“I will, I will! Oh, Arthur, I’m so excited! We meet first, then, at 5 Finch Court, Southampton Row — at two o’clock. But now I really must fly. I must get back to my poor aunt.”
“Let me help you on with your things. Did you come in your Darracq?”
“Yes, my chauffeur’s waiting in Albany Courtyard.”
“I’ll see you out,” said Raffles.
I heard a door open, close. Their voices and footsteps receded. I emerged from my lurking-place. My mind was in a turmoil. As I helped myself to Raffles’ whisky, he returned.
“Pour me one, as well,” he said. “My need is greater than yours.”
“The chaste Diana,” I said. “Diana the Huntress! She’s madly keen to marry you, Raffles!”
“Not so madly keen, Bunny, that she doesn’t first want to see if I can coolly produce £5000 in cash at short notice — as an ‘earnest’ that I must have much larger private resources to draw on. Obviously, the man Jay’s attempts to find out for her what I’m worth have failed, so Diana’s trying to find out for herself — in her quaintly feminine way.”
“Have you got £5000, Raffles?”
“What an idiotic question, Bunny!”
“Then why, in heaven’s name, did you agree to accept her fantastic ‘dare’?”
“Because I couldn’t do otherwise,” Raffles said, “without possible damage to the general belief that I’m ‘a sporting gentleman of independent means.’ ” He gave me a wicked smile. “And because, unwittingly, my prudent Diana provided me with security, of a kind, on which I think I can raise a loan.”
“What security?” I said, puzzled.
“One often used in aristocratic circles,” said Raffles. “I refer to marriage prospects — specifically, to my own evident prospects of being able to marry the heiress to the Rivenhurst Cottonmills fortune. Drink up, Bunny! We’ve a call to make.”
On the strength of Raffles’ golden prospects, our friend and invaluable “fence,” Ivor Kern, who always kept large cash sums handy for the purchase of stolen property, produced the £5000 there and then, in the cluttered, gaslit sitting-room over his antiques shop in the King’s Road, Chelsea. He was assured that the money was to serve solely as a tangible token of Raffles’ “independent means” and, seven days from now, would be refunded intact to Kern.
“I’m easy,” said Kern, with his cynical grin. “Make it eight days, Raffles.”
This was all very well. But what, I wondered, were Raffles’ intentions regarding Diana Rivenhurst? Though I was not present at their meeting at 5 Finch Court, at two p.m. on the morrow, what worried me about the whole situation was that I simply did not know how Raffles really felt about Diana.
Neither, I suspected, had George H. Jay known on the night I had spotted him watching them together at the Café Royal. He may well have had a reason more intensely and jealously personal than a merely business one for wishing to gauge the depth of feeling between his beautiful and wealthy client, Diana Rivenhurst, and that agreeable bachelor, A. J. Raffles, England’s cricket captain.
If George Jay, ex-Hussar and now confidential agent to the aristocracy, had had hopes of marrying Diana himself, he now knew — because of her quaint “escrow” notion — what his hopes were worth: namely, zero. With the “escrow” established, she clearly was confident that Raffles would propose to her, and, just as clearly, she intended to say yes.
But what were Raffles’ own intentions? This was what worried me. I knew his scruples about marriage, but, despite them, I could not forget the tone in which he had spoken of his sojourn as a guest in Diana’s lovely home, of the garden there enchanted in midsummer moonlight, and Diana with a rose in her hair.
Even after he had learned that she was having inquiries made about his financial worth, he had called her only, with a wicked but amused indulgence, “My prudent Diana!” And he would be with her again, to-night, at the Café Royal.
For a moment, I was tempted to go to the Café Royal again myself, and unobtrusively watch them together. But I did not like the idea. I dismissed it. Instead, I took a lady friend of my own to the Alhambra Music Hall, with supper afterwards at Frascati’s in Oxford Street, and the following evening, just as I was brushing my topper before going out, Raffles turned up at my flat. His expression was strange.
“I’ve had tea to-day with Diana and her aunt, at the Cavendish,” he said. “I stayed on, talking to Diana, and only got back to the Albany about ten minutes ago. I found a note waiting for me.” Frowning, he helped himself to my whisky. “Tell me something. When a man finds that he’s no hope of winning a woman he wanted, what does he do — let’s say, if he’s a Hussar type of chap?”
“Traditionally,” I said, “he goes to Africa to shoot lions or find a small war he can get himself shot decently dead in. It’s rather expected of him.”
“The note I found waiting for me,” Raffles said, “was from Ivor Kern. It was to tell me that the snoop he put on to watching George Jay, at my request, reports that Jay left London this evening on the 5:50 train to Newhaven.”
“Probably he’s gone,” I said, “to see one of his aristocratic clients on some business matter.”
“Alternatively,” said Raffles, “has he gone to board the boat that leaves Newhaven, at nine every evening, for Dieppe? I don’t know. But it was after nine when I found Kern’s note. And what I do know is that there are, or should be, two fat envelopes in ex-Captain Jay’s safe. One envelope contains £5000 of Diana’s money, the other contains £5000 belonging to Ivor Kern. Bunny, if there’s one man in London whose money we dare not lose, it’s Kern. He knows too much about us. And what I’m asking myself is: Are those two envelopes still intact in Jay’s safe?”
My heart pounded. The gaslight seemed to me to turn with a suddenly uncanny brilliance.
“I intend to find out,” Raffles said, his eyes hard. “It shouldn’t be difficult. The night’s turning misty. By the small hours, it’ll be mistier still. Even more to the point — when I saw Jay put those two envelopes into his safe at just after two p.m., day before yesterday, I noted and memorized, by reprehensible habit, his manipulation of the dial. I know the combination of his safe.”
Raffles drained his glass.
“If I find the two envelopes there intact,” he said, “then there, as far as I’m concerned, they shall remain — intact!”
Terrified yet fascinated as I always was on such an occasion as this, I insisted on accompanying Raffles. Our motive, for once, was guiltless and clearly justified, but that would by no means mitigate the penalty if we should be caught in the act we intended as we went, on foot in the small hours, to Finch Court, Southampton Row.
As Raffles had said, the night was misty. Finch Court’s solitary gaslight, on its lampstandard at the kerb of the narrow sidewalk in front of Number 5, at the dead end, was no more than a dim nimbus on the dank vapour. Keeping guard at the entry to the cul-de-sac, I could just discern Raffles as, at the dead end, he climbed up the lampstandard. He opened the door of the glass lampcase. He must have pulled the short chain that reduced the gaslight to its daytime pilot jet, a speck of blue not visible to me. Neither, now, was Raffles visible.
My heart pounded. Diana Rivenhurst had called marriage, for a woman, “a leap in the dark.” Raffles must now be preparing to make a different kind of leap, also in the dark. He must be pulling himself up so that he could straddle the lampcase and, with his feet on the iron bar that protruded slightly to either side, just under the case, balance himself for an instant upright — then make a flying leap, over the narrow sidewalk, and land on all fours on the roof of the shallow porch of Number 5.