The Black Mask by E. W. Hornung (read after .TXT) 📕

my dear Bunny? He is not only in it, but of it; there’s no comparison between us there. Society is in rings like a target, and we never were in the bull’s-eye, however thick you may lay on the ink! I was asked for my cricket. I haven’t forgotten it yet. But this fellow’s one of themselves, with the right of entrée into the houses which we could only ‘enter’ in a professional sense. That’s obvious unless all these little exploits are the work of different hands, which they as obviously are not. And it’s why I’d give five hundred pounds to put salt on him tonight!”

“Not you,” said I, as I drained my glass in festive incredulity.

“But I would, my dear Bunny. Waiter! another half-bottle of this,” and Raffles leant across the table as the empty one was taken away. “I never was more serious in my life,” he continued below his breath. “Whatever else our successor may be, he’s not a dead man like me, or a marked man like you. If there’s any truth in my theory he’s one of the last people upon whom suspicion is ever likely to rest; and oh, Bunny, what a partner he would make for you and me!”

Under less genial influences the very idea of a third partner would have filled my soul with offence; but Raffles had chosen his moment unerringly, and his arguments lost nothing by the flowing accompaniment of the extra pint. They were, however, quite strong in themselves. The gist of them was that thus far we had remarkably little to show for what Raffles would call “our second innings.” This even I could not deny. We had scored a few “long singles,” but our “best shots” had gone “straight to hand,” and we were “playing a deuced slow game.” Therefore we needed a new partner⁠—and the metaphor failed Raffles. It had served its turn. I already agreed with him. In truth I was tired of my false position as hireling attendant, and had long fancied myself an object of suspicion to that other impostor the doctor. A fresh, untrammelled start was a fascinating idea to me, though two was company, and three in our case might be worse than none. But I did not see how we could hope, with our respective handicaps, to solve a problem which was already the despair of Scotland Yard.

“Suppose I have solved it,” observed Raffles, cracking a walnut in his palm.

“How could you?” I asked, without believing for an instant that he had.

“I have been taking the Morning Post for some time now.”

“Well?”

“You have got me a good many odd numbers of the less base society papers.”

“I can’t for the life of me see what you’re driving at.”

Raffles smiled indulgently as he cracked another nut.

“That’s because you’ve neither observation nor imagination, Bunny⁠—and yet you try to write! Well, you wouldn’t think it, but I have a fairly complete list of the people who were at the various functions under cover of which these different little coups were brought off.”

I said very stolidly that I did not see how that could help him. It was the only answer to his good-humored but self-satisfied contempt; it happened also to be true.

“Think,” said Raffles, in a patient voice.

“When thieves break in and steal,” said I, “upstairs, I don’t see much point in discovering who was downstairs at the time.”

“Quite,” said Raffles⁠—“when they do break in.”

“But that’s what they have done in all these cases. An upstairs door found screwed up, when things were at their height below; thief gone and jewels with him before alarm could be raised. Why, the trick’s so old that I never knew you condescend to play it.”

“Not so old as it looks,” said Raffles, choosing the cigars and handing me mine. “Cognac or Benedictine, Bunny?”

“Brandy,” I said, coarsely.

“Besides,” he went on, “the rooms were not screwed up; at Dorchester House, at any rate, the door was only locked, and the key missing, so that it might have been done on either side.”

“But that was where he left his rope-ladder behind him!” I exclaimed in triumph; but Raffles only shook his head.

“I don’t believe in that rope-ladder, Bunny, except as a blind.”

“Then what on earth do you believe?”

“That every one of these so-called burglaries has been done from the inside, by one of the guests; and what’s more I’m very much mistaken if I haven’t spotted the right sportsman.”

I began to believe that he really had, there was such a wicked gravity in the eyes that twinkled faintly into mine. I raised my glass in convivial congratulation, and still remember the somewhat anxious eye with which Raffles saw it emptied.

“I can only find one likely name,” he continued, “that figures in all these lists, and it is anything but a likely one at first sight. Lord Ernest Belville was at all those functions. Know anything about him, Bunny?”

“Not the Rational Drink fanatic?”

“Yes.”

“That’s all I want to know.”

“Quite,” said Raffles; “and yet what could be more promising? A man whose views are so broad and moderate, and so widely held already (saving your presence, Bunny), does not bore the world with them without ulterior motives. So far so good. What are this chap’s motives? Does he want to advertise himself? No, he’s somebody already. But is he rich? On the contrary, he’s as poor as a rat for his position, and apparently without the least ambition to be anything else; certainly he won’t enrich himself by making a public fad of what all sensible people are agreed upon as it is. Then suddenly one gets one’s own old idea⁠—the alternative profession! My cricket⁠—his Rational Drink! But it is no use jumping to conclusions. I must know more than the newspapers can tell me. Our aristocratic friend is forty, and unmarried. What has he been doing all these years? How the devil was I to find out?”

“How did you?” I asked, declining to spoil my digestion with a conundrum, as