We were not on intimate terms with His Excellency, as he had been at the school a good many years before our time; but he was a keen cricketer and had followed Raffles’s career in that sport with special interest. So that when His Excellency had found himself sponsoring a Gala Cricket Week in Gibraltar, and had decided to invite a few good amateurs to come and stiffen the Government House side against some strong Army and Navy teams, the first person he had thought of was Raffles. In inviting him to come and to bring someone along with him, the Governor had added, “There’s also an important service which you’re the very man to carry out for me.”
Intrigued by this, Raffles had accepted the invitation, saying he was bringing me. When Ivor Kern had heard where we were going, he had expressed his envy, and Raffles had said, “By all means desert this shop of yours and come along with us for the trip, Ivor. We go in the Karoo Star, which calls at Gibraltar on its way to Capetown, and return eight days later in the sister ship, the Karoo Queen, which calls at Gibraltar on its way from Capetown.”
As I leaned back in my corner seat, admiring the length of my cigar ash, the thought of escorting the girl with violet eyes to Government House garden parties enticed my mind to halcyon daydreams.
“Look at him, Ivor!” said a voice. “Purring away to himself like a cat that’s swallowed a canary!” In light raglan overcoat and grey bowler, his keen face tanned, a pearl stickpin in his cravat, Raffles stepped into the compartment. “Hullo, what’s my cricket bag hogging that seat beside you for, Bunny?”
“I’m reserving the seat for a young lady,” I said. “She’ll be here in a moment. Kindly remember that I saw her first.”
“The point is well taken,” Raffles conceded. “On the other hand, have you noticed that the train’s beginning to move?”
Startled, I glanced from the window. It was true. The platform was streaming backward at a quickening tempo. Leaping up, to the ruin of my cigar ash, I thrust my head into the sunshine. Nowhere along the platform, now rapidly receding, could I see the girl.
“She seems to have missed the train,” Raffles said.
“She couldn’t have!” I exclaimed. “I just lent her ten pounds.”
“Note the non sequitur, Ivor,” said Raffles. “But tell us, Bunny, what were the circumstances of this accommodation?”
I explained the girl’s predicament. And smiles broadened slowly over Raffles’s face and the pale, young-old, cynically intelligent face of Ivor Kern, until it seemed to me that they were grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh, my dear chap!” said Raffles.
“What do you imply?” I shouted angrily.
But, with a stab of horrified understanding, it flashed upon me what their amusement implied. They thought I had fallen victim to the wiles of a confidence trickstress! I sank into my seat, appalled.
“But a girl like that!” I said. I was reluctant to believe the worst of her; I simply could not believe it. “If you’d only seen her, Raffles! Violet eyes, white dress, and—”
“Violet eyes?” He gave me an odd look. “Eyes of true violet are very rare, Bunny. I knew a girl once—” He broke off, turned to Ivor Kern. “Ivor, do you remember a clandestine client you had a couple of years ago — something of a nine-day wonder — a fellow the newspapers dubbed ‘Jack of Diamonds’?”
“Phil Benedict,” Kern said. “For about six months, he was the most sensational safe-cracker in London. He pulled off job after job, all on diamond merchants of Hatton Garden. I fenced some of the stuff for him. He was a young fellow, about twenty-two — perhaps a year or two younger than you, Raffles. Why, I remember introducing the two of you in the room over my antique shop — I even proposed that you join forces to do a job on a certain safe that needed two pairs of hands. You both turned it down. Pick-and-choose amateurs, the pair of you. Gentlemen type. Same kind of background.” The receiver smiled cynically. “Yes, Phil was a nine-day wonder, all right, then he just vanished. I wonder what happened to him?”
“He was a strange case,” Raffles said. “In one respect only was he a criminal — he had a kink against Hatton Garden diamond merchants. I’ve often thought it was a significant that he was the son of a domineering tight-fisted father who not only was a domestic Caligula of the worst kind but a Hatton Garden diamond merchant!”
“How did you know that?” Kern asked.
“He told me,” said Raffles. “I saw quite a bit of him after that first meeting at your place. In fact, I was best man at his wedding. That’s all that happened to him — he got married. It seemed to me a rather quaint romance — and a rather touching one. He married a girl called Eugenie — Ginnie, he called her. Her background was — well, uncommon. There was a kind of essential innocence about Ginnie — a real innocence of heart — yet, you know, she’d been brought up by a guardian who had the whitest hair, the most frail and patrician face, the most courtly and beguiling manners of any confidence trickster in London. And he’d spared no pains, from her childhood up, in coaching her to one end — to excel in his own profession.”
Excited, I opened my mouth to speak; but Raffles’s grey eyes quelled me.
“When Ginnie and Phil got married.” he said, “each of them took me aside in the vestry to confide to me, privately, that they were determined to go straight and to keep each other straight. Do you know, they were such a charming young couple, and so desperately in love and so earnest, that I’d have staked my life on their sincerity. They went abroad on their honeymoon, and that was the last I saw or heard of them. Ginnie’s favourite colour was white. Her eyes were the only truly violet eyes I’ve ever seen.” He looked at me grimly as he took a Sullivan from his cigarette case. “If Ginnie Benedict is now working adroit little confidence tricks round the London railway stations, it’s the saddest news I’ve heard for a long time. What in the world can have happened to the two of them?”
I had never seen him so depressed. Though we were on our way to be the personal guests of the Governor of Gibraltar, we were a silent trio as we sat over our coffee in the Pompeian Lounge of the ship that night. Arms folded, Raffles stared unseeingly at his cup, faintly vibrant on its saucer to the throb of the engines below. I knew what he was brooding about, and so did Ivor Kern; but Kern grew impatient.
“Hang it all, Raffles,” he burst out, at last, “all this gloom over a—”
He checked as a figure glided out from behind a potted palm nearby. A white arm reached between us. Slim fingers placed on the table before me a neat, small tower of gold, and a voice said softly, “Your loan, Mr. Manders.”
I gaped for an instant at the ten sovereigns, then looked up incredulously into eyes deeply violet, with dark, long lashes.
“Ginnie!” Raffles sprang to his feet. “Ginnie! Why?”
“May I sit down?” she said.
She took the chair he placed for her, glanced round as though to assure herself that there were no other passengers within earshot.
“A.J.,” she said, then. “May I still call you A.J.? Phil always does. I had two reasons for what I did, A.J. One of them was to find out whether I altogether had lost the — the opportunism, the approach and timing taught to me by my guardian.” She glanced at me. “I didn’t know your name, Mr. Manders, until I asked your dining-room steward just now. But I saw you and A.J. walk on to the station platform this morning. Him, of course, I recognized at once. You passed my compartment together, then A.J. came back along the platform alone. I thought that probably he was going to the bookstall and that in his absence I’d just have time to — to make the little test of myself that I needed so very much to make.”