E. W. Hornung

A Thief in the Night (eBook, ePUB)

A Book of Raffles' Adventures

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

If I must tell more tales of Raffles, I can but back to our earliest days together, and fill in the blanks left by discretion in existing annals. In so doing I may indeed fill some small part of an infinitely greater blank, across which you may conceive me to have stretched my canvas for the first frank portrait of my friend. The whole truth cannot harm him now. I shall paint in every wart. Raffles was a villain, when all is written; it is no service to his memory to glaze the fact; yet I have done so myself before to-day. I have omitted whole heinous episodes. I have dwelt unduly on the redeeming side. And this I may do again, blinded even as I write by the gallant glamour that made my villain more to me than any hero. But at least there shall be no more reservations, and as an earnest I shall make no further secret of the greatest wrong that even Raffles ever did me.

I pick my words with care and pain, loyal as I still would be to my friend, and yet remembering as I must those Ides of March when he led me blindfold into temptation and crime. That was an ugly office, if you will. It was a moral bagatelle to the treacherous trick he was to play me a few weeks later. The second offence, on the other hand, was to prove the less serious of the two against society, and might in itself have been published to the world years ago. There have been private reasons for my reticence. The affair was not only too intimately mine, and too discreditable to Raffles. One other was involved in it, one dearer to me than Raffles himself, one whose name shall not even now be sullied by association with ours.

Suffice it that I had been engaged to her before that mad March deed. True, her people called it "an understanding," and frowned even upon that, as well they might. But their authority was not direct; we bowed to it as an act of politic grace; between us, all was well but my unworthiness. That may be gauged when I confess that this was how the matter stood on the night I gave a worthless check for my losses at baccarat, and afterward turned to Raffles in my need. Even after that I saw her sometimes. But I let her guess that there was more upon my soul than she must ever share, and at last I had written to end it all. I remember that week so well! It was the close of such a May as we had never had since, and I was too miserable even to follow the heavy scoring in the papers. Raffles was the only man who could get a wicket up at Lord's, and I never once went to see him play. Against Yorkshire, however, he helped himself to a hundred runs as well; and that brought Raffles round to me, on his way home to the Albany.

"We must dine and celebrate the rare event," said he. "A century takes it out of one at my time of life; and you, Bunny, you look quite as much in need of your end of a worthy bottle. Suppose we make it the Café Royal, and eight sharp? I'll be there first to fix up the table and the wine."

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Sai ePublications
• Seitenzahl: 151
• Erscheinungstermin: 4. Januar 2017
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781304509291
• Artikelnr.: 47510123

Autorenporträt

Author and poet Ernest William Hornung was born on June 7, 1866, in Marton, Middlesbrough. Hornung was given the nickname Willie at a young age. The A. J. Raffles series of tales, which center on a gentleman burglar in late 19th-century London, is what made him most famous. His friends Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde, as well as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, served as inspiration for several of the characters. In 1898, he published ""In the Chains of Crime,"" which introduced Bunny Manders and Raffles. In 1899, the collection of Raffles' short stories was published as a book for sale. In addition to his Raffles tales, Hornung was a prolific fiction author who produced a large number of works between 1890 and 1914. He wrote a lot when he was in France; his son, Oscar, was killed at the Second Battle of Ypres in July 1915. The strain of his wartime duties significantly deteriorated Hornung's already poor constitution. On the train, he had a chill that developed into influenza and pneumonia, which led to his death on March 22, 1921, at the age of 54. In the south of France, in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, he was laid to rest.