Mr. Justice RafflesHornung, E. W. (Ernest William)
General
Mr. Justice Raffles
Hornung, E. W. (Ernest William)
Criminals -- England -- Fiction; Raffles (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
"I don't want to know, Mr. Manders! Of course you know all about Mr.
Raffles"--there was a touch of feeling in this--"but it's nothing to me,
though in this case I should certainly have been on his side. You said
yourself that it could only have been a practical joke, if there was
anything in it at all, and so I tried to think in spite of those horrid
men who were following him about at Lord's, even in spite of the way he
vanished with them after him. But he never came near the match
again--though he had travelled all the way from Carlsbad to see it! Why
had he ever been there? What had he really done there? And what could he
possibly do to rescue anybody from Mr. Levy, if he himself was already in
Levy's power?"
"You don't know Raffles," said I, promptly enough this time. "He never
was in any man's power for many minutes. I would back him to save the
most desperate situation you could devise."
"You mean by some desperate deed? That's what I feared," declared Miss
Belsize, rather strenuously. "Something really had happened at Carlsbad;
something worse was by way of happening next. For Teddy's sake," she
whispered, "and his poor father's!"
I agreed that old Raffles stuck at nothing for his friends, and Miss
Belsize again said that was what she had feared. Her tone had completely
altered about Raffles, as well it might. I thought it would have broken
with gratitude when she spoke of the unlucky father and son.
"And I was right!" she exclaimed, with that other kind of feeling to
which I found it harder to put a name. "I came home miserable from the
match on Saturday--"
"Though Teddy had done so well!" I was fool enough to interject.
"I couldn't help thinking about Mr. Raffles," replied Camilla, with a
flash of her frank eyes, "and wondering, and wondering, what had
happened. And then on Sunday I saw him on the river."
"He didn't tell me."
"He didn't know I recognised him; he was disguised--absolutely!" said
Camilla Belsize under her breath. "But he couldn't disguise himself from
me," she added as though glorying in her perspicacity.
"Did you tell him so, Miss Belsize?"
"Not I, indeed! I didn't speak to him; it was no business of mine. But
there he was, at the bottom of Mr. Levy's garden, having a good look at
the boathouse when nobody was about. Why? What could his object be? And
why disguise himself? I thought of the affair at Carlsbad, and I felt
certain that something of the kind was going to happen again!"
"Well?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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