught it means that dingy Old Bailey dock on the capital charge!'
'Then I'll be with you,' said I, 'as accessory before and after the fact. That's one thing!'
'No, no, Bunny! You must shake me off and get back to town. I'll push you out as we slow down through the streets of Dover, and you can put up for the night at the Lord Warden. That's the sort of public place for the likes of us to lie low in, Bunny. Don't forget all my rules when I'm gone.'
'You're not going without me, A.J.'
'Not even if I did it, Bunny?'
'No; less than ever then!'
Raffles leant across and took my hand. There was a flash of mischief in his eyes, but a very tender light as well.
'It makes me almost wish I were what I do believe you thought I was,' said he, 'to see you stick to me all the same! But it's about time that we were making the lights of Dover,' he added, beating an abrupt retreat from sentiment, even to the length of getting up and looking out as we clattered through a country station. His head was in again before the platform was left behind, a pale face peering into mine, real panic flaring in those altered eyes, like blue lights at sea. 'My God, Bunny!' cried Raffles. 'I believe Dover's as far as I shall ever get!'
'Why? What's the matter now?'
'A head sticking out of the next compartment but one!'
