"You needn't be ashamed. You are doing the very thing I was rather
hoping you were going to propose the other day on the river."
"You were HOPING it?" said Raffles, with his eyes wide open. Indeed,
it was his turn to show surprise, and mine to be much more ashamed than
I felt.
"Yes," I answered, "I was quite keen on the idea, but I wasn't going to
propose it."
"Yet you would have listened to me the other day?"
Certainly I would, and I told him so without reserve; not brazenly, you
understand; not even now with the gusto of a man who savors such an
adventure for its own sake, but doggedly, defiantly, through my teeth,
as one who had tried to live honestly and failed. And, while I was
about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave
him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat;
for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even
though that record was written only in one's own soul. It was the old
story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against
nature, and there was an end of it.
Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my
conventional view. Human nature was a board of checkers; why not
reconcile one's self to alternate black and white? Why desire to be
all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in
the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all
squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My
conclusion he considered absurd.
"But you err in good company, Bunny, for all the cheap moralists who
preach the same twaddle: old Virgil was the first and worst offender of
you all. I back myself to climb out of Avernus any day I like, and
sooner or later I shall climb out for good. I suppose I can't very
well turn myself into a Limited Liability Company. But I could retire
and settle down and live blamelessly ever after. I'm not sure that it
couldn't be done on this pearl alone!"
"Then you don't still think it too remarkable to sell?"
"We might take a fishery and haul it up with smaller fry. It would
come after months of ill luck, just as we were going to sell the
schooner; by Jove, it would be the talk of the Pacific!"
"Well, we've got to get it first. Is this von What's-his-name a
formidable cuss?"
"More so than he looks; and he has the cheek of the devil!"
As he spoke a white drill skirt fluttered past the open state-room
door, and I caught a glimpse of an upturned moustache beyond.
"But is he the chap we have to deal with? Won't the pearl be in the
purser's keeping?"
Raffles stood at the door, frowning out upon the Solent, but for an
instant he turned to me with a sniff.
"My good fellow, do you suppose the whole ship's company knows there's
a gem like that aboard? You said that it was worth a hundred thousand
pounds; in Berlin they say it's priceless. I doubt if the skipper
himself knows that von Heumann has it on him."
"And he has?"
"Must have."
"Then we have only him to deal with?"
He answered me without a word. Something white was fluttering past
once more, and Raffles, stepping forth, made the promenaders three.