“I understand perfectly,” he said, in a low voice. “I saw by the dates, and gathered from the tenor in which they were written that they concealed some hidden romance. To expose what was written there would have surely been a most cowardly act—meaner even than stealing a helpless, ill-judged woman’s jewels. No, Princess,” he went on; “I beg that although I stand before you a thief, to whom the inside of a gaol is no new experience, a man who lives by his wits and his agility and ingenuity in committing theft, you will not entirely condemn me. I still, I hope, retain a sense of honour.”
“You speak like a gentleman,” she said. “Who were your parents?”
“My father, Princess, was a landed proprietor in Norfolk. After college I went to Sandhurst, and then entered the British Army; but gambling proved my ruin, and I was dismissed in disgrace for the forgery of a bill in the name of a brother officer. As a consequence, my father left me nothing, as I was a second son; and for years I drifted about England, an actor in a small travelling company; but gradually I fell lower and lower, until one day in London I met a well-known card-sharper, who took me as his partner, and together we lived well in the elegant rooms to which we inveigled men and there cheated them. The inevitable came at last—arrest and imprisonment. I got three years, and after serving it, came abroad and joined Roddy Redmayne’s gang, with whom I am at present connected.”
The career of the man before her was certainly a strangely adventurous one. He had not told her one tithe of the remarkable romance of his life. He had been a gentleman, and though now a jewel thief, he still adhered to the traditions of his family whenever a woman was concerned. He was acute, ingenious beyond degree, and a man of endless resource, yet he scorned to rob a woman who was poor.
The Princess Claire, a quick reader of character, saw in him a man who was a criminal, not by choice, but by force of circumstance. He was now still suffering from that false step he had taken in imitating his brother officer’s signature and raising money upon the bill. However she might view his actions, the truth remained that he had saved her from a terrible accident.
“Yours has been an unfortunate career, Mr Bourne,” she remarked. “Can you not abandon this very perilous profession of yours? Is there no way by which you can leave your companions and lead an honest life?”
When she spoke she made others feel how completely the purely natural and the purely ideal can blend into each other, yet she was a woman breathing thoughtful breath, walking in all her natural loveliness with a heart as frail-strung, as passion-touched, as ever fluttered in a female bosom.
“Ah, Princess!” he cried earnestly, “I beg of you not to reproach me; willingly I would leave it all. I would welcome work and an honest life; but, alas! nowadays it is too late. Besides, who would take me in any position of trust, with my black record behind me? Nobody.” And he shook his head. “In books one reads of reformed thieves, but there are none in real life. A thief, when once a thief, must remain so till the end of his days—of liberty.”
“But is it not a great sacrifice to your companions to give up my jewellery?” she asked in a soft, very kindly voice. “They, of course, recognise its great value?”
“Yes,” he smiled. “Roddy, our chief, is a good judge of stones—as good, probably, as the experts at Spink’s or Streeter’s. One has to be able to tell good stuff from rubbish when one deals in diamonds, as we do. Such a quantity of fake is worn now, and, as you may imagine, we don’t care to risk stealing paste.”