But I was not convinced. There was something else at the bottom of this sudden impulse and its inconceivably sudden execution. Why had he never told me of this plan? Well, because it had never become one until after the morning's work at Levy's bank, in itself a reason for being out of the way, as I myself admitted. But he would have told me if only I had turned up at seven: he had never meant to give me time for much packing, added Raffles, as he was anxious that neither of us should leave the impression that we had gone far afield.
I thought this was childish, and treating me like a child, to which, however, I was used; but more than ever did I feel that Raffles was not being frank with me, that he for one was making good his escape from something or somebody besides Dan Levy. And in the end he admitted that this was so. But we had not dashed through Sitting- bourne and Faversham before I wormed my way to about the last discovery that I expected to make concerning A. J. Raffles.
'What an inquisitor you are, Bunny!' said he, putting down an evening paper that he had only just taken up. 'Can't you see that this whole show has been no ordinary one for me? I've been fighting for a crowd I rather love. Their battle has got on my nerves as none of my own ever did; and now it's won I honestly funk their gratitude as much as anything.'
That was another hard saying to swallow; and yet, as Raffles said it, I knew it to be true. He was looking me full in the face in the ample light of the first-class compartment, which we of course had to ourselves. Some softening influence seemed to have been at work upon him; he looked resolute as ever, but full of regret, than which nothing was rarer in A.J.
'I suppose,' said I, 'that poor old Garland has treated you to a pretty good dose already?'
'Yes, Bunny; that he has.'
'And well he may, and well may Teddy and Camilla Belsize!'
'But I couldn't do with it from them,' said Raffles, with quite a bitter little laugh. 'Teddy wasn't there, of course; he's up north for that rotten match the team play nowadays against Liverpool. But the game's fizzling, he'll be home to-morrow, and I simply can't face him and his Camilla. He'll be a married man before we see him again,' added Raffles, getting hold of his evening paper once more.
'Is that to come off so soon?'
'The sooner the better,' said Raffles, strangely.
'You're not quite happy about it,' said I, with execrable tact, I know, and yet deliberately, because his view of this marriage had always puzzled me.
'I'm happy as long as they are,' responded Raffles, not without a laugh at his own meritorious sentiment. 'I only wish,' he sighed, 'that they were both absolutely worthy of each other!'
'And you don't think they are?'
'No, I don't.'
'You think such a lot of young Garland?'
'I'm very fond of him, Bunny.'
'But you see his faults?'
'I've always seen them; they're not full-fathom-five like mine!'
'Yet you think she's not good enough for him?'
'Not good enough—she?' and he stopped himself at that. But his voice was enough for me; the unspoken antithesis was stronger than words could have made it. Scales fell from my eyes. 'Where on earth did you get that idea?'
'I thought it was yours, A.J.'
'But why?'
'You seemed to disapprove of the engagement from the first.'
'So I did, after what poor Teddy had been up to in his extremity! I may as well be honest about that now. It was all right in a pal of ours, Bunny, but all wrong in the man who dreamt of marrying Camilla Belsize.'
'Yet you have just been moving heaven and hell to make it possible for them to marry after all!'
Raffles made another attempt upon his paper. I marvel now that he let me catechise him as I was doing. But the truth had just dawned upon me, and I simply had to see it whole as the risen sun, whereas Raffles seemed under no such passionate necessity to keep it to himself.
'Teddy's all right,' said he, inconsistently. 'He'll never try anything of the kind again; he's had a lesson for life. Besides, I don't often take my hand from the plough, as you ought to know. Bunny. It was I who brought those two together. But it was none of my mundane business to put them asunder again.'
'It was you who brought them together?' I repeated insidiously.
'More or less, Bunny. It was at some cricket week, if it wasn't two weeks running; they were pals already, but she and I were greater pals before the first week was over.'
'And yet you didn't cut him out!'
'My dear Bunny, I should hope not.'
'But you might have done, A.J.; don't tell me you couldn't if you'd tried.'
Raffles played with his paper without replying. He was no coxcomb. But neither would he ape an alien humility.
'It wouldn't have been the game, Bunny—won or lost—Teddy or no Teddy: And yet,' he added, with pensive 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
