Mr. Justice Raffles

CHAPTER III

Council of War

Raffles was humming a snatch of something too choice for me to recognise when I drew in my head from the glorious night. The folding-doors were shut, and the grandfather's clock on one side of them made it almost midnight. Raffles would not stop his tune for me, but he pointed to the syphon and decanter, and I replenished my glass. He had a glass beside him also, which was less usual, but he did not sit down beside his glass; he was far too fidgety for that; even bothering about a pair of pictures which had changed places under some zealous hand in his absence, or rather two of Mr. Hollyer's fine renderings of Watts and Burne-Jones of which I had never seen Raffles take the slightest notice before. But it seemed that they must hang where he had hung them, and for once I saw them hanging straight. The books had also suffered from good intentions; he gave them up with a shrug. Archives and arcana he tested or examined, and so a good many minutes passed without a word. But when he stole back into the inner room, after waiting a little at the folding-doors, there was still some faint strain upon his lips; it was only when he returned, shutting the door none too quietly behind him, that he stopped humming and spoke out with a grimmer face than he had worn all night.

'That boy's in a bigger hole than he thinks. But we must pull him out between us before play begins. It's one clear call for us, Bunny!'

'Is it a bigger hole than you thought?' I asked, thinking myself of the conversation which I had managed not to overhear.

'I don't say that, Bunny, though I never should have dreamt of his old father being in one too. I own I can't understand that. They live in a regular country house in the middle of Kensington, and there are only the two of them. But I've given Teddy my word not to go to the old man for the money, so it's no use talking about it.'

But apparently it was what they had been talking about behind the folding-doors; it only surprised me to see how much Raffles took it to heart.

'So you have made up your mind to raise the money elsewhere?'

'Before that lad in there opens his eyes.'

'Is he asleep already?'

'Like the dead,' said Raffles, dropping into his chair and drinking thoughtfully; 'and so he will be till we wake him up. It's a ticklish experiment, Bunny, but even a splitting head for the first hour's play is better than a sleepless night; I've tried both, so I ought to know. I shouldn't even wonder if he did himself more than justice to-morrow; one often does when just less than fit; it takes off that dangerous edge of over-keenness which so often cuts one's own throat.'

'But what do you think of it all, A.J.?'

'Not so much worse than I let him think I thought.'

'But you must have been amazed?'

'I am past amazement at the worst thing the best of us ever does, and contrariwise of course. Your rich man proves a pauper, and your honest man plays the knave; we're all of us capable of every damned thing. But let us thank our stars and Teddy's that we got back just when we did.'

'Why at that moment?'

Raffles produced the unfinished cheque, shook his head over it, and sent it fluttering across to me.

'Was there ever such a childish attempt? They'd have kept him in the bank while they sent for the police. If ever you want to play this game, Bunny, you must let me coach you up a bit.'

'But it was never one of your games, A.J.!'

'Only incidentally once or twice; it never appealed to me,' said Raffles, sending expanding circlets of smoke to crown the girls on the Golden Stair that was no longer tilted in a leaning tower. 'No, Bunny, an occasional exeat at school is my modest record as a forger, though I admit that augured ill. Do you remember how I left my cheque-book about on purpose for what's happened? To be sinned against instead of sinning, in all the papers, would have set one up as an honest man for life. I thought, God forgive me, of poor old Barraclough or somebody of that kind. And to think it should be 'the friend in whom my soul confided'! Not that I ever did confide in him, Bunny, much as I love this lad.'

Despite the tense of that last statement, it was the old Raffles who was speaking now, the incisively cynical old Raffles that I still knew the best, the Raffles of the impudent quotations and jaunty jeux d'esprit. This Raffles only meant half he said—but had generally done the other half! I met his mood by reminding him (out of his own Whitaker) that the sun rose at 3.51, in case he thought of breaking in anywhere that night. I had the honour of making Raffles smile.

'I did think of it, Bunny,' said he. 'But there's only one crib that we could crack in decency for this money; and our Mr. Shylock's is not the sort of city that Caesar himself would have taken ex itinere. It's a case for the testudo and all the rest of it. You must remember that I've been there, Bunny; at least I've visited his 'moving tent,' if one may jump from an ancient to an 'Ancient and Modern.' And if that was as impregnable as I found it, his permanent citadel must be perched upon the very rock of defence!'

'You must tell me about that, Raffles,' said I, tiring a little of his kaleidoscopic metaphors. Let him be as allusive as he liked when there was no risky work on hand, and I was his lucky and delighted audience till all hours of the night or morning. But for a deed of darkness I wanted fewer fireworks, a steadier light from his intellectual lantern. And yet these were the very moments that inspired his pyrotechnic displays.

'Oh, I shall tell you all right,' said Raffles. 'But just now the next few hours are of more importance than the last few weeks. Of course Shylock's the man for our money; but knowing our tribesmen as I do, I think we had better begin by borrowing it like simple Christians.'

'Then we have it to pay back again.'

'And that's the psychological moment for raiding our 'miser's sunless coffers'—if he happens to have any. It will give us time to find out.'

'But he doesn't keep open office all night,' I objected.

'But he opens at nine o'clock in the morning,' said Raffles, 'to catch the early stockbroker who would rather be bled than hammered.'

'Who told you that?'

'Our Mrs. Shylock.'

'You must have made great friends with her?'

'More in pity than for the sake of secrets.'

'But you went where the secrets were?'

'And she gave them away wholesale.'

'She would,' I said, 'to you.'

'She told me a lot about the impending libel action.'

'Shylock v. Fact?'

'Yes; it's coming on before the vacation, you know.'

'So I saw in some paper.'

'But you know what it's all about, Bunny?'

'No, I don't.'

'Another old rascal, the Maharajah of Hathipur, and his perfectly fabulous debts. It seems he's been in our Mr. Shylock's clutches for years, but instead of taking his pound of flesh he's always increasing the amount. Of course that's the whole duty of money-lenders, but now they say the figure runs well into six. No one has any sympathy with that old heathen; he's said to have been a pal of Nana's before the Mutiny, and in it up to the neck he only saved by turning against his own lot in time; in any case it's the pot and the kettle so far as moral colour is concerned. But I believe it's an actual fact that syndicates have been formed to buy up the black man's debts and take a reasonable interest, only the dirty white man always gets to windward of the syndicate. They're on the point of bringing it off, when old Levy inveigles the nigger into some new Oriental extravagance. Fact has exposed the whole thing, and printed blackmailing letters which Shylock swears are forgeries. That's both their cases in a philippine! The leeches told the Jew he must do his Carlsbad this year before the case came on; and the tremendous amount it's going to cost may account for his dunning old clients the