The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime - Michael Sims [33]
“I shall be down at Esher. I hope to catch the 9.55.”
“But surely I can see you again this afternoon?” I cried in a ferment, for his hand was on the door. “I’m not half coached up yet! I know I shall make a mess of it!”
“Not you,” he said again, “but I shall if I waste any more time. I’ve got a deuce of a lot of rushing about to do yet. You won’t find me at my rooms. Why not come down to Esher yourself by the last train? That’s it—down you come with the latest news. I’ll tell old Debenham to expect you; he shall give us both a bed. By Jove! he won’t be able to do us too well if he’s got his picture!”
“If!” I groaned, as he nodded his adieu; and he left me limp with apprehension, sick with fear, in a perfectly pitiable condition of pure stage-fright.
For, after all, I had only to act my part; unless Raffles failed where he never did fail, unless Raffles the neat and noiseless was for once clumsy and inept, all I had to do was indeed to “smile and smile and be a villain.” I practised that smile half the afternoon. I rehearsed putative parts in hypothetical conversations. I got up stories. I dipped in a book on Queensland at the club. And at last it was 7.45 and I was making my bow to a somewhat elderly man with a small bald head and a retreating brow.
“So you’re Mr. Raffles’s friend?” said he, overhauling me rather rudely with his light small eyes. “Have you seen anything of him? I expected him early to show me something, but he’s never come.”
No more, evidently, had has telegram, and my troubles were beginning early. I said I had not seen Raffles since one o’clock, telling the truth with unction while I could; even as we spoke there came a knock at the door, it was the telegram at last, and, after reading it himself, the Queenslander handed it to me.
“Called out of town!” he grumbled “Sudden illness of near relative! What near relatives has he got?”
Now, Raffles had none, and for an instant I quailed before the perils of invention; then I replied that I had never met any of his people, and again felt fortified by my veracity.
“Thought you were bosom pals?” said he, with (as I imagined) a gleam of suspicion in his crafty little eyes.
“Only in town,” said I. “I’ve never been to his place.”
“Well,” he growled, “I suppose it can’t be helped. Don’t know why he couldn’t come and have his dinner first. Like to see the death-bed that I’d go to without my dinner; it’s a full-skin billet, if you ask me. Well, we must just dine without him, and he’ll have to buy his pig in a poke after all. Mind touching that bell? Suppose you know what he came to see me about? Sorry I shan’t see him again, for his own sake. I liked Raffles—took to him amazingly. He’s a cynic. I like cynics. I’m one myself. Rank bad form of his mother or his aunt to go and kick the bucket to-day.”
I connect these specimens of his conversation, though they were doubtless detached at the time, and interspersed with remarks of mine here and there. They filled the interval until dinner was served, and they gave me an impression of the man which his every subsequent utterance confirmed. It was an impression which did away with all remorse for my treacherous presence at his table. He was that terrible type, the Silly Cynic, his aim a caustic commentary on all things and all men, his achievement mere vulgar irreverence and unintelligent scorn. Ill-bred and ill-informed, he had (on his own showing) fluked into fortune on a rise in land; yet cunning he possessed, as well as malice, and he chuckled till he choked over the misfortunes of less astute speculators in the same boom. Even now I cannot feel much compunction for my behaviour to the Hon. J. M. Craggs, M.L.C.
But never shall I forget the private agonies of the situation, the listening to my host with one ear and for Raffles with the other! Once I heard him—though the rooms were divided by the old-fashioned folding-doors, and though the dividing door was not only shut but richly curtained, I could have sworn I heard him once. I spilt my wine and laughed at the top of my voice at some