Mr. Justice Raffles | Page 2

together?"
"You mean that night we had supper at the Savoy?"
"It's only three weeks ago, Bunny."
"It seems months to me."
"And years to me!" cried Raffles. "But surely you remember that lost
tribesman at the next table, with the nose like the village pump, and the
wife with the emerald necklace?"
"I should think I did," said I; "you mean the great Dan Levy, otherwise
Mr. Shylock? Why, you told me all about him, A. J."
"Did I? Then you may possibly recollect that the Shylocks were off to
Carlsbad the very next day. It was the old man's last orgy before his
annual cure, and he let the whole room know it. Ah, Bunny, I can
sympathise with the poor brute now!"
"But what on earth took you there, old fellow?"
"Can you ask? Have you forgotten how you saw the emeralds under
their table when they'd gone, and how I forgot myself and ran after
them with the best necklace I'd handled since the days of Lady
Melrose?"
I shook my head, partly in answer to his question, but partly also over a
piece of perversity which still rankled in my recollection. But now I
was prepared for something even more perverse.
"You were quite right," continued Raffles, recalling my recriminations

at the time; "it was a rotten thing to do. It was also the action of a
tactless idiot, since anybody could have seen that a heavy necklace like
that couldn't have dropped off without the wearer's knowledge."
"You don't mean to say she dropped it on purpose?" I exclaimed with
more interest, for I suddenly foresaw the remainder of his tale.
"I do," said Raffles. "The poor old pet did it deliberately when stooping
to pick up something else; and all to get it stolen and delay their trip to
Carlsbad, where her swab of a husband makes her do the cure with
him."
I said I always felt that we had failed to fulfil an obvious destiny in the
matter of those emeralds; and there was something touching in the way
Raffles now sided with me against himself.
"But I saw it the moment I had yanked them up," said he, "and heard
that fat swine curse his wife for dropping them. He told her she'd done
it on purpose, too; he hit the nail on the head all right; but it was her
poor head, and that showed me my unworthy impulse in its true light,
Bunny. I didn't need your reproaches to make me realise what a skunk
I'd been all round. I saw that the necklace was morally yours, and there
was one clear call for me to restore it to you by hook, crook, or barrel. I
left for Carlsbad as soon after its wrongful owners as prudence
permitted."
"Admirable!" said I, overjoyed to find old Raffles by no means in such
bad form as he looked. "But not to have taken me with you, A. J., that's
the unkind cut I can't forgive."
"My dear Bunny, you couldn't have borne it," said Raffles solemnly.
"The cure would have killed you; look what it's done to me."
"Don't tell me you went through with it!" I rallied him.
"Of course I did, Bunny. I played the game like a prayer-book."
"But why, in the name of all that's wanton?"

"You don't know Carlsbad, or you wouldn't ask. The place is squirming
with spies and humbugs. If I had broken the rules one of the prize
humbugs laid down for me I should have been spotted in a tick by a spy,
and bowled out myself for a spy and a humbug rolled into one. Oh,
Bunny, if old man Dante were alive to-day I should commend him to
that sink of salubrity for the redraw material of another and a worse
Inferno!"
The steaks had arrived, smoking hot, with a kidney apiece and lashings
of fried potatoes. And for a divine interval (as it must have been to him)
Raffles's only words were to the waiter, and referred to successive
tankards of bitter, with the superfluous rider that the man who said we
couldn't drink beer was a liar. But indeed I never could myself, and
only achieved the impossible in this case out of sheer sympathy with
Raffles. And eventually I had my reward, in such a recital of malignant
privation as I cannot trust myself to set down in any words but his.
"No, Bunny, you couldn't have borne it for half a week; you'd have
looked like that all the time!" quoth Raffles. I suppose my face had
fallen (as it does too easily) at his aspersion on my endurance. "Cheer
up, my man; that's better," he went on, as I did my best. "But it was no